The Blindboy Podcast - The return of Manchán Magan

Episode Date: July 28, 2021

Manchán Magan is a documentary maker with a passion for the Irish language and folklore. We chat about the connection between rivers and ancient Irish knowledge, and the role of gender in the mythological Irish landscape. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pop the bin man's pimple, you dripping dimpness. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. Thank you for the lovely feedback for last week's podcast. Which is one I thought I just pulled out of my arse because it was too hot, you know. It was in the middle of a heatwave last week. I did a podcast on Irish summer salads and the Irish reaction to heat and you really liked it based on the feedback I got

which is good to know because I like doing a little ramble every so often I like just picking something and doing a ramble on it not necessarily any deep hot takes or any huge amount of research gone into it

but it's not hot anymore this week it's Not necessarily any deep hot takes or any huge amount of research gone into it. But it's not hot anymore this week. The weather is nice. The heatwave is gone. And what we have now is... The air is pregnant with moisture. It's cool and wet. And you can wear a t-shirt. You know what I mean?

It's just beautiful. It's the type of weather you long for when you're... If you're in Australia, if I'm in somewhere like fucking Perth, which is incredibly hot and dry, the weather that I fantasize about is what we have right now. It's what I imagine the weather in Japan to be like. It's just cold and overcast with a light drizzle and you can drink the air. The air just has this incredible, incredibly high humidity, but it's cold humidity. So I'm

very grateful for that and I'm enjoying the fuck out of it. And my relationship with hot Irish weather has been restored. Like, I don't actually want it to be hot and dry in Ireland. I like it to be cold and wet and then to be wishing for it to be hot and dry, but not for it to actually be hot and dry. Cold and wet, but wishing for it to be hot and dry but not for it to actually be hot and dry cold and wet but wishing for it to be hot and dry there's an aspiration to that

there's a motivation in that you know but when it's actually hot and dry you're just like oh fuck what am I going to do now I have the thing I wanted and I don't know if I'm enjoying it enough so lovely cool weather I'm happy with that

I also so a buddy of mine has gone away on a fucking staycation right down to Kerry for a week and he gave me his virtual reality headset it's one of those good ones

so I've been using virtual reality this week and I mean what can I say it's incredible it's incredible I'm someone who doesn't I'm not interested in psychedelic drugs because I'm my anxiety I'm too anxious a person

to give myself over to a psychedelic experience so putting on a virtual reality fucking helmet a good one is the closest I'm going to get to Ayahuasca and it's fucking overwhelming so I was like playing virtual reality table tennis

I was walking around virtual reality environments like there's these little things for my hands as well that vibrate when I touch things in the virtual world so literally my brain forgets that I'm in virtual reality and now it becomes reality but then when I take the helmet off I'm now in actual reality and it it gave me some existential anxiety. It gave me some pretty heavy feelings. First off, it made me cognitively realise that reality itself might be a simulation. When you put on a helmet of virtual reality and you walk around a digital world and it feels fucking real, then cognitively, it's like seeing God. it's like a secret of the universe that was

beyond my perception now becomes revealed to me it's like ah okay so when i put on this virtual reality helmet which is definitely fake but yet it feels a hundred percent real after about a minute then when i take it off and now I'm in so called reality well who's to say this isn't a simulation also and then I was playing this virtual reality game called Moss where

I'm basically a god like figure and I'm overseeing this little cute rabbit so think of like Sonic the hedgehog or super mario brothers except you're in the game you this is your world you look around you and you are in this environment except you're god and you're overseeing this lovely cute little creature and you control when it jumps and runs and then the creature looks up at you and when the creature looked up at me

I got overwhelmed with the response, overwhelmed with a sadness and a compassion like when I was a kid playing Super Mario, I didn't give a fuck about Super Mario, look at this little stumpy greedy Italian

prick looking for gold coins I didn't give a shit about him. If he fell down a hole or got murdered by a turtle. I didn't give a fuck. But when I was playing this moss game and now I'm in the world and I'm looking down at this gorgeous little cute little rabbit with a little sword and now I'm responsible for its welfare. I started crying. I started crying and had to take the helmet off

couldn't handle it so that was quite overwhelming so I had to get back into meditation now so now I'm meditating twice a day because I'm using virtual reality so I put on my virtual reality helmet I play a bit of virtual reality table tennis enjoy it

experience kind of overwhelming existential anxiety take the helmet off and then meditate for 20 minutes around things like compassion and smells and my senses to ground myself in actual reality so that's what I've been up to now that the hot weather is gone so this week i've got a little treat for you i have um i brought back on

a guest who i had before who was very very enjoyable the first time man con magen and man con is he's a journalist he's someone who he's a travel writer he makes travel documentaries he has a huge interest in the Irish language and Irish culture

and Irish history and he's just a very fascinating person and I love chatting with Man Con because of how his brain works he's just incredibly interesting and he's got a well of knowledge and I love chatting with Man Con because of how his brain works. He's just incredibly interesting, and he's got a well of knowledge when you speak to him,

and we have a lot of fun. So I interviewed him last year, like last October, and we had great crack on the podcast, and all of ye people loved when I had him on. And what I noticed was we ended up speaking about Man Con's life and it was amazing, it was fantastic but by the end of the podcast I'd realised I hadn't asked him much about the areas that he's interested in, in particular Irish folklore the Irish language so I brought him on this week to speak specifically about Irish folklore

and Irish words so that's what I have this week I've got Mancon back on and we have a lovely chat about the significance of water in Irish history and Irish folklore we speak about

Irish folklore when it was non-patriarchal, when it embraced the female, we'll say, rather than retellings of Irish folklore that are very male-centred. And also, what I begin chatting to him about is, when Man Con was on the podcast the last time, he told this story about being in africa and traveling on a river and getting lost and we ended up going on a segue and he never got to finish the story so he finishes the story of what happened in africa

so what i'm gonna do is because it's it's a fun chat and I don't want to interrupt it I don't want to interrupt it I'd like to play it all the way through rather than interrupt it what I'm going to do is I'm going to do my ocarina pause early before I get into the chat with Mancon and that way it's not interrupted you can just listen to it all right so here's the Ocarina pause 9 minutes in, this is a record this is the earliest the Ocarina has ever been played I'd say on this podcast

Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th Thank you. So, who will you rise for? Register today at SunriseChallenge.ca. That's SunriseChallenge.ca. The first omen, I believe, girl, is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey!

Movie of the year. It's not real, it's not real. What's not real? Who said that? The first omen, only in theaters April 5th. That was the ocarina pause. which means you heard an advert there so this podcast is supported by you the listener via the patreon page all right patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast so this podcast is my full-time job it's what i do for a living um it's quite a bit of work but it's work that i absolutely adore and love doing and it's work that i have the space and

time to do because i'm supported via patreon you know it's it's incredibly difficult to earn a living as an artist today. Incredibly difficult. But Patreon makes this possible. So all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. If you enjoy my podcast and you're listening to it regularly, just consider paying me for the work that I'm doing. That's what I'm looking for.

Pay me for the work that I'm doing. If you can't afford it, if you're out of work, something like that, don't worry about it. You don't have to pay. You can listen for free. But if you can afford it, you're not just paying me for the work that I'm doing. What you're doing is you're paying for the person who can't afford to listen. You're paying for them to listen. So everybody gets a podcast.

