Æ (George William Russell)

George William Russell (10 April 1867 – 17 July 1935), who wrote as Æ (also AE or A.E.), was an Irish poet, painter, visionary, Theosophist, agricultural organiser and editor. His unusual importance lies in the way he joined activities that are usually kept apart. In The Candle of Vision (1918) and Song and Its Fountains (1932) he described his own visionary experience and asked how it could be disciplined, tested, interpreted and turned into art. In his poetry, his play and his two novels he recast the gods of pre-Christian Ireland within a comparative metaphysics drawn from modern Theosophy, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, Plotinus, the Hermetic writings and a Gnostic strand. In his public work he argued that spiritual ideals require social form, and spent thirty years giving them one through rural cooperation and the political press. For Æ, imagination was not an escape from reality but an organ of knowledge: the power by which latent meanings become visible, and by which individuals and communities recognise a larger life within themselves. That conviction connects the seer, the poet and the organiser, and it is the thread this entry follows.

Life#

Lurgan and Dublin (1867–1890)#

Russell was born in William Street, Lurgan, County Armagh, the youngest of three children of Thomas Elias Russell, a bookkeeper, and Marianne Armstrong. His family belonged to the Protestant culture of mid-Ulster, whose evangelical intensity left a lasting mark on his prose. They moved to Dublin in 1878. He attended a model school in Lurgan, Dr Power’s school in Harrington Street, Rathmines School, and evening classes at the Metropolitan School of Art, where he met W. B. Yeats in 1884.¹²

Russell later dated the beginning of his visions to about 1883–84, when he was sixteen or seventeen. Walking the country roads outside Dublin he experienced what he called “intense and passionate imaginations of another world,” which arrived “like strangers who suddenly enter a house, who brush aside the doorkeeper, and who will not be denied.” He never ceased to regard these experiences as encounters with a reality not reducible to ordinary perception, but he also spent much of his mature work asking how genuine vision could be distinguished from fantasy, memory and desire.³

Through Yeats and Charles Johnston he encountered the Dublin Hermetic Society, founded in June 1885, and the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society, chartered in April 1886. Theosophy was a modern esoteric movement that sought a wisdom underlying the world’s religions and taught karma, reincarnation, subtle levels of existence and spiritual evolution. Russell did not formally enter the Society until 9 September 1890. That year he also became a clerk at Pim’s drapery in South Great George’s Street. In 1891 he moved into the “Household” at 3 Upper Ely Place, a communal residence of Dublin Theosophists, where he painted murals of visionary figures.⁴⁵

The Household and the Irish Theosophist (1890–1898)#

The Ely Place years formed Russell’s early literary and spiritual practice. Between October 1892 and 1897 D. N. Dunlop’s Irish Theosophist published about ninety-five pieces by him: poems later gathered in his first books, parables influenced by the Bhagavad Gita, essays on concentration and states of consciousness, and extended reinterpretations of Irish myth. In 1895 the American Theosophist James M. Pryse brought the H.P.B. Press to Dublin and instructed Russell in practices of directed inner imagery, which Russell described as making pictures appear in the “astral light.”⁶⁷

During the Theosophical schism of 1895 Russell supported William Quan Judge, for whom he retained deep reverence. The later institutional history was more complicated than a single break. Russell founded his own Hermetic Society in 1898; in 1904 a Dublin lodge attached to the Adyar Society re-formed under his presidency; after about four years it drifted from the parent body and became once more an independent Hermetic Society, which he led until he left Dublin in 1933, when he handed it to Captain P. G. Bowen, under whom it was dissolved in 1939. Its weekly meetings emphasised meditation and comparative reading — the Gita, the Upanishads, The Secret Doctrine — rather than ceremonial ritual. Although Russell increasingly avoided the label “Theosophy” in books written for a general audience, he did not abandon the central ideas he had learned in this period.⁸⁹

The pen-name also emerged from these years. Russell later recalled inwardly hearing the phrase “the Birth of Aeon” while painting. He first found aeon in a dictionary of religions in the Leinster House library, and, on asking the librarian who the Gnostics were, was referred to a volume of Augustus Neander’s Church History, “and there, in the section dealing with the Sabaeans, I found the myth of the proud Aeon who mirrored himself in chaos and became the lord of our world.” A letter dated 6 November 1888 and printed in Lucifer the following month already bears the signature “A.E.”; he used it regularly from 1893. The familiar story that a compositor shortened an illegible “Æon” may explain how the two letters became fixed, but the documentary record does not settle every detail.¹⁰¹¹

The Organiser and Editor (1897–1930)#

In 1897 Horace Plunkett recruited Russell to the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS). Russell began by organising cooperative credit societies in County Mayo and became assistant secretary in June 1898. He married the Theosophist Violet North on 9 June 1898. Four children were born to them; two died in infancy, while Brian (born 1900) and Diarmuid (born 1902) survived.¹²¹³

From 1905 Russell edited the IAOS weekly The Irish Homestead, where James Joyce’s “The Sisters” had appeared the previous year. For eighteen years his “Notes of the Week” connected practical matters — credit, creameries, land, education and local organisation — to a larger idea of rural civilisation. In September 1923 the paper was merged into The Irish Statesman, which Russell edited until 12 April 1930. The journal was weakened by the costs of a libel trial in which the jury failed to agree and by the loss of American backing after the financial crash; it did not “lose” the case, as later accounts sometimes state.¹⁴¹⁵

His literary work continued alongside his public career. Deirdre was staged from 2 to 4 April 1902 on the same bill as Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan. Russell served as a vice-president of the Irish National Theatre Society until 1904 and helped draft its constitution, though he wrote no second play for production. His Sunday evenings in Rathgar became an open gathering-place for writers, artists and reformers. The anthology New Songs (1904) and his encouragement of James Stephens in 1907 established his reputation as a generous mentor.¹⁶¹⁷

Russell also painted throughout his life. His first public exhibition, Pictures of Two Countries, was a joint show with Constance Gore-Booth and Casimir Markievicz at the Leinster Lecture Hall in Dublin from 23 August to 3 September 1904, to which he contributed sixty-three of the 220 paintings he had by then made, and at which he sold thirty-seven. His paintings were later included in the 1913 Armory Show in New York. Landscapes and visionary figures in his art perform the same task as his prose: they present nature as the visible surface of a more extensive life.¹⁸

The Public Man (1913–1923)#

Three interventions made Russell a national figure. During the Dublin Lockout the Irish Times printed his open letter “To the Masters of Dublin” on 7 October 1913; on 1 November he appeared with James Connolly at the Royal Albert Hall. After the Easter Rising, which he had neither predicted nor supported as a military act, he tried to recognise the moral seriousness of competing Irish loyalties: Salutation (January 1917) commemorated the leaders of the Rising alongside Irish soldiers killed in France.¹⁹

Russell took part in the Irish Convention from July 1917 until resigning in February 1918, having stated his proposals in Thoughts for a Convention. He later supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty. In The Interpreters (1922), written during revolutionary violence and civil conflict, he turned political disagreement into a philosophical dialogue about the spiritual sources, and distortions, of nationalism, socialism and empire.²⁰

Last Years (1930–1935)#

Violet Russell died on 3 February 1932. In July 1933 Russell sold the family house, resigned from the Irish Academy of Letters and moved to London. He had already toured the United States in 1928 and 1930–31; Yale awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters in June 1928 and Trinity College Dublin the same degree in June 1929. His friendship with the American agricultural reformer Henry A. Wallace, who first visited him in Dublin in 1912 and later became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture, gave Russell an unusual audience for his ideas about cooperation.²¹²²

In December 1934 Russell sailed to the United States to lecture and discuss rural cooperation. The trip had been encouraged by Mary Harriman Rumsey, who died before he arrived. He met agricultural officials, including M. L. Wilson, and President Roosevelt on 5 January 1935. Ill health forced him back to England in March. Cancer was diagnosed in early July, and he died in a Bournemouth nursing home on 17 July 1935. His body was returned to Dublin and buried at Mount Jerome on 20 July; the mourners included Éamon de Valera, W. T. Cosgrave, Yeats and Frank O’Connor, who delivered the oration.²³

Thought#

The System in Outline#

Russell never wrote a treatise, and he resisted being asked for one — a late poem is titled “To One Who Wanted a Philosophy from Me.” But a consistent system underlies everything he wrote, and it can be stated plainly before the parts are examined.

Reality has four levels, which he took from the Indian scriptures and found again in Irish myth: the Earth-world of bodies; a Mid-world of desire and imagery, where dream and most vision take place; a Heaven-world of the gods and of religious forms; and beyond them the God-world, an undivided source that he called, in Irish terms, Lir. The human being has a corresponding depth. The waking personality is the surface of a psyche that existed before birth, has lived many lives, and is itself the vehicle of a spirit that never left its source. Between the personality and the spirit lies what he called the ancestral self or oversoul, and the whole task of life is to remember it: to “imagine ourselves into greatness,” as he put it, since “what a man thinks, that he is.”

The means are three. Concentration and meditation train the will and quiet the body until “the dark caverns of the brain begin to grow luminous.” Vision — the perception of images that already exist, whether in other minds, in the memory of the Earth, or in the higher worlds — then becomes possible, and must be tested, since “it is in the interpretation of them that error arises.” Imagination, the rarer and higher faculty, does not perceive but creates: it brings what is latent into form, and in doing so reveals “the self to the self.” Poetry, painting and the great myths are its products; so, at the level of a people, are nations, which Russell regarded as the incarnation of a collective soul. The ethical rule that governs all three is that we become what we contemplate: “We grow nobly like what we adore through love and ignobly like what we contemplate through hate.”

The goal is not escape. The Earth is a living being, the “Mighty Mother,” and the gods who descended into it did so out of pity for what suffered there. Russell’s Christ is “the Magician of the Beautiful,” the power in each of us that sees and makes beauty; his Prometheus is the same figure under another name. The Golden Age “is all about us, and it was we who had been blind to it.” Everything below is a working-out of this.

Vision, Imagination, and Spiritual Knowledge#

The Candle of Vision is at once spiritual autobiography, meditation manual and speculative inquiry. Russell wrote it “to discriminate between that which was self-begotten fantasy and that which came from a higher sphere,” and “to relate his own vision to the vision of the seers and writers of the sacred books.” The book is valuable not because it proves the independent reality of his visions but because it records how a disciplined visionary understood, classified and questioned them.²⁴

His basic practice was concentration: fixing the mind steadily on a form or idea until distraction weakened. “Five minutes of this effort will at first leave us trembling as at the close of a laborious day.” He regarded will as “neither good nor bad but … power only,” and he warned that the character of aspiration shapes the character of what enters consciousness: “as our aspiration so is our inspiration.” Meditation, in his account, changed the seer before it changed the world seen. Nature, in the image that gives its chapter its title, is “Slave of the Lamp”: “We have within us the Lamp of the World; and Nature, the genie, is Slave of the Lamp, and must fashion life about us as we fashion it within ourselves.” The claim means that outer life is interpreted and, within limits, reshaped through the quality of consciousness brought to it, and that “there is no destiny in it other than that we make for ourselves.”²⁵²⁶

Russell carefully separated several levels of experience. The “Many-Coloured Land,” or Ildathach, appeared to him as a self-luminous landscape — “valleys and hills, lustrous as a jewel, where all was self-shining” — inhabited by beautiful beings who “more beautiful than we … yet seemed less than human.” He called such perceptions psychic rather than spiritual and denied that beauty alone guaranteed authority; more important were the “transcendental moments” of unity in which the ordinary boundary of the self weakened. This distinction between vivid imagery and spiritual value prevents his mysticism from becoming a catalogue of marvels.²⁷

He also distinguished vision from imagination. Vision, as he used the word, was the perception of something already existent; imagination was “a higher thing than vision, and a much rarer thing,” the creative power by which “what exists in latency or essence is out-realised and is given a form,” so that “in imagination there is a revelation of the self to the self.” Because interpretation could go wrong, he treated images as evidence to be tested rather than as infallible messages. Against the reduction of visions to “a mosaic of memories” he argued that the mind is “rather the froth of a gigantic ocean of life”; he reported cases of transferred imagery and apparent perception at a distance — a colleague’s father’s shop seen across the city, the Sphinx seen while brooding on a friend who was, unknown to him, in Egypt — from which he inferred that minds participate in a shared medium: “we and all things swim in an æther of deity.” These are his reports and conclusions, not independently verified demonstrations.²⁸²⁹

His “memory of Earth” extends the same idea to place. “Memory is an attribute of all living creatures and of Earth also, the greatest living creature we know.” Scenes from the past persist in a subtle medium and can be perceived by a sensitive mind; “no ancient lore has perished,” and “Helen is there in her Troy, and Deirdre wears the beauty which blasted the Red Branch.” The comparison with the Theosophical “akashic record” is useful, but that is not his term. What matters for his art is the conviction that landscape stores more than private memory.³⁰

The Self, Rebirth, and Spiritual Awakening#

Russell’s spiritual anthropology is layered. The waking personality is only the surface of a psyche that existed before birth, moves through different states of consciousness, and participates in a deeper Self. Dream shows “One who is vigilant through the sleep of the body” and a maker of dreams who is “higher in the tower of our being,” “more truly myself than that which began in my mother’s womb”; intuition discloses relations that discursive thought misses; and rebirth explains both the complexity of character and the sense of an unfinished spiritual history. He therefore describes human life less as the creation of a new soul than as the partial awakening of an older one. “Education is the black art” by which “one will think he is a worm in the sight of Heaven, he who is but a god in exile.”³¹³²

After prolonged concentration he experienced a power rising along the spine “like lightning,” so that “my body rocked with the power of it,” followed by “a steady light in the brain, ‘the candle upon the forehead.’” Later readers compare this with kundalini, but Russell does not use that word. His emphasis is ethical: “woe to him who awakens it before he has purified his being into selflessness, for it will turn downward and vitalise his darker passions,” and “the turning earthward of that heaven-born power is the sin against the Holy Breath.” He places the experience within the fourfold map of Earth-world, Mid-world, Heaven-world and God-world, and concludes that “the gods are still living. They are our brothers.”³³³⁴

In a broad sense gnosis is a useful name for what Russell sought: direct, transformative knowledge of spiritual reality rather than assent to a doctrine. The term should not by itself make him a member of any historical Gnostic school. His path is one of recollection and integration: to remember a deeper identity while still acting responsibly in embodied and social life.

