Ancient myths - Village Magazine

6 2 April 2017

HE HIGHEST compliment I can pay Mark Wil-

liams is that after reading his ‘Ireland’s

Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth’,

I have an appetite to learn the Irish language.

He exposes to the light a literary inheritance

that has barely ﬂickered in the Irish national conscious

ness since independence in 1922. It allows this nation to

consider its origins, and observe how mythology

involves a dynamic process of re-imagining, inclusive to

all traditions.

Williams lays down a storehouse of inspirational

sagas including the Rabelaisian intrigue of ‘The Second

Battle of Moytura’ and ‘The Tragic Deaths of the Children

of Lir’, interpreted as a Christian parable. These and

other subtle tales are a corrective to the fatalistic

machismo of the character of Cú Chulainn from the Irish

epic ‘Táin Bó Cualígne', that has tended to incarnate the

nationalist self-image.

Scholars have found it difﬁcult to deﬁne the nature of

the Celtic immortals, or gods. J. R. R. Tolkien complained

that “there is bright colour but no sense”, though the

elves of his ‘Lord of the Rings’ were inﬂuenced by ‘Celtic’

mythology. The accuracy of the term ‘Celtic’ is itself

doubtful when we consider the word’s Greek origin as

‘barbarian’, and the fragility of evidence derived from

excavations at La Téne in Switzerland of the evidence of

homogeneity of a contiguous continental ‘Celtic’

culture.

Undeterred, modern ‘Celticism’ (a hybrid of ‘Celtic’

folklore and mysticism) incubated fuzzy ideas such as

these expressed by the early twentieth-century theoso-

phist Walter Evans-Wentz:

“Of all European lands I venture to say that Ireland is

the most mystical and, in the eyes of true Irishmen, as

much the Magic Isle of Gods and Initiates now as it was

when the Sacred Fires ﬂashed from its purple, heather-

covered mountain-tops and mysterious round

towers, and the Great Mysteries drew to its

hallowed shrines neophytes from the

West as from the East, from India

and Egypt as well as from Atlan-

tis; and Erin’s mystic seeking

sons will watch and wait for the

relighting of the Fires and the

restoration of the Old Druidic

Mysteries”.

Efforts to taxonomise the

various myths and develop

rituals of worship foundered,

at times comically, but the

ethereal motifs were a well

spring of inspiration during the

ﬁn de siècle Irish Revival. This

engendered possibly the ﬁnest move-

ment in English-language literature of

the twentieth century: the early WB Yeats

and late James Joyce drew on imagery from these

tales. The corpus remains a powerful creative source,

connecting us with enduring symbols that portray Carl

Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious. Unfortunately

today in Ireland, as elsewhere, the unconscious mind is

rarely nurtured, and the Irish immortals hardly ﬁgure in

From the eighth to the eleventh century Ireland

nurtured an outstanding vernacular literature

by Frank Armstrong

Ancient myths

for today’s dreams

CULTURE

Efforts to taxonomise the

myths and develop rituals of

worship foundered but they

were a wellspring of inspiration

during the ﬁn de siècle Irish

Revival, particularly for the

early WB Yeats and late

James Joyce

April 2017 6 3

We have no evidence for

how pagan deities were

worshipped, and they tend

to appear as numinous

presences “immanent in the

landscape”

‘serious’ contemporary literature. Another revival may

be brewing, however, associated with John Moriarty’s

‘philo-mythical approach’.

Williams speculates that Irish worship of gods before

the arrival of Christianity may have been in considerable

ﬂux due to late Iron Age agricultural decline. The evi-

dence for Gaelic paganism is fragmented and mediated

for us by a Christianity that brought literacy: the indig

enous culture had not advanced beyond Ogham script.

We have no evidence for how pagan deities were wor-

shipped, and they tend to appear as numinous presences

“immanent in the landscape”. Williams speculates that

a taboo may have operated against poetic description of

pagan worship. Nor do we encounter a central Mount

Olympus or Asgard for their deities. Tara was the seat of

the high kings, not of the Irish immortals. Their frag-

mented residences in síd mounds, haunting the

countryside, reﬂect their banishment into the subterra-

nean unconscious after the arrival of Christianity. As a

reﬂection, or shadow, of a politically fragmented human

society, their supposed location is unsurprising.

