DANAAN MYSTERIES
OCCULT NATIONALISM AND THE DIVINE FORMS
Difficult are gods for mortals to see.
—HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER
WE COME NOW to the Literary Revival proper, and thus to W. B. Yeats and George Russell (Fig. 8.1), whose creativity between 1885 and 1905—when both were in their twenties and thirties—forms the subject of this chapter. The focus is again on imagery, specifically the ways in which both men came to crystallize an iconography for the indigenous gods. To do this they built on the work of Standish O’Grady in particular, who had sought with indifferent success to persuade a Protestant landed class to acknowledge a direct connection between Gaelic antiquity and contemporary Ireland. For Yeats in particular iconography was crucial, as he subscribed to a complex personal philosophy of the image; looking back from later life at his youthful immersion in Irish myth, he was to identify the generation of a coherent system of images as both the point and the pre-condition of his early work—and the place where it had most spectacularly run aground.
Thus far in this book there have been few household names among the individuals discussed, but Yeats’s fame, in contrast, threatens to overwhelm. Many scholars have touched upon the gods as a facet of the poet’s occult interests and of his use of Irish folklore, but the results have been curiously diffident, so I think something remains to be said. Perhaps the main problem has been that critics have tended to imagine that the Irish gods were fixed, with distinct identities and meanings, and thus that in dealing with Irish mythology Yeats was mastering a body of empirical data. However, as this book shows, the pantheon itself was a moving target, and Yeats himself was a central player in the process of retrieval and imaginative reshaping.1 Russell’s contribution—for he wrote about the Túatha Dé Danann at snooze-inducing length—has received less scrutiny, but was of similar importance.
ESOTERIC INVESTIGATIONS
Both Yeats and Russell can be thumbnailed as irrationalizing intellectuals, and in both cases, their view of the native gods was a redemptive one: any focus on what the gods had represented in the ancient past was subordinate to the ways in which they might be persuaded to intervene in a conflicted present. The crucial background to this redemptive vision was the longstanding predisposition to doctrinal eccentricity and spiritual exploration among Ireland’s Protestant bourgeoisie. At the more avant-garde end of the spectrum in the 1880s, this manifested as an openness to eastern wisdom and to the occult, and both of these were to influence each of the two men. However, in what has long been a truism to specialists, they were to develop those influences in different directions, Russell as a mystic, and Yeats as a magician.2
Russell’s mysticism took the form of a fervent idealism, a sense of the phenomenal world as a veil impalpably penetrated by divine beauty.3 In this he was influenced by his adherence to Theosophy—a fashionably syncretistic pseudo-religion that interwove strands of western science and esotericism with elements of Hindu and Buddhist thought.4 While its emphasis was on eastern cosmology and symbolism, as a system it could also find a place for the pagan divinities of Europe as personifications of natural forces.5 In just this way, Russell the mystic could avow simultaneous belief in a boundless original deity and in a mass of spiritual beings that had emanated from that primordial One.
The impact of Indian philosophy on Yeats’s complex metaphysics was also considerable, although he never found Theosophy as satisfying as Russell, for whom its doctrine at least would provide a lifelong spiritual berth. Like Russell, Yeats believed in the continual interpenetration of the physical and spiritual worlds, and for him occult practice held out the possibility of developing spiritual knowledge—and more-than-usual powers—by deploying the rational intellect in the service of the irrational.6 Occultism had undergone a significant late-Victorian revival; Ronald Hutton aptly characterizes its appeal, noting that it ‘offered the thinkers of the age a middle way between a defensive Christian orthodoxy and a science which threatened to despiritualize the universe and question the special status of humanity’.7 Yeats soon directed his search for spiritual development to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, which became the most active and influential magical order in the last decade of the century.8 Progress up through the grades of the Golden Dawn was via a series of initiations and examinations, each of which required the initiate to master aspects of occult symbolism and philosophy—a system of considerable intellectual complexity. As several scholars have observed, for Yeats the autodidact this training was the equivalent of university, and he was to remain a member of the Golden Dawn until 1923.9
Russell and Yeats had met at art school in Dublin in 1884. Both were Protestants drawn to the irrational and the idea of perfect, unchanging spiritual essences, but they cut very different figures. Russell—slim, unworldly, a tad dishevelled—could already be found ignoring the fleshand-blood model in front of him to paint pictures of ethereal beings. Yeats, the Sligo bourgeois and apprentice poet, suffered from a more earthly sense of dislocation: as Roy Foster points out, he was deeply conscious of the Irish Protestant identity denied him by straitened historical and familial circumstances, and therefore was inclined to overcompensate by striking ostentatiously ‘Celtic’ poses.
The nature of the difference between Yeats the magician and Russell the mystic can best be explained by returning to the concept of images. Russell beheld and—as a painter—created images, while Yeats placed them at the centre of his early-career quest to spiritualize the Irish imagination. But each man conceived of the nature of the inner imagemaking or image-beholding faculty differently, reflecting their preoccupation with different esoteric spheres, and it is worth setting out these differences schematically.
For Russell, the key word was vision. Rather like O’Grady’s Cuculain, he enjoyed near-continual visions of divine beings. His accounts of these beatific irradiations do not suggest (say) temporal lobe epilepsy—which can produce phenomena of this kind—but that, like William Blake, he possessed the capacity to give himself eidetic images: vivid inner pictures which take on an independent life of their own and can be followed with open eyes.10 The plumed titans who crowd his paintings assert the fact of Russell’s vision, but originally he did not consider these to be in any sense especially ‘Irish’: his initial interpretative scheme was a theosophical one, with its cosmopolitan aura of the east. It was only in the mid-1890s that Russell, increasingly fired up by mystical nationalism, began to understand his hazy visitants to be figures from Irish mythology.11
For Yeats, on the other hand, the key word was symbol. He handled the Túatha Dé Danann by slotting them into an occult symbol system that was under continual revision. The core of what magic offered Yeats was a system for organizing his thought, and it was a system that crucially entailed an active process of shaping rather than mimeographic transcription. ‘Symbol’ had a specific sense within the world of fin de siècle esotericism. Yeats believed that any given symbol possessed an intrinsic, living potency, which the magician might access through invocatory meditation. Thus each true symbol functioned as a pass-key with which the adept might mount a raid on the spiritual world, bringing himself into an increasing inner alignment with that realm.12 In terms of Yeatsian occult theory, therefore, each of Ireland’s ancient gods could be seen as such a symbol: the task was to identify the core image, the centre of gravity that held together the complex of meaning embodied by the deity.
IMMORTAL MOODS
Yeats’s symbol theory, coupled with what Declan Kiberd calls his ‘interrogative cast of mind’, was to inspire a taxonomic approach to the Túatha Dé Danann, the urge to pigeonhole and classify. This was an illustration of the poet’s tendency to cross-pollinate his studies in Irish folklore and the occult with the fruits of scientific enquiry, even as he loftily inveighed against the rationalizing approach.
What, precisely, did Yeats think he was taxonomizing? Mary Helen Thuente has explored the shape of his thought on the issue, and its essence can be distilled into a three-way equation: the literary Túatha Dé Danann = the ancient gods of Ireland = the fairies or Sidhe of folklore. This might seem a simple enough set of equivalences, but in fact it took an elaborate series of steps over half a century to become intellectually available—antiquarianism, anthropology, comparative mythology, historiography, primitivism, and both scientific and romantic Celticism all had a role in this process. Up to about 1890, writer after writer more or less gets there, but fails to foreground the thought; by Yeats’s early twenties the idea that the Túatha Dé were the ancient Irish gods, who in turn were also in some sense the fairies, had the odd status of a miscarried cliché.
Yeats’s innovation in the 1890s was to yoke this three-way equation to a set of personal and national agendas, with occultism as the licensing factor. Once again, others had tacked in a similar direction; at the beginning of the decade Lady Wilde, Oscar’s mother, had begun a collection of Irish folklore by asserting that ‘all nations and races’ had held a belief ‘in mystic beings… all around them’.13 This was to blend folklore with the Anglo-Irish taste for the supernatural, then spice the whole with a dash of anthropology, according to which the fairies could be interpreted as the shrunken after-images of pagan gods. Wilde failed to identify the fairies with the Túatha Dé Danann, but Yeats would later find her animist conception useful.14 He experimented with replacing the idea that the gods had dwindled over time into fairies with the proposal that, in the Ireland of his own day, the fairies were actually still gods. Ireland’s rural, Catholic poor could thus be made out to be atavistic semi-pagans in a world still thronged with the beings that their ancestors had once worshipped, beings whose divine status was continually on the point of reasserting itself.15 Unsurprisingly, considerable offense was taken in Catholic quarters at this skewed vision of rural piety.16
Nonetheless, statements like these were the end result of a decadelong process of intellectual accommodation by Yeats towards the folklorists and Celtologists. It is clear that the groundwork for that accommodation was in place by 1888. A passage in the first of Yeats’s two famous folklore collections, Fairy and Folktales of the Irish Peasantry, published in that year, began by directly addressing the issue of fairy ontology, setting before the reader the three alternatives: gods, fairies, or Túatha Dé Danann. Tellingly these three were not yet confounded:
Who are they? ‘Fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost,’ say the peasantry. ‘The gods of the earth,’ says The Book of Armagh. ‘The gods of pagan Ireland,’ say the Irish antiquarians, ‘The Tuatha Dé Danann, who, when no longer worshipped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the popular imagination, and now are only a few spans high.’17
Yeats had been sifting through a great deal of mixed material, both for himself and his readers, and the passage hints at the central importance of occultism as a unifying intellectual frame. The central option, ‘gods of the earth’—a reference back to Tírechán’s seventh-century definition of the men of the síd—is the only one of the three that Yeats picks out for expansion, and he glosses it with reference to the elemental spirits of occult philosophy: ‘behind the visible are chains on chains of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of the earth, who have no inherent form but change according to their whim…’ Strikingly, he failed to reach for a far more obvious analogy to ‘gods of the earth’—the demigods of classical religion which were ubiquitously visible in contemporary English poetry in the form of nymphs, fauns, and pans. The idea, too, that deities might dwindle if not ‘fed by offerings’ is an antiquarian metaphor which Yeats was nudging in the direction of an occult reality: by implication, it was a process which might be run in reverse.
Two years later, in 1890, he published ‘Invoking the Irish Fairies’ in the Irish Theosophist, which described an attempt by him and his Golden Dawn consœur Florence Farr to induce visions of the fairies. A far more ephemeral piece, it was nevertheless significant because it developed the idea that the fairies were occult forces but without aligning them (yet) with figures from ancient Irish mythology. The deliberately offhand frame—Yeats and Farr are idly passing the time while waiting for the kettle to boil—sets off the impinging strangeness of the ensuing phantasmagoria. The good spirits, dressed in petals, have the teeming prettiness of late Victorian fairy paintings: ‘a great multitude of little creatures… with green hair like sea-weed… after them another multitude dragging a car containing an enormous bubble.’ The evil fairies, on the other hand, are chimerical horrors straight out of Goya, centred on a monstrous serpent called ‘Grew-grew’: ‘[a]bout him moved quantities of things like pigs, only with shorter legs, and above him in the air flew vast quantities of cherubs and bats.’18 The division into two orders, good and bad, displayed Yeats’s fondness for categorization, but much closer was the world of western occultism: the Irish fairies were very obviously the elementals of that tradition, to the extent of being divided into fiefdoms of earth, air, fire, and water. This was quite a distance, aesthetically and in other ways, from the Túatha Dé Danann, who had not yet incarnated in the imagery.
The process of interlinking folklore and ancient mythology was anticipated as early as 1893 but became increasingly important during the later 1890s.19 Its effect was a cumulative increase in the fairies’ stature—in both senses—in Yeats’s writings: they get physically bigger and loom larger intellectually. The end result of this equation was explicit in ‘Dust Hath Closed Helen’s Eye’, first published in The Dome in 1899, in which Yeats tells of a woman who ‘died young because the gods loved her, for the Sidhe are the gods…’20 Such beliefs, Yeats argues in the same piece, place the peasantry ‘many years nearer to that old Greek world… than are our men of learning’. This was of course precisely the kind of Hiberno-Hellensim which had characterized Standish O’Grady’s writings, and it brought to the fore once again the epistemological gulf between scholar and peasant.21
One aspect of the divinization of the Sidhe was a radical reduction in their number. In 1888, Yeats had remarked that ‘[y]ou cannot lift your hand without influencing and being influenced by hoards’; the ensuing decade saw undifferentiated multitudes condense into increasingly iconicized personalities. This manifested as constant lists of the divinities, a literary tic the origins of which lay in O’Grady’s epic catalogues. This is apparent as early as 1894 in Yeats’s bleakly ironic story ‘A Crucifixion’, which, lightly revised, appeared as ‘The Crucifixion of the Outcast’ in the first edition of The Secret Rose (1897). The suspicious and eventually murderous medieval clerics of the story feel a particular hatred for poets, because of their lingering paganism. As one brother says:
‘Can you name one that is not heathen in his heart, always longing after the Son of Lir, and Aengus, and Bridget, and the Dagda, and Dana the Mother, and all the false gods of the old days; always making poems in praise of those kings and queens of the demons, Finvaragh, whose home is under Cruachmaa, and Red Aodh of Cnoc-na-Sidha, and Cliona of the Wave, and Aoibheal of the Grey Rock, and him they call Donn of the Vats of the Sea… ?’22
And in one of Yeats’s most plushly hallucinatory short stories of the period, ‘Rosa Alchemica’ (first version 1896), the conditional return of the native divinities is anticipated:
A time will come for these people also, and they will sacrifice a mullet to Artemis, or some other fish to some new divinity, unless indeed their own divinities, the Dagda, with his overflowing cauldron, Lug, with his spear dipped in poppy juice lest it rush forth hot to battle, Aengus, with his three birds on his shoulder, Bodb and his red swineherd, and all the heroic children of Dana, set up once more in their temples of grey stone. Their reign has never ceased, but only waned in power a little, for the Sidhe still pass in every wind, and dance and play at hurley, and fight their sudden battles in every hollow and on every hill; but they cannot build their temples again till there have been martyrdoms and victories…
The contextual ironies of these catalogues are complex, and ‘Rosa Alchemica’ is examined in more detail below. But the point here is that these two passages, one anti- and one pro-paganism, use comparable formulae: in both cases there is a shift from great personages of the Túatha Dé Danann to the Sidhe, though in the first passage some of the Sidhe are actually named and not very well distinguished, except by sentence structure, from the divinities. In the second, there is a kind of pulling back from close-up (Túatha Dé) to long-shot (Sidhe), cleverly implying simultaneous difference and sameness.