The Celtic Cosmogony#

Russell’s “Celtic cosmogony” first appeared in “The Legends of Ancient Eire” (1895) and reached its mature form in The Candle of Vision. It is not a reconstruction of a single pre-Christian Irish theology. It is a modern comparative metaphysics in which Russell assigns Irish divine names functions analogous to those found in Indian, Platonic, Theosophical and other esoteric systems. He claimed that vision had disclosed the pattern before study confirmed it, but he also allowed readers to regard the result as “romantic invention.”³⁵

At the summit is Lir: “In the beginning was the boundless Lir, an infinite depth, an invisible divinity, neither dark nor light, in whom were all things past and to be. … Of Lir but little may be affirmed, and nothing can be revealed. It is beyond the gods.” Lir is the Absolute, “the great deep of deity.” From Lir proceeds Manannán, “the most spiritual divinity known to the ancient Gael,” “the root of existence from which springs the Sacred Hazel whose branches are the gods,” “the divine imagination,” which “throws itself into seven forms or divinities.” Unmanifest, he is “the unuttered Word,” and Russell compares him with the Logos of St John and with a Chaldaean Oracle preserved by Proclus; his mantle, the féth fiada [concealing mist], is the aether. Manannán is thus “the root of all conscious life, from the imperial being of the gods down to the consciousness in the ant or amœba.”³⁶³⁷

Russell then identifies Dana with Sinann of the Shannon legend and interprets her as “the primal form of matter, the Spirit of Nature,” “the first spiritual form of matter, and therefore Beauty,” and “that divine compassion which exists beyond and is the final arbiter of the justice of the gods. Her heart will be in ours when ours forgive.” Medieval sources do not themselves make Dana and Sinann identical; this is his synthesis. Angus Óg becomes cosmic desire: “an eternal joy becoming love, a love changing into desire, and leading on to earthly passion,” “the fountain in which every energy has its birth.” Russell compares him with Eros and with Kāma in the Vedic hymn of creation.³⁸³⁹

From these powers unfold the worlds: Tír na nÓg [Land of Immortal Youth], “the World of Immortal Youth”; the Mid-world “where everything changes with desire”; and the Earth-world “where matter has assumed that solid form.” Beyond them lies the God-world as the deepest unity. Russell finds parallels in the Upanishads and claims that Irish tradition preserved equivalent intuitions: “that spiritual Overworld our Gaelic ancestors beheld was in essentials the same as the Overworld revealed in the sacred books.” The claim is comparative and theological, not a conclusion accepted by historians of early Irish religion.⁴⁰⁴¹

The Sídhe [people of the fairy mounds] were not metaphors for Russell. “I saw … a divine folk who I think never were human but were those spoken of as the Sidhe.” At a pool in woodland he saw “one there who seemed like an elemental king … of a brilliant blue and gold opalescence”; in another vision seven silvery figures rose from water carrying “a gigantic sword of quivering flame,” a spear, a cauldron and “a great and glittering stone” — “why these beautiful beings should bring forth the four precious symbols of the Tuatha de Danaan [people of the goddess Dana] I do not know.” At Newgrange, the Brugh on the Boyne, a being resembling Angus said: “Can you not see me? Can you not hear me? I come from the Land of Immortal Youth.” Russell offers these accounts as testimony while still asking whether they are “poetry or fantasy.”⁴²⁴³

In the 1890s this cosmology acquired a prophetic and nationalist edge. Russell wrote to Yeats that “the gods have returned to Erin and have centred themselves in the sacred mountains and blow the fires through the country,” and that “a new Avatar is about to appear … one of the kingly Avatars, who is at once ruler of men and magic sage.” A related vision recorded in The Candle of Vision showed “a woman with a blue cloak” lifting a child on whom rays converged “from all Ireland,” a throne on which “a figure of empire … grew weary and let fall the sceptre,” and “the whole of Ireland lit up from mountain to sea.” He admitted he had “no definite proof as yet that any vision I saw was prophetic,” yet the expectation survived and became the premise of The Avatars.⁴⁴⁴⁵

The Language of the Gods#

Russell’s most systematic theory of correspondence concerns language. He proposed that basic speech sounds have inherent relations to ideas, forces, colours and forms. An early version appeared in The Theosophist in 1887; he rewrote it as “The Element Language” for the Irish Theosophist in 1894 and returned to it in the chapters “The Language of the Gods” and “Ancient Intuitions” in 1918. Blavatsky’s idea of a primordial “sound language” supplied the framework, but Russell candidly said that “the correspondences necessarily had to be evolved out of my inner consciousness.”⁴⁶⁴⁷

The system assigns a metaphysical value to each sound. A is “the sound symbol for the self in man and Deity in the cosmos. Its form equivalent is the circle.” R represents motion, red, the line; H heat, orange, the triangle; L “fire, light or radiation,” lines radiating from a point; Y binding, concentration or will, an inward spiral; W water, “semilunar,” green; G and K earth and mineral hardness, the square and the crossed square. Other consonants stand for processes — S insouling, Z begetting, TH growth, SH dissolution, T outgoing action and D inward absorption, V and F the life of water and of air, P paternity and B maternity, N “continuance of being, immortality if you will,” M “finality … the close, limit, measure, end or death.” “The vowels are the sound symbols of consciousness in seven moods or states, while the consonants represent states of matter and modes of energy.” For J and CH, “my intuition failed utterly.”⁴⁸

He then searched philology, scripture, mantra and ancient alphabets for confirming parallels: Krishna’s “I am the A among letters,” a tantric association of R with red triangular fire, and roots that seemed to connect sound with meaning. He submitted the whole “for consideration by others whose study of the literature, learning and language of the ancients may give them special authority,” and called it “the only considered effort made by any one to ascertain the value of intuition as a faculty by using it in reference to matters where the intellect was useless but where the results attained by intuition could be judged by the reason.” The theory did not become a contribution to historical linguistics and should not be treated as one. Its importance is esoteric and poetic: it is Russell’s most sustained piece of correspondence-thinking, and it expresses his conviction that speech can reveal a kinship among consciousness, energy and form.⁴⁹

Politics as Mysticism#

What makes Russell distinctive among modern Theosophists is his sustained attempt to connect spiritual anthropology with economic and political institutions. The National Being (1916) begins: “The State is a physical body prepared for the incarnation of the soul of a race.” A nation becomes more than an aggregate when individuals participate in “some God-begotten mood”: “in the highest civilizations the individual citizen is raised above himself and made part of a greater life, which we may call the National Being. He enters into it, and it becomes an oversoul to him.”⁵⁰

For Russell, cooperation was the practical mechanism of that incarnation. The organised parish could give farmers economic agency, education and a civic life; federations of such communities could become “the real Parliament of the nation.” His indignation at slums and rural exploitation was both material and spiritual: poverty prevented “Children of the King” from developing their powers, and “the spiritual wrong done him by the social order is greater than the material ill.” The ideal is generous, but it carries a paternalist risk. Adrian Frazier has argued that Russell’s “cooperation” could become a code for guidance by an intellectual elite, a criticism the text does not entirely escape.⁵¹⁵²

The Interpreters (1922) turns this theory into a dialogue set in the future. Russell explained that he was “not interested in the creation of characters but in tracking political moods back to spiritual origins,” since “the political images in imagination were but the psychic body of spiritual ideas.” Brehon, the historian closest to the author’s position, argues that “every great civilization … had a deity behind it, or a divine shepherd who guided it,” that such powers “incarnate in the race: more in the group than in the individual,” and that humanity is “one Heavenly Man manifesting in legions of forms.” The dedication to Stephen MacKenna acknowledges his translation of Plotinus, and the Plotinian movement from scattered forms toward unity shapes the book. Yet the ending remains deliberately unresolved: inward liberation and imperial power leave the prison by different doors.⁵³⁵⁴

Song and Its Fountains#

Song and Its Fountains (1932) returns from nation and myth to the making of poetry. Russell begins with pre-existence: the psyche seeking embodiment “was no angelic thing, pure and new from a foundry of souls,” but “a being stained with the dust and conflict of a long travel through time.” He describes a double tendency within it — one part avid for life, the other cold and seeking the Spirit — and imagines the personal self as connected by many “spokes” to “some celestial zodiac.”⁵⁵

Poetry is traffic between those levels. “How is poetry born in us? … Some character in aspiration determines the character of inspiration.” A poem “seemed like an oracle delivered to the waking self from some dweller or genie in the innermost,” while in dream “there is a dramatic sundering of the psyche. One part of us is seer and another is creator.” Russell revisits the origin of his own poems — “Babylon,” “Resurrection,” “Michael,” “Germinal” — not to reduce them to biography but to show how memory, dream and vision are transformed. He objects to accounts of poetic influence that confuse the contents of the artist’s palette with the creative act: “the logic of that analysis would almost lead to the assumption that when the palette is spread with colour it accounts for the masterpiece.”⁵⁶⁵⁷

The book relates waking, dreaming and deeper consciousness to the four states discussed in the Upanishads, and its central image is the Mount of Transfiguration: “I think all true poetry was conceived on the Mount of Transfiguration and there is revelation in it and the mingling of heaven and earth. The Mount is a symbol for that peak of soul when, gone inward into itself, it draws nigh to its own divine root, and memory and imagination are shot through and through with the radiance of another nature.” The poet is therefore prophet — “almost the only oracles which have been delivered to humanity for centuries have come through the poets.” The book ends with the same warning as The Candle of Vision: unpurified desire can colour what the seer receives. Its poetics is also an ethics of attention.⁵⁸

Sources, Synthesis, and Gnosticism#

Russell’s sources are diverse but recognisable. Blavatsky supplied the broad Theosophical frame: an Absolute beyond attributes, emanation, karma and rebirth, planes of being, correspondences, and a perennial wisdom underlying the religions. The Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads gave him the language of the Self and of multiple states of consciousness; he first met the Upanishads, he says, when “a book taken down idly from a shelf opened at a sentence quoted from a Upanishad, scriptures then to me unknown.” Emerson contributed the “oversoul” and the view of poetry as “first written in the heavens”; Plotinus, in MacKenna’s translation, sharpened the metaphysics of The Interpreters, though Russell confessed he “could never be like Plotinus and place the good above the beautiful.”⁵⁹⁶⁰

He also drew on a Chaldaean Oracle (the epigraph of Song and Its Fountains), the Hermetic Poimandres (“for there is nothing which is not the image of God”), Christian scripture, the Kabbalistic Ain-Soph [the Infinite] and comparative accounts of ancient religion. He did not join the Golden Dawn or any ceremonial order. His cooperation with Yeats’s projected Celtic Mysteries in the later 1890s consisted mainly in sharing visions, while his own regular practice centred on concentration, imagination, ethical purification and group reading. “Hermetic” therefore describes the comparative programme of his society; it does not establish a practice of alchemy, astrology or ceremonial magic.⁶¹⁶²

Gnostic influence requires careful wording. Russell’s encounter with the term aeon is documented, and patterns of emanation, descent, spiritual forgetfulness, obstructing intermediary beings, light and darkness, and return to a divine source invite comparison with late-antique Gnostic myths. Camden Roy has argued that this strand may have been at least as important as the Hindu materials usually stressed. That remains a developing interpretation, not a consensus, and the same patterns also occur in Platonism, Christianity, Indian tradition and Theosophy itself. Russell is best described as a modern Theosophical synthesist with a significant Gnostic strand, not simply as “a Gnostic.”⁶³

Spiritual Ethics#

Russell’s spirituality is neither a secret system nor a flight from the world. Its governing ethical movement is from separateness to participation. Concentration frees attention from compulsion; vision must be tested against purity of motive; imagination should disclose the divine in other lives; and compassion recognises hidden nobility even in damaged or hostile people — “we may set side by side the head of Christ and the head of an outcast, and there is an equal radiance around each.” Matter is not evil in itself. The danger is forgetfulness: spiritual powers become appetite, glamour or domination when they lose relation to their source. And since “we grow nobly like what we adore through love and ignobly like what we contemplate through hate,” hatred is not merely wrong but self-defeating — the doctrine that governs his response to war, to the Rising and to the Civil War alike.⁶⁴⁶⁵

Works#

The works are treated in order of publication. Each is given its publication data, an account of its contents — with plot summaries and endings where there is a plot — its characters or key poems, its major themes, its esoteric and metaphysical symbolism, its relation to Russell’s other books, and a main takeaway. Quotations are from the first editions unless noted; chapter and page references are given in the text.

Homeward: Songs by the Way (1894)#

At a glance. Dublin: Whaley (the imprint of Russell’s friend Charles Weekes), 1894; second edition 1895; Portland, Maine: Mosher, 1895 (with poems from the Irish Theosophist later gathered into The Earth Breath); third edition London: John Lane, 1901, and reprints. Fifty-one short lyrics, opening with a “Prelude” and closing with “The Secret.” No dedication; a four-sentence prefatory note that is the book’s whole argument: “I moved among men and places, and in living I learned the truth at last. I know I am a spirit, and that I went forth in old time from the Self-ancestral to labours yet unaccomplished; but filled ever and again with home-sickness I made these songs by the way.”⁶⁶

The poems. The “Prelude” warns against the seduction of daylight beauty and instructs the soul to listen inwardly — “Oh, be not led away, / Lured by the colour of the sun-rich day” — until its song “Echoes her multitudinous meditation.” “The Unknown God,” the book’s most anthologised miniature, ends in the turn from seeing to being that defines Russell’s lyric: “Our hearts were drunk with a beauty / Our eyes could never see.” “By the Margin of the Great Deep” dissolves the self into the Mother at dusk — “When the trees and skies and fields are one in dusky mood, / Every heart of man is rapt within the mother’s breast” — and drinks “From the olden fountain more than light or peace or dream.” “Krishna,” retitled “Oversoul” in 1913 with an epigraph from the Gita, refuses to locate God outside the perceiver: “Where rose the fire: in Thee? in Me?” “The Great Breath” takes its title from The Secret Doctrine’s name for the cosmic out-breathing and in-breathing of worlds, and turns the sunset into an elegy for Beauty who “Neared to the hour when Beauty breathes her last / And knows herself in death.” “Om” sets a child in an Indian vale chanting the syllable “which Brahma at his dawn / Outbreathes and endeth at his night.” “The Veils of Maya” addresses the Mother and closes with a compressed doctrine of reincarnation: “Self-found at last, the joy that springs / Being thyself, shall once again / Start thee upon the whirling rings / And through the pilgrimage of pain.” “Sung on a By-Way” gives the will, the soul and the heart each a stanza and ends “Love has found itself the whole”; “Three Counsellors” sets three voices against each other and lets the quietist win: “Only be thou thyself that goal / In which the wars of time shall cease.”

Major themes. Homesickness for the Self-ancestral: life is exile and the poems are “songs by the way” home. Twilight and dawn as thresholds: almost every landscape is dusk or dawn, the hours when day-consciousness thins and the soul touches what it came from. The living Earth-Mother, who “takes her child again.” Beauty as bait and as revelation: sensory beauty both veils (“The Symbol Seduces,” “The Veils of Maya”) and discloses (“Sacrifice,” where wind, star and cloud “Offer in sacrifice” before an altar). Pity and brotherhood as the emotions proper to a descended soul.

Esoteric symbolism. The Theosophical vocabulary is undisguised — Great Breath, Maya, Om, Brahma, Krishna, “the whirling rings” of rebirth, “the Wise,” “Self-ancestral.” Celtic material is almost absent; this is the Indo-Theosophical Russell of the Irish Theosophist. The governing pattern is the Neoplatonic and Gnostic one of descent into “clay” and return “into the vast of God.”

Relation to other works. The first statement of the whole idiom. Yeats, who printed several of these poems in A Book of Irish Verse (1895) and called their author “the chief poet of the school of Irish mystics,” later judged that “after writing Homeward Songs by the Way, where all is skilful and much exquisite, he would never again write a perfect book.”⁶⁷

Takeaway. A slim and remarkably unified book in which small, exact lyrics of twilight dissolution establish the doctrine everything else will elaborate: that the soul remembers a home it has not seen with the eyes.

The Earth Breath and Other Poems (1897)#

At a glance. New York and London: John Lane, 1897; second edition 1906. Fifty-five items including a verse “Prelude” to a beloved and an “Epilogue”; fifteen poems had already appeared in the American Homeward. No dedication, though the “Prelude” — “I thought, beloved, to have brought to you / A gift of quietness and ease and peace” — serves as one.⁶⁸

The poems. The title poem transfers the Great Breath from cosmos to soil: “From the cool and dark-lipped furrows / breathes a dim delight,” and the labourer bowed to the sod “Deep beneath his rustic habit / finds himself a king.” “Immortality,” eight lines, is the hardest statement Russell ever made: “We must pass like smoke or live within the spirit’s fire.” “The Memory of Earth” records a dusk walk on which the landscape gives up its stored past — “While I gazed a madness grew / Into thundered battle cries” — and anticipates the chapter of that name in The Candle of Vision by twenty years. “The Man to the Angel” is the book’s most daring poem, a Promethean defence of the fallen against the unfallen: “They are but the slaves of light / Who have never known the gloom”; “Dark and lost amid the strife / I am myriad years of pain / Nearer to the fount of life.” In Song and Its Fountains Russell traces it to a boyhood fantasy in which a Child of Darkness whispered “We of the Darkness are more ancient than you of the Light” — “the root of my many revolts against accepted faiths.” “Glory and Shadow” is a dialogue between the higher and lower selves as separated lovers; “Brotherhood” makes twilight the hour in which “the Ancient knows itself, the Soul,” and ends “Fades every hate away before the Mother’s breast / Where all the exiles of the heart return to rest.” “The Fountain of Shadowy Beauty,” a dream-voyage of some 150 lines, and “The Robing of the King,” in which the ascetic’s body dissolves and the spirit is crowned, are the first of his long vision-narratives. The “Epilogue” is a self-elegy he kept as the last word of every later collection: “To the stars from which he came / Empty handed he goes home; / He who might have wrought in flame / Only traced upon the foam.”

Major themes. Earth as living, breathing mother. The heroism of the fallen: descent freely willed and therefore ennobling. Memory of past lives and ages. The city and the dark age: the first appearance of his social conscience (“The Dark Age”: “The streets are spread with dross and slime”). Vision-narrative: the long dream-voyage to the Father-Self.

