Confessions of a Pagan Nun

by Kate Horsley

  One of her fearful tales concerns the monk who gardens and cannot speak. She says that he wanders outside her clochan and has made it clear with his eyes that the infant’s corpse is now inside her. I did not respond or argue but prepared a salve with lard and rosemary to put on the tips of her fingers, which looked to have been scalded or rubbed raw by some repeated and frantic task. In wild fear she tells me that she still sees me go to the woods with the laywomen to gather plants and dig in the earth for roots. In truth, I have done this, for there are valuable energies in these plants, and though I sound like a Pelagian, I say that these plants were made by God and must therefore be useful. Sister Aillenn held my hand away with the lard mixture on my fingers, holding hard my wrist and spying the salve as though it could move by itself to her skin. She said, “Do I tell the abbot that you are a bean sidhe?” But seeing how pale my face was at this threat, which is dangerous, she laughed and embraced me, whirling me around the small cell, whispering and weeping.

  I then told her that I had seen herself and the abbot one night, in the chapel when she was to attend to Brigit’s flame. I had passed by and heard banging on the chapel door, as though someone were pounding his fist against the wood to be let out. I parted the shutters on one window enough to peer in, and saw by the light of Brigit’s flame Sister Aillenn with her legs like a belt around the abbot’s waist, her back against the door as his thrusts knocked her against the wood. In that light, I saw her face as a spirit’s face, as though she were an angel of ecstasy. I felt Brigit’s passion as her lips parted and her eyes looked inward to her pleasure. I looked away and leaned against the stones to recover my breath, for I felt the passion with her. But I heard soon after the abbot weeping, and I ran from there to my clochan. I told Aillenn that this is what I knew of her rituals with the abbot and that I have told no one.

  She became quiet, and I believe she was calmed by my frankness. Her madness seemed to have evaporated like a thin puddle of rain in sunlight. Then she looked into my eyes, her own so white and clear, and begged me to pray with her. So we said, “Nos auten in nomine Dei nostri ambulabimus.”2 This recitation comforted her more, so that she spoke with lucid terms, forgetting her strange mythologies. Her narrative explained how she had come to the convent of Saint Brigit to tend the flame. I held her close to me so she could speak softly if there were listeners outside leaning into the doorway to hear our conversation, and so we could be warm, for the fire had burned to embers and there was no dry wood.

  As some have guessed, Sister Aillenn was born the daughter of a chieftain. He himself was the son of Dubtach Maccu Lugil, the pagan who rose to honor Saint Patrick and so was blessed. In his and his heirs’ túath, all but one became Christians, being visited often by the Britons, who were already converted. The one who remained a pagan was the chieftain’s daughter Aillenn, who had always been timid of people and gatherings of any kind. This, she told me, was because she had fallen from a horse and damaged her ear and was confused by noise and attention until she learned to ignore those who spoke to her or to watch their mouths to see what words they formed. As she grew toward aimsirtogu, there were songs sung about her beauty and also about her skills with horses, which she loved more than human or god. She sang one of those songs for me, in which it was said that her eyes were haunted gems and she smelled of horses and slept with arrows. To these things she devoted herself. Her father urged her to be baptized and become a Christian, but she wanted only to groom and ride her horse, a black mare who was her companion from dawn to sunset. In desperation and for the salvation of his daughter’s soul, the chieftain killed the mare. With horrible emotion, Sister Aillenn told me of the method of his cruelty: he pounded the horse’s skull with a club as his daughter watched, held fast to a chair with cords. She saw its legs fold and collapse. Its face, which she had stroked and held against her own cheek, became an unrecognizable heap of ruin.

  Aillenn grieved heavily, weeping day and night, unable to attend feast or games. She seemed more like a hostage or bonded woman than a chieftain’s daughter. She did not comb her hair or brush her cloak. She wore a braid of her dead mare’s hair around her neck, even when her father said that she had made a beast into a god and would be punished. He attached a great dowry to her as inducement to suitors to take her away, out of his sight. But all were afraid of her, and she hid her face with her hair when men approached her. Then a priest came to the túath to discipline the monks and sharpen their doctrine. He found Aillenn living in a corner of her father’s home, sooted and despairing. She liked his eyes, which were brown like her mare’s, and he came close to her and spoke into her ear so she was not confused. He spoke gently and told her stories of the saints, including Patrick and Brigit. He enticed her to eat by feeding her with his own hands and letting her suck upon his fingers.

  She told me that they spoke to each other without words, and I knew well what she meant. I could have traded my own thoughts of Giannon for hers about this priest. They breathed like winded horses when they looked into each other’s eyes, and they trembled if their fingers touched. With great tenderness the priest attached devices to her soft and flawless body in order to keep them both chaste. Aillenn showed me how the priest went down on his knees to put iron around her loins, his face so close to where he held a key that was like an iron flower. And they both loved the feel of the key, inserted into the lock and turned, barring her genitals from any penetration. The sound it made was more intimate than any other sound, and their passion for it was great. They consulted the chieftain’s smith and had the black-stained man create pretty new devices in which to encase Aillenn’s lean pelvis. The smith decorated the iron with Latin words and Christian symbols, which the priest touched with his lips. When Aillenn woke in the night from a vision of her horse’s head crushed to pulp, the priest was beside her and distracted her from the pain of her thoughts and the pain of her loins with his philosophies. He told her that the mare was in heaven, its head restored. He moved her legs apart so the iron would not chafe her. He put salves upon the abrasions the metal made and washed the wounds that festered. He could not have enough of Aillenn, and she could not have enough of him. She washed his feet and tore his meat with her own teeth. She lifted the wine cup to his lips. Despite these diversions, the priest’s agitation grew. Aillenn suffered fevers from the fetid wounds and humid enclosure of the iron. The priest looked for comfort in the scholarship of saints and found Saint Augustine to be a twin soul. Shadowed constantly by Aillenn, who says that she could not stop her desire, he began to be ill, unable to swallow his food. He had an epiphany, which told him that he had made a woman into an object of worship, having been seduced, like Adam, by lust and beauty. He prayed to be given the strength of Saint Augustine, who had renounced his own mistress and acknowledged original sin, which was a constant weakness that a man had to battle in himself. The priest had fevers and thought that he was going to die of the heat he and Aillenn shared. He saw this heat as a foretelling of the hell they would endure for eternity. He told Aillenn, with the wildness of fever, that the world was a horrible place in which human flesh created hideous suffering. He muttered about his mother being raped, about the promises, at least, of heaven, of a place of beauty beyond the world of worms. He asked, grasping her arm, which she mimicked by grasping my arm so that I thought it would be broken, “How can we not believe and follow the Son of God, who promises some purpose to this suffering and some laws to guide us out of human agony and sorrow?”

  And I was considering the notion that words cannot, after all, lead us out of misery and the certainty of death. I was also studying in my mind the matter of men who are afraid of passion and of a woman’s power to incite it. But I did not speak, and instead listened on to Aillenn’s tale.

  When the priest was well, he spurned Aillenn, having made a promise to God to do so were he to live. Is it not strange to think of a man so intent upon heaven who yet makes desperate promises to be spared passage to it? Poor Aillenn crawled on her knees and
held on to the hem of his robes. Her penance was extreme, and she howled like a dying dog when the priest was sent to Kildare to be abbot to the monks, who had begun to seek the protection of Brigit. He joined the men who are brothers to the nuns to become abbot and confessor and is the very man who came only a few seasons ago to our community and now gives sermons about our fetid souls. In his absence, Aillenn’s state became so feeble that her father locked her in the stables and gave speeches to her, for as many hours as he had no duties, about the necessity of her not agitating the abbot or any other Christian cleric. He told his daughter with passionate effort that the only solace in the world of humans was power, and that the power now was with the Christians and their allies, and he saw no end to that power. He struck her to the ground and, standing over her, told her that she should betray all else and befriend the Christians in order to secure for their lineage the power that would soon rule this land and all others. She must prove herself not to be a fairy demon with her beauty and her seduction of holy men. She must do penance and represent her father and their family as a saint and nothing less. That, he said, is what she must become, for she would enrage the abbot if she were to marry. She must be a saint. He was sorely afraid of being less than chieftain and being remembered for a mad daughter who tormented an abbot’s God-directed celibacy.

  One day, Aillenn asked one of the bonded women to help her bathe and comb her hair. She let herself be fed and oiled, and then she walked into the túath and past rounded eyes and onto the road that led to Kildare, where the priest had gone. She had to travel many days without food or companionship until she came to the convent of Saint Brigit and lay herself on the threshold to be taken in.

  I recall the change in the mood of the abbot and understand now that his agitation began when Aillenn came to us. Sister Aillenn told me that he filled up with anger when he saw her, and he forced a promise from her never to refer to the days when they had been together in her túath. He allowed her to stay only if she made this promise and stayed away from him. He scolded her for bringing herself to him to tempt and ruin his soul. He said that she suffocated him as though she lay her body across his face. He said also that, as long as her face and body were beautiful, he would not look at her, he would not say her name. He told her that his regard for her would be based solely on the devotion she gave to Christ and his saints. But then he came to her when she was guarding the flame in the chapel, and they did not speak except with their bodies, and then he wept and left her.