What Yeats had taken from d’Arbois de Jubainville and O’Grady was permission to give iconic identities to the deities. In both excerpts the light only catches on a single suggestive detail for each god—the Dagda’s cauldron, Donn’s mysterious ‘Vats of the Sea’, Aengus’s three birds—as though describing a painting. Elsewhere in The Secret Rose, the ‘ancient gods’ appear in tenebrous form as ‘tall white-armed ladies who come out of the air, and move slowly hither and thither, crowning themselves with the roses or with the lilies, and shaking about them their living hair, which moves… with the motion of their thoughts…’23 The godfairies here have been aligned to the shadowy world of spirits, ghosts, and dhouls—the whole Yeatsian spectropia—but they have nonetheless acquired a certain glinting individuality.
This was rooted in Yeats’s most hermetic theological idea, the doctrine of gods as ‘moods’ or ‘signatures of the divine imagination’ that threads through the stories, poems, and plays he wrote during the 1890s. This was a strategy for asserting the reality of the invisible and ideal: it was also in a sense a new theory of divine or fairy ontology more fundamental and more personal than the three he had set out at the beginning of Fairy and Folk Tales in 1888. The key idea was a hermetic twist on Plato’s theory of forms. To Yeats, ‘immortal moods’—clusters of mingled thought and feeling, rather like a musical chord—existed in the divine mind, eternal and disembodied. They become incarnate in the visible world and in time by means of human emotions, which they govern and in which they participate, but they can also be consciously invoked by the occultist. This is why symbols were significant to Yeats in both his poetry and occult practice: to Yeats, a well-chosen symbol should resonate like a tuning fork with a particular discarnate, immortal mood, consciously drawing its influence across into the human world.
Typically, he ironized his own theory in The Celtic Twilight (1893), in the story ‘Regina, Regina Pigmeorum, Veni.’ In an example of the blend of folklore collection and occult reportage that characterized that volume, Yeats dramatized an evocation of the queen of the fairies which he, his uncle George Pollexfen, and his cousin Lucy Middleton had undertaken in Sligo. When the queen appears, the speaker questions her just as a Victorian anthropologist, notebook in hand, might investigate an uncontacted tribe:
I then asked her whether she and her people were not ‘dramatisations of our moods’? ‘She does not understand,’ said my friend, ‘but says that her people are much like human beings, and do most of the things that human beings do.’ I asked her other questions, as to her nature, and her purpose in the universe, but only seemed to puzzle her.24
This brilliant moment of self-parody simultaneously invited and held back the uncanny by demonstrating the gap in understanding between human observer and supernatural observed. It also stressed that the occult theory of the fairies—or divinities—as immortal moods does not reduce them to a merely subjective existence: they live with a life of their own which is as real, perhaps more real, than that of human beings. In ‘Rosa Alchemica’, Yeats placed a more extreme and unsettling form of this in the mouth of his fictional theurgist Michael Robartes, who refers to ‘the power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have won everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense’:
The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay in death-like trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which indeed is but the trembling of their lips.’25
From about 1890 Yeats was able to put his ideas about the Túatha Dé Danann before the public through a number of channels, and this mirrors his cautious control over perspective and ironic parcelling out of positions among fictional personae like the just mentioned Michael Robartes. The first channel comprised his occult fictions and poetry, and particularly the apparatus of explanatory glosses with which early editions of The Wind Among the Reeds, for example, were supplied. His two folklore collections, both of which were prefaced with significant essays, constituted the second. Those collections gave him the status of perceived expert on Irish folklore, which led to invitations to write reviews and other occasional pieces for a range of periodicals: these made up the third avenue. A more intimate perspective is granted by the drafts of his various plays, especially the perennially unfinished The Shadowy Waters, which was full of Celtic and occult themes. Very frequently Irish deities who appeared in the drafts were edited out of the published versions; since the drafts are now available to scholarship it is possible to use them to watch Yeats’s thought developing.26
Yeats’s views about specific divinities will be examined shortly, but first we must turn to George Russell. In the 1890s he too began to grapple with the nature of the native gods, and his views were a major influence on Yeats. His favoured mode was frenetic journalism on mystical and nationalist themes, though in the last decade of the nineteenth century he had not yet started his influential career as an editor.27 From 1895, his rate of publication gathered pace, turning a peppering into a fusillade. Article after article emerged (often in the Irish Theosophist) and it is these articles, rather than his poetry or fiction, which provide the best guide to Russell’s growing thought about the Túatha Dé.
Repetitiousness was the inevitable result of such a rate of production, and week after week Russell’s Celto-theosophical sermons turned to the same stock of themes and images. In tenor these owed much to his love for O’Grady’s History, a text which seems to have fixed the form taken by Russell’s visions of Irish spiritual beings.28 (Many of Russell’s paintings could be aptly captioned with phrases drawn from O’Grady, so closely is his visionary aesthetic anticipated by the older man’s ‘gorgeous unearthly beings’, and ‘mighty forms of men and women seen afar upon the sides of the mountains’.)29 That aesthetic remained basically unchanged for most of Russell’s life, but his theoretical take on the Túatha Dé seems to have undergone at least one significant shift. His initial position in the mid-1890s looked back to the antiquarians of over a century before, with a mystical twist:
[T]he Tuatha De Dannans who settled in Eire… were called Gods, differing in this respect from the Gods of ancient Greece and India, that they were men who had made themselves Gods by magical or Druidical power… Superhuman in power and beauty, they raised themselves above nature; they played with the elements; they moved with ease in the air.30
Here again are Samuel Ferguson’s ‘race of magi’, or even—with a more positive spin—Dermod O’Connor’s ‘strolling necromancers’. Magic here is hermetic wisdom, and the gods are supreme occultists. A corollary of this idea for Russell was the possibility that strenuous spiritual exercises might allow the modern seeker to undergo the same process and so become a god: many of Russell’s visions, related at length in his articles, involve a human being brought before the gods—cloudy, luminescent colossi—to be enthroned among them.31 The idea was drawn from the psychic evolutionism of Theosophy, according to which individuals might attain spiritual perfection and become immortal; but it also could be made to dovetail with the native concept of the man or woman enticed away to the deathless otherworld of the síd. It is a conspicuous irony that by taking the gods to have once been mortal magicians—in precisely the manner of ‘The Book of Invasions’—Russell ended up emphasizing the most obviously non-pagan element in the medieval mythography.32
The idea that spiritual illuminati might swell the ranks of the native divinities remained a lasting feature of Russell’s thought. Nevertheless, the concept that the Túatha Dé Danann themselves had begun as divinized magicians was gradually jettisoned around the turn of the century, in favour of ascribing them innate divinity; at this point we must look at the pantheon’s internal structure as he imagined it. By 1902, Russell was downplaying the distinction he had drawn between other Indo-European pantheons and that of Ireland, and the orientalist strain in his thinking, long encouraged by Theosophy, became more marked. Theosophy, to him, was an ancient truth, and he expected to find its doctrines reflected in Irish mythology. This aprioristic way of working was, in typically theosophical fashion, a distorted reflection of Victorian science, in this case comparative philology and mythology. (In a similar way, evolution was an important concept in Theosophy, but one shunted from the biological to the spiritual plane: karma replaced natural selection, and reincarnation took the place of reproduction.)33 Comparative mythology at the time pointed to parallels between deities from different Indo-European cultures and suggested that a proto-pantheon might be reconstructed: Russell took this to mean that there was no essential difference between Irish and Indian divinities, licensing him to take Hindu mythology as a framework into which Irish elements might be slotted as he saw fit.
An instance of how this worked in practice is offered by Russell’s response to Irish mythology’s notorious lack of a creation myth. Shortly after the turn of the century he borrowed from theosophical doctrine in order to furnish Ireland with an ‘ancient’ cosmology. The task he faced was to show how an infinite, impersonal, and ineffable deity could have given rise to the many spiritual beings which he saw in visions. His solution was two parts Hinduism to one part Kabbalah, with a dash of Neoplatonism.34 From the infinite primordial One (thought Russell) two beings emanate: the unmanifest male Logos, or Divine Mind, and the female World-Soul, which becomes both matter and the spiritual substance out of which matter supposedly coagulates. This primal couple then eternally mingle and from them proceed myriads of manifest beings (including human souls) which fall into increasingly coarse grades of embodiment. Their most important emanation, however—their child, in a sense—is the so-called ‘Light of the Logos’, a universal shaping force of divine energy in the form of love.35
The difficulty lay in mapping this scheme onto the figures of the medieval literature, and in March 1902 Russell tackled the process in two instalments in the strongly nationalist weekly, the United Irishman. His title for the piece, ‘The Children of Lir’, was sly, for it led the reader to expect a version of the story of the transformed swan-children (Fig. 8.2), long a maudlin favourite of the Revival; instead, Russell provided a theosophical theogony crowded with wafty abstractions. Lir himself appeared, not as an anguished father, but as the transcendental meta-deity of Hindu thought:
In the beginning was the boundless Lir, an infinite depth, an invisible divinity, neither dark nor light, in whom were all things past and to be… . The Great Father and the Mother of the Gods mingle together and heaven and Earth are lost, being one in the Infinite Lir. Of Lir but little can be affirmed, and nothing can be revealed… . It is beyond the gods and if they were to reveal it, it could only be through their own departure and a return to the primeval silences.36
FIG. 8.2. J. H. Bacon, A.R.A., Lêr and the Swans, in Charles Squire, Celtic Myth and Legend (London, 1905); a roughly contemporary but more conventional Lir/Ler than Russell’s transcendental Source. Photo: The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Images.
By making Lir into the primordial and boundless sea of divinity, Russell simply attached a Celtic name to a Hindu concept, the frail connecting thread being the meaning of the word ‘Lir’—really ler—‘ocean’.37 But as I suggested in chapter 6, it is possible that Lir was not originally a proper name but part of an idiomatic epithet of Manannán, only appearing as a personage in the tradition in the thirteenth century. As a result, it may be that he underwent probably the most extreme transformation of any figure traced in this book, moving in under a millennium from an ordinary noun meaning ‘sea’, to a literary character, and later to ‘an infinite being, neither spirit nor energy nor substance’.38 Lir is thus emblematic of the radical instabilities which are characteristic of the Irish pantheon.
Russell’s Celtic cosmogony maintained the link between Manannán and Lir, having the former arise from the latter as ‘the Gaelic equivalent of that Spirit which breathed on the face of the waters’. Manannán was thus his Logos and represented the divine imagination, ‘the most spiritual divinity known to the ancient Gael’—perhaps a distant harking back to ‘The Voyage of Bran’ in which the sea-god articulates a double layered vision of reality, though the phrase itself was a quotation from O’Grady.39 Russell continued that as Manannán separated from Lir, Lir seemed to him to be obscured by a ‘veil’: that veil was the World-Soul personified as ‘Dana, the Hibernian Mother of the Gods’, ‘the primal form of matter, the Spirit of Nature’. From Manannán all the other deities then ramified, beginning with seven whom Russell does not name but who presumably include Bodb Derg, Ogma, Lug, Goibniu, and so on.
To readers not familiar with Theosophy, the Vedas, or the Upanishads, all this was no doubt mightily cryptic. Neither conviction nor clarity were added when Russell commented offhandedly that the Irish names did not in fact matter—the Dagda would do just as well for Lir, ‘Boan for Dana, Fintan for Mananan, and others again might be interchangeable with these’.40 Clearly all this cannot really be described as ‘myth’—it is too exasperatingly shapeless—but Russell’s basic point was nonetheless clear: Theosophy, with its Indian trappings, offered a congenial cosmogony, and Irish mythology could and should be massaged into harmony with it.
