This subject is a vast one; it is difficult to know how to tackle it intelligibly. Books and books have been written on it; hardly any two agreeing about anything. If you want to establish any conclusion you may draw, you have to bring forward pages and pages of evidence, from Greek literature, from Latin literature, from Welsh literature; and argue and argue and argue. That is the correct scientific way of doing things. I shall have to ask you to take all that for granted, and say that what I am going to give you are the conclusions my own mind has formed after considerable study, considerable pondering of all the evidence that remains to us; and that I could not prove any of these conclusions to anyone who did not want to believe in them.
You see, there are two types of mind, or two sides to the mind. One says, I'm from Missouri; show me; I won't accept anything unless it is proved; you've got no business to believe anything unless you can prove it in a chemical laboratory; measure it, weigh it, tie it up neatly into little packages, and stick a label on each. For that type of mind, or that side of the mind, there is nothing to say about Druidism; it dismisses the subject as something we know practically nothing about. But the other type is alert to catch suggestions of unknown greatness. When it hears of something, it does not ask for that something to be proved, but asks: Can I use that? Is that of value to me? Can I enlarge my soul, so to speak, by contemplation of it? To this second type of mind the subject of Druidism is one that must appeal very greatly.
The Druids were the priests of certain Celtic peoples in antiquity. They and their religion preceded Christianity in Gaul (France), in Britain and in Ireland; their headquarters was in Britain, where the religion started, and where the training colleges for the priesthood were situated. In the literature of Greece and Rome we find references to them from about 200 b.c. to 200 or 300 a.d.
The first is from an Alexandrian Greek writer named Sotion, about 200 b.c. He speaks of it as a common belief in Greece that philosophy came to the Greek world from certain foreign peoples: from the Brahmins, the Magi of Persia, the Egyptian priesthood, and the Druids. All that is proved by this is, that the highly civilized Greeks regarded the Druids not as the medicine men of a savage tribe, but as the possessors of a highly developed philosophy, capable of teaching the Greeks. Then we get references to them from the century before Christ as students and teachers of a very sublime philosophy. Then comes the time when Rome was at war with the peoples whose religion was Druidism. First there was Caesar's attack on and conquest of Gaul. It was quite unprovoked; its cause was Caesar's personal ambition; he is said to have caused the death of some three to five million Gauls in the course of the war. It is on his account of the Druids that the popular view of them is based: their supposed human sacrifices, etc. Now whatever Caesar was, there is no doubt that he was thoroughly unscrupulous. We know that he deliberately misrepresented and understated the civilization of the Celtic peoples, his enemies. We know that their civilization was in some ways more advanced than that of the Romans who conquered them: e.g., they used sailing ships, while the Roman ships were propelled by oars; and they manufactured better textiles, made and wore better clothes than the Romans, or even the Greeks. We know, too, that to lie about your enemies in war-time is a common practice with erring humanity; and Caesar did it liberally; as is proved by this fact: In giving his account of the Druids, he speaks of them as not only the priests, but as also in charge of the legal system of Gaul: which is correct. In this latter capacity, he says that the severest punishment they inflicted was excommunication: a criminal was forbidden to attend the religious services; but then two pages later he goes on to tell horrible tales about their punishing criminals by erecting huge wicker cages, filling them with criminals and burning them to death. Now if his first statement that the worst punishment they inflicted was excommunication was true, this second statement, made with a view to war-time propaganda, could not also have been true; nor does it jibe with what he says further about their being students and teachers of philosophy and science: in which connection he, like every other classical writer, speaks of them with high respect.
From Caesar's time, who conquered Gaul and twice invaded Britain unsuccessfully, for about 150 years until the Roman conquest of southern Britain was accomplished, we get a good many Roman writers referring to the Druids. They all copy Caesar in speaking of the human sacrifices; during this period the Druids were still actively or potentially the enemies of Rome. Then, when Britain was conquered and the war was finished with, we find that supposed dark side of Druidism forgotten; no writer seems to know about it any more; and we get references once more classing the Druids with the Brahmins, the Magi and the Egyptian priesthood as possessors of a high wisdom, as the teachers of the Greeks in philosophy; as a class that knew the wisdom of the gods, the secret laws of the universe. Even in that period during which it may be supposed war-time propaganda would have influenced the Roman mind, every reference made to the Druids speaks of them as possessors of an occult knowledge, something not in possession of the Romans themselves. Sometimes it is in the way of poking a bit of fun at them — they alone knew or they alone were ignorant of the secrets of the gods; sometimes it is very respectful indeed; but always it is there. I do not think an absolutely unprejudiced student could examine all the evidence from the literature of Greece and Rome without coming to the certain conclusion that the classical world held strongly to the belief that the Druids were philosophers, possessors of an esoteric wisdom, a deeper knowledge of the secrets of life and death than their neighbors and contemporaries. That undoubtedly was their reputation. Caesar with all his efforts could not shake that; indeed he does not attempt to; he accepts it. What he did was to add to it the statement that they were cruel and barbarous; which statement was believed while the Romans were at war with the Druidic peoples. When that war was over, and civilized Romans had the opportunity of mixing with civilized Celts and knowing their minds, the belief in Druidic barbarism seems to have died away.
