We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modem tide
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked
Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
The lineaments of a plummet measured face
- W.B. Yeats, 'The Statues'
Since we have been given the admonition to avoid the conquest, as there will be sorra' galore soon enough, I will instead contain myself to elucidating the archaic qualities of the Irish, which for me represent examples of a world-view worth conserving and transplanting. First we will look at the Megalithic culture of the Atlantic coast of Europe and contrast it with the Iron age Celtic culture as seen in the Táin Bó Cuailnge. The most vital bit of information I discovered in Every Earthly Blessing relates how the saints were associated with the Druidic and Poetic schools, and consequently often used the leitmotifs, of these ancient 'technicians of the sacred' in their own hagiographic constructions. This consequently makes the Irish church and its patrons much closer to the Indo-European Paganism eradicated on the Continent by the Roman Church. The survival of this religious caste and its corpus into the 17th century, in both the manuscripts of the Irish Monasteries and the poetics of the Bardic Order, gives us an opportunity to reconstruct aspects of the Gaelic world-view prior to it being tossed in the boiling cauldron of the European Nation States. Much of the material we have on the religious castes of Ireland comes through the less then objective lens of their conquerors and would-be conquerors. Consequently we have a shadowy and biased view of them, especially the much-maligned final leg of their tripartite organization, the Vates or Seers. Yet in looking at them we can discern both the reason for their dismissal and their importance in the transition from archaic shamanism.
I
Isle a ho boys, let
her go boys
swing her head round into the weather
Isle a ho boys, let her go boys
sailing homeward to Mingulay
-traditional (Casey Neill Trio), 'Mingulay Boat Song'
Along the Atlantic seaboard of the European
continent from Ireland to the Mediterranean islands of Malta are megalithic
structures, which mark the steps of a migration of people from the cradle
of civilization to the very periphery of the farthest Western shores. The
purpose of these monuments, often described as communal burial tombs, remains
an ambiguous assertion. Some call attention only to their contents of bones
and material remains and maintain they were tombs for an elite social order.
While others interpret their placement and architecture and suggest they
are astronomical observatories designed to measure the solar year and thus
act as an agricultural calendar. Some suggest that their purpose was more
religious and the Winter Solstice ritual at Newgrange, or Brugh na Bóinne,
in the interaction of dark and light, cave and sunbeam, the sacred marriage
of the chthonic: feminine earth and the luminescent masculine sky is enacted.
In the film The Atlanteans, there is a concerted attempt to draw
a connection between the North African and Mediterranean cultures with Ireland
through the vehicle of maritime trade routes and cultural similarities.
With only a brief mention of these megalithic structures, it is no wonder
that the effort comes off as incomplete. These megaliths point to a cultural
source for the ancient Irish not solely in the Celtic world of the European
heartland, but in the wine-dark sea of the Mediterranean and the north coast
of Africa. I see an important linguistic point to address in the argument;
how long has the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language tree been separated
from the main trunk, or from the branch associated with Greek and Italic?
The American Heritage Dictionary suggests that Proto Indo-European
was likely spoken around 5th millennia BCE, which fits approximately with
the time this migration of the megalithic builders began. Perhaps this is
also around the time of the first Kurgan invasions of the Indo-European
lands, which began a major cultural shift from the matrilineal or kin relations
to patriarchal or power relations, from an egalitarian to a domination model
of social interaction.
In the Bronze Age the mythic template was the Goddess and her consort, the
Dying God of Vegetation. This is itself an overlay on the Hymn to Demeter,
or the relations between a Mother and Daughter, the major trope in Eavan
Boland's 'Pomegranate' (or see 'Brugh na
Bóinne and the Triple Irish Goddess'
by the author). It represents the turning of the agricultural round and
the connectivity of life's cycles, from birth to death and back again ?
letting go and embracing change (a salmon leap?!). In the Iron Age the myth
becomes the hero's individual fame or infamy in cattle raids and the subjugation
of women as possessions, whether in the battle for the Brown Bull in the
Táin or the capture of Helen in the Trojan War. This is a move from
the agency of being as seen in the Gaelic "ag", to the subordination
of having, not a descent of godhead into the individual as the hero's birth
represents, but the original fall from our connection to the universal.
