So!
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!
Happy Spring Equinox!
[there follows the transcription, lightly edited, of an ex tempore lecture to students delivered during the Plague Years, and thus recorded for them as a video, in a playground full of Spring flowers, birdsong, and the sound of playing children, rendering the audio quite difficult to hear. Bloody children, always ruining everything]
Really, I’ve come to think that the celebration by the Irish of this Feast, usually falling within Lent, during which the Lenten austerity would be put on hold and a feast of riotous revelry would take place, with parades in the streets with giant floats, giant marionettes, roaming the streets, monsters out of myth and legend, many Saint Patricks carrying their staffs, wearing their mitres – the Crozier Staff, with the top like a still-furled fern – chasing dragons and snakes… It often struck me that this is very much a Spring Festival: these are the Rites of Spring, and Patrick is the one who chases off the Dragons of Winter, and the flood of drink cleanses us, purifies us, and enlivens us for the Spring to come, coming to break up that dry arid stretch of Lenten abstinence of course…
Saint Patrick didn’t really drive out snakes. And contrary to what some modern pagans would have us believe the snake was not either a symbol of paganism, particularly, in this case. I mean, we could read it symbolically: that Saint Patrick was the one who evangelized the Irish, thus the Old Serpent – the Serpent Power of the Monoliths and the Mounds – was driven away or driven underground again, quite possibly. However, as we know, while we might look at the knotwork and the spiral patterns on the megalithic structures and the tumuli and so on as possibly serpent-like, these structures were not built by the Celtic Druidic culture of the Gaels, but thousands of years earlier by the Neolithic Irish Culture. The Druids, the Celts, certainly incorporated those structures into their myths and their Imaginary, but there is no evidence whatsoever of their having used the Snake as a symbol for themselves, their culture, their religion (I’ve seen some talk of linking the Snake Symbolism to the Crom Cruach cult, the Phallic Idol, the Twisted Pillar … I think that this is a little, as they say in France, “pulled by the hair”… All that is certainly worth talking about another time though…).
We also know, of course, as we previously learned, that there were no snakes in Ireland, because Ireland was cut off from Mainland Europe by the waters of the Irish Sea and the Celtic Sea as the glaciers receded after the last ice age, and the snakes never made it. And they couldn’t really get on boats, or fly or swim. And so Ireland has always been snake-free, pretty much. There are a couple of small lizards and even, I think, something called a slow-worm, which I think is a legless lizard, so it’s hard to say whether we might call that a serpent or not, but basically there are no snakes in Ireland…
[some great background follows, from Reddit user Lonnbeimnach, on the r/Ireland SubReddit, which is a constant source of wit, wisdom, begrudgery, and Notions …]
But there are Dragons; there are Sea Worms, Lake Monsters of all sorts in our legends and perhaps Patrick could be seen as having put those to flight … But even that doesn’t make sense, as we can see in the fabulous stories of legendary voyages told in Early Christian Ireland, the Imramma which became the Peregrinatio pro Christi, that adventurous monks such as Saint Brendan absolutely did come across Sea-Serpents and Dragons in their wild and epic travels.
So what’s the actual Story of Saint Patrick? I mean: “who was this man did he exist?” It certainly seems that he’s a real person, and we know him mainly from two texts: his Confessio, his confession, and a later text which was a letter written to a Roman dignitary. And in school we learned that the year of Patrick’s arrival in Ireland in the fifth century was very easy to remember: 432. Tradition has it that was the year. Of course, it’s not actually that sure, and it’s possible that Patrick arrived just sometime in the latter half of the fifth century. He says at one point that the Franks were still pagan when he wrote one of his texts, and we know that the Franks’ incursion into what would become France was in 451, and in the 490s they were baptized en masse, so that places him comfortably sometime in the second half of the fifth century for a lot of his activities.