Esoteric symbolism. The “earth breath” is the Theosophical cosmic rhythm brought down to the furrow; the “Father-Self” and “Bright Bird” are the ancestral self and the liberated spirit; the Gnostic inversion of “The Man to the Angel” — the fallen one nearer to life than the unfallen — will govern The Hero in Man and The House of the Titans. Celtic references remain rare.

Relation to other works. Longer lines, longer poems, dialogue and the modern city enter; the register shifts from homesickness to defiance and consolation. Boyd called it “a companion volume” to Homeward.

Takeaway. The book in which Russell’s Earth-mysticism and his defence of the fallen soul are fully stated; it contains “Immortality,” “The Man to the Angel” and “Brotherhood,” three of the poems by which he is remembered.

“Priest or Hero?” (1897)#

At a glance. The Irish Theosophist, 15 April – 15 May 1897; issued as a pamphlet, Dublin, 1897; reprinted in The Descent of the Gods (1988). Prefaced with Whitman’s “I think I could turn and live with animals … No one kneels to another.” Not, despite frequent statements to the contrary, reprinted in Imaginations and Reveries. It should not be confused with Lady Gregory’s anthology Ideals in Ireland (1901), to which Russell also contributed.⁶⁹

Argument. The true problem confronting Ireland is spiritual freedom, since priests “dictate politics and public action with no less authority than they speak upon religion and morals.” The heroic Ireland of the bards knew “no craven dread of the hereafter”: in the bardic dialogues Ossian preferred hell with the Fianna to Patrick’s paradise, and “there spake the true spirit of man; spark of illimitable deity.” Christ’s teaching was “beautiful, pathetic and ennobling,” but institutional religion’s “noxious weed” is “the power to inflict a deadly wrong upon the soul, to coerce the will by terror.” Of hell: “It is a lie which the all-compassionate Father-Spirit never breathed into the ears of his children.” The essay’s central passage, which Russell was still quoting of himself in 1932, describes the soul’s duty “resolutely to put aside all external tradition and rule; adhering to its own judgment, though priests falsely say the hosts of the everlasting are arrayed in battle against it … still to persist, still to defy, still to obey the orders of another captain, that Unknown Deity within whose trumpet-call sounds louder than all the cries of men.” Thesis: “The choice here lies between Priest and Hero as ideal, and I say that whatever is not heroic is not Irish.” It ends with a prophecy of “young men, fiery-hearted … calling your flocks from your dark chapels … to the altars of the hills,” and with Ireland emerging as “priestess of the mysteries.”

Themes and takeaway. The Promethean strain of The Earth Breath turned on the Church; the Gael who “seeks the gods on the mountains” against the Gael who kneels. Toshio Akai calls it Russell’s manifesto, and it is the seed of every later attack on fear-based religion, including the closing chapters of The National Being and the Irish Statesman pieces collected in The Living Torch.

Literary Ideals in Ireland (1899)#

At a glance. London: Fisher Unwin, 1899; with Yeats, John Eglinton and William Larminie. The record of the Daily Express controversy of 1898–99 over what a national literature should be.

Argument. Russell’s essay, reprinted in Imaginations and Reveries as “Nationality or Cosmopolitanism,” answers Yeats’s “autumn of the body” mood and the decadents — art in decadence is “a crimson figure undergoing a dark crucifixion” — by arguing that Ireland is “not yet sick with this sickness” and that nationality is now “a spiritual force.” Only Egypt and Greece had truly national literatures; if Irish nationality is to justify itself against the cosmopolitan art of Tolstoy and Ibsen it must be as a sacred ideal, “the Ireland in the mind … not the actual Ireland,” which he names Tír na nÓg, “the Land of the Living Heart.” The legends “have now the character of symbol, and, as symbol, are more potent than history … Deirdre is, like Helen, a symbol of eternal beauty; and Cuculain represents as much as Prometheus the heroic spirit, the redeemer in man.” Two paths lie before Irish writers: to obliterate nationality, or to build “a mountain-top of our own, which may be in the future the Mecca to which many worshippers will turn.”⁷⁰

Takeaway. “To reveal Ireland in clear and beautiful light, to create the Ireland in the heart, is the province of a national literature” — the doctrine that the nation is first imagined, which The National Being will make into a politics.

Deirdre (1902; book 1907)#

At a glance. A legend in three acts, written in 1901; staged 2–4 April 1902 at St Teresa’s Hall, Clarendon Street, by the Fays’ Irish National Dramatic Company, on the bill with Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan — the evening from which the Abbey Theatre descends. Dublin: Maunsel (Tower Press Booklets), 1907; reprinted in Imaginations and Reveries. Russell designed the setting and costumes. Dramatis personae: Concobar, Ardrie of Ulla; Naisi and his brothers Ainle and Ardan; Fergus and his sons Buinne and Ilann; Cathvah, a Druid; Deirdre; Lavarcam, a Druidess; a herdsman; a messenger.⁷¹

Plot. Act I, the dun where Deirdre has been reared in seclusion. She greets the spring — “the music of the Father’s harp is awakening the flowers” — and Lavarcam warns that “the harp has but three notes; and, after sleep and laughter, the last sound is of weeping.” Concobar arrives and explains the sacred frame: at Deirdre’s birth the Druids foretold that “through her would come the destruction of the Red Branch” and would have killed her, but he refused, “thinking … the chivalry of the Red Branch would be already gone if this child were slain. If we are to perish it shall be nobly.” He had her fostered by a Druidess so that her heart would turn to the Sídhe and away from warriors, and he speaks his vision of the order: “the gods who fought at Moytura are descending and dwelling in the heart of the Red Branch.” Deirdre, who fears “this stony king with his implacable eyes,” has dreamed of three hunters at dawn, “the three gods whom Lu condemned to wander in mortal form,” the tallest “like a flame against the flameless sky.” Lavarcam recognises the sons of Usna and turns from king to gods: “I am not thy servant, but theirs. Let the Red Branch fall!” Naisi enters — “Goddess, or enchantress, thy face shone on me at dawn on the mountain” — and Deirdre answers, “I will go with thee where thou goest.” Told she is the Deirdre of the prophecies, he replies that “it was a lying prophecy … If the Red Branch must fall, it will fall through treachery.” The lovers flee to Alba with Ainle and Ardan; Deirdre sees “bright birds … with dazzling wings,” and Lavarcam names them: “They are the birds of Angus. Their singing brings love — and death.” Concobar, returning, swears vengeance “by Balor, Tethra, and all the brood of demons.”

Act II, a dun by Loch Etive three years later, in a silver twilight — “the enchantment of Dana is upon the lakes.” Deirdre reads in Naisi’s heart “a king with scornful eyes thinking of thy flight.” Naisi remembers the fellowship of Emain Macha and the boy Cuculain, “a dark, sad child … a god in exile.” The birds of Angus reappear, “dabbled with crimson,” shaking “a ruddy dew” on Naisi’s face; he refuses the omen: “there are no birds … We are immortals and it does not become us to grieve.” Fergus arrives with his sons bearing Concobar’s forgiveness. Naisi, longing for the Red Branch, rebukes Deirdre’s fears — “What would the bards sing of Naisi — without trust!” — and Fergus, bound by geasa not to refuse a feast, is separated from them on the road. Alone, Deirdre speaks the act’s close: “The Father has struck the last chord on the Harp of Life … O Mother Dana … Soon shall I lie close to thee for comfort.”

Act III, the House of the Red Branch at Emain Macha. Concobar sits at his divining chessboard, troubled by omens and by “the sin of my boyhood” against one of the Sídhe; he plans “one kingdom in Eri between the seas.” Told that Deirdre’s beauty is undimmed, he resolves: “tonight shall see the broken law set straight, and vengeance on the traitors.” Lavarcam confesses that the return was “all my doing.” Naisi, refusing to bar the door because “the word, once passed, is inviolable,” sits to finish Concobar’s game “with fate,” and cries “everywhere my king is threatened!” When the messenger demands that Deirdre be given up, the brothers rout the household slaves — but outside, the Druid Cathvah chants: “Let the Faed Fia fall; Mananaun Mac Lir … Let thy waves flow over them, Mananaun: Lord of ocean!” Under the glamour Naisi believes their galley is sinking; Ainle and Ardan stagger out and are cut down; Naisi sees the swans of Lir and Ildathach “lit up with its shining mountains,” walks through the door and falls to a spear with the words “The Druid Cathvah! — The king! — O Deirdre!” Deirdre, unafraid now — “The earth has grown dim and old, fostermother. The gods have gone far away” — lays her head on his body and dies. Lavarcam’s curse on the entering king is the play’s thesis: “Do you think to bind men together when you have broken their hearts? … The gods have overthrown thy dominion, proud king, with the last sigh from this dead child; and out of the pity for her they will build up an eternal kingdom in the spirit of man.” As Fergus’s avenging cry sounds at the door, Concobar kneels: “I have two divided kingdoms, and one is in my own heart. Thus do I pay homage to thee, O Queen, who will rule, being dead.”

Characters. Deirdre is beauty and the soul descended among men, “one of the immortals,” a “priestess of tears” whose sovereignty is posthumous. Naisi is heroic honour that cannot conceive treachery, “the light of the Ultonians … not the star of knowledge.” Concobar is law and state-building corrupted by a secret sin and a hidden hunger; he breaks the sacred order he claims to defend. Lavarcam is Druidic wisdom that serves the gods rather than the king and whose loving deceit becomes fate’s instrument. Cathvah is the order’s magic turned against its own: the féth fiada of Manannán, which in The Candle of Vision is the aether itself, is used here to kill.

Major themes. Prophecy fulfilled by the attempt to evade it, as in Greek tragedy. The broken oath and the geasa: every catastrophe follows a violated bond. The sovereignty of beauty over will: Lavelle in The Interpreters will cite the Deirdre story as exactly this. Pity as the founder of kingdoms: Lavarcam’s last speech states Russell’s theory of the myth as Ireland’s sacred wound, out of which “an eternal kingdom in the spirit of man” is built.

Symbolism. The Father’s three-noted harp (sleep, laughter, weeping); the birds of Angus, love and death in one flock; the divinatory chessboard; the swans and the Faed Fia of Manannán; the Kingdom of Youth as the country of the dead. Balor and Tethra are the demonic oath.

Relation to other works. The play is the Celtic cosmogony staged: the gods descending “into the heart of the Red Branch,” Dana as the Mother of comfort, Angus as love-and-death, Manannán as the veil. Its austere structure distinguishes it from Yeats’s later Deirdre (1907) and Synge’s.

Takeaway. Foreknowledge does not remove choice; the sacred order is destroyed by the king who invokes it; and beauty, defeated in time, rules in eternity.

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)#

At a glance. Dundrum: Dun Emer Press, 1903; the press’s second book, printed by Elizabeth Corbet Yeats and finished on 10 October 1903. Thirty-two items, a prologue and epilogue and thirty poems, “old and new.” Dedicated in capitals “For Brian when he is grown up this handful of the nuts of knowledge I have gathered on the secret streams.”⁷²

The poems. The title poem takes the hazels of wisdom over Connla’s Well into a mountain cabin “where door and windows open wide that friendly stars may look,” and makes every “high and lonely thought that thrills my being through … a ruddy berry dropped down through the purple air.” “The Divine Vision” names the mood that “sees / … through the shadowy terrors of their hell / The love for which they fell.” “Babylon” opens a Dublin dusk into a former life — “The blue dusk ran between the streets; my love was winged within my mind” — the clearest reincarnation-lyric he wrote. “A Call of the Sidhe” — “Tarry thou yet, late lingerer in the twilight’s glory” — makes the fairy host messengers of “the Light of Lights.” “The Grey Eros” is the first appearance of the elderly, disillusioned speaker: “We are desert leagues apart; / Time is misty ages now.”

Themes and symbolism. Irish sacred geography — Connla’s Well, the hazels, the Sídhe, the Land of Youth — enters the verse in bulk for the first time, grafted onto the Theosophical apparatus; the hazel-nut becomes the Celtic figure for the doctrine that thought is received rather than made.

Relation to other works and takeaway. Two-thirds a selection, one-third new; the new poems are Irish in setting and are love-poems of a kind absent from the earlier books. It marks the turn from India to Ireland — the moment the Sídhe replace Brahma — while its subtitle insists the mood has not changed.

The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories (1904)#

At a glance. Dublin: Whaley, [1904]; fifty-three pages; five hundred copies. Seven parables written for the Irish Theosophist between 1893 and 1897 and reprinted in Imaginations and Reveries: “The Mask of Apollo,” “The Cave of Lilith,” “The Story of a Star,” “A Dream of Angus Oge,” “The Childhood of Apollo,” “The Midnight Blossom” and “The Meditation of Ananda.”⁷³

The stories. In The Mask of Apollo (1893) the god, disguised as a sleeping old priest in pastoral Greece, receives four petitioners. To the husbandman: “Zeus is no greater in the aether than he is in the leaf of grass, and the hymns of men are no sweeter to him than a little water poured over one of his flowers.” To the shepherd who hears voices: “The voices have a message to thee from beyond the gods … Men shall hold starry sway.” To the lovers he tells how Eros bade Aphrodite “Put your own soul in, O mother,” so that love “which asks not return” becomes immortal; to the children he shows his unmasked face and fades. The priest wakes: “Oh, that we could talk wisely as we do in our dreams!” The Cave of Lilith (1894): the enchantress, whose cave lies “between the valley and the height,” boasts that “I offer every soul its own shadow … Men have made me; the mortals have made me immortal … I was the Beatrice who led Dante upwards.” A Sad Singer chants “What of all the will to do?”; the Wise One answers that “when desire dies the swift and invisible will awakens,” and that Lilith too shall follow, “not as mistress, but as handmaiden.” The narrator learns three things: that thought “leads nowhere,” that “we weave our own enchantment,” and that “the truest wisdom is to wait, to work, and to will in secret.” The Story of a Star (1894): a clerk in a cathedral town lapses into vision and, as a Persian magus, watches a planet born from “the dreadful Fountain” in song; its luminous race tell him “The end is creation, and creation is joy. The One awakens out of quiescence as we come forth, and knows itself in us.” A Dream of Angus Oge (1897): the boy Con, fed on tales of Cuculain, is carried by a golden-bearded Shepherd to a mound with a stone circle and a cross-shaped cave — Newgrange — which floods with light that is also sound: “I am Angus; men call me the Young. I am the sunlight in the heart, the moonlight in the mind; I am the light at the end of every dream, the voice for ever calling to come away; I am the desire beyond you or tears.” A voice cries “You remember, Con, Con, Conaire Mor, you remember!” and he sits among the Danaan gods before waking. The Childhood of Apollo: Diotima shows the child “the Ancient Beauty” and prophesies that “the light you hail in joy you shall impart in tears. So from age to age the eternal Beauty bows itself down amid sorrows.” The Midnight Blossom (1894): four shepherd brothers on a hill above King Suddhodana’s realm are taught by a yogi “the small old path” of the great ones who “turn backwards from the gate” of Brahma into “every sorrowful heart”; a crystal flower blooms at midnight in the snow — “one is born who has chosen the greater way” — the birth of the Buddha. The Meditation of Ananda (1893): a young ascetic exhausted by visions of the Lokas hears the Legend of the Great King of Glory and “found the secret of the true, how the Vision could be left behind and the Being entered”; his fire of love, pity and sympathy works four unseen miracles in the world.

Major themes. The god who speaks through the dreaming self, masked by the personality. Immanence: Zeus in the leaf of grass; work and unselfish love as worship. The astral light as self-woven enchantment: Lilith, whom “men have made.” The bodhisattva’s turning-back: the illumined soul returning to the world, the doctrine of the Gita and the Voice of the Silence. Reincarnation and the remembering child.

Symbolism. The mask; the cave between valley and height as the Mid-world; the fountain of manifestation; the Shepherd of the Starry Flocks, who recurs in every later work; the mound as the inner sun; the midnight flower of the Arhat.

Relation to other works. All seven dramatise the Theosophical ethic of return; “A Dream of Angus Oge” is the fictional form of the Newgrange vision in The Candle of Vision, and Aodh’s out-of-body flight and mountain palace in The Avatars repeat it; The Childhood of Apollo is the avatar-child in embryo.

Takeaway. A compact introduction to Russell’s ethics of divine immanence: vision is to be left behind and Being entered, and the way of the wise runs back down into the world.

