The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality by: Jason Kirkey by Hiraeth Press

THE SALMON IN THE SPRING

THE

SALMON SPRING

in the

The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality

Jason Kirkey foreword by Frank MacEowen

Hiraeth Press San Francisco

All Rights Reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages. An effort has been made to trace the ownership of all copyrighted material contained in this book, to request permission where necessary, and to use that material in accordance with the terms of fair use. Errors will be corrected upon notifying the publisher. The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to reprint excerpts from their work: “Love Dogs.” Barks, Coleman, trans. The Essential Rumi. New Expanded Edition. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Reprinted with permission of Maypop Books.

First Edition 2009 Reprinted with corrections, 2010 Cover and text design by Jason Kirkey Cover photograph: © iStockphoto.com / Natalia Bratslavsky ISBN: 978-0-9799246-6-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009908769

Published by Hiraeth Press San Francisco, California www.hiraethpress.com

To the ancestors— whose wisdom must not be forgotton… and to the future generations— to whom the difficult tasks will fall.

We need a spirituality that emerges out of a reality deeper than ourselves, a spirituality that is as deep as the Earth process itself, a spirituality born out of the solar system and even out of the heavens beyond the solar system. For it is in the stars that the primordial elements take shape in both their physical and psychic aspects. Out of these elements the solar system and Earth took shape, and out of Earth, ourselves. There is a triviality in any spiritual discipline that does not experience itself as supported by the spiritual as well as the physical dynamics of the entire cosmicEarth process. Ultimately, a spirituality is a mode of being in which not only the divine and the human commune with each other, but through which we discover ourselves in the universe and the universe discovers itself in us. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Thomas Berry

CONTENTS

Foreword by Frank MacEowen . . . ix Introduction . . . 1 Part One: The Ecology of Perception 1. Place and Story . . . 15 2. Wild Earth, Wild Mind . . . 35 3. The Fomorian Eye . . . 53 4. Tuatha DĂŠ Danann Vision . . . 75 5. Dreamtime Circle . . . 97 6. The Birdreign . . . 119 Part Two: The Well and the Branch 7. The Soul's Horizon . . . 139 8. Borderlands . . . 161 9. Connla's Well . . . 179 10. Ecos and Psyche . . . 205 11. Empty Mountains . . . 221 Coda: The Man Who Had No Story . . . 243 Glossary of Terms . . . 251 Notes . . . 261 Bibliography . . . 273 Resources . . . 279 Acknowledgements . . . 281 About the Author . . . 283

vii

FOREWORD

by Frank MacEowen

n the cover of this book is a gorgeous image: Luminous bands of sunlight cascade down through the mist and settle on a pristine forest of evergreens and deciduous trees. A streambed of shining water trickles over dark stones, mirroring clouds and the light of day on its surface. It is easy to imagine a solitary deer entering the scene, lapping up her morning refreshment at the river’s edge; or a beaver gnawing down another sapling to add to the home he builds for his family in the face of impending winter. There is something primal and comforting about the photograph. The landscape invites us into a contemplative state, one that mirrors the slow rhythm of the forest and the sky-mirroring “art” of the stream. The image of the forest speaks of a softer way of being as well as the unseen integrity inherently woven within the harmonious bonds of relationship that shape the ecosystem. The harmonious bond of which I speak is the original language of the planet. A few knowledge-bearing wisdom-keepers in the human family still remember this language. All of the other species on the planet are fluent, for it is encoded within them, and their days and nights are aligned with it. Whether wise two-legged, fourlegged, or the finned and winged ones, this ancient language is a sacred language that shapes their songs, their stories, and their patterns of seasonal activity and movement. It is a language that most of us have forgotten. We must re-learn this language, and guide our lives by it, or it will be our peril. A stark juxtaposition to the beautiful image that graces the cover of this book is the cover of the September 2009 issue of National Geographic. The photographs and paintings in the article entitled “Before New York” say it all. In the ix

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article, ecologists turn back the clock by four centuries to reveal how Manhattan Island would have appeared before industrial development. The comparison is shocking. In one set of plates we have the image of ponds, beaver, elk, miles and miles of untouched forest, with one image of a Lenape village set up according to an undoubtedly minimum impact ethic. These retrospective paintings are juxtaposed with photographs of the actual human footprint today. Needless to say, the vast majority of the natural world is gone, replaced with concrete, unnatural lighting, and tributaries of sludge and waste rather than streams of pure water. In contrast to the songs and stories of those who live according to the original language, our current story is one of disconnection from our naturalness. With no regard to the immediate or eventual backlash to our own bodies, our neighbors downstream, that of future generations, or the indigenous cultures around the planet (who tend “technologies of the sacred” for remembering the original language), the technocratic industrial complex continues its steady march forward. Fueled by greed, chemicals, an addiction to petroleum, an obsession with consumption, and a false myth that the natural “resources” of our planet are an unending supply chain, we of the “First World” (unless you live completely “off-thegrid”) are perpetrators, recipients, and devotees to a toxic reality—albeit for many people unconsciously. In fact, the forces at work count on the masses remaining unconscious and driven more by compulsion than contemplation. This toxic reality, which is undoubtedly mandated, propagated and legislated by people sitting on both sides of the aisle (and both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific), is oriented to one thing and one thing only: the generation of wealth through an economic engine that is fully-aware-yet-dismissive of the ecological impact of its system. The end result: we are slowly but surely killing ourselves, and the Earth. Yet, there is also good news, evidenced by seemingly small things but which will ultimately shape a future culture aligned to the original language. I think of those people who make an attempt at living a life that bears less and less of a carbon footprint, or those communities where people have the bravery to engage in an honest conversation about how we can slowly change our culture from one of addiction to awareness.

Foreword

The good news is also evidenced by the calling you feel inside your own chest— a calling for a different way of being spiritual, a desire to explore your connection to the natural world, a need for peace and a way to befriend your own mind. Perhaps this calling ultimately led you to pick up the book in your hands. You won’t be sorry. There have been many books published exploring the vast domain of Celtic spirituality, some of my own books among them. When I first started my journey of trying to make sense of the ‘spiritual tug’ I felt from my Irish, Scottish and Welsh ancestors, I had come from years within an explicitly indigenous and shamanic context. Naturally, I saw everything through a shamanic filter, including what I perceived to be Celtic culture and spirituality. In time, because of other experiences, this profoundly limiting filter dropped away, changing my perception of everything I’d ever written or experienced. What I was left with was a much more vast and contemplative way of relating to life and the essential power of spiritual inquiry. It is a way of being that transcends all labels, and it is a spiritual landscape that author and poet Jason Kirkey has been moving through for years. From his own deep-dreaming journey into the realms of nature and spirit he has brought forth certain healing nectars of insight for each and every one of us. In these pages you will find a sophisticated understanding of cosmology and spirituality, a Jungian understanding of the transformative power of archetypes and story, a near-mystical and poetic way of perceiving the natural world, a shamanic and contemplative comprehension of the nature of the soul, light touches of insight from the Shambhala and Buddhist traditions, with an ever-present current of inspiration bubbling up from the deep strata of Celtic consciousness. In The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality, each of us is issued an important and sacred invitation. It is an invitation to reclaim the awe and wonderment we felt as children playing in the dew of the morn. It is an invitation to interface with and bask in the numinosity of place and the luminosity of story for the purpose of healing. This book is also an invitation to face, front and center, once and for all, the stark truth that the ecological crisis is not a crisis of the Earth at all, but rather a human self-esteem problem—one that ultimately stems from a tragic state of for-

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getfulness. As the late, great postmodern philosopher Alan Watts once said, â&#x20AC;&#x153;You did not come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave out of the ocean. You are not a stranger here.â&#x20AC;? If the human species truly believed this it would completely transform our world. It would translate into who we are and how we are. As a lived-experience, if each of us truly perceived and comprehended this sacred reality, it would slowly replace the toxic reality we see today. We would come to a point of dynamic awareness that we are empowered shapers of reality and that how we conduct ourselves as citizens and consumers, how we relate to other people (and other nations), and how we carry on a relationship with the life-giving Earth is, ultimately, what we hand the generations yet unborn. The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality is a thirst-quenching contribution in the parched desert of these challenging times. It is one way of receiving the tools for remembering the ways of perception that lead us back to ecological and spiritual integrity. It is a way of remembering the original language of the planet.

INTRODUCTION

The historical mission of our times is to reinvent the human—at the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience. —Thomas Berry

bout 13.7 billion years ago a threshold was opened between darkness and light. In one moment there was nothing of form and in the next, something. The universe “banged” into being, and I like to imagine that if it was capable of producing sound, it would have been followed by the same sigh a lover might make post-climax. Ever since that first creative act, things have been both strange and wonderful. You are a result of this sudden emergence of existence—so is this living, phenomenal, thinking, spiritual world as well. That we exist is a miraculous thing. One of the billions of planets which formed after the Big Bang was Earth. Earth is different than the other planets in the Solar System, for it alone produces complex and sustaining life. What is more, out of the abundance of life on Earth emerged our curious human species—a species with self-reflective awareness, who plays music and writes poetry. Although we appear to ourselves unique, we are 1

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one of many members of an Earth community. We are newcomers here, just born and unlearned in how to live properly on this planet. That, in brief, is the cause of the current ecological crisis. We of the modern industrial world have not yet fully grown and matured as a species. We stand at an epochal threshold: the theoretical termination of the 65 million year Cenozoic era marked by a mass extinction of species, during a period of time in which the diversity of species is greater than it ever has been in the history of the planet. We are fundamentally altering the biosphere in ways which could make it impossible for complex forms of life to continue to exist, facing the loss of up to fifty percent of Earth's biodiversity—human life included. It is a crisis which could take as long as 50 million years to recover from. Although we have caused the current ecological crisis through our pollution, soil erosion, greenhouse gas emissions, and the consequent extinction of other forms of life—it does not mean that we are intrinsically unfit for the Earth community. It does mean we have some maturation to do, both as individuals and as species, so that we might become integrated with the rest of organic and nonorganic life-processes. Because we are humans this means that the ecological crisis is also, by necessity, a socio-political crisis, a psychological crisis, and a spiritual crisis. Our crisis is one of ecology and psychology—and it is this knowledge which motivates me to write, to tell stories, and to craft poetry. This is my form of activism and disobedience against industrial culture. Any creative act can become activism and the roots of social change can come from anywhere as long as they are grounded in an interior revolution of consciousness. We must find not only a new way of thinking but a new way of being. While writing this book I found myself dealing with the balance of what at times seem to be opposites. The absolute balanced and integrated with the relative, the Earth with Spirit, the universal with the cultural. When I recount that the universe came into being about 13.7 billion years ago, I do so because I am writing this book and Celtic myth, upon the back of that event, as though it were a parchment. For this book to be written, atoms had to form—then join into molecules, and into stars, planets, oceans, microbes, plants, fish, reptiles, and animals (humans included). That is the long pedigree to which the written page is owed and I believe

Introduction

it will take nothing less than a total integration into that living cosmos for humans to remain a viable species. In other words, we need to cultivate an awareness of the whole, to hear the whole story, and in order to truthfully tell that story I find I that must also recount the personal genesis of this book: my story, because I too am a part of that whole. When I was twelve years old, during what I remember to be a somewhat balmy November, my cousins and their family came to visit. During a conversation on the topic of God and religion my cousin pointed outside to the trees lining the fence, explaining why he had begun to study what he called the “old ways” of pagan spirituality. “Nature does not require our belief; it is right here for us to experience.” That was the essence of the statement. Short, sweet, and simple. I wonder if he knew the depth and importance of what he had said. The statement struck me and stayed with me. It was not a statement of atheism but rather a yearning to not only believe in a divine ground, but to experience it directly though the senses and the body—through nature. This moment and this utterance decided the direction of my life. It marked a new found awareness through which I discovered the interplay of nature, story, and ancestry in the Irish druidic tradition. In many ways this statement remains the seed thought of this book.

ruidism is often said to be the original religion of the Celtic peoples. This is not entirely true, though it is a serviceable enough definition of the word, fit for casual use in a modern context. In truth there never was such a thing as druidism, though no doubt the druids were the intellectual caste of the Celtic people and shared in their religion. So speaking of the religion of the Celtic people as druidism, the religion of the druids, is not entirely wrong either. The druids were community leaders who played a wide variety of roles: historians, doctors, philosophers, poets, storytellers, law makers, genealogists, seers, priests, and shamans (though the application of that term remains contentious among many scholars). Comparisons have often been drawn between druids and the Brahmins of India in terms of their social significance and vocation. Regrettably we know very little of the ancient druids because theirs was an oral tradition, passed on through spoken word, myth, and poetry. By the time the

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taboo of writing down the old stories and poems was lifted, most Celtic people had converted to Christianity. Much was forgotten, or at least not written down; what little written was either intentionally distorted by the sensibilities of the priests or poorly translated through the lens of their new worldview. Although the druids no longer had a place in society, much of the pagan Celtic religious tradition was absorbed into local vernacular traditions, often mixing comfortably—or at the very least, bloodlessly—with Christianity. The Celtic people still survive today on the fringes of Northern Europe where they struggle to keep their native languages alive. The Celtic mode of imagination is still native to some, despite its change in form from the pagan to the Christian. Even today the more Earth-centered expressions of Celtic spirituality are being resuscitated, all around the world, often under the name of Druidry or Druidism. The Celtic, whether we name it druidic or not, is still alive, at home in Celtic countries such as Ireland and Wales, and abroad amongst the diaspora, hungry to return to their cultural roots. It should be no wonder that in these confusing and somewhat dark times, upon an Earth in crisis, that Celtic spirituality has become so popular. It presents many people of European descent a way to recontact the vital depths of nature and soul in a way enlivened by the myths and stories of their ancestors. It is my hope that this book will be an inspiration and a guide to those walking an Irish Celtic path—but also to those who are not, but who may still find in these stories and wisps of cultural wisdom, a map and compass along their own paths. The vision of this book began as a broad and deep survey of the Irish druidic tradition in ancient and modern times, a multifaceted approach in which I hoped to include voices from native Ireland as well as from those in exile around the world. A friend once asked me, hoping to explore his ancestral heritage, what the single best introductory book was: one which would give him an overview of the tradition without the New Age trappings which seem so common in the popular literature. No such book exists I told him. My recommendation was several books, all with a different scope. “Well,” he asked, “why aren’t you writing one?” Eventually I decided I would try. My vision was something which was historical and anthropological yet practical and contemplative. It was a worthy idea but my plans changed when the book decided to draft me.

Introduction

Shortly after my third trip to Ireland I experienced an inner ecological crisis. I had, prior to this, been involved with the Druidic community and identified as a practitioner of Irish Earth-based spirituality and shamanism. But that identity had suddenly become like a fence, hemming me in to a mode of being in the world which ultimately was much too small to live in. The problem was not with the tradition itself but with my attachment to it, an attachment which had caused me to root my perceptions of myself into the culture and spiritual tradition. Tradition can be double edged. It can provide a map for us, guiding us along routes that others have taken, and give us heart in difficult times. It can also condition us to experience reality in a very narrow range, fogging over the freshness of the world with a dullness of expectations and belief. When I was suddenly uninspired by my work and spirituality I became devastated. Something which had been a part of me for nearly ten years suddenly slipped away and I was left feeling naked in a dark night of the soul, lost on the sea without even the reference point of stars or moon. During this time of conflict I gained an increased sympathy for Buddhism and the practice of sitting meditation. Whereas before my spiritual path was one of descent to soul and the creation of a healthy and soulful identity rooted in the Earth, my practice now shifted to one of ascent and disidentification with the ego. During a “practice day” at Naropa University (a day during which classes are suspended for the sake of contemplative practice) I was taking part in Reginald Ray’s “meditating with the body” work. Something happened. It was as though the world had come alive. Really, it was my perceptions which came alive. That night I could not sleep as I struggled to find a reference point for what was taking place. Everything I touched within my mind dissolved at the moment of contact. I studied the light from a building behind my apartment, which in that moment, seemed to me to be a work of art despite its ordinariness. This “peak experience” taught me a lot, and so when I did come back down to my ordinary mind I had learned a lot about myself, about reality, about being a human being in this world. It taught me this both through the joy and the pain which I experienced during that time. Soon afterwards I moved from Boulder, Colorado back to my home state of Massachusetts. It was an altogether different world. I found myself in a job which

The Salmon in the Spring

left me unsatisfied and creatively drained. One day I took my first shamanic journey after nearly a year of diligent meditation practice. I felt as though I was being called now to integrate what I had learned in both the soulful descent and nondual ascent oriented practices. I was recontacting the soul from a meditative angle. One night I found myself, again, unable to sleep. The night wore on forever and sleep refused to come until I made a silent vow. The next day, figuring I had enough savings to last me a while, I quit my job and began to write this book. The book you now hold in your hands is the product of these experiences. It is not about Celtic spirituality at all; not really. As the subtitle suggests it is a book about ecology—about the spirituality, philosophy, and psychology of the Earth and our relationship to her. It is a book about wild nature, and about the soul, and about cleansing our perceptions to experience the world freshly and directly. It is about finding an experience of divine ground, of the nondual, and perhaps even enlightenment without forgetting or abandoning the Earth. It is about the world we live in, about what is wrong with it and what is right with it, and how we can come to live in it more entirely, more sustainably in our thoughts and in our actions. It looks at all of these things through the landscape and mythology of Ireland, through an ecology where Earth and Spirit meet. We tend to think of ecology as an empirical science. Without negating that discipline I would also like to adopt a wider meaning of the word. It is a rich and beautiful word and deserves to be applied to deeper contexts, disciplines, and philosophies. I use “ecology” here to mean the entirety of a thing’s personal and transpersonal relationships and enfoldment in the wild Earth; its integration with an ecosystem, with the phenomenon of place, which is both an interior and exterior phenomenon. By transpersonal I mean that even from those levels of consciousness in which the boundaries of the self have been transcended that there remains an ecological framework to our lives. This will become clear as the book progresses. The ecology of Celtic spirituality, using the above definition, is a map of an individual and cultural consciousness embedded in, but also transcending, the Earth. The Celtic tradition is not the object of this book; it is a lens through which I have looked at ecology and psychology, at our relationship to Earth and soul. I thought, at first, to title the book Druid Psychology, as it contains a psychological map which is firmly embedded in the Irish mythos. In the end I settled on ecology because, like

Introduction

the mind itself, psychology is emergent from ecology, and so I chose the wider field in which to situate this project. As you read this book, keep that focus in mind. You are reading a book about our relationship with the Earth and how we might transform it and thus ourselves, not a book about practicing an “authentic Celtic spirituality.” My interpretations and my conclusions, I believe, are in the spirit of the tradition, of the Irish and Celtic dreamtime, but they are not the tradition itself. Our unique position in time calls for a unique response. We are being called to an initiation into the living cosmos. Despite romantic notions of going “back to nature,” with the exception perhaps of some indigenous populations, past and present, we as a species have never actually been psychically integrated into the biosphere. As evolution both differentiates from the old order and then integrates into a new order, our time on this planet has been one of differentiation from the Earth. It has turned now to psychological dissociation. We have before us an imperative to integrate before we destroy ourselves, and with us, much of the biodiversity of the planet. This is why I have chosen not to write a book on Celtic spirituality directly. I contend that the tradition itself, in fact all traditions, must go through a process of re-imagination—of integration into the new story of the 21st century. The New Cosmology, as Brian Swimme calls it, is a larger story than our traditional worldviews can accommodate. It is the story of our evolving cosmos and the new ecological awareness which is emerging at this time. In his autobiography, philosopher John Moriarty spoke of reading Darwin for the first time and how his traditional Christian worldview ran against it like the Titanic against an iceberg. Similarly, we are lately coming into startling new realizations about the universe in which we live; an organismic universe which seems to be creating itself on a trajectory of complex creativity and ever deepening communion. Faced with the danger and groundlessness of our times we must resist the temptation to turn backwards to the very worldviews which brought us to the current moment. We must also not forget the cultural-specific indigenous wisdom of the Earth by which ancient people lived and knew their connection to the cosmos. It is worth asking ourselves whether or not the old story can live within the new story. If it cannot, should we continue to live the old story at all?

The Salmon in the Spring

Fortunately, I believe the old stories can be preserved in ways which enhance the human presence in the cosmos even while dissolving and transforming those things which bind us to our destructive course. I believe, in the instance of this book, that the Celtic way can be integrated into the New Cosmology and provide a firm cultural ground and way of communion with the living universe. Our culture, whether we are from Europe, Africa, Asia, Turtle Island, or Australia, can guide us, if we are willing to be visionary within it, into an ecologically re-imagined human species.

o be a second, third, fourth, and so on, generation North American, is to be in an altogether strange position. In some sense it is to be without a culture of place and story—to be without a soul-nourishing dreamtime. Those of us descended from Europeans are often looked at quizzically as we show up in places like Ireland, saying “I’m Irish, too.” Sometimes our romance for the old countries gets chuckles and rolled eyes; sometimes it is given sympathy and understanding. The ones who understand, I think, are the ones who know how important it is to have a place to come from; a place where our minds are reflected in the landscape and the landscape defines the territory of the mind. Somewhere in us all blood and psyche mix. I sometimes see my mind in New England forests and in the Rocky Mountains—places where I have lived and landscapes which I have met in mutual communion and reciprocity. I see my mind in these places, but sometimes my mind sees in Irish hills, in cairn-topped mountains, and a little valley of lakes and ruins in Wicklow, Ireland. When I’m there, the mist calls to my blood and I respond in kind. I can hardly help it. I do not know if I can claim to be Irish in anything but the romance of heritage, but I do know my mind in that place and in its stories more deeply than I could ever know my mind without it. But I am in America, trying to be native to America without being Native American. I think this must be noted because it means that whatever my goal and method in this book, it is born from some tension of exile and nativity. I am, above all, native to the Earth. I see the Earth only though my own eyes; eyes which are American born but see through the lens of stories from across the ocean. What I write here is my experience; my love letter home to the cosmos, to the Earth, to

Introduction

Ireland, and to America whose original inhabitants named Turtle Island. Writing it has been a process of map making through terrain which I have walked. My hope is that others in need of a map will find it and be somewhat guided, somewhat assured the dangers inherent of any journey are surpassable—whether that person is Irish or not, American or not; we are all people of the Earth and of this living cosmos. I have not made my journey alone. I have already written at length on my relationship to the Irish spiritual tradition. You will also find in this book that I draw heavily on Buddhism and the Shambhala warriorship teachings of Chögyam Trungpa where appropriate and relevant—this is simply another lens, and not an attempt to “Easternize” Celtic culture (though W.B. Yeats did once say that before the Battle of the Boyne, Ireland belonged to Asia…). Additionally the work of Irish philosopher and writer John Moriarty has given shape, story, and language to many of my ideas. His bold readings and retellings of the tales have opened doors within the tradition (and leading out of the tradition) which have transformed me in ways I cannot even begin to count. Finally, the Great Work articulated by Thomas Berry and his book of the same name gave me one of the initial “hazelnuts of wisdom” contained in the book, which I have used as an epigraph to this introduction. Berry was a true elder and his call for the reinvention of humans is the nutrient rich soil from which my book has grown. You will find, peppered throughout the book, practices aimed at bringing the intellectual content of the text into experiential reality. These practices are designed to turn this book from a philosophical treatise into a practical guide, adding a compass to the map. Take nothing here as truth, but test it to your own experience. In Ireland, the rivers find their source in the Otherworld; specifically in an Otherworld well or spring which, bubbling up from the earth, is surrounded by trees of wisdom. Five streams, said to be the five senses, flow from the spring. Salmon swim in that spring and eat the hazelnuts which fall, occasionally, into the water. To eat a salmon from this water is to receive poetic inspiration and to drink from the water itself, in ecological interpretation, is to enter into a way of being that is consonant with the underlying patterns of the cosmos, expressed as Fírinne or Truth in Irish. The title of this book is taken from this image. It is a mythopoetic way of

The Salmon in the Spring

speaking to the wisdom of the senses and of a process of coming-into-being that is participatory with the unfolding of the universe. The salmon in the spring is the soul in the cosmos. Because in so many ways, as you will find, this book is an upstream journey to just such a spring of wisdom, I wish you all the blessings of those salmon.

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Jason Kirkey San Francisco Lughnasadh 2009

H Part One

THE ECOLOGY OF PERCEPTION

CHAPTER ONE

PLACE AND STORY

The Landscape of Identity

Each place is its own place, forever (eventually) wild. —Gary Snyder There is no single, unique reading to a story, but rather many enfolded and interpenetrating levels, none of which need to be thought of as more fundamental than any other. Understanding comes from a direct experience of the dance between these levels of meaning. —F. David Peat

e need stories to live. Not just any stories, but STORIES—ones of mythic proportions which attempt to not only explain our existence to ourselves, but in their telling and their hearing enact on us an initiation into the greater cosmic community. These are the stories, which like the pomegranate seeds fed to Persephone, bond us to the psychic Underworld of our genetic and instinctual human inheritance. Such stories are capable of integrating us spiritually, ecologically, culturally, and psychologically into the world. Stories tell us who we are. Since the emergence of consciousness stories have orientated us to the proper order of things in the world. In this sense mythology is a bridge between culture and nature. Stories, at this level, are about the creation and sustainability of viable cosmologies. The Greek word kosmos means ‘order.’ Cosmology is thus the prescribed proper or natural order of things. Myths tell us how to 15

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be in right cosmological relationship with nature. Stories are the synchronization of nature and culture into functional integrity. When we lose myth we gain cultural anarchy. We might see myth as the encoding of natural order or law for which we could also use words like the Sanskrit Dharma, Chinese Dao, Navajo Horzo, or the Irish Fírinne to describe. The loss of myth is equivalent to straying from “the Way,” from the ecological and spiritual imperative of wildness. This is not to say that all cultures who have an active relationship to their mythology will be ecologically and spiritually integrated. To my knowledge no culture, indigenous or industrial, has ever achieved this completely, if it is even possible; most cultures occupy shades of gray. Equally, however, no society can achieve ecospiritual integration without a relationship to myth and story. Oral place-centered stories, whether mythic or not, engage us sensually in our immediate surroundings. In indigenous oral cultures, many of the stories told are place-specific, detailing how to properly survive in a particular bioregion. To walk through lands as diverse as North America, Ireland, and Australia is to encounter specific places such as a mountain, a bend in a river, or a grove of trees, which are storied: places which the native inhabitants have had reciprocal relationships with, places which are ensouled and converse with them. As David Abram writes: To live in a storied world is to know that intelligence is not an exclusively human faculty located somewhere inside our skulls, but is rather a power of the animate earth itself, in which we humans, along with the hawks and the thrumming frogs, all participate. It is to know, further, that each land, each watershed, each community of plants and animals and soils, has its particular style of intelligence, its unique mind or imagination evident in the particular patterns that play out there, in the living stories that unfold in that valley, and that are told and retold by the people of that place. Each ecology has its own psyche, and the local people bind their imaginations to the psyche of the place by letting the land dream its tales through them.1 Stories tell us about our soul or the soul of a place. Bill Plotkin marvelously describes soul as our “ultimate place in the world.”2 In the archetypal sense stories are descent oriented—toward the soul, the wild Earth, and the unconscious—and

Place and Story

initiatory: the process whereby we come into contact and embodiment of our soul. To tell or enact a myth is to initiate its listeners, tellers, and participants into the cosmos, and into the deepest strata of the self. A storied existence is one rooted in the mysteries of soul and nature. To live is to live as an ever-evolving story. But just as we need these stories, we also at times need those stories to dissolve or become transparent. That is to say that we must, at a certain point in our development, transcend our own stories and places. To transcend our stories into a direct experience of the living cosmos is not to simply come to inhabit a larger story but, as Moriarty has said, “to go beyond that in us which is subject to evolution.”4 To transcend them, to go beyond evolution, does not mean to stop evolving. We do not need to forget our stories, to cease telling or living them. Rather we need to take part in a dynamic process whereby they are both transcended and included, a foundational process in evolution as described by transpersonal theorist Ken Wilber. Although there are plenty of stories, as mentioned previously, which tell us how to physically live on the land, there are also stories which tell us how to psychically or spiritually inhabit the land. These are the stories which can both help or hinder us in developing into initiated adults, depending on whether or not we are in touch with what Buddhist teacher and scholar Reginald Ray calls the “living reality” to which they are pointing. Ray writes: In indigenous initiation, the adolescent is shown that the conventional view he or she has learned and come to take for granted is ultimately not real. The purpose of indigenous initiation ceremonies is, then, just this: to bring young people into their own contact with this living reality; only then do they understand the point and purpose of their spiritual traditions and the truth behind the cultural façade. Only then can they themselves find nourishment and sustenance from the living cosmos and thus become creative and mature adults in their society.3 Our stories are not the living cosmos, but stand as representatives for it until we can contact this reality ourselves. Once transcended, however, the stories do not go anywhere. We do not lose our relationship to them but the relation-

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ship itself changes. Like the old Zen saying, they are only the finger pointing to the moon. We must experience the moon itself, and to do that, we need to be fluid enough to let our stories drop away. The foundation of orally told and enacted stories must exist for this transcendence to take place in a healthy context. That story may be healthy and life-enhancing or it may be unhealthy and lifedegrading. Our identity is intimately tied to the stories we tell about ourselves and the world, both consciously and unconsciously. The process of differentiating and transcending our stories takes us through the very same process with our sense of identity, with the ego. To experience the world freshly and directly we must also be able to experience ourselves in the same way. Otherwise we merely project ourselves out onto the world as though a canvas—we see only our stories rather than having a direct and true encounter with living reality. Largely, we have suffered the loss of our stories, which is to say we have become dissociated—or pathologically differentiated—from them. We have “fallen out of our stories,” to use the visceral turn of phrase used by the late Irish philosopher John Moriarty to describe the process whereby the stories—whether religious, mythic, or scientific—which once provided us with meaning and the ability to make sense to the world, can no longer support us. Coming to a crescendo in the Enlightenment period of human culture, scientific reason was advocated above mythological wisdom.5 The old stories could not stand under the pressure of reason, could not be verified to scientific or historical truth, and so were relegated to quaint and naïve tales spun by our less-knowing ancestors to explain what they could not understand. Having dissociated from and repressed these stories, it is high time that we once again include them in our lives and cosmologies. Read without the lens of literalism mythology has the benefit of enriching the scientific story of the universe rather than negating it. The 21st century is an amazing and often frightening time to be alive. We face problems which perhaps no other generation before could even imagine. The wholesale destruction of the biosphere on a planetary level may potentially lead to a mass extinction of both human and non-human life, reducing life on this planet by as much as fifty percent. Fortunately this is a worst-case scenario and with it comes the possibility for growth, evolution, and the re-integration of humans into

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the ecos from which we emerged. This is the current story we are living. Insomuch as ritual is the enactment of mythology, we may regard these times as a ritual of initiation into the living cosmos. Through the reclamation of the old Celtic stories we can participate in this ecological initiation.

CELTIC AND DRUIDIC ROOTS

uring the Iron Age most of Continental Europe was considered Celtic. Today, Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Scotland, Cornwall, and Brittany (and, to some, Galicia in the Northwest of Spain) are all considered modern Celtic nations. The label of Celtic, however, is a vague one and in modern scholarship somewhat inadequate. Nonetheless, the label Celtic remains firmly embedded in the popular imagination as a way of expressing the native cultures of these nations and is relevant from linguistic and mythological perspectives. The druids were intellectuals, philosophers, poets, doctors, and magicians among the Celtic peoples. Many speculate that they played a shamanic role, a theory which is well supported by evidence but often refuted by scholars, conservative and hesitant in the application of an Evenki term from Mongolia. French scholar Jean Markale describes them as the “conscience of the social organization,” pointing out that once the Celtic frameworks of society vanished the druids naturally went with it.6 Many of them are thought to have joined the Christian priesthood, accounting for a unique Celtic Christian tradition in Ireland, and went on to scribe many of the stories and myths which have survived into the present. Other druids may have regrouped as the filidh, an elite caste of poets which carried on many of the druidic traditions after the coming of Christianity. After several invasions and occupations both the institutions of the druids and the filidh—who unlike the druids survived into the Renaissance—were dismantled and much of the ancient tradition was lost. Despite the loss of the native Celtic religious traditions there are today three broad lineages which can be classified as participating in the Celtic spiritual imagination. To be clear, these are generalizations of which there are many expressions, most falling somewhere in the gray area. These lineages are Reconstructionism, Druidry, and the native folk traditions which still survive on the fringe of society.

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The Reconstructionist approach is the most recent innovation and also perhaps the most conservative in general. It is a historical method of reconstructing the tradition based on literary and physical evidence left behind in order to recreate the ancient Celtic religions in a way fit for the modern world. Although it is primarily classified as a methodology there is often a strong sense of polytheistic religion surrounding it. Many Reconstructionists are fierce defenders of culture and stress the learning of language and history as part of a participatory relationship with the living Celtic communities. In this way, conservative or liberal, they very much hold the energy of homeostasis and ensure the continued integrity of the cultureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a crucial role in the wider community. In contrast to the historical-religious approach of the Reconstructionists are the modern Druids, practitioners of Druidry. Historically it is possible to trace the roots of this movement to the 18th century English revival, which had more in common with Freemasonry than with any ancient Celtic religion. The approach today has been influenced by the environmentalism of the 60â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and is altogether more wild and pagan than the Romantic gentry of England intended. Druidry is an ever shifting thing; to some a religion, to some a philosophy, to some a spiritual path. Although it includes historical inspirations from the ancient Celts, it is more focused on the present and exhibits more freedom in its innovations. Some groups have stayed quite true to the English Revivalist stream whereas others have taken on more animistic trends. Due to this innovating nature this group exemplifies tendencies of emergence and evolution, the desire to keep the tradition growing and to incorporate into it the modern context in which it occurs. This role, like the maintaining of homeostasis, is crucial and ensures the continued ability of the tradition to respond to new challenges. Finally, the native folk traditions are the actual living traditions which still survive today, mostly notably in the places which retain their native languages. This includes the often unique brand of Christianity practiced by Celtic people, as well as older animistic remnants such as leaving offerings to the faery people at faery trees, important traditions of storytelling, and ancient rituals now thinly Christianized, such as circumambulations around holy wells on certain auspicious days. These are all testament to the survival of certain beliefs and practices within the native Irish. Within the native folk traditions, people seem to be less concerned

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with the identity of Celtic-ness, a problem which appears to spring up most noticeably in the deracinated, uprooted, and exiled. Unlike the historical research and spiritually innovative approaches of the first two categories, the native folk traditions are far more organic and natural in the way they evolve and are expressed. In writing this book my methodology has been to embrace the best of all three of these lineages; the historical and cultural inclusion of the Reconstructionists, the freedom and innovation of modern Druids, and the organic connection with the land and myth found in the native Celtic people. I see this work as being an expression of what I call the druidic archetype. The word druid is the finger pointing to the moon. The moon, in this case, is the archetype. If we are to accept transpersonal modes of reality then we must consider the way in which form arises from the formless. That is, we must consider that druidism (the form) arose as a response to a particular archetype (the formless) based on the culture and ecology of those responding. Based on this understanding ancient druidism is not the template of what druidism ultimately is. It is just one time-based example of how a group of people responded to this archetype. This allows us to respond to the very same archetype in a completely unique way, without becoming caricatures of our ancestors. The authenticity of our modern response is not based on how well it can conform to the past but on how fully it can integrate and embody the archetype itself. Consider this quote by Fabrice Midal, speaking of the unique way Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa brought the dharma to the West: The word tradition must be understood here in the precise sense of being associated with the source of the teachings. It thus has nothing to do with the desire to maintain the past for the past’s sake…Thus, an authentic relationship with Tradition is a matter of purity of heart and not of being a conservative. It is inseparable from the freedom to return, beyond all conventions, to the source.7 The archetype, as suggested by the literal meaning of the word, is a “primordial image” (from the Greek arkhe, beginning; and typos form or impression). More specifically it refers to a primordial image of consciousness which is universal in

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nature, arising from psyche, or soul, itself. C.G. Jung spoke of archetypes as being inherent to humans, and being culturally based. Cultural historian and scholar of ecopsychology, Theodore Roszak, has since returned the archetype to its ecological roots with the idea of an ‘ecological unconscious.’ In this sense, the archetype is not solely situated in a cultural field but actually penetrates to deeper strata and emerges from the biosphere itself. If the archetype is culturally universal, let alone ecological, then what makes it druidic, or for that matter, Celtic? The druidic archetype refers as much to the response as it does to the archetype itself. One could speak similarly of a Hopi archetype, and perhaps refer to the same thing. It is an archetype because of its universal and primordial nature in consciousness—which embraces the biological, physical, and cosmic as much as it does the human, who is not and never has been separate from these things—and it is druidic because of the specific cultural and ecological way in which it is embodied. In this sense, to be a druid, to be an active, work-in-progress embodiment of that archetype is to participate in the stories and places of the Celtic people. One can authentically respond to and embody this archetype without being Celtic or a druid, but one is Celtic or druidic by way of cultural and ecological participation in the stories and landscapes of the Celts. Words have power, and without these specific cultural-landscape components the power implied in the word druid is misplaced and perhaps even misappropriated. Because druidism can trace no unbroken line of transmission into modern times, it is free to shape and be shaped again by the needs of the time. It is free to be re-imagined, to be returned to its own source in the Otherworld Well, and to emerge again, relevant to our time and need, for anyone moved and compelled to drink from its cup. This freedom to innovate must also be tempered by the inclusion and integration of the past. In this way we can participate both temporally and eternally with the tradition. In this sense, might it be better to talk instead, or additionally, of a druidic teleotype? Rather than simply being the ecopsychological root of druidism at the base of nature and consciousness, it also has direction toward the fulfillment of general aims. Druidism is an archetype striving toward fulfillment of a wholeness ever transcending itself, forever shifting and changing as it grows. It is ever becoming, and as long as we locate the defining characteristics of the tradition in the past, we run

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the risk of inhibiting its further growth and evolution. What does the druid spirit want to become? In the introduction to his book Dreamtime, John Moriarty asks a question, originally posed by the poet Hölderlin in his poem Bread and Wine, and later taken up philosophically by Heidegger: “What use are poets in times of need?” Poetry is at the core of druidism, and so Moriaty’s answer is also the answer to “What use are druids in times of need?” He says, “poets must be healers—healers who, healed themselves, heal us culturally, heal us, or help heal us, in the visions and myths and rituals by which we live, and to do this effectively they must in some sense be…temporary ones, not eternal ones, of the Dream.”8 And so we return to the source of druidism, nature itself and the stories which are the living Dream of Ireland. What I write here in this book is, I hope, a temporary constellation of the druidic archetype—it is not the tradition itself. No expression can claim such a right, whether it is five thousand years old or fifty years old. This temporary constellation of the Irish Dream is a gateway to examining our relationship with Earth and Spirit, and as such is posited here as healing work for the 21st century.

THE ECOLOGY OF EXILE

o be an exile is to be uprooted from both native place and story, and thus from one’s own mind as well. I call this the mytho-ecology of exile. Because the Celtic people once covered most of Europe, most people of European roots can trace their line back to the Celts, which perhaps explains its current mainstream popularity amongst spiritual seekers. At a loss for an authentic tradition of being indigenous to a place, we have the tendency to trace our ancestry back until we find who we are and where we come from. There is nothing wrong with this inherently, but it also does not mean that instances of cultural misappropriation are forgivable when they are an appropriation of Celtic culture or any other culture in our background. Cultural appropriation or misappropriation describes a situation in which a person from a dominant culture has taken on other cultural forms of which they are not a part, especially when used in public contexts. An example is an American publicly practicing “Native

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Americanâ&#x20AC;? spirituality, perhaps offering Lakota sweat lodges without permission from the culture, and charging fees for the ceremony.9 What often needs to be stated is that the Celtic people are an indigenous people, and just because they are European does not mean that their exploitation is made acceptable by common genes. Culture does not equal genetics and ancestry does not equal inheritance, spiritual, or cultural ownership. We must take care to give back in some way to the living culture, and to honor its traditions appropriately. Misunderstood as the culture so often is, this popularity need not be seen in such a cynical light but as testament to the veracity of the culture and its ability to adapt and stay relevant. This will no doubt raise concerns in many about who is Celtic and who has the right to these traditions and stories. It must be desperately communicated that the Celtic people do not exist in past-tense, as they are often spoken of in New Age literature. Beginning with the Roman conquest of the Gallic people, Celtic culture has been pushed further and further to the edge of the Western world. Some modern scholars deny that much of the insular Celtic people should actually be considered Celtic at all. It has been noted that in Ireland there is very little archeological evidence which suggests any wide scale presence of Celtic culture. For a time it was thought in Ireland that a mass invasion of migration brought the culture to the island, but there is no archeological evidence for this, and tellingly the genetic makeup of continental Europeans (who most certainly are direct descendents of the people classically considered Celtic) differs from that of the Irish. Yet it is undeniable that linguistically and mythologically the Irish and other insular Celtic groups retain cultural and cosmological markers of the Celtic people. What this means is that we should not take the idea of Celtic identity as a simple matter. It is far more complex; being not a matter of genetics or archeology, but of language, and thus more importantly, shared stories. One does not necessarily need to be fluent in Irish to practice druidic or Irish spirituality. Language is hotly debated. There are good reasons to learn a Celtic language. A language encodes a worldview through the network of associations woven by the words and the way that they are used. It is telling for example that the word dĂĄn (a word we will become more familiar with later in this book) means things such as art, gift, and destiny. Even more telling are the webs of related wordsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;whether

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related etymologically or by poetic “word-play”—such as Tuatha Dé Danann (a mythological people often associated with the goddess Dana or Danu, but thought by some scholars to refer to the word dán), dánacht (audacity or boldness), bradán (salmon), and the term Áes dána which refers to both the Tuatha Dé Danann and to poets and druids in general.10 There is an abundance of meaning here not available to those who have never made a study of the language. Inclusion should be based on language, but shared participation and commitment to the cultural dreamtime through stories and landscape. This is pre-linguistic; stories exist in eternity, before they are told. Certainly there are personal benefits to studying the language, but what should really be stressed here are the cultural benefits. The culture, as a whole, is largely kept alive and thriving by the language. The language is the culture’s beating heart; to learn the language is an act of reciprocity, contributing to the overall health of the organism. Much like the workings of the circulatory system in a body, each part of the body both receives and returns the nourishment of blood in a fully functioning system. It is an act of respect and of service. The next area of concern is landscape. Many readers of this book may not be living in a “Celtic nation” such as Ireland. How do you justify participation in an oral place-based cultural spirituality while living abroad? This question is particularly tricky because many of those living abroad have Celtic roots but live in places like the United States, Canada, and Australia and feel a visceral connection with their ancestors and homelands. In these instances the relationship to place and land is a bit different. Here we are dealing with the psychology of exile and the process whereby one becomes native to a place. To be native to a place means that our minds our rooted there, derive their nourishment from the familiarity of the landscape and from the stories that are woven into it. Mind is deeply involved with the land. Nature writer Barry Lopez refers to the inner landscape as “a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape,” claiming that the interior landscape of the mind has a similar set of relationships as can be found in the external world. The shape and character of these relationships in a person’s thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on the earth one goes, what one touch-

The Salmon in the Spring es, the patterns one observes in nature—the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.11

