The Blindboy Podcast - Irish Folklore and Environmentalism with Manchán Magan

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

Manchán Magan is a writer and documentary maker with an interest in Irish Folklore and Mythology. We speak about Indigenous mythology and its relationship with the environment. Manchán has a new book out "Listen to the Land Speak" Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Beck in the bedpans, you gentle decklands. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. I hope you've all had a charming week. I got wonderful feedback for last week's podcast, which was about Irish rivers and their relevance within Irish folklore and mythology. I'm finding myself drawn more and more to Irish mythology recently, specifically because of its relationship with the land and the nature and the weather of Ireland.

As I explained last week, Irish mythology was recorded in an oral culture, a culture that didn't have writing. So these stories were told to preserve information about the environment and about places and about lakes and rivers and trees and mountains so because of that because it was written in such a unique way it's very easy to connect with a story that might be 4 000 years old because the rivers and mountains that it was written about still exist today and I noticed this myself like when I write my like I'm currently writing a book and I wrote my first two books mostly over in Spain and there's a there's a genuine difference

between writing in somewhere like Spain and writing in somewhere like Ireland. With Spain you get a predictability because the weather doesn't change. If I sit down in a cafe in Spain with a laptop I can say to myself I'm gonna stay here for eight hours and nothing's gonna change. It's gonna be dry, hot and clear all day long. It's like creating a laboratory environment, a controlled environment. But in Ireland you can't do that at all. The thing with Ireland is no matter what time of year, the weather is violently unpredictable. It could be freezing cold now, then in a half an hour's time the sun comes out and it's too hot to wear a jacket. Then you take your jacket off and all of a sudden it starts pissing rain. And that can all happen in the course of one hour.

And if I'm sitting outside writing, then obviously that's disastrous because I could have my laptop and all of a sudden it starts raining without warning. But even if I'm sitting inside in a cafe somewhere, it could be nice and quiet and then suddenly it's full of people because it's raining outside. And the unpredictable chaos and anxiety and madness of that always finds its way into my writing in some way. And I adore that because it means that the environment and the weather and a cloud or the rain is like the hidden hand.

It's like my co-writer. The other thing too about Ireland and the weather and storytelling. You're always having a little internal conversation with the sky when you're in Ireland. You're not doing this when you're in somewhere like Spain. You might say to yourself, Jesus, it's a bit hot. I'll go over there to that shadow or I need to cool down. I get a drink that's about the extent of it but in Ireland you find yourself talking to clouds in your own head it could be dry but you look up and you see this big angry purple cloud and you have to talk with it in your head you have to say what's your plan are you coming over here how How much water is inside of you? You look very dark.

You're going to fucking soak this place in about five minutes, aren't you? And then you squint and you notice that the clouds that are closer are moving quickly in another direction. And then you hope that that moves the big fat cloud above it so that you don't get wet. the big fat cloud above it so that you don't get wet or you find yourself leaving your house and looking up into the sky and seeing the blackness in the distance and almost pleading with a cloud in your own head please don't come over here because right now it's too hot for a jacket and an umbrella and I don't want to do that are Are you going to fuck my shit up in 10 minutes? The rapidly unpredictable weather in this country demands a consistent conversation with it and demands a type of internal narrative and storytelling.

And I find that present in old, old Irish mythology and it fascinates me. So I have a guest this week. And this week's podcast is almost a part two to last week's podcast. You don't have to listen to last week's podcast to appreciate this week's episode, but if you do, you will have a greater appreciation of it. I'm going to be chatting to a writer and a documentary maker by the name of Mancon Megan. Mancon has been on this podcast before. He's an authority on Irish mythology,

Irish folklore, the Irish language. He's an incredible storyteller and a fascinating person. And he's who I kind of go to when I have questions about Irish mythology and Irish folklore that I can't find answers to. Also he happens to have a book out right now. That just came out last week called Listen to the Land Speak. Which it's about Irish folklore and Irish mythology and it's relationship with the Irish environment.

And if you're interested in buying that book. Buy it at mayobooks.ie. That's M-A-Y-O. Because if you do that, Man Con gets a better profit share of the book when you buy it on that website. They might have a couple of his books. His last book was 32 Words for Field.

So me and Man Con had an absolutely wonderful chat. I learned a lot of fascinating things about Irish mythology and Irish words. And I reckon ye will enjoy this too. Before I get into the chat, I just want to plug my Vicar Street gig that's coming up. My Vicar Street gig on the 1st of november is sold out i added a second vicar street live podcast on the 2nd of november the tickets are going for that quickly i won't be adding a third date and this will be the last live podcast i do in dublin this year it'll be a lovely wednesday night gig which is a perfect night for a live podcast

because you can go to one of my live podcasts like you would the cinema or the theatre. You don't need to fucking drink. You don't need to go mad. You can be home in bed at a reasonable hour and up the next morning. So if you've ever wanted to come to one of my Vicar Street live podcasts, this is your last opportunity this year on the 2nd of November. All right, here's my chat with the wonderful Mankon Magan. So Mankon, you're back again. And I had you back on because my podcast last week that I did

really overlapped with a lot of themes that you and I speak about and when I was doing the podcast I was thinking of yourself and then I realized you have a new book out at the moment now so I figure what a brilliant time to get Man Con back on so firstly I want to mention your new book which is called Listen to the Land Speak so what is the new book that you're doing what was the process like uh making it so you know i had had that book whatever 32 words for field which was looking at the insights that the irish language gives into our psyche into the landscape into the other world into our heritage but i decided i'd love to look at what the ask the same question about landscape like what insights does the landscape give into all of these

elements into our into the old world into our psyche into the other world and because i think i told you last time about this thing that was in the shanachas more the great collection the first literary writing down collection of our great ancient or you know literature that went right right back is is the shanachas the one that's a little bit like a glossary like an ancient glossary of places though that's the din shanachis yeah it is the din shanachis is that it's the glossary of places but the shanachis more is just it's actually the first written collection of all the old law tracts and what's shanachis mean what does that word mean shanachis shanachis just means lore it means yeah but it comes from shan old so it's basically old thing the old thing you know the old information the old lore and um

the shanachas more in other words the big collection of the old lore was just all the ancient law tracts and it seems like when linguists look at our at our written heritage they see the law tracts are definitely the oldest because they're in a language a really really primitive really early form of irish language so it seems that although they were accorded in the 8th century they're way way older but they were passed down from mouth to mouth by the druids in a way that they never changed they they were so we get these insights into way old um culture and in one in theachas Móir, this vast tract of knowledge, there's a question and it says, what is the preserving shrine? In other words, how is information kept from the old age to now?

And it says, what is the preserving shrine? And the answer is easy. It is memory and all that is contained within it. So that's just, it's giving honor to the druid to the shaman to the the male figure normally who kept the the lineage the climate um information the information right right back to the first settlers alive in their minds and then it asked the question again so the first time it says what is the preserving shrine easy it is language it is memory and all that is preserved in it and then to reiterate the question and ask the question again, what is the preserving shrine? And the second time they repeat

the question, they say, easy, it is landscape and all that is preserved in it. So what they're trying to say is that the Druids, the ritual priests who kept all the knowledge from the ancient, ancient times, maybe back to the first settlers who came here 9,000 or 10,000 years ago after the Ice Age, kept the memory alive in memory, in other words, in songs and in rhythms and in sagas. But how were they going to keep that memory alive without it going astray? Or without writing, in the absence of writing.

