In their theological astronomy, or astronomical theology, the Druids considered the totality of all living beings as divided into three circles. The first of these circles, the circle of immensity, _Ceugant_, corresponding to incommunicable, infinite attributes, belonged to God alone; it was properly the absolute, and none, save the ineffable being, had a right there. The second circle, that of blessedness, _Gwyn-fyd_, united in it the beings that have arrived at the superior degrees of existence; this was heaven. The third, the circle of voyages, _Abred_, comprised all the noviciate; it was there, at the bottom of the abysses, in the great oceans, as Taliesin says, that the first breath of man commenced. The object proposed to men's perseverance and courage was to attain to what the bards called the point of liberty, very probably the point at which, being suitably fortified against the assaults of the lower passions, they were not exposed to be troubled, against their wills, in their celestial aspirations; and when they arrived at such a point--so worthy of the ambition of every soul that would be its own master--they quitted the circle of Abred and entered that of Gwyn-fyd; the hour of their recompense had come. Demetrius, cited by Plutarch, relates that the Druids believed that these souls of the elect were so intimately connected with our circle that they could not emerge from it without disturbing its equilibrium. This writer states, that being in the suite of the Emperor Claudius, in some part of the British isles, he heard suddenly a terrible hurricane, and the priests, who alone inhabited these sacred islands, immediately explained the phenomenon, by telling him that a vacuum had been produced on the earth, by the departure of an important soul. "The great men," he said, "while they live are like torches whose light is always beneficent and never harms any one, but when they are extinguished their death generally occasions, as you have just seen, winds, storm, and derangements of the atmosphere." The palingenetic system of the Druids is complete in itself, and takes the being at his origin, and conducts him to the ultimate heaven. At the moment of his creation, as Henry Martyn says in his Commentary, the being has no conscience of the gifts that are latent in him. He is created in the lowest stage of life, in _Annwfn_, the shadowy abyss at the base of _Abred_. There, surrounded by nature, submitted to necessity, he rises obscurely through the successive degrees of inorganic matter, and then through the organic. His conscience at last awakes. He is man. "Three things are primarily contemporaneous--man, liberty, and light." Before man there was nothing in creation but fatal obedience to physical laws; with man commences the great battle between liberty and necessity, good and evil. The good and the evil present themselves to man in equilibrium, "and he can at his pleasure attach himself to one or the other of them."