Believe
me, I approached this book with plenty of misgivings,
given the title and the promotional hints. I do
not know how much is savvy marketing — the
more academic side of Monaghan's here put forth,
as opposed to her being the author (uncredited in
these pages!) of 'Wild Women' or the one subtitled
'myth, marigolds, and mulches'. Her eponymous web
domain seems to have faded, but looking for information
about her as I was reading this, she is noted as
a leading popularizer of the Goddess and the reconstructed
rituals that rejoin (as in the root of 're-ligion')
people to nature. This insistence likewise permeates
this thoughtful memoir-cum-itinerary-cum-critique.
It's
carefully written. I almost always 'heard' her voice
on each page, and as she hints in an aside, I assume
that much of what she shares was freshly conveyed
in a daily notebook on her travels and through her
studies, and then expanded and mulled over much
further before coming to print here. Her two decades
of wandering Ireland are here compressed into a
more linear narrative deiseal following the sun's
course around the island. I admire Monaghan's determination
to excavate using etymology. With a solid grounding
in Irish as well as a rare combination of scientific
training, her ecologically aware, if persistently
soft-focused, depictions of the intermingling of
the spiritual, the eccelesiastical, the historical,
and the anecdotal make for quite an ambitious product
belying the quick title-and-cover glance that casual
prospects might give to this if in a New Age bookstore's
Celtic & Druidery nook. (Full disclosure: that's
where I found a copy of this book used; I had known
about it, but no library I frequent had purchased
a copy.) More power to her and her readers —
they'll pick up more learning and not only lore
than they may have bargained for. But you have to
put up with, or become enchanted by, visions of
she and her pals declaiming Yeats to the wind.
She
eschews footnotes but acknowledges any idea or source
not her own, and an annotated booklist and source
locator appends the book. (Errata: Lughnasa appears
also as Lehynasa on p. 273; Kevin Danaher's The
Year in Ireland was not printed by Cork's Mercier
Press in 1922 but 1972 — otherwise I found
no glaring errors or typos, impressively.) Honestly,
New Age is not the first shelf I turn to when seeking
books of Irish interest, but you need to be as eclectic
and alert as is Monaghan when searching for elusive
traces backwards into the "symbiosis"
that she posits exists between Christianity and
paganism in Ireland, over more than 1500 years.
Other
reviews have been more impressionistic, but let
me give you a quick view of what in Irish is called
dindsenchas, as fellow Celt-meets-Native
American shaman Frank MacEowen in his Amazon US
blurb calls 'place-bonding stories', that tie toponymy
to theology, ecology, and psychology in Monaghan's
circuit sun-wise around the island. Beginning in
the West, at Gort in Co Clare, she ties her Burren
travels to the Hag, or 'cailleach'. Then she goes
to Connemara for the 'red-haired girl' and fairies
— who are not Disneyfied delightful sprites.
Up to Sligo, Mayo, Roscommon on the trail of Medb
(Maeve) and the Morrigan, amidst Cruachan, Knocknarea,
and holy wells. Then northerly for Emain Macha and
Newgrange, with her own theories about a feminized
Sun and the Irish ritual landscape thoughtfully
told.
A
chapter inevitably a bit apart relates her own struggles
during a few visits in the North, and her self-awareness
of being seen as the Other. Her sympathies with
the Nationalist and Republican side come naturally,
inherited as they are from family she still talks
to from the old IRA, even if for readers of The
Blanket her political reflections may reveal
little fresh detail. Still, it's rather rare to
read circa 2000 of a first-generation Irish American's
factual (as opposed to fictional cliché)
encounter with her family's living militant past
remembered through talking to her relatives rather
than reconstructed through second-hand recollections.
This Northern chapter's clumsier and more self-consciously
told, yet more direct and reality-based. She confronts
her own resentments of those she perceives as eying
her differently. It's a bold departure from the
rest of the book, and she does not shy away from
reality. She cannot offer any solutions, and she
probably knows this, but her encounter with her
darker side balances her cheerful nature throughout
the rest of her travelogue.
