The Celtic World (Routledge Worlds)

(Barry) #1

  • Chapter Twenty-Three -


1969: 503ff.) a stranger approaches the king of Tara, County Meath, who is looking
out over the countryside at dawn. The season is Beltain, May, a time of magic. Later
the king learns that his visitor is the god Manannan, an important deity in the Insular
Celtic world. He carries on his shoulder a silver branch on which there are three
apples of gold. 'Delight and amusement enough was it to listen to the music made
by the branch.' A similar story is told in the tale The Adventures of Connla the Fair.
Connla, son of Conn, high-king of Ireland, was with his father at the druidic centre
Uisnech, in modern County Westmeath, ancient centre of all Ireland. A beautiful
young woman approached him, invisible to all except Connla. She was a goddess
from the Otherworld. Although she could not be seen, her voice could be heard.
'Whereupon the Druid (Corann) sang a magic incantation against the voice of the
woman, so that no one could hear her voice.' But before the young woman departed
'before the potent chanting of the Druid', she threw an apple to the boy. He lived on
the flesh of that apple alone for a whole month. 'What he ate of the apple never
diminished it, but it remained always unconsumed' (Dunn 1969: 489). These are but
two examples of the occurrence in early Irish of magical apples, and their connection
with a god or a druid or both. In his choice of the apple branch in order to work his
spells against Mochuda, the druid must have felt himself to be on fairly safe ground;
his dismay at the superior magic of his enemy must have been considerable. Here, at
the very beginning of our investigation, we witness a scene which would doubtless
have been familiar to a much earlier Celtic world (Figure 23. I).
The passage from the Life of Saint Mochuda is of especial interest in that it
demonstrates the survival of an active paganism in Ireland in the late sixth century,
some one and a half centuries after the Patrician mission, and several centuries after
Tiberius issued a decree against the druids and learned classes in Gaul in the first
century AD. Even at this late date Irish druidism offered an alternative-belief-system.
While the origins of druidism and the earliest religious rites of the druids remain
obscure, the survival of druidic influence and the continuing role in some form of the
druid immediately after the introduction of Christianity in Ireland is not in question.
Druids figure in early Irish hagiographies, in certain of the Penitentials, and in
prayers for protection known as loricae (Bieler 1953; Mac Eoin 1962; O'Lochlainn
196 I). The constant druidic presence in the orally transmitted sagas demonstrates the
original integral role of this order in pagan Irish society; and the huge corpus of
native learning and tradition was dependent in its written form upon the early
churchmen, who tried to record it as faithfully as possible.
The complex laws of medieval Ireland likewise testify to the continuing presence
in some form of the druids and druidic beliefs, until the eighth century. At the same
time, their elevated place in society would seem to have been usurped by the fdid,
the vatis of Gaul, the scholarly poets with certain original powers of a priestly and
prophetic nature. These powers were shared by another class of learned men
stemming from the pre-Christian druidic order, the so-called brehons (from Old
Irish brithemain, 'judges'). In these two learned orders a great deal of the ancient
teachings of the druids must have survived. Later still, the blacksmith in Celtic
society, with his alleged powers of healing, his spells, and his mastery of iron, the
magical metal, and the itinerant soothsayers replaced the influence of the old learned
orders to some extent. For example, this is reflected in the great corpus of spells,

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