Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

One day in late summer St Patrick was summoned to Ardee to sort out a row about the disappearance of church funds. He set out on foot carrying his trusty staff as a walking aid. His way went through Moybolgue in the rolling borderlands of east Cavan. The day was blistering, with a sun that beat down on the saint from an azure blue sky. There wasn’t a breath of wind. Patrick was thirsty and foot-sore and what’s more he was “out of his head with the hunger”. As he walked along he saw before him in the distance a beautiful girl with long golden tresses cascading over her shoulders and down her back. She had eyes as blue as the sky and teeth whiter than marble. She was riding a lovely white horse which was being led along the pot-holed road by a handsome young groom. St Patrick was a saint but he was also a man. He thought the heat had got to him and that he was seeing mirages.  The girl, horse and groom were riding along a hedge of wild bilberries, so close that the girl put out her hand to pick some fruit. Patrick watched avidly as her delicate mouth opened to receive the berries. As she bit into them the air was rent by the loudest clap of thunder St Patrick had ever heard. The sun darkened and clouds of acrid, foul-smelling smoke swirled around. The young girl was nowhere to be seen. She had been replaced by a giant hag with horrible, slime-green eyes shooting forth tongues of fire. With each breath this creature pulsated violently, spewing forth a suffocating poisonous mist. It opened its mouth to reveal a deep chasm, guarded by two horrible fangs which fell upon the horse and groom devouring both and digesting them with a stomach-churning belch. Not far off there was a funeral cortege. The mourners carried a   black-draped coffin. On seeing the hag they dropped the coffin and ran off, but they were not swift enough for the hag who seemed to swoop down upon them, issuing a cackle before consuming them. At this the hag spied St Patrick. Its appetite was not yet sated and it moved towards him, with the obvious intention of adding him to the bill of far. He crouched down behind some stones and held the staff he walked with away from his body. He waited until he could feel the hag’s malodorous breath upon him and taking precise aim propelled the staff through the air towards the hag’s forehead. As it landed between its eyes it exuded an ear-splitting screech of agony, followed by an ever louder exposition, accompanied by fire and multi-coloured sparks. The hag separated into four large pieces which flew through the air. As each one landed the earth was shaken as if by an earthquake. The air then suddenly cleared, the smoke disappeared and the sun-blessed day of late summer reappeared. St Patrick was in no doubt that he had been saved from the hag’s fury through Divine intervention, so he built a small wooden church at the site. In the later Middle Ages this was replaced by a stone building whose ruins still stand today.

Locals still point out the places where the hag’s miserable body fell to earth. These are usually large stones, sometimes relics of the last Ice Age. Opinion is divided though about their exact identity, though everyone agrees that the final quarter of the hag crashed into a lake causing a minor flood, though once again not everyone agrees about exactly which lake was the recipient. Locals also point to another stone with two distinct hollows. This they say was the stone upon which the saint knelt.

This story is interesting because it portrays Patrick as an athletic, action-man saint with his sleeves rolled up fighting the forces of evil. It is interesting that he is portrayed as using his staff like a javelin or a spear. Lugh Lamhfhada (the well-hung), the ancient Celtic God of nearly everything, was also supposed to be a good man with a spear. His was called Gae Assail and came from Persia. An early Irish text relates that Lugh’s spear flashed like lightning and brought instant death to whoever it struck. It would then return to Lugh’s hands if he pronounced the word ibhar (yew) before throwing it. Also the action is set in late summer, near to Lugh’s feast of Lughnasa, maybe in the month of the year called Lughnasa in Irish, though known as August in English.

 In the fifteen hundred odd years since these events Moybolgue has enjoyed a reputation as a quiet and safe place. A legend was long believed that the spot had not seen the last of the hag, and that it would return after thirty-three generations. Now let’s just say an average generation is a little over fifty years, and that the events described in the legend happened around say 450 AD … I’ll let my readers do the math.

© Ciaran Parker

Mad uncle Frank

Francisco Macias Nguema, was Equatorial Guinea’s first president. In the eleven years he held the post he was responsible for the deaths of 50,000 people, as well as sending thousands of others into exile. Before his overthrow and murder by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema (who is still in power) the country had earned the unwelcome epithet of “the Dachau of Africa”. Amnesty International’s annual report were full of the heinous acts of human rights violations carried out by Macias, not t mention the crimes against humanity to be laid at his successor’s door. He oversaw one of the most bizarre personality cults in history – so bizarre because it was so unmerited. He adored bestowing grandiose titles on himself, yet he was barely literate. It is said he failed the colonial exams to become an office clerk three times and was only successful on the fourth because of some positive discrimination. He was given to violent swings of personality and received treatment in Spain and the United States for unspecified psychiatric problems; towards the latter years of his life he had acquired some unidentifiable disease

Not really like his uncle?

which may have been AIDS-related.

