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- Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
From the author of the hugely successful book Legendary Ireland, The Turning of the Year explores the Celtic division of the year, from Samhain to Imbolc, to Bealtaine, to Lunasa, back to Samhain. It examines the significance of particular times of the year and features re-tellings of various legends associated with them. The book will look at the close connection of the Irish with the land and with nature, bringing us on an exhilarating journey through the Irish seasons and the customs that welcomed each one in turn. Along the way we encounter saints, scholars, kings and goddesses, whose stories, preserved in myth and folktale, counterpoint the book's exploration both of lost traditions such as keening and how other customs and rituals have been preserved in today's celebrations and communal events. It brings to the reader a new awareness of how such ritual can still have relevance in our lives, and a deeper appreciation of the power of the natural world.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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‘The celebration of the natural world and the close connection to it are everywhere in this striking collection.’
Irish Voice review of Eithne Massey’s
Legendary Ireland
3
Dedication
For Julie Howley, 1956–2020: friend to many and keeper of the seasons
Acknowledgements and Thanks
There were a number of seminal sources for the material in this book. In terms of printed material, the works of Kevin Danaher and Dáithí Ó hÓgáin deserve special mention. Thanks are also due to Eugene Costello for sharing his thoughts on booley houses and their music. To the library workers, both in the National Library and the Public Libraries, a special thank-you for helping me with sometimes long lists of requests. The staff at the Traditional Music Archive were also very helpful. I would also like to express my thanks to those people who helped me with copyrighted material: 7Tara Doyle of Dublin City Libraries, Tom Gillmor of the Mary Evans Picture Library, Ailbe van der Heide of The National Folklore Collection, UCD, Jonathan Williams of The Jonathan Williams Literary Agency and Alan Brenik of Carcanet Press.
Given that much of this book was researched in 2020, the ability to freely access the JSTOR collection of periodical articles proved invaluable. It could not have been written without that access, nor indeed without access to the invaluable National Folklore Collection. The material held there, collected from the schoolchildren of almost a hundred years ago, is truly a national treasure. I would like to thank the Director of the Collection, Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh for permission to quote from the Collection (a full list of the quotations used appear in the text credits at the end of the book).
In addition, I would also like to thank all at the O’Brien Press for their hard work in putting this book together, especially Susan Houlden and Emma Byrne. Finally, I would like to thank family and friends for their encouragement and helpful suggestions, which ranged from discussions on the uses of red flannel to information on ancient mousetraps. Fidelma Massey, Tara Huellou-Meyler and Jacques Le Goff, thank you for allowing me to use your pictures and photographs. Jacques Le Goff, who had to listen to me through many a rant when things were not going well, deserves a very special thank-you for his support.
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The Dagda’s Harp
In Ireland, the year begins in music. The Dagda, the great god of the ancient Celts, had a harp that was a living creature. We are told that when the Dagda played it, the year came forth from the music. Like a tune circling into itself, the seasons, marked by the changing weather and the changing face of the landscape, whirled along in a rhythmic progression. First the gold and red of dying leaves, then the dun of barren fields, then onwards to the whiteness of snowy hillsides and to the green of spring and summer forests. Forward to the gold of the harvest and then back again, to the deeper gold of autumn. The music the harp played was what the hero Fionn called the sweetest music in the world: the music of what happens. What is the music of what happens? Wolves howling, blackbirds singing, the small bleat of a newborn lamb sheltering on a February hillside or a girl calling her cows in from the pasture? It is all of this and more. It is the music that is played in time, as the seasons turn.
Contents
12
Introduction
THE YEAR IN IRELAND
The dying leaves of Samhain heralded the New Year in the Ireland of our ancestors, in celebrations beginning on the eve of the first of November. The Celts celebrated sacred days from twilight on the day before the festival, and similarly, the year began in the quiet of winter, where life can root and grow, waking to spring on the first of February, Imbolg. Summer was welcomed on the first of May, Lá Bealtaine, and autumn and harvest at Lughnasa, at the beginning of August. Samhain, Imbolg, Bealtaine and Lughnasa – each of our seasons arrives several weeks earlier than is the norm in the rest of the world, for worldwide, the seasons are based on the movement of the sun, on its solstices and equinoxes in December, March, June and September.
In Ireland the division of the year is more closely based on agricultural activity, on the life cycles of the beasts that graze the land and the crops that grow on it. This division is seen in the earliest myths, such as in the story of the Second Battle of Moytura, which was fought between the Tuatha Dé Danaan and the Fomorians. The Fomorians had enslaved gods such as 14the Dé Danaan god Dagda, forcing him to dig ditches. When the Tuatha Dé Danaan defeated the Fomorians and captured their leader Bres, in return for his life he tells them the secrets of crop growing:
Spring for ploughing and sowing and the beginning of summer for maturing the strength of the grain, and the beginning of autumn for the full ripeness of the grain, and the reaping it. Winter for consuming it.
