Spiritism among the Druids.

— About ten years ago, under the title Le vieux neuf (The Old New.) [Le vieux-neuf, histoire ancienne des inventions et découvertes… — Google Books], Mr.

Edouard Fournier published, in the Siècle, a series of articles as remarkable from the standpoint of erudition as they were interesting for their historical connections. Surveying all the modern inventions and discoveries, the author proves that, if our century has the merit of application and development, it does not have, at least for most of them, that of priority. At the time when Mr. Edouard Fournier was writing those erudite serials, Spirits were not yet under consideration, without which he would not have failed to show us that all that happens today is merely a repetition of what the Ancients knew very well, and perhaps better than we do. And we regret this on our own account, because his profound investigations would have allowed him to scrutinize mystical Antiquity, as he scrutinized industrial Antiquity; and we wish that his laborious researches may one day be directed toward that side. As for us, our personal observations leave us no doubt about the antiquity and universality of the Doctrine that the Spirits teach us. This coincidence between what they tell us today and the beliefs of the most remote times is a significant fact of the highest importance. We shall point out, however, that, although we everywhere find traces of the Spiritist Doctrine, nowhere do we see it complete:

everything indicates that it was reserved for our epoch to coordinate these fragments scattered among all peoples, in order to arrive at unity of principle through a more complete and, above all, more general body of manifestations, which would prove right the author of the article we cited above, with respect to the psychological period into which Humanity seems to be entering.

Almost everywhere, ignorance and prejudice have disfigured this doctrine, whose fundamental principles are mingled with the superstitious practices of every age, exploited to stifle reason. Yet, beneath this heap of absurdities, the most sublime ideas germinate, like precious seeds hidden beneath the brambles, awaiting nothing but the vivifying light of the sun in order to develop. More universally enlightened, our generation clears away the brambles; such a clearing of the ground, however, cannot be done without transition. Let us therefore allow the good seeds the time to develop, and the weeds the time to disappear.

The Druidic doctrine offers us a curious example of what we have just said. This doctrine, of which we truly know little but its outward practices, rises, under certain aspects, to the most sublime truths; but these truths were only for the initiated: terrified by the bloody sacrifices, the people gathered with holy respect the sacred mistletoe of the oak and saw only the phantasmagoria. We shall be able to judge it by the following quotation, drawn from a document as precious as it is unknown, and which casts an entirely new light upon the theology of our ancestors.

— “We submit to the reflection of our readers a Celtic text, recently published, whose appearance caused a certain emotion in the learned world. It is impossible to know for certain its author, nor even to what century it dates back. But what is incontestable is that it belongs to the tradition of the bards of Gaul, and this origin is sufficient to confer upon it a value of the first order.

