God;
I have been three periods in the prison of Arianrhod.

I was in Asia with Noah in the Ark;
I saw the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah;
I was in India when Rome was built;
I am now come here to the remnant of the Trojans.

I was with my Lord in the ass's manger;
I strengthened Moses through the waters of Jordan;
I was in the firmament from the Cauldron of Ceridwen
I shall be on earth until the day of doom. *

------
* I quote it from Mr. T.W. Rollestone's _Myths and Legends of the
Celtic Race._ The poem appeares in the _Hanes Taliesin,_ in Lady
Guest's _Mabinogion._
------

Now, what would common sense have to say about things like that?
Simply, I think, that they are echoes that came down in Wales
through the ages, of a teaching that once was known. They do
not,--they would not,--no one would expect them to,--give the
true and exact features and the inwardness of such teaching, but
they do reflect the haunting reminiscences of a race that once
believed in Reincarnation so firmly, that people were ready to
lend money not to be repaid until a future life on earth. If you
can prove that that poem not written until the thirteenth, or
sixteenth, or eighteenth century, all the better; it only shows
the greater strength, the longer endurance, of the tradition;
and therefore, the greater reality of that from which the
tradition came. It is the ghost of something which once was
living; and the longer you can show the ghost surviving,--the
more living in its day was the something it survived from. Your
Tamerlanes and Malek Rics can be used to frighten babies for
centures;--their ghosts walk in that sense; their memories
linger;--but your Tomlinsons die and are done with, and no wind
carries rumors of them after.

And the name of Taliesin,--whom you may say we know to have been
a Welsh poet of the sixth century,--is made the peg on which to
hang these floating reminiscences of Druidic teaching;--and the
story told about him,--a story replete with universal symbolism,
--is, for anyone who has studied that science, clearly symbolic
of the initiation of a Teacher of the Secret Doctrine.

What is it accounts for race-persistence? _Not_ just what you
see on the physical plane. There is what we should call an
astral mold; and this is fed and nourished,--its edges kept
firm and distinct,--by forces from the plane of causes, the
thought-plane. When this mold has been