Naturally, the Romans forbade the practice of Druidism during their occupation of Gaul from b.c. 50 say to a.d. 450, or about 500 years, and during their occupation of south Britain from about a.d. 70 to 410, say 340 years. But they never went to Ireland, which was also Druidic by religion, nor to northern Scotland; and even their occupation of Wales was very partial. There was nothing to prevent British, or to give them the modern name, Welsh, Druids from taking refuge in Ireland — which country all along must have had a good deal of intercourse with Britain; there was very little to prevent Druidism being carried on on the quiet in Wales throughout the Roman occupation.
The cardinal doctrine of the Druids, according to the classical, i.e. Greek and Roman authors who refer to them, was Reincarnation. Almost every Latin author who speaks of the Druids emphasizes their belief in that natural law or fact. The idea was familiar enough in the Roman world; since it was a cardinal teaching of Pythagoras. But the way the Celts held to this doctrine or knowledge struck the Romans with surprise. To the Roman, as to us, death was rather an important event; it was the end of the book: you might speculate as to what lay beyond it; but you weren't quite certain at the best of times. Tuum semel occideris, et de te splendida Minos Fecerit arbitria, Non, Torquate genus, non te facundia, non te restituet pietas, says Horace, expressing the feeling of the Roman man in the street: When you die, and Minos, the judge of the dead, has passed judgment on you, neither genius nor piety nor wit will restore you; therefore spend what you have, enjoy your wealth now. But the Celt, the Welshman of those days, felt very differently; the Roman was both amused and amazed at the way he felt. To him, death was not much more than going to bed nightly; it was not any interruption in the long course of his life. At the appropriate time a new body would be born for him; he knew perfectly well that he would live again, here on earth. You could always even borrow money from him, to be repaid next life, or in the next but one, or in some future life, as the borrower and lender might agree. You could bank on the fact of reincarnation, just as you could bank on the sun's rising tomorrow.
Now thrice in my lifetime I have come on families in Wales wherein that knowledge had been handed down even to our own day. They were all pious Christians; but they knew that Reincarnation was a fact. Who then shall pretend to say that Druidism died out under the Roman proscription?
Soon after the Romans went in 410, Welsh literature began to be created. One of the first of the poets was Taliesin. Seventy-seven poems attributed to him come down. Scholars have fought over the question as to whether there ever was such a person, when he lived, who wrote his poems, and so forth. But according to the tradition — and the most advanced scholarship these days believes that tradition is the best possible historical evidence, although the scholarship characteristic of last century was chiefly interested in picking it to pieces and pouring scorn on it — according to tradition Taliesin made those poems in the sixth century, when Wales was freed from Roman rule. And if there is one idea they reek with, it is Reincarnation. "I have been in many a shape before I attained my congenial form; I have borne a banner before Alexander; I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain; My original country is the Region of the Summer Stars; I was formerly little Gwion. Now I am Taliesin."
So we see that when the classical writers contacted the Druids, they found them believers in Reincarnation as their first and most characteristic doctrine, and we find that same doctrine blazing up in Wales as soon as the Roman proscription was lifted. I think we are bound to believe that the Welsh remembered and held to their Druidism through the period of the Roman occupation.