The Divine Vision and Other Poems (1904)#

At a glance. London and New York: Macmillan, January 1904. Fifty-five poems, dedicated “To S.M. T.K. S.V. G.R. E.Y. J.S. Comrades in the Craft” — Susan Mitchell, Thomas Keohler, George Roberts, Ella Young, James Starkey and their circle, whom Russell anthologised the same year in New Songs — with a sixteen-line dedicatory poem ending “the songs I have uttered / Come from this heart that was touched by the flame.”⁷⁴

The poems. “Dana,” in blank verse, is the theophany of the Mother of the Gods: “I am the tender voice calling ‘Away,’ / Whispering between the beatings of the heart”; “I am the heartbreak over fallen things”; “I am in the kiss that foemen give / Pausing in battle”; “Among the Danaan gods, I am the last / Council of mercy in their hearts.” “The Gates of Dreamland,” retitled “Carrowmore” in 1913, is set at the lake of that name in Erris, County Mayo, known from his organising rounds: “‘Tis the twilight of the ages and it’s time to quit the plough. / Come away,’ the red lips whisper, ‘all the world is weary now.’” “Children of Lir” is the descent-and-return myth complete: the swans wake “in the bosom where cradled together we lay,” fly “from the infinite Lir,” fall “for comfort” into the leaning of body to body, pass “from the vision of beauty to the fathomless being of love,” and wait for the bell-branch to call them home “made one in the infinite Lir.” “The Twilight of Earth” is his Götterdämmerung of the imagination — “The wonder of the world is o’er: / The magic from the sea is gone” — with the counter-claim that “The hidden light the spirit owns / If blown to flame would dim the stars.” “The Voice of the Waters” rebukes the seeker’s “timeless quest” from the water itself; “Reconciliation” (“I begin through the grass once again to be bound to the Lord”) and “The Joy of Earth” form a pair; “An Irish Face” reads Deirdre’s ancestral grief in a living girl; “Ordeal” names “the Dark Immortal” who “would shepherd our weeping souls.”

Major themes. The Celtic pantheon as psychology: Dana as pity, Lir as the Absolute, the Sídhe as the call. Ireland’s landscape as sacred text: Carrowmore, Connemara, Ballylee. The waning of wonder and the duty to rekindle it. Parting, exile and return. The national face and national sorrow.

Esoteric symbolism. Dana is the Theosophical Mother-substance under an Irish name; Lir the boundless from which souls issue; the swans’ “chain that was silver and golden” and their fall into clay restate the Gnostic descent; “the Dark Immortal” is the hidden God; the “deeper vesture” of “A Farewell” is reincarnation.

Relation to other works. The full Celtic book and the counterpart to Yeats’s The Wind Among the Reeds — but, as Ernest Boyd insisted, “Yeats is a symbolist, whereas A.E. is a mystic,” who “refers the folk legend back to its origins where he finds analogies with his own visions.” Darrell Figgis marks it as the point where Russell “first begins definitely to turn to speechcraft from songcraft.” It was the last volume of wholly new verse for twenty-one years.⁷⁵

Takeaway. The gods of the Tuatha Dé Danann converted into the offices of a Theosophical cosmology, in the most ambitious and most Irish of the lyric volumes.

By Still Waters (1906) and Some Irish Essays (1906)#

At a glance. By Still Waters: Lyrical Poems Old and New, Dundrum: Dun Emer Press, 1906, finished “on All Souls’ Eve”; thirty-two poems, twenty-six from the earlier books. Some Irish Essays, Dublin: Maunsel (Tower Press Booklets 1), 1906.⁷⁶

Contents. The new poems of By Still Waters include “The Winds of Angus” — “The grey road whereupon we trod became as holy ground”; “Twin gates unto that living world, dark honey-coloured eyes” — in which the god of love is present in a lover’s glance; “The Virgin Mother,” which asks “Who is that goddess to whom men should pray” and answers with the Earth “Whose mother nature they have named in scorn / Calling its holy substance common clay”; “Creation” (“Oh Master of the Beautiful, / Creating us from hour to hour”); and “A Prayer” (“O, holy Spirit of the Hazel, hearken now”). Some Irish Essays gathers four pieces: “Nationality or Cosmopolitanism” and “The Dramatic Treatment of Legend,” in which Russell answers Standish O’Grady’s plea to leave the heroic cycles alone — “Heroism is a quality of the soul and not of the body,” and “there never can be, while man lives in a body, a greater means of expression for him than the voice of man affords”; “On an Irish Hill” (1896), a dream of a cabin above “an enchanted valley, only a morning’s walk from the city,” where “the Mother lays aside veil after veil” and Manannán or Lu may yet return “holding out the Silver Branch”; and “A Poet of Shadows,” on Yeats.

Takeaway. The lyric canon refined, and the case made that Irish myth can become living art through drama rather than antiquarianism.

The Hero in Man (1909) and The Renewal of Youth (1911)#

At a glance. The Hero in Man: Orpheus Series no. 1, published by D. N. Dunlop at Hale, Cheshire, and Clifford Bax at Hampstead, May 1909 (1,000 copies), with a prelude by Bax; second edition, Orpheus Press, September 1910. The Renewal of Youth: Orpheus Series no. 7, London: Orpheus Press, 1911; the essay is dated 1896. Both are reprinted in Imaginations and Reveries.⁷⁷

Argument of The Hero in Man. The essay opens on an intuition: “we may set side by side the head of Christ and the head of an outcast, and there is an equal radiance around each.” The fallen are shielded by “a nobility hidden in them,” their darkness “the result of some too weighty heroic labour undertaken long ago by the human spirit”; justice “intellectually conceived tends to beget a certain hardness of the heart.” Of all the immortals, the chained Titan and “that bowed figure heavy with the burden of the sins of the world” draw the deepest tenderness because they share man’s labour: “Prometheus, Christ, are in every heart; the story of one is the story of all; the Titan and the Crucified are humanity.” The divine incarnation “was not spoken of one, but of all those who descending into the lower world tried to change it into the divine image”; the angels “grew rebellious in the Master’s peace” out of pity for chaos and “were crucified in men.” The second section insists that “the mystic … must be worker as well as seer,” and that “not one golden ray of all our thoughts is sped ineffective through the dark”: a soul that attains love or will radiates to unknown others, and “if we let our lamp go out, some far away who had reached out in the dark … may … give way and fold the hands in despair.” The third describes the loving soul as “the centre of a ring of wounding spears,” armed only with love and endurance, by which “the red ruby of the heart is transmuted into the tenderer light of the opal” — the work of “the Great Alchemist.” It closes with the Irish peasant in hospital who drew a crucifixion with the heart, not only the brow, wreathed in thorns: “For that … was where he really suffered.”

Argument of The Renewal of Youth. “Humanity is no longer the child it was at the beginning of the world”; the spirit is “old and burdened with experiences,” and whenever life is fashioned to our liking “the spirit, without warning, suddenly falls into immeasurable age.” But weariness is the prelude to renewal: “we have to assume mastery over that nature which now overwhelms us.” The second part attacks bookish occultism — “The soul of the modern mystic is becoming a mere hoarding-place for uncomely theories. He creates an uncouth symbolism, and blinds his soul within with names drawn from the Kabala or ancient Sanskrit”; “To read a mystic book truly is to invoke the powers” — and states the Hermetic law on which everything in Russell rests: “What a man thinks, that he is: that is the old secret. … We have imagined ourselves into littleness, darkness, and feebleness. We must imagine ourselves into greatness. ‘If thou wilt not equal thyself to God thou canst not understand God.’” The disciple is to enter the path “facing all things in life and death with a mood at once gay and reverent, as beseems those who are immortal.” The third part defends the Earth against the metaphysician — “do not dream it will lead you farther away from the earth, but rather deeper into its heart”; “I do not believe in a nature red with tooth and claw” — and warns that “the last secrets are for those who translate vision into being.”

Themes and symbolism. The Titan and the Crucified as one figure; descent as pity; the secret ties by which souls sustain one another; the war in heaven as the soul’s enterprise; self-imagination as divinisation; reverence for the Mother. Prometheus is the Theosophical rebel-angel who brings the fire of mind; the Great Alchemist’s transmutation of ruby into opal is the heart’s purification.

Relation to other works. The two essays are the ethical core of the system: the Christ/Prometheus intuition returns in The National Being and Song and Its Fountains; the “imagine ourselves into greatness” of 1896 is the doctrine of The Avatars forty years later.

Takeaway. Every human being, and most of all the fallen, is a descended divinity on a redemptive errand; the mystic must be a worker; and we become what we imagine ourselves to be.

The Building Up of a Rural Civilisation (1910) and Co-operation and Nationality (1912)#

At a glance. The first, Dublin: Sealy, Bryers & Walker, 1910, is Russell’s address to the IAOS of December 1909, whose thesis is that “civilisation has passed the farmer by.” The second, Co-operation and Nationality: A Guide for Rural Reformers from This to the Next Generation, Dublin: Maunsel, 1912 (reprinted 1982), expands it into thirteen chapters, dedicated “To Sir Horace Plunkett, Father Thomas Finlay and Robert A. Anderson, three good comrades,” with an appendix of IAOS statistics for 1910 (881 societies, 94,512 members).⁷⁸

Argument. Ireland’s rural exodus is the world-problem of a civilisation built for cities. The unorganised farmer has been fleeced by auctioneers, merchants, loan offices and the gombeen man, because “the organized industries, the organized communities, are always wresting any surplus from the unorganized”; the machine-age market demands the uniformity Denmark has achieved. The remedy is not a utopia — the dangers are a new gombeen aristocracy and “worship of the State,” “the decline and fall of the human will in the people” — but general-purpose cooperative societies federating into “a vast farmers’ trade union” and a new social order. A nation is “a single yet multitudinous being,” and “the parish is the cradle of the nation”: “Tell me how people work and live in the parishes to-day, and I will tell you how in the next generation the councillors of the nation will act and think.” The Co-operative Commonwealth is “the fourth alternative to State Socialism, the Servile State, or our present industrial anarchy.” Two chapters on women on the land — “The object of all religion, art, literature and economics is the creation of perfect human beings” — argue that no change of government will lighten the countrywoman’s labour. Against the Department’s “Mandarins”: “Experts ought to be on tap and not on top”; “The Eden of the bureaucrat is the hell of the governed.” The last chapter’s parable of the Children in the House and the Children in the Fields foresees power shifting back to the country, for “the natural level of the spirit in man is with the highest in the universe.”

Themes and takeaway. Cooperation is not an economic device but the foundation of a rural civilisation and of citizenship, threatened above all by dependence on the State; “the phrase, ‘Every man for himself,’ is one of the maxims in the gospel according to Beelzebub.” The book is the social counterpart of the metaphysics: association gives a collective soul a body in which to act.

Collected Poems (1913; enlarged 1919; second edition 1926)#

At a glance. London: Macmillan, September 1913, dedicated “To D.N.D. in memory of the Household”; 172 items from the four earlier volumes “with such new verses as I thought of equal mood.” The 1919 printing “with additions” inserted the war and political poems of Gods of War, with Other Poems (Dublin: privately printed, 1915); the 1926 second edition added the whole of Voices of the Stones and ran to 233 items. The prefatory note is Russell’s own best criticism: “When I first discovered for myself how near was the King in His beauty I thought I would be the singer of the happiest songs. Forgive me, Spirit of my spirit, for this, that I have found it easier to read the mystery told in tears and understood Thee better in sorrow than in joy; that, though I would not, I have made the way seem thorny, and have wandered in too many byways, imagining myself into moods which held Thee not.”⁷⁹

The new poems of 1913. “Krishna” (“Imitated from a fragment of the Vaishnava Scriptures”) sees the King of Kings at play as a child, a faithless lover and a reeling drunkard — “a thing to shudder at and fear” — and yet “the Light of Lights whose blossoming is Paradise,” “the Prodigal, the Spendthrift of the Heavenly Gold”; Russell later cited it as an oracle that came unbidden. “Faith” declares that God “does not love the bended knees, / The soul made wormlike in His sight.” “The Iron Age,” in three parts, is the first full statement of his historical pessimism: “We choose the chieftains of our race / From hucksters in the market place”; “That road to anarchy doth go, / This to the grim mechanic state”; and the prayer, “Grant us one only evening star, / The iron age’s avatar.” “On Behalf of Some Irishmen Not Followers of Tradition” (first printed in Sinn Féin, 1908) is the manifesto of the unbought Ireland against ancestor-worship: “We hold the Ireland in the heart / More than the land our eyes have seen”; “our lips would gladlier hail / The firstborn of the Coming Race / Than the last splendour of the Gael”; “Against the sceptred myth to hold / The golden heresy of truth.”

The war poems (1915, collected 1919). “Gods of War,” printed in The Times, reads the war as the return of the pagan gods: “This is the Dark Immortal’s hour, / His victory, whoever fail”; “Is Thor / Not nobler for a world at war?”; and to Christ, “it was too soon / For flags of battle to be furled … Come in the twilight of the world.” “Battle Ardour,” a sonnet, finds the soldier’s ecstasy a self-outcasting in which “He and his foeman the same tryst do keep. / His foemen are his brothers in the skies.” “Continuity,” which also closes The Candle of Vision, is the doctrine of the Brooding’s care for the orchid under the boot: “Though the crushed jewels droop and fade / The Artist’s labours will not cease, / And of the ruins shall be made / Some yet more lovely masterpiece.” “Apocalyptic” sees Earth’s kings “met by those wild kings / Who swept through the Apocalypse,” and holds that only “The strong Initiates of Pain” can face the terror. “Statesmen” states the karma of nations — “The foe ye meet is still yourselves, the blade ye forged the sword that kills” — and “Tragedy” the karma of hatred: “None ever hated in the world but came / To every baseness of the foe he fought … all are wrought / Into the image that they contemplate.” “Shadows and Lights” asks “Is there some trouble in the heavenly house?” and counsels the inward turn.

Major themes. The return of the pagan gods — Zeus, Thor, Ares, “the Dark Immortal” — as the truth beneath Christian Europe. The karma of hate. The Iron Age and the “grim mechanic state”. Apocalypse as initiation. Continuity. Against ancestor-worship, for “the Coming Race.”

Esoteric symbolism. “The Heavenly Brooding,” “the Everlasting,” “the Mighty Master” as names for the oversoul; “Father, and … Mother of the Gods”; “Initiates”; “the iron age’s avatar” — the Hindu Kali Yuga fused with Hesiod’s ages and the Theosophical “Coming Race.” The twilight now belongs to history: “Come in the twilight of the world.”

Relation to other works. The public voice: octosyllabic argument and the newspaper as venue. Boyd wrote that the result “is not so much the utterance of a poet as the song of a prophet,” and records that the 1913 book was meant as a farewell to verse, “frustrated only by the stirring events which moved the world.”

Takeaway. Russell’s own canon, and the volume that gave him a second reputation as the Irish poet of the Great War — the one whose gods were Zeus and Thor and who read hatred as the surest road to becoming what one hates.

Imaginations and Reveries (1915; enlarged 1921)#

At a glance. Dublin and London: Maunsel, 1915, dedicated “To John Quinn”; second edition, Maunsel & Roberts, 1921, adding “Thoughts for a Convention,” “The New Nation,” “Standish O’Grady” and “The Boyhood of a Poet.” Twenty-four items in 1915, twenty-eight in 1921: the essays on heroic literature and nationality, “A Poet of Shadows” (Yeats), essays on James Stephens, Seumas O’Sullivan, Irish art, “Ulster,” “The Spiritual Conflict,” “Ideals of the New Rural Society,” “On an Irish Hill,” “Religion and Love,” “The Renewal of Youth,” “The Hero in Man,” the seven parables and Deirdre. “Priest or Hero?” and the myth-reconstructions of 1895–96 are excluded.⁸⁰

Argument. The preface states the tension governing his career: “Birth in Ireland gave me a bias towards Irish nationalism, while the spirit which inhabits my body told me the politics of eternity ought to be my only concern … My desire to help prompted agreement, while my intellect was always heretical.” “The Spiritual Conflict” (1915, reprinted from The Times) warns that “all the needles of being point to Germany, where the apparition of the organized State is manifest,” that the wartime state “will be unable easily … to relax its autocratic power,” and that “Love and hate are alike in this, that they change us into the image we contemplate.” “Religion and Love” (1904) charges that in Ireland “Aphrodite … is outcast,” that “the home life in Ireland is probably more squalid than with any other people equally prosperous in Europe,” and that “spirituality is the power of apprehending formless spiritual essences, of seeing the eternal in the transitory”; the woman who awakens love is “priestess of a divinity than which there is none mightier.” “The Character of Heroic Literature” (1902) finds in the Cuchulain tales “the signature of the Sidhe” and cries, “In the symbolic expression of our spiritual life the eagle has become a dove brooding peace. Oh, that it might rebecome the eagle and take to the upper airs!”

