At the Edge of Ireland

by David Yeadon

  I didn’t feel I deserved such a pleasant good-bye and the blessing of God after I’d ignored all her advice at the outset. But I smiled and wished her a long life—saol fada chugat. Slowly—very slowly—I was learning these little bits of Irish, and my efforts always seemed to bring a chuckle or two.

  We’d really come to hear a talk by Connie Murphy or Conchur O Murchu, as he preferred to be called, another one of our key mentors in the arena of Beara traditions and folklore. His subject, “Is There a Future in Our Past?” sounded intriguing, and we entered the meeting hall—one of those all-too-familiar bare spaces with creaky chairs, a small stage, and a stale aroma of disinfectant, as if the room had been used for far more nefarious purposes the night before. Unfortunately Connie was not there. Somehow we’d mixed up dates and times and found ourselves listening (and yawning) to a young archeologist whose lecture ended up being, when his PowerPoint machine functioned properly, a rather nebulous set of slides and lists of ancient stone piles on nearby mountains whose functions, age, and significance seemed to elude him and certainly everyone else.

  Brochures in the hall on previous Eigses, however, reflected a fascinating glimpse into the folklore collected by Dr. O’Suilleabhain—tales of witches and kings and giants and moorland creatures and “hags” and death omens and resonant memories of ancient gods.

  One of his most popular books, Irish Wake Amusements, had an oxymoronic appeal to it, but apparently wakes were not quite the grim occasions one might assume and were often an excuse for a wealth of rough and rowdy games and rituals that seemed to relate little to the individual being mourned. They were also occasions for violence, particularly if bodies were transported over the mountains from County Cork into County Kerry. Before the construction of the dramatically serpentine Healy Pass road, an impressive project to link the two counties funded at the time of the Great Famine to provide much-needed employment for the starving and poverty-stricken inhabitants, it was not unusual for “stopping the funeral” skirmishes to occur (over something about burial rites, we were told) on the high ridge near the huge flat stone where coffins were usually rested after the arduous climb.

  “We were not the most civilized of people in those days,” explained one of the elderly men huddled at the back of the hall after the lecture.

  “Well—are you different today, then?” I couldn’t help but ask, grinningly of course.

  “Oh well, what with all the TV we’ve got now and the stupid high price of Guinness in the pubs, we don’t get as much of a chance as we did to do the mischief. Isn’t that right, Dermont?”

  And so Dermont joined in and then Patrick and then Sean and then “Old John,” and the tales began to roll. Some we found utterly incomprehensible, others were such a mishmash of English and Irish that we couldn’t understand the punch lines, but a couple stood out—little flickers of ancient folklore, fears, and superstitions.

  “Old John” Kelly claimed to recall an old woman always dressed “bog black” who lived near his family house and “used to go about with the fairies.” “A couple of farms from us was a child of four years who couldna’ walk at all. So the old woman came—I think they asked ’er, y’ know—to see the child, and she told the family that the cure was in the kitchen. Now in those days you often kept the hens in a coop in the kitchen. Nothing unusual ’bout that then. Quite normal. So they asked—whereabouts in the kitchen?—so the old woman points to the large cock and says ‘It’s in that old gentleman over there, so take him out of the house and wash his feet three nights in a row and then wash the child’s feet each night in the same water.’ And would you believe what happened—the little girl was walking within the week. Within the week, I tell y’!”

  “Old John” acknowledged the murmurs of appreciation at his tale. “Sean would have liked that one,” said Patrick. “Did y’ ever hear his story of the mermaid horse, then…?” A shaking of heads. “Well, it appears that a farmer lived down by the sea not far from here, near Lauragh, and one day he sees this beautiful strange horse coming in with the tide—big chestnut brown creature with a long black tail—and wearing a fine-looking leather and brass collar. So the farmer went down to the strand and stroked him and removed his collar and led him back to the farm. And he kept him as a workhorse for seven long years—plowing and pulling loads. But then one day they were clearing out the barn and they left the horse’s collar outside. And the horse sees his collar, runs over, and puts his head into it, and races off toward the beach. Then they say he stopped, turned, and gave this great roar that echoed all around the Caha mountains—then disappeared back into the sea, never to be seen again…”

  More murmurs and smiles of appreciation.

