Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, Second Series
General
Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, Second Series
Atlantic Coast (Ireland) -- Social life and customs; Folklore -- Ireland; Ireland -- Social life and customs
All angels were once men, he says, and it is therefore men who have
entered into what he calls the Celestial State and become angels,
who attend us immediately after death, and communicate to us their
thoughts, not by speaking, but by looking us in the face as they
sit beside the head of our body. When they find their thoughts are
communicated they know the time has come to separate the spiritual
from the physical body. If a man begins to feel that he can endure
them no longer, as he doubtless will, for in their presence he can
think and feel but sees nothing, lesser angels who belong to truth
more than to love take their place and he is in the light again, but
in all likelihood these angels also will be too high and he will
slip from state to state until he finds himself after a few days
"with those who are in accord with his life in the world; with them
he finds his life, and, wonderful to relate, he then leads a life
similar to that he led in the world." This first state of shifting and
readjustment seems to correspond with a state of sleep more modern
seers discover to follow upon death. It is characteristic of his whole
religious system, the slow drifting of like to like. Then follows a
period which may last but a short time or many years, while the soul
lives a life so like that of the world that it may not even believe
that it has died, for "when what is spiritual touches and sees what
is spiritual the effect is the same as when what is natural touches
what is natural." It is the other world of the early races, of those
whose dead are in the rath or the faery hill, of all who see no place
of reward and punishment but a continuance of this life, with cattle
and sheep, markets and war. He describes what he has seen, and only
partly explains it, for, unlike science which is founded upon past
experience, his work, by the very nature of his gift, looks for the
clearing away of obscurities to unrecorded experience. He is revealing
something and that which is revealed, so long as it remains modest
and simple, has the same right with the child in the cradle to put
off to the future the testimony of its worth. This earth-resembling
life is the creation of the image-making power of the mind, plucked
naked from the body, and mainly of the images in the memory. All our
work has gone with us, the books we have written can be opened and
read or put away for later use, even though their print and paper have
been sold to the buttermen; and reading his description one notices,
a discovery one had thought peculiar to the last generation, that the
"most minute particulars which enter the memory remain there and are
never obliterated," and there as here we do not always know all that
is in our memory, but at need angelic spirits who act upon us there as
here, widening and deepening the consciousness at will, can draw forth
all the past, and make us live again all our transgressions and see our
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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