It is important to emphasise that throughout the

period the Bible remained the foundation of learning,

and few other books were available. Thus we ﬁnd Ba’al,

a biblical Canaanite god, being associated with the feast

of Bealtaine at the start of May in ‘Cormac’s Glossary’

(Sanas Cormac) c.900, rather than the native ‘Bel’. More-

over, access to the writings of Isidore of Seville (d.636)

brought poets into contact with the myths of Classical

Rome and Greece which inﬂuenced the ceaseless recast-

ing of indigenous tropes.

It might be assumed that the early Church brought a

doctrinaire and prescriptive faith, but early medieval

scholarship is infused with the language of paradox.

Scholars were also acquainted with a Neoplatonism

which posited a universal harmony attractive to poets.

As when two ocean plates collide to produce an extir

pation of life, the encounter between a relatively

insulated native civilisation and wider European currents

stoked great cultural ferment. From the eighth to the

eleventh century a formidable vernacular Irish literature

arose, although most of the poets are unknown. Williams

says this must count as “an outstanding contribution to

the literary inheritance of humanity”. It is also striking

that many of the great works emerged at a point when

the nation was suffering grievously under Viking attacks.

This must have prompted deep questioning of God’s will,

and the validity of their social institutions. The pre-exist-

ing deities offered imaginative tools with which to

criticise society when overt attack was dangerous, and

artistically limiting.

Irish ﬁlid (poets) were experts in memorialisation of

tradition, genealogies and vernacular composition, and

6 4 April 2017

CULTURE

were an exalted cast among the áes dána (skilled

people). They were not clerics although, some of

their education overlapped with priests’. In a

highly stratiﬁed society they painted themselves

as equal to kings. They were also legal authori-

ties in a society spared full-time lawyers. As

masters of language – and performance perhaps

– they shaped the outlook of their audiences;

They were more or less Percy Shelley’s “unac-

knowledged legislators”.

These Irish poets learnt their trade, often

operating under exacting metrical demands.

According to Williams: “They were expert in

grammatical analysis … in the highly formalised

rules of poetic composition, and in training the

memory to encompass the vast body of histori

cal and legendary story, precedent, and

genealogy which it was their business to know”.

Pagan gods and lore were their discreet pre-

serve, conferring deep awareness of the native

language and landscape, although, as Williams

stresses, they were not atavistic pagans.

The Romantic inspiration for the Revival of

Irish mythology at the end of the nineteenth cen-

tury is significant. Yeats, especially, was

inﬂuenced by Romantics and pre-Raphaelite

poets of a previous era, foremost perhaps Shel-

ley who saw poetry as the font of wisdom and

extensively mined Classical mythology for meta-

phor and inspiration. In his essay ‘The

Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ (1900) Yeats

refers to the “ministering spirits” for the former’s

poem Intellectual Beauty: “who correspond to

the Devas of the East, and the Elemental Spirits

of medieval Europe, and the Sidhe [sic] of ancient

Ireland”. In quoting that poem he reveals the sig-

niﬁcance of the síde to his own Art:

“These are ‘gleams of a remoter world which

visit us in sleep,’ spiritual essences whose shad-

ows are the delights of the senses, sounds

‘folded in cells of crystal silence’, ‘visions swift,

and sweet, and quaint,’ which lie waiting their

moment ‘each in its thin sheath, like a chrysalis,’

‘odours’ among ‘ever-blooming Eden trees,’ ‘liq-

uors’ that can give ‘happy sleep,’ or can make

tears ‘all wonder and delight’; ‘the golden genii

who spoke to the poets of Greece in dreams’;

‘the phantoms’ which become the forms of the

arts when ‘the mind, arising bright from the

embrace of beauty,’ ‘casts on them the gathered

rays which are reality’; ‘the guardians’ who move

in ‘the atmosphere of human thought,’ as ‘birds

within the wind, or the ﬁsh within the wave’”.

Yeats, however, felt, “Shelley’s ignorance of

their more traditional forms, give some of his

poetry an air of rootless poetry”.

Yeats identiﬁed himself with Ireland (as

opposed to England where he spent much of his

early life), ﬁnding here vibrant and novel mysti

cal sources for his poetry, containing symbols

he considered universal. His Ireland was a

Romantic illusion coinciding with a doomed

attraction to Maud Gonne whose intense

nationalism bewitched him. Building on the work

of Standish O’Grady and others, he and his

friends, the journalist and visionary George Rus-

sell and the folklorist Augusta Lady Gregory,

developed a pantheon of Irish gods mirroring

Classical and, importantly, Hindu, models. In

Yeats’ view: “Tradition is always the same. The

earliest poet of India and the Irish peasant in his

hovel nod to each other across the ages, and are

in perfect agreement”.