I earn a living. It's a wonderful model that's based on a soundness and kindness. All right. And it works magnificently. For the first time in my career, I have a predictable and regular income that allows me to plan and to take creative risks. OK. And thank you to all of my patrons for making that possible. Thank you so much. much also it keeps the podcast independent um the podcast space in general is becoming saturated with big corporate money

all right my podcast is independent i have the odd advertiser to fulfill my contract with a cast but if i don't like an advertiser I can tell them to fuck off and most importantly no advertiser can suggest or say to me what my content is they can't change my content and that's the most important thing to be honest I get to make the podcasts that I want to make and that you want to hear because advertisers can't fuck that shit up and they love to fuck that shit up it's why so much tv and radio is harsh shit and and almost impossible to watch or listen to it's advertisers do that so catch me on twitch once a week twitch.tv forward slash the blind by podcast on thursday nights and follow me on instagram blind by boat

club all right share the podcast like the podcast you know the crack and support support all independent podcasts if you're listening to an independent podcast support it not just financially but talk about it share it word of mouth this is the stuff that really matters dog bless so without further ado here is my chat with Mán Chán Magan if you're interested in Irish folklore, the Irish language stuff like that, you're going to find this really really interesting

I didn't want to interrupt Mán Chán too much because he's just a great person to leave him talk so I didn't want to interrupt him too much because he's just a great person to to leave him talk so i didn't want to interrupt him too much which means that there might be a few things in here especially around irish folklore where i don't stop him and say can you explain what this is what can you explain what that is i tried to do it as much as i could without interrupting his flow. So apologies if you're not too familiar with Irish folklore

or early Irish literature and you get confused at points. Exactly. So one thing, when we had our chat the last time, we were darting between so many subjects. You had began a story about your first trip to Africa when you were a young fella and I interrupted

you and you never got to finish the story and there was people on Instagram asking can you finish the fucking story in Africa yeah um and like you did me a big favor so I told that story in a book called Truck Fever and that book came out maybe maybe, I don't know, maybe 12, 13 years ago. And I had loads of copies left. I had a warehouse full of copies. Well, you know, I had my garage full of copies of it. And now I don't have any copies left because all of your listeners started buying it.

And so the only way you're going to hear the end of the story now. Yeah, is if I tell you the end of the story. Yeah, so as we, you know, we were, I remember I was 19 or 20, I was in the back of an ex-army truck, all had gone well, going down through Algeria, where our main driver, Belinda, sort of left us there, abandoned us in the middle of this tiny town called Mbutu, sorry, Bumba, but very near where the dictator Mbutu was born. And we were left without money, without, you know, prophylactics, without tablets, without anything whatsoever,

basically left to fend for ourselves in the middle of like the darkest most sort of most corrupt military regime at a time where the president the dictator was falling apart so the army hadn't been paid there were no there was no money for anyone there were no roads have been built there was no diesel left in the country and we had just been caught being captured in this net without without anything um And as I was telling you last time, like the dry season had come early. So there were no roads left in the country. They'd all been destroyed by this stage.

There was only these mud tracks and we had the only four-wheel drive truck that had come because the first Gulf War had just begun. So all the borders around us had closed. And what happened, like after about five days, and I told you, you know, through my own stupidity, we had bought this big sack of this plastic bag of cannabis. So we were sort of out of it and we were trying to negotiate with the soldiers. We just were lost.

We didn't understand. Now, any Africa hand, any experienced Africa person would know, if you're captured in a military dictatorship, it's the military who are behind it. But we didn't realise that. So we were negotiating with them. We weren't getting anywhere. And eventually what happened was a barge turned up. A barge turned up

on this river. Now, as I said, the dry season had come early, so there wasn't enough water for a barge. So it kept on slowly going down the river from Kinshasa to Kis ghani from the old leopoldville to stanleyville getting stuck the whole time on a sand you know dune or sandbank and then hoping it'd rock itself off and so that and i told you there was a big split in our truck at this point half the people were petrified uh half of the we were all most of them were English people, our few Aussies and New Zealand people and me, the one Irish person. And we were all just the

dregs of the earth, but half of them were petrified and hadn't lost their money or their passports because they hadn't decided to engage with African life like we had basically hadn't been stupid and got stoned and the rest of us had nothing um and so when the barge came that 10 left us they abandoned us and we realized our only chance of getting out of that place was if they had um shared the tiny bit of money they had left with with us we could buy a ticket but they didn't so they abandoned us we were left there basically to die um and when you're 19 or 20 you're full of idealism i just thought this is what I want for life. I want to live my life, even if it means death, by hanging out with friends and by

trusting people and by exploring my world around me rather than hiding and protecting myself and being fearful. So we were in a delirious cannabis haze, which was probably why I was feeling so idealistic. But eventually, after another three days, and by this stage, we had no water, we had no food, and we had to drink the river water, as I explained to you, and I got bilharzia. That's that parasite. There was a parasite you got. Exactly. I got bilharzia, yeah, or schistosomiasis. It's this little slug or snail that goes up into your urine, that gets into your body,

and it does you no harm for the first few years. But slowly, it creates a shell, a calcium layer every year in your kidneys. And basically, you turn to stone. You turn to a shell from the inside out. And there was no cure for it at the time. But I arrived back in Dublin, and the Tropical Medical Bureau had,

the World Medical Council had just come up with a new tablet, and the Irish Tropical Medical Bureau had, the World Medical Council had just come up with a new tablet and the Irish Tropical Medical Bureau gave me the first tablet and I was cured. So I was okay that way. But so we were stuck there. We had no way out until finally this American truck came and we told them how the others had abandoned us. And they had money.

So they were able to find a way, despite the fact, as I say, there was literally no diesel left in the country at this time the very end the country was entirely bankrupt like the the zaarian currency at the time was like in the inflation was leaping about like 300 every day but these people had so much money they were able to find one small barrel of diesel and then they got some local people to cut out um tree trunks make pirogues, which are, you know, the floating wooden canoes. And they got three huge tree trunks, carved them out. We got into those and we slowly made our way down upriver, upriver to Kissingani. And it was really tough. Like it was lightning. There were storms on the river.

It took it took four, it took five days in all. And again, we had no water. We were in the belting hot sun. Like at this stage, a lot of my friends were getting, um, we all had amoebic dysentery, but they were all, they were getting malaria. They were getting fevers. Um, and eventually on the fourth day, just before we arrived. What's dysentery? What's dysentery mankind? It's just a really bad, well, it's a bad, it's diarrhea, basically. It's an upset stomach from just, we got it from the river water. But, you know, when you get weak, you know, your body gives in. And that's one of the first things, obviously, your gut flora, the inner bacteria inside your stomach is so different from Africa.

So we were all sort of, a lot of us were basically in fever deliriums. And we were drinking the water and knowing we were going to get bilharzia or black river blindness, both of which had no cure. Black river blindness is probably worse. And on the fourth day, we looked ahead of us and we saw on a sandbank, we just saw this shady thing way, way, like there was intense

heat. It's right on the equator. So in the heat, and once we approached it, we realised it was the barge with the other ten people who had abandoned us to die. Now, there was probably, I don't know, maybe 200 people on that barge. It was just, it wasn't a barge really. It was a floating metal sheet with an old Rhine River barge pulling it slowly upriver. And we got on, we slowly realized that we were going to pass them, but we were still miles away.

