heart torn out and clinging to it, embedded in a tree. Some weeks later I too was in London and found among Macgregor's pupils a woman whose little child had come running in from the garden, perhaps at the time of my vision, perhaps a little later, calling out "Oh, mother, I have seen a woman shooting an arrow into the sky and I am afraid that she has killed God." I have somewhere among my papers a letter[1] from a very old friend describing how her little cousin—perhaps a few months later—dreamed of a man who shot at a star with a gun and that the star fell down, but "I do not" the child said "think it minded dying because it was so very old," and that presently she saw the star lying in a cradle. Had some great event taken place in some world where myth is reality and had we seen some portion of it? One of my fellow-students quoted a Greek saying "Myths are the activities of the demons" or had we but seen in the memory of the race something believed thousands of years ago, or had somebody—I myself perhaps—but dreamed a fantastic dream which had come to those others by transference of thought? I came to no conclusion, but I was sure there was some symbolic meaning could I but find it. I went to my friend who had spoken to Megarithma and she went once more into her trance-like meditation and heard but a single unexplained sentence: "There were three that saw, three will attain a wisdom older than the serpent, but the child will die." Did this refer to myself, to Arthur Symons, to Fiona MacLeod, to the child who feared that the archer had killed God? I thought not, for Symons had no deep interest in the subject and there was the second child to account for. It was probably some new detail of the myth or an interpretation of its meaning. There was a London coroner in those days, learned in the Cabbala, whom I had once known though we had not met for some years. I called upon him and told all that I had set down here. He opened a drawer and took out of it two water-coloured paintings by a clumsy painter who had no object but a symbolical record, one was of a centaur, the other of a woman standing upon a stone pedestal and shooting her arrow at what seemed a star. He asked me to look carefully at the star and I saw that it was a little golden heart. He said: "You have hit upon things that you can never have read of in any book, these symbols belong to a part of the Christian Cabbala"—perhaps this was not
- ↑ This letter is not now within my reach, for my papers are stored till our Irish civil war is finished.—W. B. Y.
