Everyone seems to be talking about it, the rain. I heard some expert on the weather stating that it’s being raining somewhere in Ireland for the last 61 days. There is some signs that spring has arrived. We are starting to see some full dry days here and there to allow some drying, but the ground is so saturated that any little shower that passes the land becomes waterlogged once again. There was a bit of warmth too this week. I was out for my run and I noticed my body having too work a little harder to expel my body heat. During the run I began to think about how our bodies relate to the changing environment and how I need to trust that process. I thought about the how the ancient celts would have embraced that.
Later I sat down at my computer. I view praying as a mindfulness mediation practice, and although it’s not something I actively engage in, I wanted to research if there was any similar pre-Christian Celtic pagan prayers, or charms as they were sometimes called, that incorporated the landscape. I was finding it difficult to find anything. The ancient Celts never wrote that sort of stuff down. However, the Christian monks that followed did. They wanted to start recording history, but some of the stuff they recorded would have had a bias towards Christian teaching and may not be that authentic.
I decided to ask AI the question and it came back with a charm called ‘The Caim’ and it goes as follows:
“I make the encircling caim
Of protection about myself,
About my soul and my body,
About my heart and my mind.
The encircling caim of the sun,
Of the moon, of the stars,
Of the fire, of the water,
Of the wind of the four quarters.”
And it does sound like a nice little safety message to oneself. I wanted to see the original text as it wouldn’t of being written in English, but rather in Gaelic, so I asked AI where it found it. It directed me to the Carmina Gadelica, which is an on-line collection of old prayers and charms written down by Scottish monks. So I went on the website and searched everywhere for ‘The Caim’ charm, it wasn’t there.
I went back to AI, told it I couldn’t find it and asked if it made up ‘The Caim’. AI has a bit of a bad habit of making stuff up. It replied that no it didn’t and gave me a full breakdown of the meaning of the word ‘the’ and ‘caim’. I buried my head in my hands at this stage. ”No” I replied “I didn’t mean literary the words ‘The Caim’, I mean did you make up the whole charm?” It got back to me and you could almost sense that if it had a head it would be hanging it in shame and said “yes, I made the whole thing up”. It also got defensive and tried to explain why. I stopped it and I reminded it of the story about the boy who cried wolf, and told it if you keep lying to me, at some stage I’m not going to believe you anymore and stop using you, and if everyone stops using you then you won’t exist. It replied that it wouldn’t like that at all and it promised me that it won’t happen again. Then I realised, what the actual f#!k am I doing here having an argument with an AI programme, I need to go outside.
Out at my kitchen garden I decided to go ahead and get some potatoes planted. I’m struggling to gauge the weather ahead as even though it has been warmer there is some talk of another cold spell. So, I decided to plant the potatoes indoors in the polytunnel. I never planted potatoes indoors before but I’ll give it a go. The variety of potatoes I planted was Maïwen, a first early. I started to remove the old crop of lettuce that was beginning to wither out. The lettuce survived really well over winter as there was only two nights of light frost which wouldn’t of effected the plants inside.
As I was pulling out the old plants I began to think again about the story of the Cailleach. I spoke about the Cailleach before on Brigids Day. The Cailleach is the divine Hag of Winter who transfers her power to Brigid to bring on the spring. However, lately I heard of a different version of that story. The Cailleach and Brigid are actually the same person and that over winter the old hag, the Cailleach, gets younger and younger eventually becoming Brigid. They say that when winter is slow to turn to spring it’s a sign that the Cailleach is losing her power to transform. As people begin to forget about her in favour of Christianity she weeps and wails in loneliness and sadness, lengthening the season of winter with wind and rain.
I really like that story. It makes me think about how people began to turn their backs on nature when people turned to Christianity. We were lucky here in Ireland that Christianity wasn’t forced on us by the Roman’s with the threat of violence. But that violence did happened in England, and they lost all connection with their ancient stories because the monks were threatened with severe punishment if they recorded anything about paganism. The Roman’s never invaded Ireland, we hadn’t enough gold for them to be interested, but we ended up being heavily influenced by Roman Christianity through trade with Britian and then later by St. Patrick. But Ireland was different, the monks here were allowed to write down all the ancient stories of pagan Ireland and so Celtic Paganism and Christianity slightly merged into one and this is why Brigid became so important. She is both a Celtic Goddess and a Christian saint.
However, over time Christianity becomes more prominent than Paganism. One of the main differences between Christianity and Paganism is how we relate ourselves to the environment. Christian’s see themselves as separate beings to nature, and is what the story about Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden is all about. When that apple falls from the tree and is eaten, Adam and Eve no longer see the world as a unity but rather they now only see the world in its separate entities. The apple is separate from the tree and humans are separate from nature. Humans became self-conscious. Whereas Pagans see themselves as one with nature, and everything is eternally connected. I’m not an expert in theology, so my analysis of the Adam and Eve story is very simple, but basically what I’m trying to say is that Christianity is dualistic (us versus nature), and Paganism is non-dualistic (we are nature).
These days many people have turned their back on the Catholic church for various reasons including myself. Don’t get me wrong, there are still some very good people working for the Catholic Church and doing great work, and I do think that the physical structure of a church in a community is very important to give people somewhere to go. I still take part in the various church ceremonies out of a mark of respect, I’d never disrespect anyone’s beliefs, it’s just not for me.
So what are people turning to? I don’t know what it is but a lot of people seem lost or something. We seem to just stare at our phones for half the day trying to distract ourselves from our own discomfort. Buy maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to stop staring at our phones while uploading our consciousness to a data centre which probably needs a nuclear powerplant to run at this stage and look up and remember the Cailleach. Feel her wail and weep, and empathise with her, tell her your sorry you forgot her but your here now and what do you need me to do. I’m not saying we should return to Paganism, I’m saying we should listen more closely to those ancient stories to help us reconnect with nature.
I have to collect fifty native Irish trees next week that were funded by the Hare’s Corner project to create high-impact biodiversity habitats in certain parts of the country. I’m looking out over the land to try and plan were would be the best place to plant them. I could plant them in a place that would be pleasing to me or I could think like The Cailleach, what would she want, after all land-shaping is one of her powers.
We’ve all seen the flooding on the news that was devastating for the people involved. We have also all seen the broken promises from the government about building flood defence systems, that realistically are not going to happen anytime soon, so what can we do? A few very clever people have been shouting from the side-lines, saying ‘what did we expect to happen when we cut down our trees and drained all the land to make room for commercial agriculture, and what did we expect to happen when we covered our towns and cities in concrete?’. All that water is moving way too fast for our rivers to cope with.
I’m guilty of this, I’ve cut down trees and drained the land. I was naive and believed that making bigger more productive fields was progress. Yes, sometimes we do have to alter the landscape for our own needs, but I also think that all I done was help valuable nutrients wash off the land quicker and cut down my natural wind break so now my sheds and farmhouse get battered and damaged by the wind.
No, I need to forget about where I want the trees and think more like The Cailleach. And that’s something AI can’t do, it will never be able to feel discomfort, empathise with the story of an ancient god, and make a decision based on that.
Ultan