Now I am going to speak of something rather intangible, but within the rights of a literary critic. If you take two literatures, the Welsh on the one hand, and the English, French, German or Italian, any modern literature on the other, you will notice one thing in particular. The great literatures are concerned with life as we know it. They sort and examine human experience; explore human thought. The best part of them is the work of great minds reaching out for something, trying to announce new truths concerning life; reaching out from here, from this present life in the world into the unknown. Welsh literature on the other hand, small and unimportant as it is compared to those others I have mentioned, does nothing of that kind. But — and the farther you go back in it the more you feel it — it is haunted by something, a feeling of something vast, mysterious, in the past. Go back to the Triads, to the Mabinogi and romances, to the sixth century poetry, and you are drenched in this atmosphere. It issues from a grand mystery; it is haunted by a great unrecoverable memory. If I said that it was haunted with the memory of a real knowledge as to the inside of the universe, the secrets of life and death, once possessed in great fullness, now to be mentioned only with bated breath, to be only hinted at — I think I should explain just the feeling that one gets.
Put that side by side with what the classical authors say about the wisdom possessed by the Druids, and I think we have the strongest kind of suggestion of the truth. Matthew Arnold, one of the very greatest of English literary critics, felt it strongly; he said that in studying the oldest Welsh literature he felt as if he were in a village of peasants" huts built of the ruins of Ephesus. Ephesus can be taken as implying a grand, beautiful and forgotten city of the ancients, of which every stone had been curiously carved by a master artist. The literatures of the modern great nations: stones quarried out of the mountains of thought by each great writer, and built by him into the architecture of his imagining; the old Welsh literature — stones quarried by giants and demi-gods of old, and by them fashioned into heaven knows what heaven-touching towers and pinnacles long since fallen into ruin; and of the broken ruins, peasants' cabins built. In those, the human spirit, blinded it is true, working its way from everyday human experience towards greatness, and achieving a high measure of greatness; in this one half understood reminiscence of an even greater greatness foregone. The very greatest poetry is that which most exalts the human spirit, most reveals its divinity. You might find in Shakespeare, in Dante, in Goethe — to name the three grandest figures in European literature — lines which assert that divinity and lofty origin as strikingly, as daringly, as those I quoted of Taliesin's — "My original country is the Region of the Summer Stars"; but I have failed to find them; and I doubt whether they are to be found.
Now to every people come alternately centuries of waking, active dynamically creative life; and centuries of sleep and inactivity. Great literatures, like all other great works, are only produced by peoples in their waking or active periods; never otherwise. All great thought comes from waking peoples; all great art; all great building. Now consider that from about the thirteenth century the peoples of western continental Europe and England have been in their waking state; consequently all great literature, European and not ancient, has been produced by each of the European nations. Before the thirteenth century there was nothing of importance from any of these peoples. Of books written in this island before the thirteenth century, three make interesting reading today. They are, the Mabinogion, which was written in Welsh; and two that were written in Latin, a History of the Kings of the Britons, by a Welshman named Gruffydd ab Arthur, and an Itinerary of Wales by one Geraldus Cambrensis or Gerald the Welshman. Which means, to put it shortly, that while England, France, Germany and the other countries of western Europe, have been in the waking state, Wales, and for that matter Ireland, have been sound asleep; but that between 400 a.d. or earlier and 1200 or so, the Welsh (and Irish) were to some extent awake. We may say that the period 400-1200 was night for the Europeans, and the period 1200 to the 1900's has been day for them; but that for the Celts, 400 to perhaps 1480 was twilight, and 1480 to now has been night. Now you will find this rule applying all through history wherever you may look; there are no exceptions.
II
The most interesting thing in all Welsh literature is the matter contained in a book called Barddas or Bardism, which won a prize in the National Eisteddfod of 1858. It is the most interesting thing, because it expounds a great system of thought. That great system purported to be the doctrine of the ancient Druids. It is freely accused by the pundits of having been forged by a man named Iolo Morganwg in the eighteenth century. To a student of history and world literature, it is quite certain that it — that is, the system of thought, the philosophy — could not have been created by any native of a sleeping race, Welshman or other. It comes out of Wales beyond doubt; it explains and makes intelligible a thousand references in early Welsh literature. But no Welshman could have invented it in the sleeping time of Wales; because that would have implied a highly dynamic use of creative thought, which does not happen among a sleeping people. Nor could it have been invented in a twilight time, or say between the Roman conquest of Britain in 68 a.d. and the battle of Bosworth; because in such twilight periods you can get literature with a reminiscence or echo of ancient greatness, but not great creative thought such as is implied in the thinking out of a philosophy to explain life and the universe. The conclusion therefore is irresistible that this system does come down from a time when the Celtic peoples were awake, alive, dynamic; which they have not been since the Romans landed in Britain.
