How the Irish Saved Civilization

by Thomas Cahill

  It would be understatement to assert that the Irish gods were not the friendliest of figures. Actually, there are few idols that we have retrieved from barrow or bog that would not give a child nightmares and an adult the willies. No smooth-skinned, well-proportioned Apollos and Aphrodites here. Archaeological finds at Celtic sites beyond Ireland serve only to underscore the monstrousness of the Celtic pantheon, as do the few appearances of gods in the Tain. When, for instance, the warriors of Connacht bivouac on their way to Cuailnge, the druid Dubthach chants a prophecy while they eat their evening meal. The vision that he conjures up, though deliberately obscure, is of an impending battle, one that will end with “man’s meat everywhere”—a phrase that can hardly have improved the digestion of the troops. As they sleep, the war goddess “Nemain assailed them. They had no peace that night, with their sleep broken by Dubthach’s brute outcry. Groups of them started up, and many of the army remained troubled until Medb came and calmed them.”

  Medb is herself a kind of goddess. Her name is a cognate of the English word mead and may be found as a root in many Indo-European languages, meaning something like “she who intoxicates”—which was probably how she reduced the troops to slumber. Insensate drunkenness was the warrior’s customary prelude to sleep.

  On the night before the last battle between Connacht and Ulster, a sinister shape-changing goddess called the Morrigan spoke “in the half light between the two camps,” describing in gory detail all the horrors of the morrow. That night two war goddesses, Nemain and Badb, “called out to the men of Ireland near the field at Gairech and Irgairech, and a hundred warriors died of fright. It was a bad night for them,” concludes the storyteller with compact understatement.

  So, an obscure prophecy could banish sleep that only excessive drink could restore, and a dim flickering in the twilight or a cry in the night could kill a hundred men. Beneath the bravado of this warrior society, constantly brandishing its flesh-destroying weapons, rumbles a quaking fear so acute that it can kill. The conscious indifference to death that is a hallmark of all the heroes of the Tain masks a subconscious fear of death that no public rhetoric can erase.

  Patrick held out to these warrior children, in his own person, a living alternative. It is possible to be brave—to expect “every day … to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved—whatever may come my way”—and yet be a man of peace and at peace, a man without sword or desire to harm, a man in whom the sharp fear of death has been smoothed away. He was “not afraid of any of these things, because of the promises of heaven; for I have put myself in the hands of God Almighty.” Patrick’s peace was no sham: it issued from his person like a fragrance. And in a damp land where people lived and slept in close proximity, everyone would have known sooner or later if Patrick’s sleep was brought on by the goddess of intoxication or broken by the goddesses of fear. Patrick slept soundly and soberly.

  Just as there was in the Irish psyche a cleft between conscious bravery and unconscious fear, so we can also discern other conscious-subconscious dualities that give us excellent clues to the true temper of this race of seemingly carefree warriors. In virtually all the Irish tales, for instance, we come upon the Celtic phenomenon of shape-shifting, an effect that the Irish seem to have taken for granted as we take for granted molecular structures: this was simply the way the world was. Shape-shifting was the ability of a being to turn itself into something else, and it went far beyond the metamorphosis of the warp-spasm. We have already seen a splendid example of shape-shifting in Amhairghin’s foundation lyric: he is first an estuary, then a wave, then the pounding of the sea, then an ox, then a hawk, and so on. And though a contemporary reader might take all this as metaphor, the Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters. In The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, to the Land of the Living, the wizard Tuan Mac Cairill, celebrates his protean life:

  A hawk to-day, a boar yesterday,

  Wonderful instability! …

  Among herds of boars I was,

  Though to-day I am among bird-flocks;

  I know what will come of it:

  I shall still be in another shape!

  But however wonderful this instability may have seemed to the conscious Irish imagination, it had its dark side as well, for it suggested subconsciously that reality had no predictable pattern, but was arbitrary and insubstantial. There is within this worldview a terrifying personal implication: that I myself have no fixed identity but am, like the rest of reality, essentially fluid—essentially inessential. Of course, the Irish had no way of expressing such ideas directly. One needs a sense of identity before one can complain of its absence. But this wonderful and terrifying instability haunts virtually every sentence of the ancient literature.