“It is known, in fact, that even in our own days Gaul constitutes the most faithful refuge of the Gaulish nationality which, among us, has undergone such profound modifications. Only lightly touched by the Roman domination, which lingered there only briefly and feebly; preserved from the invasion of the barbarians by the energy of its inhabitants and by the difficulties of its territory; submitted later to the Norman dynasty which, nevertheless, had to grant it a certain degree of independence, the name of Galles, Gallia, that it has always borne, is a distinctive trait by which it is connected, without interruption, to the ancient period. The Kymric language, formerly spoken throughout the northern part of Gaul, never ceased to be used, and many customs are likewise Gaulish. Of all the foreign influences, the only one that triumphed completely was Christianity; but it did not succeed without many difficulties, relative to the supremacy of the Roman Church, whose fall the Reformation of the sixteenth century did no more than determine, having been long prepared in these regions full of an indefectible sentiment of independence. “One may even say that the Druids, converting entirely to Christianity, were not totally extinguished in Gaul, as in our Brittany and in other regions of Gaulish blood. As an immediate consequence, they had a very solidly constituted society, devoted in appearance above all to the cult of the national poetry, but which, beneath the poetic mantle, preserved with remarkable fidelity the intellectual heritage of ancient Gaul: it is the Bardic Society of Gaul which, after having maintained itself as a secret society throughout the entire Middle Ages, by an oral transmission of its literary monuments and of its doctrine, in imitation of the practice of the Druids, decided, around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to commit to writing the most essential parts of this heritage. From this foundation, whose authenticity is attested by an uninterrupted traditional chain, proceeds the text of which we speak; and its value, given these circumstances, depends, as one sees, neither on the hand that had the merit of writing it, nor on the epoch in which its redaction was able to acquire its final form. What transpires in it, above all, is the spirit of the bards of the Middle Ages, themselves the last disciples of that learned and religious corporation which, under the name of Druids, dominated Gaul during the first period of its history, more or less in the same manner as the Latin clergy did in the Middle Ages. “Even if we were deprived of all light on the origin of the text in question, we would clearly be on the right path, in view of its concordance with the teachings that the Greek and Latin authors have left us, relative to the religious doctrine of the Druids. This agreement is constituted of points of solidarity that allow no doubt, because they rest upon reasons drawn from the very substance of such writings; and the solidarity, thus demonstrated by the principal writings, the only ones of which the Ancients spoke to us, naturally extends to the secondary developments. Indeed, these developments, penetrated by the same spirit, necessarily derive from the same source; they form a body with the foundation and cannot be explained except by it. And, at the same time as they go back, by so logical an origin, to the primitive depositaries of the Druidic religion, it is impossible to assign them any other point of departure; for, outside of the Druidic influence, the region from which they come knew only the Christian influence, wholly foreign to such doctrines. “The developments contained in the triads are so far outside Christianity that the rare Christian influences, which slip in here and there throughout, are distinguished from the primitive foundation at first sight. These emanations, arising ingenuously from the conscience of the Christian bards, could well, if we may say so, insert themselves into the interstices of the tradition, but could not merge into it. The analysis of the text is therefore as simple as it is rigorous, since it can be reduced to setting aside all that bears the seal of Christianity and, once the sorting is done, to considering as of Druidic origin all that remains visibly characterized by a religion different from that of the Gospel and of the councils. Thus, to cite only the essential, and starting from the well-known principle that the dogma of charity in God and in man is as special to Christianity as that of the transmigration of souls is to ancient Druidism, a certain number of triads, in which breathes a spirit of love never known in primitive Gaul, betray themselves immediately as marks of a comparatively modern character; whereas the others, animated by a wholly different breath, let the seal of the high antiquity that distinguishes them be seen even better. “Finally, it is not useless to observe that the very form of the teaching contained in the triads is of Druidic origin. It is known that the Druids had a particular predilection for the number three and employed it in a special manner, as the majority of the Gaulish monuments show us, for the transmission of their lessons which, by means of this precise form, were more easily engraved in the memory. Diogenes Laertius has preserved for us one of these triads, which succinctly summarizes the whole of man's duties toward the Divinity, toward his fellows, and toward himself: “To honor the superior beings, to commit no injustice, and to cultivate in oneself manly virtue.” The literature of the bards has propagated, down to us, a multitude of aphorisms of the same kind, touching all the branches of human knowledge: science, history, morals, law, poetry. There are none more interesting, nor more apt to inspire great reflections, than those we publish here, according to the translation that was made by Mr. Adolphe Pictet. “Of this series of triads, the first eleven are consecrated to the exposition of the characteristic attributes of the Divinity. It is in this section that the Christian influences, as was easy to foresee, had the most action. If one cannot deny to Druidism the knowledge of the principle of the unity of God, it is possible that, in consequence of its predilection for the ternary number, it had vaguely conceived something of the divine trinity. Nevertheless, it is incontestable that what completes this elevated theological conception, namely, the distinction of the persons and particularly of the third, may have remained perfectly foreign to this ancient religion. Everything leads one to believe that its sectaries were much more preoccupied with establishing the liberty of man than with instituting charity; and it was even in consequence of this false position of its point of departure that it perished. It also seems logical to associate with a Christian influence, more or less determined, this whole beginning, particularly from the fifth triad onward. “Following the general principles relative to the nature of God, the text proceeds to expound the constitution of the Universe. The whole of this constitution is superiorly formulated in three triads which, by showing the particular beings in an order absolutely different from that of God, complete the idea one must form of the unique and immutable Being. Under more explicit formulas, these triads ultimately do nothing but reproduce what was already known, by the testimony of the Ancients, of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, passing alternately from life to death and from death to life. They may be considered as the commentary on a celebrated verse of the Pharsalia, in which the poet exclaims, addressing the priests of Gaul, that, if what they teach is true, death is merely the middle of a long life: Longae vitae mors media est.