Ironically even though the Táin is a heroic saga for an audience
of prepubescent boys, being at its heart misogynist, it contains elements
that point out the path this shift traversed. Deirdre, the self-possessed
Maiden refusing to be a sacrifice to a vainglorious king's pride and desire,
and likewise the curse on Ulster by Macha's "A mother bore each one of you,"
in the film A Celtic Trilogy are examples of the agency and respect women
had. As is the connection of Medb with the Goddess of Sovereignty and her
claims of preeminence over Aillil's in the 'Pillow Talk' section of the
Táin. The agency of these women directly contradicts the image of
women as chattel and the cause of men's struggle for honor or infamy found
in the Táin. In addition to these triune Goddesses, the story of
Nes, mother of Conchobor, and her maneuvers to get her and the Druid Cathbad's
son on to her husband Fergus' throne at Emain Macha, illustrates the agency
women had in the political sphere. In fact without Lugh, who some sources
suggest is actually a British solar deity not indigenous to Ireland, the
only aspects of the divine present would be the triune Goddesses Nemain,
Badb, and (as the) Morrigan; albeit their function is confined to the masculine
arts of warfare. Morrigan is likely another manifestation of a Goddess of
Sovereignty, her name being mor 'great' and rigan 'queen(s)'.
So why weren't there queens in Ireland? Was it this masculine overlay that
turns the maiden into "a sheep between two rams", the pregnant mother into
a horse race contestant, and the crone, as the sacred hills of Ath Lúain
and Brugh na Bóinne, into the mutilated body of the Goddess of Sovereignty?
If these stories are propaganda for the patriarchy, why are these remnants
of a matrilineal culture where wisdom, inspiration, and agency, as seen
in the blood which is not Gods, but instead belongs to thee all of creation,
still remaining so prominently in the text? What lesson is learned by the
juxtaposition of these starkly different foci in the tales, the misogyny
of the warrior's deeds of exploitation and honor, and the Goddess with her
daughter a salmon's leap up the great yew tree teaching the power of the
Gae Bolga, to the hero?
I am the God who created in head
the fire
Who is it that throws light into the meeting on the mountain?
Who announces the ages of the moon?
Who teaches the place where couches the sun? (If not I?)
- Amergin the Milesian, 'The Mystery'
The first references we have to Druids,
which is also concurrent with the first notice of the Keltoi
is around the 4th century BCE, well into the Iron Age. The Indo-European
root of Druid is deru - meaning tree (concrete), and solid, strong
or true (abstract). The definition given for Druid is 'strong seer'
in turn points to the IE root weid - meaning to see (concrete)
and wisdom or knowledge (abstract) (AmHer, 2099, 2131). Druids
were part of the tripartite priestly class made up of themselves, the
Poets or Bards, and the Vates or Seers. They encompassed the powers
of the other two, with the additional responsibility of being king's
council and natural philosophers. Much of the lore we have of their
function is seen through the occluded lens of their Roman adversaries
and Christian commentators, for they were doubly damned by being the
priestly class of the Pagan Celtic culture. As the Táin is a
repository for certain elements of the pre-patriarchal, or matrilineal,
so too the Christianity of Erigeana contains remnants of the Pagan cultural
tradition of the Druids, Poets and Seers.
There is an argument in Indo-European studies that these 'technicians
of the sacred' were the inheritors of a shamanism itself as old as the
Neolithic. In effect the Oral Traditional material contains many references
to the activity of this priestly class as mediators between the divine
and the temporal, from the Indus to the Sinann. One of the common motifs
of the Druidic references, and by default, due to the absorption of
the Druidic/Bardic colleges, many of the lives of the Irish Saints,
which points to this shamanism, is the shape changing and close association
with animal totems. Whether it be Patrick's transformed deer escaping
the king's insult and anger, Kevin's mothering a nest of blackbirds,
or Bede's otter moccasin walk across the strand, these suggest not so
much a connection to the "family of things" as the ages old accretion
of Paganism. The frequency with which the early saints are associated,
both with "animal presence", and with or as Poets suggests that infiltration
might be a more apt description of the process of Ireland's conversion
of Christianity.
