Gaul

The Emerald Vault: The Eternal Wisdom and Resurrection of Ancient Gaul Introduction: The Ancestral Doctrine To ancient Gaul, a great doctrine was given. It lived and thrived there in a powerful, inexperienced form, deducing consequences that were unknown elsewhere in the ancient world. While India settled into rigid castes of limitation, the Gaelic organization was founded upon three primitive unities: God, Light, and Liberty. It was a society built on universal equality, the community of belongings, and electoral rights.

We must study these Gaelic philosophical tendencies with deep reverence, for Gaul is the great ancestor in whom we discover, in strong relief, all the qualities of our race. There is no subject more worthy of our respect and inquiry than the doctrine of the Druids. For centuries, they were deemed barbarians, but this was a falsehood. For too long, all we knew of the Celts was what Catholic and Latin writers chose to tell us—writers like Caesar, whose Commentaries were written with an evident eye to posterity, and whose works Philo and Suetonius testify are full of misrepresentations and voluntary errors.

However, the truth survives. Certain fathers of the Church—Cyril, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen —were careful to distinguish the Druids from idolatrous herds, assigning them the noble distinction of "philosophers." The Virile Doctrine: Life, Death, and Courage The progress of Celtic research, through the Triades and the Songs of the Bards, allows us to drink from a clearer source. We now view Druidical philosophy as conforming with the secret doctrines of the Orient and modern spiritualistic thought: it asserts the progressive lives of the spirit as it ascends the ladder of worlds.

This was a virile doctrine. It imbued the Celts with such indomitable courage and self-assurance that they went forth to death as if to a merry-making. While the soldiers of Rome sheathed themselves in steel and iron, the hardy Celts stripped off their clothes and fought bare-breasted. They gloried in their wounds, deeming the artifices of warfare to be no better than cowardice—a nobility of spirit that, tragically, contributed to their many defeats and final downfall.

Their conviction in a future existence was absolute. It was so profound that they often made loans redeemable in a future life. They confided messages to the dying to be delivered to the dead. They viewed the physical remains of dead warriors merely as "torn envelopes," abandoning them on the battlefield to the amazement of their foes, regarding the flesh as unworthy of further consideration once the spirit had fled.

The Celts had no notion of hell. As the poet Lucan praised in his Pharsalia, they believed the spirit does not bury itself in the sombre regions of Erebus but hies straight away to other worlds to animate other bodies. To them, death was but the midway point of a long life. They were happy, these men who knew not the supreme fear of the grave.

The Druids: Sages of the Forest In Druidical institutions, we find the highest expression of Celtic genius. The Druids were not a sacerdotal priesthood; the title "Druid" was equivalent to "sage" or "scientist." Those who bore it were free to choose their own field of action. Some, known as "eubages," presided at religious ceremonies, but the majority devoted themselves to the education of youth, the practice of justice, and the cultivation of science and poetry.

They were chosen by election, requiring twenty years of study for initiation. Their worship was not held in stone temples, but under the green canopy of the woods. A primeval forest was their temple, with innumerable columns and an emerald vault illumined by the sun’s golden shafts. The moaning wind and shivering leaves filled this great green temple with mysterious sound, inclining the soul to reverie.

Their symbols were borrowed from nature: the oak, the most sacred of trees, was the emblem of divine might; the evergreen mistletoe represented immortality. They rejected idols and the puerile forms of Roman faith. Their altar was a heap of boulders, for they believed "a hewn stone is a stone defiled." To ensure their principles remained untainted by material symbolism, they forbade plastic art and written precepts, entrusting their tenets solely to the memories of bards and initiates.

We must also address the harsh condemnation regarding human sacrifices. In the main, these were legal executions. The Druids, acting as magistrates and executioners, made a holocaust of condemned criminals to the Supreme Power, often with an interval of five years between sentence and execution. Eager to rejoin their departed in happier spheres, these Celts gaily mounted the sacrificial stone, death coming to them amidst a song of joy.

The Theology of the Circles The Druids taught the Oneness of God. The deities Teutates, Esus, and Gwyon were nothing more in the Celtic Pantheon than the personifications of force, light, and mind. Above these reigned the Infinite Power, worshipped in the majestic silence of the forests. Their metaphysics were profound. According to the Triades, the soul is formed in the depths of the unfathomable abyss, known as Anoufn. There, it assumes rudimentary forms of life, acquiring conscience and freedom only after being captive to lower instincts.