We realized we couldn't go at night. For the first two days, we had, you know, canoed at night and day. But we were realizing we overturned the canoes and there were both crocodiles and hippopotamuses in the water. So every night then we'd just we'd go on land and we'd ask the local tribesman could we stay there could we just sleep on the ground um so this night we were we pulled in again we pulled into this tiny just nothing really there had been an old processing factory during the days of leop king leopold and the belgians maybe in the 1920s but there was nothing there and we we lay down on ground and like normal a tribesman comes out a chief comes out from a local tribe and demands just to know who we are so that we ask his permission. And then you normally pay him something to sleep there.

But we told him and we told him the story about these other people who had abandoned us. In fact, the Americans told the tribespeople. And they said they had a gift for us. They had, oh, they happened to have one crate of Coca-Cola. This Coca-Cola was probably three years old. You know, the glass bottles in a gift for us. They had, oh, they happened to have one crate of Coca-Cola. This Coca-Cola was probably three years old. You know, the glass bottles in a red plastic crate, they've been keeping it there. I don't know how they got it.

And the Americans said they were going to buy it off them so that when we passed the people who had abandoned us, we could all be drinking Coca-Cola and looking like we were free and we were going to be in Kissingani that night and all was going to be well. So the next morning we got on the back on the river. Slowly we approached the, the, the, the metal barge or the metal sheet,

the floating sheet. And what we saw was devastating. Basically the hundreds of people so, you know, were crammed on that sheet so much that they couldn't sit down. They all were standing up or leaning against each other. And we could see they were just as fever stricken and sick and malaria ridden as we were. But the Americans told us that this was important. This was about revenge. And we needed to clean ourselves from the trauma we'd experienced. And we needed to put on happy faces and open up the Coca-Cola. And we all had to sing. And we all had to come up with a song that we could all sing. It took a long time for us to decide a song that

we, the English and Irish people and the Americans and the three local Congolese or Zairean boatmen. And eventually we came up with On the Rivers of Babylon. And so as we passed them, we all just sang. We said nothing. We drank our Coca-Colas. We sang and slowly glided. And they knew we were going to reach Kisingani that night.

And it was like the biggest healing thing I've ever had in my life. And finally that night we did arrive was like the biggest healing thing I've ever had in my life. And finally, that night we did arrive in Gissingani. And I remember, I remember just the greed in me, the selfishness. I just left everyone. And there were some girls and people, younger girls and people there who were a lot weaker, but I just ran up trying to get to a restaurant and we found somewhere open. It was about 10 o'clock at night and everyone charged in after me. And we all ordered everything we could think of, you know, from there was just an outside barbecue pit. And all the food came. Yeah.

And we couldn't eat any of it. Our bodies had forgotten how to eat. We just had to stare at the food. And I wasn't able to eat and none of them were able to eat. Oh, my God. Until well into the next day. Yeah. So then we spent about three days in Kissing Gany slowly recovering until the other ten arrived.

Their floating barge arrived. And Belinda was there, the woman who had abandoned us, the leader of the truck. And the truck was there. And she just said, I don't care what happened. You need to get on with it. We still have to finish this trip. We have another two months to get on through to get on through tanzania to kenya and so we all got back in the truck she got us all very very drunk we had a false floor in the truck full of spirits well it had been full of spirits that we'd bought in ceota in the spanish duty three course port and she sort of knew that you know she had maybe either between seven and ten overland trucks she had left she had led before over the years and she knew that the only way you're going to get through was with a lot of spirits so she got us all legless drunk told us to forgive and forget and we continued on for another two months when you mentioned there about the coca-cola one thing that came into my head was so around that time or i think it might have been the 70s so when i don't know was it the un or was it some charity organization they were trying to get

diarolite like electrolyte salts to as many people in the world as possible and what they found the most effective way to deliver the electrolyte salts or diarolite to the most remote parts in the world was if they used if they used coca-cola because coca-cola was getting everywhere so they ended up designing these triangular diurelite packages that they could fit between bottles of Coca-Cola because Coca-Cola had the most effective distribution network in the world. That's ingenious. That's amazing. And like often when I've had severe amoebic dysentery or dysentery or diarrhea in places in India and South America, and I don't, I mean, I'm always looking for access for diarrhea lights.

And if I don't get it, you know, the best, the second best thing is 7-Up that's allowed to get flat. It almost has, matches the same element of sort of salts, minerals, and sort of sugars that your body needs so that you don't die. And you know, diarolite was invented by a limerick man called William Brooke O'Shotnessy. Come on. Yeah. There's a fella called William Brooke O'Shotnessy. Come on. Yeah. There's a fella called William Brooke O'Shotnessy.

And he was one of the first people to do electrolyte salt therapy in the late 18th century. He's also, and he's from Limerick, he's the first Western doctor. He's the first doctor to introduce the medicinal use of cannabis to Western medicine in the late 1800s. And that's William Brooke O'Shaughnessy from Limerick. Phenomenal. One thing I really wanted to get to speak about more on the last podcast than we didn't was you're very interested in the etymology of Irish words. And one thing I'm very interested in is like I did a podcast recently. I found I found a document.

It was an archaeological journal written in the 1840s, and it was about English people hearing Irish spoken in the Berber areas of North Africa. There was this phenomenon around the 1840s, 1850s, where these English people are convinced that they heard Irish spoken in the barber areas of North Africa. And there was also a story in the 1810 where a farmer in Antrim claims that Tunisian sailors washed up near his land and the Tunisian sailors were able to go to his laborers who spoke Irish and they were able to have a conversation with each other.

spoke Irish and they were able to have a conversation with each other. So in the 1800s, there was this opinion that Irish shared huge commonalities as a language with the language of North Africa. And what's your opinion on that? Is that a myth or is there something to it? Yeah, I remember hearing that and I remember checking into it. And my feeling, it's just, yeah, it's like, i suppose it's a myth or just a good story that could they couldn't see any grounding of fact like you know the way people love tall tales from you know the victorian era but really in the middle in the medieval ages you look at any of those stories and they it's all about exaggeration and which is just so hard to how do you separate the mythology or the exaggeration from truth?

And so I looked into that. I remember when I was writing my book, 32 Words for Field, a book about the language, and I couldn't find, I wanted so badly for it to be true. And I couldn't, I couldn't find it. You know, have you ever come across, people are always talking about a Japanese man who did experiments on water crystals and realized he could mimic the shape of water crystals. So like the water from dirty, the water samples from dirty water had ugly crystals and water from beautiful sources of spring water had gorgeous crystals. And if you sang to them or if you said nice words, the crystals were nice and the opposite. And now the amount of people who quote that fact to me, and I remember the first time I thought I heard about it,

it made absolute sense and I wanted to tell everyone about it. But what is his name? Some Sugamoto or something. But no one has ever managed to replicate that test. It's one of those, like when I heard about the Tunisian, I thought I want that to be true, just likewise with these water crystals. But I don't think they are and what i was thinking it was man con is i just thought it was kind of a the people who were

writing this study at the time were they were kind of posh english people and i felt that it was kind of a a noble savage trope or maybe a bit of orientalism where they were just them as as colonizers were comparing the poor people of North Africa and the poor people of Ireland and going, I sure aren't they the same? Yeah. But at the same time, what am I, just today, I'm writing a book now about place and I was looking at, you know, there's the five sacred trees of Ireland, these ancient trees that were written about in the old annals. They're written. We have accounts of them written about in the 14th century, but they're way older than that. It could be like 2000,

2,500 years old. And they say they were brought to Ireland by a magic giant from the other world who was clearly supernatural because he went from, from the rising sun to the setting sun. And he's called, he's called the triple holder of the three keys, which if you ever want a supernatural, magical word, you know, this man is clearly powerful.