This, needless to say, was not what the comparative mythologists had had in mind, and the interest of the article lies not so much in its turbid theology as in the excuses Russell mades for his method. The United Irishman was a significant nationalist newspaper and Russell could probably expect less indulgence from its readers than from those of a fringe publication like the Irish Theosophist. This made no initial dent on his style, however, and the article opens with his characteristic tropes—the waters of faery, the call of the Sidhe, the tinkling bell-branch—and goes on to make a bold plea for an imaginative polytheism. This was at the time quite usual for a certain type of radical poet, being germane to the escapist and anti-materialist strand in nineteenth-century English verse, which called for a revival of the (classical) divinities and the veneration of nature; it was to project on, essentially unimpeded, into the Edwardian era.41 Russell’s cosmological articles were very much in this vein; he predicted an imminent return to ‘ancient sweetness’, and asked, of God, ‘… is the nature He has made nobler in men’s eyes because they have denied the divinity of His children and their invisible presence on earth?’
What was unusual, but well-judged for a nationalist publication, was the specifically Irish inflection which Russell plied throughout, along with his adoption of the Yeatsian idea of the native gods as moods—dense nuclei of meaning, energized by a single emotion:
The gods are not often concerned with material events. They build themselves eternal empires in the mind through beauty, wisdom, or pity: and so, reading today the story of Cuculain, we do pay reverence by the exaltation of our spirits to the great divinity, Lu the sun-god, who overshadowed the hero.42
Readers of the United Irishman might have been surprised to find that their bedtime reading was in reality a way of doing obeisance to the god Lug. But Russell continued, prefacing his account of Lir, Manannán, and Dana with an unusual apologia that went some way to acknowledging his audience—a subliminal acceptance of the fact that many of his fellow countrymen would judge his cosmogony to be twaddle:
I am mindful that these names which once acted like a spell in the secret places of the soul are no longer powerful… . They do not interpret moods, but require themselves an interpreter; and here I propose, not with any idea of finality or fullness, and without pretence of scholarship, to speak of Druid Ireland, its gods and its mysteries. Let no one who requires authority read what I have written, for I will give none. If the spirit of the reader does not bear witness to truth he will not be convinced even though a Whitley Stokes rose up to verify the written word. Let it be accepted as a romantic invention, or attribution of divine powers to certain names to make more coherent to the writer the confusion of Celtic myth.43
On one level this was apotropaic, but its tone betrayed a personality who found it difficult to accept that there might be other ways of seeing the world than his own. Did even Russell really believe that theosophical free-association could recover the lost mysteries of Irish mythology? That there had been such mysteries was to him an article of faith. Since 1895 he had sought to demonstrate how these mysteries lay concealed within the medieval literature, attempting to recuperate the sagas of the Middle Ages as druidical scripture. But in the present article one can detect his (rather belated) awareness of the shift in the meaning of Celticism which had been going on for twenty years. It is difficult not to see Russell’s intransigent truth-claim for his cosmology as driven by anxiety—the realization that intellectual control of the native gods had been wrested from the seer-poet by the Celtic philologist, of whom the wholly remarkable Whitley Stokes was his exemplar.44
As we have seen, Russell’s Túatha Dé were remodelled from native mahatmas into Irish reflexes of Indian divinities. There was no equivalent iconographic shift to match the philosophical one: his depictions of the gods, in both verbal and visual media, remained consistent throughout his life.45 The spiritual entities of his paintings are invariably larger than human and glow from within in various hues, mainly yellow, pink, and (especially) purple.46 They appear nude or in vaguely classical drapery in twilit rural landscapes—rising from water or amongst trees or on a mountainside—and usually to one or more human figures. The latter may be taken aback or apparently unaware: often Russell’s pastel phantasms seem to be tenderly bending towards some oblivious human, perhaps inspiring them with vision. So much is exemplified by the painting reproduced here in which a small child is being led away by three selfradiant fairy-women (Fig. 8.3). The painting also illustrates another of Russell’s characteristic motifs, namely the plumes or rays that rise from the women’s heads. Like a halo in Byzantine art these always face forward flatly in his paintings, even when the being’s head is not in profile. These had struck Yeats early on, who included them in his account of the art of a ‘Visionary’—a thinly-disguised Russell—in The Celtic Twilight, describing paintings of ‘spirits who have upon their heads instead of hair the feathers of peacocks’.47
FIG 8.3. The Stolen Child (date unknown), pastel by George Russell, Armagh County Museum Collection. Reprinted by the permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the Estate of George Russell.
Russell later explained that these plumes were simply what he saw, and that their presence or absence denoted an internal division within the world of spirits. The lower orders of Sidhe-beings were shining and plumeless, but the upper echelons were opalescent and lit from within (Fig. 8.4). He described his first vision of one of these:
… there was first a dazzle of light, and I saw this came from the heart of a tall figure with a body apparently shaped out of halftransparent or opalescent air, and throughout the body ran a radiant, electrical fire, to which the heart seemed the centre. Around the head of this being and through its waving luminous hair, which was blown all about the body like living strands of gold, there appeared flaming, wing-like auras.48
He went on to identify the presence of plumes as a sign that these beings were ‘Aengus, Manannan, Lug, and other famous kings or princes among the Tuatha De Danann’. The division shows that he too was facing the old problem that Yeats had tackled by means of the divine catalogue: the many undifferentiated Sidhe of folklore were hard to square with the limited number of individualized Túatha Dé, each of whom has a specific narrative trajectory.
FIG. 8.4. George Russell, A Spirit or Sidhe in a Landscape (date unknown), oil on board, National Gallery of Ireland. Reprinted by the permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the Estate of George Russell.
His paintings bespeak a struggle to evolve a visual language to fit this distinction: it was difficult for him to individualize the Túatha Dé Danann crisply when ‘trembling on the verge of no form’ was the highest compliment he could give.49 By 1897 Yeats’s fairy divinities had become shadowy but iconographically precise; Russell’s rainbow smudges, on the other hand, tended to a sunlit non-specificity. The same problem continued to dog his poetry: May 1900 found Yeats mildly remonstrating with him that ‘vast and vague’ was a poor choice of words to use about Dana, mother of the Túatha Dé Danann—a criticism the obdurate Russell refused to take on board.50
THE CELTIC RITUALS
Russell’s conception of the genesis of the gods was a strong influence on Yeats, and it is time to look in more detail at how the two men imagined specific divinities. The focus of operations was Yeats’s attempt between 1896 and 1902 to develop an Order of Celtic Mysteries, his most wellknown, though abortive, attempt to fuse Irishness and occultism. It was also the Túatha Dé’s most famous modern outing, and one long familiar to scholars of the Literary Revival, though the material which Yeats produced towards it (in collaboration with others, including Russell) is more often alluded to than investigated.51 Many of the texts discussed previously here emerged during the years that the Celtic Mysteries were being planned out, especially the stories of The Secret Rose (1897), the verse-play The Shadowy Waters—which had a particularly close relationship to the Mysteries—and the collection The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), not to mention most of Russell’s more delphic pronouncements on Irish legend.
The Celtic Mysteries were to be the poet’s hermetic ‘dissertation’, a distinctively Celtic hermetic order which would have involved, in Roy Foster’s words, a Golden Dawn-style ‘ascent by stipulated “paths” from the world of material consciousness to that of the transcendent archetypes’.52 From the Golden Dawn too was borrowed a great deal of the physical and mental structure which was projected for the Mysteries—the idea of a lodge of adepts, for example, as well as the use of symbolic gestures, colours, images, and invocations, and of the four elements as markers of grades of initiation. These last were inevitably identified with the four treasures of the Túatha Dé Danann, partly because the symbolism of the latter seemed to Yeats to evoke the four suits of the Tarot: swords (like that of Núadu), wands (Lug’s spear), cups (the Dagda’s cauldron), and pentacles (the stone of Fál).53
The occult nature of these secondhand fixtures and fittings stresses that the project, as Yeats conceived it, was always more magical than religious, no matter that part of the plan was to waft incense about while intoning invocations to Midir, Aengus, and so on. Its goal was not, in other words, to reinstate Irish paganism as it had once been (or even as Standish O’Grady thought it had once been); rather it was an attempt, nationalist in spirit, to solder Irish symbolism onto the template of international occultism. As Ronald Hutton remarks of the parent order, ‘the ceremonies… were not acts of worship; their focus was the celebrant.’54 As we shall see, this was once again to bring to the surface Yeats’s differences with Russell, not least because it was essential to Yeats that his Mysteries be hybridized with Christian imagery.
Inventing tradition from a magpie range of sources came easily to Yeats, despite the disjunctions identified above. He began developing the idea for the Mysteries in the mid-1890s, and initially planned to base it in a castle on an island in Lough Key, which he and Douglas Hyde had seen on a trip in April 1895. Appropriately enough the lake had mythological associations: according to the dindshenchas it was named after Cé (whence Key), a daughter of Manannán, who had drowned in it, or alternatively after a male Cé, Núadu’s druid. This piece of fantasy real estate never came to pass, and the idea itself was not original: Yeats had come across it in a book by Nora Hopper years earlier.55 Looking back in 1915, Yeats went into classicizing mode, recalling that he had sought to ‘establish mysteries like those of Eleusis or Samrothace’; but the idea of a grand (or grand enough) building to which a self-marginalized and selfidentified esoteric elite might repair from an uncomprehending Catholic populace had obvious Anglo-Irish resonances—it was to be a kind of equivalent on the spiritual plane of Coole Park, the Galway seat of Yeats’s friend and patron, Augusta Gregory. In this connection, one wonders too about the Protestant overtones of the Túatha Dé’s ‘temples of grey stone’ projected for restoration in ‘Rosa Alchemica’. These recalled the Ascendency ‘Big Houses’, which Yeats himself had dismissed as ‘granite boxes’, before a change of heart: such temples would house another kind of marginalized elite, for after all the fairies were also termed ‘Gentry’. Once again we see the Túatha Dé Danann functioning subliminally as a form of anxious Anglo-Irish self-representation.
After some two years of intermittent work, the Celtic Order and its rituals seem to have been framed by late November 1898, followed by another burst of activity in 1901. Working divinities so bereft of cult into a series of ceremonies was an uphill task. Lucy Kalogera, who has investigated Yeats’s papers on the subject in depth, writes that Irish mythology has ‘strong ritualistic associations’: but in fact this is the element in which it is most signally lacking. Thus the whole process entailed a conspicuous irony, for it required the Túatha Dé Danann to be equipped with two things that they had never possessed in the whole course of Irish literature—a detailed iconography and a ritual context—at the same time as it excised the one area in which that literature made them splendidly rich, that of dramatic narrative. The mythological tales which d’Arbois de Jubainville among many others had recovered could therefore only find a place in the rituals as allusions in litanies of invocation, which took the form of a frieze-like resumé of each god’s career. Here is Midir:
Midir dweller at Bri Leith I invoke you.
Midir father of Blathart I invoke you.
Midir foster father of Aengus I invoke you.
Midir mast[er] of the fairies I invoke you.
Midir Husband of Etain I invoke you.
Midir loser of Etain I invoke you.
Midir builder of the way in the bog I invoke you.
Midir builder of Lam rad in the bog I invoke you.
Midir the clearer away of the stone out of Meath I invoke you.
Midir the planter of Tethba with rushes I invoke you.
Midir master of the three cows I invoke you.
Midir master of the three herons I invoke you.56
This invocation does acknowledge, in a rather clumsy way, that members of the Túatha Dé such as Midir were embedded in a web of complex story; but as we have seen repeatedly in this book, such a web is not quite a mythology. Mythology furnishes a culture with a total worldview, interpreting and mirroring back everything that that culture finds significant. For traditional peoples mythology has a role in explaining everything: the configuration of their landscape, the nature of truth, the dealings of the gods with each other and with humans, all the way down to gender relations, social customs, art, and technology. Ireland’s monastic early literature certainly had strands of mythology in it, but it was not in itself a full mythology in this sense. Hence, for Yeats, the tremendous value of occult philosophy, which provided a substitute context within which the native gods, orphaned of their mythology by Christianity, might be productively incubated.
IMAGES AND EVOCATIONS
This brings us to the actual processes by which Yeats invented tradition about the Túatha Dé Danann for his projected order. The single most crucial activity was the generation of vivid inner images of the gods which were then recorded. Recalling this period in his life in 1924, Yeats dismissed his activities as ‘willful phantasy’: he meant this self-disparagingly, but it was in fact an accurate description of the psychic state required for occult visualization. For this he needed his old companion Russell, whose sensibility seemed permanently tuned to the correct ethereal frequency; the Celtic Mysteries were the last time the magician and the mystic would actively collaborate. By laying bare their differences of opinion the process resulted in a cooling of relations. Nevertheless, Russell was an essential contributor to the shaping of the god images, along with the Scottish writer William Sharp—whom we shall encounter at length in the next chapter—and a number of Golden Dawn initiates, not least MacGregor Mathers, the peremptory and authoritarian head of that order. Others included Yeats’s maternal uncle George Pollexfen, plus a husband and wife team, Edmund and Dorothea Hunter, the last of whom had an Irish background.57 Investigation should not be imagined as taking place in a physical group: Yeats had long resided in London (as did the Hunters), Mathers was in Paris, Russell in Dublin, and Sharp in Scotland, and so work on the Mysteries was usually carried on by correspondence, or consisted of Yeats plus one other person.
