[1] For further particulars of the life of Adamnán, see Dr. Reeves’s introduction to his Adamnán’s Life of St. Columba, Dublin, 1857 (Irish Archæological Society); Dr. Healy’s Ireland’s Ancient Schools and Scholars; Canon John O’Hanlon’s Lives of the Irish Saints, vol. i.

[2] Mr. Alfred Nutt has suggested that the above passage appears to claim for the Irish scholars and clerics a monopoly of the educational and missionary work of the age to the exclusion of the eminent Anglo-Saxons who were labouring with success and distinction in the same field. I had no intention to disparage either the original genius nor the learning of Bede and Aldhelm, Caedmon and Cynewulf, Winifred and Alcuin, nor their missionary and scholastic work, both at home and in the Frankish Empire; only to point out that the position acquired by the Irish scholars and clerics enabled them speedily to disseminate through Western Europe the works of their compatriots. By recalling the names of a few of the most eminent Irishmen who enjoyed a Continental fame during the Middle Ages, we may perceive how wide was the area, and how long the duration, of their influence.

Clement was the chief of a group of Irish scholars who took a leading part in the educational reforms promoted by Charlemagne. Alcuin, Clement’s great English rival at the Frankish Court, had been educated at Clonmacnois. Joannes Scotus Erigena, in the reign of Charles the Bald, founded the scholastic philosophy, and by his translation of the pseudo-Areopagite, and his studies of the Neo-Platonists, bridged over the chasm between ancient and modern thought. Dungal, in the first half of the ninth century, was the first astronomer of his age; at the mandate of Lothair, King of Lombardy, he founded a school which afterwards developed into the University of Pavia, with branches in several other cities, and laboured with success at the task of civilising the Lombards. Add to these Dicuil, a geographer of the same date, the most accurate topographer of the early Middle Ages; Firghil, or Virgilius, Archbishop of Salzburg, who taught the rotundity of the earth and the existence of antipodes; Sedulius, the ninth-century grammarian; St. Donatus, Bishop of Fiesole (fl. c. 840), traveller, topographer, and Scripture commentator; Marianus Scotus, one of the leading chroniclers of the eleventh century; and many others, who laboured with distinction in France, Italy, Germany, England, and Flanders, down to the thirteenth century, when Frederick II., Emperor, summoned Petrus Hibernicus to the University of Naples, where he counted among his theological pupils no less a personage than Thomas Aquinas.

[3] There was also a Tír Enda, between L. Foyle and L. Swilly.

[4] Tigernach gives the date as 624, which Dr. Reeves is inclined to accept, op. cit. Introduction, xl-xli. Lanigan is in favour of 627, which agrees with the reputed age of Adamnán, 77, at the time of his death. Possibly the latter date is correct, the difference being explicable by the different system of chronology adopted by Tigernach.

[5] Lives of the Irish Saints, vi. 708; and see Ibid., ix. 505.

[6] Acts x. 11.

[7] 2 Cor. xii. 2-4. Cp. also Galat. i. 12, 16; Ephes. i. 3; and the Apocryphal Acts of Paul, Ante-Nicene Library, vol. xvi.

[8] With the ancient Irish, the abode of the departed was beyond the Atlantic, towards the setting sun; so, in the Hindu mythology, Yama, King of the Dead, crossed the stream towards the sunset, first showing the way by which all men were to follow him. This natural idea has been shared by many barbarous races.

[9] Vault; inna luinge, genitive of long, = ship. Qy. here = ‘nave’?

[10] South-east, possibly because that is the direction of Jerusalem, the Holy City.

[11] The word used is Mórdáil, the name of the Irish National Assembly, or States-General. See ante, Sec. 2.

[12] Or, ‘a chair highly wrought,’ Inna ċaṫair ċumtaċta.

[13] The comparison of the arch above the head of the Heavenly King to a wrought helmet or a regal diadem, may have been suggested by the picturesque and chivalrous custom of the Irish kings recorded in the ancient Irish poem upon the Fair of Carman, whence it appears that their head-dress on ordinary state occasions was a wrought helmet, the royal crown being reserved for the day of battle.

[14] ‘Glow,’ derge, lit. ‘redness,’ which, Mr. Whitley Stokes suggests, ‘symbolises divine love, creative power, royalty.’ If so, cp. Dante’s description of a ‘goodly crimson’ as ‘questo nobilissimo colore.’

[15] Or, qy. ‘comet’?

[16] Compare the description of the seven walls of Ecbatana, of different hue, in Herodotus, Book I.

[17] So Windisch trans. Crand caingil, = cancelli.

