From: Ireland, Image, Essence
The first people to settle in Ireland arrived before the Flood. Linked with Egypt they comprised a group of fifty women and three men. Their leader, Cessair, is known as a daughter of Biblical Noah, who advises her to sail for distant Ireland to avoid the Flood having refused her passage on his Ark. Two of the men die. Fintan, perhaps feeling overwhelmed, throws himself into the sea in the guise of a salmon. He survives the Flood in this form and goes on to live for thousands of years, witnessing every change that sweeps over the country, eventually to render faithful accounts of all. Thus he becomes a prototype of the Irish shaman-bard, skilled in shape-shifting, poetic recitation and memory-keeping. Moreover, Salmon as a mythic totem merits special esteem as a creature who constantly returns (knows the way back) to its place of origin, there to spawn and die. Both it and Fintan thus become associated with themes of death and re/birth, sacrifice and renewal that resonate into the Christian era, including the extended shamanic prerogative of returning to Source when special medicine is required to heal a community in crisis.
The next wave of invaders is known as the Partholonians, variously associated with the Middle East, Iberia and Greece. A cattle-herding people, they introduced this way of life to Ireland, where it established firm roots. They eventually succumb to a plague and are replaced thirty years later by the people of Nemed, who arrives with four sons, their wives and extended clans. Also linked with Iberia and Greece, they clear the plains of Ireland for agriculture and build forts to safeguard local kings, so adding new layers that would also become permanent features. Their initiative entails altering the face of the land and, presumably for this reason, brings them into conflict with the Fomorians. These are not invaders in any sense but rather chthonic spirits raised by disturbances visited on a wild nature that had previously been their domain. The Nemedians are roundly defeated and only a small group survives to escape. They return to Ireland several generations later. These descendants are now known as the Fir Bolg, literally Stomach Men, apparently from a root that means ‘swollen’.
It has been suggested that they are swollen with vengeful rage but this seems unlikely as they form an alliance with chthonic Fomorians to oppose the next wave of invaders, the Tuatha De Danann. These are a magical race, very different from all who came before. They are said to hail from the North of the world and arrive on a burning cloud rather than more customary ships. Associated with pagan gods of the Irish Celts, they are also a precursor people who most likely originated Druidic magical practices that the Celts inherited. The Irish word ‘Tuatha’ means ‘people’; De means of God, or Goddess when a gendered name is added. Hence people of the god/dess Dana: an ancient goddess name for Ireland that also speculatively links to the Danube as one of prehistoric Europe’s Great Mother Rivers. All we can infer is an association with Old (Goddess-encompassing) Religion. A balanced partnership culture is also suggested by four treasures that the Tuatha bring from their mythical North, one each from four mystical islands: Falias, Gorias, Findias and Murias, associated respectively with Stone (Earth), Spear (Fire), Sword (Air) and Cauldron (Water).
Together these are said to comprise the fundamental elements required for a viable civilisation. The four treasures are: i) the Stone of Destiny (Lia Fail), supposedly visible to this day on Tara Hill, ancient political centre of the Irish High Kings. Its role is to sing out when a fitting aspirant to this office approaches. Speaking for the Land, it champions a goddess-based sovereignty that the political king must honour and mythically marry; ii) the Spear of Lugh, an invincible weapon wielded by the Celtic god of war and, analogically, light (lux); iii) a Sword that is described as a weapon from which it is impossible to escape once drawn from its sheath. It shines brightly then as a magical blade, perhaps anticipating Arthur’s legendary Excalibur; iv) Finally there is a Cauldron that yields inexhaustible supplies of food for all and, in other iterations, restores slain warriors to life. Each treasure has a metaphysical value but modern scholars, materialists by default, focus mainly on functional aspects of these basic things required for a civilisation to thrive.
Thus we look to Cauldron for sustenance, Stone as raw material required to build dwellings that offer protection from hostile forces and Sword-Spear to meet defence and security needs. This list overlooks whatever magic might once have been associated with these treasures of the famously ‘magical’ Tuatha De. We will see later that subtler readings are also possible. For now I note that the Tuatha defeated the Fomorian and Fir Bolg alliance by magical means. A new supernatural layer of civilizational order was thus added to cattle-raiding, field-clearing, eating, drinking and fighting layers that were already in place. Regarding what else was specific to this new regime, not a lot has yet been established. We are told that sons of Mil (Milesians from Celtic Spain) came next, intent on conquest. The Tuatha magicians disguised their island as a floating pig but the Milesians, displaying magical acuity of their own, land anyway. Many battles ensue, with neither side able to gain decisive advantage.
The Tuatha De propose a truce to last three days. One condition is that the Milesians must withdraw their ships an agreed distance offshore. As this happens the Tuatha magicians unleash a great storm to destroy the enemy fleet. The Milesians’ chief bard, a renowned harpist, sings a magical song to quell the tempest. Again neither side can defeat the other. Finally it is agreed that the warring camps will divide the island between them. The Milesian Harpist-Bard is entrusted with exact determinations. He does so and by dint of trickster eloquence secures an arrangement whereby the Milesians come to occupy the surface of Ireland while the Tuatha De must withdraw to an Underworld dimension. Again occupying Faery mounds and hollow hills, they become known as the Sidhe (Shee) and continue to abide there in folk memory, so consolidating Ireland’s Otherworld affinities.
