nor write has
described to me a woman dressed like Dian, with helmet, and short skirt
and sandals, and what seemed to be buskins. Why, too, among all the
countless stories of visions that I have gathered in Ireland, or that a
friend has gathered for me, are there none that mix the dress of different
periods? The seers when they are but speaking from tradition will mix
everything together, and speak of Finn mac Cool going to the Assizes at
Cork. Almost every one who has ever busied himself with such matters has
come, in trance or dream, upon some new and strange symbol or event, which
he has afterwards found in some work he had never read or heard of.
Examples like this are as yet too little classified, too little analyzed,
to convince the stranger, but some of them are proof enough for those they
have happened to, proof that there is a memory of nature that reveals
events and symbols of distant centuries. Mystics of many countries and
many centuries have spoken of this memory; and the honest men and
charlatans, who keep the magical traditions which will some day be studied
as a part of folk-lore, base most that is of importance in their claims
upon this memory. I have read of it in 'Paracelsus' and in some Indian
book that describes the people of past days as still living within it,
'Thinking the thought and doing the deed.' And I have found it in the
prophetic books of William Blake, who calls its images 'the bright
sculptures of Los's Halls'; and says that all events, 'all love stories,'
renew themselves from those images. It is perhaps well that so few believe
in it, for if many did many would go out of parliaments and universities
and libraries and run into the wilderness to so waste the body, and to so
hush the unquiet mind that, still living, they might pass the doors the
dead pass daily; for who among the wise would trouble himself with making
laws or in writing history or in weighing the earth if the things of
eternity seemed ready to hand?

VII

I find in my diary of magical events for 1899 that I awoke at 3 A.M. out
of a nightmare, and imagined one symbol to prevent its recurrence, and
imagined another, a simple geometrical form, which calls up dreams of
luxuriant vegetable life, that I might have pleasant dreams. I imagined it
faintly, being very sleepy, and went to sleep. I had confused dreams which
seemed to have no relation with the symbol. I awoke about eight, having
for the time forgotten both nightm