How the Irish Saved Civilization

by Thomas Cahill

  Like religion in our own day, the Irish religious impulse must have manifested itself in two very different ways. The basely religious would have been glad to sacrifice others to gods they conceived of as ravening horrors, projections of their own psyches and their own twisted lives. These we still find today among religious types who rigidly put principle before people, whose icons (within Christianity) are likely to be bland, breastless madonnas or glassy-eyed Nordic Christs. At the other pole were people like Lindow Man, who willingly died for his people. Between these poles, I’d say, stood the vast majority of Irish votaries, sometimes giving in to their baser religious instincts, sometimes inspired by the nobler ideals of their religion.

  That Lindow Man was a sacrifice there can be little doubt. His hands are uncalloused, his nails beautifully manicured. Thus, he was an aristocrat, though, strangely, he cannot have been a warrior, for his body shows no evidence of the scars of battle. Indeed, leaving aside for the moment the marks of his elaborate execution, he appears to be without blemish of any kind. According to British archaeologists Anne Ross and Don Robins, he was a druid prince who had come from Ireland about A.D. 60, as the Romans were asserting their control and expunging druidism. He offered himself as a sacrifice to the gods for the defeat of the Romans. Ross and Robins even think they know his name—Lovernius, the Fox-Man. Certainly, he had dark red hair and a full beard (like a druid, unlike a bushily mustached warrior) and wore around his left forearm a circlet of fox fur, the naked man’s only adornment.

  The digestive tracts of all these sacrificial victims have been analyzed to see what their last meal might tell us about their circumstances. In the Danish cases, each last meal was a disgusting potpourri, grains mixed with many other (only marginally edible) plants—a stomach-turning, prehistoric granola! The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from this evidence is that the people of each of the Danish victims, enduring famine and close to starvation, were diluting their dwindling cereal supply with anything that would make it last longer. It is easy to understand a victim’s willingness to offer his life to the earth goddess so that she might deign to feed his family.

  But Irish Lovernius is another matter. His esophagus was found to contain only some bits of blackened hearthcake, a rather odd last meal. Ross and Robins rightly remind us that a scorched or blackened piece of unleavened bread has long served in Celtic communities as a sign of victimhood. As late as this century, boys in remote Scottish hamlets would meet on the moors on May 1, the ancient feast of Beltaine, kindle a bonfire, and divide a cake in equal pieces corresponding to the number of boys. “They daubed charcoal over one of these until it was perfectly black, and placed all the pieces in a hat. Everyone was blindfolded, and drew out a portion. Whoever drew the black piece was the devoted person, and was figuratively sacrificed to Baal [the god of the feast of Beltaine]. He had to leap three times through the flames.” One can imagine that once upon a time the sacrifice was hardly figurative.

  The most conclusive evidence that the bogmen were sacrificed is the story their bodies tell of the manner of their deaths. Each submitted himself naked to an elaborate, ritualized Triple Death. In the case of Lindow Man, for instance, his skull was flattened by three blows of an ax, his throat garroted by a thrice-knotted sinew cord, his blood emptied quickly through the precise slitting of his jugular. Here is the ancient victim of sacrifice, the offering made out of deep human need. Unblemished, raised to die, possibly firstborn, set aside, gift to the god, food of the god, balm for the people, purification, reparation for all—for sins known and unknown, intended and inadvertent. Behold god’s lamb, behold him who takes away the sins of all.

  Patrick declared that such sacrifices were no longer needed. Christ had died once for all. I’d bet he quoted Paul, his model, who in his letter to the church at Philippi recited this mysterious poem about sacrifice, the oldest Christian hymn of which we have record:

  Though he possessed divine estate

  He was not jealous to retain

  Equality with God.

  He cast off his inheritance,

  He took the nature of a slave

  And walked as Man among men.

  He emptied himself to the last

  And was obedient to death—

  To death upon a cross.

  And, therefore, God has raised him up

  And God has given him the Name-

  Which-is-above-all-names,

  That at the name of Jesus all

  In heaven high shall bow the knee

  And all the earth and depths

  And every tongue of men proclaim

  That Jesus Christ is LORD—

  To the glory of the Father.

  Yes, the Irish would have said, here is a story that answers our deepest needs—and answers them in a way so good that we could never even have dared dream of it. We can put away our knives and abandon our altars. These are no longer required. The God of the Three Faces has given us his own Son, and we are washed clean in the blood of this lamb. God does not hate us; he loves us. Greater love than this no man has than that he should lay down his life for his friends. That is what God’s Word, made flesh, did for us. From now on, we are all sacrifices—but without the shedding of blood. It is our lives, not our deaths, that this God wants. But we are to be sacrifices, for Paul adds to the hymn this advice to all: “Let this [same] mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”

