Celtic Otherworld
Filed by Aine MacDermot
THE OTHERWORLD IDEA LITERALLY INTERPRETED
With this parallel between the Otherworld of the Celts and that of the Ancients seemingly established, we may leave poetical images and seek a literal interpretation for the animistic idea about those realms. The Rites of Proserpine as conducted in the Mysteries of Antiquity furnish us with the means; and in what Servius has written we have the material ready. 3 Taking the letter Î¥, which Pythagoras said is like life with its dividing ways of good and evil, as the mystic symbol of the branch which all initiates like Aeneas offered to Proserpine in the subjective world while there out of the physical body, he says of the initiatory rites:–’He (the poet) could not join the Rites of Proserpine without having the branch to hold up. And by “going to the shades” he (the poet) means celebrating the Rites of Proserpine.’ 3 This passage is certainly capable of but one meaning; and (p. 338) we may perhaps assume that the invisible realm of the Ancients, which is called Hades, is like the Celtic Other-world located in the Western Ocean, and is also like, or has its mythological counterpart in, the Elysian Fields to the West, reserved by the Greeks and Romans for their gods and heroes, and in the Happy Otherworld of Scandinavian, Iranian, and Indian mythologies. It must then follow that all these realms–though placed in different localities by various nations, epochs, traditions, scribes, and poets (even as the under-ground world of the Tuatha De Danann in Ireland differs from that ruled over by one of their own race, Manannan the Son of the Sea)–are simply various ways which different Aryan peoples have had of looking at that one great invisible realm of which we have just spoken, and which forms the Heavenworld of every religion, Aryan and non-Aryan, known to man. And if this conclusion is accepted, and it seems that it must be, merely on the evidence of the literary or recorded Celtic Fairy-Faith, our Psychological Theory stands proven.
The Rites of Proserpine had many counterparts. Thus, to pass on to another parallel, in the Mysteries of Eleusis the disappearance of the Maiden into the under-world, into Hades, the land of the dead, was continually re-enacted in a sacred drama, and it no doubt was one of the principal rites attending initiation. In our study of the Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth, we shall return to this subject of Celtic Initiation.
Brian Lee wrote:
I know this story, it differs from this, only in one way. It is a Welsh legend and not Irish. Even tho the Irish came on the scene later. Makes sence, seeing that the Welsh are the Celts, and the Irish are Gaelic/Manx. A lot of Wales`s scripts where either destroyed by the English or where hidden by Welsh royalty that lived in Ireland. Ireland & Scotland have also stolen a lot of the Welsh history to use as their own. Rhiannon was a Welsh princess who was abused by her husband (Irish noble), she managed to get word back to her father, hence war. And so the story begins.
Posted on 23-Jan-08 at 3:47 pm | Permalink
Blackbird wrote:
Umm…the Irish are Celts as well. Irish speak q-Celtic and Welsh speak a LATER form of p-Celtic…since it is based on linguistics (and the early mainland Celts spoke q-Celtic)…the Irish are most definitely Celts.
Posted on 03-Mar-08 at 9:39 am | Permalink