In Irish manuscripts, the Otherworld beyond the Ocean bears
many names. It is Tir-na-nog, 'The Land of Youth'; Tir-Innambéo, 'The Land of
the Living'; Tir Tairngire, 'The Land of Promise'; Tir N-aill, 'The Other Land (or
World)'; Mag Mar, 'The Great Plain'; and also Mag Mell, 'The Plain Agreeable
(or Happy).'
But this western Otherworld, if it is what we believe it to
be--a poetical picture of the great subjective world--cannot be the realm of
any one race of invisible beings to the exclusion of another. In it all
alike--gods, Tuatha De Danann, fairies, demons, shades, and every sort of
disembodied spirits--find their appropriate abode; for though it seems to
surround and interpenetrate this planet even as the X-rays interpenetrate
matter, it can have no other limits than those of the Universe itself. And that
it is not an exclusive realm is certain from what our old Irish manuscripts
record concerning the Fomorian races. These, when they met defeat on the
battle-field of Moytura at the hands of the Tuatha De Danann, retired
altogether from Ireland, their overthrow being final, and returned to their own
invisible country--a mysterious land beyond the Ocean, where the dead find a
new existence, and where their god-king Tethra ruled, as he formerly ruled in
this world. And the fairy women of Tethra's kingdom, even like those who came
from the Tuatha De Danann of Erin, or those of Manannan's ocean-world, enticed
mortals to go with them to be heroes under their king, and to behold there the assemblies
of ancestors. It was one of them who came to Connla, son of Conn, supreme king
of Ireland; and this was her message to him:--'The immortals invite you. You
are going to be one of the heroes of the people of Tethra. You will always be
seen there, in the assemblies of your ancestors, in the midst of those who know
and love you.' And with the fairy spell upon him the young prince entered the glass
boat of the fairy woman, and his father the king, in great tribulation and
wonder, beheld them disappear across the waters never to return.
THE SILVER BRANCH AND THE GOLDEN BOUGH
To enter the Otherworld before the appointed hour marked by
death, a passport was often necessary, and this was usually a silver branch of
the sacred apple-tree bearing blossoms, or fruit, which the queen of the Land
of the Ever-Living and Ever-Young gives to those mortals whom she wishes for as
companions; though sometimes, as we shall see, it was a single apple without
its branch. The queen's gifts serve not only as passports, but also as food and
drink for mortals who go with her. Often the apple-branch produces music so
soothing that mortals who hear it forget all troubles and even cease to grieve
for those whom the fairy women take. For us there are no episodes more important
than those in the ancient epics concerning these apple-tree talismans, because
in them we find a certain key which unlocks the secret of that world from which
such talismans are brought, and proves it to be the same sort of a place as the
Otherworld of the Greeks and Romans. Let us then use the key and make a few
comparisons between the Silver Branch of the Celts and the Golden Bough of the
Ancients, expecting the two symbols naturally to differ in their functions,
though not fundamentally.
It is evident at the outset that the Golden Bough was as
much the property of the queen of that underworld called Hades as the Silver
Branch was the gift of the Celtic fairy queen, and like the Silver Bough it
seems to have been the symbolic bond between that world and this, offered as a
tribute to Proserpine by all initiates, who made the mystic voyage in full
human consciousness. And, as we suspect, there may be even in the ancient
Celtic legends of mortals who make that strange voyage to the Western
Otherworld and return to this world again, an echo of initiatory rites--perhaps
druidic--similar to those of Proserpine as shown in the journey of Aeneas,
which, as Virgil records it, is undoubtedly a poetical rendering of an actual
psychic experience of a great initiate.
