Rekindling the powerful image of Elcmar the druid and poet and diviner atop Newgrange at Samhain

In the story of Tochmarc Étaíne, the Wooing of Étaíne, there is an incredibly powerful image of Elcmar, standing atop Newgrange at Samhain in druidic garb with a fork of white hazel in his hand. Elcmar has arrived into the ownership of Síd in Broga through his power as a druid, and a poet, and a diviner.

And this is the symbol that is all to often missing from the interpretation of Newgrange today. Today, it is called a tomb. It has become a dead thing. The image of Elcmar standing on the mound in all his power reminds us that the creative and intuitive side of our nature must not give way to the deadening image of the archaeologist's measuring rod. 

Yes, the archaeological interpretation of Newgrange is hugely important, and we are extremely grateful for all the light that they have shed on these wonderful ancient places. But they do not hold a premium on the interpretation of these sites. In ancient times, the poet held almost equal court in terms of status with the king. 

Today, we should allow the druid Elcmar to hold equal standing with the archaeologist. This means accepting that Newgrange has a power beyond what can be measured with a red and white pole. This means empowering aspects of ourselves that are hidden in the darkness of the sídhe, and shining that solstice light into the darkness to awaken something latent in us. We must allow our Elcmar nature to stand on the sídhe at Samhain. 

Without that inculcation, that instilling of the wisdom from within, Síd in Broga loses its power, and becomes just the New Grange, that heap of stones that once was a tomb but now is an empty vessel. And the real danger in depriving ourselves of our Elcmar image is that everything thus follows the same path - everything becomes inanimate and materialistic and our view becomes perhaps even nihilistic. Why are we here at all? 

The Meaning of Myth - the Fork of White Hazel. Anthony Murphy with Treacy O'Connor.

Our Elcmar image allows us to stand in the power of our presence, in all that it encompasses - scientific and spiritual, awesome and terrible - and to engage fully with the journey of life. Thus, the childlike initiate becomes the supreme poet of the Boyne, the one who has tasted the Salmon of Knowledge. To the rationalist, the monument is called Newgrange, and it is a pile of stones from the past - the corpse of something it once was. To the poet, the monument is called Síd in Broga, and it is a crystal bower, a place where the sun eternally shines.

Sadness and the monuments: remembering the ancestors and embracing this one life

(Or 'Ramblings and Reflections upon sadness', part II)

Another aspect of sadness in relation to the megalithic monuments is the feeling of melancholy  engendered by thinking about the ancestors, and the lives that they endured, and the sometimes harsh existences they lived through. And to what end? So that we can exist on this day? So that we too can endure the fullness of life, and all its agonies and all its ecstasies?

I think part of the sadness relates to the temporal, and temporary, nature of our physical existences. As I wrote in Newgrange: Monument to Immortality, "we are here only for a short time". We look at the magnificent megalithic edifices, those wondrous temples of stone from the ancient world, and we stand in admiration of a society of people who created something so powerfully enduring, so permanent, in an ever-changing and ever-vanishing world. And that sums up a powerful part of the human experience on this earth. We are born. We live a short life. We die. And what do we leave behind, as a memorial of our brief existence here?

The builders of Newgrange created something powerfully enduring in an ever-changing world.

In Land of the Ever-Living Ones, I addressed the issue of ancestors in the beautiful dialogue between the sean-draoi, the wise old man, and the young boy. The sean-draoi tries to impress upon the boy that we must never forget the ancestors, because we are them and they are us.

"We are the ancestors," the sean-draoi declares, to the bemusement of the young boy.

"We are on a winding trail, an ancestral pathway that is much longer than any road we will ever walk in this world. It winds out of the furthest reaches of the past, and leads onwards to some unknown destiny, far off in the distant future. If we were to forget from whence this path emerged, from our own mothers and fathers of the long forgotten yesteryear, if we were to forsake our own journey along this path, would we not also be denying the magical future, the unknowable destiny that awaits our myriad descendants yet to come? Are there not a thousand, nay a million, even more, of our offspring who will look back along the path to remember us, their distant progenitors, those who continued the pilgrimage on this great path that leads back to the very dawn of time itself?"