  “Good story, Patrick,” I said. “Actually it reminds me very much of those Scottish island tales of silkies that emerge like seal men or women from the sea with a sealskin belt, and so long as you keep the belt hidden, he or she will stay with you, but once the belt is rediscovered, the silkie is off back to the ocean. And like your mermaid horse, for some reason it’s usually after seven years on land.”

  “Aye.” Patrick nodded. “I’ve heard tales like that from Scotland—but that’s hardly surprising, is it? It was all the Gaeltacht—all part of the Celtic-Gaelic heritage.”

  “Maybe it still is,” I suggested.

  Another murmur of assent and appreciation—a bonding in the mysteries of tales told down through the centuries, collected and preserved by such individuals as Dr. Sheain Ui Shuilleabhain or Sean O’Suilleabhain or Sean O’Sullivan, the English version of his revered name. No wonder this part of the Beara—the Kerry part—is so proud of his long and contributive life of research and as a storytelling seanachai.

  AND LIAM DOWNEY WAS very proud of his research too into “bog butter.”

  Traditions and tales of traditions come in all peculiar shapes, sizes, and guises, but this most certainly must be one of the more esoteric and elusive fields of academic study.

  I’d been told that one of the regular meetings of the Beara Historical Society was being held at Twomey’s (where else?) one Thursday evening, so I wandered down for a peep into the back room to see if anything of interest was going on. And there was Liam Downey, an eloquent, smiling-faced gentleman of very mature years, boggling the audience of fifty or so in the cramped, stuffy room with tales of his years of research into the obscurities of “booley huts.” These were temporary summer shelters way up on the peaty hilltops where younger farming family offspring would take the cattle from May Day to early October for upland grazing to give the lower pastures a chance to recover from overuse.

  “And what did all those lovely young people do up there all day while the cows were chewing away?” asked a middle-aged gentleman with a sly wink and nod at the audience.

  There was snickering laughter, but Liam, who was not in the mood for licentious innuendos, insisted that “oh, don’t you be thinking things like that—there was an awful lot to do that kept them busy. They had to watch the cows all the time, then milk them twice a day, make and salt the butter in the old wooden churns, which takes a lot of time and effort, maybe make cheeses with the spare milk…And of course they had to make votive offerings to the gods of the earth in the form of ‘bog butter.’”

  There was a ripple of giggles through the audience. This was obviously a new term for most of them.

  “No, I’m very serious,” said Liam. He was obviously not one to tolerate undue levity on the part of his listeners, especially if it reflected adversely upon his years of arduous study and compilation of learned papers. “We have scores of examples of where they buried butter in the bogs—often in communal drinking vessels known as methers, or in less sophisticated hollowed-out tree trunks, or tight-woven wicker baskets, kegs, churns, or even in animal intestines and bladders. And radiocarbon dating on the bog butter finds in Ireland cover a very wide range of time spans, from 400 BC up to at least the thirteenth century. And it wasn’t just in Ireland. Many similar offerings have been found
in Scotland and Scandinavia. It’s thought they were left as important offerings to the forces of nature and fertility.”

  “How do you know if the butter wasn’t put in the bog to keep it cool or something, and then th’ eejits just forgot where they’d put it. Or maybe it went off, so they just left it…Or maybe they hid it in the bog to keep it from their greedy neighbors…” This was from a younger member of the audience. Someone with a distinctly British accent, which caused a distinct swiveling of heads to see who was making such facetious suggestions.

  Liam realized it was time to ignore such digressions and impress his audience with a welter of his scientific data. “So, using high temperature gas chromatography in combination with GC-mass spectrometry enables researchers to develop the capacity to distinguish between fatty acids from different sources by using GC-combustion—and isotope ratio MS to determine core values for the dominant fatty acids present to confirm the chemical composition of milk-based butter.”

  That did the trick. No more comments and questions from the audience now. The man next to me whispered conspiratorially with a lopsided grin, “Liam’s almost always right, y’know. Not because he’s a know-all y’understand, although he’s a very bright man, but because he hardly talks about anything he doesn’t know backward and inside out.” And to substantiate his well-justified claims of intensive research, Liam handed around copies of his published papers full of graphs, charts, dating profiles, bog butter chronologies, radiocarbon records, fatty acid profiles, and sample “discovery” locations throughout Ireland.