Exactly. From mouth to mouth doesn't work, because we change it every time we say it yeah but you see once you encode it into the land once you have a story that then is connected to a particular landscape you can't get it wrong um because every adventure every insight every story is connected to a particular place so actually all of our information is encoded is like held in memory is banked in the landscape and that's so what would be a practical example of that because the one thing that's jarring me about that is i live in like right now

like i'm worried about my fucking memory because i have a smartphone like i i kind of don't even have to remember shit anymore because i just have it on my smartphone it's there and to think of a culture whereby writing doesn't exist so we need to keep the history within the landscape like what does that look like is that i mean is that like last week i my podcast was about the history of the river shannon and how the shannon came about when a woman called shannon was messing around with conlan's well and then you had this beautiful story about the river shannon like is that an example of what they mean by this myths and stories about specific elements in the landscape and once you have that you don't forget shit exactly so in some way you could tell the birth

of the shannon is just a story about a young girl you know but actually it's all the information that's encoded within that story and luckily we're only beginning to realize the story that's encoded now because experts because like scholars are going back into the myths and reading reading into them seeing the the information that's in them so for example the shannon shona the young goddess or otherwise um tf o'rally the great gaelic scholar who was a relation of mine, connected to the O'Reilly, he had this idea that it was actually Shanna, Shanna, old Anya, Anya being the goddess of Munster. The powerful, An means brightness or illumination. And so Anya is the genitive of An. So basically the god Anya of Tuatha Dé Danann, probably the Anya.

Anya is everything in Munster. She is the goddess of the warmth of the sun of the light. And so the Shunna is either Shana Anya, old Anya, or Shunna, a goddess in herself, or also it could be Sina. Sina means a teat or a breast. And what all of these things point to is that she is the maternal, she's the earth goddess, she is mother earth, okay? Sina, the breast, where the humans suck on for their nourishment. Shana, a young girl,

but then why would it be old Anya? Because if we're saying the whole thing about the story that you would have told last week, it was a young girl seeking more knowledge, seeking more information, so she goes to Cun as well. But then why do we have Shana Anya you which is old on

you because remember the kaila the kaila is the personification of ancient hag the old woman the wrinkled old woman who brings in the winter who destroys life and vibrancy and fertility and creates the blackness the demise the the death, the destruction of winter. But according to that old lore we had, the Cailach was the exact same person as Bridget. In other words, the young, fertile, nubile representation of spring. So we... And you mean Saint Bridget there? No, I think, I mean, well, I mean both.

I mean the pagan goddess Bridget who then became Saint Bridget. Wow, I didn't know that, well, I mean both. I mean the pagan goddess Bridget who then became Saint Bridget. Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, the exact same thing. But you see, because you and I think in a linear way, we think someone is either old or young, okay? Fuck. We think someone, but of course we have to break out. Our ancestors didn't think linear.

They didn't have linear time. That's a very Western thing, a modern thing. Everything was circular. So that's why the Kaila who destroys winter, she's the exact same being as the Bridget who brings in spring. She's both ancient and young, as all of us are both evil and good. We are all both ancient and young. We're all both wise and stupid.

And is that because, like, so that secular nature of time there, is that because time to those people was very much about the seasons? Exactly, exactly. All they could see was the sun coming up and going down. They could see the crops growing and then dying. Everything was was circular, was seasonal. Nothing was linear. And they had a sense like that. That idea of Samhain of the first of November November the idea where the dead would come back to the living so it wasn't even about linear lifespans the the human being would have a lifespan but then they could we could reconnect with them at Samhain everything was was linear so just to give you

a sense so let's say the Shonan so anyway she's this young goddess as you say as you two would have told she went to the to the well have told. She went to the well. So why does she go to the well? Remember, she wants to become a better communicator. Yeah, that's what I want to know. Why? Is she an artist? What does she want?

What knowledge does she want? Yeah. And, you know, you would have come across a few different versions of the story. But actually, and some say she's a poet and she wants to have even better poetry. Some say she's a musician and she wants to have even better poetry. Some say she's a musician and say that she wants better music. Some say she's just a young leader and she wants to be more wise. But all of those three things are saying the same thing. She wants to grow. She wants higher consciousness. She wants to expand herself to be more creative. Self-actualization.

Exactly. So that she can then touch more people so that she can shine more brightly that's all those three things so that she can shine more brightly okay so what did she do she goes on a voyage like the buddha did like everyone did like every seeker does she goes to kundal well the well of longevity the well of wisdom the well of insight and she gets enlightened according to the story but then as you would have said the well rises wisdom, the well of insight. And she gets enlightened, according to the story. But then, as you would have said, the well rises up and drowns her. Now, when we're listening to these stories, the beauty is we need to use our own intuition to listen to them and read what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. Now, for a certain point of that time, a young girl wanting,

as you said, self-actualization, wanting insight, that resounds, that resonates with us because that's what humanity have always done to do. The woman then, or the young girl then getting drowned, being destroyed by, as she seeks it. No, that mightn't be true. That could be a male layer that's put on top of it. Either the male druid or the monks or maybe even the 19th century transcribers who were of a Victorian male would have seen, oh, look, this is an uppity young girl who wants to grow more, wants to expand, wants to get into her power.

Let's change the end of the story to say she dared and by daring to do it, she gets killed. Just as a little message to any other uppity women. This is what happens if you dare to get out of your own limited place because it would like you could you contrast that with fun mccool you know he was told don't fuck with that fish and he fucked with the fish and he got all the knowledge in the world there was no cautionary tale there exactly exactly so we so it's a really exciting time where there's really good researchers going back to these mythologies and realizing okay we haven't been told the full uh history of it

one tiny thing i just want to point out there as well man con that i adored about that story with shannon so i was reading it as okay she was a poet and she wanted inspiration and what i loved was when i want inspiration what i look for is flow that's what i want i want creative flow and i just adore that here i am using the english language and the accepted term for to to achieve inspiration in psychology of creativity is flow and again it's water language oh that's beautiful that is beautiful isn't it amazing like what the fuck's that about like creative flow is an established word in creative psychology you're so right yeah and we all know every one of us listening to this realize we do get a sense of bigger intuition or a sense of ease or clear

thinking with water whether we even go to a lake yeah or even water and flames water like water staring into water or staring into flames both of those things if if i because i spoke last week i was talking about what the shannon means right now and the mythology of the shannon right now and right now it's quite dark. And what I was speaking about was. I'm in Limerick. And in Limerick. The Shannon is fucking huge.

It's the mouth of the Shannon. The Shannon is a huge part of our city. And I throughout my life. Will often go to the Shannon. Just to look in. Because I want that daydream mesmerizing. That the current will give me. I can't do that anymore

because the rate of suicide in Limerick is so high that if I, as a man in his 30s, especially after dark, choose to look into that river, people will stop their cars or suicide prevention people in high-vis jackets will come and stop me. Which I just found, I found that profound because that's the mythology of the river

now it's like this was created because shona drowned and flowed down the river and i without even knowing this story go to the river looking for inspiration and i'm not allowed because it triggers a trauma response in people now that's what the that's what the landscape tells us now trauma and we have the helicopter that we call the mechanical banshee oh god there's nothing i can say back to that except how far we've gone as you said it's a perfect example of how far we've gone there's a beauty in it because in a way we're carrying on that tradition in a way, but there's also a tragedy in that beauty. Even, like I said, the Mechanical Banshee. No one decided that.

No one said, oh, wouldn't that be a clever name? It's what we call the helicopter and its relationship with the River Shannon, the Mechanical Banshee. It's still there in our, I don't want to say DNA, but it's there in our fucking irishness and how we speak so where are we we're in this place where as you say we're in a place of real of real grim despair and yet somehow we have clung on to the knowledge that can lead us back we haven't lost it we it's still in stories it's still in the songs it's

still in the books but as you're saying we've got so far so this is almost the moment either we grab it now and we re-listen to these knowledge and we redirect ourselves to how our ancestors did get nourishment from rivers how they did get healed um are we keep on exploiting our rivers we keep like all of the rivers in munster now are just polluted with nitrates so it's a it's it's and and this great movement to steal so much of the water from the shannon and just exploit and bring it over to dublin um so we're at the data centers yeah we're at this knife point this in the 10th century text to collect the colloquy of the two sages it says that the bank of a body of water was a place

where knowledge was always revealed for poets. And you see the exact same thing in India. That's why you go to Varanasi and you go to the Ganges and everything is about what the wisdom comes from rivers. It wasn't just an Irish thing. It was an Indo-European thing. The rivers flow, as you say. They bring you energy.

They inspire us. They're not meant to be places of death. They're not, they're just not. One thing I wanted to ask you there, because I found it fascinating. When you were speaking about the story of Shona, you just casually mentioned,

oh, by the way, my relative, T.F. O'Rahilly. Like, how does it feel for you to be doing this work that you're doing? And when you consult the writing on it, you're literally consulting with your direct ancestors as if you're conducting a type of family business. That's mad. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what to make of this. It's mad. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what to make of this.

And I hadn't thought about it until I made that connection with Eoghan O'Reilly, you know, the last great poet of the Bardic tradition, who was writing from about 1640 to about 1730. And it was taught that he was, I think I told you on maybe a podcast before, he was entitled to wear the cloak of crimson bird feathers. Now, this is a poet or an olaf. He such a hierarchy what year are we talking here this is 1640 to 1730 so the end of the 17th century beginning of the 18th century and he was most people acknowledge he was the last of that bard of the bardic tradition and if he's entitled to wear a cloak of crimson birds feathers that's pure paganism that's druid basically you know

because what happened we have the druids and obviously before the druids we must have had some sort of matriarchal culture because the druid the druid kings are brahmins they're male they're powerful male figures okay but they obviously they were nature worshippers so they saw the god in the bird in the eagle in the oak tree in in life and so they would have worn almost like this shamanic cloak of the bird feathers because they got their power from the birds as so many you know primitive animistic cultures did so along comes christianity and the christians say saint patrick says no we can't have druids anymore we're bringing the new law in but you can keep some elements of your druidic powers so the druids just like they were identical to the Brahmins, really,

in the same ways that Brahmins can be very elite and posh and snobby and exploitative today. And so were the druids, to be fair. Any powerful figure that is given so much respect normally sort of rots. Were they viewed as magical or simply very learned people or very learned men? It's hard to know, but it seems they claimed at least they had magical power. They had so many different strains to them. They were the historians. They were the collectors of the lore, of the genealogy.

The key thing was that they remembered the genealogy of the people. And you see, that's why the king couldn't be a king unless someone traced his genealogy and said, yes, you're entitled to be a king because you can trace yourself back to the first settlers. So there was no computers, there were no libraries, it was all in the druid's head. So that's why in the town of Cuilne and in other stories, the king has to defer to the druid. The druid tells the king to do something

and the king does it because the druid had memory. The druid is basically Google. But the druid then is obviously a very corruptible individual was there any stories of people either threatening a druid or bribing a druid or getting a druid because it'd be quite convenient if the druid lies and goes oh you're actually the son of god or something like that or you know what i mean so yeah so there are there are but in this way so let's say the druid is pre-Christian, so we don't have, in a way, a written account. But the Druid comes along and St. Patrick says to him,

you either have to go or you can become a poet. You can become a filler. So you can keep your literary side. Because the Druid has three different sides. Oh my God, I didn't know that. The Druids became the poets. Well, they became the Druids, the poets, and they became the early saints.

Okay, so you imagine the druid has everything. The druid has all the knowledge of the genealogy, all the knowledge of the history. He also has the power to say words and that they would manifest things, like Amargan did, the great druid, the great poet. So his words could manifest reality. And also his words could curse and could bless. His words had magical ability in the world

to to manifest and create things um and he was also a spiritual sort of um a high priest so he'd all those elements along comes saint patrick and he says no we're the spiritual high priests but you can keep your literary element and if you want the philly obviously the poets the philly and the olive and olive is just a high poet olive which is now our modern word for professor which originally meant a high poet who had done like many years of study they said okay we'll keep our poetic abilities that we can compose we can say things words but are actually we're going to claim our words actually have impact in the world they can manifest things so Egon O'Reilly, my great-granduncle, four times removed, in other words,

great, great, great, great-granduncle, who lived in Sleveluch, on the Cork-Carrie border, in, as I said, the end of the 17th, early 18th century, he was renowned for being able to, his expertise was at the Eir, the satire. And his satires were so dark and so powerful that they could raise a fad up on someone's cheek and a fad up means a welt so he was his words could actually have physical

impact on the world they were like a slap exactly yeah even yeah exactly i mean they could they could you could you could curse a person's cattle with the words so there's loads of accounts of the poets using this power of um like kings were so afraid because if they if they wrote a satire against the king they could pollute the land they could pollute the cattle they could pollute the kingdom with their words so there's loads of accounts of poets being corrupt and going if they if they didn't get the right hospitality from a king they would write a really evil slur on him and then the king would be destroyed um and so that filler by doing that the corrupt poet was actually following the corrupt um druids traditions so what you have

there is the modern equivalent is how how certain journalists or how certain news channels would be in the pocket of politicians exactly exactly yeah because i mean when we're saying that the king you know is afraid of the poet yes saying a satire the reason that the king is bribing the hell out of the poet and giving them the best of things and even the knight of glen you know desmond fitzgerald until he died whenever 10 years ago he was so good to the poets and the artists and the harpists and musicians of around Glynn, of Limerick, of South Limerick, Kerry Border, because he recognized that his ancestors, the Gaelitris. But also, well, the Dimitris had an agenda. They were trying to create a Christian church. But the Gaelic lords and the Norman lords really probably loved the arts,

but also they wanted the poet in their pocket so the poet would then praise them and increase their power. And then becoming a poet becomes a pretty cool job because you have a patron forever with a ton of money and you're sorted. Exactly. Were there any hipster ones then?

Were there any like, so if you think of it back then, all right, there's your local poet and it's like, oh, look at him. He's got his fancy clothes, whatever. He's got all the money in the world, but everything he writes, he's writing good things about whoever's in power. Were there any like hipster,-cultural lads going fuck that i don't want your money man my words are the truth i'm gonna say what i want there were actually and um interestingly some like i was somewhere early saints so let me just two first ones is what i mean yeah i don't want a record label i i'm incorruptible yeah the the two one one first is one that chemistini really popularized,

and that was Mad Sweeney. So do you remember, Mad Sweeney is a king. He gets banished and he gets cursed and sent out of his kingdom, and then he spends his life roaming the wild trees, composing this most beautiful, pure, radical, sort of Timothy Leary-esque nature poetry, saying, I cursed a lot of you and your corrupt greedy ways i just want to live and enjoy the lichen on the tree and the blackberries and

he and that's he ended up in the well of madness down in kerry with the lithium in the well that's right they find minor trace trace elements you know there's a man a professor of geology uh bruce lipton from trinity who has he's retired and he's now gone around every well in ireland to to do chemical analysis on every well and wow i i knew about the one down in kerry but i didn't know about the rest yeah the one in kerry now to be fair i know there was a teaching documentary and said there was a lot of lithium in it it's actually professor brendan kelly of trinity college professor of psychiatry has said it's only the minus trace elements. But at the same time, the story about Glowne Galt in Kerry said that the mad people used to go there and settle there for quite a while.

And eat the watercress. Yeah, exactly. So you see, good point. So it's concentrated in the watercress. And clearly, if you just go and drink a cup of it, you're not going to a little of lithium but if you're living by it for a few months or years then maybe you could build it up so there could still be be truth in that but back to king sweeney so we we know that king sweeney ended up there but so he was cursing everybody in the land so what were you going to continue with there i was just going to the other examples of really cool hipster poets are the poets who became the early saints.

Fuck! So, okay, the druid had a choice. The druid had a choice. Either I'm going to become a poet or fill it and keep in with the kings and have my comfortable life. Or if I want to keep the sacred element, which I've always been practicing, let's say for the good druids who weren't interested in their power but they actually had connection with god and saint they decided okay all i need to become is a saint and that's why like column killer you know column killer all you know about that's amazing yeah no come saint column killer means column is a dove okay he's the saint of the dog yeah and then where is he he's in dairy the oak tree and the only thing we know about the druids

is they worshipped in nemata which are groves of oak forests they're sort of clearings in a woodland and it's normally taught that they were oak these nemata so the druid who was bringing his people to a tiny little clearing in an oak forest and then connecting to them with the energy of the oak and the energy of the dove he then most likely becomes column kill column kill and that's why all these images of Cullum, of the early, some of the early saints, are just like nature-loving St. Francis. Yeah.

But the other thing too that I'm thinking is the early saints, so if we're thinking of, okay, there might have been some Druids who were being heavily, getting a good patronage from their patrons. Like, the early saints were absolute hipsters they were like i don't want money i'm an ascetic i want to live in a fucking cave i want to live in a monastery i i don't need anything other than the love of god and just to write these books that's incorruptible from the

power of the land that's right yeah yeah and that's why rome was never comfortable what was happening with irish christianity because it kept so much of its paganism, its animism, its nature worship alive within this really controlling Roman center. And wasn't concerned with human people. It wasn't concerned with popes or bishops or people who were in power. It's the land and nature and spirituality. And we kept that alive right up until the 19th century. You know, the Catholic Church did not have a hold on mainstream Ireland until after the famine.

You know, we were always, I mean, there was always, obviously there was churches, but any of the big churches you're seeing in Ireland, you know, they're all 19th century, late 19th century churches. So the church in Ireland was a very humble, very nature, local nature worshipping small thing. There was obviously elements of the roman church trying to push into it and particularly um the protestant church on top but actually it was a pretty humble it was very different from that powerful mainstream church and so which is positive because if we want to get back to a more encompassing spiritual practice we don't need to go back to pre-saint patrick we just need to go back to pre, you know, the 1850s, 1860s,

when the church realized, just like they realized in Africa, this is a wounded, damaged people on their knees. We can come over and take over absolute control. Let's have a little break now for the ocarina pause, where you're going to hear a little advert. Before I do that, actually, follow Mancon on social media, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

He's at M-A-N-C-H-A-N M-A-G-A-N Mancon Magan. Here is the ocarina pause. You're going to hear an advert that is digitally inserted by Acast. Actually, I have a new ocarina I forgot. That's quite a high-pitched one.

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This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Jimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder. April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit TSO.ca That's a nice ocarina. It's got lots of different size holes. Okay, that was the ocarina pause. Support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast this podcast is my full-time job this is what i

do for a living i adore this work it's an absolute pleasure to be able to bring this podcast to you each week and to spend my time researching and writing this podcast. I love doing it. But if it brings you entertainment, solace, joy, laughter, distraction, whatever reason you have that you come listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I do with this podcast. Become a patron of this podcast is what I'm asking. Now, if you can't afford that, I understand. I've more and more people coming to me saying, sorry, Blind Boy, I love the podcast,

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And thank you to all the patrons of this podcast, because what it also does is it keeps this podcast independent i'm not beholden to any advertiser advertisers advertise on this podcast on my terms but none of them can tell me what to speak about to adjust my content in any way because that's what they do if you get a sponsor for a podcast they don't give a fuck about you making the best piece of work. They want you to make the piece of work that gets the most listens. And if I want the most listens,

I'm not going to do a podcast about Irish folklore, Irish mythology. I'm going to do a podcast about whatever the fuck is trending on the internet this week. Or worse, I'll try and be controversial. I'll platform some fucking prick who doesn't need to be platformed. Well, I won't be doing that because if that's what it came to, I wouldn't be making a podcast. But this environment is why so many podcasts are atrocious today and why the podcast space in general has become so corporate. And it is has become so corporate and it is overshadowing and crippling

small independent creators who just want to make podcasts about what they're passionate about which is the reason we all started listening to podcasts in the first place to get away from what was terrible about television or terrible about radio spaces that became destroyed by money

and the need for ratings and listeners. So support your favorite independent podcasts. Do it directly, monetarily, or just share it online. Tell a friend about it. Share it on your Instagram stories. Tweet about it. Whatever independent podcaster you enjoy, support them in some way i'm back on twitch on thursday nights twitch.tv forward slash the blind boy podcast doing my never-ending musical my never-ending video game musical i'm going a bit earlier now i tend to log in at around half seven or eight just a few upcoming live podcast gigs um got those two dates in Vicar Street. The 1st and 2nd of November. The 1st is sold out.

You might get one or two tickets if you checked. Someone might have given one or two back. You might get one if you checked. Still tickets available for the 2nd. On the 5th of November I'm in Wexford in the Spiegel tent. I'm in Brussels on the 18th of November.

Or this month actually on the 30th of October I'm at the Puka Festival up in Meath and then 3rd of December I'm in the TLT Theatre in Dredda now back to my chat with the wonderful Mankan Magan one thing I'd love to ask you about because I don't know enough about it is the importance of harp music in Irish culture someone described

it to me recently as Ireland's indigenous classical music and I know that Henry VIII I believe it could be wrong banned Irish harp music what can you tell us about uh harp music and why was it so important and why were the composers so important i don't think i know no i've met two people who are doing one over in in saint paul's or minnesota recently who's done some really interesting research on it and she sent me her book and i haven't even i haven't opened it yet so i don't know what's interesting that you go into trinity college and there you have the brian barue harp that guinness then just flicked it on its side there's some resonance there that we need to encode and it's interesting it's on our coins it's trying to tell us something um well it was whatever the fuck it was about it

it was banned yeah so as soon as something is banned i'm very interested in it going well why was this so powerful why did you need to ban this harp? What did it mean? But like every element of our culture, wasn't it like our language was banned? Our holy wells were banned. Going to the holy wells in the 17th century was either there was a fine or whipping. When we say holy, does that mean Christian holy or is it a holiness that goes before Christianity? Like what is it with us and wells? Because we seem to be quite obsessed with the old wells. Yeah, so, yeah,

I shouldn't probably say holy, I should probably say sacred well. So, like, if you look at the book, the accounts, the early Christian accounts of either St. Patrick or St. Bridget or Colmcille, they spend their whole time

doing this thing called seining wells. They'd go to a pagan well and they would have a druid and a gathering of people who would be around this well and they would turn up there, christian saint and say uh i am going to rid the evil devil from your well and i'm going to bring in the god of say of christianity to it and all of you then need to

baptize yourselves in the well so then they'd turn up like this but they turn up with an army because these were like really violent it seems they they were violent encounters at the edge of every well. A bit like, anyway, and the act was called sainting, basically sainting, I suppose, or, you know, making a well. And were these people protecting their well then? Get the fuck away from it with this Christianity. That's right. Well, obviously, well, the church came and realized,

okay, all the worshipping is happening in Ireland around these sacred wells. So we know that Nemeton, the groves in the forest where they worshipped, when the groves of these oak trees look exactly like cathedrals, it seems uncanny that then, you know, in the Gothic era, we created this cathedral that looked exactly like forest, probably remembering how we used to worship. But so there were the groves. But then in Ireland, it seems to have been these wells that were the places, because the reason we know that is because there's so many accounts in the early christian lives of the early saints eyes of the saints going to the well finding the

pagans there and converting the pagans and so what are they why are they going to the wells okay we know from so much that it seemed for me the neolithic tombs the ritual sites and the nouth and the doubt and newgrange lock crew and all that that they're all this this passageway leading in to a womb-like center a magical chamber at the center of a of a hill which looks like a pregnant woman and you know the male the passageway once or twice a year the sun the male the sun is a male figure in so many in belief systems so the male sends his phallus sends his penis down through the into the vulva, the outside mouth of the passage tomb, down through the vaginal passageway into the basically into the womb, impregnates the

womb. So we know that male and female thing has always been a thing. And the land has been a female, a great female with different orifices. The chambers are man-made orifices designed so that the phallus of the sun can direct into them. But the other natural orifices, almost like these teal in the gig things, are the wells. The wells are basically vulvas. They're entrances into the goddess energy. And we know because in all the stories of Tyrannog, and again, just with Tyrannog, we're back to this nonlinear thing. Because most of us don't understand Tyrannog because we don't yeah think of it in a it's a parallel universe as such isn't it exactly and it's not tiernanog is the other world and tiernanog the same thing yeah as far as we know so tiernanog like it

doesn't mean the land of of the young it's the land of no age it's basically the the einstein idea of there being beyond time so it's not that people are young or old, they're just beyond time. It's on another realm. Wow. Which ties up with, that's more in line with modern physics than the idea of heaven and hell,

which is end times and you die and then there's something above it. I love that about the Irish Christianity. Or sorry, the Irish mythology. Yeah, it's pure Heisenberg or Einstein, exactly. Long linear sequences. And so there's so many different names for it. You know,

Toch Dunn, the House of the Fairy Lord Dunn, or Inis Suva, the Island of Joy, or Arag Hach, the Silver House, or Mághá Thió, the Plane of Two Mists. Yeah, mist is another thing. Anytime I read about the other world, it's within in Irish mythology. Anytime there's mist present, it's like this is something that leaks from the other world or is used to cloak figures from the other world when they try and exist in our world. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you get from that?