Takeaway. The collected prose of the Revival years, in which the doctrines of the Household are applied to art, sex, war and the nation, and in which “there is no true art or literature which has not some image of the Golden Life lurking within it.”

The National Being: Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity (1916)#

At a glance. Dublin and London: Maunsel, September 1916; dedicated to Horace Plunkett (“A good many years ago you grafted a slip of poetry on your economic tree … This book is a consequence of your grafting operation”). Twenty untitled chapters, composed from March 1914.⁸¹

Argument. The first chapters lay the foundation: “The State is a physical body prepared for the incarnation of the soul of a race”; “a nation is but a host of men united by some God-begotten mood”; the National Being is the oversoul into which the citizen “enters,” and which “in a theocratic State is a god; in an aristocratic age … a hero. … In a democracy it becomes a multitudinous being.” Chapters IV–VIII build the organised rural community as the cell of that being — “Before … Ireland can become an Attica, Patrick must be led out of his economic cave”; “Co-operation is the seed” — and indict the slum, where “the destined comrade of Seraphim and Cherubim … is herded with other Children of the King.” The later chapters extend the argument to the town. The wage system is “practically a form of slavery”: “we can buy labor, which means we can buy human life and thought, a portion of God’s being, and make a profit out of it” (IX). Urban workers should build cooperative stores as “the commissariat department of the army of labor” and turn trade unions into “co-operative guilds of producers” (XI); town and country should be united by federations serving both (XII). Russell distrusts revolution (“Nobody can remain standing on tiptoe”; “The gods are never so turned away from man as when he ascends to them by disorderly methods”) and representative government as practised (“The jury of the nation was found to be packed”; “The press, capitalistically controlled, creates public opinion”), and proposes in chapter XIV a scheme of functional councils elected by the organised industries alongside a national assembly, with a Council of Education elected by educationalists. Chapter XV states his political character-doctrine: “We shall succeed or fail in Ireland as we succeed or fail to make democracy prevail in our economic life, and aristocratic ideals to prevail in our political and intellectual life.” Chapter XVI, on militarism, carries the 1916 footnote: “Since this book was written Ireland has had a tragic illustration.” Chapter XVII proposes civil rather than military conscription — two years of “a comradeship of labor” that could make Ireland “in less than half a century as beautiful as ancient Attica.” Chapter XVIII is the ethics of hate: “We grow nobly like what we adore, and ignobly like what we hate,” so that Ulster and the rest of Ireland “should at last appear to have exchanged characteristics”; “Moral forces are really more powerful than physical forces. One Christ changed the spiritual life of Europe.” Chapter XIX gives the metaphysics: “Heaven cannot fully manifest its will to humanity through the individual, but must utter itself through multitudes. There must be an orchestration of humanity ere it can echo divine melodies”; the synchronous vibration of many minds creates “a psychic unity … It is that inner unity which constitutes the national being,” whose “shepherd” is the national genius; “Without love we are nothing.” The last chapter turns to the churches and the artists: “the fading hold the heavens have over the world is due to the neglect of the economic basis of spiritual life”; “It is the work of the artist to create for us images of desirable life … and to prefigure that vaster entity which I have called the national being”; “All greatness is brought about by a conspiracy of the imagination and the will.” It ends with the vision of a society “guided harmoniously by the Shepherd of the Ages.”

Major themes. The nation as a spiritual entity with a physical body. Economic democracy and intellectual aristocracy. Functional representation against the packed jury of parliament. Civil conscription. The refusal of hatred. The artist as maker of the nation’s images.

Esoteric content. The oversoul; “Children of the King”; the “orchestration of humanity”; the Shepherd; the prism that divides freedom and solidarity as it divides light — the Theosophical doctrine of the group-soul applied to a polity.

Relation to other works. The politics of Co-operation and Nationality raised to metaphysics; the seed of The Interpreters, which Russell said grew from it. Its warning that “one who lives in the Iron Age … knows it is Iron” links it to the poems.

Takeaway. Institutions should enlarge individual powers rather than reduce people to dependants; and a nation, being a soul, must be imagined before it can be built.

Salutation (1917) and Thoughts for a Convention (1917)#

At a glance. Salutation: A Poem on the Irish Rebellion of 1916, London: privately printed by Clement Shorter, January 1917, twenty-five copies; later retitled “To the Memory of Some I Knew Who Are Dead and Who Loved Ireland.” Thoughts for a Convention: Memorandum on the State of Ireland, Dublin and London: Maunsel, 1917, first printed in the Irish Times on 26–29 May 1917.⁸²

Contents. The poem toasts the executed leaders — “Here’s to you, Pearse, your dream not mine, / But yet the thought, for this you fell, / Has turned life’s water into wine”; “Thomas MacDonagh, and it seemed / The words were idle, but they grew / To nobleness by death redeemed”; “Here’s to you, Connolly, my man, / Who cast the last torch on the pile” — and, with the same refrain, “You paid the price,” the Irish dead of France: Alan Anderson, “Dear Kettle, of the generous heart,” Willie Redmond. It ends with the two Irelands reconciled beyond death, “Thronged on some starry parapet, / That looks down upon Innisfail, / And sees the confluence of dreams / That clashed together in our night, / One river, born from many streams, / Roll in one blaze of blinding light.” The memorandum proposes dominion status, safeguards for Ulster and constitutional negotiation, warning that partition would make the six counties Ireland’s “Alsace-Lorraine.”

Takeaway. The ethics of The National Being in practice: no tradition has exclusive possession of sacrifice, and a settlement that institutionalises grievance will breed it for generations.

The Candle of Vision (1918)#

At a glance. London: Macmillan, October 1918; reprinted November 1918 and January, April and August 1919, and repeatedly since; dedicated “To James Stephens, best of companions.” Title-page epigraphs: “The Spirit of man is the candle of the Lord” (Proverbs) and “When his candle shined on my head and by his light I walked through darkness” (Job). Twenty chapters: Retrospect; The Earth Breath; The Slave of the Lamp; Meditation; The Many-Coloured Land; Analytic; The Mingling of Natures; The Memory of Earth; Imagination; Dreams; The Architecture of Dream; Have Imaginations Body?; Intuition; The Language of the Gods; Ancient Intuitions; Power; The Memory of the Spirit; Celtic Cosmogony; The Celtic Imagination; Earth.⁸³

The arc of the book. The chapters build in five movements. The first four are autobiography of awakening and method: the return to a hill cottage and the night among the rocks in which Russell knows he still belongs “to the heavenly household”; the boy’s involuntary visions on the roads; the alternation of ecstasy and exile in the office, where the recoil into “the hot foetid air of the gaslit room” was “an agony of darkness and oblivion” and he felt “condemned … because of some sin committed in remote ages” — “We were all lost children of the stars”; the law of affinity by which “every intense imagination” attracts its kin, so that within a week of awakening he met the comrades of a lifetime; and the discipline of concentration and meditation, with its demand that religion be verifiable: “The religion which does not cry out: ‘I am to-day verifiable as that water wets or that fire burns. Test me that ye can become as gods.’ Mistrust it.” The next four are the phenomenology and epistemology of the image: the Many-Coloured Land and the Planetary Spirit “whose body is Earth”; the “Analytic” refutation of the memory theory, using a childhood vision of giants in brazen armour running up a boulder-strewn hill that no recombination of remembered fragments could have produced; the porous mind of “The Mingling of Natures” — “the house of our being has many chambers … there are corridors there leading into the hearts of others, and windows which open into eternity”; and the memory of Earth, with its ruined chapel that renews its ancient congregation and its grassy duns rebuilt with people in saffron and blue. The third movement rises from vision to imagination and dream: the Aeon episode and the distinction of imagination from vision; the One “vigilant through the sleep of the body”; the “Architecture of Dream,” with its argument against Freud that “a mood may attract its affinities but it does not create what it attracts,” its series of airship visions, and the one vision Russell thought prophetic; and “Have Imaginations Body?”, which proposes that every living being is “a continuous fountain of phantasmal effigies of itself,” three-dimensional and living, so that “he who attributes least mystery to matter is furthest from truth, and he nighest who conjectures the Absolute to be present in fullness of being in the atom.” The fourth movement tests intuition and power: the alphabet of the gods offered as a checkable experiment, and the awakening of the fire. The fifth is return and synthesis: the memory of the spirit, with its many selves and its scorn for an education that teaches man “he is a worm in the sight of Heaven, he who is but a god in exile”; the Celtic cosmogony; the Celtic imagination, with the pool, the four treasures and the Boyne; and the last chapter, “Earth.”

The last chapter. “I think of earth as the floor of a cathedral where altar and Presence are everywhere.” Russell admits he has “obscured the vision of that being by dilating too much on what was curious,” and re-reads theology in terms of the living Earth: “the Mighty Mother is that Earth on which they tread and whose holy substance they call common clay … the Paraclete is the strength of our being, the power which binds atom to atom and Earth to Heaven … the Christos is the Magician of the Beautiful and … is that in us which sees beauty, creates beauty, and it is verily wisdom in us and is our deepest self … the Father is the fountain of substance and power and wisdom.” He foresees “that divine hour in the twilights of time, when out of rock, mountain, water, tree, bird, beast or man the seraph spirits of all that live shall emerge realising their kinship,” and closes with the poem “Continuity.”

Major themes. Vision as a discipline, not a gift — “Gifts! There are no gifts. For all that is ours we have paid the price.” The testing of images: interpretation, not perception, is where error lies. The living, remembering Earth. Imagination above vision. The layered self and its pre-existence. The verifiability of religion. The sacredness of matter.

Esoteric content. The whole Theosophical scheme — planes, the Planetary Spirit, the astral image, the fire, pre-existence, the “Kabiri” with whom many “keep tryst” in sleep — rendered without its jargon; the Hermetic Poimandres; the Chaldaean Oracles; the Kabbalistic Ain-Soph (“a soliloquy of Deity wherein Ain-Soph talks to Ain-Soph”); the Gnostic Aeon; the Upanishadic four states and the Gita.

Relation to other works. The doctrinal centre: Song and Its Fountains is its sequel on the poem, The Avatars its dramatisation, The House of the Titans the cosmogony chapter in verse. The 1918 chapters are revisions of Irish Theosophist pieces of the 1890s, and Russell said the book dealt with images having form, leaving poems, “the most intricately organised form of thought,” for later.

Takeaway. Vision and imagination, disciplined by meditation and interrogated by reason, testify to a living Earth-spirit, a pre-existent soul and a Golden Age that “is all about us”; the old scriptures, Celtic and Eastern, are reports of the same thing. The only book of its kind in the literature of the Revival, and the only one of Russell’s never out of print.

The Pamphlets of 1920–1921#

At a glance. The Economics of Ireland and the Policy of the British Government, New York: Huebsch, 1920; The Inner and the Outer Ireland, Dublin: Talbot Press, 1921, from Pearson’s Magazine; Ireland and the Empire at the Court of Conscience, Dublin: Talbot Press, 1921, answered at once by Henry Harrison for the Irish Dominion League; A Plea for Justice, Dublin: Irish Homestead, dated 1920 or 1921 in the catalogues.⁸⁴

Contents. The first analyses the economic policy of Dublin Castle; the second sets the Ireland of fact against the Ireland of imagination; the third is a moral indictment of imperial conduct during the War of Independence; the fourth demands a public inquiry into attacks by Crown forces on cooperative creameries, the institutions Russell had spent twenty years building.

Takeaway. The language of conscience and the national soul addressed to specific institutions and documented violence.

The Interpreters (1922)#

At a glance. London: Macmillan, 1922. Dedicated “To Stephan MacKenna for the delight I have in his noble translation of Plotinus.” Three epigraphs: “In Him we live and move and have our being” (St Paul); “What relation have the politics of time to the politics of eternity?” (Leroy); “How can right find its appropriate might?” (Lavelle). Twenty chapters. Russell’s preface: “I have been intimate with some who risked and with some who lost life for causes to which they were devoted, and came to understand that with many the political images in imagination were but the psychic body of spiritual ideas. Behind the open argument lurked a spiritual mood which was the true decider of destiny … the symposium has been laid in a future century so that ideals over which there is conflict today might be discussed divested of passion and apart from transient circumstance. … The Interpreters may be taken as a symposium between scattered portions of one nature dramatically sundered as the soul is in dream.”⁸⁵

Plot. A late-autumn evening in a great city of a world-empire, where “tall pillars crested with a ruby glow marked the airways” and airships roar overhead. “A world empire was in trouble. A nation long restless under its rule had resurrected ancient hopes.” Rebels converge on the arsenal at the bell, wearing scarves; “the crowd, a river of fiery life, surged through the open gate” — into a trap. The captured are held for the night in a room above the arsenal. Among them are the poet Lavelle; the anarchist Leroy, who writes as “Dark Angel”; the labour leader Culain; the architect Rian; the old historian Brehon, whose History had rekindled the dead nation; and Heyt, “the autocrat of one of those great economic federations” and president of the world’s air federation, arrested by mistake on a picked-up scarf. Outside, the imperial air-fleets — “dragons of the air” whose crews believe themselves under “a mandate from Heaven to keep the peace of the world” — hover over the burning city, and a lone rebel airship is hunted down and falls “like a falling star.” Brehon proposes that each man confess “as between himself and Heaven” what imagination brought him to consider his ideal more important than life.

The confessions form the book. Lavelle speaks for beauty and the national genius: lying on a hillside “I was … smitten through and through with another being, and I knew it was the earth, and it was living”; the poets “have sung of their country as the shadow of Heaven”; his question is how right can find its might, and he would begin “with consideration for the poorest first.” Heyt speaks for power and law: “The might of an organism is a measure of its rightness … the world soul has decreed the world state”; “Science now sits in the seat of Caesar”; “We attain our fullest life by becoming its slaves.” Leroy rebuts him — “It is not science sits in the seat of the Caesars, but the magicians” — and speaks for the self-existent individual: “The worst tyranny is uniformity”; “The end of life is to be, not to do”; “You may think of me as a rebel angel. I am in revolt against Heaven”; his founding dream is that “When most you rebel against the known God the lips of the unknown God are tenderest upon your forehead.” Culain, born in a tenement, “avatar of the Earth spirit incarnated in some grand laborer,” speaks for love and the collective: the workers’ terms of peace are “the surrender of the world to the workers of the world”; humanity is “one Heavenly Man manifesting in legions of forms”; to Heyt’s “What power can you invoke?” he answers, “It will be overcome by pity.” Rian, the maker, joins him — “To work for the world will be like working for the gods again”; “Where there is no beauty there is no spiritual authority” — and asks Brehon for a reconciliation.

Brehon’s synthesis occupies chapters XIV–XVII. The trinity of matter, energy and spirit generates the politics of beauty, power and love; anarchy is the balanced self-existent; men are “God animated rather than God guided”; “The universe exists for the soul not the soul for the universe”; “Politic is a profane science only because it has not yet discovered it has its roots in sacred or spiritual things.” He argues against warfare — “every great conflict has been followed by an era of materialism”; “those who hate open a door by which their enemies enter”; “If a kingdom is won by force, it must be sustained by force” — and describes a secret brotherhood “in many lands” whose group-meditation “rose like a tower into heaven,” for “even the solitary or captive can by intensity of imagination and feeling affect myriads.” Perverted energies breed pestilence and cataclysm, and “who can say our mad humanity is not making inevitable a similar doom [to Atlantis] for this continent?” Yet “what is right always exercises its appropriate might … Yes, we shall rule in the Kingdom.” After a roll-call of the lesser prisoners’ motives, Lavelle chants the poem “Michael” (chapter XIX). In chapter XX he has a night vision in which “Everything was understood. Everything was loved. Everything was forgiven,” and at dawn Brehon whispers: “You have come nigh to the Kingdom. You have seen the Kingdom.”