  The Celts have left us two cups—perhaps the two most famous cups in all of history—which beautifully reveal the story of the transformation of Irish imagination from its fearful and unstable pagan origins to its baptized peace. The first cup is the Gundestrup Cauldron, found in a Danish swamp where it was thrown as a votary offering by a Celtic devotee a century or two before Christ. We know it was intended as an offering because it was newly forged and, in accordance with Celtic custom, broken into pieces before it was offered: it was never intended for normal, human use. (All sacrifices, even the communion bread, must be set aside and somehow broken, consumed, or transformed in order to be authentic. This is part of the “logic” of sacrifice.) The Cauldron is a dazzling feat of silversmithing, its panels alive with gods and warriors. Several panels refer to sacrifice, both animal and human. One panel depicts a gigantic cook-god who drops squirming humans into a vat as we might lobsters. Another, though, depicts a horned god—a figure often referred to as Cernunnos, a god found on coins from India to the British Isles—a lord of animals, surrounded by goat, deer, snake, dolphin, and other members of the animal kingdom, as well as by trefoils of plants and flowers. Against the violence of the warriors and the carnivorous, cannibal gods is set this prehistoric Saint Francis, ruling his peaceable kingdom. The image serves almost as a bridge between the angry Celtic gods, demanding sacrifice, and the Christian God, who offers himself.

  The other cup is the Ardagh Chalice, found in a Limerick field and dating to the end of the seventh or the beginning of the eighth century—the same period in which the “Breastplate” reached its final form. It is the most extraordinary metalwork of the early Middle Ages, both barbaric and refined, solid and airy, bold and restrained. Like the Cauldron, it was forged for ritual, but it makes a happier statement about sacrifice, for the God to whom it is dedicated no longer demands that we nourish him and thus become one with his godhead. The transaction has been reversed: he offers himself to us as heavenly nourishment. In this new “economy,” we drink the Blood of God, and all become one by partaking of the one cup, the one destiny. The silver Cauldron was made in thanksgiving for some great favor: it was not meant to be seen by human eyes but was made for the sole delight of the swamp god. The silver Chalice, on the other hand, was meant to delight and refresh the humans who drained its mystical contents. Its elegant balance, its delicate gold filigree interlacings, its blue and ruby enamels beckoned from afar. As the communicant approached the Chalice, he could admire more fully its subtle workmanship; and as he lifted it to his lips, he would be startled to see, debossed in a band b
eneath the handles, the almost invisible names of the Twelve Apostles. As he drank the wine—at the very moment of communion—he would briefly upturn the base toward heaven and there would flash skyward the Chalice’s most thrilling aspect: the intricate underside of its base, meant to be seen by God alone. This secret pleasure connects the Chalice to the Cauldron and to all the pagan ancestors of the Irish. But the pagan act of pleasuring the god is now absorbed completely into the New Imagination and to all that will follow. The smith is still a “man of art,” a poet or druid, but he is no longer one of those whose evil craft and power Patrick had to protect himself against:

  Against craft of idolatry,

  Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,

  Against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul.

  For God’s pleasure and man’s are reunited, and earth is shot through with flashes of heaven, and the Chalice has become the druidic Christian smith’s thanksgiving, his deo gratias.

  And that is how the Irish became Christians.

  * The phrase “the violent bear it away” fascinated the twentieth-century Irish-American storyteller Flannery O’Connor, who used it as the title of one of her novels. O’Connor’s surname connects her to an Irish royal family descended from Conchobor (pronounced “Connor”), the prehistoric king of Ulster who was foster rather to Cuchulainn and “husband” of the unwilling Derdriu. In the western world, the antiquity of Irish lineages is exceeded only by that of the Jews.

  * Plunkett, a visionary poet from a noble Irish house and lateral descendant of the Elizabethan martyr and archbishop of Armagh Oliver Plunkett, was executed by the British in 1916 for his part in the Easter Rising. A very different poet, Edith Sitwell, wrote a comparable poem later in the century, “Still Falls the Rain,” in which she imagines the incessant rain during an air raid in 1940 as the mercy of Christ.

  VI

  What Was Found

  How the Irish Saved Civilization

  Patrick was a hard-bitten man who did not find his life’s purpose till his life was half over. He had a temper that could flare dangerously when he perceived an injustice—not against himself but against another, particularly against someone defenseless. But he had the cheerfulness and good humor that humble people often have. He enjoyed this world and its variety of human beings—and he didn’t take himself too seriously. He was, in spirit, an Irishman. “Supreme egotism and utter seriousness are necessary for the greatest accomplishment, and these the Irish find hard to sustain; at some point, the instinct to see life in a comic light becomes irresistible, and ambition falls before it.” This insight of William V. Shannon’s, if applied to Patrick, casts a peculiar illumination on his personality, and even suggests why his real achievements have remained historically obscure. It also puts Patrick at a further remove from his fellow bishop and confessor, the self-obsessed Augustine.

  The exchange between Patrick and his adopted people is marvelous to contemplate. In the overheated Irish cultural environment, mystical attitudes toward the world were taken for granted, as they had never been in the cooler, more rational Roman world. Despite its pagan darkness and shifting insubstantiality, this Irish environment was in the end a more comfortable one for the badly educated shepherd boy to whom God spoke directly. His original home in Roman Britain had become an alien place to him. But the Irish gave Patrick more than a home—they gave him a role, a meaning to his life. For only this former slave had the right instincts to impart to the Irish a New Story, one that made new sense of all their old stories and brought them a peace they had never known before.