Now who was he? Well, in fact Patrick was a Roman Briton; he was perhaps of mixed descent but he came from a Roman family, the family of Calpurnius, and he lived in what would become Wales. However, he was, as a young man, kidnapped by Irish slavers, and this is an interestingthing to know: that the Irish Gaels kept slaves, and raided to take slaves on the coasts of Wales. So he was taken as a slave, and the legend has it, and his own auto-hagiography has it, that he was put to tend sheep on a hillside; he was a shepherd. And at one point, one starry night, the stars arranged themselves into a Vision of God’s Angels, if I remember right, and in a dream he was shown his route to escape. And he escaped on a ship from Ireland and fled back to Britain but he had another dream in which a figure came to him bearing the voice of the Irish, and they cried out to him for succour: they said “come save us” (“Oh Paddy Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling…” so to speak). Now, Patrick was resistant; he resisted this Call to Adventure at first. He said he was not worthy and he was lacking in education. So it took him a while to learn enough to come back. When he did, he arrived in Ireland maybe around 432, to the Pagan Irish, and he became one of the most incredible evangelists that we have known. He was a diplomat; he went to kings and gave them gifts; to lawmakers, petty kings; he gave them gifts but would accept none in return. He made magical bells, cast in iron and coated in bronze that were said to convert those that were within earshot. He crafted other magical items; he performed in magical contests against the Druids, and won. The Druids’ magic could not defeat him. He converted kings, and so their whole Tuath, their whole kingdom, would convert along with them. And he challenged the druids at the Bonfire of Uisneach, at the umbilicus, the center, of Ireland, in Míde, the fifth central Cúige, or province. Patrick traveled all over Ireland; he performed miracles. Even by his own account he raised people from the dead. Perhaps, yes, metaphorically, we could see his defeat of the Druids as the defeat of the Serpent Power of Earth; but that would be our own back projection: at the time, or in the centuries after, no-one saw it like that, no-one characterised it like that.
He’s also well known for his parable of the Shamrock. It’s another probably apocryphal story, but apparently someone asked him “but how is this that there could be three Persons in One God?” Now, that strikes me as odd, considering the tendency for the Pagan Gaels to have Triple Gods, and particularly Triple Goddesses, for example the Three Bríghids, or the Goddesses of the Mórrigna; they were well used to the idea of three gods in one, and indeed one might argue that many of the features of the Patrician Celtic Christian Church were actually borrowed and copied from a Druidic Pagan world-view including this Triadicity… But isn’t it funny how the Triple Spiral, the famous Triskele, symbol of perpetual flow, the Three Worlds, of Manannán Mac Lír, of the Isle of Man, became, in a sense, the Shamrock: the three circles joined. The story goes, he held up this three-leafed clover – the Shamrock – and showed it to them, and he said “you see, from the one stalk, three leaves. From the One God, Three Beings: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Of course, in Celtic Christianity and in Irish Catholicism all the way up to today, the Three Beings of God, in a sense, are more like “Father, Son, and the Mother”, because the Cult of the Goddess, the Marian Cult, is so strong in Ireland, and always has been. I’ve been talking to friends recently about this, about how Irish Catholicism, and indeed many other forms of Catholicism, are really halfway towards what we call Paganism, because they include this aspect of Goddess worship; they include the aspect of soft polytheism, of the many Saints who are called upon to intercede, and much folk magic. In fact, the Mass itself is an act of magic, and it’s no surprise to me that Patrick, when he went up against the Druids, would be seen as a Magician, because the Early Christian Priest-Saints, Pilgrim-Saints, Evangelist-Saints: they were also Magicians, Wonderworkers, and when they held bread and wine and told the people “I am transforming these into the Body and Blood of our God-become-Man”, this was an act of Deep magic.
He performed many other feats and wonders. I think at one point he struck the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny that is the Heartstone of Ireland, with his staff and caused it to cry out. I have to look up that one again, though he definitely struck a stone with a staff, which has an interesting sort of Freudian ring to it as well.
All in all, as far as I’m concerned, Patrick is a soul-searching, humble, holy, but quite simple man, burning with the power of his Faith and the power of his Doubt.
Even here in France, we are not immune…
We spent the evening of Saint Patrick’s Day in the local town of Sainte Loy la Morte, at the bar under the Arcades, where they had surprisingly excellent Guinness on tap and a food truck with a terrible pun for a name serving honestly some of the best fish ‘n’ chips I’ve had ANYWHERE, let alone in France. They also had a local DJ spinning the worst diddley-Oirish rubbish I’ve heard in a long while. It got better, though that might have been just the Guinness taking the edge off.
Intially it was mainly English people braying at each other and appearing to take the thing in a spirit of vague quaint satire. I even heard some talking smack about the Irish, but merely noted it, and kept my counsel.
Later, I saw some Irish heads around, scurrying in under cover of the Gloaming for a few pints and a bit of craic, but we are far outnumbered here in Aquitaine by its old Imperial colonists, who still come here, consume the culture, but will not speak the language or engage the people…
But we’re not like that, you see…
Those of us who know are not that bothered by the commodifixion and the flogging of Paddy’s Day tat to the World; indeed we count on it.
Honestly, I get a little impatient with those who get all up in arms about this stuff. What other tiny insignificant country in the world do you know with SUCH brand-recognition? Oh of course, a lot of it is terribly cheesy, but you have to have something for the lower end of the market if you want to really rake it in. At the top end, we punch far above our weight in pretty much every single cultural, political, sporting, historical, social, and scientific field. I want to say to people who get fussy about it: “don’t bite the arse of the pocket you’re picking”… Those of us with any sense laugh and smile all the way to the bank (both hard cash and soft power), and gleefully shout “kiss my arse!” at passing American tourists.. In Irish. With a wave and a merry twinkle in our eyes. They smile and wave back, and then hand over their cash over their fist. 800 years of imperial oppression teaches you the lessons of Stephen Dedalus: “Silence, Exile, Cunning.”
We know how to survive.
As for whether the parade of clichés and nonsense that surges up around Saint Patrick’s Day all over the world constitutes a kind of racism: in short, no.
It is NOT Racism. I don’t believe it is. Because while Irish people may (and do!) still suffer from a certain amount of prejudice (which is really only negative from a certain type of English person; otherwise, the prejudice the vast majority of people have towards Irish people is POSITIVE: they think we’re great!), they do NOT suffer from racism, and the prejudice towards them as an ethnicity is NOT systemic or oppressive. This is because they are White. Interestingly, they didn’t used to be; in the mid-nineteenth century, around the time that racialist theories were first being developed, the Irish actually WERE seen as a very different “race” to the Anglo-Saxon. They were either Romanticised as the wild, brooding, poetic Celt, in the more benign form, or as brutish, subhuman, ape-like creatures, barely able to think for themselves let alone govern themselves, as best exemplified in the horrible Punch magazine cartoons of the period.
Much the same type of almost-racialist prejudice was held against Southern and Eastern Europeans in general, especially in America, as huge waves of them immigrated in the latter half of the 19th c. The Spanish and Portuguese, the (Southern) Italians, the Greeks, the Slavic people in general: from benign but patronising romanticisation to outright ethnic contempt: they were held as being “closer” to African, the sine qua non of racial theory, and its raison d’être: the reason we needed to invent Blackness was to justify slavery; and thus Whiteness was born. But the waves of European immigrants to America made a Faustian Pact, particularly the Irish (but also the Poles, Greeks, Italians, etc). We will be good citizens, we will build your cities, your railroads; we will become your cops (first invented as slave-catchers, of course), your firemen, your dock workers, your domestic servants, cooks, cleaners, your shopgirls. All to serve the great WASP elite. And in return, you will grant us Whiteness. And then, when the next wave comes (largely from Asia), we will join you in reviling them. We will finally have access, ourselves, to racism and White Supremacy. We will have Arrived. And so it was.
One only has to look with shame at the number of Irish names in the Tromp administration to see how successful they were; among the Fox News anchors.
And so no, to speak badly of the Irish, to stereotype them, to hold prejudice AGAINST, instead of FOR (as is more common): this is not racism.. But its history is bound up with racism. And the Irish, particularly the Irish Americans, they made that deal with the Devil, the perfidious Saxon. And if doesn’t always go how they please, I would tell them “shut your mouth, you made your bed; why did you never make common cause with your Black brothers and sisters? Why did you never rise up in their defense, rise up together for your common rights? Why did you willingly sell them out for scraps from the table of those who were your masters just as much as theirs? You made your bed, for all the comfort it would give you. You have benefitted from the System. Don’t come crying to me when one day in the year they drink green beer in your name! When they make mistakes of snakes! There are people who believe the Earth is flat. There are NAZIS. Actual Nazis, again. Surely we can find a better hill to die on? Or better yet, a better hill to fortify, together, from where we shall make our stand?”
MARK DEVLIN
Born in Australia to Irish parents, Mark Devlin spent most of his childhood in Ireland, with occasional spells in the United States. As a child, he was obsessed with fantasy literature and roleplaying games, but kicked the habit in his mid-teens, when he realised that sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and being a Dungeon Master, were mutually exclusive. He would still read The Earthsea Trilogy at least once a year, but he didn’t talk about it. After studying English and Philosophy at University College Cork, he became a secondary school teacher in an all-girls Catholic school and started a theatre company. When his nerves couldn’t take it anymore, he applied for a position as a lecteur in English literature at Université de Paris-Nouvelle Athènes. One thing led to another, and he ended up getting sucked in by academia again. Initial enthusiasm gave way to diffidence and procrastination, and he defended his very pedestrian thesis in 2015, after spending five years researching irrelevant and esoteric topics in the dark corners of the internet and furtively reading RPG forums, and one year desperately typing the thing that he ended up calling his dissertation.
Eventually, he gave up pretending and started writing a fantasy novel. He very much enjoys hiking and camping, and communing with Nature. He lives in Montmartre with his wife and two children. He works as a Passeur, a Guide and Translator, a Smuggler across borders of people, ideas, culture.