[18] ‘Seats,’ or qy. stalls; the author appears to have in mind the construction of a Christian church. Cp. note to ch. 31 post. ‘Canopies,’ lit. ‘crowns.’

[19] Or ‘virgins,’ W. S.

[20] See last note.

[21] Or ‘parricides,’ fingalaċ, which O’Donovan translates both as ‘a fratricide, one who has killed a tribesman,’ and ‘parricidal’ (Supplement to O’Reilly’s Dictionary).

[22] The Erenach, or aircindeċ, was the official guardian of Church temporalities.

[23] Dánaib, which signifies ‘gifts,’ ‘arts,’ etc.

[24] pluic, which W. S. trans, ‘maces,’ or ‘clubs.’

[25] ‘Reivers,’ aiṫdibergaig, which W. S. trans. ‘men who mark themselves to the Devil,’ but expresses doubt on the subject, and cites authorities which seem to imply the sense of rapine or plunder.

[26] Or ‘without remission, but they,’ etc.

[27] Co lár, which W. S. trans. ‘down to the ground.’

[28] Roṫa, so Windisch from ruṫ; W. S. trans, ‘wheels’ from roṫ.

[29] Or, ‘the ordained who have broken their vows.’

[30] Erdam, which, Mr. Whitley Stokes says, was the name used by the Irish ecclesiastical writers as equivalent to the Greek pronaos or narthex. See notes 1 and 2 to Ch. 13, ante.

[31] Cp. ante, Sec. 2.

[32] The Mórdáil at which these laws were passed was apparently held in the year 697, while Finnachta Fledach had been assassinated in 695. This anachronism affords yet further evidence of the comparatively late composition of our version of the Vision.

[33] Anmċairdine, ‘soul-friendship’; anmċara, ‘soul-friend,’ is the Irish name for a father-confessor.

[34] Professor Bryce considers that the first extant mention of the Donation of Constantine is contained in the letter of Pope Hadrian 1. to Charlemagne, dated A.D. 777 (Holy Roman Empire, ch. vii. p. 112 note, 4th ed.). If so, the allusion is couched in very general and obscure terms. Döllinger, who dates the letter in question 775, holds that it refers not to what is commonly understood by the Donation of Constantine, but to gifts of land in various parts of Italy, afterwards seized by the Lombards. The forgery of the Donation would appear to be later than 750, but prior to 774, as it refers to the state of things existing before the first Frankish settlement in Italy, which took place in 774. In any case, it is later than the time of Adamnán.

[35] Philip succeeded to Gordian III. in 224, but was not his son, being an Arab. He favoured the Christians, and corresponded with Origen, whence arose a report, countenanced by Eusebius, that he had embraced Christianity, but for this there is no authority.

[36] Taiṫleċ, so W. S.

[37] Suṫi. So Windisch, though W. S. trans. ‘fruitfulness (?).’

[38] Mr. Alfred Nutt, in his Essay on the Irish Vision of the Happy Otherworld and the Celtic Doctrine of Rebirth, appended to Prof. Kuno Meyer’s Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, 1895-7, points out that in Greece and Ireland alone of Aryan nations the Elysium legend existed devoid of any eschatological belief (i. 329).

[39] See Odyssey, xi. 36 sqq.; 222, 391 sqq.; 488 sqq. This gloomy impression is little mitigated by mention of the ‘Asphodelian meadow’ in which the dead reside (Od. xi. 539; xxiv. 13).

[40] See, in particular, Homer, Odyssey, iv. 563; Hesiod, Works and Days, 110, 166; Pindar, Olympiad, ii. 68, 120, which last, perhaps, contains the most finished picture of the Elysium drawn by the earlier poets.

[41] It would be possible to cull from the Greek writers a great wealth of allusions to the Otherworld; not only, however, do exigencies of space forbid this, but they are hardly pertinent to the present subject, for the reasons mentioned in the text. Still less need we enter into the burlesque descriptions of an Otherworld, conceived as a Land of Cockayne, several of which are preserved in fragments of the comic poets.

