Even yet at rare intervals, like a phantom, Hy Brasil appears far out on
the Atlantic. No later than the summer of 1908 it is said to have been
seen from West Ireland, just as that strange invisible island near
Innishmurray, inhabited by the invisible 'gentry', is seen--once in
seven years. And too many men of intelligence testify to having seen Hy
Brasil at the same moment, when they have been together, or separated,
as during the summer of 1908, for it to be explained away as an ordinary
illusion of the senses. Nor can it be due to a mirage such as we know,
because neither its shape nor position seems to conform to any known
island or land mass. The Celtic Otherworld is like that hidden realm of
subjectivity lying just beyond the horizon of mortal existence, which we
cannot behold when we would, save with the mystic vision of the Irish
seer. Thus in the legend of Bran's friends, who sat over dinner at
Harlech with the Head of Bran for seven years, three curious birds acted
as musicians, the Three Birds of Rhiannon, which were said to sing the
dead back to life and the living into death;--but the birds were not in
Harlech, they were out over the sea in the atmosphere of Rhiannon's
realm in the bosom of Cardigan Bay.[323] And though we might say of that
Otherworld, as we learn from these Three Birds of Rhiannon, and as
Socrates would say, that its inhabitants are come from the living and
the living in our world from the dead there, yet, as has already been
set forth in chapter iv, we ought not to think of the _Sidhe_-folk, nor
of such great heroes and gods as Arthur and Cuchulainn and Finn, who are
also of its invisible company, as in any sense half-conscious shades;
for they are always represented as being in the full enjoyment of an
existence and consciousness greater than our own.
In Irish manuscripts, the Otherworld beyond the Ocean bears many names.
It is _Tír-na-nog_, 'The Land of Youth'; _Tír-Innambéo_, 'The Land of
the Living'; _Tír Tairngire_, 'The Land of Promise'; _Tír N-aill_, 'The
Other Land (or World)'; _Mag Már_, 'The Great Plain'; and also _Mag
Mell_, 'The Plain Agreeable (or Happy).'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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