Primary Chief Bard am I to Elphin,
     And my original country is the Region of the Summer Stars;
     Idno and Heinin called me Merddin;
     At length every being shall call me Taliesin.

I was with my Lord in the highest sphere
When Lucifer fell into the depths of hell;
I have borne a banner before Alexander;
I know the names of the stars from north to south.

I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain;
I was in the Court of Don (the Milky Way) before the birth
of Gwydion;
I was on the high cross of the merciful Son of God;
I have been three periods in the prison of Arianrhod.

I was in Asia with Noah in the Ark;
I saw the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah;
I was in India when Rome was built;
I am now come here to the remnant of the Trojans.

I was with my Lord in the ass’s manger;
I strengthened Moses through the waters of Jordan;
I was in the firmament from the Cauldron of Ceridwen
I shall be on earth until the day of doom. *

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* I quote it from Mr. T.W.  Rollestone’s Myths and Legends of the
Celtic Race.  The poem appeares in the Hanes Taliesin, in Lady
Guest’s Mabinogion.
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Now, what would common sense have to say about things like that?  Simply, I think, that they are echoes that came down in Wales through the ages, of a teaching that once was known.  They do not,—­they would not,—­no one would expect them to,—­give the true and exact features and the inwardness of such teaching, but they do reflect the haunting reminiscences of a race that once believed in Reincarnation so firmly, that people were ready to lend money not to be repaid until a future life on earth.  If you can prove that that poem not written until the thirteenth, or sixteenth, or eighteenth century, all the better; it only shows the greater strength, the longer endurance, of the tradition; and therefore, the greater reality of that from which the tradition came.  It is the ghost of something which once was living; and the longer you can show the ghost surviving,—­the more living in its day was the something it survived from.  Your Tamerlanes and Malek Rics can be used to frighten babies for centures;—­their ghosts walk in that sense; their memories linger;—­but your Tomlinsons die and are done with, and no wind carries rumors of them after.

And the name of Taliesin,—­whom you may say we know to have been a Welsh poet of the sixth century,—­is made the peg on which to hang these floating reminiscences of Druidic teaching;—­and the story told about him,—­a story replete with universal symbolism, —­is, for anyone who has studied that science, clearly symbolic of the initiation of a Teacher of the Secret Doctrine.