"We are the meeting point of ancestors and descendants. The track leading from the past, and the road heading off into the future, are joined, here and now, with us. We are what binds ancestors to progeny, forebears to descendants, yesterday to tomorrow. We have a very special place in the life of the world, and we must recognise and honour it, holding fast to the onerous pathway beneath our feet, and all the time remembering ancestors who have brought us to this point. Some day we will be the ancestor, lifted off this worldly trackway and brought aloft towards the heavenly realm, and although our own feet will no longer tread the sacred pathway of life, those of our children and our children’s children will, we hope, find their way on the never-ending trail from ancestor to descendant."

It's so beautiful. And yet to tragic. And poignant. None of us will endure the harsh contract that life imposes upon us. "We are locked into a binding and irreversible contract with life, a treaty that insists upon death for every last one of us, with no exception".(1) The 17th century poet James Shirley, in his poem Death the Leveller, wrote:

The glories of our blood and state

     Are shadows, not substantial things;

There is no armour against Fate;

     Death lays his icy hand on kings:

               Sceptre and Crown

               Must tumble down,

And in the dust be equal made

With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

The following short film that I made a few years ago tries to capture some sense of the sadness relating to the passing of the ancestors, and of the temporal and fleeting nature of our earthly existence:(2) 

 

Remembering the ancestors at Dowth, Ireland from Anthony Murphy on Vimeo.

Faced with this awful reality, that we must all tumble down into the dusty grave of death, what are we to do?  We have but one choice. To live life, and all the consequences that that choice entails. Joseph Campbell has some good advice for it:

“All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.”  (3)

“Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.”

“You can't say life is useless because it ends in the grave.”

Of course, all the above is predicated on the belief that "this is it", that this life is the only life, and that when we die, we are going into a grave, and we will be extinguished forever.

If there is one thing that can be said about the ancient mound of Síd in Broga/Newgrange (and there are many great things that can be said about it), it's that the people who built it were keenly participating in life and its mysteries, at the same time, preparing themselves for what might lie beyond. In Newgrange: Monument to Immortality, I postulated that the design of the monument is in tune with aspects of the near death experience (NDE), with its dark tunnel leading towards the light. We might call them primitive, but our distant forebears were pragmatic about life and death. They sensed that there was something beyond this life, and aspects of this belief survived into later times in the form of stories about wondrous otherworlds and places or realms where people lived on in happiness.

"All the greatest spiritual traditions of the world...have told us clearly that death is not the end. They have all handed down a vision of some sort of life to come, which infuses this life that we are leading now with sacred meaning. But despite their teachings, modern society is largely a spiritual desert where the majority imagine that this life is all that there is... Believing fundamentally that this life is the only one, modern people have developed no long-term vision. So there is nothing to restrain them from plundering the planet for their own immediate ends and from living in a selfish way that could prove fatal for the future."(4)

And so it becomes clear that the sadness that I sometimes feel at the monuments is not always one that's inherently part of those monuments, but rather a sadness that I bring from my modern world and its attendant psychosis, and its bulldozers. We see fit to destroy in order to create. We deem it normal to rip the earth asunder, because in our own shortsightedness, we think that this is all there is, so we'd better make the most of it, even if that means depriving our descendants of a hospitable planet.

Despite my great love for the monuments, there are yet some hard questions that must be asked. To shy away from them would be a disingenuous act. An honest appraisal of our relation to the mounds, and the landscape, and the past, and the ancestors, requires us to remove the mask and to see ourselves as both ancestors and descendants. What would we have done, in the same situation, in the past? And what are we likely to do in the future? Does anything really change? Do we change at all?

We might ask Newgrange if it should ever have been built at all.