Now when you get that law of history firmly fixed in your mind, that for every people periods of activity and periods of rest alternate; and put that side by side with what the classical writers, Greeks and Romans, say about the Druids as possessors of a lofty philosophy, you will, I think, conclude that (1) the Celts had a waking period which ended, for the Welsh, with the Roman conquest; and (2) that a lofty philosophy broached in Wales in the eighteenth century could only have been an echo of the philosophy held to and believed in in Wales before the Roman conquest: or in other words, that the doctrine put forward in the book Barddas is an echo or reminiscence of Druidism.
An echo or reminiscence necessarily; not the complete thing. A pagan system that had come down in Christian and troubled Wales through all those troubled Christian centuries, could not but have been corrupted in some degree; could not but have lost some elements of greatness and taken on some elements of imperfection. Just as old Welsh literature has a thousand references in it that need this philosophy of Barddas to make them intelligible; so does the philosophy of Barddas need Theosophy to explain and complete it. To explain and show the real meaning of certain parts that have become dimmed by age; to fill in certain parts that have been lost through the centuries.
We are introduced first to two principles: Duw and Cythraul, names very familiar to the Welsh, being the common words for "God" and the "devil." I shall however leave them both in Welsh, to come at their meaning more easily. Duw undoubtedly has taken on something of personality from Christian teaching; but this personalizing has not gone the whole way; in the case of Cythraul it has not even begun. Cythraul, the opposite pole of existence to Duw, is thus defined: it "is destitute of life and intention" — a thing of necessity, not of will; without being or life in respect of existence and personality; vacant in reference to what is vacant; dead in respect to what is dead; and nothing in reference to what is nothing.
Duw, uniting Itself with Cythraul with the intention of subduing it to life, imparted the existence of vitality to animated beings; and thus did life lay hold upon the dead, whence intellectual animations first sprang. Intellectual existence first began in the depths of Annwn for there is the lowest and least grade. The greatest cannot exist in an intellectual existence before the least; there can be no intellectual existence without gradation. Thus may be seen that there is to every intellectual existence a necessary gradation, which begins at the lowest grade, progressing from thence incessantly along every addition, intervention, increase, growth in age, and completion. Animations in Annwn are removed gradually, by means of dissolution and death to a higher degree, where they receive an accumulation of life and goodness, and thus they progress from grade to grade nearer and nearer to the extremity of life and goodness. That state of extremity of life and goodness is to be reached when these "intellectual animations" have attained to the state of humanity.
Now there we see that Duw and Cythraul, in simple modern terms, are translatable as Spirit and Matter; Duw uniting itself to Cythraul, speaks of the involution of spirit into matter, whereby is caused the evolution of matter towards spirit. The Druidic map of the universe, so to speak, consists of two concentric circles. The space within the inner circle is called Cylch yr Abred, the Cycle of Inchoation; it is the world in which we live, the plane we live on. The space between the inner and outer circle is called Cylch y Gwynfyd, the Cycle of Bliss; it is the world above ours, so to say, the state to which we evolve after learning all the lessons existence as human beings can teach us. Outside the outer circle are rays shooting out; they represent the Cylch y Ceugant or the Cycle of Infinity, in which we are told there is only Duw.
Now below the innermost circle or Abred there is what is called Annwn, the great deep; a word I believe poetically used for hell; a word occurring much in Welsh folklore with more or less that meaning. But in Bardism it is explained as simply the inception point of existence; where life begins; the worlds below the human, through which in Druidism as in Theosophy, all life, all existence, must gradually evolve up to the human stage. There, says Barddas, are the manred or atoms, the stuff out of which the worlds were built; Duw uniting itself with Cythraul started these on the pilgrimage of evolution. Each had innate in itself its own awen, different from that of all others; its own peculiar nature, which should be evolved, during the course of innumerable ages, by undergoing every imaginable, every possible, form of experience, in stage after stage of evolution: elemental, mineral, vegetable, and animal, up to self-consciousness in the human stage or state: that which began as the unself-conscious god-spark becoming the self-conscious human being.
The further you go down in Annwn, says Barddas, towards the beginnings, the more does the nature of Cythraul, and the less does the nature of Duw, preponderate; until when the human state is reached, the two natures equiponderate, and you have free will, and a choice between good and evil at every turn of thought or action. If, says Barddas, the nature of Cythraul has come to preponderate in a man, through gross thought and evil action, dying, that man descends below the human state to that point in Annwn or the evolutionary journey which corresponds to the character he has made for himself. If, through noble thought and action the nature of Duw has come to preponderate in him, dying he passes out from the human state, and from the Cycle of Abred, into the Cycle of Gwynfyd.