To be Celtic in a non-Celtic place essentially means to have two places. We are exiled from one place and participating in another. Although the body can only participate in one place, the mind can give itself to many. This means the expressions of Celtic spirituality will be as diverse as the places in which they are found. In an interview with the Paris Review, Gary Snyder states that “having a place means that you know what a place means.”12 To know what a place means is to know both what it means in a storied sense of myth, character, and presence, but also in an ecological sense; to know the seasons, the flora and fauna, and the geography. In the same interview Gary Snyder says that, “anyone is, metaphorically speaking, a Native American who is ‘born again on Turtle Island.’ Anyone who chooses, consciously and deliberately, to live on this continent this North American continent, with a full spirit for the future, and for how to live on it right…[is a Native American].”13 One has the opportunity, wherever they call home, to become a native of that place. So what about a native American (in Snyder’s metaphorical sense of the term) practicing a Celtic spirituality, Irish or otherwise? There must be a conscious and deliberate effort to know the meaning of that place as well, to know the meaning of Ireland, for example. This can be done in many ways: through pilgrimage, through study of the place-based mythologies, local folklore, geography, geology, ecology, etc. One cannot become a native without living there, coming to know the place intimately, but one can sustain a relationship, a sort of exiled love affair, which provides a cultural, ancestral (if the practitioner has ancestral roots there), and cosmological meaning and knowing that maybe is not, or cannot, be provided by the place where a person lives. It is as if, for the diaspora, becoming native means to bridge the ancestral home and the new home within the individual. A reconciliation of place must occur.

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To further bring this point home I would like to share my personal experience with this process. I share this both for the sake of transparency, to allow the reader to understand where I am in my own process, and to illuminate what has been discussed by way of narrative. I am an American by birth, English speaking, and raised in the Boston area of Massachusetts. Because of the insular nature of most American culture, I was raised knowing only the English language. I became involved with Celtic spirituality at the age of twelve. After moving from Massachusetts to Colorado to attend college at Naropa University I began taking my study and practice much more seriously. In 2004 I made my first pilgrimage to Ireland with a group led by Celtic and shamanic teacher Frank MacEowen. It was a homecoming in many ways, initiating me into an experiential relationship with the land, the spirits and presence which occupy it, and the interweaving of modern and ancient culture that so often takes place there. After returning I decided to learn the language. I have made a study of it, though I am far from fluent, and continue the difficult task of learning. I see this as my reciprocal responsibility, though I also endeavor to give back to the culture through teaching and storytelling. I traveled to Ireland again in 2006 and 2007. In 2006 I lived for four months on the Dingle peninsula, studying language, music, archeology, and folklore at the Díseart Institute of Education and Celtic Culture. I spent a majority of the time in the hills, rather than the pubs. When I traveled to Ireland in 2004 there was a marked cognitive dissonance between the place and my own consciousness. When I returned two years later that cognitive dissonance began to evaporate as I did the work of integrating my native consciousness with my ancestral and mythic consciousness. Where once I often felt pangs of longing and “homesickness” for Ireland, I now am content in those American places which I have come to know as home. People often ask me if I will ever move to Ireland. I tell them that perhaps when I have grown old I will retire there, but that for now my task is on this land and that I will continue to take pilgrimage at times to reinvigorate my relationship with Ireland. The tension of this dynamic has become a central part of my identity, and has profoundly influenced my path. Likewise, we are all “works-in-progress,” and though I advocate for the learn-

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ing of one or more Celtic language and for direct experience with Celtic landscapes, our practice is enriched and brought more alive by them, not contingent upon them. Like the well known Irish trait of hospitality, this spiritual tradition is open to anyone who would warm their hands by its hearth.

THE SECOND BATTLE OF MAIGH TUIREADH

hen the Tuatha Dé Danann came to Ireland some say it was on the clouds themselves, landing on a mountain in the Northwest of Ireland on Bealtaine, the first day of summer. Others say they came on great ships, which they burned upon coming to shore. Whatever the case they soon made Ireland their home and ruled, as was the custom of everyone who came there, from the Hill of Tara. The name Tuatha Dé Danann is often translated to “the People of the Goddess Danu.” Danu is a mysterious figure. There are no stories connected to her, though they call her the mother of the gods. There are only mountains named for her; two breast-shaped mountains with cairns of stones for nipples. If Danu is their mother, surely the Tuatha Dé are the children of the land. They were not alone in Ireland. They shared the land with the Fomorians, a darker race of beings who wanted to rule the land, not be ruled by it. The Tuatha Dé had an uneasy alliance with the Fomorians and when the king, Nuada, lost his arm in the first battle of Maigh Tuireadh (when they won the land from its previous inhabitants, the Fir Bolg), he was replaced by a half-blood Fomorian named Bres. No king in Ireland could rule with a blemish—the severed arm here a blemish or wound on the wholeness of his psyche—or the land would go barren. He had no choice but to abdicate. And so Bres, whose name means beautiful, and who was half Tuatha Dé and half Fomorian became the new king. It seemed a wise idea and could perhaps unite the two people. Soon though Bres became a much greater blemish, both to the land and the Tuatha Dé. Every day the Dagda, chief of the gods, would build and dig trenches for Bres; Ogma, the Eloquent One, was reduced to carrying firewood. No one who visited the hall at Tara was ever given ale or shown the generosity required of a king. The land grew barren. The cows stopped giving milk and nothing green would grow. One day the great poet Cairpre, who by law deserved the highest honors,

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visited the hall. He was given nothing but stale bread to eat, not a drop to drink, and was lodged in the poorest conditions. So Cairpre, using his best judgment, composed a poem which caused Bres to break out in hideous blemishes. Meanwhile, Dian Cécht, the physician of the Tuatha Dé had crafted Nuada a new arm and hand of silver. However, his son Miach, did not like the artificial hand though it moved like one of flesh. He went to Nuada, saying “joint to join, sinew to sinew” and the arm grew whole once again, flesh and blood as it should be. Dian Cécht grew jealous and murdered Miach but where he was buried 365 healing herbs grew from the ground.* With Bres now disqualified from kingship and Nuada’s arm flesh and blood once more he was allowed to resume his role as king. This is how the Second Battle of Maigh Tuireadh came about. Bres, humiliated, went back to his people and roused them to war. Now with war brewing a man could be seen walking across the fields toward the great hall at Tara. Not just any man was this, but Lúgh Lamhfada. He came because the Fomorian people made war with the Tuatha Dé Danann. It was a war between dark and light. A war between two people experiencing the world in two opposing ways. The Tuatha Dé, content to live with nature, ruled only though the sovereignty of the land. The Fomorians, not so content, who were possessed with Súil Milldagach, the destructive eye which eradicated anything it looked upon, were intent on ravaging the land. Lúgh approached the doorkeeper at the great hall who was instructed not to let * This scene of the story raises many questions about the nature of wholeness and its relationship both to what is natural and what is artificial. It is evident in the story that Miach found the artificial arm inadequate. We might say that the silver arm is what Edward Goldsmith calls a heterotelic development and, “though it may, partly at least, satisfy the requirements of the individual, does not satisfy those of the larger system of which it is part…and thereby reduces its stability and integrity” (471). The arm did not fulfill the requirements of the larger social system's need for wholeness. We might see this, in light of current technology and our ever increasing compulsion to be “wired in,” as a reminder that what is Whole is Real and what is Real obeys and enhances the natural laws of the system in which it participates. This is true whether we are speaking about an arm, a king, or a psyche.