I
think her musings here about rapacious and/or romantic
Viking ancestors accounting for her blue eyes went
a bit overboard. I don't doubt that Monaghan might
agree and/or battle me into giving in to her determination
to include her reveries — she's that kind of fair-minded
investigator — but at least she does not back down
from the strength or the fancy of her convictions.
This is the model she admires and seeks to project
into the Irish past as well as to gain sustenance
from the faint but stubbornly grooved and cyclical
tracks of its past power for our present. I did
wonder at times why [feeling as I read a bit left
out; compare neo-paganism, itself about 70% female
practitioners] so few men compared to so many women
sought to resurrect and rekindle its meanings and
symbols, but the feminine-dominated powers, as she
argues, assert this prominence even in the old tales
and placenames more than males. As in Ireland-Eriu
(the latter meaning 'fertile field', a derivation — rare
by comparison with her usual method — that she does
not explicitly define here for herself).
Monaghan
tends to follow her instinct wherever it leads.
Trained as a botanist before entering academia,
it seems from the hints she drops that she perches
at its fringes, preferring to use her scholarship
in a variety of ecological critical modes, teaching
in a Chicago university's spirituality program.
This stance liberates her from any limit to one
discipline or one pet theory. Off the tenure track
or maybe past it, Monaghan's able to dart about
in a zig-zag, spiralling, idiosyncratic pattern
recalling for me John Moriarty's own mythopoeic
excursions after he too tired of the collegiate
treadmill. (Read, if you dare, his massive memoir
Nostos from Liliput Press, Dublin.) Like
Moriarty, Monaghan does not avoid the scholarly,
but never lets it crush her soul. Monaghan, as with
Moriarty, takes nourishment from the natural. She
has found a much more gentle and inspirational (in
the root sense) sacralized landscape than I have
encountered in Ireland. She has the advantage that
many Irish Americans do not of direct connections
and still-connected cousins due to more recent immigration
in her family. This allows her more of a base from
which to leap out across what she views ahead of
her, intellectually, spiritually, and physically,
This is a bold attempt to confront what always stoked
my own thoughts: how far beneath today's Irish psyche
and habits and mentality do you have to scratch
before the pagan emerges?
Helped
by her clever ability to navigate pop culture, dictionaries,
her own widespread support network of family and
friends, and her inbred wanderlust from her being
raised in Alaska, she brings her pagan and her Christian
sides together most evidently in the visit to the
unprepossessing exterior of the relit pagan fire
for Brigit in Kildare. This joins the two realms
in which she and so many Irish, according to her
study, wander. Then, down to the sacralized cow,
Tara, and the central Uisneach hill for fire ceremonies
and Bealtaine. The scholarship related to Munster
dragged a bit more than elsewhere, but coupled with
a moving meditation on the death of her friend Barbara,
this makes for an honest encounter again with mortality.
Monaghan recalls bravely her own husband's early
demise. She points out that it's not the inevitability
of death we fear, but its timing.
Finally,
she rounds out the tour in Kerry. She neither connects
the goddess Mis with Austin Clarke's 1970 poem 'The
Healing of Mis', nor cites Emmet Larkin's 1970s
model of the devotional revolution of the later
19c that transformed Ireland into the 20c stereotype
of a priest-ridden backwater by extirpating many
remnants of its folk beliefs, but her thoughts on
the pagan sexuality nearly extinguished by a post-Famine
Church share her provocative speculation. Danu's
'paps' and how its worshippers erected atop her
nipples as stone cairns above a gentle-breasted
hilled landscape make for a perspective that, as
she asserts, only a woman as herself noticed after
so many male-dominated studies never had —
or at least demurred from recording! Related to
the perception from ancient times commemorated in
placenames that the land looked likd ourselves,
Liam Clancy's recent memoir of growing up in Carrick-on-Suir,
The Mountain of the Women, takes its title
from Slievenamon, seen as a feminine breast supine
but overlooking his Waterford hometown. In the wrap-up
chapter of Red-Haired Girl, Monaghan and
a friend go in search of first-hand folkloric recovery
of their own sacred place, Garravogue near the Cavan
border. They circle back and extend the circle into
a spiral, fittingly, as they revolve around Ireland's
own places made holy.