GOD AND THE UNIVERSE.

I — There are three primitive unities and, of each of them, there could exist only one: one God, one truth, and one point of liberty, that is, the point where the equilibrium of all opposition is found.

II — Three things proceed from the three primitive unities: all life, all good, and all power.

III — God is necessarily three things, namely: the greater part of life, the greater part of science, and the greater part of power; and there could be no greater part of each thing.

IV — Three things that God cannot fail to be: that which must constitute the perfect good, that which must will the perfect good, and that which must realize the perfect good;

V — Three guarantees of what God does and will do: his infinite power, his infinite wisdom, his infinite love; inasmuch as there is nothing that cannot be effected, that cannot become true, and that cannot be desired by an attribute.

VI — Three principal ends of the work of God, as Creator of all things: to diminish evil, to reinforce good, and to bring into evidence every difference; so that one may know what must be or, on the contrary, what must not be.

VII — Three things that God cannot fail to grant: that which is most advantageous, that which is most necessary, and that which is most beautiful for each thing.

VIII — Three powers of existence: not being able to be otherwise, not being necessarily another, and not being able to be better by conception; and it is in this that lies the perfection of all things.

IX — Three things will necessarily prevail: the supreme power, the supreme intelligence, and the supreme love of God.

X — The three grandeurs of God: perfect life, perfect science, perfect power.

XI — Three original causes of living beings: divine love, in accord with the supreme intelligence; supreme wisdom, by the perfect knowledge of all means; and divine power, in accord with the will, the love, and the wisdom of God.

THE THREE CIRCLES.

XII — There are three circles of existence: the circle of the empty region (ceugant) where, except God, there is nothing living, nor dead, and no being that God cannot traverse; the circle of migration (abred) where every animate being proceeds from death and which man has traversed; and the circle of felicity (guynfyd) where every animate being proceeds from life and which man will traverse in heaven.

XIII — Three successive states of animate beings: the state of descent into the abyss (annoufn), the state of liberty in Humanity, and the state of felicity in heaven.

XIV — Three necessary phases of all existence in relation to life: the beginning in annoufn, the transmigration in abred, and the plenitude in guynfyd; and without these three things nothing can exist, except God.

