Honourable companions,

"The Land of Youth" is the Irish name of the Celtic Heaven, or paradise-like magical Otherworld. It is located in islands in the ocean to the west of Ireland, some of which have their own names. It is accessible if one sails past "the ninth wave", which is the horizon, the point at which the solid reliability of the mortal world gives way to the dynamic fluidity of the Otherworld. One may also access the Otherworld by venturing below the surface of the ocean; the ocean, it might be added, is sometimes called "Manannan's Plain". The Otherworld is believed to exist by Celts of all the ancient nations: Julius Caesar reported that it was the warrior's belief in rebirth in an otherworldly realm that gave them fearlessness in battle, and the same belief allowed people to put off repayments of debt until the afterlife. The Otherworld is also postulated as the origin of human souls, and the guarantee of the immortality of the soul.

A particularly Celtic feature of the otherworld has to do with food and drink; folklore all over the Celtic world reports people entering the Otherworld after consuming Otherworldly food. To consume otherworldly food is to take the Otherworld into one's body, and so it would be right to say the Otherworld is brought upon the Seer and spiritually enters her. Connla, the son of Conn, was enabled to pass to the Otherworld when his faerie maiden gave him a magical apple, which would be whole in the morning if eaten to the core the previous night. There are, however, enough stories of mortal heroes consuming a feast in the Otherworld and returning to the mortal realm without difficulty, therefore this should not be thought of as a hard and fast law.

Time seems to flow differently in the Otherworld. Oisin lived in Tir Na nOg with Niamh for three years, and upon his return to Ireland found that three hundred mortal years had passed. Other stories give the rate of passage into the future at different speeds, both faster and slower than as it happens in the mortal world, so one should not assume a fixed ratio. The salient point is that time passes differently there because the whole order of reality is different there.

This is what is different about the Otherworld in an important respect, of which the passage of time and the magical properties of the food are but indicators. The Otherworld is always described as a land of beauty, love, plentiful abundance, and not subject to disease, old age, nor death. Tir Na nOg is almost always contrasted against our mortal world, and the pronouncements about the mortal realm, compared to the ideal otherworld, are consistent on one theme: this mortal world is a world of sadness, transience, suffering, and death. A mortal life is but a day and a night, as Aengus Og says, for there is nothing permanent nor enduring here. The Poet in his age laments "All that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters", and therefore he exclaims, "I spit into the face of time, that has transfigured me." Faerie-abductions seem to remove from this mortal realm the best of our kind, the most innocent, beautiful and saintly, as if to preserve them in the Otherworld, lest death and dissolution corrupt and destroy them forever. The faerie tells the human child that the world is "more full of weeping than you can understand", as The Poet wrote, and then she takes the child away. It is because mortal life is beset with suffering and sadness, that heroes venture to the Otherworld, and return bearing a treasure that has the power to bring some relief to human suffering, or sometimes, as in the case of Bran, they return only to say goodbye.

The mortal world is renewed and empowered on the occasions when the energy and blessing of the Otherworld floods into the mortal world again. The Mystery of Brugh Na Boinne teaches that the renewal of the physical environmental occurs regularly, when one season in the cycle of the year is ended and another about to begin. The journey of the hero is the renewal of the human social world, the world of the tribe, which has its own cycles of alternating prosperity and poverty, peace and turbulence, freedom and bondage, refinement and extravagance, intelligence and bullishness. The hero teaches that the renewal of the world can be achieved at any time, outside of the regular cycle of environmental renewal. Anyone daring enough to enter the Otherworld may return bearing a treasure that will restore the tribe.

To drink the water of the Otherworld is to receive a life-renewing bliss, but the irony is that immersion in its ocean will bring sadness again. For all of the glamour and beauty of the Otherworld, it is essentially changeless. Its energy is like the slim stream of smoke from the candle, before it dissipates into chaos at the top of the plume, which is the world of mortal existence. Its changelessness is what makes it eternal and immune from suffering, and hence attractive to us, but also what makes it ultimately unsatisfying. The sight of an otherworldly maiden destroys the ability to appreciate mortal beauty, which manifests as a wasting sickness, yet residence in her land brings a yearning for the very imperfections and hardships of the mortal world. Perfection and eternity are not, in the end, very fulfilling. The mortal world is still the world in which we find vital purpose and meaning. Oisin must return home after three years with Niamh, because the Otherworld offers him no challenge. "We would not give up our own country", says Fionn MacCumhall when invited to Tir na nOg, "if we were to get the world as our estate, and the Country of the Young with it". The purposiveness of the mortal world is what redeems it; this purposiveness is renewed annually by the cosmogonic cycle of time, and also renewed at special occasions by the adventures of heroes. The touch of the Otherworld on the great figures of Celtic mythology makes them both heroic and also tragic. Their moments of glory are tinged with sadness, and their despair contains an inkling of "amor fati", the love of one's destiny however tragic it may be. The armies mourn the death of their opponents, for they too were heroes and they too did glorious deeds in their time.

The role of the Otherworld in the effort to dispel mortal suffering, is not as a place to go to leave it all behind. That is no more a solution to suffering than passive acceptance of it. The Otherworld is the place where may be found the ideal condition of life which we must work to bring into manifestation on our mortal plane. We must part the Mist, not so much to walk through it, but to invite what dwells on the other side to enter here.

Cathbad
Out of the Grove,
and in the season of Samhain, the year 2000.