So do you remember that word skim? I had my first book, Skim. Skim means, it means a magical mist or fairy mist that covers the land in the early morning, or it also means succumbing to the other world through sleep. So mist was that way of acknowledging the fuzziness between this reality and all of the other realities. And that great idea of high Brazil, you know, this island that's off the southwest coast of Ireland. That was obscured by mist. Exactly. And so explorers, you know, from the 16th century on, really from the 14th century when it appeared on maps, used to hunt for this island. But the Irish realized there's no point hunting for it

because it's hidden in the mist until every seven years. So going for it, looking for it, exploring it during the wrong point in that every seven years so going for it looking for exploring it during the wrong point in that every seven year period it's like looking for a blackberry in the middle of winter it's just not going to be there so the irish it's you know it's a beautiful idea that there's yes and it's not about that there's some some noise exists it can exist and not exist at the same time which as you said which is quantum physics exactly exactly yeah and so just back so so we were talking about wells and we keep going a little tangents but we were talking about

wells and why wells are so important and you were speaking about the the reproductive organs of the land yeah yeah so um the well so it's this entranceway into the other world and the other world was you know tiernan oak whichever way you want to describe it, it is everything. But the main description of Tir na Nog is at the center of it, there is a well. And the well at the center of Tir na Nog, so, you know, every well is linked to every other well, it was taught, because there's this underground water system. Everything is connected. Wow. So the well in Tir na Nog is a birthplace of humanity. So the events, even like probably of the entirety of existence, starts from this well, which is why Shona goes to Cunna's well.

Because if you tap into Cunna's well, the magical well underneath the Atlantic Ocean that gave birth to the Shannon, it's connected to the well at the centre of Tir na Nog. And they're all part of this mother goddess this entity this beingness that gives birth not only to the planet but to existence and do you remember we have a name for that mother goddess no not really um i mean yeah bit is one word so bit was considered to be the first person who arrived in ireland bit means you still have it in irish bit in the irish is rudder bit anything at anything at all. A bid is everything. A bid also means the cosmos. And so it's used, still used in modern Irish,

rudderbid, but actually bid means the cosmos. It means everything. But around this tree, around this well, sorry, Cunliswell, or the well at the centre of Tirnan Oak, they're the same well. They're just a well of everything. Parallel universes. Yeah, was these hazel trees you know you probably

heard you know shun and gets her magic because the the nine hazel trees they're hazels in the form of cold crimped which is hazel of insight or bulligis bubble of knowledge or bubble of wisdom fall into the well and these these nine hazel trees are not only are they the they're not only in transforming the neutral water of the well into this potent potion of wisdom but they're also the axis of the world in the same way as sanskrit thought as vedic or hindu thought has this world axis being a tree with its roots going right down to the bottom it's it's leaves going right up and it basically being the spine in yoga you know everything comes from this central,

it's the tent post of the circus realm in which we currently inhabit. It is everything. And one of the branches of this tree that overlooks the main magical well that is tied into all the other well is the silver branch. And John Moriarty spent his life trying to, the great philosopher from Kerry, spent his life trying to describe the silver branch. It's like, it's impossible.

It's basically sacredness. It's a metaphor for a concept that's like beyond our ability to communicate. But I'll tell you, it's said that every single living soul exists in the form of a bird on that silver branch. So it's basically everything at all it's just it would blow your mind even me start when i try and think about this okay around this well which is connected to all of the wells which is connected to all seas and all lakes and all rivers which is the mother goddess has these trees which are these straight linear more male things and one of the branches of these trees is the silver branch and the silver branch is all consciousness and that has every single soul in the form of a bird um whatever perched on its branches so that's why

when you go to a well you're tapping into basically the biggest lsd trip basically it's blowing your mind um and we're amazing we kept all of that even the christian church allowed us keep these wells alive and a lot of them have a saint connected to them but even your local priest when he tells you And we're amazing. We kept all of that. Even the Christian church allowed us to keep these wells alive. And a lot of them have a saint connected to them. But even your local priest, when he tells you the stories about the saint, will say, ah, yeah, but this was actually a pagan god who then took on the name of the saint. Because even one thing, Mancon, that I can't get out of my head right now as we're talking about this is, like, we do love our holy water like irish catholicism holy

water was a big deal growing up and is our love of holy water like even though that's a catholic thing is that tied in with our well worship yeah um and well i suppose first i should say you know although it's amazing that our wells have been so important and water the holy water from the well is real is key this was a global thing it just shows you know there's nothing elite there's nothing exception about ireland so many primitive cultures still have holy sacred wells and they have magical beings either in the form of worms or snakes or pastes or crocodiles who appear and disappear from the well so we have it in ireland egypt has it eustonia has it south america has it and the idea of imbibing some of that water or taking a little bottle of that water and that water then healing you is, as you said, still powerful. You used to listen to the Jerry Ryan show or any absolutely global, too, because it goes back to, you know, pre-farming.

Like if I said we're sort of Bronze Age people who arrived here four and a half thousand years ago, there were the Neolithic people who came before. We're almost learning about civilization on the banks of the Nile and coming together when the Nile flooded and then disappearing, or just coming together when the Nile retreated and dissipating and when it flooded and learning these things and learning that water is sacred, which all of us do. And learning, of course, the important thing with the Nile is that any time the Nile would retreat and come back, it would bring with it nutrients that would be responsible for the next year's crop.

Exactly, which is exactly why theannon is our most worshipped river um there's a great because it's dragging because the other thing i was trying to say last week when i was talking about wells like springs and wells are fantastic because they bring nutrients from far far deep in the earth and they bring them up to the surface and these are quite beneficial to either fertilize crops or for our brains when we drink the water like magnesium calcium zinc all of this shit that's hard to find in food but it's not hard to find when you have a good source of mineral water that drags it up from the rocks you see you said it exactly and what a modern like academic anthropologist will come along and say oh all of this talk of sacredness is rubbish. People worship the trees or the rivers because they grow broad nutrients, because they fertilize this crop.

What they're not realizing is it's not one or the other. It's yes and. Neil MacQuitter, the great writer who writes about the trees of Ireland and the animals, he has this point about, he talks about buffalo. The reason that the Native American worshiped the buffalo is because the buffalo were sacred to them, but also the buffalo were incredibly useful. They gave the hide, they gave the meat, they gave the water, they tromped the ground, they fertilized the ground. So it's yes and. The creature or the entity or the element that is most practical and useful to the people also becomes the most worshipped which is why the oak tree was so important to the Irish it gave us dye it gave us pigment for writing our charts it gave us the strongest wood for making our our buildings um it gave us the leaves to make different tannin for preserving things in a way so this this is going back to the the initial point that we opened with which was you you were speaking about not the Dinshankas, the other, the Shankas Moor. Shankas Moor, yeah. the memory of the druid and then also in the land then if you have one well and this one particular

well has loads of nutrients and minerals and it's a fantastic place then of course you're going to make fucking stories about it because then you won't forget it exactly yeah again there's some amazing um anthropologists and professors of geography and minute are really going into the wells of ireland and are real and and seeing that there was a psychological element to wells. Sometimes all of us need a place apart, a place to calm our minds or a place if we have a really sore back or if we have a pain in our head or a foot, we need a therapy. We need to go to a GP or a consultant or a clinic. The well was doing that too. It was a place where you could heal your mind or your body and so humans have always created that even when you go to a spa now and you listen to the music they play they play the sound of a slow babbling brook not a big loud river but that gentle