An example of this difference between the animism of Druidry and the
appropriation of animal motifs by the Irish saints is the fox. The fox
is the original animal totem of a Poet named Crimthamn, who would later
change that totem to a dove when he took the name Colm Cille. Likewise
the fox is imaged in the stories of saints in Every Earthly Blessing
as malicious and in need of forgiveness because of its innate tendencies.
Is it these innate tendencies of cunning and wiliness that made them
appropriate totems for a Poet or Druid? Oddly enough, the cat Pangur
Ban is neither a vegetarian, nor criticized for cruelty towards the
mouse. This need to 'tame' the wildness of these trickster animals is
in essence an ongoing manichaeism between order and chaos. "That academic
dichotomy gone forever/It is not that they are tame/But that we become
wild." And that was what was feared most and hence required eradication,
the wildness of it all.
Another important indicator of Druidical residue is the frequency with
which monasteries are associated with Oaks or dairí, which is
most likely a cognate of the IE root daru Kildare or 'Oak Church'
and Derry being the most obvious examples. In European Paganism it is
suggested that the reason the Oak was singled out as sacral is its inability
to ground lightning, often described as being 'lightning-blasted', showing
the favor of the sky Gods. It is possible that the Oak is consequently
to be associated with the Iron Age gods of "displaced responsibility",
and that a likely candidate for an earlier pre-Celtic world tree is
the Yew. It is associated both with death and immortality, and its relative
placement at burial sites, suggests use by Saxons, Celts or even the
enigmatic Megalith builders of the late Neolithic.
|
Mise
Rafteraí an file
Lán dóchais is grá Le súil gan solas Le ciúnas gan crá Dul siar m'aistir Le solas mo chroí |
I am
Raftery the poet
Full of hope and love Eyes without light Calm without sorrow Going west on my journey With light in my heart |
Fán
agus tuirseach
Go deireads mo shlí Féach anois mé Is m'agaith ar balla Ag senim ceoil Da phócaí folarnh |
Wandering
and weary
To the end of my way Look at me now With my face to the wall Playing music For empty pockets |
- Anthony Raftery, 'Mise Rafteraí'
A certain irony can be seen in the
way that the Irish monks and many of the saints have affiliations
with, were trained as, or maintain the traditions of the Poets.
This further points to the possibility that the Druidic and Poetic
functions of the Pagan religious caste infiltrated the Christian
clergy in Celtic Ireland and consequently mediated the form it took
there. Because of the power of this caste, whereas elsewhere in
Europe the Church was bringing a destruction to Pagan venerated
wells, sacred trees and groves, Pagan Ireland maintained these sacred
spaces by converting their activities to Christian use; thereby
preserving their ability to inform us of their earlier connections.
In the same way that we can see the residue of Druidic shamanism
in the use of animal totems by saints, the close connection between
the Poets and the saints and monks highlights how thin the veneer
of Christianity was on the Pagan practices of Celtic Ireland.
The Poets and the Bards were the information technology of their
time because of their ability to encode and preserve the Oral Traditional
material of Ireland. In their stories and songs we get a picture,
although incomplete, of the Gaelic world-view. Their preservation
of the Gaelic language made it possible for us to look back past
the Greek and Roman models of social organization and see vestiges
of an earlier Indo-European culture in the "psycholinguistics" of
its syntax. Their destruction is illustrated in both the Raftery
poem above, and in the Brian Friel play Translations, where
the Gaelic names from the Dindshenchas are being Anglicized
by the English. The repartee between the Hedge School master and
his students could be taken as an example of how their academic
discourse carried on. Before the monks copiously reproduced the
classics, these Poetic students were trained to have the Greek,
Latin and Celtic cultures all present and interacting in their education.