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any man pass the gates who did not possess an art; not only an art, but one which was not already possessed by someone within the hall. The doorkeeper told this to Lúgh who replied, “Question me doorkeeper, I am a warrior.” But there was a warrior at Tara already. “Question me doorkeeper, I am a smith,” but there was already a smith. “Question me doorkeeper,” said Lúgh again, “I am a poet,” and again the doorkeeper replied that there was a poet at Tara already. Lúgh continued, determined to get in. He was a harpist, a historian, a sorcerer, a builder, a champion, a cupbearer, and a physician. But Tara had someone skilled in each art. Finally Lúgh said, “Go and ask your king if he has someone skilled in all of those arts and if he has then I shall leave.” So the doorkeeper went, and the king sent for Lúgh and placed him in the seat of the sage, for Lúgh was truly a sage of every art, a samhildánach. Soon began the battle between the Tuatha Dé and the Fomorians. The king, regarding Lúgh as precious, had him locked up because he feared what might happen if he were to fall in battle. But Lúgh could hear that battle raging on outside at Maigh Tuireadh. The Fomorians had let loose their own champion, Balor of the Piercing Eye—in whom Súil Milldagach was concentrated—and he met the king on the field. Lúgh, hearing the fury of their encounter, broke free of his prison, taking a chariot and racing to battle. He was too late though. Nuada had already been slain. As Lúgh arrived he jumped from his chariot to face Balor. Now, Balor had just one poisonous eye for which he was named. So afraid of this eye were the Fomorians that they placed nine lids over it, each lid attached to a chain with a hook. Anything which the eye looked upon was consumed and destroyed. Balor spoke: “Lift the lids of my eye so that I might see the whelp who confronts me.” The lid was lifted off Balor’s eye. As the eye was opened Lúgh casts his stone toward it, sending it out of the back of Balor’s head, and destroying the entire Fomorian army it looked upon. Defeated, Bres fled but the Tuatha Dé caught up with him and his remaining people. He begged for mercy. “What will you give for our mercy?” the Tuatha Dé asked. “I will tell you the secret of getting milk from your cows and crops from your land in every season.” Knowing the importance of the pattern of things, they did not accept this deal. “Tell us in which season to sow our seeds, in which season to harvest, and how to tend to the land, and we will show you mercy.” So Bres told them what they wanted to know—how to live appropriately in Ireland—and in return he was allowed to live.

Place and Story

he SECOND BATTLE OF MAIGH TUIREADH is often considered to be the primary cosmological story of the Irish people. For that reason it is also the primary myth of this book. The battle taking place in the story is also the battle of an individual’s struggle with their ego. It is the battle of the ecological crisis. As ecopsychology claims, these two matters are intricately linked. It all comes down to this: Lúgh standing ready with a stone in his sling, and the lids slowly being lifted off Balor’s piercing eye. It was a battle, as John Moriarty has it, “between a people intent on shaping nature to suit them and a people who, surrendering to it, would let nature shape them to suit it.”14 Myths are layered like dreams. On one level we could say that the Second Battle of Maigh Tuireadh is the heroic struggle between culture and nature, between the dark and fecund Fomorian spirits of nature and the luminous Tuatha Dé Danann culture of humans. Most certainly it is a story about how to live appropriately. To a modern practitioner this characterization of wild nature as the antagonist who is essentially out of balance may seem counter intuitive. Consider the story as a seasonal one. To the agrarian Irish, when winter came it was as though nature become unruly and destructive. The story, from one angle, is about the balance between the ordered human community and the more chaotic spirits of nature. In the story we witness a struggle for balance that mirrors our internal struggle with our own spiritual and psychological growth and development but also the difficult task of integrating ourselves with the land. The antagonism in the story is justified because through it all things are maintained in the proper order, despite at times both factions experiencing set backs. It is this push and pull of things which characterizes the dance of relative reality. Today it has, by necessity of our changing psychology and society, taken on an additional meaning. If we drop the baggage of the old interpretation—which is no less valid alongside a new interpretation—we can see something slightly different. Two tribes: one tribe, the Tuatha Dé Danann are concerned with observing the proper order of the cosmos; the other, the Fomorians, break it at nearly every turn in the story and choose to shape things to their own end. Balor’s Eye is no longer a necessary death, seasonal or psychological, but an all-consuming poison that blights the biosphere. Our industrial culture is the Fomorian eye of Súil Milldagach. Today, as always, it is an inner battle between two ways of seeing and being in the world,

The Salmon in the Spring

a statement of ecological, psychological, and spiritual importance. If we consider our own psychology as containing both Tuatha Dé and Fomorian, we can now say that the balance has been disturbed. Balor’s eye is unleashed within us on the Earth. Súil Milldagach, in psychological terms, is the fixated neurosis of the ego. In spiritual terms it is that which covers the soul. The ego itself is not the enemy, but a lens through which soul might shine through. Because the Fomorians are actually spoken of as spirits of the Earth, Súil Milldagach is what happens when we step out of balance and relationship with nature. In Súil Milldagach the Earth becomes our shadow and constellates unconsciously within the ego. We are standing at a moment which recapitulates this same mythic motif of this story. Our culture has become a Fomorian Súil Milldagach. An examination of our tendencies toward environmental destruction in favor of, and as a means to human wealth and “progress” make this clearer than ever. Having become like Balor our viability as a species, and moral responsibility to the rest of the Earth community, demands our realignment with soul and wild nature. Sometimes this means throwing a sling stone into that poisonous eye, so that it turns in and sees itself. We can then begin to integrate that Fomorian wildness in a more healthy way. This integration is a transformation of confusion into wisdom, and is at the heart of Lúgh’s arrival at Tara. In many ways this book and the other stories told herein are an elaboration and peeling away of the motifs inherent in his arrival. He approaches the doorkeeper and is told “no one enters Tara who does not possess an art.” He then goes on to tell the doorkeeper that he is a master of all the arts. If we consider that Tara is at the symbolic center of Ireland, and thus the center of a mandala then this takes on a new philosophical importance. This mandala will be explored in-depth in later chapters, but here it is enough for us to know that the mandala is a representation of psychic wholeness and enlightenment. Thus, no one enters a state of wholeness who does not possess an art. No one finds enlightenment who does not possess an art. Philosophically this is what it means to enter Tara. To not only possess an art but to become an embodiment of it is integral to the transformation of confusion into wisdom. It is integral to battling Súil Milldagach and realizing the inherent wholeness that exists between humans and nature. This myth is an invitation into the ritual enactment of an initiatory story, an invitation to participate in the battle of Maigh Tuireadh, the inner and outer

Place and Story

“battle” between the Fomorians and Tuatha Dé Danann. To align with soul and nature is to become Tuatha Dé Danann, Áes Dána, a gifted one and to bring out and embody that gift in service to the entire Earth community. It is the foundation for the naissance of an engaged druidic way of taking part in the 21st century transformational task of what Thomas Berry calls “The Great Work,” the work of re-inventing the human being.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ason Kirkey grew up in the North Atlantic watershed of Massachusetts. At the age of twelve he began his long apprenticeship to the Earth and soul. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Contemplative Psychology and Environmental Studies from Naropa University and is currently working toward his Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at California Institute of Integral Studies. In 2006 Jason founded Hiraeth Press, a small-scale publishing company focusing on poetry and ecological wisdom. He runs Dinnseanchas, an organization committed to teaching people how to find their place in the Earth community through poetry, meditation, traditional Irish stories, and ecological mysticism. Visit him on the web at http://www.jasonkirkey.com.

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