His hold on power was maintained through fear, not only of his loyal thugs but of Macias personally. He deliberately cultivated the belief that his father had been a witch doctor and sorcerer, and that he had inherited many of these gifts. He was rumoured to have drunk the blood of some of his political opponents, and he kept a large stockpile of human skulls at his presidential compound, alongside all of the country’s foreign currency reserves and medical supplies. Macias loved the dark and detested light; a Spanish airline pilot was arrested and tortured when he accidentally shone his ‘plane’s headlights on Macias’ jet as it sat on the airport tarmac one night. In 1977 a visiting researcher was told that “… you may be against Macias while the sun shines, but after dark you have to be for him,” Even when overthrown and sentenced to death, no locals could be found to man the firing squad, and the task had to be performed by Moroccan soldiers.

Macias  Nguema’s preference for the dark reminds me of the activities of a solicitor employed by the Irish health Service Executive, who is sadly well-known to her victims, and who seems to delight in working in the hours of night, well after “The Bard’’s witching hour. Does she feel that her victim are more cowed by the inky blackness, and less able to put up a defence to her machinations when they are awoken suddenly by the headlights of the garda cars ferrying her to the scene of her nocturnal sacrifices? or is there a yet more sinister reason for this, tied up perhaps with practice of the dark arts?

While the sun shines it is easy to be against Ms Helen (or is it Ellinor?) Stone, but after dark …

I wonder what she’s doing for Halloween?

Some people may be surprised at what they will no doubt term my outburst against sparklers, “bangers” and fireworks in my most recent “Echos of the Past” piece in the Cavan Echo. As I said these are dangerous; what’s more they cause a lot of distress to animals. There is one group of animals upon whom humans really depend: guide-dogs for the blind. They are highly trained to be able to navigate their handlers, and to add a pair of eyes which the blind person does not possess, but yet they become distressed and disoriented when confronted with the detonation of one of these bangers. This then affects the blind person, who may often find themselves completely lost.

This anti-social aspect of Halloween was recently exprressed on RTE radio by guide-dog user Bethann Collins. She asked why were such items allowed to proliferate, especially when they are technically illegal in the Irish Republic. I feel I can answer her – it is because of the ambivalence of the authorities who never act unless they are forced to by events. If, and I hope it never happens) somebody is fatally injured, then there will be an outcry and the police will put out their collective eggbags to clamp down on the sale and posseession of fireworks, but they’ll get tired of it and the whole thing will peter out into the sands of habitual laziness.

SAMHAIN
 
Samhain was the beginning of the Celtic year. It was when the year turned and so was propitious for divining the future. Long after Christianity had apparently triumphed this aspect was retained in popular memory when cooks placed talismans in food whose discovery might reveal what lay ahead for those discovering them.

In prehistoric Cavan Samhain was a time of terror, when the prescribed sacrifices of the first-born were made to the idol of Crom cruach in west Cavan. At a season when the skies were visibly darkening the land around Darragh Fort near Ballymagovern often ran red with blood.

 Samhain marked another turning-point; from those seasons when man mastered nature through husbandry of the soil and care of plants towards the dead season of winter. With the lengthening of night Man became an important slave of nature and its forces, which were mysterious and frightening.

The enveloping darkness was luridly illuminated by people’s imagination. The boundaries between the living and the dead became blurred: the dead shook off their shrouds and emerged from their tombs to pay often unwanted visits to their friends and relations who had been able to cheat the grim reaper. The connection with the dead was so strong that the early Church, which had struggled for so long against this pagan survival was forced to embrace Samhain, transforming it into the Feast of All Saints or All Hallows.

A young Monaghan boy has been seriously injured when a firework exploded in his hands while playing yesterday. These fireworks have been illegal for many years but not a year passes without someone, usually a child, sustaining horrifying injuries.

The Gardai Siochana have once again warned of the dangers of handlings these things. Quite frankly, that’s a lot of use. They’re illegal, so why aren’t the gardai getting up off their butts and confiscating them?

Hallowe’en with its bangers, hateful to humans and animals alike, has come early this year. I heard fireworks being let off on the Children’s play-ground in Belturbet in the last week of August.

But what is the connection with Hallowe’en or Samhan? This was traditonally celebrated in Ireland by a bit of human and animal sacrifice, not with fireworks. These are much more closely linked to the “alien” rituals of Guy Fawkes night, rituals which are inherently anti-Catholic and anti-Irish. Ah once again Paddy’ll do anythin’ for a jar and a bit o’ crack.