Their importance to a conception of a national culture (which they
were on the verge of birthing before the English exiled the Wild
Geese), as well as the continued destruction of these sages of ages
past is suggested in a poem by Ted Hughes 'Hear it Again' excerpt
here:
Tyrants know where to
aim/As Hitler poured his petrol and tossed his matches
Stalin collected the bards ... /In other words the mobile and
only libraries...
of all those enslaved peoples from the Black to/the Bering Sea
And made a bonfire/ Of the mainsprings of national identities
to melt
the folk into one puddle/And the three seconds of the present
moment
By massacring those wordy fellows whose memories were/bigger than
armies.
Their colleges had to have been seats of great learning, for "invaders and conquerors don't easily admit to the existence of admirable qualities", and the tendency for Irish monks to establish monasteries and colleges as far afield as Russia is well established. Anytime one of these Poets or Bards passed into the West without transmitting their songs and stories what was lost amounted to an entire library being incinerated. A library, not simply filled with dusty old tomes and colorful manuscripts constructed by monks, but a multi-media collection, made up of poetry, song, and stories, covering history, genealogy, geography, and religion (a religion not based on the received and mediated word, but the manifest living word). These were not mere artifacts from a golden age long past, they were the living and breathing cultural traditions, which continued to interact with the people and shape their world-view; even in the face of outside attempts at cultural conquest from Roman Catholicism and the English.
|
Sun's
in the mirror, red and gold
in the sky behind me, one huge crimson blazing globe - Glas Gaibhneach's heart milk through a sieve her drops of blood strained out like a picture of the Sacred Heart. Three scarlet brightnesses are there and pain so sharp, and sob so short. I stared at the drops afraid but almost unaware - like Sleeping Beauty when she gazed at her thumb pricked by the wheel, she turned it over, and over once more as if her actions were unreal. When Deirdre saw the blood on the snow did she know the raven's name? |
Then
I realize I drive towards you
my dearest friend and lovely man (may nothing keep me from your bed tonight but miles of road and truffic lights) and your impatience like a stone falls upon us from the skyand adds to our uneasiness the awkward weight of my hurt pride. And more great loads will fall on us if the omen comes to pass much greater than the great sun's globe that lately bled into glass And so, Great Mother, cave of awe - since it's towards you we race - is it the truth? Is your embrace and kiss more fine than honey, beer, or Spanish wine? |
The title of
this paper is my own personal raison d'être, it informs
much of my academic work. I look for the connections, which
point towards a world-view that is not dissimilar from that
expressed among the Archaic Gael. This is a place where
gender and ethnic considerations are moot in light of the
concerns of the tribe or tuatha. A world-view invested
in the place and space, in time and tide, of our spinning,
hurtling spaceship earth. Where the realm of the Otherworld
has as much importance and function as the boiling cauldron
of the daily grind. The Archaic is manifest for me in the
connection and connectivity of the blood, which is not God's,
from which we all spring. It is invoked and evoked by the
efforts of various 'technicians of the sacred' who are "priests
of the eternal imagination transmuting the daily bread of
experience into the radiant body of everliving life" in
poetry, in ritual, or in prophecy. They are the pontifex
maximus the bridge builders who cross the boundaries
others only see as obstacles and limitations. They are the
bridges between the world-views of Pagan Ireland and Roman
Christianity, because of them we have a fuller view of what
Christianity could and should have been, and yet may be.
My task is not to escape into the mists of prehistory in
some fantastic transcendence of our 'filthy modern tide'.
It is to strive in hope of re-visioning a whole and healthy
story which lives and breathes, and which is a model for
right livelihood for all in this great tide of pulsing and
throbbing life.
I hope that this has elucidated some of the differences
I see between the early Indo-European Megalithic Builders
and the Iron Age Continental Celts, and why they are important
in relation to the change in gender focus seen in the Táin.
Likewise, the discussion of how the Indo-European religious
castes were instrumental in the adoption and adaptation
of Christianity in Ireland. I realize that there is little
of the I you might have been seeking in this paper, these
are issues which are highly significant to me and the work
I have done and will continue to do. They are not merely
mediated through the obfuscating lens of academia, which
has become my primary mode of discourse they are a passion.
I still write poetry and sing and chant, participating in
the living and breathing of these ideas as much as I dissect
and reintegrate them for the academy's gristmill. I leave
you with a poem about the Patriarchs of the Old Testament: