English literature -- Scottish authors; Scottish literature
It has occurred to me often of late, from what I have seen, and read,
and heard from others, that the Celtic mythopoëic faculty is still
concerning itself largely with an interweaving of Pagan and Christian
thought, of Pagan and Christian symbol, of the old Pagan tales of a day
and of mortal beauty with the Christian symbolic legends that are of no
day and are of immortal beauty.
A fisherman told me the story of Diarmid and Grainne, in the guise of a
legend of the Virgin Mary and her Gaelic husband. Three years ago, in
Appin, an old woman, Jessie Stewart, told me that when Christ was
crucified He came back to us as Oìsin of the Songs. From a ferryman on
Loch Linnhe, near the falls of Lora, a friend heard a confused story of
Oìsin (confused because the narrator at one moment spoke of Oìsin, and
at another of "Goll"), how on the day that Christ was crucified Oìsin
slew his own son, and knew madness, crying that he was but a shadow, and
his son a shadow, and that what he had done was but the shadow of what
was being done in that hour "to the black sorrow of time and the
universe (_domhain_)." In this connection, Celtic students will recall
the story of Concobar mac Nessa, the High King of Ulster: how on that
day he rose suddenly and fled into the woods and hewed down the branches
of trees, crying that he slew the multitudes of those who at that moment
were doing to death the innocent son of a king.
Out of this confusion may arise a new interpretation of certain great
symbolic persons and incidents in the old mythology. As this legendary
lore is being swiftly forgotten, it is well that it should be saved to
new meanings and new beauty, by that mythopoëic faculty which, in the
Celtic imagination, is as a wing continually uplifting fallen dreams to
the imaging wind of the Spirit.
FOOTNOTE:
[8] _Vide_ Notes, p. 431.
THE WIND, SILENCE, AND LOVE
I know one who, asked by a friend desiring more intimate knowledge as to
what influences above all other influences had shaped her inward life,
answered at once, with that sudden vision of insight which reveals more
than the vision of thought, "The Wind, Silence, and Love."
The answer was characteristic, for, with her who made it, the influences
that shape have always seemed more significant than the things that are
shapen. None can know for another the mysteries of spiritual
companionship. What is an abstraction to one is a reality to another:
what to one has the proved familiar face, to another is illusion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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