Memoir of a Mythteller: Æ, George William Russell

Imbas Dispatch #30

A Chairde, Friends,

Who is a mythteller? Who decides? What makes a mythteller? Is myth only meant to be oral? Is story the only mythteller? Is the mythteller human? Can other art forms be a mythteller? Can a person’s life be a mythteller…

These are a few of the questions I’ve been chewing over as part of my research and training in Ecologies of the Imagination with the Anima Mundi School. My teacher, the sage, vibrant and wondrously gifted storyteller, Gauri Raje, of Silent Sounds introduced me to Wisdom of the Mythtellers by Sean Kane, a book that has been liberating a rigidity that had frozen potentials within me as a mythteller since my degree in Celtic Studies over 20 years ago now.

As part of these explorations, I was inspired to create a series of artworks bringing to life a mythteller’s voice: that of ‘Æ’, George William Russell, who, samildánach in nature, was an Irish painter, poet, writer, theosophist and activist. He is often called the ‘forgotten’ Irish mystic, having lived in the memory-shadow of his beloved companion and rival, W.B. Yeats. In their wider circle, Æ was known as the closest expression of a druid incarnate.

‘Æ was the nearest to a saint you or I will ever meet. You are a better poet but no saint. I suppose one has to choose.’

- Georgie Yeats to her husband W.B. Yeats

Æ was a mentor of Ella Young, the Irish storyteller whose Celtic Wonder Tales feature in Sean Kane’s work; a friend of the Irish revolutionary and artist Maud Gonne, who brought Young’s mythic retellings into artistic form; an associate of Pamela Colman Smith, ‘Pixie’, who painted the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, (which

Regina de Búrca

has illuminated for me the threads of inspiration drawn from the Creideamh Sí, the Irish ‘Fairy Faith’); a co-founder of the Irish National Theatre Society (later the Abbey Theatre in Dublin); and the first person to publish and financially support James Joyce’s early work. He was revolutionary in his ideas during the Celtic Twilight, and his art, to me, is the closest I have ever seen to what the sídhe, the ‘Shining Ones’, our otherworldly ancestors, look like in my own soul, as I’ve seen them since childhood.

When I decided to create these artworks, I was reading Æ’s mystical memoir, The Candle of Vision, on the train into Dublin city. I had decided I was going to work from the reading room in the National Library. As the train tumbled towards town, I learnt from the man himself that Æ means ‘Aeon’, a name given to him by what he calls an ‘earth memory’, a similar term to Sean Kane’s ‘energy-voice’. George William Russell had no idea at first what it meant. Then, one day, now over one hundred years ago, he was in the National Library, where I was headed, and he caught sight of a book the librarian had left lying open, a ‘dictionary of religions’, and he saw the word ‘Aeon’ that had come to him in his vision, explained as a word used by the Gnostics to describe the first created beings. In this moment, ‘power [was] passed from one world, to the other, to use’.¹

I share the artworks below as a series of collages that combine elements of Æ’s paintings curated with specific excerpts from The Candle of Vision that, for me, combine to generate the ‘mythteller’s voice’.

Before you go any further, I invite you to close your eyes, open your heart, the compass of your soul, and allow the image of the ‘mythteller’ to step forth from the shadows of your unconscious.

Then move through the images and words one by one…

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The Mythteller’s Claim

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The Mythteller’s Elixir

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The Mythteller’s Imagination

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The Mythteller’s Earth

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The Mythteller’s Breath

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The Mythteller’s Mother

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The Mythteller…

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This was a deeply emotive project with roots that entangled past, present and future for me while feeling the presence of Æ as the shadow man who has gone forth to become one with the ancestral self.

In loving memory of this Shining One.

Croí isteach,

Jen x

Sources:

Æ/Russell, G.W. (1918). The Candle of Vision. London, Macmillan and Co., limited.

Kane, S. (1998). Wisdom of the Mythtellers. Broadview Press.

North, S., & North, J. (2024). A History of Irish Magic. Holythorn Press.

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Paintings:

The Mythteller’s Claim: ‘The Lordly Ones’, 1913.

The Myteller’s Elixir: ‘Mystical Figure in Winged Boat’, 1900-1915.

The Mythteller’s Imagination: ‘The Spirit of the Pool’, 1900-1915.

The Mythteller’s Earth: ‘The Stolen Child’, 1900-1915 (like W.B. Yeats’s poem of the same name).

The Mythteller’s Breath: Detail from a Theosophical mural painted by Æ and W.B. Yeats in the Drawing Room at 3 Ely Place, Dublin, and ‘An Apparition’, 1921.

The Mythteller’s Mother: ‘A Spirit or Sídhe in a Landscape’, date unknown.

The Mythteller: Æ, George William Russell: ‘Deirdre at her Dún’, 1900-1915.

1. Kane, S. (1998). Wisdom of the Mythtellers. Broadview Press.