  Allied to their experience of reality’s fluidity is their understanding that the world is full of hidden traps, as if it were a forest filled with concealed pitfalls by which hunter-gods catch small animals. In another story, The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, the hero Conaire, whose bird-man father was a shape-shifter, is warned against hunting birds by a bird who changes into a man and announces that he is “Nemglan, king of your father’s birds.” Nemglan tells Conaire that he must go to Tara, for he is to be high king, but that during his reign

  birds shall be privileged, and this shall be your observance always: you shall not pass Tara on your right hand and Bregia on your left; you shall not hunt the crooked beasts of Cerna; and you shall not stay abroad from Tara for nine nights; and you shall not spend the night in a house from which firelight is visible outside after sunset and into which one can see from outside; and three red-haired men shall not go before you into a red-haired man’s house; and plunder shall not be taken during your reign; the visit of one woman shall not come into your house after sunset; and you shall not settle a quarrel between two of your subjects.

  In short, Conaire’s reign is doomed, for there is no way he can successfully respect all these taboos. Indeed, hostile powers trigger the violation of each taboo in turn, thus precipitating Conaire’s inevitable downfall.

  There is not a hero in ancient Irish literature who does not fall prey to some taboo or another—geis, the Irish called it (gessa in the plural), a word that may perhaps be translated as “observance.” We are familiar with such Iron Age observances from the land mines and booby traps of the Greek myths: Achilles’s heel, his one bit of vulnerability, is what proves fatal to him; Oedipus’s prophesied fate—that he will murder his father and sleep with his mother—turns out to be inescapable, though he does everything he can to avoid it. But in the Irish stories the traps seem to lie hidden at every crossroads, and trickster-gods lurk behind each tree. In such a world, where no one can hope to avoid disaster for long, the boy Cuchulainn’s choice of a short life and eternal fame makes perfect sense. Once more, the cold-eyed truth in the face of the Dying Gaul appears before us.

  Patrick could put himself—imaginatively—in the position of the Irish. To him, no less than to them, the world is full of magic. One can invoke the elements—the lights of heaven, the waves of the sea, the birds and the animals—and these will come to one’s aid, as in the incantation of the “Breastplate.” The difference between Patrick’s magic and the magic of the druids is that in Patrick’s world all beings and events come from the hand of a good God, who loves human beings and wishes them success. And though that success is of an ultimate kind—and, therefore, does not preclude suffering—all nature, indeed the whole of the created universe, conspires to mankind’s good, teaching, succoring, and saving.

  Patrick could speak convincingly of these things. He could assure you that all suffering, however dull and desperate, would come to its conclusion and would show itself to have been worthwhile. He could insist that, in the end, you too would hear the words “Your hungers are rewarded: you are going home. Look, your ship is ready.” He could speak believably of the superabundance of a God who in response to humble prayer feeds his lost and
wandering people with heavenly manna—and a crew of lost and starving sailors with a herd of very earthly pigs. For Patrick, as for the nineteenth-century mystical poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was also deeply influenced by Celtic sensibility,

  The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil—

  just as do the cunning little birds and charmingly complicated animals of Celtic metalwork.

  The key to Patrick’s confidence—and it is the sort of ringing, rock-solid confidence on which a civilization may be built, an unmuffled confidence not heard since the Golden Ages of Greece and Rome—is in his reliance on “the Creator of Creation,” the phrase with which the “Breastplate” opens and closes. Our Father in heaven, having created all things, even things that have since become bent or gone bad, will deliver us, his children, from all evil. But our Father is not only in faraway heaven, but lives among us. For he created everything by his Word, which was with him in the beginning, which became flesh in the human Jesus, and flames out in all his creatures:

  I see his blood upon the rose

  And in the stars the glory of his eyes,

  His body gleams amid eternal snows,

  His tears fall from the skies.

  I see his face in every flower;

  The thunder and the singing of the birds

  Are but his voice—and carven by his power

  Rocks are his written words.