  Patrick’s gift to the Irish was his Christianity—the first de-Romanized Christianity in human history, a Christianity without the sociopolitical baggage of the Greco-Roman world, a Christianity that completely inculturated itself into the Irish scene. Through the Edict of Milan, which had legalized the new religion in 313 and made it the new emperor’s pet, Christianity had been received into Rome, not Rome into Christianity! Roman culture was little altered by the exchange, and it is arguable that Christianity lost much of its distinctiveness. But in the Patrician exchange, Ireland, lacking the power and implacable traditions of Rome, had been received into Christianity, which transformed Ireland into Something New, something never seen before—a Christian culture, where slavery and human sacrifice became unthinkable, and warfare, though impossible for humans to eradicate, diminished markedly. The Irish, in any case, loved physical combat too much for intertribal warfare to disappear entirely. But new laws, influenced by Gospel norms, inhibited such conflicts severely by requiring that arms be taken up only for a weighty cause. Ireland would not again see a battle on the scale of the Tain till Brian Boru would rout the Vikings in the eleventh century.

  As these transformed warrior children of Patrick’s heart lay down the swords of battle, flung away the knives of sacrifice, and cast aside the chains of slavery, they very much remained Irishmen and Irishwomen. Indeed, the survival of an Irish psychological identity is one of the marvels of the Irish story. Unlike the continental church fathers, the Irish never troubled themselves overmuch about eradicating pagan influences, which they tended to wink at and enjoy. The pagan festivals continued to be celebrated, which is why we today can still celebrate the Irish feasts of May Day and Hallowe’en.* To this day, there is a town in Kerry that holds a fertility festival each August, where a magnificent he-goat presides like Cernunnos for three days and nights, and bacchanalian drinking, wild dancing, and varieties of sexual indiscretion are the principal entertainments. It is this characteristically Irish mélange of pagan and Christian that forms the theme of Brian Friel’s magnificent play Dancing at Lughnasa—Lughnasa being the harvest feast of the god Lug, still celebrated on August 1 in parts of Ulster. Irish marriage customs remained most un-Roman. As late as the twelfth century—seven centuries after the conversion of the Irish to the Gospel—a husband or wife could call it quits and walk out for good on February 1, the feast of Imbolc, which meant that Irish marriages were renewable yearly, like magazine subscriptions or insurance policies. As late as the last century naked men (and, for all we know, women) raced horses bareback along Clare’s beaches through the surf at high tide, looking for all the world like their prehistoric warrior ancestors. But after Patrick the eviler gods shrank in stature and became much less troublesome, became in fact the comical gargoyles of medieval imagination, peering fearfully from undignified nooks, and the belief grew strong that the one thing the devil cannot bear is laughter.

  Edmund Campion, the Elizabethan Jesuit who was martyred at Tyburn in 1581, has left us a description of the Irish that rings true to this day:

  The people are thus inclined: religious, franke, amorous, irefull, sufferable of paines infinite, very glorious, many sorcerers, excellent horsemen, delighted with warres, great almes-givers, [sur]passing in hospitalitie…. They are sharpe-witted, lovers of learning, capable of any studie whereunto they bend themselves, constant in travaile, adventerous, intractable, kinde-hearted, secret in displeasure.

  We can still make out in this Elizabethan group portrait not only the Irish of our own day but the lively ghosts of Irishmen long past—Ailil, Medb, Cuchulainn, Derdriu, and, after a fashion, Patrick himself. Whether or not Freud was right when he muttered in exasperation that the Irish were the only people who could not be helped by psychoanalysis, there can be no doubt of one thing: the Irish will never change.

  The one element in Campion’s description that we might not immediately associate with the characters of the Tain is his reference to scholarship—“lovers of learning, capable of any studie whereunto they bend themselves.” For it was Patrick’s Christian mission that nurtured Irish scholarship into blossom. Patrick, the incomplete Roman, nevertheless understood that, though Christianity was not inextricably wedded to Roman custom, it could not survive without Roman literacy.

  THE DYING GAUL

  The epitome of the Celtic warrior’s bravery, this is a Roman copy of a Greek statue made in th
e third century B.C. The great curved trumpet was one of the musical instruments that made a fearsome racket as part of every Celtic war party’s equipage.

  CELTIC GODS

  The god at bottom right is devouring a human. Note the details of a bracelet on the wrist of the victim, the severed heads of previous victims, and the erect phallus of the god, who is patently enjoying himself. (Bouches-du-Rhône, c. third century B.C.) The idol above left is a sheela-na-gig, a motif found throughout Britain and Ireland, although very difficult to photograph well because the surviving examples are in extremely inaccessible nooks and have usually been damaged by weather or censorship. The sheela parts her vulva both as an invitation to sex and as a reminder of her fertility. Her face, although sometimes smiling, is moronic and brutal, and usually skeletal. She is, like Kali of India, death-in-life and life-in-death. (Kilpeck, England.) The figure above right was found in Tanderagee, Armagh. The position of its arms, although difficult to interpret, is reminiscent of the traditional posture of some Indian deities.