The bard Taliesin sang of this evolution: "I have been a viper in the lake, an eagle upon the mountain tops, a wolf in the woods. Then did Gwyon, the sage of sages, stamp me with his seal and I acquired immortality." The Druids held that the soul passes through three successive circles:

1. Anoufn: Where it endures the tyranny of matter (the animal period).

1. Abred: The circle of migrations and expiatory worlds, of which Earth is one. Here, the soul is often incarnated.

1. Gwinfyd: The circle of happy worlds of felicity. Finally, at the cost of incessant struggle, the soul casts off corporeal influences to attain this state.

Higher still lies Ceugant, the circle of the Infinite, which encompasses all others and belongs to God alone. Destiny and Cosmology The Triades hold that man is neither the bauble of fate nor the slave of a capricious will. He moulds and shapes his own destiny. His objective is not temporary gratification, but elevation attained through self-sacrifice and duty. Life is a battlefield where the brave are promoted.

However, a culpable soul persisting in wrong-doing may lose the fruit of its labors and retrograde to lower degrees, or even be reduced to the germ level to restart its tedious ascent. Yet, even here there is mercy: the loss of memory enables the soul to take up the struggle without the clogging fetters of past remorse. Finally, in Gwinfyd, memory returns, and the soul regains the vision of its entire existence.

Possessing extensive cosmologic knowledge, the Druids knew our planet whirls through space. Taliesin’s Song of the World asks what upholds the earth as it travels, marveling at its constant course. Even Caesar admitted the Druids taught much concerning the size and shape of the earth, the motion of the stars, and the precipices of the moon. They understood that the universe, while immutable as a whole, undergoes constant transformation in its parts, animated by an endless circulation of life.

Communion with the Unseen The ancient Celts lived in close communion with the unseen world. From within stone enclosures, they evoked the dead. Druidesses and female bards rendered oracles. It is recorded that Vercingétorix, before rousing Gaul against Caesar, betook himself to the Isle of Sein, the venerated dwelling of the Druidesses. There, in a clash of thunder and lightning, a spirit appeared and predicted his martyrdom.

The commemoration of the dead is of Gaelic origin. On the first of November, the "feast of the spirits" was celebrated—not in cemeteries, for they did not honor dead bodies, but in every house where bards and seers evoked the spirits. They peopled the woods and plains with wandering souls; the "Duz" and the "Korrigan" were merely souls in search of reincarnation.

Society, Justice, and the Fall Socially, the Celts possessed both liberty and equality. In all Gaelic republics, chiefs were elected by the assembled people. Over-ambitious usurpers were punished by fire. Women held a status of immense respect; they were seers, prophetesses, and members of councils. They were subservient to themselves alone and chose their own husbands. Property was collective, with all land belonging to the republic; hereditary rights did not exist.

But this great civilization fell. The long Roman occupation, the Frankish invasion, and the introduction of feudalism caused the loss of these true national traditions. Gaul lacked one crucial element: Solidarity. While they knew liberty and equality, they lacked the sentiment of fraternity, which caused their disunity and downfall.

The Resurrection: 1789 and Joan of Arc Yet, the spirit of Gaul did not die forever. One memorable day, the old Gaelic blood surged in the veins of the people. The Revolution of 1789 swept away the two foreign importations: the theocracy of Rome and the monarchy of the Franks. Ancient Gaul lived anew. But the most radiant resurrection of the Gaelic spirit arose from the womb of the dark ages in the form of Joan of Arc.

The bard Myrdwin, or Merlin, had prophesied her coming centuries before. It was in the shade of the mystic oak, next to a table of stone, that she heard "her voices." She was a pious believer, but above the earthly church, she placed the Church Eternal—the only one she would obey. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, when France was being strangled by England’s iron grip, this eighteen-year-old child, assisted by unseen powers, reanimated a demoralized people and saved France from dissolution. She never presumed to act without consulting her voices. Only once, in her dungeon at Rouen, exhausted by suffering, did the voices seem to desert her, and she consented to recant. But as soon as the spirits returned, she regained her courage, telling her judges: "The voices told me that it was treason to recant. The truth is this: God has sent me and what I have done was well done."

Conclusion: The Synthesis Sanctified by her dolorous passion, Joan gave humanity a sublime example of self-sacrifice. Today, after being bowed beneath twenty centuries of oppression, the nation has at last become unified. The law of love and charity—Christ’s great gift to humanity—has come to complete the Druidical teaching. It adds the missing link of fraternity to the ancient pillars of liberty and equality, constructing a noble philosophical and moral synthesis.

Let us look back with pride at our ancestors, the custodians of the mysteries of birth and death, and look forward with the knowledge that the spirit is immortal, the universe is ours to traverse, and the brave are ever promoted on the battlefield of life.

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Merlin Lafortune & Lirael Lafortune