  All pathways by his feet are worn,

  His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,

  His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,

  His cross is every tree.

  This magical world, though full of adventure and surprise, is no longer full of dread. Rather, Christ has trodden all pathways before us, and at every crossroads and by every tree the Word of God speaks out. We have only to be quiet and listen, as Patrick learned to do during the silence of his “novitiate” as a shepherd on the slopes of Sliabh Mis.

  This sense of the world as holy, as the Book of God—as a healing mystery, fraught with divine messages—could never have risen out of Greco-Roman civilization, threaded with the profound pessimism of the ancients and their Platonic suspicion of the body as unholy and the world as devoid of meaning. Even Augustine, whose synthesis of pagan and Christian attitudes is the most remarkable philosophical creation of Christianity’s first five centuries, can come nowhere near Patrick’s originality. True, Augustine’s theories on sin will haunt the Middle Ages, and cast their shadows still. But from the celebratory spirit of the “Breastplate” will spring the characteristic art and poetry of the western world—the immense symbolic power of the medieval liturgy, the smiling angels of Gothic art, the laughable demons, the sweetness of poets like Francis of Assisi (whose “Canticle of the Sun” could almost be mistaken for a Celtic poem), Dante (who spoke of “the love that moves the sun and the other stars”), and Chaucer (whose “Creatour of every creature” is almost a line from the “Breastplate”). Nor did this spirit die at the close of the Middle Ages. For it remains a continuing tradition in British and Irish poetry that takes us down to the present—from the gentle visions of George Herbert and Thomas Traherne to the excited ecstasies of Gerard Manley Hopkins, from the mysticism of Joseph Plunkett—who wrote “I See His Blood upon the Rose” not in the fifth century but in the twentieth*—to the Christian druidism of Seamus Heaney, who to this day is carving out poems that might stop even Derdriu in her tracks.

  In this tradition, there is a trust in the objects of sensory perception, which are seen as signposts from God. But there is also a sensuous reveling in the splendors of the created world, which would have made Roman Christians exceedingly uncomfortable. I think it likely that, had Augustine ever read the “Breastplate,” he would have sniffed heresy. Even in Patrick’s Confession and Letter, which no one disputes came from his pen, there are emphases and omissions that Augustine would have found unnerving. Where, in Patrick’s own story, is there any negative treatment of the temptations of the flesh? Aside from the ambiguous incident in which the sailors offer their nipples to be sucked, the only passages that come anywhere near the subject of sex are Patrick’s notice of the “most beautiful” Irish princess, whom he baptizes, and his horror that his female converts have been made into sex slaves by the soldiers of Coroticus. Patrick is as silent about sex as are the Gospels.

  It may simply be that Patrick, in his zeal to baptize—to wash clean—Irish imagination, was not as sex-obsessed as his continental brethren and felt little need to stress these matters. Before his mission, Irish sexual arrangements were relatively improvisational. Trial “marriages” of one year, multiple partners, and homosexual relations among warriors on campaign were all more or less the order of the day. Despite Patrick’s great success in changing the warrior mores of the Irish tribes, their sexual mores altered little. Even the monasteries he established were not especially notable for their rigid devotion to the rule of chastity; and as late as the end of the twelfth century Geraldus Cambrensis reports that the kings of Clan Conaill continue to be inaugurated in the high style of their ancestors—by public copulation with a white mare.

  None of this should be surprising if we assume that there were characteristic aspects of Irish culture that Patrick had taken to heart and on which he chose to build his new Christianity. These aspects would have included Irish courage, which he admired greatly, but even more would he have been impressed by the natural mysticism of the Irish, which already told them that the world was holy—all the world, not just parts of it. It was on this sturdy insight that Patrick choreographed the sacred dance of Irish sacramental life, a sacramentality not limited to the symbolic actions of the church’s liturgy but open to the whole created universe. All the world was holy, and so was all the body.

