Almost exactly 90 years ago, in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, there occurred the death of an exceptional Irish man. At the time, he was famous internationally and a household name in Ireland. Just before George William Russell’s anniversary, a new summer school in Dublin will aim to return this now somewhat forgotten figure to public awareness.
Russell was born in 1867 in Lurgan, Co Armagh. His family moved to Dublin when he was 11. He became a journalist, editor, publisher, poet, pacifist, artist, mystic, social activist, and organiser and theorist of the Irish agricultural co-operative movement, through which he aimed for nothing less than the “building of a rural civilisation”.
Russell was also the egoless, behind-the-scenes engine of the Irish literary revival and cultural renaissance – the “Celtic Twilight” movement that helped fuel Irish liberation from colonialist rule.
This extraordinary polymath was better known by his self-assumed spiritual name, AE, which stands for “aeon”, in this case meaning “eternal being”. By the time he succumbed to cancer, on July 17th, 1935, at the age of 68, he had been a key player, in Ireland and, latterly, in the United States, in the movements for inner and outer peace, cultural regeneration, and social and economic justice.
His approach to his final days was extolled in an essay called The Death of AE: Irish Hero and Mystic by Pamela Lyndon Travers, author of the Mary Poppins books and one of many writers, including James Joyce, whom AE nurtured and published.
Travers recounts that she had hoped to bring AE, who had moved to London in 1932, after the death of his wife, Violet, to convalesce in her Sussex home. After AE was given just weeks to live, he was moved instead to a nursing home in Bournemouth. Travers managed his final days, including the stream of friends arriving to say goodbye, from his bedside.
She writes that AE’s surgeon, after breaking the news of his terminal illness, was so moved by AE’s calm acceptance that he left the room in tears. AE told him, “I have had a very interesting life. I have done nearly all the things I wanted to do. I have rejoiced in the love of friends. What man could want more?”
Travers quotes from AE’s novel The Avatars on his view of death: “There must be a lordly way out of the body ... If we do not find this way, I think we must return again and again ... until we have mastered the secret of death and can take that lordly way out by our will.”
“This, clearly,” Travers writes, “was what he was trying to do.”
AE took his final breaths just before moonrise. In language reminiscent of the moon that AE loved to paint, Travers writes: “Never before or since have I seen such a moon. It came up slowly out of the sea, full, golden and enormous, dazzling as the sun.”
She recalls a chapter of the Bhagavad Gita – one of the many sacred eastern texts that AE studied – that he had often quoted to her. She writes that she now owns AE’s copy, excerpting a section that he had heavily annotated.
The passage details “at what time yogis, dying, obtain freedom from rebirth”, advising that if the soul departs under certain conditions – during the fortnight of the waxing moon and “the six months of the sun’s Northern course – going then and knowing the Supreme spirit, men go to the Supreme”.
“Those markings of ink and crayons,” Travers writes, “tell us what AE hoped for and what he worked towards and also that we shall not see his like again.”
Winged serpents often appear in AE’s visionary artwork. James North, one of the authors of A History of Irish Magic, suggests that these serpents symbolise kundalini, or “serpent power”, a concept from Indo-Tibetan esotericism referring to mystical awakenings. Understanding these eastern traditions, North argues, is key to grasping AE’s spiritual world view and entire output.
Kundalini is the latent energy said to lie coiled at the bottom of the spine. In The Candle of Vision, the spiritual memoir from 1918 that many consider to be his masterpiece, AE describes his earliest mystical encounters as a child: “As I walked in the evening down the lanes scented by honeysuckle my senses were expectant … The visible world became like a tapestry blown and stirred by winds behind it ... Every form ... appeared to be the work of gods.”
AE later deepened these experiences with years of study and meditation through the Irish Theosophical Society, which grounded his insights in eastern philosophy. Kundalini is associated with Shakti, or divine feminine energy. AE’s embrace of serpents contrasted with Christianity’s vilification of Eve and the snake, which some regard as a repression of that feminine power.
Though AE’s awakening followed the contours of eastern teachings, his visions remained rooted in Irish soil. He saw the Irish landscape as alive with otherworld beings, particularly the “sídh” or Tuatha dé Danann, “the people of the goddess Danu”. In his art, AE often depicted the radiant entities he saw in clairvoyant vision as playful, joyful figures, or as giant guardians with flames of illumination or auras around their heads, supporting human beings through life’s sorrows and travails.
“AE painted between 600 and 1,000 pieces,” says Deirdre Kelly, an art historian who did her doctorate on his “dream” paintings and is writing a book about his art. “A lot went untitled or were given away as gifts, so many could be hidden in people’s attics without them even knowing what they are.
“While all major Irish galleries hold his paintings, few are on regular display. A notable exception is The Winged Horse, in Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery. Glenveagh Castle, in Donegal, features several of AE’s mystical pieces on its tour. Armagh County Museum also exhibits AE regularly. His work was seen as anachronistic after his death, but in recent decades, there’s been a revival of interest, reflected in rising auction prices.”
When AE’s body was returned to Dublin, his funeral procession from the Irish co-operative movement headquarters, on Merrion Square in the middle of the city, to Mount Jerome Cemetery, in Harold’s Cross, was reportedly more than 1.5km long. The mourners included Éamon de Valera, at the time president of the executive council of the Irish Free State, his predecessor WT Cosgrave, and the writers WB Yeats and Frank O’Connor.
At his graveside, O’Connor said: “If AE had devoted himself to one art only, he might have been amongst the very greatest figures in the world. But if he had done so, he would not have been AE, and Ireland – and we – would have been poorer for that.”
Patrick O’Donnell, chairman of the recently formed AE George Russell Society, sees this as the right moment for AE’s rediscovery. “He’s a figure of world importance, the luminous centre of the Irish literary renaissance. Yeats was ‘the mage,’ but AE was ‘the sage’, comparable to figures like Tolstoy and Martin Luther King.”
O’Donnell emphasises AE’s role as a “universal connector” who blended art, spirituality, literature and economics. “In India, Gandhi expressed interest in AE’s thinking, including how sweeping change could be achieved without violence. During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt’s administration in the US even sought AE’s advice on rural economic development.”
Roosevelt’s vice-president, Henry Wallace, later wrote: “AE was a prophet out of an ancient age. He was one of the finest, most gifted, and most colourful people I ever knew.”
Réamonn Ó Ciaráin, the head of Gael Linn, an organisation promoting Irish language and heritage, recently finished translating AE’s The Candle of Vision into Irish.
“When AE wrote his masterpiece, the first World War was raging,” he says. “His book brought relief. We can see a comparable existential crisis now, in the wars breaking out around the globe, in the turmoil in the political landscape and the environmental crisis. In AE’s veneration of Mother Nature, he was yet again ahead of his time.
“People are yearning for more depth,” says Ó Ciaráin. “As guidance, we have this Celtic yogi who came amongst us and left a fantastic record of his ideas. Anybody who dips their toes into his thinking tends to want to submerge themselves fully.”
- AE 90, the first George Russell summer school, takes place in Dublin from Wednesday, July 2nd, until Sunday, July 6th
