DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

As shown by the Barddas MSS. in our chapter vii, the Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth is the scientific extension of Darwin’s law as corrected, 1 that alone through traversing the Circle of Life man reaches that destined perfection which natural analogies, life’s processes as exhibited by living things, and evolution, suggest, and from which at present man is so far removed. There seems to emerge this postulate: the world is the object of normal consciousness, the Ego or Soul-Monad the object of subconsciousness; and the subconsciousness cannot be realized in the world until through the normal consciousness of man the Ego is able to function completely, and so endow man with full self-consciousness in matter, which endowment seems to be the goal of all planetary evolution.

We conclude that the Otherworld of the Celts and their Doctrine of Re-birth accord thoroughly in their essentials with modern science; and, accordingly, with other essential elements in the complete Celtic Fairy-Faith which we have in the preceding chapter found to be equally scientific, establish our Psychological Theory of the Nature and Origin of that Fairy-Faith upon a logical and solid foundation; and we now submit this study to the judgement of our readers. With more complete evidence in the future, both from folklore and from science, there will be, we trust, a better vindication of the Theory, and perhaps finally there will come about its transformation into what it but seems to us to be now — a Fact.

Some beliefs which a century ago were regarded as absurdities are now regarded as fundamentally scientific. In the same way, what in this generation is heretical alike to the Christian theologian and to the man of science may in coming generations be accepted as orthodox.

Footnotes

495:1 Cf. Sigmund Freud, The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis, in Amer. Journ. Psych., xxi, No. 2 (April 1910).

496:1 The fact that all matter is capable of assuming a gaseous or invisible state furnishes good scientific reasons for postulating the actual existence of intelligent beings possessed of an invisible yet physical body. There may well be on and about our planet many distinct invisible organic life-forms undiscovered by zoologists. To deny such a possibility would be unscientific.

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