  Patrick’s adventures in the Irish dreamworld must have reached their crucial moment when he faced the phenomenon of human sacrifice. All early peoples sacrificed human beings. One has only to remember Agamemnon’s sacrifice to angry Artemis of the most beautiful thing he possessed, his daughter Iphigenia. But this was a story of the Greek Iron Age, no more present to the Romanized world into which Patrick was born than public executions are to ours. For us, it is a strain to find any surviving elements of sacrifice—cut flowers, Christmas trees, vigil lights, and the Mass may be the last vestiges—but in the Roman world animal sacrifices were still offered. These were scarcely different from the animal sacrifices we read of in the Jewish scriptures, sacrifices that were still being offered in the temple as Jesus was led to Calvary and the blood of newborn lambs darkened the river that flowed through Jerusalem.

  It seems that at some point in the development of every culture, human sacrifice becomes unthinkable, and animals are from then on substituted for human victims. The story of the Binding of Isaac in Genesis may constitute symbolically just such a turning point in the history of the Jews—when Abraham’s God tells him it is no longer required that he sacrifice his only son, but may substitute a ram instead. At all events, the Irish had not reached this point and were still sacrificing human beings to their gods when Patrick began his mission. They sacrificed prisoners of war to the war gods and newborns to the harvest gods. Believing that the human head was the seat of the soul, they displayed proudly the heads of their enemies in their temples and on their palisades; they even hung them from their belts as ornaments, used them as footballs in victory celebrations, and were fond of employing skull tops as ceremonial drinking bowls. They also sculpted heads—both shrunken, decapitated heads and overbearing, impassive godheads—and a favorite motif was the head of a tri-faced god, for three was their magical number, and gods and goddesses often manifested themselves as three.

  Why do human beings do these things? The psychological mechanism is not far to find, since there is probably not a reader—even the most convinced atheist—who has not offered from time to time an old-fashioned quid pro quo prayer: if you let me pass this exam, I will return t
o church; if you make sure my wife doesn’t learn of my infidelity, I will give my next bonus to charity. The theology—the view of god—that lies behind these petitions is of an arbitrary trickster, a bad parent who can be coaxed, flattered, and manipulated. If belief in such a god is strong and primitive enough, it is easy to see how it can lead to human sacrifice: Here, take him, not me! The impassive godhead demands someone’s blood. Let it not be mine! I am not sure that some of our more inexplicable murders—the victims of Jeffrey Dahmer in Milwaukee, the small child killed by two other children in Liverpool—are not explained best by this prehistoric impulse. Certainly, the most appalling of war crimes, such as those being perpetrated in the bloody tragedies of Bosnia and Rwanda, are human responses to this subterranean prompting. And if we study the faces of the Celtic gods, we can have no doubt that only blood could satisfy most of them.

  But we delude ourselves about the complex history of religious feeling if we think that all sacrifice—human included—can be reduced to this base motive. Throughout history, different civilizations have thought very different thoughts—for example, the Greeks thought the cosmos was eternal, whereas we suspect it had a beginning; the Jewish patriarchs never thought of a soul, which was central to Greek thought. But unlike human thought, human feeling—like the human body—has not changed at all. Whatever the Irish felt, we feel. For all the terror of the Celtic cosmos and the bloodthirstiness of the Celtic gods, no human society could hold together for long if it understood sacrifice only along the lines of the savage tribe in King Kong, offering terrified beauties to the Beast.

  This caricature is belied by the most direct evidence of human sacrifice that we have found to date—the prehistoric corpses of Tolland Man, Grauballe Man, and Borremose Man, dug out of Danish bogs in the 1950s, and an even more intriguing discovery recently made in a remote English bog. The Danish bodies may be Celtic; the English one—a man discovered in 1984 and dug out of the peat of Lindow Moss, an ancient bog south of Manchester—certainly is, and may even be Irish. These bodies all owe their amazing state of preservation to the chemical properties of the peat, which has leatherized the skin but left it otherwise intact, so that we can see every physical detail—even smile lines around the eyes—just as we could have in life. All the bodies were sacrificed, and all the faces are at peace. In other words, all went willingly, one might almost say happily, to their sacrificial deaths—like Isaac, trusting to the last in the goodness of the sacrificing priest and, even more important, in the goodness of the father god.