But what they say about him is the reason he comes to Ireland, because he's passing through... Sorry, where are you reading about this, Mankon? Where are you reading about this? So it's a good question,, like I saw on your Instagram, people are saying, where do you get these stories? So all of these stories are in the manuscript. So, you know, all our literature, the only way we have these ancient stories

is because they were written by monks or scribes, you know, in maybe ideally from the 8th century, but really mostly from the 12th, 13th, 15th, 16th century. And they were all written, some were written in Latin, but mostly in Irish, in either Old Irish or Middle Irish. And then they were translated in the 19th century or the early 20th century. Now they were only accessible to scholars until, you know, the last maybe 10 years or 15 years. And now all of them are on the internet. So both the original Irish or old Irish or middle Irish versions,

and then the English translations. And so there's this wealth of information there. And of course, then there's all later versions that people would have, you know, edited them and made them more accessible, sort of Druid sites and things like that, and pagan Celtic Christian sites. But they sometimes will change things.

But yeah, well, I give you a great example of that. Yes. And I need to get, it's okay, I remember to go back to what I was saying, which was the trees, but Sian Áine, so the Irish for the River Shannon, as we know it, is Shannon, and Shonan. And the Shonan is a female god, goddess, as are all rivers. I might get back to that. But it's either Shonan was a name of the female goddess, or otherwise it was Shan Áine, Old Áine.

And Áine is a really powerful goddess. I might get back to her too. But what we are told from the 19th century translations about the Shannon is she was this uppity goddess, uppity woman who wanted more wisdom than she had access to. And so she goes to a holy well to try and get more knowledge. And she gets her just desserts by being killed, by being drowned by the water. And so what that is, is in that story, and there's the same, the roots of the story about the Boyne River, which we touched on last time, but are similar. It was the Boyne, a mother goddess who was drowned for daring to want more wisdom, more knowledge,

more creative potency and power. And what that is really, what we need to be aware is, these are 19th century English, sorry, Irish men, but Victorian men translating the original Irish. And so they would have put their own twist on it. You know, 19th century patriarchal men would have put a slightly anti-women twist. And whenever there was talk about goddesses, they would have stressed the fact that they were just uppity women who didn't know their place. So we need to be really aware that we're really lucky that we have the written versions of these ancient oral myths from maybe, you know, the 12th century to the 15th century in books like Láir na Hóra, the Book of the Dun Cow.

Are you able to read the Middle and Old Irish? Are you able to read those versions? I am not, no. I'm not able to read Middle or Old Irish. And I'm not a scholar in anything, which is like, I'm a journalist really. So my knowledge is very thin

on everything. And I was aware of it, having, you know, this book I wrote, whatever, 32 Words for Fields, it did very well over the last year. And people now come to me

thinking I'm an expert and I'm an expert on nothing. All I knew, all I'm just trying to gather all these amazing resources that are now easily available on the internet and trying to, you know, separate out

the exaggerations and the slight inaccuracies that, you know, eager druids, druid followers and, you know, followers of sort of pagan early Christian belief, romantic myth. People are looking for myth and just trying to see, do we, what basis do we have for any of this truth?

And can you tell me about these five trees that you mentioned earlier, the five trees? Yeah, exactly. So, you know, so in this particular story comes from the Láir Búi Lechon. So the Yellow Book of Lecken. It was a very early 15th century manuscript, but then it would have collected tracts that were far older. And it talks about this giant who comes from sun to sun.

But he says the reason he comes to Ireland, he comes to the Hill of Tara, is because he heard about a Palestinian man, a man in Palestine, that had made the sun stop in its course. So this was some reference to Jesus. But what we see is that these stories that could be 2000 years old or at least 1500, they're aware of what's happening in the Middle East, even before Christianity, before the first missionaries started arriving in 430 a.d wow yeah so we knew there was a bigger world out there and man con one thing that i've also heard about the origins of the irish language right and not north africa

i've heard that phoenician the the pre-greek culture of the phoenicians that there's huge similarities between the irish language and the ancient ph Phoenicians, that there's huge similarities between the Irish language and the ancient Phoenician language. Is there anything in that? Or again, is it one of these myths? I think it's mostly a myth. Like the Irish language, as we sort of talked about last time, it's not really very old in Ireland. Well, you know, so I think I said the Celtic people and that word is often complex, but the Celtic people are the people who spoke the Celtic languages that are still spoken in Ireland, in Scotland, and in Wales, and Manx, and Cornish, and then a different strand of Celtic languages

in northern France and Brittany and Galicia. But they were a main culture of mainland Europe, and they only really arrived in Ireland in about maybe 500 BC or maybe 800 BC. And they brought this language with them. So the Irish we spoke, we speak now. We can trace the words that are in the language. Most of them can be traced back to Indo-European, which is the main language that was spoken in the center between Europe and Asia, like thousands of years ago. So we know that we all spoke this one language and then it divided out. And so, you know,

it's pretty clear. But what we don't know is that the language that was spoken here before 500 BC, before the Celts came, some of those words by these Bronze Age people, some of those words must still be in, on Gaelic, must still be in the Gaelic language. And we need to sort of pick out those ones and find out the really old ones. Yeah. And what about the similarities in words between the Irish language and languages in India? Well, you know, we touched a little bit last time on like the main connections between Irish is with the Indian language, with Hindu and Sanskrit and the languages of India. And we touched a little bit last time on the connections with Arabic. There's not many. I mean, I pointed out some of the words that are very similar between Irish and Arabic. Whether they're coincidence or not, it's hard to know, particularly the Shamraka and Shamrock.

But there is no end to the amount of similarities between Irish and Indian culture. But there is no end to the amount of similarities between Irish and Indian culture. You could talk of anything. Our literature is very similar. Our rules and laws are very similar. Our way of life, our noble, our sort of way of feudal system of separating out the peoples. And then the amount of words that are very, very similar in Irish and Sanskrit. Even our gods are the same. And we touched on some of them last time. There's no end to that.

We basically are the same people who were divided by time. And so you see, I think last time I talked, it's like if you dropped a stone into a pond of water, the ripples come out. So that stone would have been dropped

in the center of Europe and Asia, where they meet. And then other cultures and other tribes would have come in the thousands of years since. Fucking hell. And can you give us some specific examples? Yeah. So like, even words.

To start with, there's a word, manama is an Irish word for mind or thought or desire. And it's almost the same word as the Sanskrit word manaman and the modern Hindu word, which is to express the idea of a wish or to pray, then Brehav is an Irish judge and Brahman is, you know, the leader or the person, the key figure who came to judgments in India. And it comes from the same root, Brit, and Brit means master of mantras. So the Irish word for a judge is Brit, Brehav,

the master of mantras, which just shows, you know, a brehav, a judge, it's something druidic, it's something powerful, it's someone who had this lore from way, way back and was able to then use it to come to judgments. So even the deva, you know, I think we talked a little bit last time, the Vedas, the Vedas are the gods of Hindu culture, these key gods. There was actually two groups of them, and one were the Devas. And the Devas, these gods, it's the exact same word as Dia, the Irish for God.