The technique for generating images of the gods—‘building up the divine forms’, in the jargon—was simple, and was part of the training imparted by the Golden Dawn. Usually one person—typically Yeats himself—would enter a state of loosely focused concentration upon a deity until imagery began to flow unimpeded before his mind’s eye. All that had to be done was to keep steering one’s mental focus back to the figure until a clear and detailed picture had been built up; this was described to the other person present, who wrote it down.58 The obvious problem with this photofit approach was the absence of a control against which to calibrate the results, as the medieval saga-writers had failed to provide a gazetteer. Ultimately there was nothing to reassure the seer that any given image was ‘correct’ beyond gut instinct, or the protocols internalized from other mythologies and from the works of romantic and scholarly Celticism. The effect was a pervasive sense of forcedness: details transparently derived from a personal, conscious reading of d’Arbois de Jubainville and O’Grady can be observed floating to the surface, to be announced as pre-conscious—and also in an important sense defensively pre-aesthetic—emanations from the collective.
Yeats’s magical notebooks contain descriptions of the ‘forms’ of Lug, Étaín, Ogma, the Dagda, Manannán, Lir, Núadu, Danu, and Bodb Derg, which all emerged out of the studious aimlessness of inner vizualization and were noted down by Dorothea Hunter.59 Lug led off:
Entering into the presence of Lug it is impossible for some time to discern any distinct form, because of the dazzling light which proceeds from him, but after a little while the light becomes less overpowering. His hair is like yellow wool, his eyes red, revolving with a terrible rapidity; above his head are radiations of light in the colours of the prism. His under robe is red, his mantle yellow. From his eyes, mouth, and hands pour streams of light.60
It is clear that Lug has become a deity of solar fire here, for which medieval literature gave no warrant. Standish O’Grady’s Lug had been radiant but at considerably lower wattage, and was cloaked in decidedly non-solar green—the last a detail drawn directly from his appearance to his son Cú Chulainn the Táin. It is difficult to pinpoint the source for Lug’s Victorian transformation from multi-skilled warrior into the sungod exemplified here. Several factors were in play; the simplest was that as a young, handsome deity associated with the arts, Lug was the nearest match for the Graeco-Roman Apollo. Initial etymologies of Lug’s name linked it to an Indo-European root meaning ‘light’, though later research has shown this was certainly wrong.61 Furthermore, we saw that the Early Modern Irish version of ‘The Tragic Deaths of the Sons of Tuireann’ had averred that ‘the appearance of his face and his forehead was as bright as the sun on a dry summer’s day’, though this was conventional literary exaggeration typical of its times and not a relic of ancient solar cult.62 Finally, d’Arbois de Jubainville had repeatedly stressed that the Fomorian king Balor was a god of night, and that alone might have been reason enough for Yeats and others to associate his slayer with sunlight.
More surprising was the ‘form’ of the god Ogma, who came
… dancing a curious barbaric measure in which he gesticulates much. He is naked and carries under his left arm a bunch of fruit, in his right hand he waves an apple bough. Laying down the fruit and placing a reed pipe between his lips, he dances round the fruit, forming figures of intricate circles, playing meanwhile weird wild music on his flute.63
This was superficially an exception to the general rule of the over-apt image; note that one of Ogma’s genuine medieval attributes—the epithet gríanainech, ‘sun-faced’—had been noted by d’Arbois de Jubainville but failed to make it into Yeats’s consciousness, perhaps because its basic import had been used up by Lug. But secondhand associations from classical mythology have flowed in to fill the gap: Ogma is half-satyr, halfmale maenad. Yeats went on to say that Ogma ‘represents the natural impulse in action, as opposed to any Art expression’, showing that at this stage he clearly did not know Ogma’s traditional role as inventor of the ogam alphabet or Lucian’s account of the cognate Ogmios, since ‘Art expression’ would in fact have been an excellent description of the latter’s role as patron and personification of eloquence.
Superficially, Manannán proved less baffling:
The form of Mahanon [sic] rises from the depths of the ocean on a chariot formed of the crests of two meeting waves; this chariot is drawn by two swans. His face is old and calm; and over it ceaseless shadows flicker. His under robes are formed of calm sweeping waters, his mantle of broken tossing waters; above his head is a winged sun.64
This peaceable description of the god is compatible with Russell’s, in which he was the ‘Logos’, the primordial male emanation of Lir. But Manannán clearly refused to settle, as elsewhere in Yeats’s writings the sea-god cuts a more ambivalent figure. In the prototypes of his 1907 play about the Ulster Cycle heroine Deirdre, Yeats seems to have thought of Manannán as a god of fate, and as basically inimical to human beings. He noticed—as had others—that by virtue of his dominion over the sea, Manannán was aligned with the realm of the Fomorians, whom he envisaged as marine deities of watery darkness, the opponents of the Túatha Dé Danann as gods of life and light. In manuscript drafts of Deirdre, he went so far as to make Manannán Deirdre’s father—a blatant alteration of medieval tradition—and thus the source of the fateful tragedy which overtakes the Ulstermen. One (rather good) version described the god appearing in the court of king Conchobor with the infant Deirdre, before prophesying disaster:
… ‘this weakling shall grow up a woman
So coveted by the proud kings of the world
They shall blow up all to quarrel and in that quarrel
Your country and all the countries of the west
Shall go to rack and ruin’; and thereon
He folded his sea green cloak upon his head
and vanished.65
Typically, Yeats removed Manannán as god of fate from the final version of the play, perhaps out of anxiety that the god was locked into a personal symbolic language that could not be successfully conveyed to a general audience.
Looking over the notes of the esoteric visualizations, the overall impression conveyed by these deities—kitted out with branches, tridents, and chariots—is classical pastiche. The ‘forms’ were not intended, of course, as art in themselves, but as the archetypal background against which a national art might be made. This, however, was to deny the aesthetic debts which the figures so obviously proclaimed: the attempt at the primordial and pre-aesthetic feels second-hand. Because the point was to find the eternal essence which underlay each god’s narrative, the shaping of the god-forms involved the concentration and condensation of information drawn from an eclectic range of medieval sources. The god-forms were thus abstracted from mythic narrative and so locked into an endless automatic motion.
Yeats read the medieval sources in translation, but he accessed most through the summaries in the works of Celtic scholars. The quirks of the transmission process could not always be evaded, and sometimes determined the whole shape of the image. Nowhere was this clearer than in the case of the triple-goddess Brigit:
The Three Bridgets guard the entrance to the land of the Gods. This entrance consists of 3 gateways, formed of heavy beams of wood, inlaid with small ornaments of silver and brass.
Bridget the Smithworker stands strong and alert at the left hand gate. She is very dark, with black wiry hair, and restless black eyes. Her tunic is of blue and purple. Her bratta purple; a bronze broach clasps her bratta and on her head is a bronze band; beaten bronze work adorns her leather belt and sandals. She governs all handiworks and represents the hard, laborious and painful side of life.
Bridget of Medicine stands at the right hand gate. She has a fair and gentle face. Her robes are light blue embroidered with silver thread, clasped by a silver winged broach, another winged ornament rests on her head. She represents the happy and sympathetic side of life, and so becomes the healer of that which is bruised and broken by the hammer of the Bridget of Smithwork.
Bridget of Poetry. Over the central gateway stands Bridget of Poetry, her robes are more sombre, and cloudy. They are of dull blue grey and white; her face is neither fair nor dark, she has soft blue eyes which sadly look out upon the world, feeling the joys and sorrows that work therein. She combines the forces of the other two, being both active and passive, receptive of impressions, and possessing the power of producing form.
Her right arm rests upon a silver harp, her left is extended as though to emphasize some spoken words. She says ‘expand, express, dispose from the centre, then rest and draw in. Old force must be thrown away or it becomes unhealthy.’ She gives as her sign the drawing of the hands inwards towards the heart, then throwing them open outwards.
While she rests the vegetation grows; she blows the blast from her trumpet during the dead months of winter. The waves of the sea flow towards her when she is at rest, and are driven back when she becomes active.
Behind the posts of the gateway are two hounds, that on the side of B the Smithworker is black, the other is white. They represent Life and Death, Joy and Sorrow. Whosoever would enter through this gateway should know the secret of one of these hounds, for a battle takes place between them, and that hound which is known grows stronger through that knowledge, and when the stronger has devoured the weaker, it becomes the servant of him who knows its nature.66
This was the longest and the most icon-like of all the god-forms, for reasons that are revealing. Brigit was unique in medieval tradition because she combined a clear and intriguing purview with a minimal narrative presence, hardly appearing in the Mythological Cycle. This was (perhaps) a pure accident of transmission: we know the likes of Midir, Lug, and Aengus thanks to saga-narratives, but our knowledge of Brigit’s character comes not from a tale, but from ‘Cormac’s Glossary’. The factuality of the glossary form invested her with exactly the kind of timeless stillness Yeats was trying to achieve in the Celtic workings, identifying her first as the daughter of the Dagda, and then, in triplicate, as a female poet, female smith, and female healer, worshipped by the professional poets ‘for very great and famous was her application to the art’.67
Yeats’s figure is essentially a thoughtful expansion of the glossary entry, and the idea that Brigit the poetess mediates between the harsh and the tender sides of life that her sisters represent was an inspired allegorical touch of a kind that went unachieved elsewhere. His imagination was clearly compelled by the idea of a native goddess of poetry, and it was significant that the three Brigits ‘guard the entrance’ to the land of the gods: they seem to be initiatory figures embodying the opposites inherent in life, as well as the reconciliation of those opposites in art. (It is worth noting that the two antithetical hounds are Yeats’s invention, and a telling one.) As such they anticipate the dynamic equilibrium of antinomies in A Vision, that much later Yeatsian system—but they also echoed the initiation ceremony for the second grade of the Golden Dawn, which involved a complicated visualization of a divine woman, Isis-Urania.68 Given Brigit’s position at the gateway to the land of the gods, Yeats may have intended this elaborate ‘form’ to perform a similar function in his Celtic order.
So far our analysis of the iconography of the Celtic Mysteries has necessarily focused on Yeats as prime mover, but we must now turn to Russell’s contribution. The project brought the two men into collaboration, albeit one charged with mutual frustration. Ultimately, it foundered on the intrinsic contradictions which that collaboration crystallized.
The rise of Russell’s Celtic interests in 1895 preceded the groundwork for the Mysteries by about a year, but the advent of Yeats’s project supplied tremendous additional energy. On the simplest level, Russell’s visionary faculty could be used as a kind of digital enhancement for the god-forms seen by others. (A letter to Yeats in June 1901 saw him imitating the latter’s quasi-scientific tone, informing him that ‘[t]he colour of the ring in the Nuada symbol is gold or yellow, not blue’.)69 But it became obvious that Russell imagined the role the ancient gods would play in the Ireland of the future to be wholly different from the one Yeats had in mind. Yeats himself was later to write, famously, that he had in his youth sought to create an ‘aristocratic esoteric’ literature, and this very typical phrase also characterizes the basic bias of his Celtic order. Its ceremonies were projected to be for an elite group of initiates, and were to fuse pagan and Christian imagery in an occult rather than devotional mode.
Russell, on the other hand, remained fired by the evangelistic tenor of Theosophy, which held itself to be the restoration of a universal and enlightened religious system. The important difference was that he had come to see ‘druid Ireland’ as one of the places where that system had been preserved in uncorrupted form, and one which might yet enlighten the rest of Europe.70 (Atlantis—inevitably—was invoked as the source of the ancient doctrine.) His articles from 1895 connecting Theosophy with Irish myth were propelled by a conviction that the Irish should return en masse to this idealized, imagined paganism. This belief system would have the advantage, to Russell’s way of thinking, of being rooted in the land of Ireland (and thus nationalist), while also being a local version of theosophical doctrine (and thus true). It was also historically determinist, because Madame Blavatsky—Theosophy’s formidable foundress—had prophesied that a new age would dawn at the end of the 1890s, and this prophecy made a profound impression on Russell. Yeats’s call to create a Celtic mystical order seemed to him like the first glimmerings of that new dawn, for it echoed an 1896 decision by the International Theosophical Convention to begin founding temples and mystery schools, including one in Ireland.71
The psychological effects of all of this on Russell—a kindly, shy, and still young man—were tinged with the uncanniness of religious mania. By 1896 he had initiated a period of frenetic public campaigning, famously writing to Yeats in June of that year that the new age had already arrived:
The Gods have returned to Erin and have centred themselves in the sacred mountains and blow the fires through the country. They have been seen by several in vision, they will awaken the magical instinct everywhere and the universal heart of the people will turn to the old druidic beliefs. I note through the country the increased faith in faery things. The bells are heard from the mounds and soundings in the hollows of the mountains.72
Russell’s mobilizing rhetoric was oddly dissociative, since the ‘several’ visionaries alluded to seemed to mean Yeats and himself; the reader is further disconcerted by the recurrent paramilitary note in his letters during that year (‘The hour has come to strike a blow… Let us be hopeful, confident, defiant!’; ‘What am I to understand? Am I to tell my men to go ahead?’).73 Millenarian excitability was pushing him in the direction of mental breakdown; he began accosting Catholic priests and on one occasion was observed preaching to Sunday strollers on the esplanade at Bray, near Dublin, about the return of the native gods. (By surreal coincidence, among his bemused audience was none other than Standish O’Grady.)74 By 1900, Yeats had become seriously concerned by the suicidal imagery which had begun to appear in his friend’s visions, particularly the recurrent urge to drown himself.75
The crucial point is that both men anticipated the return of Ireland’s pagan divinities, but from very different underlying ideological positions. Russell saw Yeats’s projected order as the nucleus of a spiritual revolution that would mould collective Ireland and usher it into the New Age. Yeats’s own plan was for something on a more homeopathic scale—not to mention the fact that one of his major concerns for the order was to capture Maud Gonne, his great if unavailing love of the period, who would act as its High Priestess. Russell was not incapable of putting his involvements in this period into an ironic perspective, but of the two, Yeats possessed the mind far more able to stand back, scrutinize, and aestheticize occult and mystical experience.