  At the end of her account, Sister Aillenn wailed like a child and said that she had tried to be devoted and pure but that she attracts demons and is beset by them. She claimed again that a demon has entered the infant’s corpse and come into her womb. She believes that the monk who does not speak is also a demon who watches her. She separated from me then and struck me hard across the face, and she said that I had seduced the story from her and was a demon myself. At this second time of being struck by this sister, I was heartsore to be so cruelly treated and sick with sudden loneliness. She made her eyes into narrow windows through which arrows are shot, and she said to me that indeed power was all that mollified misery. She said that she would align herself with whatever showed the greatest power as her father had taught her to do. She said that her father was a great chieftain who killed the mare because he was not weakened by affection of any kind. And I asked her if affection was not also a strong means of enduring human life. I said that men fear affection because it is stronger than power and one must only have brute force to wield power but must have strength deeper than flesh to wield affection. For with affection comes great sorrow, the sorrow of inevitable death, but also with affection comes joy and peace that power can never give. Aillenn asked me what good my affection had ever done, for I was barren and alone. This made me weep as she looked on, her chin raised as though she knew herself to be a chieftain’s daughter. And here I say that a woman can ally herself with men’s power as long as she has her youth to offer. But when a woman loses her youth, she will regret playing that game. And she will wish that she had learned instead the art of druid or warrior to make those less wise respect her capacity for affection. May God receive such arts as a holy offering, not meant as heresy. This I say with love for Saint Brigit and for the Mother of God, Mary, who was strong enough to be impregnated by the Holy Spirit and wise enough to raise Jesus Christ.

  I fell asleep with supplications to God on my lips and woke too late to attend the morning psalms, ripped from sleep by an approaching thunder that rattled the stones of the clochan before fading away. I fled outside, fearing that the stones would come down on me. The sun was not yet above the horizon, and I saw in the early light the two wild horses, the brown mare and the gray stallion. They were galloping with arched tails down the hillside and along the edges of the valley below. In the middle of the open space, as though to defy the convent and flaunt their freedom, they mated. I did not look away and saw that a few yards away from me, in front of her own clochan, Sister Aillenn stood watching as well.

  1. Fled co-lige: feast of the deathbed.

  2. “We however shall walk in the name of Our God.”

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  AFTER THE DISAPPEARANCE of Giannon, I stayed a fortnight in the dwelling, eating little and afraid to let my eyes close at night. I watched the hillside and the edge of the woods and thought many times that I saw a figure and that the figure I saw was Giannon returning. Every shadow and movement teased me until I believed that Bebo’s fairies were using me for their entertainment. I went to the stone in the woods and made offerings of scrolls, feathers, herbs, and polished pebbles. At certain times of the day, when the words on the stone that Giannon and I had put there were illuminated by the sun, I stood before it and chanted whatever came to my head in praise of powers I knew and in supplication to them. These were pagan acts, which I did not know to be sins. May God and Saint Brigit understand the fear and soreness I felt. I begged to dream of Giannon and be told where he had gone and what happened to him. But all I dreamed of were the great fires that the tonsured men set, and these fires blew all over the land and blackened the ground and made the lakes boil.

  My mind could not be still, and I thought of all the places where Giannon might have been taken. I wished to go myself to Teách Duinn1 to search for him. Instead, I waited until the Fair of Tailltenn, where my mother had taken me when she went to the council of women. I took Giannon’s own pack, filled it with his scrolls, and went west to meet the road to the fair. I looked well into every face I passed on the road and stopped at the public place to hear the voices there. They were all strangers that I heard and saw, not even one child or man from the túath of Tarbfhlaith. I felt strongly my loneliness on this earth and sometimes imagined that I was despised by the gods. I had no mother and no companion; I had not even a friend.

  The Fair of Tailltenn that year did not thrive. There were half as many people as I had seen years before, but the noise was greater. There were new games and so a new appearance to the fair. There was only one hurling field and many long tables on which men played fidchell.2 Only a few vendors sold the old wares: baskets, cheese, cakes, and such. The fair was now dominated by the trading of livestock, and the ground was bare from being trampled by horses, pigs, cattle, and goats. Indeed, I could no longer call this a fair but a place to procure husbanded animals. As I walked through the stalls and bargaining groups, the smell of manure heavy around me, I saw no gleemen nor heard any jingling of bells or trumpet. I stopped to listen to one woman play the harp. Her slender fingers moved gracefully over the instrument and made it sing as I imagine a spirit sings to express its loneliness in the deep forest where there is a sweet longing. The music drew out tears, and I was glad when she stopped, though now I think it was the most beautiful sound I have heard except for the sound of Giannon’s low voice as I heard it with my ear pressed against his chest.

  I felt sick from the smells and dust and from the yelling of the men who announced with agitating repet
ition the strength of their animals. Small as I was, my pack and I were knocked upon by shoulder and arm as men competed for the best view of a bull or a horse. I set out for the oak trees under which the druids sat, in hopes of finding familiar poets and astrologers with whom to talk. I was afraid that they would scorn or curse me for my association with the man who had not kissed their brows. I was afraid, too, that I would see in their faces a hideous pity that came from their knowledge of Giannon’s fate. They would turn from me rather than tell me of their memories of his screams as his heart ceased to beat and he succumbed to some unjust and cold cruelty. To believe that those we love did not die in contortions of pain is all we humans can do to comfort ourselves when death has separated us forever. It is a pitiful solace, and when we cannot have it we say that death was merciful in ending their torment. God have mercy on us.

  There were no druids that year at the oak tree. Instead there were four tonsured men, monks who called out words about Our Lord Jesus Christ when anyone passed. I watched them as I stood behind a group of women with their children. I studied the monks’ words and the responses of the people who walked by. No one scorned them. Many lowered their heads and walked on, dragging behind them their hoofed bargains.