In fact, Dia and Deus and the Greek Zeus and the Latin Deus, there's the same cognate, the same root as Dia. There was just this one God. In terms of social class, the leading social as Dia. It was all, there was just this one god. In terms of social class, the leading social class in Ireland were the filly, the poets, and they were more powerful than kings. Like in the

Toa de Donan, sorry, in the town of Coiny, you know, the great cattle raid of Ulster, of Cooley. Before, a king needs to ask permission from a poet before he breaks up a fight. Wow. They had absolute power.

And just in the same way as the Brahmins had absolute power in India. And they both, that absolute power corrupted them. I mean, the Brahmins today still in India, they're the ones who are controlling the caste system. They're the ones who are controlling the political party. They just had way too much power. In Ireland, the Philly, the poets, you know, took over from the role of the

Druids. When the Christians came, they banned the Druids and just the filly, the poets took over their power to be able to say words that changed reality. And again, we talked a little bit about Amargan, the first ever Irish poet and Druid to arrive in Ireland, who basically summoned up the country. And we know the words that he said. We know the first words we said when he arrived in Kerry. Am gwae, am mhaidh, am tond trehan, am fúim mara. It goes on and on. But am gwae, am mhaidh,

I am the wind on the sea. And even school-level Irish, we can hear that. Am gwae, it's the same word, the wind. Am mhaidh, mara, mhaidh, the sea. Am tond trehan. Tón is still a wave in Irish today. Trehan, strong, still a word. Am fú, mara, muir, the sea. Am tunn, treann. Tunn is still a wave in Irish today. Treann, strong, still word. Am fúim, mara.

Fúim is still the modern word for sound, the sound of the sea. So we have from thousands of years back, the first words that were said in this country that manifested the land, that brought the land to life. That's on a level of Native American peoples. You know, that puts us on a level of indigenous people

who can summon up reality by speaking it. One little question there as well, Mankan. So when you're speaking about, you know, these texts from, we'll say, the 8th century that were being written by monks, were these monks effectively recording our oral history and writing it into books? And how did that then clash with Christianity? Yeah, that's the big question. That's what we can never know. What was their agenda and how true were they to what they were transcribing? Like you

can imagine they would have had an agenda to make these stories sound as exaggerated and ridiculous as possible. So we're blind. Like we're so lucky we have these manuscripts from, as you say, the eighth century up until the 16th or 17th century, but we don't know how literally they transcribe them. We have a few hints because some of the scribes said, I, you know, this is my name. I have transcribed this accurately, have a few hints because some of the scribes said, I, you know, this is my name. I have transcribed this accurately, though I don't believe a word of it. And I am a true Christian. So they felt a real strong urge to record truth. And that's the thing that both the Brahmins in India and the Druids in Ireland, the most important thing for both of those people was

memory, was truth, because it was the only way, like both Druidic and Brahmin power was based on your memory. Could you remember the climate that happened a thousand years ago or a few hundred years ago? Could you remember the genealogy of every single king and every single key person, because there was nothing else beyond memory back then. You were barbaric and ignorant if you couldn't remember all the best fishing holes, the best, the winds that could happen, the different plants, the different landscapes abroad. So there's a great, in the Shanachas Mor, which is the ancient text, again, you'll find it online translated, it's the first attempt to transfer the oral traditions into writing. And it asked a question in a sort of question and answer, like a Socratic dialogue.

It says, what is the preserving shrine? In other words, how do you best preserve knowledge and wisdom? And the reply is, not hard. It is memory and what is preserved in it. OK, but then it asks the same question again to really hammer this home. What is the preserving shrine? And the second time, not heart,

it is nature and what is preserved in it. Now that is powerful. That means just like the Aboriginals in Australia, the Druids and the Brahmins realized the only way you could keep memory, I mean, you keep it in the oral tradition by saying the words and, you know, making poems and rhymes, but really you had to build it into the landscape.

So you had to have mythology connected to mountain, to river, to tree, to sky, to animal, just like we saw those, you know, how potent animals in sacred caves in Europe from 20,000 years ago and in Aboriginal culture from 20 and 30 thousand years ago. The knowledge and wisdom was contained within stories that were linked to the land. So that's what makes us in Ireland I'd say exaggeration

to say Aboriginal but indigenous and rooted to an extent that no one in Europe has the same rootedness. So in the absence of paper, in the absence of writing, in the absence of writing, what you do is you have to create these mythologies and stories about mountains and about a tree

and about the rivers and about the land or about an animal as a way to preserve history because there's no writing as such. You create myths. Exactly. There you have it. And so we hear in know, we hear in India or we hear in Aboriginal culture about the

song lines, or it's also called the Chirunga lines, and that is an Aboriginal from any different tribe can, so an Aboriginal can cross huge swathes of land in Australia by without knowing the land or anything, by just chanting the lines and the words that he

would have learnt or he or she would have learnt from their ancestors. And this will summon up for them the sort of climate they're entering into, the sort of landscape they're entering into, where waterholes might be, what sort of animals live there. And even if they don't have the same language with another aboriginal tribe, like these people have been here, you know, 20 or 30,000 years, they've developed many languages. they can understand it beyond language, because it's, there's knowledge within the rhythm, rhythms, they say the words when they're pacing on the land, and somehow that brings the land to life. It's, it's phenomenally potent. But again, you know, about four years ago, in 2014, the Nobel Prize was won by scientists who realized that we have a part of

our brain that maps knowledge with space so we it's they are spatial system in our brains just like a bird spatial system knowing a swallows knowing how to get from Ireland to Africa you know in human beings it's connected in with um the spatial patterns is connected in with knowledge and so that's how the aboriginals can walk the land. The memories come back to them in these rhythms, and then they see the future. They see what happened here thousands of years ago, back to glacial times. And they see, you know, even things like waterholes and marks, geological, ancient geological marks on the landscape. Now, we clearly don't have something as developed as

the Chirunga lines, as the Song lines, but our Din Sianachas, which is our collection of stories and mythology about place, the lore of notable places, has enormous amount of information of things that would have happened not only a thousand or two thousand years ago, but hints of things that happened when the humans first arrived here 10,000 years ago. I can't remember if I gave you examples of that last time, but I can if you want. I'm having my trouble. I'm trying to get my head around this. I'm trying to get my head around this. So what would be an example of that? What do you mean, like something in the Irish landscape tells a story of what's there before? OK, so first, the Din Seánachas, the mythology now, if you read one of

them, they sound utterly over the top and exaggerated. And a lot of them are Rom-Aish, they're rubbish because in, I don't know why, maybe the 14th, 15th, 16th century, people would have just added more to the story to make them more outlandish. But an example, if you dig down to find truth, would be... Did we talk last time about Town Clíona and Town Tullia and Town Rhydraige? No. Now, these are three great waves of Ireland, the three greatest waves. I was talking about the five sacred trees that your man, the three key man had.

Well, there were three also great waves. Like waves in the sea, like the tide. One of them, but all three of them are still extant today. Like only a week ago did I hear that. So there's one wave, Town Cliona, it's in Glandar Harbour in County Cork. Okay. There's another, Town Rory,

it's in Dundrum Bay in County Down. And there's another one called Town Tuatha, which is on the way out to Rattan Island. And Town Cliona, so what they say is these were waves and they have great stories. Like Town Cliona was a goddess and she was killed by Monanon, who was either her father or her lover. Fucking hell.

