The Wild Irish Cry: Reclaiming the Keen with Mary McLaughlin, PHD

A sacred ritual is returning.

After centuries of suppression under colonial rule, the Irish Keen is being reclaimed. Once an essential communal ritual of grief, praise, remembrance, and devotion, this powerful vocal tradition was systematically severed from the Irish people, leaving generations disconnected from one of their deepest ancestral practices. Today, that lineage is being remembered and brought back to life.

In this extraordinary episode of the Wild Temple Podcast, Brooke Sullivan is joined by Dr. Mary McLaughlin, one of the world's foremost scholars and practitioners of the Irish Keen, to explore the history, mystery, and living revival of this profound tradition. More than a lament, the Keen was a sacred ritual that helped communities move through death, honor the dead, celebrate life, and maintain an unbroken relationship with the unseen world.

Together, they explore how colonialism interrupted this ancient lineage and why reclaiming the Keen is about far more than preserving folklore. It is about restoring a way of grieving, remembering, and belonging that modern culture has largely forgotten.

This episode is an invitation to remember what has been hidden. To reclaim a tradition that refused to disappear. To discover how the wild Irish cry still echoes through the land, the body, and the ancestral heart, waiting for us to listen once again.

Whether you come with Irish ancestry or simply a longing to reconnect with ritual, voice, and community, this conversation offers a powerful reminder that what has been severed can be restored, and that some of our oldest medicines are also the ones our world most needs today.

Connect with our guest: 

MaryMcLaughlin's website: https://www.marymclaughlin.com/ 

Workshops with Mary: https://www.marymclaughlin.com/workshops/workshops.html

At the heart of yoga is learning not only how to move and breathe, but how to experience prāṇa as a living intelligence within us. 

August 28–30, Brooke will be teaching 5 Pranic Arrows: The Yoga of Flowers, a three-day immersion offered in person and online through Hidden Yoga Studio in Colorado, for yoga practitioners and teachers, Ayurvedic coaches, and nature lovers.

www.hiddenyogawithkittymoore.com for more information and to register

Discover Your Elemental Archetype Within the Wheel of Tantric Time

Take the quiz at https://www.thewildtemple.com/ 

Transcript

riverside_mary_keen 1_brooke_sullivan's s

SPEAKER_01 0:02

In that album, I did a little keening. I didn't know that's what I was doing exactly because I didn't know what keening really was. I'd heard of it and I'd begun to think, is what I did when my mum died because that key is that it? So I thought, right. I was doing Latin songs, a lot of Latin songs. And I took the Latin Requiem, which is a short thing, you know, a short prayer, and I created a new tune for it, you know, or levels of tune for it. It's called Requiem. It then goes through a monastic chant, and then I went into the keying. Now I didn't really know what I was doing, I just opened my mouth and I thought of that time with my mom, and I brought it up myself again, and the minute I did, all of this stuff came up. So when I finished and I went round out of the booth, and the the the engineer and the uh producer were sitting there with their mouths firmly on the ground, and I said, What was that? How? I remember this is in California. I said, I was keen. And they said, America's not ready for this.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

We the omnipotent fermentations of time, thinking ancient dreams, a technological prime, weep the stories of the own, right through the soul, and so they told and told until they start to transform. The born again into the next era. With the mod of flare, but the message still bears one in the many, many in the one. So come on in, cuz you're most welcome to the temple of earth, the sun and the moon. We claim your power is the place we commute. A place with the mind, the body, the whole. Welcome to the Wild Temple. Welcome to the Wild Temple.

