That this is the true interpretation is confirmed—so far as Europe is concerned—by the teachings of the Druids, the learned Brahmin-like priests of Europe’s scientific pre-Christian religion, held by the Celtic nations.[1]
In The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, in the year 1911, I suggested that the rebirth doctrine, in its straightforward, Druidic form, accords, in its essentials, with the psychological science of the West—that the subconscious mind is the storehouse of all latent memories; that these memories are not limited to one lifetime; that these memory-records, being recoverable, prove the doctrine to be based upon demonstrable facts. Since the year 1911 the whole trend of Western psychological research in the realm of the subconscious and in psycho-analysis has tended to confirm that view.
I was unaware when I wrote The Fairy-Faith that Huxley held—as he did—the theory of human reincarnation to offer the best explanation of even ordinary physiological and biological phenomena. And since the testimony of Huxley, as one of the greatest biologists, coincides with that, as above given, of the late Dr. Tylor, the foremost of modern anthropologists, and also confirms from the standpoint of our own Western Science the higher or esoteric interpretation of the Rebirth Doctrine as offered by the Occult Sciences of the East, we here record it as a fitting conclusion to this Section:
‘Everyday experience familiarizes us with the facts which are grouped under the name of heredity. Every one of us bears upon him obvious marks of his parentage, perhaps of remoter relationships. More particularly, the sum of tendencies to act in a certain way, which we call “character”, is often to be traced through a long series of progenitors and collaterals. So we may justly say that this “character”—this moral and intellectual essence of a man—does veritably pass over from one fleshly tabernacle to another, and does really transmigrate
- ↑ Cf. Caesar, De B. G. vi. 14.5; 18. 1; Diodorus Siculus, v. 31. 4; Pomponius Mela, De Situ Orbis, iii, c. 2; Lucan, Pharsalia, i. 449–62; Barddas (Llandovery, 1862), i. 177, 189–91; and W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (Oxford 1911), Chaps. VII, XII.