In this book, each section will include legends based on the lore, festivals or activities associated with the season. Like each place, each season in Ireland also has a story.
Each of the seasons has a different energy, and different tasks, pastimes, animals and plants associated with it. Each one has a different way of being, a different relationship with the earth. We mark these differences in every aspect of our lives, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat, in our celebrations and holidays and in the dark times when we trudge through each day, hoping that we are heading in the direction of the light. Seasons are also closely related to human cycles of growth, as singer/songwriter Yoko Ono put it succinctly in her album Season of Glass – spring with innocence, summer with exuberance, autumn with reverence and winter with perseverance.
The Cycles of Nature and Their Rituals
In the past in Ireland, each turning point in the year was marked by a celebration which, over hundreds if not thousands 15of years, had become entrenched in the folk traditions of its people. The arrival of each season was marked by distinct customs and rituals.
It is these traditions that we will be looking at in this book. These folk rituals are more than just quaint observances and beliefs. For hundreds of years they brought the community together and acted as a form of social control. They also reflect the special relationship that both the individual and the community held with the natural world. Paying attention to the turning of the year and the natural cycles of the Earth can still be a way of experiencing a direct and powerful relationship with the world of nature.
In the past, this acknowledgement of the natural cycles was seen both in everyday activities and the celebration of great communal events. Today much of this connection has been lost. The balance in the world population has tipped so that the majority of people now live in urban environments. Technology, which has made our lives safer, more comfortable and more interesting, has also blotted out the moon and stars and covered over the green world of natural growth. In recent years horrific forest fires have blotted out the sun. In many parts of the earth, our time and our activities are no longer controlled by the cycles of weather or the cycle of day and night. People live on global time now, most of us in societies where everyone runs very fast, in order, like Alice when she went through the Looking Glass, to stay in the same place. The enforced pause of 2020 brought home to many that their ‘normal’ way of life was in some ways a toxic one. Some of us learned to call our time our own, though some found their ‘free’ time invaded by 16extra work. Either way, our relationship with time changed. Some of us realised that we need time to pause and reflect on where we are and where we want to go. Connecting with the natural world and marking the year’s turnings is one way to do this.
Finding Time
Time as a concept has its own history; it is not absolute. Much of the eastern world does not celebrate the New Year on 1 January. Pope Gregory summarily removed ten days from the month of October in 1582 in order to correct the ‘drift’ that use of the Julian calendar had caused over the centuries; by 1582 the equinoxes and solstices were out of sync with their original dates. The spring equinox was happening ten days before 25 March. This calendar was not adopted in Britain until 1751, nearly two hundred years later and in Turkey in 1927, so even within a quite small geographical area there were periods when not just the daily time but the dates of the month differed between countries.
Humans are also obsessed with managing time by dividing it into periods. At one end of the scale we have aeons, at the other nanoseconds. Few of us can comprehend either.
Most of us do realise that time moves at a different pace according to our environment, what we are doing and how we are feeling. The ancient image of time as a wheel is an international one, from the Great Wheel of the Hopi to the Zodiac of the Greeks. The Greeks also saw time as the great river Ouranus that encircled the earth and, while moving 17forward, created an unbroken circle. There have been changes in how we see time during the last thousand years, particularly where societies have moved from away from an agricultural base. Time is now seen as something linear, moving towards a future point. Most of us have lived for many centuries in cultures where time is part of the capitalist world view – time is a physical entity: like money, it can be lost, spent, wasted, saved. The Dagda’s harp on the back of our Irish coins tells us in a very literal way that time is money.
However, we are not so far away from the world of our ancestors as we might think. Many of that world’s rituals have been preserved, while others have been transformed into contemporary celebrations. It is estimated that Irish children born in 2021 will have a life expectancy of a hundred and five, a lifespan of over a century. Looking back, we are less than a century away from a time when most Irish people lived close to the land and the changing seasons and their rituals were very much part of our lives. Glancing through the 1911 census of Ireland, you will see many families listed as workers of the land: agricultural labourers, farm domestics, farmers, farmers’ sons, daughters. These people worked within the rhythm of the seasons and were dependent on the will of the weather gods as to whether they could work at all. Seasons were their time, and weather and time are deeply linked, even in the Irish language. The word for weather – aimsir – is the same word that is often used for time and also for grammatical tenses, how we talk about our past, present and future.
We cannot return to a world of pre-technology. We cannot un-know what we know and no one wants to go back to a 18world where brutal diseases killed so many and a large percentage of people lived in poverty. Nor do we want to return to the sheer back-breaking toil of subsistence farming; digging rocky fields by hand, hauling seaweed to fertilise the land, piling stone upon stone at the boundaries and bending, lifting, shifting the sheaves of corn to pile them up on a cart for the harvest home. There was a reason thousands of people fled the land of Ireland, not just during the nineteenth century but well into the twentieth.