[42] The Greeks themselves referred to a foreign origin most of their mystical rites, and the deities worshipped therein. No doubt it is often the case that peoples who observe in foreign nations practices akin to those existing among themselves, are apt to derive these from the former; nevertheless it appears certain that while the cults which formed the basis of the mysteries existed, in a primitive form, in the indigenous Greek religion, they received a great impetus, at several distinct periods, through the importation of similar myths and rites from abroad. Thus M. Paul Foucart (Recherches sur l’origine et la nature des Mystères d’Eleusis, p. 75) accepts the Greek theory of the Egyptian origin of the Demeter cult and the Eleusinian rites at a date prior to the eleventh century B.C. These rites, he assumes, were purely agricultural at first, but at a later day (seventh century B.C.) became associated with the doctrine of a future life (pp. 75-9). He further holds that this doctrine was itself brought from Egypt by the philosophers, Pythagoras and others, who are reported by tradition to have travelled thither for instruction (p. 83). This latter part of M. Foucart’s theory presents certain difficulties. The name of Pythagoras is commonly associated with the Orphic mysteries, to which M. Foucart denies any connection with Eleusis, while the conception of a future life which prevailed both in the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries and in the teaching of Pythagoras, differed in important points from the Egyptian doctrine, as will be pointed out in a later place. Professor Rohde likewise holds that while the Dionysiac mysteries existed in Greece in pre-Homeric times as a minor and local cult, the Dionysos-Zagreus rites, which formed the basis of the Orphic mysteries, were imported from Thrace at an early date; probably, Mr. Nutt suggests (op. cit., ii. 141), during the period of change which followed upon the Dorian invasion. Thrace, apparently, derived the Zagreus myth from Phrygia. Prof. Percy Gardner (Contemporary Review, March 1895) is also inclined to accept the Greek traditions as to the derivation of many of their mystical rites and cults from Asiatic sources, differing herein from Prof. Dieterich, who holds that these were native developments. For a discussion by Mr. Alfred Nutt of these various theories see op. cit., 1. ch. xi.

[43] The best authorities appear to be agreed that there are no grounds for the views once held that the mysteries contained either some esoteric creed of a religion purer than that held by the multitude, and jealously guarded from the latter, or, according to others, a system of occult philosophy or theosophy.

[44] See his article, ‘Mysteries,’ in the Encyclopædia Britannica ed. 9, vol. xvii.

[45] Sir W. M. Ramsay further mentions a Rhodian inscription of the fifth century B.C., which required the candidates for initiation at the temple of Lindus to bring a pure heart and a conscience free from crime (loc. cit.).

[46] This may possibly represent the conception originally prevailing in the mystic schools concerning the future life of mankind in general. (See Mr. Nutt hereon, op. cit., i. 256.) If so, redemption from such a lot would be one of the most important objects to be compassed by the theurgic effects of initiation, until the growth of moral ideas in connection with the mysteries converted this ‘place of filth and gloom’ into a place of punishment for the wicked.

[47] In like manner, the spirits were amazed to see that Dante’s body cast a shadow, as the souls of the dead did not (Purg., iii. 88 sq.), and that he breathed (ib., ii. 67-9). According to the old Persian belief, the souls of the beatified dead were to cast no shadows. See Sec. 2, post.

[48] See Books iv. and vi. of his De Civitate Dei.

[49] See Dante’s Tenth Epistle, addressed to Can Grande della Scala, Oxford Dante, pp. 414 sqq.

[50] Op. cit., p. 416, ll. 173-5.

[51] Ib., l. 169.

[52] Ib., p. 417, l. 268.

[53] Lenormant, Origines de l’Histoire, vol. ii., cited by Ragozin, Chaldæa, p. 276, which work gives a compendious account of the subject. For fuller particulars see Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 1887, Lectures iv. and v., and his article ‘Chaldæa’ in the Encyclopædia Britannica, ed. 9, vol. iii.

[54] Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 1887, p. 364.

[55] ‘She makes the soul of the righteous one go up above the Hara-berezaiti (Mount Elborz), above the Kinvad bridge she places it, in the presence of the heavenly gods themselves.’—Vendîdâd, xix. 30; in Darmesteter’s translation, Sacred Books of the East, iv. 219; and see Ragozin, Media, c. iv.

[56] In the Avesta we meet with an idea which is prominent in Jewish and Christian examples of the Vision legend. If, at the balance of any soul’s account, when his good and evil deeds were weighed one against the other, the scales were equally poised, he was reserved for the last Judgment in a place set apart for his like.

[57] Vendîdâd, p. 55.

[58] Loc. cit., footnote.

[59] Vendîdâd, p. 20, note. A similar bird occurs frequently in the Hindu mythology. The Accadian ‘divine storm-bird’ stole the lightning from heaven, and was thereby enabled to impart to man the knowledge of fire, and of divination by lightning flashes.—Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 1887, 293-4. The Babylonian Semites identified this bird with their culture-god Zu, who, in form of a bird, robbed the gods of the ‘tablets of destiny’ (op. cit., 295-7). All the world over, the part of Prometheus has been played by a supernatural bird, such as Yehl, the crane, of the Thlinkeets; Pundgel, the eagle-hawk, of Australia, etc.