“In sum, on this capital point of Christian theology, namely, that God, in his creative power, draws souls from nothingness, the triads do not pronounce themselves in a precise manner. After having revealed God in his eternal and inaccessible sphere, they simply show souls originating in the deepest layers of the Universe, in the abyss (annoufn); from there they pass to the circle of migrations (abred), where their destiny is determined through a series of existences, according to the good or bad use they have made of their liberty; and, finally, they rise to the supreme circle (guynfyd), where the migrations cease, where one no longer dies, and where life passes in complete felicity, conserving in everything its perpetual activity and the full consciousness of its individuality. It would indeed be necessary for Druidism to fall into the error of the Oriental theologies, which lead man to be finally absorbed into the immutable bosom of the Divinity, for, on the contrary, it distinguishes a special circle, the circle of the void or of the infinite (ceugant), which forms the incommunicable privilege of the supreme Being and into which no being, whatever its degree of sanctity, could ever penetrate. It is the most elevated point of the religion, since it marks the limit fixed to the progress of creatures. “The most characteristic trait of this theology, although it be a purely negative trait, consists in the absence of a particular circle, such as the Tartarus of pagan Antiquity, destined to the endless punishment of criminal souls. Among the Druids, hell properly speaking does not exist. In their eyes, the distribution of chastisements is effected, in the circle of migrations, by the engagement of souls in conditions of existence more or less unhappy, where, always mistresses of their liberty, they expiate their faults by suffering and predispose themselves, by the reform of their vices, to a better future. In certain cases it may even happen that souls retrograde as far as that region of annoufn, where they originate and to which one can hardly give any other meaning than that of animality. By this dangerous side (retrogradation), which nothing justifies, since the diversity of the conditions of existence in the circle of Humanity is perfectly sufficient for penalty of all degrees, Druidism would have, then, come to slip down to metempsychosis. But this deplorable extreme, to which no necessity of the doctrine of the development of souls through the life of migrations leads, as will be seen by the series of triads relative to the regime of the circle of abred, seems to have occupied, in the system of the religion, only a secondary place. “Save for some obscurities, which perhaps result from a language whose metaphysical subtleties are not yet well known to us, the declarations of the triads relative to the conditions inherent to the circle of abred shed the most vivid light upon the whole of the Druidic religion. One breathes there a breath of superior originality. The mystery that the spectacle of our present existence offers to our intelligence acquires therein a singular aspect, which is found nowhere else; one would say that a great veil, rending itself before and after life, allows the soul to navigate, suddenly, with an unexpected force, through an indefinite extent that it itself never suspected, by virtue of its imprisonment between the thick doors of birth and death. Whatever the judgment we arrive at, as to the truth of this doctrine, we cannot fail to agree that it is powerful. Reflecting on the effect that these principles must inevitably have produced upon the ingenuous souls, their origin and their destiny, it is easy to realize the immense influence that the Druids had naturally acquired over the spirit of our forefathers. Amid the shadows of Antiquity, these sacred ministers could not fail to appear, in the eyes of the populations, as the revealers of Heaven and Earth. “Here is the remarkable text in question:

THE CIRCLE OF ABRED.

XV — Three things necessary in the circle of Abred: the least possible degree of all life and, thence, its beginning; the matter of all things and, thence, the progressive growth, which is realized only in the state of necessity; and the formation of all things from death and, thence, the debility of existences.

XVI — Three things in which every living being necessarily participates through the justice of God: the succor of God in abred, because without this no one could know anything; the privilege of participating in the love of God; and the accord with God as to realization by the power of God, so long as it is just and merciful.

XVII — Three causes of the necessity of the circle of abred: the development of the material substance of every animate being; the development of the knowledge of all things; and the development of moral force to overcome every contrary and Cytbraul (the evil Spirit) and to liberate itself from Droug (evil). Without this transition of each state of life, there could be in it no realization of any being.

XVIII — Three primitive calamities of abred: necessity, the absence of memory, and death.

XIX — Three conditions necessary to arrive at the plenitude of science: to transmigrate in abred, to transmigrate in guynfyd, and to recall all past things, even in annoufn.

XX — Three things indispensable in the circle of abred: the transgression of the law, since it cannot be otherwise; the liberation by death before Droug and Cythraul; the growth of life and of good by the distancing of Droug in the liberation of death; and this through the love of God, which embraces all things.

XXI — Three efficacious means of God in abred to dominate Droug and Cythraul and to overcome their opposition in relation to the circle of guynfyd: necessity, the loss of memory, and death.

XXII — Three things are primitively contemporaneous: man, liberty, and light.

XXIII — Three things necessary to the triumph of man over evil: firmness against pain, change, freedom of choice; and with the power that man has to choose, one cannot know in advance where he will go.

XXIV — Three alternatives offered to man: abred and guynfyd, necessity and liberty, evil and good, the whole in equilibrium, and man may at will attach himself to one or the other.

XXV — By three things man falls under the necessity of abred: by the absence of effort toward knowledge, by non-attachment to good, and by attachment to evil. In consequence of these things, he descends in abred to his analogue and recommences the course of his transmigration.

XXVI — By three things man necessarily returns to abred, although in other respects he may be attached to what is good: by pride, he falls even into annoufn; by falsehood, to the point of equivalent demerit; and by cruelty, to the corresponding degree of animality. Thence he transmigrates anew toward humanity, as before.

XXVII — The three principal things to obtain in the state of humanity: science, love, moral force, in the highest possible degree of development, before death supervenes. This cannot be obtained prior to the state of humanity, and it can be obtained only by the privilege of liberty and of choice. These three things are called the three victories.

