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PDF------ * De Jubainville, Irish Mythological Cycle; when also Fintan’s poem quoted above. ------
Now here is a strange relic of the Secret Teaching that comes down with this legend of Fintan. Each of the four Cardinal Points, it was said, had had its Man appointed to record all the wonderful events that had taken place in the world.* One of them was this Fintan, son of Bochra, son of Lamech, whose duty was to preserve the histories of Spain and Ireland, and the West in general. As we have seen, Spain is a glyph for the Great Plain, the Otherworld.
------ * See The Secret Doctrine, for the Thesophical teaching. ------
From this universal euhemerization,—this loving preservation and careful cooking of the traditions by the Christian redactors of them,—we get certain results. One is that ancient Ireland remains for us in the colors of life: every figure flashes before our eyes in a golden mellow light of morning, at once extremely real and extremely magical: not the Greek heroic age appears so flooded with dawn-freshness, so realistic, so minutely drawn, nor half so lit with glamor. Another result is that, while strange gleams of Esotericism shine through,—as in that about the Four Recorders of the Four Cardinal Points,—things that it seemed undangerous to the monks, because they did not understand their significance, to let pass,—we hear nothing in Irish literature about the philosophy of the Druids. Ireland retains her belief in magic to this day; and his would be a hard skull that could know Ireland intimately and escape that belief. So it seemed nothing irreligious to the monks to let the Druids remain magicians. But philosophy was another matter entirely; and must be ruled out as conflicting with the Christian scheme of things. From this silence our Druid-Medicine-men Theorists draw great comfort and unction for their pet belief. Reincarnation appears in some stories as a sort of thing that might happen in special cases; because “God is good to the Irish,” and might be willing to give them sometimes another chance. But nothing is allowed to come down to imply it was known for a law in Nature; no moral or philosophic bearing is attached to it. This is just what you would expect. The Christian censors of the literature had rejected it as unchristian doctrine. They would hate to have it thought that Irishmen could ever have believed in such things; they would cover such belief up in every possible way. You would find peasant-bards in Wales to this day, men learned in the national tradition, who are deacons in their chapels and druids of the Gorsedd, and firm believers in Druidism. They have founded a Gorsedd here in America lately, with an active propaganda of Druidism, and lecturers touring. They think of it as a kind of Pre-christian Christianity; and would open their eyes wide to hear that Reincarnation was the cornerstone teaching in it. This may throw a little light on the attitude of those early Irish Christians.—But on the other hand there were tales that could not be preserved at all, that you could not tell at all, without bringing a touch of reincarnation into them. The universal doctrine survived in that way in Ireland, as it survived as a rumor in the folk-lore in Wales.