[60] Vendîdâd, vi. 15-16.

[61] Op. cit., p. 17.

[62] Speaking of the effects which the conquest of Babylon by the Persians produced upon the religion of the latter, Professor Dill remarks: ‘The conquerors, as so often happens, were to some extent subdued by the vanquished. Syncretism set in; the deities of the two races were reconciled and identified. The magical arts and the astrolatry of the valley of the Euphrates imposed themselves on the purer Mazdean faith and never released their hold, although they failed to check its development as a moral system.’—Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, 1904, p. 587, where the author cites Cumont, Monuments relatifs aux Mystères de Mithra, and Gasquet, Le culte de Mithra.

[63] Vendîdâd, Introduction, sec. v.

[64] The cult of Mithra, which, in the earlier ages of the Empire, extended not only over the Mediterranean littoral, but throughout all Europe so far as the Roman legions went, even to Yorkshire and the forests of Pannonia, was full of symbolism, the meaning and even the nomenclature of which are only to be explained by the Persian religion, in which the cult originated, although it came to receive an interpretation consonant with the Neo-Platonic theories.

[65] He further suggests that the original notion of the Var as a place of refuge for the seeds of things from a coming destruction is borrowed from the Judaic account of Noah. This would seem to be a very strained inference from a slight analogy. The Biblical account finds much closer parallels not only in the Chaldæan traditions, but in the Vedic account of Manu and the Rishis being saved from the deluge in an ark containing the seeds of things, not to speak of deluge myths in the East and in the West, as the Thlinkeets, the Natchez, and other tribes of North America; the Muyscas and Orinoco Indians of South America; the Samoans, Tahitans, etc.

[66] He assumes that Vohu Mano (Good Thought) is the Neo-Platonic Logos, and if so, that the other Amesha Spentas are of post-Alexandrian development, and he goes on to find parallels for them too in the rest of the seven emanations enumerated by Philo. However, even if the parallels are so close as to compel the conclusion that the character and functions ascribed to the Amesha Spentas in their latest form are due to Neo-Platonic influences—and even this is not shown very convincingly—it by no means follows that the very conception of the seven celestial powers is due to the same source.

[67] We have here, in Persia, an anticipation of the Neo-Platonic æons before the time of Plato himself—a conception which can hardly be referred to the earlier theory of the kind propounded by Hesiod.

[68] Vendîdâd, Introduction, p. liv, and see p. lxi. For the dead casting no shadow, cp. Plutarch’s Vision of Thespesios.

[69] Op. cit., p. lxv.

[70] Article ‘Chaldæa,’ in Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. iii.

[71] Revelation xv. 2, and cf. Fis Adamnáin, ch. II.

[72] Herodotus, Euterpe, ii. 156.

[73] Dill, op. cit., p. 561.

[74] Athenian colonists were settled in the Nile delta in the seventh century B.C. at latest, and at an even earlier date intercourse had been maintained between Greece and Egypt by the medium of Greek traders to the Nile, and Greek mercenaries in the Egyptian service. The cult of Isis was introduced into Attica, at the Peiraios, in the fourth century B.C. (Foucart, Associations réligieuses, etc., p. 83), and extended over the Grecian islands and the mainlands of Greece and Ionia.

[75] Budge, Book of the Dead, 1901, 1. lxv., and Ib. lxvii. sqq. Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 1879, pp. 180-1.

[76] According to one Rabbi Leo, the wicked are tortured by fire and otherwise, some without hope of remission, others for a time only.—E. Cowper, Apocryphal Gospels, Introduction, lxviii.

[77] At a somewhat later date, the doctrine of the end of the world by fire, held by many of the Stoics who, in the first century of the Empire, represented the best and most serious side of Pagan thought, would appear to have encouraged the bent of Christian teaching in that direction rather by familiarising the subject to men’s minds than by the contribution of any new matter.

[78] The speculative writings of the Rabbis belong to a time when the Jewish schools of learning had fallen under the spell of Hellenism. So preponderating was the influence of the latter that Professor Percy Gardner appears inclined to trace the entire Hades theory to the Orphic rites, and suggests a ‘great probability that the Christian doctrine of the Descent into Hades, together with the imagery in which the future world was presented to the early Christian imagination, was derived neither from a Christian nor a Jewish, nor even a Hellenic source, but from the mystical lore of Dionysos and Orpheus.’—Contemporary Review, March 1895. So Mr. Alfred Nutt, speaking of the Elysium of the Christian apocryphal writers, considers that the ‘source must be sought for not in Jewish but in Greek conceptions,’ and that the Christian Heaven derives immediately from the Hellenic one.—Voyage of Bran, i. 256, and see ch. xi. generally. With all respect to these eminent authorities, I would submit that it would be going too far absolutely to exclude from those parts of late Jewish and early Christian eschatology which deal with the theory of Hades, including the Descent thither, and with the description of Elysium, all indebtedness to the Oriental creeds which have contributed so much to that eschatology in other respects. With this reservation, we may readily agree with Mr. Nutt that ‘Christian eschatology, as so much else of Christian doctrine, is emphatically a product of the fertilising influence of Hellenic philosophy and religion upon Eastern thought and fancy’ (op. cit., p. 281); only contending that Eastern thought and fancy contributed much of the raw material.