As Peter Kuch has pointed out, the story ‘Rosa Alchemica’ can be seen as a clearing house for the anxieties stirred by the recuperation of the gods. Michael Robartes, the leader of the neo-pagan theurgical order in the story, can be seen as a chiaroscuro portrait of Russell: the gods of this little cosmos are eerie, hallucinatory presences who are enemies to personality. At one point Robartes boasts (wrongly) that he and his adepts can come to no harm from ordinary mortals, ‘being incorporate with immortal spirits’. This was a heavily ironic version of Russell’s theory that human beings might become gods, but for the narrator the process—accomplished through a disorientating grand pas of adepts and immortals—has more in common with the pleasures of being vampirized:
… [A] mysterious wave of passion, that seemed like the soul of the dance moving within our souls, took hold of me, and I was swept, neither consenting nor refusing, into the midst. I was dancing with an immortal august woman, who had black lilies in her hair, and her dreamy gesture seemed laden with a wisdom more profound than the darkness that is between star and star… ; and as we danced on and on, the incense drifted over us and round us, covering us away as in the heart of the world, and ages seemed to pass, and tempests to awake and perish in the folds of our robes and in her heavy hair.
Suddenly I remembered that her eyelids had never quivered, and that her lilies had not dropped a black petal, nor shaken from their places, and understood with a great horror that I danced with one who was more or less than human, and who was drinking up my soul as an ox drinks up a wayside pool; and I fell, and darkness passed over me.76
This was an ironic version of Yeats’s own doctrine of the gods as eternal signatures or moods, fused with suspicion of Russell’s woozy deprecation of ego and outline. The mysticism of Michael Robartes (and by implication, Russell) depends on the cancellation of individuality, human and divine. This may be the reason that in later versions of the story Yeats excised the passage quoted below on page 394, which listed the individual gods of the Túatha Dé Danann. Iconographic precision was out of place in a narrative in which becoming ‘incorporate’ with immortal spirits entails a horrifying exsanguination of the self.
‘Rosa Alchemica’, therefore, implicitly criticized Russell’s hopes for a pagan renaissance as formless and fanatical, and by extension inimical to art. (In a telling moment, the narrator regains consciousness at dawn to find that the exquisite symbolic icons of individual divinities that he had seen the night before are in reality only ‘half-finished’, and that the decorations of the temple are botched.) Developing the Celtic Order demonstrated that the two men’s polytheological positions were irreconcilable. For Yeats, the gods had individual identities and trajectories, each a facet of the divine imagination. His hierarchic desire to control and examine spiritual experience led him to see them as gateways to the ultimate, unknowable divinity. For Russell, in contrast, the gods were less distinguished and individualized. He emphasized the Many at the expense of the One, approaching them all with oceanic feelings of sweeping, all-purpose reverence. It is telling that Yeats’s writings tend to introduce the Túatha Dé separately, one by one, whereas Russell’s bring the reader before assemblies of indistinguishable beings.
In both cases, the gods were extracted from the stories about them and reconfigured as unchanging principles that had always underpinned the inner Ireland. But the very indistinctness of Russell’s divinities made them languorous; when they were also divorced from their narratives the effect was a catastrophic loss of imaginative force. But as seen in the case of the god-forms, Yeats’s need to focus in on each deity could attract similar problems. Recovering the native gods implied energy and movement, but the creation of individual iconographies necessitated first fixing each god into a lifeless pose, like a daguerreotype; as such they were opposed to the passionate experience out of which Yeats felt art should come.
Much later in life the poet asserted that a great poet’s role was to be ‘the subconscious self’ of his people, capable of uttering the ‘truths they have forgotten, bringing up from the depth what they would deny’.77 This was to see the poet as the mouthpiece of the collective unconscious of the nation. Something very like this was implied by a mysterious passage in Yeats’s Autobiographies, which posited ‘a nationwide multiform reverie, every mind passing through a stream of suggestion, and all streams acting and reacting on one another, no matter how distant the minds, how dumb the lips’.78 In the late nineties, Yeats seems rather to have imagined the role of the magus-poet as activator and accelerant, bringing into consciousness the archetypes—the ‘primordial images’—buried deep in the country’s unconscious psyche.79 John Hutchinson stresses the top-down rather than bottom-up dimension of this project: ‘Yeats believed in the creation of a nation from above, from an injection of a unified body of images into society, which, diffused by journalists, would bind the different social strata into a community of sentiment.’80 What is clear is that one source of the disillusionment which the Celtic Mysteries produced was the basic contradiction inherent in delving into the national unconscious while having pre-existing expectations about what would be found there: in this case the paralyzing expectation was that the ‘unified body of images’ that emerged would correspond to the gods of ancient Ireland.
THE ANGLO-IRISH AENGUS : A CASE STUDY
The final part of my argument widens out again from the abortive Celtic Mysteries to make some points about broader currents within the Revival, looking now at how a single deity was re-imagined in the period.
The Homeric poems have a formula: ‘which god was it who… ?’ If we were to ask which member of the Túatha Dé Danann was the presiding deity of the Revival, the answer could only be Aengus Óg (Óengus, the Mac Óc). Aengus, in short, was the Irish divinity most complexly projected into modernity, and his very ubiquity in the poetry, prose, drama, and visual art of the period requires explanation. What are the forces that propelled him—and not Lug, or Brigit, or the Dagda—into the minds of so many writers and artists? How and why did Aengus become the ‘subtle-hearted’ god of love, when the Túatha Dé tended, precisely, to lack purviews of that kind? Unlike almost every other member of the pantheon, the revived Aengus has also enjoyed a long career as a literary figure, persisting well into the afterglow of the Celtic Twilight and beyond—the most recent mainstream fiction in which he features, by the popular Scottish novelist Alexander McCall Smith, was published in 2006.81 What follows therefore is the first of two case studies of the Mac Óc in this book, divided partly by theme and partly by chronology: this initial investigation takes us up to the turn of the century, while the god’s more recent career is examined in the penultimate chapter.
A superficial reason for Aengus’s prominence is that he was simply the most pleasant member of the Irish pantheon in the medieval literature. As we saw in earlier chapters, he appears therein as a byword for physical beauty and as a wily, youthful trickster, remarkable for his rich emotionality. He exhibits a range of humanly recognizable responses—reverie, love-longing, and suffering—and displays warmth to mortals. Restless desire and the propulsive force of visionary beauty were immediately appealing in the context of an idealist literary movement.
A second reason is to be found in the subject matter of the Irish texts that early scholars chose to edit and publish. One of the most important of the fissiparous learned fraternities established to rescue Irish traditional literature was the Ossianic Society, founded in Dublin in 1853. As the name suggests, its raison d’être was to collect and publish poems and tales about Oisín, Finn, and the fíana—partly out of a long-simmering resentment that cultural ownership of the material had been so spectacularly claimed by the Scots, for whom Ossian, thanks to Macpherson’s epics, had become a cultural totem. And in that copious Ossianic material Aengus had the status of recurring special guest star, appearing in tight situations as a deus ex machina to rescue the lovers Díarmait and Gráinne. The Transactions of the Ossianic Society had the double effect of highlighting Aengus’s significance and of underscoring his role as the protector of a pair of human lovers, especially as its third volume consisted of a translation of the canonical version of the story, Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (‘The Pursuit of Díarmait and Gráinne’).82 Of course, traditionally speaking, Aengus’s sympathies were a function of his role as Diarmaid’s foster-father, and in rescuing his foster-son he was acting entirely within the norms of the traditional Gaelic mores upon which the stories depended. But this was a subtle point, and it is easy to see how, in the imaginations of those who read the Transactions, Aengus could begin to acquire a romantic penumbra as the supernatural patron of lovers.
Two more steps were now required before he could be identified as the god of love, and these happened concurrently. The first was the recognition that the Túatha Dé Danann were Ireland’s pagan deities, as already detailed. It helped that in one early saga, the poignant ‘Dream of Óengus’, the god appeared as a lover himself, thus reinforcing Ossianic perceptions to nineteenth-century readers. The second step was to expand his role from protector of two specific literary lovers to the guardian spirit of lovers in general. Standish O’Grady was once again the crucial figure here, and at the end of the 1870s Aengus appeared in his work as a fully fledged native divinity of love.83 O’Grady’s formula ‘Angus an Vrōga, the Eros of the Gæil’ was the first instance of his conflation with the classical love-god—a motif which soon became conventional.84
O’Grady’s imagination was clearly attracted by Aengus, and he equipped him with the halo of circling birds which were the most distinctive feature of his modern iconography, the equivalent of Apollo’s lyre or Neptune’s trident. There was a tendency to multiply the number of these over the next decade, but—typically—their origin was obscure, being originally drawn from a puzzling dindshenchas story, where they were four in number. The story tells of Aengus shaping four of his kisses into two pairs of birds, ‘so that they might entice the nobles of Ireland’.85 Dindshenchas material is often elliptical—because it alludes to stories that the reader or audience probably already knew—and so the significance of Aengus’s action is unclear to us. The rest of the story makes it obvious that it was something mischievous at best and sinister at worst, because the four birds act as the supernatural equivalent of nuisance callers for the unlucky Cairbre Lifechair, son of the legendary king Cormac mac Airt. They appear at his dwelling, Ráth Cairbri, where one pair chirrups ‘Come here, come here!’ while the others cry ‘I go, I go!’ They follow Cairbre wherever he goes for almost a year, incessantly carolling this peculiar mantra.
There was no scholarly edition of this anecdote until 1895, but Eugene O’Curry had mentioned Aengus’s birds, and this was probably O’Grady’s source.86 Fashioned from kisses and with a mysterious song that hinted at unattainability, Aengus’s birds could be taken to gesture towards the erotic. O’Grady enthusiastically took up the theme: Aengus/Angus made numerous appearances in the History, and the birds were repackaged both as his permanent accessories and as metaphors for the impalpable force of romantic love which he had come to personify in O’Grady’s mind. At one point the god appears to Cormac mac Airt accessorized ‘with a shining tiompan in his hands’—a tiompán being a stringed instrument, perhaps a psaltery.87 Even more typical was the following passage:
… and Lara observed her, and she observed him, for in the minds of both there sang the immortal birds, children of the breath of Angus of the Brugh, the beautiful son of Yeoha, and their minds trembled towards one another, and a strong compulsion led them on to love.88
Accounting for human behaviour and emotion in terms of the actions of gods was very rare in medieval Irish tradition, as a direct consequence of its ‘post-pagan’ character.89 When an ancient Greek thinker wanted to rationalize his divinities he could call upon philosophy to recast them as poetic labels for inner or outer phenomena—such as the atmosphere, or sexual desire—and this was a persistent, respectable current within the intellectual mainstream of antiquity, the roots of which could be traced back as far as Homer.90 But in a Christian culture like that of medieval Ireland, the idea that pagan gods might inwardly interfere with human beings was not a welcome one—so rationalization had to take place upon the plane of history, not upon that of philosophy.91 The Anglo-Irish Aengus, then, began as a particularly vivid example of Standish O’Grady’s fondness for taking a well-attested figure from medieval Irish tradition and wresting it into a new, Hellenic shape.
The result was an old-yet-new deity who had come sharply into focus—bird-haloed, tiompán-toting—by the early 1880s, and over the next twenty years other writers continued to refine him. Both Yeats and Russell found Aengus compelling—perhaps the most compelling of all the Túatha Dé Danann—and this has been recognized by scholars in passing but not fully accounted for.92 It is clear that he chimed with their esoteric (and, for Yeats, erotic) preoccupations, and could be keyed to the ways in which those preoccupations shifted over two decades. ‘The Dream of Óengus’ in particular set forth themes that seemed tailormade to appeal to the younger Yeats, not least supernatural vision and the relationship between transcendence and desire.93 It is also likely, given the poet’s thwarted love life, that the elusive nature of consummation in that tale stirred him deeply. Its hero, who seems every bit as adolescent as his sobriquet ‘the Young Lad’ would imply, is charged with eros but seems to lack genital sexuality. And when Óengus and his beloved are united, instead of falling into one another’s arms they turn into swans and fly off together—desire sublimated by a seemingly symbolic metamorphosis.
