"water" meant "lunar" and "lunar" all that is simple, popular, traditional, emotional. But why should woods concentrate the solar ray? I did not understand why, nor do I now, and I decided to reject that part of the message as an error. I accepted the rest without difficulty for after The Wanderings of Usheen, I had simplified my style by filling my imagination with country stories.[1] My friends believed that the dark portion of the mind—the subconscious—had an incalculable power even over events. To influence events or one's own mind, one had to draw the attention of that dark portion, to turn it, as it were, into a new direction. Macgregor described how as a boy he had drawn over and over some event that he longed for; and called those drawings an instinctive magic. But for the most part one repeated certain names and drew or imagined certain symbolic forms which had acquired a precise meaning and not only to the dark portion of one's own mind, but to the mind of the race. I decided to repeat the names associated with the moon in the cabbalistic tree of life. The divine name, the name of the angelic order, the name of the planetary sphere, and so on, and probably, though my memory is not clear upon the point, to draw certain geometrical forms. As Arthur Symons and I were about to stay with Mr Edward Martyn at Tullyra Castle, in Galway, I decided that it was there I must make my invocation of the moon. I made it night after night just before I went to bed and after many nights—eight or nine perhaps—I saw between sleeping and waking as in a kinematograph, a galloping centaur and a moment later a naked woman of incredible beauty, standing upon a pedestal and shooting an arrow at a star. I still remember the tint of that marvellous flesh which makes all human flesh seem unhealthy, and remember that others who have seen such forms have remembered the same characteristic. Next morning before breakfast, Arthur Symons took me out on to the lawn to recite a scrap of verse, the only verse he had ever written to a dream. He had dreamt the night before of a woman of great beauty, but she was clothed and had not a bow and arrow. When he got back to London, he found awaiting him a story sent to the Savoy by Fiona MacLeod and called, I think, The Archer. Someone in the story had a vision of a woman shooting an arrow into the sky and later of an arrow shot at a faun that pierced the faun's body and remained, the faun's
- ↑ The stories of my Celtic Twilight. The learned man wishes me to point out that nothing there could have suggested the visions or dreams described in the chapter.—W. B. Y.