  What else could his admiring listeners do but burst into genuine applause. “Booley huts” and “bog butter” would now enter the vocabularies of attendees and be used to boggle their compatriots out in the bar.

  An evening well spent indeed.

  THEN, AFTER ALL THE Eigse and bog-butter folklore, I was abruptly and unexpectedly introduced to the secrets of the sheela-na-gigs by way of a booklet I bought after the meeting (on the enthusiastic recommendation of Liam).

  And talking of being “boggled.” That was definitely my reaction when I first studied the book’s grainy black-and-white photographs of Ireland’s most bizarre totemic creatures.

  Considering the blatant sexual flagrancy of the objects themselves, the introductory paragraph of the outrageously illustrated booklet on the origins and functions of these bizarre entities was a splendid little euphemistic masterpiece of modest and decorous prose. It begins:

  Sheela-na-gigs are carvings usually of naked females posed in a manner which displays and emphasizes their genitalia…They were first brought to scientific attention in the 1840s by antiquarians, some of whom regarded their aggressive sexuality in negative terms. More recently the images have come to be regarded in a positive light. By some they are seen as a symbol of Irishness and by others, particularly Irish feminists, they are a symbol of active female power.

  The term sheela-na-gig derives from the Irish language and is interpreted as “the old hag of the breasts,” although on most of these arm-size, powerfully primitive carvings, the breasts are far less emphatic. As my booklet explains politely, they invariably depict: “widely and acrobatically splayed legs and sagging genitalia…and the commonest position of the arms is with the hands placed in front, gesturing toward the abdomen or, more explicitly, toward the pudenda.”

  Sheela-na-gigs

  While the primitive nature of the hundred or so sheela-na-gigs so far discovered throughout Ireland might suggest prehistoric origins, they were in fact created primarily following the Norman invasion of Ireland from England in 1169. At that time the papal power of the Catholic church, headquartered in Rome, fully supported the invasion. Apparently as the Irish had come to be regarded as a “sinful and licentious people” particularly in regard to their “ambiguous” attitudes toward marriage and divorce and the freewheeling marital status of the priests, who, according to one prominent Norman lord, “celebrate fornication rather than celibacy and themselves do outrageous deeds of concubinage.”

  As the Irish church was brought into fuller accord with Roman practices under their new conquerors and with such reforming churchmen as St. Malachy, it became obvious that women were seen as the prime instigators of lust and licentiousness (males seemed to be criticized more for their avaricious and pecuniary natures) and closely allied with the great and powerful earth goddesses—Tellus Mater, Terra, Gaia, Cybele, Anu, Demeter, and her daughter Persephone.

  Some suggested the figures depicted the primary forces of fertility and procreation, but others claim that, as sinners were said to be punished in hell through the bodily organs by which they had offended, the vastly enlarged genitalia depicted the dangers and ultimate denigration of the body resulting from the sins of carnal lust. Certainly that could explain how, despite the fury of sanctimonious priests, these carvings still exist in all their graphic explicitness.

  It seems, from the sheelas that did survive the destructive “reformations of paganistic church sculptures” in the seventeenth century, that their creators had considerable freedom and license in the realization of their creations. In some instances the pudenda is over half the size of the whole figure. In others, the poses range from distinctly masturbatory to multi-orificed and ghoulish depictions of both male and female sexual contortions of almost Hindu-like dexterity and in some instances, purely male in all-too-obvious phallic enormity.

  In almost every instance, the eyes and often the fanged mouths are hugely out of proportion to the rest of the torso. Ears are often enlarged too and protruding, and striations on cheeks on foreheads may be indicative of ritual scars or tattoos.

  These are indeed powerful and even fearful entities, but some scholars decry the negativity of the female spirit that others claim they depict. On the contrary, they suggest that in Ireland, particularly as a result of the devastating events of the fourteenth century, including the Bruce invasions from Scotland in 1315–1317 and the decimating Black Death of the mid-1300s, the sheela-na-gigs were seen as urgently needed societal reinforcers or protective icons, warning sinners of both sexes of the hellfire-and-damnation repercussions of unrestrained lust.