Lucky Days and Ancient Calendars
If the Sun and Moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out
William Blake, from ‘Auguries of Innocence’
If our grandparents and great-grandparents milked cows and ploughed the fields, herded sheep and dug potatoes, they also tied red thread to the tails of their cows on Lá Bealtaine and left the doors open at Imbolg, guarding against the malice of the Otherworld or inviting its protection into their homes. Even within the weekly cycle, they watched for lucky and unlucky days – days when one might bury a dead animal, start a journey, sell a cow. Depending on the locality, the lucky and unlucky days could vary and even contradict one another, but among the hundreds of entries in the National Folklore Collection it seems that Mondays and Fridays tended to be unlucky days, Tuesdays and Thursdays more fortunate. For some reason, Thursday was an especially auspicious day for 19curing ringworm. If we look back to when The Triads of Ireland were written, in the ninth century, we find that the three ‘woman-days’ were Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday; if the woman goes to a man on those days, the man will love them better than they will love the man, and the woman will outlive her partner. This tradition of good and bad days goes back millennia.
The Coligny Calendar shows how the Celts marked time, but its main function was recording lucky and unlucky days. The Calendar is marked on a bronze tablet, which was found at the end of the nineteenth century near Lyon and is thought to date from the second century CE. By this time the Celtic tribes had been heavily influenced by Roman culture – the Calendar uses Roman numerals. The calendar includes both sun and moon reckonings, with the months divided into light and dark sections. Its lunar cycle of nineteen years underscores the importance of the moon’s phases to our ancestors. The carvings at Knowth, one of the Boyne Valley sites in Meath, also clearly depict the cycles of both moon and sun. Indeed, the four divisions of the year can be seen as reflecting the monthly phases of the moon – beginning at Samhain at its darkest phase and moving to waxing crescent, full and waning crescent moon.
The Coligny calendar supports the Roman writer Pliny’s statement that the Celts of Gaul used a calendar based on the moon, so it is very possible that for them the actual date that each season commenced corresponded with a phase of the moon, most probably the first phase. Therefore, the three days of the Samhain feast would begin on the evening the new 20moon first appeared in the sky. The ‘wild’ Irish, we are told by the Elizabethan William Camden, in his survey of Ireland and Britain, knelt in front of the new moon and prayed, asking it to:
Leave us as whole and sound as thou hath found us.
And the moon, of course, rules the tides, the other great marker of time.
The interior of Newgrange.
21The Coligny Calendar reflects a society with a sophisticated relationship with the cycles of sun and moon, and this relationship is also seen in the Nebra Sky Disc, a bronze disc that shows the sun, the full and the crescent moon and some stars, including the Pleiades or Seven Sisters group. The disc is much older than the Coligny Calendar. Found in Germany, it dates from the Bronze Age and it shows us that long before the Celts the study and depiction of the heavenly bodies was well established.
The Megalithic Landscape
Our ancestors’ knowledge of the movements of the heavenly bodies is seen on a massive scale in the construction of the great stone monuments found all over Europe. In Ireland, the alignment of Neolithic structures to the sunrises and sunsets of the solstices and equinoxes occurs throughout the country, from Carrowmore and Carrowkeel in Sligo to the Drombeg Stone Circle in Cork. But it is nowhere more evident than in the great concentration of tombs in the Boyne Valley. Newgrange, Knowth, Dowth and further west the Loughcrew cairns; so many of these structures are aligned to the sun, the force that made the grass and the crops grow. The mysteries of these constructions are still in the process of being explored and recent advances in genetic science have revealed the scale of the culture that created these passage tombs. DNA studies have found that despite the fact that this type of tomb is distributed over an area of hundreds of kilometres and was built over a period of five hundred years, there are close genetic links between the people buried in them. 22
The lunar and solar references in these tombs can be seen not just in the way they are aligned in the landscape but also in the treasury of sculptural art that they hold – the most concentrated accumulation of megalithic art in the world, with constantly recurring symbols of spiral and solar wheel. Knowth especially, with its sunbursts, spirals, cupmarks, moons and suns, constitutes a whole bible of symbolism, a lost narrative waiting to be read. Carved on what is known as Knowth’s calendar stone, Kerbstone 52, is an image of the phases of the moon over a nineteen-year cycle – just like the Coligny Calendar. Some observers have also linked the alignments and imagery of the site with other astronomical features, such as the Milky Way, Venus and the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, which appear in the sky from October until the end of April, directly corresponding to the period from Samhain to Bealtaine.
The Kerbstone, Knowth.