At Newgrange, "we wish that we could scale the fence, walk right up to its gleaming facade, and ask the very monument to speak to us of matters cosmic, of creation and the journey of life and, ultimately, why we are here and where we are going".(5)

Could I even dare to suggest that, at Newgrange, I might even ask it, "should you have been built at all?"

Was its construction not the beginning of this sometimes awful phase of humanity, the one in which we rip the earth up to build our castles of mortal life on foundations of sand? Has the result of this "civilisation" of ours not been the gradual removal and detachment of humans from the natural world? And has that divorce of human from wilderness not been one of the greatest crimes against the planet? (I'm not blaming the construction of Newgrange for the state of the planet, but merely opening up a line of enquiry here.)

"Modern industrial society is a fanatical religion. We are demolishing, poisoning, destroying all life-systems on the planet. We are signing IOUs our children will not be able to pay ... We are acting as if we were the last generation on the planet. Without a radical change in heart, in mind, in vision, the earth will end up like Venus, charred and dead."(6)

When we left the forests, and the antediluvian hunter-gatherer life of the Mesolithic, were we not beginning on this frightful march towards oblivion? Could we yet contemplate the notion that there was someone who stood watching the construction of Síd in Broga all those 50 centuries ago, who observed with bewilderment the emergence of a new phase of human madness?

To be continued...


References and footnotes:
(1) Murphy, Anthony (2012), Newgrange: Monument to Immortality, p.134.
(2) I should add that several times in this movie I mention the "men" who built Dowth. This is not an intentionally sexist statement, but rather a repetition of the myth about Dowth, which says that the king commanded "all the men of Erin" to build it.
(3) Campbell, Joseph, Pathways to Bliss.
(4) Sogyal Rinpoche (2002), The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, p.8.
(5) Murphy (2012), p.10.
(6) Former Brazilian Minister for the Environment, Jose Antonio Lutzenberger (quoted in the Sunday Times, London, March 1991)

A dream of the collapse of Mellifont Abbey and the reinstatement of the old names of Newgrange

This is perhaps going to be a blog post with a bit of a difference. I don't often talk about my dreams, but I've had a few very interesting ones lately, and my mind is bubbling with intuitive thoughts as I consciously (and perhaps unconsciously) try to extrapolate some meaning from them.

A couple of nights ago, I dreamt I could see an old wall, or a portion of an old building. There was a storm, and the wind was very strong. As I watched, I could tell that this structure was going to collapse. And collapse it did. It came crashing down. I was greatly moved by this, and a sense of urgent duty compelled me to reach for my mobile phone, to call for help. I'm not sure who I was supposed to ring for help, but the words were there, on the tip of my tongue, ready to be shouted into the phone to anyone who answered.

"Mellifont Abbey has collapsed."

The remains of Mellifont Abbey, Co. Louth, founded in 1142 and dissolved in 1539.

The location of my dream was not Mellifont Abbey. It was set in another tranquil and scenic location, a place,with which I am familiar, overlooking the River Boyne. However, there was no doubt in the dream that it was Mellifont Abbey that had collapsed. Its strange appearance and obvious dislocation may also have meaning, but for the moment I am concentrating on what seems to me to be the central import of the dream.

Mellifont Abbey

For those of you unfamiliar with Ireland and its history, Mellifont Abbey is one of those places that occupies a reasonably prominent and influential role in our past. A Cistercian monastery, it was founded in 1142 by Saint Malachy of Armagh and went on to become the largest Cistercian abbey in Ireland. It is located on the banks of the River Mattock, a tributary of the Boyne, and is located just over 5 kilometres (3.3 miles) north of Newgrange.