tinkling of a small little stream or spring it calms the mind totally exactly and you remember most wells if you think of most holy wells most of them will either have a sacred tree or a sacred rock or a sacred slab of stone beside them so it wasn't just the well these were this you know like we could talk about how trees are sacred to the irish consciousness and the consciousness of so many early societies but the tree had magic had potency in it too so often you'll have you know an ash tree or a willow tree or a rowan bending over connected to the tree and then there'll be a stone and most wells have a ritual you enact at the place in the exact same as most neolithic stone sites the passage tombs and all will have this seems to be a route way that you

go around Deshel, you go around Sunwise and doing particular actions. So it's not only that you're going to visit the metaphorical vastness of the goddess, the vulva, the vagina entrance into the vastness of the god, but also you are connecting with the sacred tree which is almost the phallus the male energy and then you have this rock that either you are touching the rock or you are scraping the rock or you are winding your way you're walking around the rock so it is this choreographic movement too it and so you're having the psychological blissness as well as you said the calmness the place beyond um and the magical element the idea that most whales have a patron day a day that where they are particularly on where they are where the

interface between them and the other world is at its weakest and who decides this i mean was that corresponding with nature i mean i know in ireland too we have these things called turlocks which are lakes that just arrive out of nowhere seasonally did you see that fact like uh so yeah we've loaded turlocks in the burren and elsewhere in ireland but how many that i can't remember maybe there's about 1200 turlocks in ireland and how many no maybe there's like i said there's one 1225 or some turlocks in the world how many are in ireland there's like yeah what the fuck is that about yeah there's a seasonal lake yeah but there's only there there's only two outside of ireland okay there's about the 1222 are in ireland and two are outside of ireland turlocks are utterly unique to ireland

and as you say nothing is more magical a lake that appears um either for a season or it can appear for five years and then disappear. And I love how Irish it is, because that sounds like something an Irish person would say. There's a lake over there, but it's not there now, but it'll be there next year. That's pure Irish madness. Exactly. And most, well, a lot of turdocks, particularly the ones in the burn, will have this peisht, this monster or this worm who lives in the sinkhole beneath where the well, where the lake appears from and disappears. When I say it's a sinkhole, sometimes you don't see the sinkhole beneath where the where the well where the lake appears from

disappears when i say it's a sinkhole sometimes you don't see the sinkhole because it's just a it's just a bit of clay at the bottom at the navel at the umbilicus of the of this magical lake that appears and disappears and it does it because you know it's it's geography geographically it's to do with limestone systems and the complexity but it's unique that the fact that 99.9 percent of these are in ireland you won't find them any anywhere else um and it reminds me i mean i could spend all night if i where are the other two in wales i think the other two are in wales okay um you know there's i mean i'd love to get into the the whole idea of for lakes disappearing about loch gur but i just there's one point i wanted to say from the beginning as you were saying the shanachas more and it says the memories in the landscape

and we were saying but as you say you don't remember even things that happened a week ago none of us did now and you asked me how did our ancestors remember and I sort of said vaguely they remembered because they put the memories into the landscape but that didn't make sense to me until this year I was out in Alberta

in Edmonton, Alberta I was bringing my show Ron and Ghazim oh just to say you know I have this podcast called The Almanac of Ireland, and we've looked a lot at Wells. We've brought Bruce Mistier, the professor from Trinity, who's doing the clinical analysis. And we've brought this other man from Maynooth out to Wells to explain just what Wells were about to us. But anyway, I was out in Alberta doing the show, Ron and Ghazim.

And I come to Albertata to edmonton and this delegation of um really senior cree elders indigit first nations people from canada the cree tribe the plains indians tribe they come to me and they present me with this ritual um ritual top the ceremonial uh shirt or top and they say we want to give you this in in recognition of the work that's being done in bringing out the old indigenous knowledge of Ireland and I said first like no I said we can't use I can't use the word indigenous we're white we're exploited we the white people wiped out the indigenous people of Argentina we weren't great in North America either and the Cree elders very senior now they said to me, look, the first thing

is you need to get over all that shit. They said, you don't have time for this. They said anybody who's been living sustainably for the last, you know, thousands of years on one island is indigenous. Anyway, we got into a lot of stuff that took a few days, but one of them was called Jerry Saddleback. Now he was, you know, the way the Canadians have just done this big peace and reconciliation committee into the abuse that was happening in the residential schools, the Indian schools in the 20th century. A lot of that was done by the Catholic Church, wasn't it? Exactly, it was indeed, yeah.

And there were three senior Cree elders, or senior native First Nations elders, oh, we're looking at one, was this man, Jerry Saddleback. And anyway, and so he says to me, he, so he's very senior, okay, and he says, by the age of four, he was able to tell the birth story, the whatever, there's another word for that, you know, the beginning story of his people, the four day story, the story that took four days to tell by the age of four okay um by the age of 16 he was able or 21 i can't remember he was able to tell the four week story of his people the origin story by the age of um that was the age of 16 or 21 now he can tell the four month story of his people so it's the origin we're talking about an oral story that takes four months to tell

we're talking about an oral story that takes four months to tell exactly yeah fucking hell yeah now there's a great irish storyteller there's a great englishman who tells stories in ireland he tells some of the stories called martin shaw he had a good book on john murray artia but he says he needs like four days to tell a good to tell one of the irish stories in their fullness but anyway the first question i asked jerry saddleback i said how do you remember a four month old four months sorry it takes four months to tell he says i can't forget it i cannot miss say a single word because he says before i start the story i need to set up a whole camp a campsite i go out into the land and i recreate the cat this site the entire campsite that I have been told by my ancestors how to do. That I was told, you know, from the age of four, the age of 16, 21.

So he creates round circles and that become rivers and they become mountains and become hills and becomes everything. And when he starts the story on the first day, each single line in the story has a particular movement connected to it. It's pointing at a particular direction of the river or the mountain or the hill or a wind. And he said there'll be a direction. He'll point to a different direction for every line, southwest, east, west.

And each direction has a particular colour attached to it, which I don't know if you know, but Irish winds had a particular colour attached. I know that from Flann O'Brien. Yeah, yeah. So there's a great salt in Iran, a great, i think it's 11th century story that goes into detail about the color connected to each wind anyway so he says like i can't miss say a line because every word i'm

saying is connected to me pointing in a direction a particular movement a particular piece of this vast campsite that he's built out which is a recreation of the area the locality where the story was first told as far as i understand as far as i understand that's the case somehow you know but somehow he's recreating landscape and that's why he never gets it wrong and that's all i can think of that must be how the druids did it that's why our stories are so connected with landscape and that's why when you read native american anthropologists they go into they do the same thing aboriginal australian people have a very similar practice i think it's known as walkabout but it's a form of storytelling that requires a specific journey to be told or you have to embark upon a specific

journey in the land and then the story reveals itself. That's right, exactly the song lines are the Churunga lines and in Aboriginal culture you can have one Aboriginal tribe can come to a new area, an area they've never been before and say the song lines that they have learnt even if they're in a different language of a different Aboriginal tribe

and it will still summon up the landscape around them and it will summon up where the water holes are, where things happened long ago, where the geological happenings happened. And it seems so like so we have, as you say, that's the Aboriginal idea. Then Jerry Saddleback is telling me he has. And he tells me, he says, you know, he says historians say that we didn't have horses. And I said, he says, of course we had horses. I know we had horses i know we

had horses because it's in our origin story he said the origin story can't be wrong and he said so sure enough like 10 years ago five years ago archaeologists found horses the remains of horses from whatever five six thousand years ago and they expected us to be excited we know there are horses they're in our origin story but then the next thing he says he says you know you you're probably you've been told in your in ireland that we came across the bering straits the native american people the first nations people from bering straits to canada down through north america and south america yeah that's wrong he said it's because it's not in our story our story says we've always been here so we know it's true you can you you're you're historians your archaeologists can say what they want i can tell you another few generations you'll find out differently

because we have that story of um sometimes they say it's saint brendan that saint brendan managed to meet native american people yeah on his voyage exactly exactly they're going that's you're bullshitting someone made that up yeah yeah yeah and how did we lose that because that's what breaks my heart about so much of this shit is that just 800 years of being canonized that very very important things just get lost i mean the other thing too like ireland used to be a rainforest and if you have a culture and a mythology that's associated with a land that's a rainforest and then you cut it all down specifically oliver cromwell aggressively cut down all our forests. What stories do you lose and what histories do you lose

when you cut down a fucking rainforest? Yeah, two things I'd say. But I wouldn't just blame it on 800 years on the English. It was the church. So as I said, when the church came in, they told the Druids, you can't keep this ancient knowledge alive. You can keep some of it alive as poets, some of it can be alive as the saints but over the years it got rotted so that we didn't and we don't even know that was like when you know saint patrick came

