From Fairies to Freemasons Pt. 1
'Guest Post' by Copernicus
Before I go to bed at night, having replenished the horn of nerdom with a couple of Star Trek episodes, I pause before the bookshelves in the hall, pluck from them a random volume and, standing stock still in the silence, read a chapter quietly for perhaps ten minutes or so. The other night, I found myself running a finger along the spines of The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Sagas of Icelanders, Irish Sagas, Early Irish Myths and Sagas, and Early Irish Literature until it arrested on the much-thumbed Eddie Lenihan joint, Meeting the Other Crowd; The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland.
Evoked in the traditional storytelling of the Irish countryside is a world of strange taboos, threats and an opaque morality centred, to a great extent, on the belief in fairies, a belief which is coterminous but often at odds with the dominant, official esoterica of the Catholic Church. Eddie Lenihan keeps alive many of the stories and traditions which have been on the back foot since the lights came on all over Europe, making day of night and banishing the world of shadows from the modern mindscape. Who knows, but it may be that greys and their ilk have descended to our well-lit world from the heavens to plug the gap.
The brother told me one time about a clerical academic from UCD who explained that the average Irish countryman or woman could keep in his or her mind at once a series of ostensibly contradictory concepts and hold them simultaneously true. He or she could believe in fairies and the impossibility of the fairy world, in God and a complete absence of life after death and, despite this cynicism about the great beyond, in ghosts. It is as good and compelling a mapping of the human condition as I have seen and one which ought to put ideologues of whatever stripe in a box from which they should be loath to stray. To an extent, we're all mad.
In Meeting the Other Crowd, Eddie presents to the reader unmediated the tales his informants relate about the fairy folk and their carry on as witnessed in Clare, Limerick and Kerry, a sort of Ireland from below as the sociologists would say and a very curious and entertaining Ireland it is. Like Jim White's old-timey musicians singing out of lonesomeness for a God it is obvious they fear may not, in fact, exist, it is difficult for the human animal not to feel like the victim of a cold and random universe who may get his or her reward in neither this life or the next. What's worse, this is not to say the next life does not exist. Indeed, folk tales suggest the veil between ours and the next or other worlds is but a thin one.
Despite our vaunted post-modern sophistication, we seem less accepting of the miserable prospects of eternity than were our ancestors whose infinite but oddly noble fatalism extended to Hades and the bleak eschatology of Ragnarok, which Tolkein adapted to great effect in The Lord of the Rings. Like the Norsemen of old, Frodo and company bind themselves to follow an honorable course even though it is ultimately futile, if not immediately, then in the falling away of their world in the fullness of time. It is this which suffuses the professor’s book with its certain melancholy.
Interesting questions all, many of them prompted as I flicked through the pages of Eddie's book and chose as my sermon Fairy Races Horse to Repay a Favour which starts promisingly thus:
FAIRIES AND MILK, yes. There was a lot between them all right. I heard stories about fairy women milking cows. I'll tell you one of 'em.
A prosperous farmer with a fondness for gambling discovers that one of his cows will give no milk and it is obvious to him the milk is being stolen in the dead of night. Eventually, he brings his shotgun out before daylight and sure enough the cow is missing from her companions. He finds her inside a fort near his house with a woman milking her. Fústarers will see immediately where this is going and the farmer was no slower on the uptake. Rightly surmising his gun is no use to him in the particular circumstances, he succumbs to a proper dose of the fear. To cut a long story short, the fairy woman's husband is slain in battle (no doubt buried 'neath the fairy tree of Latoon, woe unto him who took steel to it) and she needs the milk for her small son who sits preternaturally nearby among the briars and grass of the fort.
The farmer knows better than to argue but is promised the boy will one day do him a good turn in payment for his milk. Years pass and his gambling catches up with the man. One day a strange youth approaches and encourages him to enter his unpromising horse of less than Arabian lineage in a big race at the Curragh in which this same youth will himself ride the animal.
If ye want to know what happens next, gather ye round the hearth again soon…
February 19, 2006
13 responses to From Fairies to Freemasons Pt. 1
The whole idea of the simultaneous ‘truth’ of contradictory concepts is a fascinating (and important) one.
There’s always been an oddly ambivalent attitude to ‘truth’ in this country – with a sly wink and a nod often telling you all you need to know, i.e. a multi-layered story is frequently preferred to ‘truth’ with a capital ‘T’.
I’m all for contradiction and different levels of ‘truth’…only overly empirical killjoys insist on concrete divisions between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’.
So do I believe in fairies? Well no…and…yes!
Let me put it this way. Jacked in cyberpunk though I may be, would you find me abroad in the pitch black of night taking a chainsaw to a sceach of the Good People? Would you fuck.
i’ve always been struck by the story of the ‘bad farmer’ who rather than till his fields or look to his animals spent his evenings in pursuit of a fairy tribe he knew to be living in the neighbourhood and whose easy wealth he coveted.
After many years he finally caught sight of the youngest of the fairy tribe as he pottered around a field with a bag of ancient coinage.
Having long neglected his land the field was home at one spot to a crop of buachalann bui (the poisonous and illegal ragworth). The farmer watched the fairy bury his treasure under the weeds and stole off to bed. When he arrived back next day to dig it up hadn’t the yellow weeds spread right out over the field so that he couldn’t recognize the spot he was after. His confidence was so high, and greed so powerful, that undeterred he set about digging down under the deep roots of every weed in the field until he had tilled and turned every sod he owned.
It was only when his poor wife saw what was going on and came to congratulate him on his hard work and great reform as a character that he realised he had been tricked. The fairies had been watching him all along and in their pity for his hungery children and desperate wife had tricked him into an honest days work. As the truth dawned on him the farmer realised the error of his ways and vowed to settle down to a life of honest toil and steady income rather than continue the desperate search for an easy fortune.
Feckin fairies, what a bunch of moralising hypocrites – with their pots of loot and well known predilection for whipping anything that takes their fancy.
Apparently, the gold coins more usually associated with the fairies’ shoemakers is none other than the ancient treasure left behind by the marauding Danes.
The farmer in question should have had a look at the judgment in Webb v Ireland [Webb and his son found the Derrynaflan hoard on their very first expedition with a newly acquired metal detector] before bothering his arse trying acquire it from the wee folk. The AG would have it in the National Museum in Dublin quicker than you could say “Leprechaun in the Hood”.
By the way “Londoner”, who was the UCD priest and wasn’t he from Castleisland?
Hoho. A fair point. What do fairies know of “honest toil”? Aren’t they forever dancing, making merry, and spreading mischief far and wide?
For all that they don’t seem shy on dishing out cough-softening lessons…
well copernicus i believe it was one archdeacon brown.
the gist of his reply, on being asked what people in Ireland believe with regard to the dead was:
on the gold coins issue, one of the most remarkable archaeological finds i’ve certainly ever heard mention of were the gold coins sewn into the clothes of women found at a site associated with Carrickmines castle outside Dublin.
The theory is that the women were killed during a raid from the Dublin mountains on the English Pale and buried afterwards by people who had missed the loot – presumably this would have been during the 13th or 14th century, though possibly later. Given the effective cantonisation of ireland up to the close of the 17th century one wonders how much of the country’s portable wealth was kept and lost in comparable circumstances. Certainly enough one supposes to keep the fairies in lucre.
Thanks, I thought it was Brown all right, but I wasn’t sure enough to name names.
I believe it is correct to point out that Brown was in no way speaking dismissively of the apparently contradictory nature of the seeming miasma in question.
I’m sure a lot of cultures where strong indigenous beliefs/customs survived the coming of Christianity exhibit similar ‘contradictions’ to those outlined (delightfully) by Brown.
It’s always a pleasure to see instances where the rich tapestry of the human imagination resists the steel cage of ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ dogma.
Londoner, ever thought of doing an Irish history blog like the ones that seem popular among American academic bloggers. We recently got picked up on one of their quarterly blog carnivals on early modern history. Seems a popular area.
i could be wrong re the name of the priest – i heard the story from a since retired sociologist at UCC. There was no question i think of the cleric being in anyway dismissive or attempting to ridicule the beliefs he outlined – though presumably he would have favoured a more orthodox credo.
I had some good gossip for you on Sean Haughey by the way, but I couldn’t mail you from work.
Mail me at theapothecaryguy at yahoo dot co dot uk and I can do a return of post jobby.