[4] 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.

[6] 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.

And yet my spirit rose in pride Refashioning in burnished gold The images of those who died Or were shut up in penal cell Here's to you Pearse, your dream, not mine And yet the thought- for this you fell Has turned life's water into wine.

With the demise of this newspaper, he was for the first time in his adult life without a job, and there were concerns that he could find himself in a state of poverty, as he had never earned very much money from his paintings or books.

At one point his son Diarmuid was reduced to selling off early drafts of his father's works to raise money, to the annoyance of Russell, who accused the lad, with whom his relations were not good, of "raiding the wastepaper baskets".

He designed the famous Starry Plough flag for the Irish Citizen Army which was unveiled on 5 April 1914 and flown during the Easter Rising.

[10] Russell's generosity and hospitality were legendary: Frank O'Connor fondly recalled "the warmth and kindness, which enfolded you like an old fur coat".

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.

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.

In Song and its Fountains, he speculates on the nature of the soul based on his experiences:[14] Looking back on the past I have a vivid sense of a being seeking reincarnation here, beginning with those faint first intuitions of beauty, and those early dreamings which were its forerunners.

It was no angelic thing, pure and new from a foundry of souls, which sought embodiment, but a being stained with the dust and conflict of a long travel through time, carrying with it unsated desires, base and august and as I divined it, myriads of perceptions and a secret wisdom.

If there was an original purity of being it had become corrupted, yet not altogether for there was in it, I believe, some incorruptible spiritual atom, carrying with it maybe some perception of its journeyings with deity.

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:[14] apparitions of light taller than human, riding on winged horses, or shining musicians circled by dazzling birds, or queens bearing branches with blossoms of light or fruit from the world of immortal youth, all moving in a divine aether.

These were messengers of the gods and through these came about that marriage of Heaven and Earth in our literature which made it for long centuries seem almost the utterance of a single voice.

[18]He claimed to see nature spirits and made paintings about them, such as the sídhe, elven or faerie beings in Irish folklore.

[20] In 1889 he had traveled with W. B. Yeats to a town in County Galway, where Russell also painted these spirit beings, and a Druid is said to have appeared to them in vision.

[21] 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.

[14] Russell, who had become increasingly unhappy in the Irish Free State (which according to Yeats he called "a country given over to the Devil"),[24] moved to England soon after his wife's death in 1932.