A few weeks ago I talked about Hallowe’en in my piece for the Cavan Echo, called It will be all fright on the night (a marvellous headline for which credit must go to Maria McCourt). I discussed some of its pagan antecedents in an interview with Donagh McKeown on his programme All Points North on Northern Sound. I thought that this might be a good place to talk a little more about some of the aspects raised.

Hallowe’en gets its name from All Hallows Eve, or the eve of the Feast of All Saints, celebrated in the western church since the seventh century on Novemmber 1st. This feast, despite its Christian veneer, is the old pre-Christian feast of Samhain. This was already a major feast of the Celtic calendar at the dawn of the Christian era. In 1897 some bronze tablets were unearthed near the town of Coligny, in the departement of Ain in France. These were written in the Celtic Gaulish language and contained a detailed calendar of the Celtic Year, or more accurately, of a segment of five consecutive years. The cycle started with the month of Samonios, which was clearly the same as Samhain. This also pointed to Samhain being the beginning of the Celtic year, divided into two main halves: the first one of darkness giving way eventually to the half of the year suffused by light.

The prevalence of the feast of Samonios for religious ritual was noted by commentators like Julius Caesar in his De Bello Gallica and also, a century later by Lucan in his Pharsalia. Julius Caesar noted practices in propitiation of a death god, an equivalent of the Roman Dis Pater. Classical commentators also noted the importance of the feast for human sacrifice. Two different deities were identified. Teutates. who preferred his victims to be drowned (sometimes in a big cauldron) ; and Taranis, whose preference was for flame-grilled offerings. Teutates may have been the same as the god known in Ireland as Tuathal Teachtmhar. Yet it is Taranis who is more relevant to practices in the Cavan area.  

The equivalent of Taranis amongst the Irish Celts has not been identified with certainty. I think that he may be the same as Crom Cruaich. Taranis is very close to taran, the Welsh word for thunder. As I told Donagh on the radio I remember an old woman from Drumlane telling me how she and her neighbours always prayer to St Mogue (founder of Drumlane and evangelist of Breifne) when they heard thunder. St Mogue was a saint who was known for taking on and defeating Crom Cruaich on his home ground and defeating and smashing his pantheon at Magh Slecht, not far from Ballymagovern Co. Cavan.

This site was known to attract a rather grisly set of pilgrims. Crom Cruaich expected, and no doubt got, the first born of both humans and herds. The area around Magh Slecht can best be described as a ritual landscape replete with standing stones such as that at Camagh. The Killycluggin Stone, now in Cavan’s County Museum, may have played some part in the rituals, while Kilnavart (Cill na bhFeart, the church of the graves) may mark the location of a cemetery of Crom Cruaich’s victims.

But Magh Sleach may not be the only site associated with sacrifices to Crom Cruaicfh / Taranis.  Archaeologists have long been puzzled by a strange phenomenon called vitrified forts. These consist of a stone revetement or outer wall,, which has been subjected to exceptionally high temperatures, maybe in excess of 1000 centigrade. So high is the heat that it causes the stones to partially melt and run into each other, giving the whole lot a glassy apperance. These are found in Brittany, England, Scotland (especially in Aberdeen) and in Ireland, though there are only half a dozen still recognisable, including one on Shantemon mountain outside Cavan.

They’ve puzzled archaeologists. The heating of the stones didn’t make them stronger, so what was going on? Excavations have been rare. They are something of the cinderella of the archaeological world, given a wide berth by most “respectacle” archaeologists and left to those in the profession who are academically on skid row, maybe due to a drink problem. Those that have been excavated have sometimes thrown up quantities of human body parts that have been immolated or burned, not cremated and deposited in a pot or urn, Could it be that they are the sites where victims were sacrificed to Crom Cruaich / Taranis?

The cult of Samhain / Samonios was very well established. It seemed totally resistent to the spread of Christianity. So the western church pursued a policy line which it had found to be the only effective way of dealing with recalcitrant pre-Christian practices: if you couldn’t beat them, co-opt them. So in the middle of the eighth century (some say a century earlier) Pope Gregory III moved the feast of All Saints, which had previously been celebrated on the first sunday after Pentecost, to the first of November where it still resides in the Roman calendar.

One other and probably unrelated parallel with Hallowe’en / Oiche Shamhna / Nos Galan Gaeaf is its almost identitcal position in the year to the Hindu and Sikh festival of Dipavali, the festival of light. A connection between the Celtic Samhain and the Indian Diwali may seem far-fetched but it is not entirely implausible. The ancestors of tye Celts and those who migrated into the Indian sub continanet from the third millenium BC lived quite near to each other. (I’m indebted to my friend Matt McCabe of Drumbo, Cavan for pointing out the proximity of the two festivals,)