"A priest of the eternal
imagination transmuting the daily bread
of existence into the radiant body of everliving life."
- James Joyce, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
There are three themes interlaced like knot-work running through Ester de Waal's, Every Earthly Blessing. The most important by far, and one we are little aware of in this daily slavish grind, is that life, and the living of it are the numinous. The being of existence is the great cathedral at which we should worship every moment of every day and night. The second is recognition of the intrinsic difference of the Xtianity of Eruguena and that of Augustine seen most obviously in the conflict of man and the environment, or the orientation towards the North African Coptic influences as opposed to Mediterranean Roman traditions. The last of these themes, and one which as a Xtian is most impressive for her to relate at several points, is the understanding that much of the Celtic, or Irish Culdee monastic tradition is based on the absorption of pre-Xtian pagan traditions and a cohesive religious caste - the Druids, Poets, and Seers.
"So don't tell me about
the land of Nod/Where we are supposed to sit at the right hand of God/
Where the lion will lay down with the lamb/Cause you know damn well, he'll eat
him if he can/
The lion doesn't want to be pacified/With promises of an endless life/ He knows
it's not that way/
He's not detached he sees it everyday/ The birth of death and the decay/
He accepts and says it's okay/ He wouldn't eat us for our elitist ways."
- Poi dig Pondering, Praise the Lord
Unfortunately, there are only two things that I learned from this book, largely because much of the material regarding the monastic traditions in Ireland and the battle between the Roman and Celtic churches was covered in Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization. Although there was a greater focus on the Coptic associations as we saw in the film The Atlanteans, which I find both intriguing and is supported by some of my own research on Brugh na Boinne, or Newgrange. What I did discover in this text though is the way in which Druidic ideals of interrelation with animals were incorporated in the tales of the Irish saints. One could easily suggest that they functioned in the same way a familiar would. In fact the shape-changing of Patrick and his followers at the hill of Slane (xix-xxii) is a Druidic art as we saw in the battle of the pig-keepers as told in Tain Bo Cuailnge. This use of animals and shape changing in the stories of the Irish saints and monks is an area of further study in deciphering the way in which Pagan Druidry survived in Xtian Ireland. Another similar issue is raised in the cursing of the Aspen tree (82) because of its association with the Crucifixion. What other plants, like the (Haw)Thorn are similarly singled out in the Xtian tradition, and like the familiar association of animals, did it have an antecedent in Pagan Druidry? An example of this is illustrated in the proscription of using iron on Fridays, in the reaping of grain (11). The reason given is that the nails used in the Crucifixion were iron; what underlies this proscription is older than the death of a desert prophet. Iron has always been anathema to the faeries or Tuatha de Dannan, for it is likely recognition of the battle between the kinship of the Bronze Age (N. African/Mediterranean) matrilineal culture and the kingship of the Iron Age (Roman/Celtic) patriarchal age.
"An Ash tree closes
it on one side/
And a Hazel like a great tree by a rath on the other."
- Maravan of Connacht (60)
"…No mere pantheism"(64). This statement
grates on me like sand in the eye, and the dryness of the desert in my throat.
The words of desert prophets and their lap-dogs that cut down trees that may
have been in existence since the height of the Bronze Age, some possibly as
old as 4000 years. What did they fear from those trees? Was it the psychic heaviness
of millennia of sacrifices poured on its roots and hung form its branches? Long
before the stories of Yeshua's political assassination, a one-eyed god named
Odin hung on the world-tree Yggdrasil and received wisdom and transformation.
Before Yeshua's descent to the chthonic underworld the goddesses Innanna, Ishtar,
and Koré (Persephone) had descended that path of initiation and transcendence
of mortality. Likewise before Yeshua's transfiguration was celebrated as the
resurrection of Easter, the gods Osiris, Attis, and Adonis all died as sacrifices
of the goddesses they adored, to represent the death and rebirth of life and
the cyclic vitality of the environment. Xtianity is indeed a veneer on older
and richer religious systems. The tree, the sun and the cross existed as symbols
of religious devotion and reverence long before they were cut down, defamed
as "mere pantheism" or outright stolen to prop up a faith based not on life
and the living but on death and the transcendence/abrogation of the physical.
Long ago there were giant ancient trees throughout the landscape. We danced
around the great ones because we could still remember a time in the far distant
past when we had lived in them. We had climbed down out of them to stand on
the earth and reach up to the stars as they did. Or perhaps the weather had
changed and the dry heat had made the leaves scarcer, and we were hungry. Two
great rounds circled our heads night and day. They were our measurements, the
divided the nights into months and the days into seasons. We built great monuments
to these forms, the tree, and the circle. The groves of trees we fashioned out
of great hewn stones and stood them upright in circles just like the grooves
of Yew. We made great round tumuli to absorb the sun's energies and hold it
in the chthonic womb and tomb through the dark winter. At Newgrange the sun's
rays pierce the inner womb of the tumuli at the Winter Solstice, or Yule and
represent the fertilization of the body of the Goddess. From this intercourse,
the Green Man, symbolic of the vegetative cycle, the lover and son of the Goddess
will be born only to die. These two great forms towered over us, they were anchors
and orientations for our own daily rounds. As above, so below.
And then there is the Solstice, the balance of light and dark, at Spring and
Autumn, this is the original cross, and the axis mundi.
I don't believe in the
fall, therefore i see no need for the redemption.
Tell militant Michael and judicious Jehavah that i ain't buying their eviction.
I am eating from the other tree, and the the Serpent, Eve and i are going to
dance.
"Sin and evil…the dark powers…Something carried over from an earlier pagan past"(105). Fear and awe…the powers of darkness…Something carried over from a cohesive and harmonious religious system.