The ending. The rebels are winning and encircling the arsenal. An officer announces that the garrison will evacuate and then blow up the building — “We cannot take prisoners with us.” Leroy, “always generous,” points out Heyt: “He is for empire and is not worthy to die with us.” Heyt is identified and released. “Lavelle would have intervened on behalf of the old historian. But Brehon placed his hand gently on the arm of the poet and he knew it was forbidden.” Heyt “hesitated for a moment as if he would have said or urged something … and he left them without a word and went out to make the world in his own image.” No execution is shown; the prisoners are left to the implied destruction, and the man of power alone walks free.

Characters. Each speaker is one of the “scattered portions of one nature”: Lavelle beauty, Heyt power, Culain love, Leroy self-existent being, Rian the maker who wants this world lovely, Brehon the spirit that reconciles them. There is no character named for Ireland; Lavelle’s dead beloved “Magic” appears in his vision.

Major themes. The politics of time and the politics of eternity: every polity is “the psychic body” of a spiritual mood. Non-violence and the karma of hatred, Russell’s meditation on 1916 and the Civil War. The airship empire as “the culmination of human power soaring above the planet,” set against Culain’s “earth movement” from below. The transfiguration of the individual as the only road to the perfecting of relations: “Because life is so molded for all of us there is no way of bringing about the perfecting of human relations other than by the transfiguration of the individual.”

Esoteric symbolism. The arsenal as the trap of force; the scarf as the mark of the elect; Leroy’s Gnostic inversion of dark and light angels (“more ancient than you of the Light”); Ishtar’s descent; the Heavenly Man of the Kabbalah; Er’s choice of lives from Plato; the inverted tree “whose roots are in the heavens” from the Upanishads; Brehon’s brotherhood of meditation. In Song and Its Fountains Russell called it “the more completely mystical mood of The Interpreters, where the politic of the characters is traced back to motions in Anima Mundi.”

Relation to other works. The National Being turned mystical and The Candle of Vision turned political; its cast become the “forerunners” of The Avatars, where Conaire names Lavelle and Brehon as such; its chapter XIX is the first printing of “Michael.”

Takeaway. Right cannot be given might by force without becoming its opposite; the reconciliation of the ideals that divide a nation is not in any of them but in the one nature they are portions of; and the Kingdom is entered by vision in a prison, not by victory in the street.

Voices of the Stones (1925)#

At a glance. London and New York: Macmillan, 1925; thirty-nine poems, with a verse dedication “To Padraic Colum” — “I made these verses in a rocky land, / And I have named them Voices of the Stones” — and an epigraph from The Voyage of Bran on “The shining rock / From which arise a hundred strains.” The stones are unfallen: “All things / Since Eden, bird and beast and fin, have strayed / Far from that shining garden of His thought: / We also. Only the humble stones have kept / Their morning starriness of purity.” The “rocky land” is the Donegal of his summers.⁸⁶

The poems. “Exiles,” twelve lines, is the book’s emblem: “The gods have taken alien shapes upon them, / Wild peasants driving swine / In a strange country. Through the swarthy faces / The starry faces shine … And, to themselves unknown, / They carry with them diadem and sceptre / And move from throne to throne.” “Resurrection” is the poem begun in youth and abandoned in terror — “I could not continue it after two lines had come to my lips lest the very words might wind into their music the passion which once had made wreckage of the soul” — and completed thirty years later “when I was old and desire had no power over me”: “Not by me these feet were led / To the path beside the wave”; “Let the dragons of the past / In their caverns sleeping lie”; “Penitence, unfallen pride — / These my thorny diadem!” “Michael,” some 360 lines in octosyllabic couplets and the book’s last poem, is Russell’s considered answer in verse to Easter 1916. A Donegal fisher-boy, taking leave of the cliffs on a cold Easter evening — “A wind blew by from icy hills, / Shook with cold breath the daffodils” — falls into trance and is carried in “A boat of bronze and crystal wrought / And steered by the enchanter, Thought” to Ildathach, where “lofty things to him were said / As to one risen from the dead.” He goes to Dublin, dims in “the dark warehouse where he drudged,” is rekindled by the Gaelic scroll — “It seemed the story of the soul” — and joins “The army of the Gaelic mind, / Still holding through the Iron Age / The spiritual heritage.” Three Easters later, on “a fragile barricade / The bullet rang, the death star broke,” and dying amid “the city’s burning piles” he sees the crystal barque again, drinks “a cup filled from that holy well / O’er which the Nuts of Wisdom fell,” and is “far away from these / Afloat upon the heavenly seas.” The coda withholds political judgement and offers a metaphysical one: “I do not know if such a band / Came from the Many Coloured Land / Or whether in our being we / Make such a magic phantasy”; “The slayer and the slain may be / Knit in a secret harmony”; and through all the battle-cries “A Shepherd with a single voice … Still lures us nigh the Gates of Gold / That open to the Starry Fold.” Among the shorter poems, “Promise” consoles the dreamer — “Those delicate children, / Thy dreams, still endure”; “A Holy Hill” commands “Be still: be still: nor dare / Unpack what you have brought”; “Survival” finds “The strength which tossed the hills on high” in the labourer; “Old Wine” sees boys “with their golden limbs” drinking “the oldest of wine”; “Ancient” climbs “From a beauty older than earth … To a whiteness older than Time.”

Major themes. The gods in exile — divinity in peasants, labourers and boys. The unfallen stone against the fallen creature. Age, memory and the burnt-out passions. 1916 and the ethics of sacrifice. Compression: poems of six, eight, twelve lines, and the sonnet.

Esoteric symbolism. “Starry faces,” “diadem and sceptre,” “the Starry Fold,” “the Gates of Gold” restate descent and return in peasant dress; “the risen Lord” is read as the awakening of “the lord in man”; the immram boat and the Well of Segais with its hazel nuts carry Michael’s initiation; “the Shepherd with a single voice” is the oversoul behind all causes.

Relation to other works. The first book of wholly new lyrics since 1904, and the first written, as the dedication says, “half from the hidden world and half from this.” “Michael” was first printed in The Interpreters, and its genesis — the opening lines and an unrelated line, “The city with its burning piles,” tumbling out of dream, the whole completed in a few days’ walking — is the central specimen of Song and Its Fountains.

Takeaway. The late style begins here: a poetry of fallen gods in cabins and of a mind that has outlived desire, with “Exiles” as its emblem and “Michael” as its argument that slayer and slain are knit in one harmony.

Midsummer Eve (1928), Dark Weeping (1929), Enchantment and Other Poems (1930), and Vale and Other Poems (1931)#

At a glance. Midsummer Eve, New York: Crosby Gaige, 1928, 450 signed copies — not a single poem but a booklet of ten: “Midsummer Eve,” “Platonics,” “Vale,” “How?,” “In Tirnanoge,” “The Gay,” “Time,” “The Forge,” “Will O’ the Wisp,” “Remembrance.” Dark Weeping, London: Faber & Faber, Ariel Poems 19, 1929, a single poem with a lithograph by Paul Nash showing stars above, waters below and a body plunging into a dark tunnel — the soul’s descent into the body’s dungeon and its climb back, a design Russell thought had “understood the poem’s mysteries.” Enchantment and Other Poems, New York: Fountain Press, and London: Macmillan, 1930, 542 copies, dedicated to Robert Frost. Vale and Other Poems, London and New York: Macmillan, 1931, fifty pages, taking its title from the “Vale” first printed in 1928.⁸⁷

Contents. These small volumes belong to the years of the American tours and of Violet Russell’s last illness, and move among visionary landscape, grief, age, ancestry and farewell. Their one famous poem is “Germinal,” in Vale, which Russell later quoted as the example of how “in my age … I think I shape poetry more out of my experience of life,” where “when I was young I had little but intuition.” Five six-line stanzas: “Call not thy wanderer home as yet / Though it be late. / Now is his first assailing of / The invisible gate. / Be still through that light knocking. The hour / Is thronged with fate.” The “delicate first comer” at that gate “shall be king. / They shall obey, even the mightiest, / That gentle thing”; “All the strong powers of Dante were bowed / To a child’s mild eyes”; and the fourth stanza gives the most quoted lines he wrote: “In ancient shadows and twilights / Where childhood had strayed, / The world’s great sorrows were born / And its heroes were made. / In the lost boyhood of Judas / Christ was betrayed.” Russell’s gloss: “the soul in its first kiss of the body renews an ancient love; and in this kiss, however gentle, are all the desires which brought it back to the world.”

Themes and takeaway. Karma and reincarnation turned into a psychology of childhood — the first image that enters the child rules the life — in short, cadenced, unornamented lines with no twilight scenery at all. The full contents of Enchantment and Vale are not available in open texts and must be described from bibliography rather than reading.

Song and Its Fountains (1932)#

At a glance. London and New York: Macmillan, 1932; 133 pages in fourteen numbered sections; dedicated “To Violet and Diarmuid”; published about two weeks after Violet Russell’s death. Title-page epigraph from the Chaldaean Oracles: “Explore the River of the Soul, whence or in what order you have come; so that although you have become a servant to the body, you may again rise to the Order from which you descended, joining works to sacred reason.” Preface: “In what follows I have tried to track song back to its secret fountains … Those who cannot follow my reasoning may perhaps be amused or interested by the fantasy a poet built about his life and poetry.”⁸⁸

Argument by section. I begins from the sages’ retrospective meditation — retracing the day backwards, then the years — which drove Russell “to go back to origins”: to the birth of his love of colour at four or five (the daffodils; a story-hero’s “magic sword with a hilt of silver and a blade of blue steel” — “blue and silver!”); to the waking dream at fifteen in which a Child of Darkness whispered “We of the Darkness are more ancient than you of the Light,” “the root of my many revolts against accepted faiths”; to the revelation of Earth as a living being on the hill of Kilmashogue; and to the dying woman whose self-forgetfulness began “whatever selflessness was in my life.” Each intimate has a “governing myth” — Yeats’s is “a duality in self, of being and shadow,” from a boyhood drawing to A Vision. “I could never be like Plotinus and place the good above the beautiful.” II: the psyche that sought incarnation “was no angelic thing, pure and new from a foundry of souls … but a being stained with the dust and conflict of a long travel through time,” and dual — avid for life, cold and seeking Spirit; dream shows a sundering into seer and creator, and “the poem seemed like an oracle delivered to the waking self from some dweller or genie in the innermost.” III: “How is poetry born in us? … Some character in aspiration determines the character of inspiration”; poems as the residue of waking dream — in a corridor at Pim’s he became a child adoring a dawn behind snowy peaks — and the doctrine that “we first imagine, and … later the imagination attracts its affinities, and we live in the body what had first arisen in soul.” IV: the possible readings of waking dreams — past lives, transfigured memories, symbolic dream, moments in others’ lives, the memory of nature. V: retrospective meditation may reach past lives; the “terror” that stopped “Resurrection” for thirty years, and the necessity that “before the psyche can be absorbed in spirit … there must be resurrection of the past, a resurrection of memory of all the evil we have done, and that agony must be endured”; “The Cave of Lilith” glossed — Lilith is “that Maya in which we look outside ourselves,” the sad singer the psyche, the Wise One the Spirit; “Babylon,” which came “surrounded by a wavering of phantom pictures … a great room with stone walls and an iron door,” and the later discovery that in a buried city of Bashan “the iron doors were still in the stone walls”; conclusion: Deity is “a fusion of opposites.” VI: the genesis of “Michael”; a dialogue written “as rapidly as fingers could move” whose purport he did not know until it was written — “I could only assume an internal creator”; “I believe all poetry is born beneath the dream consciousness”; the Upanishads’ four states, and the naming of “that high centre within us where the images of earth are so glorified and returned to us I call the Mount of Transfiguration.” VII: against Lowes’s Road to Xanadu; the three stages of waking — motion in deep being, images, words — which Yeats said he shared; “The Indian sages say the spirit is not taken by thought. It takes whom it wills”; the Krishna of the cabin door as the cycle “in which there is always the mystery of fallen life and unfallen majesty together in the same being”; and the fear that in age he may be “like that sad singer lost in the Caves of Lilith … where the ancient ritual is still sung but in the absence of the indwelling god.” VIII: “I am a far exile from that great glory which inhabits the universe, and can but peer through some momentary dusky transparency in my nature to a greater light than the light of day”; music before words as “a Jacob’s Ladder of Sound to the Logos”; “It is the most exciting of all adventures, the exploration of the psyche”; death as “the beginning of a long meditation in which soul returns to spirit.” IX is the doctrine of the Mount: “I think all true poetry was conceived on the Mount of Transfiguration”; the romantic imagination of Coleridge, Keats and Shelley is conceived there equally with the mystical; “we … are in council with the Cosmocratores. Our Eden is not left behind time, but is all about us and within us”; the poet as prophet, and the sin of simony; “No Church to-day can convince me that it is inspired until the words arising from it even in anger break in a storm of beauty on the ear.” X: no inspiration ever came for stories or plays — “It was not my Dharma”; “I felt as if there was a shepherd within who brought back the flock of strayed desires and fancies to a fold which was their own”; even The National Being led to “the spirit behind national movements” and so to The Interpreters; like Ulysses in Plato’s myth he had “chosen before birth a life in which I was primarily to be mystic.” XI: a symbolic myth projected into meditation — a hall of misshapen monsters, the melancholy King Nuada, the slender Armid, the gods degraded to serving the Fomorians, and Lug “a great flame-coloured warrior on a winged steed” telling the King “that he, Nuada, the power that was will, alone was real” — the germ of The House of the Titans, of which “a thousand lines or more” were then written. XII: “The high noon of time is past. We are nearing to its twilight”; spirit transcends psyche as psyche transcends ego; “When we love we are really seeking for it, and I think our most passionate kisses are given to that Lover who will not surrender to us”; “we must think of Heaven and Hell as equally dragons in the path.” XIII: in youth, having supplicated the divine powers, Russell, “normally stuttering and stammering,” was “thrust aside in my own body” and a being spoke through him with “the burning, live, unshaken voice”; “There are beings as far transcending us in wisdom and power as we may transcend the amoeba”; Neander’s remark on the Gnostics — that the mind made in God’s image “even in its wildest speculations … follows an image of truth” — applied to his own Connla’s Well poem; “The fallen divinity for an instant forgets that It is fallen and speaks as to immortals.” XIV, the close: “‘The One became many,’ said the ancient seers. Everything therefore is divinely descended”; a “riotous fertility of fancy … chokes us and blinds us on our way to the True,” and only images “which seem to have a lamp of spiritual meaning within them, which are not opaque but transparent” are to be followed; the confession “I have not written this book to my satisfaction, feeling throughout I have blundered and erred, and the lamp of intuition I held was often dim or went out altogether”; and the gain — “there are hours of resurrection when the fallen angels of the heart begin to wear again their ancient angel faces … knowing that the dead may rise” — before the last poem, “Now the quietude of earth / Nestles deep my heart within,” ending “And the ancient mystery / Holds its hands out day by day, / Takes a chair and croons with me / By my cabin built of clay.”

Major themes. The pre-existent, dual, far-travelled psyche. Poems as oracles. Retrospective meditation as a method of self-knowledge reaching before birth. The Mount of Transfiguration. The poet as prophet. Discernment: transparent against opaque images. Age and the departed god.

Esoteric content. The Chaldaean Oracles; the Upanishadic four states; the Platonic myth of Er; the Cosmocratores; the Gnostic Pleroma and Neander; the Kabbalistic ladder of sound to the Logos; the Vaishnava Krishna; the Sad Singer and the Wise One; Maya. Gibbon called the epigraph “the key to his poetry.”

Relation to other works. The sequel to The Candle of Vision and the workshop in which “Resurrection,” “Michael,” “Babylon,” “Germinal” and the Nuada myth are opened; the account of Yeats’s governing myth is a primary document of that friendship.

Takeaway. Poems are evidence of a soul that nightly returns to its divine root and sends the images of earth back transfigured; the exploration of the psyche is the true science of poetry, and its condition is purity — “I can only speak where I have been faithful.”

The Avatars: A Futurist Fantasy (1933)#

At a glance. London and New York: Macmillan, 1933; dedicated “To W.B. Yeats” (a draft dedication calling him “my oldest friend and enemy” was cut). An introduction and twenty-six short chapters. The setting is an unnamed West of Ireland — “a land where lived a perfectly impossible people with whom anything was possible” — some generations after the world war, in a mechanised world-state. Russell’s introduction: “There is no imagination of mine about Avatars in this book. No more than an artist could paint the sun at noon could I imagine so great beings. But as a painter may suggest the light on hill or wood, so in this fantasy I tried to imagine the spiritual excitement created by two people who pass dimly through the narrative, spoken of by others but not speaking themselves. … The friends with whom I once spoke of such things are dead or gone far from me. If they were with me, out of dream, vision and intuition shared between us, I might have made the narrative to glow. As it is, I have only been able to light my way with my own flickering lantern.”⁸⁹

Plot. Paul Heron, a painter, flees a fog-bound industrial city that seems “an evil wrought by sorcerers,” ruled by a “council of wizards … like to that fabled Balor of the Evil Eye, but petrifying hearts, not bodies,” for the western sea, where the old philosopher Michael Conaire had been “an elder brother” to him as a boy. On the road he has a vision of a snowbound cottage with one lit window and, above it, “two watchers, crested with many-colored lights, gigantic forms … They held swords of wavering flame as if guardians of some precious thing” (I). Conaire — “There is a prologue in heaven to that” — tells his own youthful vision: after the world war, Ares proud of having “drawn men in millions to act in his greatest drama,” the gentler deities resolving on a new drama with gods as actors, since “Only a deity could undo what a deity had done,” and choosing, over the heavy hearts of the Old World and the fierce hearts of the New, “the perfectly impossible people.” His theory: “The purpose of an Avatar is to reveal the spiritual character of a race to itself” (II). Paul dreams himself into “the heart of a great mountain,” “a dazzle of light cast up from some interior fountain,” and wakes reborn (III). An essay-chapter describes the cities of the Iron Age, “dominated by the dark mechanic genius,” haunted by “the larvae of the dead,” where “the character of the goat, the hog and the rat began to appear in men’s faces and to efface the divine signature” (IV).

In summer, painting the great mountain, Paul adds a crest of mystic flame, and a golden-haired boy of twelve or fourteen asks, “What is that light on the hill?” — “They call me a changeling … I will not be shut out of the air … I imagine them wearing gay colors and they begin to wear them.” His name is Aodh, and “many years were to pass before he again saw Aodh” (V). Aodh, leaping the crags, leaves his body, meets a being “winged with flame above the brows” — “I know you, Shepherd of the Starry Flocks. What soul do you now draw from the abyss?” — plays on a fiddle a melody “of his own imagining,” and climbs at night into an opal palace in the mountain where the immortals bow to him, “for the child who was there was one of themselves, one who had left the Imperishable Light, laying aside scepter and diadem and had narrowed himself to that body that he might waken the souls in the abyss of earth” (VI). Conaire’s small daughter Olive speaks of Aoife, “the Princess,” who owns the mountain and the lake and “sets me on fire,” with whom she sees “tall silvery people” grow from the trees (VII). The poet Felim Carew arrives, reads Paul’s three pictures — the aureoled cottage, the flame-crested mountain, the boy — as “A divine child! A manger, heavenly guarded! A holy mountain!” and is accepted into the fellowship (VIII); he names the colony of artists and “obscure mystics” in the hills “the nucleus of an army in conflict with the vast mechanism of the world … It is there the temple of the future will be built. … We are like planets drawn to circle about an invisible sun” (IX). On Midsummer Eve Felim hopes “it will be the magic of the Gay” — “The real betrayal of Jesus was not by Judas but by the other apostles who would not speak of the laughter of Jesus” — and Paul, alone on the sands, is “pelted … with celestial fire” by a being from a fountain in Anima Mundi in whose face “came the face of a child” (X). The middle chapters gather the chorus: Mark the sculptor, whose reliefs show the psyche winging out of the brute, and his wife Mary, who teaches the children to dance; the dreaming children Rory and Aileen, who remember Egypt; Mary’s tale of a peasant “Fairy Fiddler” whose playing gave “the happiness and heartache of infinite desire”; and Michael Gregor, “lofty, dark, exasperated nobility,” who holds all idealism “self-begotten fantasy,” believes only in will — “One strong man can make a thousand men of understanding tremble” — and dares not dream: “There’s many a lovely Paradise in Hell” (XII–XIII).

Seven years pass. Olive returns grown — “It is we who make civilizations and we have the right to break them” — and asks to become “an initiate of the guild” (XIV). Gregor warns that “the great beast is aroused”: the State has traced the world’s unrest to “the spiritual anarchists, pagan poets and vagabond idealists”; “The machine is efficient. Nobody is hungry now though the spirit may be starved” (XV). Olive bursts in: Aoife has gone — with a tall man with “a great mane of yellow golden hair … like a lion’s mane” and a violin-case, who said at the cromlech, “It is time for the play to begin. The chorus knows their parts,” and to whom Aoife answered, “I am ready.” Felim: “It is the child of your vision … Mary’s Fairy Fiddler now grown up … We are the chorus”; “Did an Avatar ever sit on a throne? Have they not always gone about the world as vagrants?” (XVI). Rumours come from the south of moonlit dances in which men and women “were god and goddess to each other.” Olive finds them: Rory’s play, Aodh’s violin — “the melody of ether itself” — and, in a mossy hollow, Aoife teaching that “we became what we imagine … The universe itself was nothing but Imagination ceaselessly creative … The body even is a palace all marvelous within. It has secret radiant gateways opening inward to light,” while Aodh, silent, seems to make the images glow in the air (XVII). Gregor brings news of “a plot … to tie together the loose ends of society” (XVIII), and has seen “dark and surly brutes … exotic to this country” near the village festival; he can dream now, and recites Felim’s “Comfort” — “I might after death wake amid heavenly things and be hailed there as a martyr who had died for a beauty he had never seen.” At the festival, by lantern-light, Paul sees the two faces, and hears Aoife call the people from “dark cities, their dead religions, their grey churches” to “the altars of the hills”: “Ah, my darlings, you must fight and you must suffer … laying down in dark places the foundations of that holy earth of prophecy … till God and the world be one.” A signal, a rush of dark figures, Gregor’s cry “Oh, the devils”; Paul is bludgeoned. He wakes to Olive’s news: Gregor is dead, “the first martyr for a faith he did not hold,” and Aodh and Aoife have vanished, “living or dead” (XIX).

The ending. The last seven chapters (XX–XXVI) are a symposium in Paul’s studio a year later. The story “is becoming one of the great legends of the world”; pilgrims walk “the Route of the Mystic Revelers”; an American, Cluborn, is funding a temple where the two disappeared and has “wrote down all that was told to me that nothing might be lost.” The friends argue what the visit meant. Conaire: Aodh “creates by imagination what he desires,” and “it was … to kindle a creative imagination that Aodh was born into our sphere … We have through long ages imagined ourselves into what we are. We have now to imagine ourselves back into light” (XXII). Rory: “Has not every Avatar his symbol, caduceus, lyre or cross! I think Aodh will carry that violin as long as he is in the memory of earth.” Olive: “You forget with Aodh there was Aoife … Whatever mystery had to be revealed two had to come … There must be an ethic in every revelation of the spirit. What are we to do with each other from day to day?” (XXIII). A man has made a shrine of the room they entered — “That is coming nigh idolatry”; a fashionable story-teller announces a romance in which “of course she became his mistress”; Conaire reflects on how the story of Jesus “was smothered with monstrous growths” (XXIV). Then the book’s verdict: the avatars “differ from all Avatars of whom we have knowledge in this, that they left behind them no body of doctrine … They played like two divine children”; “They gave us no ethic, no commandment”; and “I doubt if they were killed. I think they went inward and homeward. Gregor was the only martyr.” The temple “will light the candle of vision within the psyche”; the friends resolve to climb inward together, and Paul sees a Titan figure with the lion mane sweep its hand round the circle so that “a light ran from heart to heart linking them as by a chain of fire” (XXV). They agree to meet in soul on Midsummer Eve in “a vast hall with high marvelous pillars, a hall lit with a delicate golden air,” which all recognise, and part “as those do who know that departure is not farewell and that space is but a myth to soul.” The last scene is Paul and Olive on the hill road where the avatars met; Paul knows he is “however humbly, one of the heavenly household,” and Olive stands with “her face lifted up to the skies … and at that moment he loved her more in forgetting than in remembering him” (XXVI).

Characters. Paul Heron is the seer-painter who gives permanence to vision, and the book’s eyes. Michael Conaire is the philosopher-mystic — Russell’s self-portrait — who holds the theory of avatars and of freedom. Olive is the genius for living and the heart’s ethic, Aoife’s moon. Felim Carew is the poet — many of his poems are Russell’s own, reprinted in The House of the Titans — and the herald who runs before the king. Michael Gregor is the will: the lapsed man of the cities who fears dream and dies for a beauty he never saw. Mark and Mary are the crafts-colony; Rory and Aileen the generation for whom the universe is music; Cluborn the New World’s generosity and the gospel-collector. Aodh (“fire”) is the male avatar — creative imagination, freedom, music; his symbol the violin, his lion’s mane a solar sign. Aoife is the female avatar — beauty, the “Dawn Maiden,” the transfiguring companionship; she alone of the two is heard, and only through others. The State is never personified: “a multitude of devils … its name is legion.”

Major themes. The Iron Age and the “dark mechanic genius”: mechanism as sorcery that petrifies the heart, whose perfected state feeds the body and starves the spirit. Spiritual excitement rather than doctrine: each witness receives “the gift from heaven that he or she desired.” Art and fellowship as the true civilisation: “If three people are together under the skies and the soul is conscious between them, that is civilization.” The neglected “country of stones” as the site of the future temple. How gospels corrupt: legend, pilgrimage, shrine, idolatry, the vulgarising story-teller. Going inward and homeward rather than building another civilisation.

Esoteric symbolism. Theosophical: Avatars and Manus who “think out … the religions of the future”; the incarnating spark as “a little part” of the immortal; reincarnation memories; Anima Mundi and the larvae of the dead; Maya; the seven-year cycle. Platonic: the divine earth of the Phaedo “with temples where the gods do truly dwell”; Er’s choice of lives; Hermes’ “Equal thyself to God.” Celtic: the Sídhe, Ildathach, the cromlech as the place of meeting, Midsummer Eve as the thinning of the veil, the mountain as a palace of the gods, the “Shepherd of the Starry Flocks” who is the Manannán of the last book. Christian and Gnostic: “the return of the Son to the Father”; “Come out of her, my people”; the Promethean fire-bringers; the chain of fire as a Pentecost.

Relation to other works. The direct sequel-world of The Interpreters, whose Lavelle and Brehon are named as “forerunners”; Aodh’s out-of-body flight repeats “A Dream of Angus Oge”; Aoife’s teaching is The Candle of Vision dramatised; the 1897 avatar prophecy, forty years on, written as fiction by a man who no longer expected to see it fulfilled.

Takeaway. A god’s visit leaves not a creed but a quickening. The avatars are not killed but “went inward and homeward”; salvation is the group’s own ascent by imagination, will and fellowship; and the only martyr is the sceptic.

The House of the Titans and Other Poems (1934)#

At a glance. London and New York: Macmillan, 1934. A verse dedication “To Osborn Bergin” — “not only because you are my friend, / But that you are one of those who learned / An ancient speech for us, who rediscovered / Myths, once the scriptures of the northern world, / I bring this poem, half dream, half vision, to you. / I know, incredulous scholar, you will lift / Ironic eyebrows as you read the tale” — which tells readers they “may find titans and king within / Themselves” and hear “the ageless shepherds of the starry flocks.” Then the title poem, some 2,700 lines of blank verse, and twenty-eight shorter poems. Some electronic texts wrongly carry the MacKenna dedication of The Interpreters.⁹⁰

The title poem. “The day was dead, and in the titans’ hall / The darkness gathered like some monstrous beast / Prowling from pillar unto pillar.” Nuada, “the sky-born king … now king of earth,” sits on a golden throne, “His heart darkened, because the god within, / Slumbering or unremembering, was mute.” Beside him is Armid, “the wise child of the healing god” Diancecht, a shape “of ivory and gold.” The titan brood brawl in the dark; Angus plays, and his scarlet birds fill the dusk with “heart-melting eyes, alluring lips” that drive the giants to lust — to Armid he now seems “a fleshless creature … With bony fingers clutching at the strings.” “The gods had learned to weep, the earth’s first gift.” Armid asks: “Tell me our story, god-descended king, / For we have dwindled down, and from ourselves / Have passed away, and have forgotten all.” Nuada would rather memory died; she answers, “Let it not die … that ancestral self / May wake from out this pitiful dream of ours.”

Nuada’s tale is the cosmogony in verse. “In the beginning was the boundless Lir / Within whose being heaven and earth were lost, / And Light and Dark cradled together lay … at the Feast of Age.” Day begins; the legions of Light and Dark build “Ethereal realms and dim underworlds”; in the overworld the builders rear the four cities, Murias, Gorias, Findias and Falias, which “soared heavenward even at the thought.” Below, “the sorceress writhing in her mists” shapes hateful effigies, and “The only ecstasy life knew was pain, / And torture was the only sacrifice.” The cry of the underworld rises. In Nuada’s palace the shining air, “both light and sound together,” shrills with woe — “Sorrow … Came cowled invisibly past watch and ward” — and Nuada rouses the host: “This is the ending of the golden age … Ye have heard / The Children of the Darkness cry to us. / And we who are the Children of the Light / Must answer in the infinite brotherhood. / Who will go with me to that underworld / Where Balor for an iron age hath made / Anguish immutable? Who ventures there / Must wear the very body of death, and feel / The very soul of hate gnaw in his heart; / And can but overcome them so he use / The tender and fierce fire of spirit alone.” The gods answer with their gifts: “‘To earth I give the magic of the mind,’ / Said Manannan, nighest of all to Lir. / And Dana said, ‘I shall make beauty there.’ / And Angus said, ‘My birds shall waken love.’ / Ogma, ‘The might of heaven is mine to give.’ / Fintan, ‘I shall bring memory and hope.’ / ‘And I shall be the vanishing of pain,’ / Said Diancecht.” They descend “Down the sidereal streams” to “earth, the desert verge of things,” hanging “By but the frailest thread of memory from / The habitations of eternity.” The titans worship them and build “Cyclopean duns”; but “Some evil sorcery worked on the gods, / And from them one by one dropped memory”; they take titan brides, “And last the being of the gods was changed / To be but lordlier titan, and their king / Seemed but a madman dreaming of lost worlds.”

The ending follows the tale. Armid, looking into the hall, sees the titans become ghouls, apes and snakes, and worse, the sky-maidens “violated / By the passionate imagination,” for it was Angus’s own song that “kindled / Desire so high that the sky maidens only / Could satisfy the god-created lust.” A titan’s “red and bestial eyes” fix on her; she flees to the shore, where a star rises in the west: a winged horse whose rider’s brow blazes with sunrise, “a pillar of flame, his eyes so still / They might have watched only eternities.” He sends her to the king with an offer repeated in each of the gods’ offices — as a champion, an enchanter, a poet, a knower of “things past … things to be,” a healer, a shepherd with “wisdom / To guide the starry flocks” — and Nuada refuses each, for he has Ogma, who “now … leads the giants in war,” Dana, who “upon brute imaginings … casts / Her glamour,” Angus, who “praises beauty that is but redness of clay,” Fintan, Diancecht and the Son of Lir, each corrupted. “It is easier to rule the heavens than the earth.” Then: “Ask the high king has he in that dark house / One who is master of so many arts.” Nuada sits upright “As if a star had lighted the abyss / Of memory”: “Bring unto me that master of many arts” — the Lugh of the Tara legend, never named. Only the king and Armid see the god, who says: “Thou only / Art real, these, but shadows of immortals. / Since thou art darkened I will enter thee / Giving my light to see the unfallen lights. / Thou shalt hear voices speaking from thy own depths.” The hall pales, the Ever-Living appear, and the gods speak in turn as voices within the king. Angus: “I am the All-Father’s voice … I am known only to self forgetfulness. / My love shall be in thine when love is sacrifice.” Diancecht, as inexorable justice: “Yield to me and thou art my conqueror. / There is no other god than me to fear.” Dana: “I am the tender voice calling away … My heart shall be in thine when thine forgives.” Ogma: “I was made master by the All-Father only / Because I was the gentlest of the gods … I can stay the march of armies by a child.” Fintan: “I am all knowledge … Desiring nothing / I will give thee all.” Last, the Son of Lir: “I am the shepherd of the starry flocks, / The wisdom of the gods … Those who know / The heavens only are but slaves of light … When thou shalt pray, not for thyself, but for those others / I will give thee the wisdom of eternity.” By their mingled light Nuada sees into the titan heart and its whole future — desire, despair, “the descent to hells,” penitence, until it “Found in its depths the magian mind that can / Grow what it dreams on,” and the earth becomes “A mother speaking to her children,” and beyond that “that great hostel at the end of time / Where all the cycles sleep.” The last lines return him to the hall: “So the high king, rapt in his vision, dreamed … and came at last / To open his eyes upon the brazen gloom / To know the labor before him, and to hear / The titans raving madly in the hall.” He is inwardly restored — the god has entered him — but outwardly nothing is changed.

Characters. Nuada is the sovereign or godlike intelligence latent in the psyche, the will “that alone was real.” Armid is healing intuition, longing and remembrance. The titans are the heavy, instinctive, fearful, possessive elements of the self. The six gods are faculties — mind, beauty, love, power, memory, healing — each of which, disconnected from its source, degenerates: beauty into lust, power into tyranny, imagination into glamour, song into praise of “redness of clay.” The master of many arts is the higher self, and his light is what makes the gods audible again.

Major themes. Divine amnesia: the crisis is not pain or tyranny but forgetting — the titans who “sighed and knew / Not why they sighed” under the night sky. Pity as descent: the gods fall not through pride or punishment but in answer to a cry; spirit’s task is to enter suffering and transform it, at the risk of losing itself. Myth as inner psychology, as the dedication instructs. The danger of spiritual distortion: the sacred can be misused, and awakening is not automatic. The unchanged world: restoration is inward, and the labour remains.

Symbolism. Lir is the Absolute; the four cities are the archetypal planes; the descent of the Children of Light into Balor’s iron age is the Theosophical myth of the fire-bringers and the Gnostic myth of the Aeon who mirrored himself in chaos; the dropping of memory is Lethe and the “coats of skin”; the gods’ voices are the Neoplatonic return by self-forgetfulness, forgiveness, gentleness and desirelessness. The pattern invites comparison with the late-antique Hymn of the Pearl, though no direct borrowing is established.

The shorter poems. “Lost Talisman” mourns “Those images of beauty / That once I did despise, / Now in my age I cherish / And clutch with miser’s eyes.” “Time Spirits” rejects the “slang of the town” for what “has some touch of the timeless on it,” quoting Aratus: “Full of Zeus the city: / Full of Zeus the harbor; and full of Zeus / Are all the ways of men.” “The Iron Age Departs” glimpses lovers made “virginal” again in a returned Golden Age, broken by “the dragon croak of the city … And I / Was again in the iron time.” “Karma” accepts that “All that was harsh or sweet / To me was brought / Through some affinity / With soul or sense or thought. / I complain not nor wonder. / Just was my lot,” and ends “Though long passed from our glory, / I can sing! I could fly!” “Incarnation,” first Felim’s poem in The Avatars, addresses a dancing child: “Thou slender of limb; thou lightness; / Wild grace that flies … This moment that shall be for thee / A fountain of tears.” “Eros” names a love “More ancient than all human love.” “A Mountain Tarn” makes the pool “a magic cauldron” in which “the god is there.” “To One Who Wanted a Philosophy from Me” is the poet’s refusal of system: “You tell me of my songs you cannot fit / Their thought together, so contrary the lights. / I cannot help you to the sense of it. / We rise and fall, have many days and nights, / Make songs in both; and when we are in our pit / Gaze back in wonder at our own endless heights.” “Growth” finds it “half an indignity and half a delight / To know in age that I am but a child / Kept in a nursery.” “The Dark Lady” is a 293-line monologue for Shakespeare’s mistress. “The Spell” and “A Farewell” close the book and the life: “So many times my spirit went / This dark transfiguring way … Deeper than thought it knows / Unto what majesty of flame.”

Relation to other works. The god-voices gloss the whole system; the Shepherd of the Starry Flocks, the Feast of Age and the “slaves of light” are the vocabulary of The Avatars; the myth was first projected in meditation and described in Song and Its Fountains XI; “Dana” of 1904 is set into the god’s speech; Felim Carew’s poems reappear as Russell’s own.

Takeaway. The soul descended into matter out of pity and forgot its source; it must recover its divinity not by fleeing the world but by hearing, within itself, the voices it brought down with it — and then return to the labour with the titans still raving in the hall.

Selected Poems (1935)#

At a glance. London and New York: Macmillan, September 1935, two months after Russell’s death; arranged by source volume from Homeward to The House of the Titans; reissued Dublin: Swan River Press, 2017, with an afterword by Daniel Mulhall. The author’s note: “If I should be remembered I would like it to be for the verses in this book. They are my choice out of the poetry I have written.”⁹¹

Takeaway. His own late judgement on a poetic career that had become difficult to separate from his public reputation as sage and organiser.

Posthumous Collections and Editions#

Some Passages from the Letters of AE to W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Cuala, 1936) preserves part of the central friendship. The Living Torch, edited by Monk Gibbon (London: Macmillan, 1937), gathers pieces from the Irish Statesman “selected, extracted, amalgamated and re-arranged” under six heads — literature and criticism, men and women, “politics of time and eternity,” further criticism, aphorisms, civics and rural economy — behind Gibbon’s eighty-page introductory essay; it is Russell’s table-talk, and contains such statements as “A nation exists primarily because of its own imagination of itself,” “Beauty is one of the names of God in all the religions,” “We may fight against what is wrong, but if we allow ourselves to hate, that is to ensure our spiritual defeat and our likeness to what we hate,” and, asked the next form of religion, “A religion of ethics.” AE’s Letters to Mínanlábáin (New York: Macmillan, 1937) are to Kingsley Porter and his wife at Glenveagh. Alan Denson’s Letters from AE (1961) broadened the correspondence; Henry Summerfield’s two-volume Selections from the Contributions to The Irish Homestead (1978) recovered the practical journalist; The Descent of the Gods: Comprising the Mystical Writings of G. W. Russell “A.E.” (1988), edited by Raghavan and Nandini Iyer, assembled The Candle of Vision, The Interpreters, Song and Its Fountains, The Avatars, the Irish Theosophist and Lucifer writings and the unpublished story “The Return,” with a Theosophical introduction and notes; Peter Kuch’s Writings on Literature and Art (2011) completed another part of the projected collected works.⁹²

Reception and Significance#

Russell was mourned as a sage, but for much of the later twentieth century he was remembered mainly as a supporting figure in the lives of Yeats and Joyce. Contemporary assessments were more exact. Darrell Figgis argued in 1916 that the visionary and the economist were inseparable: “Man the child of Dana, and man crushed by a vast and nightmare engine, were not for him two persons.” In the memorial number of The Canadian Theosophist P. G. Bowen wrote that “before all else, Æ was a Theosophist,” whose aim “overriding all else was to bring knowledge of the World of Spirit” to others. Katharine Tynan’s description — “He is of the world, unworldly — the world’s stain has never touched him; without religion, yet profoundly religious” — which Monk Gibbon quoted in 1937 as the judgement of a devout Catholic friend, captures the tension between his public effectiveness and his refusal of conventional creed.⁹³⁹⁴⁹⁵

The American reception stressed prophecy and practical idealism. Henry A. Wallace’s essay of 1955 called Russell “a prophet out of an ancient age,” and their friendship, linking an Irish mystic and cooperative organiser with a future Secretary of Agriculture and Vice-President of the United States, remains one of the clearest examples of the reach of his rural and spiritual thought.⁹⁶

Modern scholarship began with Alan Denson’s bibliography and letters (1961) and Henry Summerfield’s That Myriad-Minded Man (1975), still the fullest account of the visions, the Household and the Hermetic Society; Summerfield also wrote the entry on AE in the Brill Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (2005). Peter Kuch reconstructed the Dublin Theosophical formation in Yeats and A.E. (1986), and Kathleen Raine read Russell within the initiatory background of the Revival in Yeats the Initiate (1986). The Iyers’ Descent of the Gods (1988) made the mystical writings available as a corpus.⁹⁷

Later work recovered other dimensions. Nicholas Allen studied the political editor and the new Ireland; Joseph Lennon placed Russell within Irish Orientalism; Selina Guinness reappraised the Protestant and dissenting context of Irish Theosophy against R. F. Foster’s dismissal of “Protestant magic”; Michael McAteer examined his relation to Standish O’Grady and Yeats. This scholarship has made it harder to divide Russell into a “real” organiser and a merely private mystic: his cooperative politics, national imagery and esoteric anthropology continually shape one another.⁹⁸

Work focused specifically on Gnostic influence is at an early stage. Camden Roy’s 2021 Inquiry Journal piece is an undergraduate research brief, not a monograph or a consensus; it proposes that the God-world beyond the Heaven-world, the ascent past intermediary beings and the light–darkness patterns disclose a stronger Gnostic inheritance than earlier scholars recognised. Roy is scheduled to present a paper on Theosophy and Irish nationalism in Russell’s work to the American Academy of Religion in November 2026; at the time of this entry’s revision that is forthcoming conference work.⁹⁹

Public interest has revived. The Lurgan and North Armagh George Russell Society, founded in 2017, runs an annual festival. Armagh County Museum holds some twenty-four works by Russell. A separate Æ George Russell Society was inaugurated in Dublin on 28 October 2023 and held its first summer school from 2 to 6 July 2025; its website announces The Sage: The Journal of AE Studies for 30 September 2026, which at the time of writing is an announced launch rather than a publication record.¹⁰⁰

Russell’s significance within modern esotericism lies in both his institutions and his ideas: a Theosophical formation, a meditation-centred Hermetic Society sustained for thirty-five years, a living and remembering nature, layered worlds, reincarnation, correspondences, transformative imagination, and a perennial wisdom read across traditions. His distinctiveness does not lie in secrecy or in a codified system. It lies in making visionary experience public in unusually lucid prose, in reconstructing an emanationist cosmogony from Irish myth and claiming to have seen it before he read it, and in asking what such experience would require of art, ethics, agriculture and democratic life. His Celtic scheme is historically speculative, his language theory is not linguistics, and his visionary claims cannot be independently confirmed; but the body of work asks, with unusual consistency, how inward knowledge might be disciplined, communicated in art and embodied in institutions without being reduced to dogma.

Bibliography#

Primary#

Russell, George William (“Æ”), Homeward: Songs by the Way. Dublin: Whaley, 1894.

——. The Earth Breath and Other Poems. New York and London: John Lane, 1897.

——. Ideals in Ireland: Priest or Hero? Dublin, 1897.

——, W. B. Yeats, John Eglinton and William Larminie. Literary Ideals in Ireland. London: Fisher Unwin, 1899.

——. The Nuts of Knowledge. Dundrum: Dun Emer Press, 1903.

——. The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories. Dublin: Whaley, [1904].

——. The Divine Vision and Other Poems. London and New York: Macmillan, 1904.

——. By Still Waters. Dundrum: Dun Emer Press, 1906.

——. Some Irish Essays. Dublin: Maunsel, 1906.

——. Deirdre: A Drama in Three Acts. Dublin: Maunsel, 1907.

——. The Hero in Man. Hale, Cheshire, and London: D. N. Dunlop and Clifford Bax, 1909; 2nd ed., London: Orpheus Press, 1910.

——. The Building Up of a Rural Civilisation. Dublin: Sealy, Bryers & Walker, 1910.

——. The Renewal of Youth. London: Orpheus Press, 1911.

——. Co-operation and Nationality. Dublin: Maunsel, 1912.

——. Collected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1913; enlarged 1919; 2nd ed. 1926.

——. Gods of War, with Other Poems. Dublin: privately printed, 1915.

——. Imaginations and Reveries. Dublin and London: Maunsel, 1915; 2nd ed. 1921.

——. The National Being: Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity. Dublin and London: Maunsel, 1916.

——. Salutation: A Poem on the Irish Rebellion of 1916. London: privately printed, 1917.

——. Thoughts for a Convention. Dublin and London: Maunsel, 1917.

——. The Candle of Vision. London: Macmillan, 1918.

——. The Economics of Ireland and the Policy of the British Government. New York: Huebsch, 1920.

——. The Inner and the Outer Ireland. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1921.

——. Ireland and the Empire at the Court of Conscience. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1921.

——. The Interpreters. London: Macmillan, 1922.

——. Voices of the Stones. London and New York: Macmillan, 1925.

——. Midsummer Eve. New York: Crosby Gaige, 1928.

——. Dark Weeping. London: Faber & Faber, 1929.

——. Enchantment and Other Poems. New York: Fountain Press; London: Macmillan, 1930.

——. Vale and Other Poems. London and New York: Macmillan, 1931.

——. Song and Its Fountains. London and New York: Macmillan, 1932.

——. The Avatars: A Futurist Fantasy. London and New York: Macmillan, 1933.

——. The House of the Titans and Other Poems. London and New York: Macmillan, 1934.

——. Selected Poems. London and New York: Macmillan, 1935.

——. The Living Torch. Edited by Monk Gibbon. London: Macmillan, 1937.

——. Letters from AE. Edited by Alan Denson. London and New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1961.

——. Selections from the Contributions to The Irish Homestead. Edited by Henry Summerfield. 2 vols. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1978.

——. The Descent of the Gods: Comprising the Mystical Writings of G. W. Russell “A.E.” Edited by Raghavan Iyer and Nandini Iyer. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988.

——. Writings on Literature and Art. Edited by Peter Kuch. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2011.

Secondary#

Akai, Toshio. “On the Early Writings of AE and the Theosophical Movement of Dublin Lodge.” The Harp 12 (1997): 75–89.

Allen, Nicholas. George Russell (AE) and the New Ireland, 1905–30. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003.

——. “Russell, George William (‘Æ’).” Dictionary of Irish Biography. Royal Irish Academy, 2009.

Beale, Diana. “Time to Give AE His Due.” Irish Times, 23 August 2004.

Bowen, P. G. “‘Æ’: Theosophist.” The Canadian Theosophist 16, no. 6 (15 August 1935): 162–63.

Boyd, Ernest. Ireland’s Literary Renaissance. Dublin: Maunsel, 1916.

Davis, Robert Bernard. George William Russell (“AE”). Boston: Twayne, 1977.

Denson, Alan. Printed Writings by George W. Russell (Æ): A Bibliography. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961.

Eglinton, John. A Memoir of AE, George William Russell. London: Macmillan, 1937.

Figgis, Darrell. AE (George W. Russell): A Study of a Man and a Nation. Dublin: Maunsel, 1916.

Gibbon, Monk. Introduction to AE, The Living Torch, 3–81. London: Macmillan, 1937.

Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. “Hermeticism and Hermetic Societies.” In Wouter J. Hanegraaff et al., eds., Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, 550–58. Leiden: Brill, 2005.

Guinness, Selina. “‘Protestant Magic’ Reappraised: Evangelicalism, Dissent, and Theosophy.” Irish University Review 33, no. 1 (2003): 14–27.

Kain, Richard M., and James H. O’Brien. George Russell (A.E.). Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1976.

Kuch, Peter. Yeats and A.E.: “The antagonism that unites dear friends”. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1986.

Lennon, Joseph. Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004.

McAteer, Michael. Standish O’Grady, AE and Yeats: History, Politics, Culture. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002.

Raine, Kathleen. Yeats the Initiate. Mountrath: Dolmen Press, 1986.

Roy, Camden. “The Strayed Angel: Gnosticism in the Works of George William Russell (A.E.).” Inquiry Journal, University of New Hampshire, 2021.

Summerfield, Henry. “AE.” In Wouter J. Hanegraaff et al., eds., Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, 2–3. Leiden: Brill, 2005.

——. That Myriad-Minded Man: A Biography of George William Russell “A.E.,” 1867–1935. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1975.

Tynan, Katharine. Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences. London: Smith, Elder, 1913.

Wallace, Henry A. “AE: A Prophet Out of an Ancient Age.” Colby Library Quarterly 4, no. 2 (1955).

Yeats, W. B. Introduction to A Book of Irish Verse. London: Methuen, 1895; rev. 1900. The Trembling of the Veil. London: Werner Laurie, 1922.