And so she still exists, this supernatural wave. You still hear her on stormy nights. You go down to Glamdor in County Cork and people tell you they hear her on stormy nights you go down to glandor and county cork and people tell you they hear her she's still alive and town let's say rury as i said a week ago i was talking to people in um in county down and they said to me in castle well and actually and they said to me that they see town uh rury okay so that's nice there's a mythology a myth a mythical story that they can see or hear today. But what geologists are now telling us is they believe these waves were actually folk memories of the flood sheets, the ice sheets that were washing off the landscape after the last ice age.

Because, you know, the way most cultures, most ancient cultures remember a flood, have stories about a flood, because they arrived on a land after a flood. And we know exactly that's what happened in Ireland. 10,000 years ago, the ice sheet retreated up towards Scotland and then up towards Iceland, the North Pole. And as it did, floods and torrents of water were washing off the soil, off the land. And these two waves, Town Rory and Town Tuatha, there was one big ice sheet left around Loch Neagh in Northern Ireland. And the southern, as the water melted from the south of Loch Neagh, it went down through Points Pass, through

and then into Carlingford Lock and Dundrum Bay. And into Dundrum, Carlingford Lock and then around into Dundrum Bay. And that's where Town Rory still is today. And then Town Tuatha was the water, according to geologists and geographers, that would have washed out from North Lough Neagh

down the Upper Ban River and then out into the sea towards the Sea of Mhael, towards Scotland. And we can actually see with our own eyes, sandbank that would have been washed out by this torrents of water from the land as the glacier melted off, washed the land and pushed it out towards Rathlin Island.

So the fact that we have these stories that talk about these waves in specific places, which is exactly where geographers say the main flood water, the main melt water from the glaciers would have been pummeling off the land just when we were trying to set foot here 10 000 years ago that's i mean again it could be a coincidence but it sounds not like it sounds like this is a memory that we passed down thousands of years in story and it's it's so hard for me it's so hard for me to to relate to because today we're like we're outsourcing all our memory now to data, to phones. Like, I don't have to remember shit anymore

because I've got a phone in my pocket that I can just Google. So I'm actively not remembering shit. I just take notes or if I hear something, I go, I don't need to remember that. I just need to remember a certain code that I can put into Google and then it will tell me what I need to know. I know, yeah. Think back to that thing, the Seánachas Múir, the ancient text that recorded all the law. And what do they say? What is the preserving

shrine? It's memory. What is it? It's not hard. It's in nature and what's preserved in it. And every one of us agree that all of our memories are now preserved in the most, the weakest rubbish, most rubbish and ephemeral form, you know, on digital, that we will not remember our truth. But since I talked to you last time, you know, I've been doing more of this project, Sea Tamagotchi project, a project where I asked fishermen along the coast of Mayo, of Donegal and Galway for coastal words and sea words. And it has blown me away.

And then since January, I set up an Instagram account at monkon.mcgham, just sending out every day a word that the fishermen would have told me and a recording of them explaining the words. And what I found, these words that are still being in daily use on the coastline of Ireland, Dunningall, Mayo and Galway, I will get down to Cork and Kerry at some point. But in these words, I was learning concepts about, in the words were sort of contained within the words or preserved were in them, were concepts about coastal practices, about navigational systems, about seasonal calendars, about psychological aspects of sea life, about migratory routes,

about fishing techniques, about where exactly the fish were, what seasons they were in, what best ways to capture them. They're all within these words that are still there but that are dying. One little thing here, I just have a little hot take that came into my brain there, Mán Chán, which is like an ironic and sad parallel to what you're speaking about. So we're speaking

there about water and the relevance of how water has been used traditionally in Ireland for memory and if you look at what's happening in Ireland today, Ireland is becoming the world's brain because of our low tax rate and our climate. These massive data centres, Amazon and Google are putting these huge,

huge data centres in Ireland. And a data centre is effectively a building with no windows that contains the brain of the internet. This is where all the information is. And they're now dotted around the Irish countryside. But what these things need to survive is access to our water. So the data centres in Ireland are using up all of our water

to cool down the electronic brains to remember stuff for the world. Powerful. That's beautiful. Good God. Yeah. Yeah. And what we're only realizing now and again this is something that i has come clearly to me since i talked to you last october whenever as i said i'm writing i have a book coming out maybe in autumn this autumn about evocative nature words for nature for kids but really the thing i'm focusing on is a book next in October 2020 about place, about landscape. And if my book, 32 Words for Fields, explored, you know, the hidden insights we can get from the Irish language, the next book is looking at the hidden insights we can get from place, from the landscape.

And what's been blowing me away is the entire landscape of Ireland is feminine. It's female. It is just radically female. And what we do when we think of mythology we think of men we think of finn mccool and we think of kukul and we think of you know kings different major kings and that that's all a layer that's been put on top of of knowledge so i don't know how it got there but one way is remember you were saying these are accounts that were written down by monks you know most of our mythology and our sagas. And it could well be that the monks decided to only record the stories about men because Christianity is a patriarchy.

It's all about just making sure men are in control. So there was a knowledge in Ireland, there was a mythology and a belief system in Ireland that was based on female, but they didn't pass that down. So you're finding a lot less stories about women in these manuscripts. That's been just vanished. That's been gone. And interestingly, a parallel with that, when I was researching my documentary about 1916 that I made in 2016, it was very, very difficult to hear about women who had been part of 1916 or who had even been involved in the Irish War of Independence because the only people who got pensions in post-independence southern Ireland were men. So these are the only stories that got recorded. And because women weren't entitled to pensions, even if they were in the IRA, we never recorded their stories. So there's very little information about that. Even though I had grandfathers in the IRA, I also had grandaunts who were involved in that as well.

But their stories didn't get recorded because they didn't apply for a pension. They couldn't. Interesting. There's one interesting source. Remember, I think we were talking about my granny was Sheila Humphreys, who was vice president of the Cumann na mBan at some point in the 20s and 30s. But when, I think in the 60s, much later in life, in the 50s and 60s, they finally did, you know, bring in laws that maybe some people were able to retrospectively get pensions. And a lot of the women who were in Cumann na mBan at the time, as you said, they were not able to get pensions previously. who were in Cumann na mBan at the time, as you said, they were not able to get pensions previously. Then there was a chance they could. And they started writing to my granny in the 60s and telling my granny, would you ever sign a form to say I was in Cumann na mBan?