Now there you see what main doctrine, known to have been the cardinal doctrine of Druidism in the days when it was a living religion, has dropt out of Druidism as presented in this book Barddas. I refer to Reincarnation. The philosophy of Barddas is absolutely sound and logical and inspiring as far as it goes; but since its chief insistence is that evolution comes by experience, by the gaining of all possible experience, we can see that logically human reincarnation is a necessity. There is no passing out of Annwn into Abred we are told, without gaining first all the imaginable experience every state of existence in Annwn can teach us; and no passing out of Abred into Gwynfyd without gaining first all the possible experience that life in Abred can give us; and as you can't get all possible human experience in one human life, we have to see that sometime during the troubled centuries of Welsh history the folk who were the custodians of the tradition of Druidism withdrew the teaching of Reincarnation; ceased to speak of it. They ceased to speak, also, of the evolution of the soul beyond the human stage; of the existence of the Gods; although we know that this teaching was a part of Druidism of old.
Now I shall turn from Barddas to another matter. When European civilization was at its lowest depths of degradation and brutality, in what are called the Dark Ages, a light shone out into it from Wales through the Normans who came here conquering. It was chivalry, centering about the Arthurian legend; at the core of which was the legend of the Holy Grail. This was supposed to be a vessel which held the blood of Christ; it was very miraculous in character; vision of it might be attained by the absolutely pure in heart. Now England had its national legend — of Beowulf; and France had its, of Charlemagne; but this legend from Wales drove out and covered over both of those, so that Englishmen forgot Beowulf and talked of Arthur as their national hero — although he was supposed to have spent his life fighting them, and Frenchmen forgot Charlemagne and his Paladins, and both tried more or less, as did Spaniards, Italians, Germans, to model their lives on the knightly ideals of Arthur's court: that purity being the centermost one, which might enable them to have vision of the Holy Grail.
Now, what was that Holy Grail?
There's no time to prove it to you now, but it can be amply proved. It was originally the symbol of Druidism just as the cross is the symbol of Christianity. In the old Welsh stories it is called Pair Ceridwen, and Pair Dadeni: the Caldron of Ceridwen, the Caldron of Rebirth.
Dadeni, Rebirth, Reincarnation: you can't make it mean anything else; the ideas, the symbolism that lie behind it are vast.
First of all, it was the symbol of Initiation. There is a cave in Snowdon, and a rock on Cadair Idris, of which the popular legend is that one who spends a night in the one, or on the other, will wake in the morning either dead, or mad, or an initiated bard, inspired — with wisdom and illumination beyond what normal human beings possess. This shows how that great central idea of all the ancient religions, Druidism included, impressed itself in Druid days on the race mind. Otherwise it could not have lived on in folklore through the Christian centuries.
The candidate for initiation, whether in Greece, Egypt, India, or Wales or any other country, prepared himself for it by a long course of training and discipline, the object of which was to bring all the lower elements of his being into subjection. Then, when he was ready, the initiation took place. In some kind of crypt — in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, for example; probably in the cave on Snowdon also: he, or his body, was placed in a vessel or receptacle or sarcophagus, or tied to a wooden cross; and he himself, the human soul, voyaged out into the inner spaces of the universe and learnt the secrets of these inner spaces at first hand. Returning, he was illuminated, an initiate; in Welsh, Bardd, a bard; which word does not originally mean a poet, but an illuminated seer, a teacher, an initiate.
In Druidism, that receptacle, or vessel, or sarcophagus, was called a caldron — the Pair Dadeni, or Caldron of Rebirth, or the Caldron of Ceridwen, the Goddess of Universal Nature. It took the place in Druidism that the cross does in Christianity; it was the symbol of Religion. Religion existed to bring men to the point of initiation, to the Caldron of Ceridwen as it were; the initiation, which made of the neophyte a Bard, was regarded as a rebirth, a second birth — dadeni.
