Ирландиялық жазушы, суретші және қоғам қайраткері Джордж Уильям Рассел

Irish writer, painter, editor, critic, poet, and cooperative organiser

George William Russell (10 April 1867 – 17 July 1935), who wrote with the pseudonym Æ (often written AE or A. E.), was an Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, painter and Irish nationalist. He was also a writer on mysticism, and a central figure in the group of devotees of theosophy which met in Dublin for many years.

Russell was born in Lurgan, County Armagh (not in Portadown as has sometimes been misreported), in Ireland, the second son of Thomas Russell and Mary Armstrong. His father, the son of a small farmer, became an employee of Thomas Bell and Co., a prosperous firm of linen drapers. The family relocated to Dublin, where his father had a new offer of employment, when George was eleven years old. The death of his beloved sister Mary, aged 18, was a blow from which it took him a long time to recover. In the 1880s, Russell lived at the Theosophical Society lodge at 3, Upper Ely Place, sharing rooms with H. M. Magee, the brother of William Kirkpatrick Magee. Russell started working as a draper's clerk, then for many years worked for the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), an agricultural co operative society initiated by Horace Plunkett in 1894. In 1897, Plunkett needed an able organiser and W. B. Yeats suggested Russell, who became Assistant Secretary of the IAOS.

In 1898, he married Violet North; they had two surviving sons, Brian and Diarmuid, as well as a third son who died soon after birth. Frank O'Connor, who was a close friend of Russell in their later years, remarked that his family life was something of a mystery even to those who knew him best: O'Connor noticed that he never spoke about his wife and seemed to be at odds with his sons (although O'Connor himself liked both of them). While his marriage was rumoured to be unhappy, all his friends agreed that Violet's death in 1932 was a great blow to Russell.

He was an able lieutenant to Plunkett, and travelled extensively throughout Ireland as a spokesman for the IAOS; he was mainly responsible for developing the credit societies and establishing Co operative Banks in the south and west of the country, the numbers of which increased to 234 by 1910. Russell and Plunkett made a good team, with each gaining much from the association with the other. As an officer of the IAOS, he could not express political opinions freely, but made no secret of the fact that he considered himself a Nationalist. During the 1913 Dublin Lock out he wrote an open letter to the Irish Times criticizing the attitude of the employers, then spoke on it in England, which purportedly helped bring the crisis to an end. Russell definitely sympathized with the Easter Rising and saw it as in line with his views on Goidelic Nationalist "traditional and natural communism", but due to his personal leanings toward pacifism, his individual involvement took the form of editing and writing rather than direct participation in the significantly violent activities that took place. He was an independent delegate to the 1917–18 Irish Convention in which he opposed John Redmond's compromise on Home Rule. He became involved in the anti partition Irish Dominion League when Plunkett founded the body in 1919.

Russell was editor (from 1905 23) of the Irish Homestead, the journal of the IAOS. His gifts as a writer and publicist gained him a wide influence on the cause of agricultural cooperation. Unbeknownst to him meetings and collections were organized and later that year at Plunkett House he was presented by Father T. Finlay with a cheque for £800. This enabled him to visit the United States the next year, where he was well received all over the country and his books sold in large numbers. at the time for everyone interested in the economic and artistic future of Ireland: his Sunday evenings "at home" were a notable feature of Dublin literary life. Russell's generosity and hospitality were legendary: Frank O'Connor fondly recalled "the warmth and kindness, which enfolded you like an old fur coat". He was the most loyal of friends, and in the notoriously fractious Dublin literary world Russell tried to keep the peace between his endlessly quarrelling colleagues: even the abrasive Seamus O'Sullivan could be forgiven a great deal, simply because "Seamus drinks too much". His interests were wide ranging; he became a theosophist and wrote extensively on politics and economics, while continuing to paint and write poetry. and Patrick Kavanagh called him "a great and holy man". P. L. Travers, famous as the creator of Mary Poppins, was yet another writer who gratefully recalled Russell's help and encouragement. He features, scandalously, in Chapter 13 of Anthony Burgess' novel Earthly Powers.

George reported seeing visions since when he was a young man, including one in which it was revealed to him a new name: Aeon, which he would only later find meaning in quotes he was unaware of. In another one, as described in Song and its Fountains:"Earth revealed itself to me as a living being, and rock and clay were made transparent so that I saw lovelier and lordlier beings than I had known before, and was made partner in memory of mighty things, happenings in ages long sunken behind time. "The visions intensified at age 17, around the time he began his friendship with Yeats. "But the luminous quality gradually became normal in me, and at times in meditation there broke in on me an almost intolerable lustre of light, pure and shining faces, dazzling processions of figures, most ancient, ancient places and peoples, and landscapes lovely as the lost Eden. These appeared at first to have no more relation to myself than images from a street without one sees reflected in a glass; but at times meditation prolonged itself into spheres which were radiant with actuality"While students, he and Yeats were members of the Hermetic Society founded by Charles Johnston and were interested in Theosophy. Johnston founded the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society in 1886, and Russell would become a member of it in 1890. In Song and its Fountains, he speculates on the nature of the soul based on his experiences:</blockquote>

He gave various explanations for his visionary memories: they could be from past lives; modified memories; symbolic dreams; moments experienced by other beings who had some affinity with him; Akashic records (according to his belief in the Theosophist doctrine); telepathy and visions of remote places. He claimed that all these occurred to him, and that he could distinguish them by certain signs. He also believed that the deities of all civilizations were archetypes or thought forms created by the collective mind, but relatively real, and he had visions of some in Ireland:</blockquote>He claimed to see nature spirits and made paintings about them, such as the sídhe, elven or faerie beings in Irish folklore. On one occasion, he showed some drawings he had made of them to a peasant, who would have pointed out that he had already seen many of those entities. The previous year, in a letter to Yeats, Russell had stated:"The gods have returned to Erin and have centred themselves in the sacred mountains and blow the fires through the country. They have been seen by several in vision, they will awaken the magical instinct everywhere, and the universal heart of the people will turn to the old druidic beliefs. I note through the country the increased faith in faery things. The bells are heard from the mounds and sounding in the hollows of the mountains. A purple sheen in the inner air, perceptible at times in the light of day, spreads itself over the mountains. All this I can add my own testimony to. Furthermore, we were told that though now few we would soon be many, and that a branch of the school for the revival of the ancient mysteries to teach real things would be formed here soon. Out of Ireland will arise a light to transform many ages and peoples. There is a hurrying of forces and swift things going out and I believe profoundly that a new Avatar is about to appear and in all spheres the forerunners go before him to prepare. It will be one of the kingly Avatars, who is at once ruler of men and magic sage. I had a vision of him some months ago and will know him if he appears. "George told friends of glimpses of past existences he had had, in Assyria, Pre Columbian America, as a contemporary of William Blake and also, as he told Lady Constance Sitwell, of "brief but very vivid, of Druidic times in Ireland; of a Spanish life―riding into a walled town and fighting; one Egyptian period, and very, very far back, a life in India". In a conversation with Julian Huxley, he asked him about where his memories would have come from, and the biologist did not know how to respond to his argument.</blockquote>The Candle of the Light is an autobiography in which he gives insight into his personal mysticism, without reference to other religious writers or Theosophist sources. It also contains a chapter on Celtic cosmogenesis. moved to England soon after his wife's death in 1932. Despite his failing health he went on a final lecture tour in the United States, but returned home utterly exhausted. He died of cancer in Bournemouth in 1935.