Setting Foot on the Shingle Shore: Reconstitutive Potential in our Dreamtime

‘’I am haunted by numberless islands and many a Danaan shore, Where time would surely forget us, and sorrow come near us no more’’.  - W. B. Yeats, ‘The White Birds’

Philosopher John Moriarty described his book Invoking Ireland as ‘’a safari of stories’’, A charted journey from the western side of the nine waves, inland as far as the hill of Tara. When asked what the goal of the project was, he remarked simply:

“How, working within our tradition, might we constitute ourselves as a people?”

This is an attempt, using Moriarty’s work, to consider what it means to reconstitute a people. It is an admittedly poetic attempt to do so. There are other concrete, more ‘practical’ avenues towards national revival. This is merely a consideration of our mythology, that is to say, our (prospective) common language that lies beneath us, in the well of the country’s consciousness, Connla’s well.

“Folktales aren't afraid. On its way to the well at the world’s end, a folktale will stop by a rock and tell you that every seventh year, at Samhain, it turns into an old woman driving a cow. On its way to Linn Feic, a folktale will sit with you under a bush and, where a bard might tell you the history of your people awake, that bush will tell you the much more serious history of your people asleep”

Today, we inhabit all the lands east and west of Uisneach, but do we dwell on them? Do we walk the sacred soil of any part of this island? It would seem like we do not. Our way of walking on the earth, our exploitative, materialist footsteps, have been disastrous for the land itself, and for the divine ground of our souls. We may liken ourselves – and modern peoples across the world – to Fomorians, insofar as we have embodied the Fomorian mindset. We shape the world to suit us, as opposed to allowing the world to shape us according to it, as the Tuatha Dé Danann did. To illustrate this point, I will briefly chart and reflect on two pivotal moments in our myths.

Every culture has its story of the great battle. The second battle of Mag Tuired was the battle for Ireland. Two races of Gods, one benevolent, and the other malevolent, faced off against each other for the right to the island. The battle hag screeched like never before, anticipating the bloodshed to come. Victory appeared to be with the Tuath Dé, but a Fomorian wizard invisibly snuck into his enemy's fortress and stole the great harp, that which harmonised the Tuath Dé to all things. Militarily, the Tuath Dé won that fight, or so they thought. But when they went for their celebrations, they discovered that their instruments played no music, and their world went silent and brutish. The Tuath Dé had become soulless, they had become the Fomorians.

Ogma eventually achieved total victory for the Tuath Dé, walking westward through the songless land to reclaim the harp.

When he returned, Coirpre asked him:

“How did you do it? How, without lifting a sword, did you bring the music of Ireland back to Ireland?”

“It was by being able to be invisible that Macguarch stole our music” Ogma replied.

“It was by being able to be visible, all the way out from the ground of my being and their being, that I was able to walk past them bringing it home”.

So even though the Fomorians and the Tuath Dé were reconciled through Ogma, this is, first and foremost, a story about a people who have lost their music, their Orphic note. We who inhabit this island today are neither the Fomorians (categorically) nor the Tuath Dé. According to the Lebor Gabálá Érenn, we are the Milesians. We did not inherit Dagda’s harp, nor do we have a harp of our own. We are a rougher people, we have no music. It is easy for us to walk through the land and never hear a single Orphic note of the curlew or the blackbird, or to never recognise a roaring river as anything but that chemical substance with the formula of H2O.

The Fomorians may have been defeated, but those of us who live on this island are inhabitants of a land that was looked at by the evil eye. Furthermore, we are the followers of Amhairghin, who landed on the shores with no orphic note, proclaiming himself alone. Announcing his anthropic ontology on behalf of his people, as ruler of the land in opposition to the Tuath Dé:

“I am the wind on the sea;

I am the wave of the sea;

 I am the stag of seven battles;

 I am the eagle on the rock

 I am a flash from the sun;

 I am the most beautiful of plants;

 I am a strong wild boar;

 I am a salmon in the water;

 I am a lake in the plain;

 I am the word of knowledge;

 I am the head of the spear in battle;

 I am the god that puts fire in the head;”

That hammering ‘I am’ is the main component of the opening proclamation of our existence on this island. With this conquering mantra on our tongues, we drove the Tuath Dé underground, and along with them, all divinity and Orphical music. The Goddess of Irish sovereignty, in a desperate bid for recognition, repeatedly submits to Amhairghin, in her three different forms (Éire, Fódla and Banba) with the notable comment:

“What you are doing is not to my liking, but if it must be, then I ask that you will call the land by my name’”

Along with being a scathing criticism of the Celts and their perceived lack of affinity for divine ground, this request is also the blessing given to the Celts, by the land they stood on, to go forth and to be what they wish to be. It is a gift of total freedom, yet overwhelming responsibility.

And what have we done with that responsibility? The more mystical dimensions of Fódla and Banba are almost entirely forgotten realms, and the word Éire has little if any mythological or spiritual connotations for the modern Irish person. Our collective eye as a people has increasingly become a Fomorian one. In Great oak-pine trees, we see square feet of timber. In magnificent lumbering Munster cattle we see kilograms of beef. The economic eye and the Fomorian eye are one and the same and when one realises this, it is not difficult to recognise who we are, who we have become.

It seems that the Celts proclaimed themselves on this island materially. In their driving underground of the divine, and their affirmation of the purely phylogenetic, they have condemned their future, their perception, and the very land on which they stand:

“Having failed to come poetically ashore into Ireland the Celt has failed in Ireland.”

