d of apple you can
buy at the greengrocer's, but in her trance she saw the Tree of Life with
ever-sighing souls moving in its branches instead of sap, and among its
leaves all the fowl of the air, and on its highest bough one white fowl
bearing a crown. When I went home I took from the shelf a translation of
_The Book of Concealed Mystery_, an old Jewish book, and cutting the pages
came upon this passage, which I cannot think I had ever read: 'The Tree,
... is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and of Evil ... in its branches
the birds lodge and build their nests, the souls and the angels have
their place.'

I once saw a young Church of Ireland man, a bank clerk in the west of
Ireland, thrown in a like trance. I have no doubt that he, too, was quite
certain that the apple of Eve was a greengrocer's apple, and yet he saw
the tree and heard the souls sighing through its branches, and saw apples
with human faces, and laying his ear to an apple heard a sound as of
fighting hosts within. Presently he strayed from the tree and came to the
edge of Eden, and there he found himself not by the wilderness he had
learned of at the Sunday-school, but upon the summit of a great mountain,
of a mountain 'two miles high.' The whole summit, in contradiction to all
that would have seemed probable to his waking mind, was a great walled
garden. Some years afterwards I found a mediaeval diagram, which pictured
Eden as a walled garden upon a high mountain.

Where did these intricate symbols come from? Neither I nor the one or two
people present or the seers had ever seen, I am convinced, the description
in _The Book of Concealed Mystery_, or the mediaeval diagram. Remember that
the images appeared in a moment perfect in all their complexity. If one
can imagine that the seers or that I myself or another had indeed read of
these images and forgotten it, that the supernatural artist's knowledge of
what was in our buried memories accounted for these visions, there are
numberless other visions to account for. One cannot go on believing in
improbable knowledge for ever. For instance, I find in my diary that on
December 27, 1897, a seer, to whom I had given a certain old Irish symbol,
saw Brigit, the goddess, holding out 'a glittering and wriggling serpent,'
and yet I feel certain that neither I nor he knew anything of her
association with the serpent until _Carmina Gadelica_ was published a few
months ago. And an old Irish woman who can neither read