As with the early period of Christianity, the

nourishment of other traditions, Neoplatonic

and Oriental, brought texture and colour to the

Irish gods. It is also telling that the leading Reviv-

alists came from Protestant backgrounds as that

tradition emphasises the malleability of immor-

tals ‘immanent in the landscape’. The Tuatha Dé

are equal-opportunities enchanters who make

no distinction based on race or creed, although

all should be beware of the amádan na bruidhne,

a supernatural being whose very touch brings

disablement and death. The fool in Ireland is not

always wise.

Importantly at this time, Yeats and his coterie

formed the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

which served a role akin to the schooling of the

medieval ﬁlid. According to Williams: “Progress

up through the grades of the Golden Dawn was

via a series of initiations and examinations, each

of which required the initiate to master aspects

of occult symbolism and philosophy – a system

of considerable intellectual complexity”. It

seems that Yeats who never attended university

was alluding to the beneﬁts of this formation

when he urged, “Irish poets learn your trade’, in

his valedictory ‘Under Ben Bulben’.

Largely owing to their identiﬁcation with

heretical Protestantism and deviant theosophy,

the Tuatha Dé largely retreat from view after Irish

independence in 1922 and most schoolchildren

are unacquainted with the riches of the early

sagas which helps explain the continuing

decline in the fortunes of the Irish language. It is

revealing, however, that the determinedly cos-

mopolitan James Joyce proposed that James

Stephens, a prominent scholar of Irish myth,

should complete 'Finnegans Wake' should he

expire before doing so.

It is instructive that the retreat of mythology

from late-twentieth-century Irish literature coin-

cided with a loss of vividness and elements of

magic.

It is worthwhile recalling the views of the lead-

ing art critic of nineteenth-century Britain John

Ruskin who asserted a belief in “spiritual powers

… genii, fairies, or spirits”. He claimed that, “No

true happiness exists, nor is any good work done

… but in the sense or imagination of such pres-

ences”. This may have been meant in the sense

that we should preserve our ‘childish’ sense of

wonder into adult life. Williams suggests that a

mythology, “furnishes a culture with total world-

view, interpreting and mirroring back everything

that that culture ﬁnds signiﬁcant”. It is a medium

that remains vitally generative in the creative

process allowing artists to imagine divine pos-

sibilities. Unfortunately its possibilities have

been tethered by a dunderhead scientism that

conﬂates all belief in the supernatural.

Scientism now operates in the same way as a

dogmatic Christianity when it ceased to express

ideas in the language of paradox. The location

of the Tuatha Dé and other Irish immortals is in

the unconscious mind, which is as real as any

other phenomenon.

John Moriarty is the latest writer to light the

torch of the Tuatha Dé in his ‘philo-mythical’ writ-

ings, dousing his work with characters borrowed

from Old Irish literature. His prose is gloriously

poetical although it is difﬁcult to keep abreast of

the ubiquitous erudition. It is advisable to begin

by listening to recordings of Moriarity as he

explores the contours of his crooked world,

observing all ontologies and mythologies that

lie in the undergrowth. Unsurprisingly, the 2012

documentary about his life 'Dreamtime, Revis-

ited' was subjected to attack, with Donald Clarke

in the Irish Times describing it as a “priceless

parody of Celtic windbaggery”. The reviewer

acknowledged that he had never read any of

Moriarty’s formidable writings and evinced no

appetite to do so; preferring instead the cheap

humour of the amádan na bruidhne, and reveal

ing the empirical and utilitarian outlook that

reigns in our culture.

Mark Williams’ book is a tour de force of schol-

arship by any measure. Naturally there are

lacunae in a treatment that spans over a thou-

sand years, including an acknowledged omission

to integrate the gods of the 'Táin Bó Cualígne'

into his narrative. It may also have beneﬁted

from further concentration on the social struc-

tures of early Christian Ireland and the

agricultural modes of production, and relations

with Nature, that underpinned these. The Tuatha

Dé exist in an Irish dreamtime that we dismiss at

our peril. Their presence remains etched into the

landscape as an undiscriminating fountain of

creativity that may help us unlock the most vivid

ideas.

Subtle tales are a corrective to the fatalistic

machismo of the character of Cú Chulainn

from the Irish epic ‘Táin Bó Cualígne', that has tended to

incarnate the nationalist self-image

April 2017 6 5

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