The victory of the Celts at Tailtiu is to be lamented:

“In the sense that it means defeat for a more sanctifying way of knowing and being in the world, Tailtiu is an infinitely sadder word than Kinsale”

So what can be learned from this particular reading of the mythological cycle? One very simple point is evident. If a group of people are to emerge into Ireland, they must do so with a vision. We have seen the result of a people with no vision. We are living it. It has not always been so. The Milesian proclamation was a gallant effort at sustaining a people, but it was not sufficient, for the reasons alluded to above, and its spell is hastily wearing off.  Before long, unless we take our own revival seriously, we will be a people without a vision, and without a vision, a people perish.

 “I that have vision and prophecy and the gift of fiery speech,

I that have spoken with God on the top of his holy hill”.

Every group of people who emerge into Ireland must come in over the nine waves, those nine rites of initiation. Partholón; Nemedh; The Fír Bolg; the Milesians; the Vikings; the Normans, in over the waves they all came, each with a different vision, a particular way of seeing. There is no shame in us, the modern Gaels, leaving Ireland for the purpose of returning. There is no shame in coming over the waves for a second attempt, to come ashore with no sword in hand, only with an ecumenical vision of Ireland, its plants and its animals.

If we can come ashore not with a view of dominion, but whistling the Orphic note of our own music, of our souls as they exist in the deeper canyon springs of our being, then we can hope to be in communion with her, to invoke Ireland. Ailiu lath n-hErend.

‘’Carry the lad that's born to be king over lands and lakes, over bogs and through woods, to fosterage with a druid in Ulster’’.

Moriarty tells the story of Cormac, the wolf king of Ireland. The story should be read in its entirety, but the brief synopsis is that Cormac, son of Art, the king of Tara is fostered by a milch wolf after his father is killed. He is eventually rediscovered by his birth mother, Achtan, who sends him to Ulster to a foster father, a great druid named Fiachna Casán. Here we have the raw material for a model hero-to-be, dual natural and druidic elements. It is these elements – or rather their combination – that allow him to tame the Fál at Tara, making him King.

His reign is famously ecumenical:

‘’Salmon and sea trout ran in the rivers. Cattle were as lovely to look at in March as they were coming down from high grazing ground in October. The calls of grouse calling in the mountains were as bright as their combs. No warrior came home with the heads of his enemies hanging from the manes of his chariot horses. No druid chanted a killing or a maddening incantation. People died as they lived, at ease with a world they had flourished in’’

This story contains a profound conception of the ideal human person, of human virtue, even. Just as Cormac enjoys a foundation in nature through his foster mother, the wolf, we should aspire to ground ourselves in nature before ever entering culture. Societies, by definition, necessitate that one be born first and foremost into culture. Any interaction with nature is merely an extension of civilisational life. This is an inverted conception of the human person.

Primarily, one must have a grounding in nature, a knowledge of oneself in the hazelwood, of one’s bush soul; away, even from sight, of the smoke from the campfire. This is the ideal formation. ‘Culture’, in whatever form it may exist in the future, must be only the supplemental extension of the natural.

As I move towards a conclusion, one thing must be addressed. The tradition of Gaelic revivalism is always one of glorification, understandably so. This is a valid approach in many circumstances. Romanticisation of things like war, and figures like Cú Chulainn, can aestheticise, spur interest, and even go a long way in awakening national consciousness. There is value in knowing that those of the past may hold some answers for the present.

The past lives on in us, but the uncomfortable truth is that the past does not contain an essence that will fix the present. There are other readings of our myths, readings that do not cast us in a favourable light, readings that call us to action to remedy our eternal shortcomings. It borders on horrifying to discover that many of the issues of today plagued – or originated in –  the latter stages of our dreamtime, that is to say, our mythology. There is a heavy burden that comes with being questioned by the past. Nietzsche sums up how one may feel about the knowledge of the days behind them:

‘’I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past. indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient beings continues in me to invent. to love. to hate, and to infer’’

The past does indeed, live on in us, and that is as much of an existential challenge, as it is an orientating bedrock. Careful, almost scientific engagement with our collective dreamtime is wholly necessary.

A final word.

As a people, not just in Ireland, but around the world, we are in something akin to what St John of the Cross calls ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’, a barren place where we are increasingly losing our vision, losing our way. But we can be comforted by this night:

“¡Oh noche que guiaste,

Oh noche amable más que el alborada;

(Oh, night that guided me,

Oh, night more lovely than the dawn)”

After all, darkness is nothingness, and nothingness can be, if we will it to be, a blank canvas on which we can paint Ireland anew again.

‘’This is what we mean when we talk about invoking Ireland, what we mean when we sing ‘Ailiu lath n-hErend’’

Afterword

John Moriarty was born in 1938 in Moyvane, county Kerry. He died at his home on the foothills of Mangerton mountain, near Killarney in 2007. Although Kerry was the place of his birth and his death, he lectured in English for several years at the University of Manitoba in Canada. He gradually became dissatisfied with Western culture, its institutions, and what he saw to be the exhausted ‘cultural axioms and assumptions’ that it propagated. He left academia and returned to Ireland to live out the rest of his life writing and gardening, spending the best part of twenty-five years living in Roundstone in Connemara. His (arguably most accessible) book, Invoking Ireland is, more or less, the subject of this essay. I have drawn from its first chapters heavily, almost exclusively, but I am sure I have not given it the credit it deserves. It is for this reason that I conclude this preface by imploring you to engage with these ideas directly from the source itself. It is a truly wonderful work of mythological criticism and I do not hesitate to admit that it has been one of the defining texts of my life.

Míle buíochas

Works Cited

• Moriarty, John. Invoking Ireland = Ailiu Iath N-HErend. Lilliput Press, 2006.

• Ó’Buachalla, Séamas. The Literary Writings of Patrick Pearse. The Mercier Press.

• St John of the Cross. Poems. Translated by Roy Campbell, The Penguin Classics.

• Yeats, WB. Selected Poetry. Edited by A Norman Jeffares, Macmillan.