XXVIII — There are three victories over Croug and Cythraul: science, love, and moral force; for knowing, willing, and being able accomplish whatever it may be in their connection with things. These three victories begin in the condition of humanity and endure eternally.

XXIX — Three privileges of the condition of man: the equilibrium of good and evil and, thence, the faculty of comparing; liberty in choice and, thence, judgment and preference; and the development of moral force in consequence of judgment and, thence, preference. These three things are necessary to the realization of whatever it may be.

— “Thus, in sum, the principle of beings in the bosom of the Universe occurs at the lowest point of the scale of life; and, if it is not carrying too far the consequences of the declaration contained in the twenty-sixth triad, one may conjecture that in the Druidic doctrine the initial point was supposed to be in the confused and mysterious abyss of animality. Thence, consequently, from the very origin of the history of the soul, the logical necessity of progress, since beings are not destined by God to remain in so low and so obscure a condition. Nevertheless, in the inferior stages of the Universe, this progress does not develop along a continuous line; this long life, born so low to rise so high, breaks into solitary fragments at the base of its succession, but, thanks to the absence of memory, its mysterious solidarity escapes, at least for some time, the consciousness of the individual. It is these periodic interruptions in the secular course of life that constitute what we call death; so that death and birth, in a superficial view, form events so diverse that they are, in reality, no more than two faces of the same phenomenon, one turned toward the period that ends, the other toward the one that begins. “Considered in itself, death is not a true calamity, but a benefit of God which, breaking the very narrow habits that we had contracted with our present life, transports us to new conditions and thus gives occasion for us to rise more freely to new progress.

“Like death, the loss of memory that accompanies it must also be taken as a benefit. It is a consequence of the first point. For if the soul, in the course of this long life, conserved clearly its remembrances from one period to another, the interruption would be no more than accidental and there would be neither death properly speaking, nor birth, since these two events would then lose the absolute character that distinguishes them and gives them force. And, even from the standpoint of this theology, it does not seem difficult to perceive to what extent the loss of memory may be considered a benefit, in what concerns the past periods, in relation to man in his present condition; for if these past periods constitute a trial, as the present position of man in a world of sufferings indicates, they were unhappily stained with errors and crimes, the first cause of the miseries and expiations of today, representing for the soul an evident advantage, in finding itself free from the sight of so great a quantity of faults, as well as from the truly overwhelming remorse that would arise therefrom. By not obliging it to a formal repentance except in relation to the faults of the present life, thus having compassion on its weakness, God truly grants it a great grace. “Finally, according to this same manner of considering the mystery of life, the necessities of every nature to which we are submitted in this world and which, from our birth, determine, by a sentence so to speak fatal, the form of our existence in the present period, constitute a last benefit, as perceptible as the two others; for, in the final analysis, it is these necessities that give to our life the character that best suits our expiations and our trials and, consequently, our moral development; and it is again these same necessities, whether of our physical organization or of the exterior circumstances in the midst of which we are placed, that, dragging us forcibly to the term of death, lead us thereby to our supreme liberation. In sum, as the triads say in their energetic conciseness, therein lies the whole and the three primitive calamities, as well as the three efficacious means of God in abred. “Meanwhile, by what conduct does the soul really rise in this life and merit to attain, after death, a superior mode of existence? The answer that Christianity gives to this fundamental question is known to all: it is under the condition of destroying in oneself egoism and pride, of developing, in the intimacy of one's substance, the values of humility and charity, the only ones efficacious and meritorious before God: Blessed are the meek, says the Gospel; blessed are the humble! The answer of Druidism is quite different and contrasts clearly with this last. According to its lessons, the soul rises in the scale of existences with a view to fortifying its personality, through work upon itself, a result that it naturally obtains by the development of force of character, allied to the development of knowledge. It is what the twenty-fifth triad expresses, which declares that the soul falls back into the necessity of transmigrations, that is, into the confused and mortal lives, not only by nourishing the evil passions, but also by the habit of lukewarmness in the fulfillment of just actions and by the lack of firmness in the attachment to what conscience prescribes; in a word, by weakness of character. And, beyond this lack of moral virtue, the soul is still held back in its progress toward heaven by the lack of perfecting of the Spirit. The intellectual illumination, necessary for the plenitude of felicity, is not operated in the blessed soul simply by a gracious irradiation from on High; and it is not produced in the celestial life unless the soul itself has striven, from this life onward, to acquire it. The triad therefore speaks not only of the lack of knowledge, but of the lack of efforts to know, which, at bottom, as for the preceding virtue, is a precept of activity and of movement. “In truth, in the following triads, charity is recommended on the same footing as science and moral force; but, here again, as in what touches the divine nature, the influence of Christianity is perceptible. It is to it, and not to the strong but harsh religion of our forefathers, that belongs the preaching and the enthronement in the world of the law of charity in God and in man; and if this law shines in the triads, it is by the effect of an alliance with the Gospel or, better said, of a happy perfecting of the theology of the Druids by the action of that of the apostles, and not by a primitive tradition. Let us snatch away this divine ray and we shall have, in its rude grandeur, the morality of Gaul, a morality that was able to produce, in the order of heroism and of science, powerful personalities, but that did not know how to unite them among themselves nor to the multitude of the humble.”