According to Christian tradition, Fairies are neutral angels who fall half-way, neither consigned to Hell nor re-admitted to Heaven for staying unaligned in the fight that prideful Lucifer picked with God. In Ireland the story was more nuanced. Availing of Fintan’s bardic knowledge, relayed to a High King after thousands of years, the tutelary spirits and deities of all precursor peoples are tacitly included in the superseding accord made with the Tuatha De, who effectively became our Celtic gods. This is evident as even Christian authors of the Book of Invasions seem content to record faithfully the mythic memories of their pagan ancestors (per my Tara experience). This may have been possible because Christianity came to Ireland without an army. Hence no political antagonisms applied. Rather, as indicated, candidates who might a generation earlier have aspired to Druidic priesthood now look to Christian monasteries instead. This sense of continuity is attested by a name the Irish mythically assigned to Saint Patrick – i.e. the Salmon of Heaven, symbolically empowering him to succeed antediluvian Fintan. That this is no mere eclipse is indicated by another medieval text known as The Colloquy of the Ancients, which recounts a dialogue between Patrick and the last surviving Giant of earlier times, who serves also as a vessel for the memory of the land.
After administering baptism to dispel residual demons, Patrick falls into earnest conversation with the Giant, who elsewhere in the Christian world would be shunned as a monstrous hybrid. Hours later, Patrick is so enthusiastically diverted by recollections of who had the finest horses and most fertile soil that he begins to doubt his judgment. Could such an association truly be fitting for a holy man? Was it not keeping him from prayer? A heavenly voice reassures that anything dangerous or unseemly in the Giant’s telling will fall away, no damage done. Thus Patrick also is entrusted with conserving the memories of his adopted people. Noting this reminds me of a peculiar affinity I felt with Don Alejandro as a Mayan memory keeper, not just in terms of scrupulous recounting but also a deeper anti-repressive tendency that this also indicates. It too is liable to compromise, obviously, as in clerical sex scandals and, beyond Joyce’s apostasy, Moriarty’s championing of integrative over tourniquet Christianity.
Indeed, a related dimension of Celtic Christianity is supported by another Patrick story. This finds him advising a novice on how to advance his monkish career. Patrick gives the young man a holy bell and instructs him to walk into the landscape trusting that, when he reaches the right place, the bell will ring to show where his church is to be built. The young man hopes for a truly spiritual location, perhaps with rarefied mountain air and infinite sky, but his bell rings out in the midst of a dark forest. Faithfully dismayed, he sets about his task. His first convert turns out to be a boar. Soon other animals approach and so his congregation grows. From a church perspective the message must be that even wild animals are drawn by the power of Christ (a vision that is wholly compatible with Jesus’ Vedic profile). The native view, expressed across many similar if not overtly pious stories, also admits a fundamental continuity between the natural and spiritual worlds. This doesn’t imply any laxity or absence of rigour in the early Celtic Church but does stop well short of repudiating fallen nature as evil.
Discovering this offered a lifeline in my own recovery, inspiring early bridging moves towards mystical Christianity by which I still feel inspired. Historically, little more than a century after the Book of Invasions’ first version was compiled a new conquest began when Normans finally crossed the Irish Sea, claiming the right to invade via a papal decree that also obliged them to standardise the Celtic Church. Eight centuries and many illusory mediations later my parents and I suffered the dregs of a coarsening brutality that this ‘taking’ entailed. That said, even their ghosts are now absorbed and just as Celtic princes once passed easily into and out from Other-Underworlds of Faery so this facility is still available in quiet parts. Having spent time there, I treasure wilderness days from the 1990’s when I knelt for hours by a mountain rock contemplating the Passion, tracking deer or watching an insect as my Heart broke open for reasons I can only now begin to understand. So reminded of One Love, I want to recall other memories before passing on.
In 1993-94, during my first ‘bardic’ year of studying Druidry, I used to hike into low mountains south of Dublin in search of Stag, my totem. A sizeable herd of deer grazed there at the time, now culled. I ascended weekly through foothills before entering a pine forest so dense that I had to crawl under interlaced branches to reach clearings where they often grazed. At first they would flee upon my coming. Gradually they let me draw near. By the end, they just went on grazing. (I repeated this pattern later with the sheep of Tara and bulls of Uisneach; an adviser of the time advised that animals have their own idea of a gentle man.) Sometimes I glimpsed the alpha, a huge stag with impressive antlers. On the last day of my bardic year, as I was making my way up, Stag appeared before me early on the winding path, the same solidly physical beast that I had stood close to several times by now. He looked straight at me, holding my eye for maybe a minute before turning away into the heather. I stayed motionless for a long time digesting this experience, which I still recollect as magical.
