Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/66

Ideas of Good and Evil. they were always praising the one mind, their foundation of all perfection.

VI

I once saw a young Irish woman, fresh from a convent school, cast into a profound trance, though not by a method known to any hypnotist. In her waking state she thought the apple of Eve was the kind of apple you can buy at the greengrocer's, but in her trance she saw the Tree of Life with ever-sighing souls moving in its branches instead of sap, and among its leaves all the fowl of the air, and on its highest bough one white fowl bearing a crown. When I went home I took from the shelf a translation of The Book of Concealed Mystery, an old Jewish book, and cutting the pages came upon this passage, which I cannot think I had ever read: 'The Tree, ... is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and of Evil ... in its branches the birds lodge and build 56