430 a.d so 1600 years ago maybe the druids had lost a lot of it by then they might have been so corrupted that they had lost their connection um to that so yeah it's going back at least 1600 years the other thing the trees really what happened with the trees it's it's farmers it's not cromwell we had we were yes when we arrived well when the when you know us the bronze age people came four and a half thousand years ago and when the neolithic people who built naut and doubt and new grange came whenever six thousand years ago they came with farming tools that they had learned um in the you know along the pontic steep and then had honed in their time in the middle east and brought them over here and they started messing around the forest not cutting

down the forest first on top of the mountains and that just made the soil slip down the mountains and it made it you know bog came after 500 years it was either it was both some some um geographers will say that it was climate change and some say that it was humans it was probably a mix of both that way we have so much peat bogs because it used to be a far a rainforest yeah well no yes it was we it was a it was a it was a rain it was a coastal tempered rainforest along the atlantic and there was probably a mix of Scots pine up on top of the hills. But it was really fragile. We'd never had much soil, but the trees had slowly grown up and managed.

The minute that you remove those trees, like is happening in the Amazon now, the soil doesn't have enough goodness to hold on. And then the rain washes it off, and then you're left with this um iron pan this white impermeable pan that uh water can't get through and so then that the rotten whatever is the trees that are rotting are just rot on top of that and they create and they form bog so really we've had it was it was farming it was us as the bronze age people we brought these bronze age influence and we're able to cut down more of the trees we destroyed this land farmers destroyed this land and the beauty is like

again this is only a realization i've had in the last probably year i've done quite a lot of talks with native american peoples um and i go and i come out on these zoom calls and i come out with my lovely romantic words from the irish language that show how we're connected with wisdom and all this and magic. And then, but you remember, the name of my book is 32 Words for Fields, which is quite revealing in itself. Basically, so I come up with these lovely words about farming and fields and all the different words for fields. And then the native people will come out with words just about the beauty of nature in its own right, not how we're going to exploit it,

not how we're going to create 32 different types of fields. We are a polluted people because we're a farming people. Whereas the native people are more hunter-gatherer and moving with herds and not necessarily exploitative.

No, and have a bit of farming. And had a lot more land as well to move around as well, in fairness. Totally. And there's nothing wrong with mixing a bit of farming. it's this idea of let's get more and more land and farm more and more so we were fine up until in 1730 there was only three million people in ireland 1730 okay then by 1840 there's 8.5 million that's when you know so you know i mean even when when there was this three three million seventeen we were still slowly eking out into any land we can and cutting down more trees so as you said crummel the english did a lot they took any of the old oak they they took it's often said that they took

it for shipbuilding actually a lot of it was done for for um oil for sorry iron oil or smelting so to make iron cast iron sorry um what's that iron called pig iron glass as well coke i think it's called is it exactly exactly um you know what's the iron the iron gate yeah a pig iron cast iron and the other type of iron is um anyway it'll come to me in a second but yeah you you basically you are creating you're cutting down oak you're creating huge amounts of coke or charcoal from that and then you're making the iron or you're you're cutting down oak, you're creating huge amounts of coke or charcoal from that, and then you're making the iron, or you're heating up the iron to get the iron from that galvanized iron.

That's the one. It's the hammered iron. Huge amounts of that happened in the 18th century using the last of our oak trees. Do you know what I heard on top of that as well, Mankon, which is nuts? It accidentally led to the invention of champagne. Go on.

When the British had an energy crisis and they needed to turn to us for wood, it was making coal, but it was also for their glass industry. The British had a very important glass industry. And then when they started running out of wood, they started using coal. And this probably could have been the 1500s.

They started to use coal and apparently the british had never really used coal because the romans didn't use coal or something like that so when the brits started using coal their glass started getting really really strong and good and then british glass became a desirable commodity then your man dom perignon who was a monk in france he'd was making sparkling wine but he could never keep it in a bottle because the bottle would keep exploding and then finally this british glass that was made from coal because there wasn't enough wood was the only thing that could hold his champagne without exploding and that's how champagne got invented that is brilliant that is brilliant

wow good god the world is complex I know yeah just because the Brits were running out of timber I've looked at uploads the one thing I can't confirm is this idea that the Romans apparently were like don't use coal it comes out

of the earth it's something about that is wrong use timber instead and apparently the british wouldn't go near coal until they finally absolutely had to because they were running out of wood and then they went shit this coal is amazing. We get much stronger glass. Wow. And interesting, there was a fear of coal, this black thing that came from underneath the earth. So I'm going to ask you one last question, which is, I'm just going to bring it back to the book that you have out right now.

What's the book that you have out right now, and what's it about? So the book is called have out right now and what's it about so the book is called listen to the land speak and i just feel that if we do reconnect with our land in other words the the rivers the wells the mountains the the bog there's this vast knowledge that's going to help be nourishing help reass reassure us, make sense of where we are in the world, connect us, make us see why we as a people are different from other people, how we've been living here for four and a half thousand years. And that roots us, that makes us strong

in a sense where everything else is getting lost and we've no idea who the hell we are. Once we know we've been here and we're part of this lineage that has survived in this rocky mad insane island for so long and have found our way not only to survive but to thrive over those four and a half thousand years that can be reassuring so that's one element but the other element that i really wanted i thought this book was just going to be about me telling the mythology the stories of finn mccool and cuchul and connecting to the land i thought it'd be easy enough to do but the minute i started looking up any of the stories of cuchul or finn mccool i just suddenly realized no they're all there of

course but beneath all them there's a layer of stories about goddesses everywhere everywhere in ireland's a story about either anya or shunnan or granya or etna or fola or eraunan or Gráinne or Etna or Fóla or Eire or Banba. Basically all of Ireland is just one big matriarchal goddess story and all of these goddesses are incredibly powerful and the only stories about goddesses that get into our modern consciousness now are things to do

with Queen Maeve, you know, a kick-ass warrior battle woman or the pirate queen Gráinne Wey, another kick-ass male type of margatachi type of person but actually what has been hidden from us on purpose i think is that actually all of the stories are goddesses and of course if the druids and then the priests and the male monks and the male 19th century translators they're all only going to focus on kukul and fimical they're not going to have focused on the other.

So I suddenly wanted to reveal it, particularly because the reason that what blew my head away was when I went down to Limerick, and when I realised about Loch Gurr. I'd never thought about this Loch Gurr, this sort of drab enough lake near Brough or Hospital in the south of Limerick City. And I realised it was connected to Áine,

because Canuck Áine is just beside it, the hill of Áine, and I knew that Áine was a goddess, and as we explained, Áine comes from brightness, the sun, the warmth, so she's the goddess of warmth and brilliance and brightness. But then Lach Gair, I recognised something in it. Lach Gair is just like, it looks like a pregnant belly, just like the New Grains tombs, okay, sticking up in the land. But Gair is a word I remember hearing when i was young like

which is a hen sitting on its eggs gar means incubation it's the hill of incubation okay so you have this land where you have an all all locker it's just full of stories of any of all the different things that happen to this goddess here and whenever there's archaeological digs done in that area you uncover swords and shields and masses and masses of oxen bones so in the 1820s and 30s they were digging up um crate loads of ancient ritual bones were dropping that water and given to every museum particularly during the famine everyone in this area limerick used to dig up these from the lake and then send them to museums all around the world as like signs of ritual symbols, all to do with this lake.