But in Yeats’ case, the concept of Aengus as divine lover was down, in part, to sheer misinformation. Aengus played an important role in the saga ‘The Wooing of Étaín’ (as discussed in chapter 3), a work which excited Yeats deeply. By virtue of involving reincarnation and shifts between orders of being, it seemed to embody some profound statement of pre-Christian Irish spirituality. Unfortunately, the only text known at the time was in fragments, leaving huge holes in the plot. (The full saga was not restored until the 1930s.) This made it necessary for scholars and littérateurs to reconstruct the story. Inevitably, major misapprehensions came in, the most serious being that Étaín had left her husband Midir in order to elope with Aengus, an idea which clearly—and with circular reasoning—drew on the latter’s recent ‘recovery’ as the Irish god of love.94
As it happened, this conjecture was utterly wide of the mark, but the idea that Aengus and Étaín had been a pair of wandering, passionate lovers shaped Yeats’s conception of the god from the first.95 He later recorded that, in 1897, ‘while I was still working on an early version of The Shadowy Waters, I saw one night with my bodily eyes, as it seemed, two beautiful persons, who would, I believe, have answered to their names’.96 Yeats’s reconstructed version of ‘The Wooing of Étáin’ mirrors the the exquisite fable of Cupid and Psyche, whose sufferings are recounted in Apuleius’s late antique novel The Golden Ass. That tale—transparently an allegory of the growth of the soul (psyche, in Greek) through love—was highly regarded by Symbolist writers and artists.97 Yet again, it seemed impossible for Irish figures to avoid being lensed through perceived classical equivalents, and in this way Aengus’s reputation as Ireland’s esoteric Eros grew. The significance of this process lay in the fact that the elements required to repackage Aengus as god of love derived from the new Celtic scholarship (comparative mythology, the editing and translation of Gaelic texts), while their actual synthesis was effected by creative writers.
Aengus made a number of appearances in Yeats’s early poetry. The most influential was ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889), in which he featured—in a weird innovation—as the father of Niamh, the fairy-maiden who lures the hero Oisin away.98 A ‘beautiful young man’, he is a narcoleptic figure, a divine lotus-eater. One suspects that this removed sleepiness was Yeats’s attempt to accommodate the contradiction of a lovedeity who seemed somehow pre- or suprasexual. If so, the effect was knowingly decadent. Yeats even gave the god a phallic sceptre which attracts the dainty devotions of both sexes:
One hand upheld his beardless chin,
And one a sceptre flashing out
Wild flames of red and gold and blue,
Like to a merry wandering rout
Of dancers leaping in the air;
And men and ladies knelt them there
And showed their eyes with teardrops dim,
And with low murmurs prayed to him,
And kissed the sceptre with red lips,
And touched it with their finger-tips.99
Such ministrations awaken the god sufficiently for him to rhapsodize on the island’s antinomian and paradisiacal delight, climaxing: ‘joy is God and God is joy.’ He then lapses back into (post-orgasmic?) slumber, after ‘one long glance for girl and boy’ in a manner suggestive of a languorous bisexual responsiveness. Discussion of the ways in which the Anglo-Irish Aengus destabilized sexual norms will be held back for the final chapter of this book, but it should be emphasized in passing that ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ launched a version of the god characterized by passivity and ephebic loveliness, and these would soon become major motifs in his imagery across the works of several writers and artists. For the most part, however, these did not again include Yeats himself, nor Russell, both of whom developed Aengus in esoteric rather than androgynous directions.
From the mid-1890s Aengus entered a second phase of importance in Yeats’s thought, and the poet returned to him with greater sophistication. This is visible in the poetry, in the notes and letters pertaining to the Celtic Mysteries, and in the earlier versions of some of the drama. George Russell led the way in 1895, giving Aengus a central position as ‘the master magician of all, sailing invisibly “on the wings of the cool east wind”’, whose ‘palace… remains to this day at New Grange, wrought over with symbols of the Astral Fire and the great Serpentine Power’.100 By 1901, ‘Angus the Young’ had become firmly embedded in his cosmogony as the native form of the ‘Light of the Logos’, meaning that emanation of the original godhead impelled to pass outwards and downwards into the material world as ‘an eternal joy becoming love, a love changing into desire, and leading on to earthly passion and forgetfulness of its own divinity’. This was another strategy for getting around Aengus’s relative sexlessness: in his primordial or refined form the god represented divine ecstasy, gradually degrading itself into energetic love, and thence into desire, finally sinking into the ‘spiritual death’ of sexual passion. For Russell, Aengus was like the little girl in the nursery rhyme: when he was good, he was very, very good, but when he was bad, he was horrid.
As Russell himself noted, ‘[t]he conception of Angus as an allpervading divinity who first connects being with non-being seems removed by many aeons of thought from that beautiful golden-haired youth who plays on the tympan surrounded by singing birds.’101 In fact, both conceptions of the god detailed here were unmistakably the imaginative creations of the late nineteenth century, one O’Grady’s, the other Russell’s own; far from being ‘aeons of thought’ apart, they were separated only by two decades and a few miles of metropolitan Dublin. But a certain amount of attraction is surely necessary for anything to exist at all, and Russell went on to identify the god with ‘every form of desire’, from the child’s instinctive urge to draw near to beautiful things all the way down to ‘chemical affinity’—that is, molecular bonds.102 This was an exalted (if diffuse) role, and one echoed by Yeats, for when the latter began work on the Celtic rituals, Aengus soon emerged as chief deity in the divine apparatus, ‘the Spirit of Life’ who embodied ‘eternal desire which is a reflection of divine love in a fallen world’.103 Yeats also identified him with Hermes and Dionysus, both sons of the father-god and envisioned as young, attractive men.104 Sometimes it appears that the god had taken on so strong a shape in the poet’s mind that he felt free to flatly contradict the medieval sources—stating that Aengus had been the king of the Túatha Dé Danann, for example, a role which in the sagas he explicitly refuses.
IMAGINATION AND DESIRE
What these versions of Aengus seem to share is a conception of the god as mediatory and mobile, making him the divinity that descends, who moves between things and joins them together. This was clear in Russell’s cosmogony, in which Aengus circulated between the realms of formless divinity and manifest matter, and it also tallied with his role in Yeats’s verse-drama. It seemed to derive from direct inner experience: George Pollexfen, followed by Yeats himself, enjoyed an astral vision of Aengus as a radiant colossus connecting heaven and earth, his head and shoulders lost among the clouds.105
But Yeats also described Aengus as the ‘god of ecstatic poetry’, and—in short—it seems he came to identify him with the poetic imagination itself. Strikingly, this meant that the Celtic Mysteries recuperated and emphasized two divinities of poetry, Aengus and his triple sister Brigit, whose complex ‘divine form’ was examined above. It may be objected that this is hardly surprising in a system developed by a poet, but what is significant is the schematic difference between the two gods. Aengus moves; Brigit is still. The three Brigits stand in a row, with the central Brigit of Poetry interblending the harshness of the Brigit of Smithwork and the sweetness of the Brigit of Medicine, being both ‘receptive of impressions, and possessing the power of producing form’. It is as though they are on different axes: Brigit’s poetry is a horizontal transmutation of experience, and that of Aengus a vertical plunge in search of it. The distinction is between the conscious mixture of rigour and sensitivity necessary for a command of poetic form on the one hand, and the ecstatic quest for inspiration on the other. This recalls Declan Kiberd’s observation about the precedence of style over content in a colony: Aengus is the rhapsodic flash that intuits and innovates a style, but Brigit the smith-goddess is the alchemical process of integration necessary to have something worth expressing—in Yeats’s own famous phrase, the hammering of thoughts into unity. In a crucial sense, then, the brother and sister deities of the Celtic Mysteries represented the twin poles of Yeats’s maturing poetic.
FIG. 8.5. George Russell, A Landscape with a Couple, and a Spirit with a Lute (date unknown), oil on canvas laid on board, National Gallery of Ireland. Reprinted by the permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the Estate of George Russell.
The ‘divine form’ of Aengus is not recorded, perhaps because Yeats and Russell felt they knew what he looked like: his iconography had been more or less fixed by O’Grady. Tellingly, Russell’s visions and images of Aengus accordingly showed an uncharacteristically confident use of detail: the being in Figure 8.5, although typically undated and untitled, answers so closely to Russell’s description of Aengus in 1901 that that is surely who it depicts. (Similar figures—again almost certainly representing Aengus—appear in a number of Russell’s surviving paintings.)106 It seems that in this period Russell came to identify Aengus retrospectively as the focus of one of his earliest and most important visions. The actual date of this experience is unclear: he did not acknowledge it in print as a vision of his own until 1918, but had worked it into a short story entitled ‘A Dream of Angus Oge’, published in 1897. (It may well have been the occasion he recalled in 1911 as the first time he had seen one of the ‘opalescent’ beings whom he identified with the Túatha Dé Danann.) The iconographic accessibility of the Anglo-Irish Aengus is clear from Russell’s account of his vision, because he expected the reader to be able to identify the god:
… I saw the light was streaming from the heart of a glowing figure. Its body was pervaded with light as if sunfire rather than blood ran through its limbs… . It moved over me along the winds, carrying a harp, and there was a circling of golden hair that swept across the strings. Birds flew about it, and… [o]n the face was an ecstasy of beauty and immortal youth.107
It is likely that Aengus would have been the only member of the Túatha Dé that Russell could have counted upon being identifiable in this way.
All this merely confirms that Aengus, much more than the other members of the Túatha Dé, had reached an extreme point of individualization and precision. But as Yeats and Russell worked him into the Celtic Mysteries, something unique happened, consonant with his exceptional position: he hived off a secondary form, a new being. The context was another attempt by Yeats, once again with Pollexfen, to get a vision of Aengus’s divine form. The attempt was made at the very end of December 1898, prefaced by an invocation to the god. A surviving litany from the Celtic Mysteries probably gives a good idea of what this was like (and may be the actual one which was used):
Aengus chief of the young we evoke thee
Master of the four winds we evoke thee
Guarder of Grainne we evoke thee
Sojourner with Mider we evoke thee
Sojourner in [the] Brugh we evoke thee
Lover of Fame we evoke thee.108
But instead of the expected radiant youth, the image of a jester or a fool appeared before Yeats’s inner eye. He described the figure as a ‘medieval fool… in a cap of pale violet with two ears of pink & a cap of the same colour & pointed shoes. He held a long staff of… mountain ash… surmounted by a kind of caduceus shape… when asked [he indicated] that he was only a messenger of the true Aengus.’109 Yeats and Russell undertook intense visionary work on the fool over the next two years, during summer sojourns with Lady Gregory at Coole Park; soon Russell began to glimpse him lurking in Coole’s Georgian corridors, dressed in white. Yeats was to frame these experiences in the third person in one of the stories included in the revised second edition of The Celtic Twilight:
I knew a man who was trying to bring before his mind’s eye an image of Ængus, the old Irish god of love and poetry and ecstasy, who changed four of his kisses into birds, and suddenly the image of a man with a cap and bells rushed before his mind’s eye and grew vivid and spoke and called itself ‘Aengus’ messenger.’ I knew another man, a truly great seer, who saw a white fool in a visionary garden, where there was a tree with peacocks’ feathers instead of leaves, and flowers that opened to show little human faces when the white fool had touched them with his coxcomb, and he saw at another time a white fool sitting by a pool and smiling and watching images of many fair women floating up from the pool.110
But where had the image come from? A fool had been the subject of one of Yeats’s poems earlier in the decade; and of course medieval tradition made Óengus/Aengus a trickster—providing a further link with Hermes, god of thieves—because in the first part of ‘The Wooing of Étaín’ he wangles Newgrange by sheer sophistry. The main source for the image, however, was the folklore collection that had become Lady Gregory’s passion, and in which Yeats intermittently collaborated. One of her discoveries was a set of traditions about ‘the fool of the fort(h)’—amadán na bruidhne in Irish—a supernatural being whose very touch, like a blasting dew, brings disablement or death.111 The fool had a reputation for being the only fairy from whose malevolence one cannot recover: paralysis and loss of speech were seen as evidence of the amadán’s touch. As with much fairylore, it is clear that his role was to provide an explanation for unpredictable losses and disasters—in this case the suddenness of a stroke or aneurysm.
At this point Yeats had a problem. Vision had associated the fool with Aengus, the most affable of Irish divinities, yet the amadán of folklore was clearly not a being one would care to meet. Various strategies were tried: he and Russell privately experimented with the theory that there might be two fools, a ‘white’ one (Aengus’s messenger) and a ‘dark’ or ‘black’ one (the malevolent amadán). In The Celtic Twilight, however, Yeats implied that there was only one, whom he acknowledged was indeed deadly from an earthly perspective—but (he weakly continued) ‘[w]hat else can death be but the beginning of wisdom and power and beauty?’112 In many anecdotes collected by Gregory, the touch of the amadán brought not death but catastrophic mental impairment (again the relationship of such stories to the consequences of a stroke are obvious); this allowed Yeats to associate the fool with the dubious insights of delirium, thus bringing him back—by a circuitous route—into the ambit of Aengus, god of ecstasy.113
At some point during this process Yeats passed on Lady Gregory’s findings about the amadán to William Sharp, his Scottish collaborator in the Celtic Mysteries. To Gregory’s great annoyance Sharp promptly published them, working the figure of the sinister ‘faery fool’ into his own misty Celtic verse.114 In particular, Sharp gave the ‘dark fool’ a name—‘Dalua’—and he inserted this being into his version of the Gaelic pantheon as the personification of madness. This process is examined in detail in the following chapter, and it was not the only occasion on which the magpie-like Sharp would lift an idea from Yeats, publish it, and then try to pass it off as a parallel and meaningfully coincident recovery of ancient tradition.115 The result was that Aengus in the 1890s produced not one but two new beings, the white fool and the black; thanks to Sharp, the latter took on a life of its own now wholly unrelated to the medieval Aengus.