Months later I found this magnificent animal dead at the same low point of my ascent, so near the car park that deer would never go there. There was no sign of any wound. Filled with a dreadful sadness, I tried to move the corpse but got nowhere with its rigidly dead weight. Instead I opted to revere and carry forward consciously all that had been awakened in me over the course of our shared year. I have since applied the same principle to every significant bereavement in my life, cultivating a sense of something lost, something gained and something ineffably more. I resolve to link this to a later magical occurrence if I can grasp the significance of what it might be trying to convey.
My Celtic immersion lasted from the early 1990s to 2008. After leaving Academia in 2005 I met Christa, who introduced me to the Mayan Calendar. I became very interested in its approach to Consciousness evolution across the flow of Sacred Time, intuiting a deep connection with the Holy Grail, which had fascinated me since childhood. After Christa’s passing in 2009 I offered a series of several Sacred Plays in memoriam and to prepare for the Calendar’s so called ‘end date,’ routinely linked with ‘2012.’
Soon after, I began work on what was to be a short book called The Calendar and the Grail. The subject matter proved intoxicating and the work rapidly expanded into a multi-volume behemoth, relating the evolution of consciousness in time to Consciousness as transcendent beyond time. This engaged Vedic perspectives and set me to clarify foundations for a universal spirituality. My resulting efforts finally imploded for lack of a coherent account of Divine Masculine/Feminine relations.
Nothing in my Grail sources proved adequate to address this lack so I admitted defeat in 2021. I then promptly discovered the teachings of Sri Kaleshwar and my work revived, but not until I had spent two years without writing while focused solely on studying his work. This meant that, Grail scholarship aside, I had no active connection with Celtic magical tradition for almost twenty years. Then the following happened:
The first red weather alert I can remember was issued for Ireland regarding a storm that was due to hit in the early hours of January 24, 2025. A wind speed of 120 kph was predicted, with gusts from 150 to 180 kph. My house, on a hill near the Atlantic coast, stood squarely in its path. All was calm at 2 am when I went asleep. I awoke at 4 to the sound of crashing masonry. The wind was raging fiercely, threatening to blow my entire roof away. The tiles were rattling violently , like a demented bone orchestra.
Another eight hours of this was forecast! Fearing the worst, I gather myself quickly and feel Parashakti energies rising from Womb chakra to Heart. There they meet an image of Baba at the evacuated centre of a cross made by four pictures arranged before, behind and to either side of my bed. My hands join at Heart and lift above my south-facing head, palms turned into the raging wind. They then descend, drawing a half-dome energy shield down between roof and storm, with me reciting a powerful protection mantra.
Immediately the rattling stops. I hold both shield and prayer until the gusts abate, then realise amazedly that the physical gesture I had made was rooted in a Druidic immersion period (1993-2008) when Merlin was my teacher and Magician my archetype. This was the first time learning from that period ever connected with inspiration from my Sai involvement or the energy of Mother/Parashakti explicitly with that of Father/Baba. I recall how Kaleshwar used to move his hands to orchestrate angelic powers and how Baba used to still rampaging elements.
A new gust blows up with terrifying speed. The rattling starts immediately. The house shakes to its foundations. I respond as before, this time focusing emphatically on Baba to direct. Again the gusts cease and rattling stops. Lacking Baba’s confidence, I feel obliged to stop-start like this every few minutes until 9 am, when wind speeds drop. Against this, I witness the same miraculous effect many times through the night. In the end I am exhausted and exhilarated to have withstood such unrelenting ferocity without further damage being caused.
Daylight revealed that a capstone had blown free and, falling, broken several tiles, displacing one. I made two neat piles of debris and wept for joy. At one point, during a lull, I had sought to extend protection to our western islands. I don’t know if this helped but as the thought occurred my Heart filled with a surge of overwhelming love, much as I had felt on registering Parashakti the previous October. There is no more I can say for now except that this felt like a significant coming together, deeply resonant with the prayer line ‘Restore me to Due Powers of my True Self.’
Weeks later, I realise that there is more to be said. Firstly, I hadn’t been consciously involved in any overt magical activity since my ‘personal archetype’ shifted from Magician to Fool in 2008. My attention since had largely been preoccupied by writing and Sai teachings. I had done no formal ‘energy work’ although there was magic involved in the Sacred Plays and even ertain passages of writing. The most significant thing I note, however, is a coming together that happened as Mother and Father streams began engaging inter-actively in my experience. This indicates a shifting inner matrix out of which this volume has been written, trans-rationally so to speak.
Harking back to Merlin also suggests integration, evoking Grail imagery and a prospect of inner Sacred Marrying/Rebirth ahead of an anticipated Holy Grail/Sri Chakra section to close. This remains unwritten, un-experienced and deeply mysterious. With it pending, the main impact of my storm episode seems to be that it shows how accurate information regarding the Truth behind our World Illusion empowers us to alter the course of that Illusion: i.e., that it’s possible to change Nature by supernatural means. This is not a casual claim. Wind speeds up to 185 km were recorded on that night: many roofs were lost and even some gables blown in. For me the Sri Chakra process ahead looms as a more exacting test, regarding which earlier Celtic magical escapades are now marked as relevant preparation, no more or less.
[From HolyWomb, Holy Grail, volume 6 of The Calendar and the Grail. Forthcoming under ‘Books.’]
