Let us now turn to the Rosses Point country, which, as we have already
said, is one of the very famous places for seeing the 'gentry', or, as
educated Irish seers who make pilgrimages thither call them, the
_Sidhe_. I have been told by more than one such seer that there on the
hills and Greenlands (a great stretch of open country, treeless and
grass-grown), and on the strand at Lower Rosses Point--called Wren Point
by the country-folk--these beings can be seen and their wonderful music
heard; and a well-known Irish artist has shown me many drawings, and
paintings in oil, of these _Sidhe_ people as he has often beheld them at
those places and elsewhere in Ireland. They are described as a race of
majestic appearance and marvellous beauty, in form human, yet in nature
divine. The highest order of them seems to be a race of beings evolved
to a superhuman plane of existence, such as the ancients called gods;
and with this opinion, strange as it may seem in this age, all the
educated Irish seers with whom I have been privileged to talk agree,
though they go further, and say that these highest _Sidhe_ races still
inhabiting Ireland are the ever-young, immortal divine race known to the
ancient men of Erin as the Tuatha De Danann.
Of all European lands I venture to say that Ireland is the most
mystical, and, in the eyes of true Irishmen, as much the Magic Island of
Gods and Initiates now as it was when the Sacred Fires flashed from its
purple, heather-covered mountain-tops and mysterious round towers, and
the Greater Mysteries drew to its hallowed shrines neophytes from the
West as well as from the East, from India and Egypt as well as from
Atlantis;[20] and Erin's mystic-seeing sons still watch and wait for the
relighting of the Fires and the restoration of the old Druidic
Mysteries. Herein I but imperfectly echo the mystic message Ireland's
seers gave me, a pilgrim to their Sacred Isle. And until this mystic
message is interpreted, men cannot discover the secret of Gaelic myth
and song in olden or in modern times, they cannot drink at the
ever-flowing fountain of Gaelic genius, the perennial source of
inspiration which lies behind the new revival of literature and art in
Ireland, nor understand the seeming reality of the fairy races.
AN IRISH MYSTIC'S TESTIMONY
Through the kindness of an Irish mystic, who is a seer, I am enabled to
present here, in the form of a dialogue, very rare and very important
evidence, which will serve to illustrate and to confirm what has just
been said above about the mysticism of Ireland. To anthropologists this
evidence may be of more than ordinary value when they know that it
comes from one who is not only a cultured seer but who is also a man
conspicuously successful in the practical life of a great city:--
_Visions._--
Q.--Are all visions which you have had of the same character?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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