This was a by-product of a process which had seen Aengus become, for Yeats, the deity who presided over and personified the intersection of sex, magic, and poetry, and who gave access to the creative energy of euphoria. I suspect his importance lay in his ability to act as a kind of projected divine double for Yeats himself during fin de siècle uncertainties, and that he should be seen as one of the poet’s many personae, alter egos, and anti-selves. To use the metaphor of ‘Rosa Alchemica’, Aengus was the immortal mood with which the poet was most eager to become incorporate, and this reminds us that the Celtic Mysteries were intended in part to claim Maud Gonne, and so represented an intertwining of the poet’s occult and erotic aims.
Yeats’s correspondence during the shaping of the Celtic Mysteries and his ‘therapeutic’ invocations to Aengus—the adjective is Foster’s—present the odd sight of Yeats and Gonne speaking to one other using the gods as metaphors for their own affective ambitions.116 If this seems far-fetched, one must remember that this was precisely what the training of the Golden Dawn had taught them, though Gonne was only briefly a member of the order. Yeats, the passionate and preoccupied lover, figured himself as a votary of the Eros of the Gael. Gonne, the English-born Fenian separatist, explicitly chose to place herself under the aegis of the god Lug, the potent and masculine divinity who rejected his mixed inheritance in order to lead the Túatha Dé Danann in throwing off Fomorian oppression. It was an easy step to substitute ‘Irish’ and ‘British’ for the mythological races, and for Gonne to feel that she was herself flinging slingshots into the eye of the colonial Balor.117 (The myth of Lug was given precisely this anti-colonial spin by revivalist poetasters such as Alice Milligan.)118 According to Yeats, in December 1898 Gonne claimed that she had dreamed that Lug had married them: ‘I saw my body from outside it—& I was brought away by Lug & my hand was put in yours & I was told we were married. Then I kissed you & all became dark.’119 She had been lecturing intensively on Irish mythology at this point, and—if Yeats’s account of her words is at all accurate—her unconscious mind seems here to have uncannily projected herself and the poet into the medieval tale ‘The Phantom’s Frenzy’, casting Yeats as Conn of the Hundred Battles and herself (majestically) as the nubile Sovereignty of Ireland.120 It was certainly of a piece with other aspects of the vehement Gonne persona, and shows how deep the saturation in mythological images went.121
Ultimately, however, the introjection of Aengus availed Yeats little, and there seems to be a link between his erotic disappointments and the increased ambivalence the god took on after the turn of the century. (The version of his play The Countess Cathleen produced in 1900 involved a misleading vision sent by Aengus, for example.)122 The Anglo-Irish Aengus emerges as an ambiguous product of individual and collective influences, arising from but also obscuring the Óengus of early Irish saga. In the hermetic circles in which Yeats moved, he came with great rapidity to personify everything that was best in the native mythology, and in particular by morphing into a god of love he emphasized delicate feeling in a mythology which was not short on bloodthirsty or sordid moments. He became in a sense a partial counterweight to the hero Cú Chulainn, important to so many writers of the Literary Revival, Yeats not least; the two figures personified the polarized self-images of a nation beginning to de-anglicize. Poetic, ecstatic, delicate, occult and sometimes halffeminine, Aengus mirrored an Arnoldian version of the supposed Celtic character, and so became, for a time, the personification of Ireland’s imagination.
1 It is this failure to understand the plasticity of the Irish gods which scuppers the one relevant study so far, Peter Alderson Smith’s loopy The Tribes of Danu: Three Views of Ireland’s Fairies (Gerrards Cross, 1987); see reviews by C. Holdsworth, ‘Yeats and Ireland’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 32.1 (1989), 108–10, and B. O Hehir, ‘The Passing of the Shee: After Reading a Book about Yeats and the Tribes of Danu’, Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 6 (1988), 245–65.
2 Useful comments by J. Hutchinson (The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: the Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London, 1987), 145–6) who points out that Yeats and Russell soon attracted distinct constituencies ‘to become rival poles of the literary revival’.
3 Like much of Russell’s oeuvre: his most recent investigator, Nicholas Allen, finds ‘his poetry invisible, his prose unrecognisable, his paintings in the vault’ (George Russell (Æ) and the New Ireland, 1905–1930 (Dublin, 2003), 14). The best single-volume biography is still H. Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man: a Biography of George William Russell, ‘A.E.’, 1867–1955 (Gerrards Cross, 1975); the course of Russell and Yeats’s friendship is traced in P. Kuch, Yeats and A.E.: the antagonism that unites dear friends (Gerrards Cross, 1986). Useful overview by J. Nolan, ‘The Awakening of the Fires: A Survey of AE’s Mystical Writings 1897–1933’, ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies (2001), 89–99.
4 The history of the Theosophical Society is concisely summarized by R. Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford, 1999), 18–20, and its doctrines by Foster, TAM, 50, and N. Allen, George Russell (AE) and the New Ireland, 1905–30 (Dublin, 2003), 16–7.
5 See Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 19.
6 For Yeats’s views of Madame Blavatsky and his own earlier break with the Society, see Foster, TAM, 102–4; for the impact of Hindu imagery and thought on him, see 47–8 in the same volume; details now set out at length in K. Monteith, Yeats and Theosophy (London, 2008).
7 Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 72.
8 Lucid overview of the Golden Dawn in fin de siècle occultism in A. Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago, 2007).
9 Foster, TAM, 103–7. The study which broke the ground on Yeats the ceremonial magician is G. M. Harper, Yeats’s Golden Dawn (London, 1974); his occult thought is condensed with astonishing clarity by G. Hough, The Mystery Religion of W. B. Yeats (Brighton, 1984). Further detail is to be found in the essays in G. M. Harper (ed.), Yeats and the Occult (London, 1976); the field will undoubtedly be transformed by the publication of Warwick Gould’s forthcoming edn. of the poet’s magical notebooks. S. J. Graf’s Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune (Albany, NY, 2015) came too late to be used in this study.
10 See the account ‘An Irish’s Mystic’s Testimony’, in The Descent of the Gods: The Mystical Writings of George Russell-A.E., ed. R. & N. Iyer (Gerrards Cross, 1988), 377, in which Russell (in his early forties at the time) makes it clear that ‘mystical beings… are never seen with the physical eyes’ and that seership requires a particular ‘mood’—meaning, I take it, mental quiescence. For Blake and eidetic images, see P. Ackroyd, Blake (London, 1995), 24–5.
11 Hutchinson, Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, 142.
12 The literature on the role of the symbol in Yeats’s occult thought is vast: the place to start is his essay ‘Magic’ (published 1901 but reprinted in Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil (London, 1903)), and see the discussions in Hough, The Mystery Religion of W. B. Yeats, 48ff.
13 Lady Wilde, Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages of Ireland (London, 1890), 1; see also M. H. Thuente, W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore (Totowa, NJ, 1980), 32–73.
14 See S. Garrigan-Mattar, ‘Yeats, Fairies, and the New Animism’, New Literary History 43 (Winter 2012), 137–157.
15 See S. Garrigan-Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival (Oxford, 2004), 46–7.
16 Yeats’s pronouncements on fairylore were criticized in the press coverage of a notorious 1895 murder trial, in which a Tipperary farmer named Michael Cleary was revealed to have burned his wife to death in the belief that she was a fairy changeling. Cleary seems to have been mentally unbalanced, but Angela Bourke’s extraordinary microhistory of the tragedy, The Burning of Bridget Cleary (London, 1993), superbly investigates the actual role that fairylore and ‘fairy-doctors’ played in a rapidly modernizing late Victorian Ireland—a useful antidote to Yeatsian mystifications.
17 W. B. Yeats (ed.),’The Trooping Fairies’, in Fairy and Folktales of the Irish Peasantry (London, 1888), in Prefaces and Introductions, ed. W. O’Donnell (Basingstoke, 1988), 10.
18 WIFL&M, 66.
19 Once again, Thuente sets out the basic movement, W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore, 143–6.
20 This was later included in the 1902 second edn. of The Celtic Twilight, from which I quote (‘Dust hath closed Helen’s Eye’, Mythologies, ed. W. Gould & D. Toomey (Basingstoke, 2005), 18).
21 This is even clearer in ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), in which the difference between the Sidhe and the Túatha Dé is explained (uniquely) as a class-based difference in terminology: ‘The powerful and wealthy called the gods of ancient Ireland the Tuatha Dé Danaan, or the Tribes of the goddess Danu, but the poor called them, and still sometimes call them, the sidhe, from aes sidhe or sluagh sidhe, the people of the Faery Hills, as these words are usually explained.’ This U and non-U distinction has no authority in medieval tradition, and was simply—as the shift of tense suggests—a back-projection of the contemporary shibboleths of middle-class scholars and dilettantes.
22 Mythologies, ed. Gould & Toomey, 101–2.
23 ‘The Heart of the Spring’, Mythologies, ed. Gould & Toomey, 115.
24 Mythologies, ed. Gould & Toomey, 37.
25 Mythologies, ed. Gould & Toomey, 181.
26 The crucial book here is H. C. Martin, W. B. Yeats: Metaphysician as Dramatist (Gerrards Cross, 1986), which uses the drafts of the drama to reconstruct Yeats’s metaphysical system at the turn of the century; a good example of how rich the versions of a drama can be is Druid Craft: The Writing of ‘The Shadowy Waters’ [Manuscripts of W. B. Yeats I], ed. D. R. Clark, M. J. Sidnell, et al. (Amherst, 1971).
27 Russell was to edit two influential journals, The Irish Homestead and Irish Statesman, weekly for twenty-five years, keeping up an extraordinary rate of work; see Allen, George Russell and the New Ireland, 9.
28 See M. McAteer, Standish O’Grady, Æ, and Yeats: History, Politics, Culture (Dublin, 2002), 104, 123, 136, for O’Grady’s influence on Russell, and also R. Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London, 2001), 13, 16–7.
29 O’Grady, History, i., 28, 61, with which compare plate 19 in O. Nulty’s rare catalogue, George Russell–Æ… . at The Oriel’s 21st Anniversary (Dublin, ?1989), 15, which shows a woman climber surprised by a luminous, purple-plumed mountain-goddess or spirit. See also Allen, George Russell and the New Ireland, 18–9, for O’Grady’s impact.
30 ‘The Legends of Ancient Eire’, The Irish Theosophist 3 (March-April, 1895), reprinted in Iyer & Iyer (eds.), Descent of the Gods, 342.
31 See e.g. Russell’s painting of a human being before a semicircle of huge, enthroned spirits reproduced on the seventh page of plates in Kuch, Yeats and A.E. [no page numbers in plates]; Kuch relates the painting to passages in The Avatars featuring ‘many immortals shining… in majesty, each on their thrones…’
32 It is worth noting the curious return here to an idea which we saw in ‘The Adventure of Connlae’, written twelve hundred years before, in which going to be with the people of the síd served as metaphor for the idea of ‘divinization’, or theosis (see above, 54–6). But in that story the idea was clearly drawn not from paganism, but from Christian theology; it is a persistent oddity of Irish mythology that many of its themes persist over centuries but have grown to look more pagan, not less, with the passage of time.
33 A precisely similar instance is his borrowing of the idea of linguistic ‘roots’ from philology to create—or, in his view, reconstruct—a primordial divine language in which the relationship between sound and meaning would be non-arbitrary. The results were, alas, ludicrous (‘The root which follows Y is W, the sound symbol of liquidity or water. Its form is semilunar ☽ and I think its colour is green’.) See ‘The Language of the Gods’, in Iyer & Iyer (eds.), Descent of the Gods, 139.
34 ’That Myriad-Minded Man’, 61–2; Summerfield gives a longer account of theosophical cosmogony than I can here.
35 Martin (W. B. Yeats: Metaphysician as Dramatist, 37–8) gives a lucid account of this aspect of Russell’s thought.
36 ‘The Children of Lir’, The United Irishman (15th March 1902), reprinted in Iyer & Iyer (eds.), Descent of the Gods, 156.
37 Iyer & Iyer (Descent of the Gods, 715), aptly point to hymn 10.129 of the Rigveda, the oldest layer of Hindu scripture, which is a famously baffling account of creation, piling up questions. Many of them imply a primordial ocean: ‘Was there water, bottomlessly deep? … Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning; with no distinguishing sign, all this was water.’ This was clearly in Russell’s mind when he conceived his Lir-astheosophical divinity: see Kuch, Yeats and AE, 141 for Russell quoting this very hymn at Yeats to justify the vagueness of his poetry.
38 See above, 254–5.
39 O’Grady, History, i., 110: ‘Mananán, the son of Lir. He was the most spiritual and remote of all the mysterious race. We never hear of him engaging in wars, but as educating youth, giving advice, bringing to his weird palace favourite kings and heroes, to teach them wisdom…’
40 Iyer & Iyer (eds.), Descent of the Gods, 160.
41 See Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 21–30 for an array of examples.
42 ‘The Children of Lir’, The United Irishman (15th March 1902), in Iyer & Iyer (eds.), Descent of the Gods, 155.
43 ‘The Children of Lir’, in Iyer & Iyer (eds.), Descent of the Gods, 155–6.
44 Stokes was one of the greatest and most prolific Celtic scholars of the age. Born in Ireland, much of his scholarship was conducted from India where he was a jurist in the colonial administration. (It is an irony that he knew the culture of India far more intimately than Russell, and at first hand). See E. Boyle & P. Russell (eds.), The Tripartite Life of Whitley Stokes 1830–1909 (Dublin, 2011).