Of the seventy-seven poems of Taliesin one stands out as, I think, the greatest; it is my favorite, because of its more than Miltonic loftiness of tone. It is called Preiddiau Annwn, the spoils of Annwn; which, as you will remember, is the deep, the underworld, even by an extension of meaning, this material universe. It tells how the Caldron was held in Annwn in Caer Pedryfan, the four-square Castle, in Ynys Pybyddor, the Strong-doored Isle; and how Arthur voyaged in Prydwen, his ship of Glass, into the Underworld to recover it; and Taliesin with him.
One could spend an evening, or many evenings, lecturing on Arthur alone, with all his implications and meanings. No doubt there was a Welsh prince who died in the year 540, after winning some striking victories over the Saxons; whose invasion of Britain certainly was held up for some twenty or thirty years before 540; that invasion actually made no progress during those years. But unquestionably that chieftain came to be identified with one of the old Gods of Druidism; we know of a Gaulish god named Artaios; the Egyptian god we know as Osiris, was called in Egyptian Ausar; he may be the same god. Scholars have identified Arthur with Hu Gadarn, Hu the Mighty, the chief God of Druidism; who figures a good deal in the Welsh triads; and who was actually worshiped in Wales as late as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In 1538, in the reign of Henry VIII, a statue of this god, known as Darfell Gadarn, which attracted great crowds of worshipers, was, with its priest, brought up from Wales to London and burnt at Smithfield: the priest, the last Druid martyr; and in the fifteenth-century Welsh poetry there are many references to Hu Gadarn, hymns to his praise; also a poem by a Christian priest-poet, Sion Cent, which says that there were then two religious influences in the world: one from Jesus Christ, and the other from Hu Gadarn among the bards of Wales. Thus we see that even then, in the time of Owan Glyndwr and Joan of Arc and the Wars of the Roses and the first Tudor kings of England, Druidism was still alive in Wales.
But to go back to the poem, the Spoils of Annwn. The Arthur it tells of is the first Arthur; the earliest stage we have in his metamorphosis from the Leader of the Gods to the chivalrous king who appears in Malory and Tennyson. He voyages through the deep, he descends into the underworld, the manifested universe, in quest of the caldron of initiation. I do not know any poem, in any language, that conveys to me so much of that sense of hidden and mysterious grandeur as this one does. What does it mean? It figures the involution of spirit into matter; the descent of the gods into the underworld, this world, this life we live, in quest of — what? Wisdom, experience, initiation. For the Caldron, the sacred symbol of Druidism, means not only that receptacle or sarcophagus that held the body of the neophyte while he himself explored the inner universe; it means that, and something more. It means life, the world. It was the Caldron of Reincarnation; the world into which we incarnate again and again; each life in its degree an initiation, a gaining of wisdom by experience. Sublime thought, this of the evolution of the god-spark in each one of us into at last the fully self-conscious God, through endless life, successions of experiences of life, of entries into the Caldron of Reincarnation, until that entry into it which shall bring us initiation, and from men we shall become bards and gods.
H. P. Blavatsky says, in an article published after her death, that in the century before Christ, Druidism was the only branch of the Mysteries of the Old World which had not degenerated; and that Caesar was inspired to attack and conquer Gaul by the black forces, the enemies of mankind, in order to stamp out that last pure light, to break its power. But even though he did so; even though he forced it underground as it were, so that from the ruling religion of Britain, Gaul and Ireland, it became a secret cult, we see that he could not quench its power and influence. Here in Wales it lived on; and, as Wales inch by inch was conquered by the Normans, its influence, spiritual and uplifting still, though strangely metamorphosed, spread out into the darkness of Christian Europe, a light to lighten the Gentiles with the noble ideals of chivalry, the vision of the Holy Grail. This illustrates the workings of the spirit, of the Masters of Wisdom, the spiritual Leaders and Guides of Mankind. There is nothing about it you can prove. You can't prove that Iolo Morganwg, the eighteenth century Glamorgan stonemason, didn't forge every document in the book Barddas; you can't prove anything spiritual for that matter. No; proof you may not have; but you may have suggestion; a hint; which, taken, used and followed up, will lead you on to heights of ennobling thought and knowledge. You may take these things and ideas that the materialist and the academic reject as unproved, and let them work upon your inner nature until they have made a god of you.
I told you the subject was a vast one; and far beyond my satisfactorily setting forth in an evening's lecture. But what I hope you may have gotten out of it is this: New evidence of the universality of the grand Theosophical teachings; evidence, too, that will show you that in bringing Theosophy to Wales, we are bringing nothing strange, exotic or foreign; but simply the lost secret of the ancient greatness of the Celtic peoples.