Now,
Monaghan has commonsense, more than some who have
written about her book credit her with in my judgment
as this Connacht-blooded Irish comments to/of another,
her family being from Mayo's Bohola about equidistant
from my two family origins only a few miles. By
the way, her comments about the inevitable assurance
from the locals of 'only a mile more' and 'sure
you can't miss it' ring true for any stranger in
search of rural landmarks, ruins, or simply the
right road. She remarks on the county-town-parish-townland
(she calls the last 'farm') narrowing that Irish
habitually engage each other with when first nosing
about the other's bonafides correctly, as I am with
her now doing. This type of sensible observation,
I hazard, makes her more observant and less beguiled
by what she ponders in the more ethereal and filtered
views she frames--and to be fair she mentions the
rain and mud too when they often appear. I learned
a lot from her, found that she often stayed one
step ahead of me on her associations with the literary
and historical and mythic resonances from what she
traversed to keep me nimble, and that she wrote
sensitively (if a bit too purple-prosed in parts,
although these were helpfully often italicized)
about her own heartfelt recoveries with the tangible
traces of ideas and events long thought intangible.
In
the last issue of The Blanket, I
reviewed two accounts of Catholic Ireland's demise.
What will replace this absence, Mary Kenny surmised
at the end of her book, will be what preceded Patrick:
the embrace of the natural world, perhaps pantheism.
Moriarty certainly agrees. When I was around twelve
in Catholic school, I remember being told that the
Church would soon collapse in Europe, due to the
hippies, hedonists, atheists, and the occultists.
Over three decades on, the collapse seems to have
happened far faster in Ireland than any could have
predicted in the mid-70s. Without fear of God, however,
will people repent? The filmed jeremiads of Al Gore
earn ridicule for being a silly Cassandra bewailing
melting ice caps. But the news over the past weeks
has documented wildfires, hurricanes, floods, meltings,
and famines all stoked by our covetous greed and
our social necessity for too much fuel. What has
been preached and dismissed by those regarded as
the loony tree-hugging radical left (and more conservatives
than one might expect as I have found when researching
what's relegated to the radical right) may, with
our new century's fears of global disaster, become
gospel for our children. Mother Earth, paternal
provider: the pantheistic long precedes the monotheistic
and the organisation of beliefs into doctrine.
Ireland
may lead the way in this step back to roots, in
both senses of the word. Michael Dames in his 1991
panorama of Mythic Ireland eloquently urged
this return. The more politicised and secularised
among you may scoff. Skeptics, rationalists, and
unbelievers would hate this book. Still, I prefer,
as Monaghan does, to think that few actually deny
all hope of some presence outlasting our own. Her
book, challenging in many parts and not all that
wince-making in others (these sections are relatively
few, to her credit), will teach any seeker a lot
about facts as well as fable. Monaghan digs into
the former to find the latter, and vice versa.
P.S.
A related account (similarly unfortunately...) titled
Emerald Spirit, (Cork: Mercier Press, 2003)
by another American, David P Stang, makes a instructive
counterpart. As mentioned above, John Moriarty's
mythopoeic and densely argued work may be too recondite
for many, but also may please readers of Monaghan;
Clare seanachie Eddie Lenihan's penetrating look
into faerie lore and fact, Meeting with the Other
Side also is highly recommended if you want
more about the play and peril between our realm
and that elusive presence still said to swirl about
the Irish countryside. Mapped well recently also
by Cary Meehan in her Traveller's Guide to Sacred
Ireland.