This knowledge of the movements of the stars and the natural cycles is reflected in many of the ancient Irish legends. 23It was seen as being part of the acquisition of wisdom. King Cormac, the wise king of Irish legend, says:
I was a listener in woods
I was a gazer at stars
We do not know, however, exactly what form this knowledge took. It was not the scientific knowledge we have today. But it seems that these ancient peoples answered some of their questions about the nature of the cosmos, not just in the great stone monuments, but also through story and ritual.
Who calls the kine from Tethra’s house, and sees them
dance in the bright heavens?
Who can tell the ages of the moon?
Amergin
Writers such as John Carey and John Waddell have shown the ways in which the myths and legends of Ireland, written down many centuries after the events they recount, can hold within them a hidden code that links them to the lost knowledge of the great stone monuments of Ireland’s earliest peoples.
One such theme is the expansion of space within space, a theme which has been carried into modern folklore, for the fairy mounds are always bigger inside than outside. In the stories relating to Newgrange and the Boyne Valley monuments, they also often involve the expansion – or contraction – of time within time. Newgrange acts in some ways as a giant timepiece, a way to understand and celebrate the cycles of 24time, most specifically that of the solar year. In one Newgrange story, the Dagda makes a day last a year, so that he can enjoy his lover Boann and she can give birth to their son, Aonghus, while her husband is out hunting.
In Dowth, where the tomb’s alignment is towards the setting sun at the winter solstice, a story told is that of the sister of the king who built it, Dubad. Dubad stops the sun in its course so that the monument can be finished. Dubad, in this story, is linked to her brother in an incestuous relationship and both are punished for their transgression. There is recent evidence that some of the bodies buried in Newgrange were the result of incestuous relationships, leading to theories of close family ties among a royal elite, similar to those in ancient Egypt. The story of Dubad reflects this and may be part of the web of images that link the stories, the sites, the rituals and the imagery, and even the lost cosmological knowledge possessed by these people. Is the silver chain that appears in so many of the stories, worn by gods such as Lugh and Aonghus, connected to the Milky Way, which author and astronomer Anthony Murphy has identified in some of the Knowth carvings? Are the Morrigan’s cattle, linked together by a chain of white bronze, also connected to the Fair Cow’s path (another name used for the Milky Way), the path which may well be that of the cow-goddess Boann, guardian of the Boyne River Valley and the tombs it holds?
We do not know why certain stories continue to live, to be told, and others do not. Perhaps the stories that are told and retold are the ones which hold the most important connections, connections which form a web of meaning that can only 25be grasped intuitively. Stretching the threads or pulling the knots of reason too tight on the connections can sometimes break the thread. We may have to live with half-glimpses, for so much of what we once knew is lost. But even where the story is lost, in many cases the traditions and rituals remain.
Ritual and Tradition
We know that ritual and tradition place order on our world, giving it patterns that reassure us and keep chaos at bay. When we participate in a ritual or indeed a tradition, we feel a sense of security in being part of an activity that stretches back a very long time. If we tie a red thread to the cow’s tail, it will be kept safe from the forces we are afraid of and do not know how to control. But in such rituals there is celebration as well as fear; it is not just about protecting livestock. Like a story or an image, or the light of the stars themselves, ritual outlasts that which it represents. The peasants who would not turn a wheel on various days in the year – Bealtaine, St Martin’s Day – were not aware that they were acknowledging the powers of the solar god Manannán. They did it because they had been taught that this was the right thing to do. That particular custom eventually died out, as the world became a safer place, a place that was more under human control. Other rituals remain, transformed in some cases, or enacted only by children, but still present deep within us, connecting us directly to the first person to light a bonfire against the darkness of the coming winter and to all the other individuals and groups who have done so since. It was one of us who on a dark 26February day lit a rush light to celebrate the coming of spring, tied a bunch of white blossom over the doorway on May Day, hid the last sheaf in the thatch after harvest. One of us was also the person who first told the tale of the girl who looked in a well and became a river, of the boy who found knowledge by sucking his thumb. We may have changed the way our stories are told, but at the deepest level they are connected with the stories, rituals and impulses of those who lived millennia before us, connecting us with the natural world. Throughout this book, I have tried to show these links, the web of meaning woven by traditions, customs and stories, as the year moves on in its constant circling.
The rituals and customs described in this book honour the 27natural world, the world that has been our nurse since the birth of our existence. Our celebration of the seasons at once bears witness to our common humanity and moves us beyond it to a connection with the wider universe of time and space and place. Honouring what each season brings, the blackbird’s song, the wind against our faces, the opening of a single leaf, makes each second eternal. The earth travels around the sun at more than 100,000 kilometres every hour, yet we cannot feel it moving. There is stillness at the heart of the movement. The world turns and hums, like a hive of bees or a spinning top: and while, as the writer Mary Webb put it, we cannot know why it turns, we and all creatures are part of its ‘giddy steadfastness’.