— The Spiritist Doctrine does not consist solely in the belief in the manifestation of Spirits, but in all that they teach us about the nature and the destiny of the soul. If, then, we refer to the precepts contained in The Spirits' Book, where all its teaching is formulated, we shall be surprised by the identity of certain fundamental principles with those of the Druidic doctrine, of which one of the most remarkable is, without a shadow of doubt, that of reincarnation. In the three circles, in the three successive states of animate beings, we find all the phases presented by our Spiritist scale. Indeed, what is the circle of abred or that of migration, if not the two orders of Spirits who purify themselves through their successive existences? In the circle of guynfyd man no longer transmigrates, enjoying the supreme felicity. Is this not the first order of the scale, that of the pure Spirits who, having accomplished all the trials, no longer need incarnation and enjoy eternal life? Let us note further that, according to the Druidic doctrine, man conserves his free will; he rises gradually by his will, by his progressive perfection, and by the trials he has endured, from the annoufn or abyss, up to the perfect felicity in guynfyd, with the difference, however, that Druidism admits the possible return to the inferior layers, whereas the Spirit, according to Spiritism, may remain stationary, but cannot degenerate. To complete the analogy, we would have to add to our scale, below the third order, only the circle of annoufn to characterize the abyss or the unknown origin of souls and, above the first order, the circle of ceugant, dwelling of God, inaccessible to creatures.

— The following table will make this comparison clearer.

SPIRITIST SCALE.

DRUIDIC SCALE.

Ceugant.

Dwelling of God.

1st order.

1st class Pure Spirits.

(No longer reincarnate).

Guynfyd. Dwelling of the blessed. Eternal Life.

2nd order.

Good Spirits.

3rd order.

Imperfect Spirits.

2nd class 3rd ”

4th ”

5th ”

6th ”

7th ”

8th ”

9th ”

Superior Spirits. * Spirits of wisdom. * Spirits of science. * Benevolent Spirits. * Neutral Spirits. * Pseudo-wise Spirits. * Frivolous Spirits. * Impure Spirits. * Abred. Circle of the migrations or of the various corporeal existences that souls traverse to pass from annoufn to guynfyd.

Annoufn. Abyss; point of departure of souls.

Purifying themselves and rising by the trials of reincarnation.

For more information on the Druids consult Wikipedia [1] Le Siècle (in Portuguese, O Século), subtitled « political, literary, and social economy journal » [frequently cited by Allan Kardec in numerous articles of the Spiritist Review], is a French daily whose first number appeared on July 1, 1836, and whose publication ceased in 1932.

[2] Pharsalia.

Poem by Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (in Latin Marcus Annaeus Lucanus;

Corduba, Hispania, November 3, 39 A.D. – Rome, April 30, 65.)

[3] Drawn from the Magasin pittoresque, 1857. [Magasin pittoresque — Google Books, 1867.]

[4] Translator's note: See Spiritist Review, the month of February.