Its importance to my own work is largely through the fact that after its establishment, the Cistercians came into ownership of a lot of the land in the area, including lands at Brú na Bóinne. They established farms, known as granges, with the purpose of supplying the monastic order with enough food to make them self sufficient, and established exclusive fishing rights along the River Boyne. Several of their granges have, it is believed, left their names in the landscape today. They include Newgrange, Sheepgrange, Roughgrange and Littlegrange.(1)

Donnchadh Ó Cearbhaill, king of Airghialla, granted the monks the site for their abbey and the lands with which it was endowed, in the 12th century. It was around that time that the monument we know today as Newgrange assumed the name by which most people now know it. The "new grange" of the Cistercian monks contained this most auspicious monument of ancient Ireland, the one previously known by several different names and variations thereof. Today, it is simply known as Newgrange, but I wonder how many visitors to Newgrange know any of its pre-Medieval names.

The old names of Newgrange

In the Dindshenchas (lore of place names), it is called Tech Mic ind Óc (the house of the son of the young, viz. Oengus/Anghus). In Tochmarc Étaine, the Wooing of Étain, it is known as Síd in Broga - síd being commonly translated as a "fairy hill or mound"(2) and Broga being from bruig, meaning "abode, house, mansion, etc."(3) The áes síde were the supernatural beings, or fairies, who inhabited these mysterious mounds and hills. Many believe these "fairies" represented a later folk survival of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the gods who were said to have owned and lived in the mounds. Dagda, the chief of the gods, is described as the original owner of Síd in Broga, but later his son Oengus takes possession of it.(4) Newgrange was also previously known by variants such as Brug Oengusa and Brug mac ind Óc. (5)

The 'New Grange', originally known by various names including Síd in Broga and Brug mac ind Óc.

A couple of months ago, I watched a beautiful documentary on the Irish language station TG4, called Fís na Fuiseoige (The Lark's View).(6) It was an exploration of the deep connection between Irish people and their places. In it, one scholar suggested that the anglicisation of many Irish place names by the English had helped to undermine this sense of connection, and, by extension, we could propose that a sort of disempowerment had taken place. Did the same thing happen when Síd in Broga became Newgrange? Did it lose some, or all, of its power for people? I believe that something of its importance was diminished by that renaming.

The Cistercians experienced their own disempowerment with the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century. Mellifont was dissolved in 1539 and today it lies largely ruined, although small but impressive remnants survive, including the much-photographed and documented Lavabo, or wash room. In terms of a direct, literal portent, the dream could hardly refer to a physical collapse of Mellifont, for there is not much left to collapse. The Cistercian order does survive, to this day, at the nearby New Mellifont Abbey, in the nearby village of Collon (on land which was part of the original Cistercian grant), which was founded in the 1930s by the surviving Cistercians from Mount Melleray Abbey in Co. Waterford.

Fascinatingly, although long renamed, the "New Grange" of the Cistercians had not altogether relegated nor eradicated the older names of the monument, even in the late 19th century, when Borlase mentioned that the place name Bro/Broe, presumably a survival of Brug/Brugh/Brú, still existed in the vicinity of Newgrange and the Bend of the Boyne. There was (and still is today) a Broe House near the river beneath Newgrange. Borlase quotes a Mr. O'Laverty, writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, who had spoken to a Mr. Maguire and his son, of Newgrange, who told him that "the field in which Newgrange tumulus stands is called Bro Park" and that in the immediate vicinity of Newgrange are the Bro Farm, Bro Mill and Bro Cottage. It appears that some things are not easily forgotten! You can listen to me reading an extract from Borlase's Dolmens of Ireland about this Bro/Broe place name in the audio clip below.



The renaming of Newgrange

I'm not entirely sure how the connection was made in my mind, but since I had the dream I've been thinking that it is, at least in part, related to the renaming of Síd in Broga to Newgrange. And I cannot help entertaining the thought that the renaming was not necessarily a deliberately sinister or suppressive act on the part of the Cistercians, but that it was merely coincidental to the long and slow degradation of the mythic and sacred importance of this monument or sídhe that we have come to know as Newgrange. For Síd in Broga slumbered in the shade for great ages of this world, and through many times of turbulence and transformation the áes sídhe kept a quiet watch on the comings and goings of kings and chieftains and religious orders from the unknown hidden realms beyond its doorway.

