Fortunate Isles

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Fortunate Isles

Isles of the Blest,

in classical and Celtic legend, islands in the Western Ocean. There the souls of favored mortals were received by the gods and lived happily in a paradise. Belief in the islands long persisted, and the Canaries and the Madeira Islands were sometimes identified with them.

Fortunate Isles

(Happy Isles) otherworld for heroes favored by gods. [Gk. Myth.: NCE, 861]

See: Heaven

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References in periodicals archive ?

He happened to read the chronicle--and was hardly surprised at what he saw, for the route west to "the isles of the blessed" detailed in Brendan's account was substantially the very route the wartime U.S.

The Big Drive: Public Libraries and Reinventing the History of the Americas

Other examples are Puguang's Isles of the Blessed (Yuan Dynasty), depicting the mountains in a long handscroll floating on the waves of a turbulent sea, and Wang Yun's The Fanghu Isle of the Immortals, dated 1699, which shows the sacred mountain on an island, which was described in a Daoist text as early as 400 BC (the Liezs): "The towers and terraces upon [the mountain] are all gold and jade, the beasts and birds are all unsullied white: trees of pearl and garnet always grow densely ...

Sacred Earth: Daoism as a preserver of environment in Chinese landscape painting from the song through the Qing Dynasties

A utopian longing for peace shows up in the variety of visions of the Isles of the Blessed, Paradise, and similar havens of delight that inhabit every human tradition.

Peace culture: the problem of managing human difference

A similar description was given by Hesiod of the Isles of the Blessed. In the earlier authors, only those specially favored by the gods entered Elysium and were made immortal.

Elysium

Before Hiawatha takes his leave of the tribe to go to the Isles of the Blessed, he tells his people to heed those who will come with a new religion.