And then they'd list all the things they did as proof that they were in it. And I gave all those papers. When I was like 17 or 18, they were all in the garage and I'd just go through them all because I was interested in the history of the time. But I gave them all to UCD. And UCD, thankfully, thanks to these data centres, you know, everything is now being digitised in UCD archives and in archives all over Ireland. So that information isn't fully available on the internet yet but the whole collection

of all the letters to my granny and all that coming to my archive has been digitised and hopefully within a few years will be accessible. But as you say there is this massive blind spot at the moment. Yeah, I'd offer trouble trying to find things. Just another thing, too, just to take things back to the water, right? You spoke at the start of the podcast about how the rivers of Ireland,

such as the Shannon, were considered like places of knowledge, like knowledge flowed through the river. And I can't help but tie this up with the salmon of knowledge like knowledge flowed through the river and i can't help but um tie this up with the salmon of knowledge this salmon that had all the knowledge in folklore that had all the knowledge of the world if you could just catch this salmon what was the deal with ireland rivers salmon lakes knowledge and and knowledge being this thing that you wanted to have and that you'd get punished for if you tried to get too much yeah so and again when you go back this far in anything so we could just go and talk about as i said kuhlman and finn mccool but they might be just um you know it's hard to know they could be just iron age stories so they could be like as late as i don't know 500 ad fifth century even

the even like 800 1000 ad we don't know, 500 AD, 5th century, even like 800, 1000 AD. We don't know. But when we go further back than that into female stuff, into stuff where women had power, and again, there's no proof of when women had power. We sort of know in our bones there was a time before male patriarchy. Then you get into something that it's not just Ireland anymore. In the same way, it's when you go right back into the roots of the Irish language, it's not Irish. As I said, we've seen, if you go far back in the Irish language, it's basically Irish and Sanskrit are the same language. They're an Indo-European

language, the same concepts, the same rules. If you go back into landscape long enough and rivers, you're back to this female world. And that is a world where you can't have nations because nations haven't been invented. So what we know, we seem to know, is that from our Aboriginal, from indigenous people all around the world, that the soil, the land was female. You know, that's what Newgrange and Nacru is about. The male sun, the phallus, male sexual organ impales itself or impregnates the female womb, the female earth at different times of the year. So in Newgrange, it happens at the solstice and in La Creux, it happens at the equinoxes. Is that why in the middle of the Hill of Tara,

there's this big stone phallus, like this big rock, langur in the middle of it? Yeah, exactly. That's it. I mean, as far as we can be sure, all we can be sure is that phallus, that sexual organ sticking up is to be found in India.

You know, it's a key part still today of the lingam of Hindu culture, the penis. And it's as Bob Quinn has found similar ones in Tunisia. This was, it was a global culture. Well, what are we saying? It was Europe, Asian cultural phenomenon that there was a male who had to are we saying yeah it was europe asian cultural phenomenon

that there was a male who had to impregnate the female and god if you strip back any of our old stories in other words you go beyond the finn mccool even the finn mccools but if you go beyond those to oh to the stories it's all about the the female and then the male having its tiny role just to impregnate to put its seed into the female. And then the female creates everything beyond it. So in Ireland, we realize all of our rivers have female names. They're all females, except Irlo Linard of, you know, of the amazing musician. He names, there's one down in him, he's from Balivorn in Cork. And he says there's one male river, a shitty little stream, I think, not even a big one.

But the fact that it sort of proves it's the exception that makes the rule that every female, because water was feminine, gushing water nourished the land, it created life, which is what women did. What the female energy did. And again, you find the exact same thing

in India. So let's say the Boyle River in Roskalman is named after the cow, a female life-giving animal, just as the Boin River is, you know, Boinda. We talked about this last time. It's a female Boinda, the white cow river. And it's the exact same as Govinda, which is the Indian river. Which is related with the Milky Way up above us. It is indeed, exactly. So the Boinda, the goddess that's made manifest in the Boine River

is the same as Govinda, the Indian god and epithet of Krishna. But then the Bo Nemed is a river in Ulster and Bo Nemed basically means sacred cow. The river is a sacred female nourishing form. The Bo Goira is the old name for the black water in County Meath.

These were all female goddess rivers. There's a river in India called Gomati. So do you remember we said Bo is the Irish for cow? Sanskrit for cow is Go. Go and Bo, same word, same root. So there's a river in India called Gomati, possessing of cows. And then Godavari, giving cows. Is this why cows are sacred in parts of India?

Exactly. And what do you think, you know why cows are sacred in parts of India exactly and it's exactly and what do you think you know what were sacred in Ireland what was the key form of currency before the Normans arrived fuck yeah

the fucking the cows exactly oh shit yeah if you were important in Ireland it was how many fucking cows you owned

that's what the whole d'etan is about exactly exactly and like you know you own. That's what the whole dataan is about. Exactly, exactly. And like, you know, you'll get that obviously in Kenya with the Maasai people. But it just goes, in Ireland, in India, it goes beyond just your possessions. It's everything. So, you know, the main story that's come down to us, the main mythology is Taingboa Cuine, the battle raid of Cooley.

And what's the main story you think of India? It's the Mahrabhata. What is the Mahrabhata about? It's about cattle raiding we have the exact same culture and you know rivers are vital in both countries because the land is alive the land is sacred so i mean this has all been this has all been denied us all of this information because you know first of i suppose during colonial era it was in old irish that we didn't understand anymore. And then the, and I say like the main people who transcribed, who translated them, the texts from the late 19th century

and the early 20th century, two of them were my relations, T.F. O'Rahilly, first cousin of the O'Rahilly, of Michael O'Rahilly of 1916. T.F. O'Rahilly, I never met, but he's the main, one of the main Celtic scholars who translated these ancient manuscripts and then his sister Cecil O'Rahilly who I knew very well she was the first major

translator of the town book Cúinna the catalogue of Ulster but she was in an era. So this is fucking family shit for you man you're carrying on a tradition I mean I didn't expect to me I had no idea I was going to get into this but they were they were scholars and experts i you know i'm just a journalist picking at this i have no deep knowledge of any of us i'm just rooting around um one question i got asked man con is uh are there someone was saying that there's forgotten

words that are associated with crafts with different crafts that we had in Ireland and alongside these crafts were words and now these words are gone. Do you know anything about them or these words? I do. Well, by coincidence, again, as I said, I really, I know what's in my book and I didn't look at those in my book, but the Craft Council of Ireland recently got onto me and had the same idea as your, as your listener was saying, what are the words connected with crafts? So I started looking at the words connected to weaving i think your listener was interested in woodworking but i'm going to get on to woodworking at some point but weaving blew me away yeah so um for the phrase for a weaver a weaver setting up his loom okay

it's fiodor so a weaver is fiododóir. Ag dennef a chid umach, doing his umachas. And basically it translates as a weaver getting into his harness. So there was this idea that weaving, weaving cloth, you know, which is a really ancient tradition that goes back to exactly, it goes back, you know, Dublin, we have weaving cloths from 2,700 years ago. But in Armagh, we have woven patterns on pottery from 3,600 years ago. But in truth, weaving goes back to the beginnings of thousands and thousands of years. But this idea of a weaver setting up his harness, he was basically, a weaver was getting into the loom the same way as a draft animal gets into a plough.

It's the same word. Omacha is used for the heddles, which are the ties that tie the loom together and also that tie the animal to the plough. I just love that idea. So you're either ploughing the soil or ploughing the cloth that comes from the animal's back. And there's quite a few.

There's other links between weaving and ploughing. The word trumon, which is a spindle whorl, or the part of the spindle in which the wheel string works. So the only thing we know about a spindle, you know, is in the centre of a record player, that pin that's a spindle. But long ago, that was the pin on which weaving went around. Yeah. And so that word trumon can mean that spindle,

but it can also mean the leather backband of plough traces. I don't know. I mean, I hardly know what a backband of plough traces are, but I know it's a key element of ploughing. A trombone can also mean a woman's pregnancy. So I love the fact that you're suddenly get if you get into weaving or if you get into Irish language and look at the use the Irish language of prism, you just get straight back to the soil, back to rootedness. And of course you do, because everything in life depended on either the land or the seasons. And that's why all these fishing words that I collected are still so rooted in wind directions, in rock formations, in the movements of shoals of fish. We are just a people based on grounding in the land.