So we have this, the knocker, the lake of incubation, basically the lake of the hatching on this pregnant belly. Basically, it is the goddess Anya. Her belly is, it is the goddess's pregnant belly. And then just to the southwest, on the Cork Kerry border, Shlee of Loughra, are the paps court carry border are the paps of danu the paps of anya the breasts of anya so the whole of munster

is basically one big mother goddess now i'm used to going to as you say australia are going to south america are going to africa and having indigenous people show me this type of thing that the land is a goddess i did not know know that. I just thought we were about Little Nice Stories by Finn McCool and Cú Chulainn on his chariot. Actually, it's a lot more powerful than that. Everything is about this knowledge we had that we were in tune with the sun, which was this male great thing, the land was a female, and we were just tiny minions in tune, in cycle with that.

And I decided I'd like to put this message out there now. And so what I was trying to convey in Listen to the Land Speak is a sense of all that. The land has all of this knowledge to give us. It's connected to mythology and most of the mythology is about the power of women. And just a little question there about how Irish mythology, as we learn it it becomes hyper masculine and quite violent you know you learn about the great warrior Cú Chul and Fionn Mí Chúil all this

does that have anything to do with we'll say the Gaelic revival like I know I know that certain mythology was brought back as a way to bring manhood back to the men of Ireland so that they would fight the British like I know the GAA

that was part of the thingsish like i know the ga that was part of the things about bringing back harling was to give irish men back a type of violent masculinity so that they would fight is is is that a thing and do you think that played a part in we'll say silencing stories of goddesses and women and the more feminine side yes yeah totally um i suppose first when i say you know the the female it's not it's like it's the female in all of us so it's not the woman versus man because that's a classic linear thing it's like we know we are in this era at the moment where it's about both women and men using our masculinity, driving forward, exploiting everything we can, destroying, you know, functioning, not being, not passively thinking, not coming together

and sharing, but driving forward and creating and using more and more resources. So it's sort of simplistic in me to say, you know, that the goddess, it's not about the woman, it's about the female in all of us. And all of us men, as you have talked so brilliantly about in the past the biggest wound in men is we're not able to express our feminine side we spend this whole time hiding emotions because men can only show uh male drive and women really can only show male drive too they have to be doing everything they have to kick ass they have to be doing it so i think what this what this knowledge is showing sure a more compassion more passion one and as you say the current state of our mythology has been given to us by the likes of T.F. O'Reilly

and even his sister, Cecilia O'Reilly, who translated the town book, another cousin of mine. She was a woman, but of course, she was a woman in a Victorian 19th century mindset. I mean, I knew her growing up in the 1970s, but still she had that, basically, my family did have a Victorian mindset, although it was in the 1970s.

And Patrick Pearce made no secret of the fact that he wanted to present the myth in a certain way to encourage the young generation to go out and commit blood sacrifice for the good so in some way they what they did was great they rescued the old stories at the end of the 19th century and gave them to us but they gave a twisted version to a version that was only going to focus on the on the violence aggressive progressive take back what's yours fight bloodshed yeah i suppose i can't just blame the 19th century and the early 20th century because there's great accounts of even the 12th century 13th century we used to um translate versions of the great greek heroic tales into irish even back in the 8th century.

And we would add loads more beheadings, loads more stabbings, and loads more blood gushing through the sky and through the air. So we did have this hunger. We were rather kind of crude and basic in our love for extreme gore,

heavy gore movies. So that was there. But yeah yeah it's definitely time for a new reading of our mythology and to see that while all of that's in there and while there's a strong story about for men to stand up and become men and to go through the rituals to get your own masculinity there was also a lot of talk of compassion of harmony of recognizing the seasons of recognizing that there's a world beyond of not exploiting harmony of recognizing the seasons of recognizing that there's a world beyond of not exploiting the land and so it seems timely that we reinterpret the myths now if we reinterpret the myths today this again is going to be biased like i am completely

biased by my own conditioning by my own time and space and that's the beauty of myths myths are timeless there's a beautiful writer from the Hudson Valley in America who writes, myths are the mushroom, sorry, myths are the fruiting bodies of mushrooms, of mycelium. So, you know, mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of mycelium, of these underground strands. So, mycelium is like the internet of mushrooms, the little webs under the ground,

and then the fruiting body of the mushroom that we see on the floor. Exactly, yes. Sophie Strand claims that myths are the fruiting bodies of human consciousness. Ah, fucking hell, that's beautiful. Of the collective wisdom of our people. And so they'll always emerge with a different strain. And they'll always emerge with the food that we need and the wisdom

and the message and the nourishment that we need at a particular time and then they spread like spores that's fucking astounding that's memetics as well

that's what a meme is in the Richard Dawkins sense fucking hell yeah so myths are frustrating because they're not linear they're not logical

they can be so long-winded but if i'm going to look what am i going to be doing in the next few years i'm going to be really connecting in a lot more with native american indigenous first nations people respectfully if they would like to connect with us and the other thing i'm going to try and get my head more and more around myths and i don't know you know myth is like it's like a drug trip you know it's not logical it's a journey it'll bring you somewhere new every time.

Have you gone looking into the role of psychedelics in Irish mythology or, you know, is there evidence for it? Yeah, no, I think we talked a little bit about it before on the podcast. And I said at the time I was hoping that there was example of that at wakes, you know, that men used to take magic mushrooms because it was told to me by professor of philosophy but since then i've realized that story from it's in the folklore commission in ucd it actually refers to it says that it says you know the men the women keened and expressed all their emotions at the wake and then they went home and the men took mushrooms they put them on the fire cooked them up and then ate them and i just thought well the person who told me that that was the men taking magic mushrooms to get in touch with their own to go on a trip and get in touch with their emotions but i realized again that story is told in june

or july and so the magic mushrooms weren't there unless they had dried them from the year before possibly um but otherwise it's that vague thought you know the amanita muscaria the red and white mushroom the fly garrick a lot of people say the reason why the salmon is often taught of as sacred is because it too is speckled with red or brownie red dots and we've got speckled doves as well yes exactly yeah so whether them maybe this yeah maybe the salmon was like a code for the fly garrick um but as we know that it's not the most interesting yeah and so that's what you know and the other word for mushroom is um bachon it's word for mushroom or faas e an eitha growth of one night but there's another word um bulig bulig or buligon and bulig is connected to buligis

and buligis is the bubble of insight or the bubble of knowledge and that's what shona shonan was looking for she was looking for the bubbles of knowledge that come from the bottom of connell as well she was looking for that buligis exactly so bubbles of knowledge that come from the bottom of Conall's well. She was looking for that bulligus, exactly. So that bulligus used in the name of certain wild mushrooms. So that could be a hint to show that they were aware that certain wild mushrooms did give insights to new ways of looking at the world or to give wider horizons.

I think it's a no-brainer. Like magic mushrooms grow in Ireland. And they grow indigenously. And they grow particularly on the sites of the Neolithic sacred ritual site. You know, I'm not comfortable calling these places tombs like of Newgrains and Náath and Dáid. Certainly there's a few.

There's been the ashes, the cremated ashes of certain bodies found there, but not many. It seems that although they might have been tombs for some very elite figures, they were actually ritual sites or sacred sites for transformation of some description and particularly lock crew which is the one nearest to me there's like magic mushrooms up and down it and when i went about 20 years ago no one ever dared pick mushrooms or be caught now if you go up there at the moment you know you will

see people on their knees and no one's ashamed anymore people are realizing this is part of our culture we've been doing this for thousands of years. It's our right. It's free. It's healthy. It's going to make us wiser. It's going to expand. Well, if we do it wisely and carefully

and do it set in setting, etc. That was the fantastic Mancon Magan. I thoroughly enjoyed that chat. He's a fascinating individual. Check out his new book

which you can get at mayobooks.ie and it's called Listen to the Land Speak and also as Mankon mentioned he has his own podcast called The Almanac of Ireland check that out too, I'll be back next week hopefully with a boiling

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