  Another interpretation and possible explanation as to the survival of so many of these vulnerable stone carvings is the Gaelicization of the Anglo-Norman conquerors, who, according to some historians, became “more Irish than the Irish.” They adopted the Gaelic language and traditions and even such epic tales as Taín Bó Cualnge—The Cattle Raid of Cooley—which encompass numerous heroic female figures. Other tales celebrated the powers of Brigid, Macha, Aine, and Cliona—all “earth mothers” to one extent or another.

  Today the sheelas are celebrated by more militant feminists as powerful touchstones of female sexuality and procreation, which ironically may have been the original Euro-Asian origins of such carvings prior to the male-dominated feudal society.

  Thus their symbolism may have come full circle, reflecting the very cycle of birth and regeneration that their female attributes emphasize so blatantly and boldly.

  One has to admire their centuries of tenacity and endurance—an easy match for those unearthed containers of ancient bog butter.

  31

  Celtic Conversations

  “TODAY IT’S DEFINITELY VERY HIP TO be Celtic,” said Ralph White with an ironic chuckle that shook his stocky frame and made his thick beard and long mane of dark hair jiggle. He had joined Anne and me up at our house in New York State during one of our return trips from Beara, and he was quoting a line from his remarkable work in progress, At the Edge of Cultural Change, a memoir he’s been slowly compiling over the last five or so years.

  Ralph and I have known each other for well over a decade, although our actual face-to-face meetings have been far too few. As a community member and organizer at Findhorn, that world-renowned mystical “garden-commune” in northern Scotland, a former program director of the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, and cofounder and creative director of the world-famous New York O
pen Center in Manhattan and a myriad clones, Ralph has been deeply involved in the evolution and devolution of holistic, ecological, and spiritual thinking throughout the USA and Europe. His current editorship of the online magazine Lapis is now sending out even wider ripples of knowledge and insight across the planet.

  I told him that I thought the At the Edge part of his book’s title was far too modest and diminished his amazing role as creator-catalyst of new ways of thinking, understanding, and living. In Deep, I suggested, might be a more appropriate title, but Ralph, a Britisher with Welsh-Irish blood, resists any insinuation of self-congratulation and hyped-up promotion.

  I tried to persuade him to join us on Beara, but the demands on his time and energy from emerging holistic centers around the globe never allowed us to settle on a date. His spirit, however, was well and truly present, particularly his deep fascination with the Celtic world and its labyrinthine web of legends, mythology, and ancient wisdom. “The Celtic soul is far more prominent now in the world today than ever,” he told me, his eyes alive with enthusiasm.

  Ralph has met and often befriended just about every major and celebrated proponent of holistic spiritual thinking and life-ways on earth. I found it fascinating that a man who has organized seminars, workshops, and conferences involving scores of these individuals—Christian scholars, yoga masters, Tibetan Buddhists, Kabbalists, Zen Roshis, Taoists, Native American medicine men, Amazonian shamans, and Sufiphilosophers—would ultimately return to the roots of his own ancient Celtic culture to find the depth, resonance, and perception he has been seeking for decades. He has managed to condense a vast diner-sized menu of philosophical and spiritual options in to a far more modest and balanced repast. He has journeyed long, hard, often dangerously—and invariably penuriously! In fact his odysseys of discovery—his inner discoveries particularly—began as a child: “I lived within a few hundred yards of the Irish Sea and went to school in tram cars that traveled through wide open fields to the shores. The mountains of Snowdonia to the south were visible through our kitchen window, and the patchwork of pastures, hedges, and hills stretching inland expressed a magic mixture of harmony and wildness that brought great joy and excitement to my child’s soul…I was always moved by the cry of gulls. What was it that touched my little soul so deeply in this most common, but also most evocative, of bird calls? Years later in Ireland it came to me that what I heard dimly, echoing as if from some ancient past, was the lost holy wisdom of the Celtic island saints. As a child I knew nothing of them, but as an adult I became an aficionado of Celtic sacred islands off the coast of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.”