[79] Le Page Renouf, op. cit., p. 183.

[80] The Book of Enoch, translated from Dillman’s text, with notes, by Charles. Oxford, 1893. See also The Book of Enoch, trans. Lawrence. Oxford, 1821.

[81] Cp. the veil of fire and veil of ice in the doorway of Adamnán’s celestial city.—F. A. 14.

[82] 2 Esdras iv.

[83] L.c. ii. 12, 18-19; and cp. Isaiah xxv. 6; Revelation xxii. 2.

[84] 2 Cor. xii. 2-4; and cp. Galatians i. 12, 16; Ephesians i. 3.

[85] E.g. in Revelation ii. 7. ‘To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the Tree of Life, which is in Paradise’; and xxii. 2, ‘In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the Tree of Life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations’; also the Throne and One seated thereon in ch. iv., xx. 11; the sea of glass mingled with fire in ch. xv.; the city built of precious stones, etc.

[86] Vide Dante, Inferno, canto iv.

[87] The fact that the work was most in repute in the Eastern Church, and that several of the leading Western fathers wrote of it in disparaging terms, may possibly be held to militate to some extent against this ascription.

[88] This passage, so thoroughly Dantesque, reminds us curiously of chapters 9 and 12 of the Vita Nuova. Indeed, the little episode might almost be termed a painting of Dante and Beatrice executed by one of the primitives. In like manner, the passage that ensues recalls the reproaches which Beatrice addressed to Dante on meeting him in the Earthly Paradise at the close of the Purgatorio.

[89] Herein the plan of the work accords to some extent with that of the Book of Enoch.

[90] Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. xvi. p. 480.

[91] Two Latin versions, together with the account of the pseudo-John, are translated in vol. xvi. of the Ante-Nicene Christian Library.

[92] Using the word ‘people’ in its wider sense, not as equivalent to the popolaccio, for there were persons of rank and culture among the early converts, but as distinguished from those who were in high station, or were remarkable for learning.

[93] De Legibus, II. xiv. 36.

[94] See Plutarch’s Consolatory Epistle to his Wife.

[95] Plutarch: On Superstition, On the Tardy Vengeance of God, On the Impracticability of a Happy Life on Epicurean Principles. Lucian: Philopseudes, De Luctu.

[96] See Ireland and the Celtic Church, by Dr. G. T. Stokes; ed. 5, 1900, pp. 169-174.

[97] Op. cit., p. 229, and cp. pp. 215-16.

[98] Edited by Mr. Whitley Stokes in Anecdota Oxoniensia, Mediæval and Modern Series, vol. i., part 3.

[99] G. T. Stokes, op. cit., pp. 228-9. For other points of resemblance and instance of communication between the Irish and the Eastern Churches, cited by the learned author, see pp. 105 n., 173-4, 186-7, 229, and Lecture x., passim.

[100] This classification, in theory at least, regulated the structure of society from top to bottom. There were four ranks of kings, from the Árd Rí, High King, or Emperor, of all Ireland, to the Rí Tuatha, King of a Tribal Territory. The territories themselves were divided according to a descending scale, analogous to the English division into county, hundred, tithing, etc. There were six grades of princes under the king, classified according to the extent of their lands. Society was divided into nobles, freemen, and serfs, and each of these classes was subdivided into a great number of minor grades. The family was traced to the seventeenth degree, and was grouped into six classes, whose rights and liabilities in matters of inheritance, in the receipt or payment of fines and damages, etc., are defined with the utmost minuteness. The land tenure, and the dues to be paid in respect of each kind; the circumstances of crimes and civil injuries, and the fines or damages to be paid for each; in short, all the details of public and private life, were elaborated with similar minuteness. For particulars, the reader may be referred to the ancient legal and customary treatises, and the respective commentaries thereon, printed in the Rolls Series, the Lebor na g-Cert, ed. O’Donovan, 1847, and O’Curry’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, ed. W. K. Sullivan, 3 vols., 1873.