45 Art historical resources on Russell are limited, but see D. Beale, ‘Landscapes and faery’, Apollo (December, 2004), 70–75, and there is also an exhibition catalogue from the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, which is H. Pyle, M. Beale, &. D. Beale (eds.), The Paintings of George W. Russell (AE) (Sligo, 2006). An earlier and difficult to obtain catalogue is O. Nulty, George Russell–Æ… at The Oriel’s 21st Anniversary (Dublin, ?1989).
46 Russell’s fondness for the latter was maliciously sent up by the dramatist Sean O’Casey, who ridiculed his ‘purple mountains, lilac trees, violet skies, heliotrope clouds, and amethyst ancestral selves…’ (Kuch, Yeats and Æ, 98).
47 ‘A Visionary’, Mythologies, ed. Gould & Toomey, 9. In fact Russell’s spirits usually have both plumes and hair, but this neatly illustrates Yeats’s knack for borrowing someone else’s idea and improving on it. Russell’s plumed beings are never eerie, but in ‘The Wisdom of the King’ in The Secret Rose Yeats created supernatural women ‘of a height more than human’ with ‘the feathers of the grey hawk instead of hair’—an altogether more unsettling because more concrete image (Mythologies, ed. Gould & Toomey, 110).
48 ‘An Irish Mystic’s Testimony’, Iyer & Iyer (eds.), Descent of the Gods, 378.
49 Summerfield, ‘That Myriad-minded Man’, 64.
50 Yeats wrote: ‘I avoid every kind of word that seems to me either ‘poetical’ or ‘modern’ and above all I avoid suggesting the ghostly (the vague) idea about a god, for it is a modern conception. All ancient vision was definite and precise.’ See Kuch, Yeats and A.E., 141.
51 See S. J. Graf, ‘Heterodox Religions in Ireland: Theosophy, the Hermetic Society, and the Castle of Heroes’, Irish Studies Review 11.1 (2003), 51–9.
52 TAM, 104. There is no space here to discuss how the Celtic Mysteries project was reflected in Yeats’s endlessly unavailing attempt at an autobiographical novel (eventually known as The Speckled Bird), drafted simultaneously with the Celtic Rituals, and whose protagonist also tries to ‘bring back the gods’; see the comments of Foster, TAM, 174–6.
53 See M. C. Flannery, Yeats and Magic: The Earlier Works (Gerrards Cross, 1977), 42–3; for the treasures, see above, 148–52; 284–5.
54 Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 79.
55 Foster, TAM, 186.
56 L. S. Kalogera, ‘Yeats’s Celtic Mysteries’ [unpublished PhD dissertation, Florida State University, 1977], 284–5. Lam rad: this strange form looks like a copying error, perhaps a variant of the previous line: the reference is surely to the task of building a causeway across the bog of the Lámraige, Móin Lámraige, imposed upon Midir in ‘The Wooing of Étaín’.
57 Foster, TAM, 186; for Mathers, see Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 74–8; for Dorothea Hunter, see W. Gould, ‘“The Music of Heaven”: Dorothea Hunter’, YA 9 [= Yeats and Women] (2nd edn., Basingstoke, 1997), 73–134.
58 More elaborate tactics involved several people meditating on the same deity and then comparing their visions, or the tracing of complex inner journeys though symbolic or elemental landscapes. At one point the aim was to create shortcuts of a sort in the form of talismanic ‘glyphs’—logo-like symbols for each deity—which could act as a kind of hotline to their essence. The finding of these talismanic forms was initially assigned to Moina Mathers, MacGregor Mathers’ wife, with limited success. See Flannery, Yeats and Magic, 90.
59 Foster, TAM, 164.
60 Kalogera, ‘Celtic Mysteries’, 271.
61 See CCHE, 1202; P. Schrijver, Studies in British Celtic historical phonology (Rodopi, 1995), 348.
62 See above, 265.
63 Kalogera, ‘Celtic Mysteries’, 270.
64 Kalogera, ‘Celtic Mysteries’, 270; ‘Mahanon’ for Manannán, like ‘Lur’ for ‘Lir’, was probably Hunter’s mishearing of Yeats’s words.
65 Quoted in Flannery, W. B. Yeats: Metaphysician as Dramatist, 39.
66 Kalogera, ‘Celtic Mysteries’, 268–9.
67 For Brigit outside ‘Cormac’s Glossary’, see CMT, 56–7, 119; also J. Carey, ‘A Tuath Dé Miscellany, BBCS 39 (1992), 24–45. Also see above, 161–3.
68 Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 79.
69 Quoted in Kuch, Yeats and A.E., 123.
70 See J. W. Foster, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival: A Changeling Art (Syracuse, NY, 1987), 58.
71 Kuch, Yeats and A.E., 110–11.
72 Kuch, Yeats and A.E., 110.
73 Kuch, Yeats and A.E., 109, 110.
74 D. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: the literature of the modern nation (London, 1995), 196.
75 See Foster, TAM, 186. Russell may have had this turbulent episode in mind when he asserted, in 1911, that he always dreaded seeing the Sidhe-beings associated with water, ‘because I felt whenever I came into contact with them as great drowsiness of mind and, I often thought, an actual drawing away of vitality’ (Iyer & Iyer (eds.), The Descent of the Gods, 380).
76 Mythologies, ed. Gould & Toomey, 190.
77 Quoted in Foster, TAP, 658.
78 W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London, 1955), 263.
79 Here, as elsewhere, there is a curious overlap between the thought of Yeats and that of C. G. Jung, the only study of which is J. Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy: Yeats and Jung (Berkeley, CA, 1980).
80 Hutchinson, Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, 145.
81 A. McCall Smith, Dream Angus: The Celtic God of Dreams (London, 2006).
82 Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne, ed. & trans. N. Ní Shéaghdha (Dublin, 1967); see above, 220, fn.86, for the problems involved in dating this tale.
83 It may have helped that there was a family connection here: Standish James’s cousin, Standish Hayes O’Grady, had been one-time president of the Ossianic Society and was the editor of ‘The Pursuit of Díarmait and Gráinne.’ Note also that O’Grady could access an accurate text of ‘The Dream of Óengus’ as it had been edited and translated in the third volume of the Revue celtique (1876–8) by Edward Müller.
84 ‘Angus an Vrōga’ = Aengus an Bhrogha, ‘Aengus of the Brugh’, meaning his great síd-mound, Newgrange.
85 ‘The Prose Tales in the Rennes Dindshenchas’, ed. & trans. W. Stokes, RC 15 (1895), 68–9.
86 E. O’Curry, Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (Dublin, 1861), 478–9.
87 O’Grady, History i., 51.
88 O’Grady, History i., 83. ‘Yeoha’ = Eochaid, i.e. the Dagda.
89 I know of only two exceptions. The first is the Book of Leinster version of the Middle Irish saga ‘The Intoxication of the Ulstermen’ (Mesca Ulad), in which Delbaeth son of Ethlenn and Óengus and Cermait sons of the Dagda mingle with an army to invisibly foment conflict among mortals; see Mesca Ulad, ed. J. C. Watson (Dublin, 1941), ll.575–80, on 25. The second comes in the perhaps twelfth-century ‘Battle of Mag Rath’ (Cath Maige Rath) in which the hero Congal’s excited mental state is directly attributed to the machinations of the war-goddesses as ‘guardian demons’ within his mind—rather in the manner of Eithne’s ‘accompanying demon’ in ‘The Fosterage of the House of Two Vessels’. Michael Clarke has related this to a wider learned tradition of equating classical and native deities, and of allegorizing both as mental states (‘Demonology, Allegory and Translation: the Furies and the Morrígan’, in R. O’Connor (ed.), Classical Literature and Learning in Medieval Irish Narrative (Cambridge, 2014), 101–22). Note that Clarke draws on J. Borsje, ‘Demonising the enemy: a study of Congal Cáech’, in J. E. Rekdal, et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Eighth Symposium of Societas Celtologica Nordica (Uppsala, 2007), 21–38.
90 Compare Iliad 19, ll.86–9, in which Agamemnon tries to explain why he has compensated himself for the loss of a mistress by robbing Achilles of his: ‘Not I was the cause of this act, but Zeus and my lot and the Fury that walks in the dark; they it was who in the assembly put wild madness in my wits, on that day when I myself took Achilles’ prize away from him.’ The point is that the two kinds of causation—that of Agamemnon’s ego-self (‘I myself’) and that of the divinities—function here as alternative languages for human motivation, operating in parallel.
91 See D. C. Feeney, The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1991), 6–14, 31–2.
92 See for example L. O’Connor, Haunted English: the Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization (Baltimore, MD, 2006), 69, 70, 204, n.15.
93 The impulse to see pervasive allegory in the tale is still with us, though Christianity rather than paganism is now in fashion: see B. Gray, ‘Reading Aislinge Óenguso as a Christian-Platonist Parable’, PHCC 24 (2004), 16–39.
94 Thus, in 1884, d’Arbois de Jubainville averred that ‘Etain, after her separation from Mider, became the wife of Oengus…’ (The Irish Mythological Cycle, trans. R. I. Best (Paris, 1884 [Dublin & London, 1903]), 176–7, emphasis mine).
95 Brendan O Hehir has set out this process of misunderstanding in detail, showing that the folklorist Alfred Nutt was probably Yeats’s source; see ‘Yeats’s Sources for the Matter of Ireland, I. Edain and Aengus’, Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 6 (1989), 76–89.
96 The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. P. Allt & R. K. Alspach (2nd edn., New York, 1966), 817.
97 See below, 392–3, where a related equation to Orpheus and Eurydice is made explicitly by Yeats’s Scottish collaborator in the Celtic Mysteries, William Sharp.
98 Niamh had been made up by the eighteenth-century poet Mícheál Coimín; see O Hehir, ‘Yeats’s sources for the matter of Ireland: I’, 77.
99 Variorum Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allt & Alspach, 17–8.
100 Russell, ‘Legends of Ancient Eire’, in Iyer & Iyer (eds.), Descent of the Gods, 342.
101 Russell, ‘The Children of Lir’, in Iyer & Iyer (eds.), Descent of the Gods, 158.
102 Russell meant it literally: it follows that the god Aengus (in one of the weirdest modulations of any medieval literary character) is to be identified not only with covalent bonds inside molecules, but also with gravity (!) because it is attraction, or ‘desire’.
103 Martin, W. B. Yeats: Metaphysician as Dramatist, 38, 41.
104 For the identification, see O’Connor, Haunted English, 204, n.15.
105 Martin, W. B. Yeats: Metaphysician as Dramatist, 41.
106 See for instance the harp-strumming, golden-haired youth in the painting entitled (though not by Russell) ‘The Glory and the Dream’, in O. Nulty’s catalogue, George Russell–Æ… . at The Oriel’s 21st Anniversary (Dublin, ?1989), 8; I would have reproduced this painting but (as with much of Russell’s art) its current whereabouts have proved untraceable.
107 From The Candle of Vision (London, 1918), but vision recorded (and fictionalized) in 1897; see below, 447.
108 This invocation is found on a folded sheet inserted into one of the magical notebooks (NLI MS 13574), quoted in Putzel, Reconstructing Yeats, 194.
109 NLI MS 13574–5, quoted in Yeats, Mythologies, ed. Gould & Toomey, 295.
110 Mythologies, ed. Gould & Toomey, 76.
111 See D. Hyde, ‘Amadán na bruidhne’, Gadelica: A Journal of Modern-Irish Studies 1 (1913), 271.
112 Mythologies, ed. Gould & Toomey, 77.
113 ‘The self, which is the foundation of our knowledge, is broken in pieces by foolishness, and is forgotten in the sudden emotions of women, and therefore fools may get, as women do get of a certainty, glimpses of much that sanctity finds at the end of its painful journey.’ (Mythologies, ed. Gould & Toomey, 77).
114 See Mythologies, ed. Gould & Toomey, 295.
115 The most famous is the ‘Archer vision’, seen by Yeats at Tulira Castle in 1896; he told Sharp about it in a letter, and the latter immediately rushed out a closely similar story under his alter ego, the Hebridean seeress Fiona Macleod. See Foster, TAM, 165–6.
116 TAM, 204.
117 For Gonne’s ambiguous devotion to and cross-gendered identification with Lug, see Foster, The Irish Story, 13, 16; also The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume 2: 1896–1900, ed. W. Gould, J. S. Kelly, & D. Toomey (Oxford, 1996), 320. For the (rare but attested) identification of the English with the Fomorians in bardic verse, see J. Radner, ‘The Combat of Lug and Balor’, Oral Tradition 7.1 (1992), 143–9.
118 See, inter alia, her crude political allegory ‘The Return of Lugh Lamh-fada’, Hero Lays (Dublin, 1908), 10–13, discussed by J. F. Deane, All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry (Syracuse, 2014), 63–5. Deane’s work came to my attention just as I finished this study and could not be incorporated, but note her important discussions of various staged representations of Lug, 63–8.
119 Crucial discussion in D. Toomey, ‘Labyrinths: Yeats and Maud Gonne’, YA 9 (1992), 95–131.
120 For this text, see above, 26–7.
121 The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume 3: 1901–1904, ed. J. S. Kelly & R. Schuchard (Oxford, 1994), 315.
122 See Foster, TAM, 230.