And, you know, whatever we know, it's only the last 200 years that we have moved away from that and one last thing i'm going to ask you about man con is someone asked me to ask you about a trip you had planned to do to find the mythical irish island of high brazil could you speak about that plan and also describe to us what is high brazil yeah so high bra, in theory, is an island that is off the southwest coast of Ireland. And some people believe that it gave the name to Brazil, to the country in South America. So what it is, it was a mythological, mysterious island that was believed about in the west coast of Ireland. But it was shrouded in a coast of mist for seven years and then revealed itself for a little bit and then hid again between the coast between mist now what gave it structure and more

believability was that it was suddenly put on maps from I think they were really early about 1500 years ago I'd have to check that but then I saw one from the 13th century with High Brazil.

That's right, there is indeed. And then it was on maps up until the 18th century, up until the late 19th century, up until 1890, British admiralty maps had it on it. So, you know, something that was part of our mythological

world and that we just told stories about, then crossed into reality by, you know, by being on maps. You had this divide. So whether it exists or not, we know that then in the 19th century, there were people went, naval or sort of, yeah, merchant naval vessels went in search of it.

And they never, well, some people claim they found it um but whether they did or not is sort of is it's hard to know but there's now a re-interest in finding it so i think i don't know where i was talking about that someone had a film maker had asked me would i join some other group of people to go on a journey in search of high brazil just there's a few hints of where it might be like there's a particular, beyond the Porcupine Bank, beyond the southwest of Ireland, there's this quite area of a sandbank, of high

land approaches the surface of the sea. And they were thinking that it might have been that. It might have been that the land came above the sea. So anyway, me and some others were going to go off on a journey and I was going to make a film about it. But that film didn't get funding. But in the meantime,

some other group from Armagh got on to me and they said they're going to make a film. They have a one-armed sailor who just crossed the Atlantic during COVID, during COVID lockdown. He got into his yacht, his one-armed sailor from Northern Ireland and sailed across the Atlantic. And now what he's going to do is join some other people and go

on a journey to to high Brazil. In fact, they wanted to get in contact with you about it. Oh, really? That's the type of thing I get contacted about. You know, it's like

there's a one armed sailor and he wants to find a mythical island in the Atlantic Ocean. It's like contact blind boy immediately and ask him if he wants to come along. What this shows is something really exciting

in that something is changing in Ireland. We are finally wanting answers to who we are, to where we come from, to the land around us. This information has been around for at least 150 years. I mean, it's been around for thousands of years, but it's been accessible in some way in libraries for 150 years, translated into English. But only now do we want to know the deep truth of our past.

The fact that the female goddess holds sway. The fact that our trees and that our water is sacred. The fact that there are things beyond reality in a sort of quantum type way. There can be landmasses that might appear and might not appear. And I feel amazingly optimistic about this. Do you know what I think that is as well though, Mancon?

Go on. I think that right now, to be decolonial in thought is no longer a dirty word. I reckon it might be a post Good Friday agreement thing, I don't know, but to be decolonial, to recognise that colonialism in Ireland, that it wasn't a good thing, that it's possible to be decolonial and to detach that from hating the British or to be decolonial without an anger to it and to say, no, I want to look at my history and I want to look at my history through the lens of colonization. Like I'm fascinated with the climate, climate change and Ireland. I'm fascinated by the fact that Cromwell got rid of all the forests and turned Ireland into pasture land. And that, you know, I'm fascinated by the fact that the Irish famine,

you can view it through the lens of the climate crisis it was a former climate crisis in a sense because colonialism forced us into a monoculture so it's it's okay now to look back at our history and to say we had something really really big and really important that's relevant to our identities today and it's we need to strip back that lens going back to the fucking penal laws of what was told to us about what Ireland is and who we are, you know, to redefine it and to take ownership of it and to take

ownership in a way that invites people in who come from different countries too and now are Irish, you know what I mean? I agree with every word you're saying and it's so exciting and talk of climate change, you know, the ultimate climate change was what happened in the fifth century AD when Christianity arrived. Like Professor Mike Bailey. Yeah. Mike Bailey of Queen's University has proven that from dendrochronology, you know, the dating of oak

trees, particularly that there was massive bad winters, a series of at least a decade of appalling winters and summers where there was no summer, basically. There was winter all year round, so no crops would have grown for 10 years in exactly the time that the main push of Christianity happened. I think it was around 530 or 520 or 530 AD. So the first missionaries came, you know, 430 AD. We know from St. Patrick he wasn't making much progress. It was very hard for people rejecting it. They kept on believing in their worship of landscape and land and female

goddesses and the sea and the river. But then around the beginning of the 6th century, suddenly these monasteries and chapels took over Ireland. Exactly the time where we had had this 10 or 15 years of bad winters. Christians were able to say, your gods don't work anymore. You need to accept new gods.

Because the ancient Irish religion is so much about, like all the different gods and goddesses within the ancient Irish culture was about harvests and it was about relying upon the weather to sort you out with your harvest. So you're saying that at a time when this was failing, when you can't rely upon the winter, that this God and Jesus Christ all of a sudden

becomes palatable because the harvest isn't showing up, your gods have abandoned you. Exactly, yeah. And I mean, Professor Mike Bailey is renowned internationally. He's regarded as the finest dendrochronologist in the world. He's now retired. So I have a podcast I do for RT called do for Archie, called The Almanac of Ireland. And we have one episode we interviewed Mike Bailey.

It's worth listening. Like, it's factual study. He can, it's, you know, every OO of his peers accept his dendrochronology. You can see this appalling series of years. He, it was either a volcano in Iceland or something caused this, caused the dust in the sky, and the Christians took advantage. And so that was when we turned away from the female and the land. The land abandoned us. Just like we say in the famine, the land let us down, we had to turn our back on the land. It initially did it in the sixth century, and that's why we

moved away and took on this ridiculous rubbish of Christianity. And then that allowed us to take on other rubbish of colonialism. But we were, you know, potent. We would not have given up. And capitalism, because capitalism and Christianity work hand in hand. Exactly, exactly. And so we can either lambaste the past. But what's amazing is we happen to be alive at the one moment when all of this realization and enlightenment is happening. So we're going to look at everything post maybe 2012 as dark ages. A new era has come where,

you know, this idea of not being ashamed, as you said, of the landscape and of your ancient indigenous connections and allowing the female energy, not seeing that as a threat, but seeing it as a nourishing, life-giving force. It's phenomenally exciting times and it's only beginning. I know there's going to be a few rough decades, but I am like just so, I can't believe how the interest that's happening in gardening and the Irish language in soil and in connecting, just as you said, not only Irish people, but Irish people with cultures all over the world and welcoming new people in it's it's an amazing time i think okay thank you so much for that man con um that was absolutely everything i i wanted from that chat so that was my chat with man con magen

uh i thoroughly enjoyed that hope you liked it too. Pretty fun. Very informative. I'll probably have him back on again. I'd love to meet him for a pint. You know. I haven't met. Mankon in real life. Because of. Because of COVID.

So. When things get a bit more. More normal. I'd love to have a pint with him. Em. So. I'll catch you next week. feeling there might be a hot take next week i've got a couple of ideas boiling up in the meantime mind yourselves have some self-compassion

go easy on yourself don't be too hard on yourself be nice to yourself Rub a dog. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock host the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your

playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play come along for the ride and punch your ticket to rock city at torontorock.com Thank you.