The Flaming Door

The Flaming Door: The Mission of the Celtic Folk-Soul

“All myths and sagas and legends are like a shimmering veil of many colors, stirred now and then by the wind of our desires, but still hiding from most of us that Council of the Wise seated at the Round Table of the Stars… But between us and them lies the gulf of our arrogance and the mists of our unbelief.”

The Flaming Door is perhaps Eleanor Merry’s most famous work and made an important contribution to the renewal of Celtic mythology. Slumbering in the ancient sagas and legends are the secrets of initiation: when men and women found their way through the ‘flaming door’, the threshold between the physical and spiritual worlds.

The book falls into two parts: before Christ, which includes studies of The Bards, The Cauldron of Ceridwen and Hu the Mighty; and after Christ, which includes the Legends of Odrum, St Columba and the Legends of the Rose and the Lily.

About the Author

Eleanor C. Merry was a poet, artist, musician and anthroposophist with a strong Celtic impulse and a life-long interest in esoteric wisdom. Born in Eton, UK in 1873, she studied in Vienna and met Rudolf Steiner in 1922 after becoming interested in his teachings. She went on to organise Summer Schools at which Steiner gave important lectures, and she was secretary for the World Conference on Spiritual Science in London in 1928. She died in 1956. Her other published works include The Flaming Door, Easter: the Legends and the Facts, Spiritual Knowledge: Its Reality and Its Shadow and The Year and Its Festivals.