The Tuatha Dé Danann encountered many "invaders", according to the Lebor Gabala (Book of Takings), and it was the Milesians, arriving from Spain, who finally dispossessed them of Ireland. But it was an incomplete dispossession, because in their armistice with the Dé Dananns, the Milesians empowered them for eternity when they granted them possession of the sídhe. Failing to understand the gravity of this lack of foresight, the Milesians guaranteed the undying Dananns a special immortality. They may have been removed from the physical landscape of the invaders, but in the realms of dream and song and netherworld, they assumed a transcendent elevation of extraordinary proportions - something that legitimized and prolonged them and ensured their vitality for countless generations of people for whom they remained (and still remain) a very real presence.

And so, in the dying light of an apparently vanquished Dé Danann world, the sidhe which had kept hushed for centuries its remarkable secret of hidden realms and banished gods had even been made to suffer the ignominy of the loss of its name. And thus, through deliberate act or unwitting insult, the Cistercians became another in the long line of "arrivers", or invaders, or takers, to attempt by guile or gullibility to degrade and dispossess the stony vault of Síd in Broga of its divine and sacred import.

And what is that import? That there survives in people, even today, a light, a sacred essence, a revered and inviolate aspect, which derives originally from the very best facets of humanity. This aspect preserves the wish to initiate oneself into divine realms, with the express aim that one can be of service to one's greater community. The sacrifice of the Dé Dananns was immense. They yielded ownership of the beautiful Éire, the land we are so blessed to call our home, in order to avoid another war. They were weary of their encounters with the Fir Bolg and the Fomorians. With their blessing, the Milesians would become the new caretakers. But they were only custodians. Their time would come and go with the waning of the years.

In the past century, Newgrange has been unearthed and restored. Given a facelift, it has emerged from the rubble of its forlorn and dormant state. After five millennia, its secret crystal bower receives the golden sunlight once again on the Winter Solstice. The great sídhe has experienced a resurrection of sorts. The Fir Bolgs and the Fomorians were vanquished. Cessair and the Partholonians perished. The Vikings and the English came and went. And the Cistercians changed the sacred name of Síd in Broga to the newfangled Newgrange. But the Dé Dananns never died. Even in the hushed ages of their belittlement, they emerged as the diminutive fairies, the "good people", and danced and sang with unrestrained merriment around their ancient hollow hill in the midnight moonlight.

The unnaming of Newgrange 

Is it too bold a proposition to suggest that Newgrange be given back its old name? If we call it Síd in Broga once again, perhaps those diminutive fairies will arise in us as the unvanquished gods of our better nature, ready to bring light back to a somewhat darkened world.

References:
(1) Stout, Geraldine (2002), Newgrange and the Bend of the Boyne, Cork University Press, p.86.
(2) Dil.ie.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Tochmarc Étaine.
(5) O'Kelly, Michael J. (1982), Newgrange: Archaeology, Art & Legend, Thames & Hudson, p.25.
(6) You can watch a short trailer for this documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR1OUXn0O48

The 12 days of Solstice - Day 4 - the doorway of Síd in Broga (Newgrange) lit up in the beautiful winter twilight

It's day 4 of my series of photos called 'The 12 days of Solstice'. Today's image shows Newgrange at twilight, with its portal aglow, as if a fire was ablaze in its doorway. One can almost imagine the Daoine Sídhe (The good people, fairies) dancing and singing there in the winter twilight.

Two ancient names for Newgrange

Two photos of Newgrange taken last night, on a beautiful October evening, with Ursa Major (The Plough) hanging in the northern sky above the monument. Two of the ancient names of Newgrange are represented, Síd in Broga and Brug Mac Ind Oc. The name Newgrange was given to the monument in the 12th century by the Cistercian order, who had established the nearby Mellifont Abbey and come into ownership of all the lands down to the Boyne. The name the 'New Grange' was given to the field which contained the monument previously known by various names, including the above. That's the name by which we know it today, but it is a relatively modern sobriquet !!!