SPEAKER_05 1:57

Welcome. I'm Brooke Shannon Sullivan, founder of the Global School, the Wild Temple School of Yoga and Herbal Wisdom, and the host of this Wild Temple podcast. Through shared inquiry with myself and guests, we explore embodied wisdom in the subtle realms, with a focus this season on desire as a generative force, Shakti and Motion, and its role in Dharmic Living and Conscious Evolution. This space is for practical mystics, heartlet seekers, and wellness professionals drawn to the Vedic and Public Sciences and in cultivating a deeper relationship with Mother Nature. New episodes arrive every noon and full moon as we follow the wheel of time. And in the spirit of reciprocity, you're invited to follow this podcast, to leave a comment on the platform you're listening on, and to share with others. Thank you so much for being here at the Wild Temple and to stay connected. Please visit theWildTemple.com or we're on Instagram at theWild Temple. One of the main reasons that I've invited Mary onto this episode today is due to this deeper desire to understand living traditions, unadulterated living traditions, and to meet people who are carriers of these wisdom traditions. And so Mary, I've had the privilege of studying with her Irish song, and specifically in the realms of the Fae and the other world. And I would say that one of the things that touched me the most was your fierce protection of the songs and how you would say, don't share this. Let it come directly from someone who is seasoned, who embodies the practices, who really knows the tradition through and through, so that it's safeguarding the potency, the magic, and the truth of what these songs are about. And so that really moved me. And I really feel it's important that sometimes we are fierce protectors of very special things like the sacred or of ancestral wisdom and heritage. And so a little bit about Mary, and then I'd love for you to comment on that, add any bit to it that you would like to, is that Mary is a singer, songwriter, and teacher who is steeped in the Ulster Gaelic song tradition of Ireland, where she was born and raised. So Mary records, performs, and teaches workshops in Irish singing, technique, and Gaelic song and culture, and has toured extensively throughout the UK, Ireland, and even North America, teaching and performing at Celtic and Irish camps. She has recorded five CDs to international acclaim, which you can find on Spotify. I know in other areas. Beautiful, beautiful work, has written two song books and has completed a PhD in Irish Otherworld song, which I personally find fascinating. And her particular expertise is in the keen, which is what we'll talk about today, Gaelic Christmas Songs, and Fairy Song. So, Mary, thank you for being here. Well, thank you for inviting me. I'm really excited about and actually just want to commend you on doing the work, the deep dive that you needed to do on specifically this Irish Keen, the grief rituals and the other world. That's a book that's coming out this September. And I know you've been holding us all at bay saying it's all gonna be in the book. All coming to you soon. So we've been on the edge of our seats waiting, and now it's emerging. And so I'm just really grateful to give you a window into our listeners and our listeners a window into you and your work so you can talk about this really powerful ritual known as the keen.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

Thank you for that introduction. I always sort of think, who who are they talking about exactly? Oh, is it me, really? I will tell you a little bit about my uh my protectiveness. I'd never heard it described like that. I I think it's really nice and I think it's true. But what happened with me was I I was born in the north of Ireland and I I was a child of the troubles, you know, the the Northern Ireland troubles. So a lot of things were not uh available to me, and one of them was Irish, and I discovered the language of Irish when I was eleven. I was just unbelievably excited by the whole concept of it, and I discovered Irish singing at the same time. And so I just gobbled up Irish songs, you know, for the next so many years. And I would go up to the Girltocht, which is the Irish-speaking area in Donegal, I would go where I believe you have some connection with. But I'd go up there and uh spend three weeks there at a time in the summer, all through my teen teenage years. And I was very disheartened because an elderly lady said to me in the Girl Tocht when I was about 15 or 16, you can't really sing these songs yet. And I was really horrified because I loved the song so much. And I I said, Well, what do you mean? She says, You haven't had the life experience. People can't really sing these songs until they're at least 40. And I thought, I mean, when you're 16, 40 is like saying 4,000, you know, it's a long way away. And I remember crying about it and thinking, well, I'm gonna sing them anyway, but I never forgot that piece of wisdom. I got to the age of 40 and I thought, hmm, I know what she means. I don't think I'm ready yet. I got to the age of 50 and thought, mm-hmm, got to the age of 60 and I thought, I'm ready now. And so it was really interesting, my own path with it. So I don't I don't say anything to my students that I haven't experienced. A lot, a lot of what I give is is is my life experience, and that's not everybody's life experience, but it's mine. Now there are some people who come out of the womb singing in Irish. I come out of the womb just singing, but you know, some people come out of the womb singing in Irish, and they can, you know, deliver these songs at the age of 16 or 17. So it's not necessarily a barrier, but certainly with people who are joining in with the tradition when they're a bit older, need to go through some of the fundamentals, you know, and so that's kind of what I say in my classes is you know, just be careful mostly who you listen to, you know. That's the that's the to me the important thing. There are many wonderful Irish singers who are very authentic and whose ancestry goes right back. There's a strong ancestral line, and they have always sung these songs and they learned them at the foot of the grandmother and things like that. And so it's really worthwhile if you're going to listen to Irish singing too, to listen to Irish singers rather than now that's not to say there aren't some excellent singers in other countries, but my counsel is to listen to Irish singers because you'll get a sense. And Irish singing is it's storytelling. It's storytelling. And that's the important piece, really. So that anybody who sings an Irish or an Irish song has got to embody the whole thing and be able to then express it out to others. I always say there's three stages in singing. There's the technical, the first one, which is mimicry, usually. That's the way we all learn. We have to mimic, we have to listen to good singers and copy them because that's the way we learn. We will never be like that good singer because we all have individual voices. And so the next piece is the embodiment where you know you take in, you take in that song into your body. And first of all, you ask yourself the question, why am I drawn to this song? What is it that gets me? And that's crucial, that question. And that can take a while, it can take up to a year to get that question right in your head, and it may bring up tears, and it may bring up memories and all sorts of things. And so I think it's extremely important to do that piece because then you get outside the song, you're now in the driver's seat, you're now in charge of the song, the song is not in charge of you. When you when the song is in charge of you, then what happens is it comes over to an audience like you know, a bit cringe worthy. No, it's not oh, you know, she's always but when you're in charge of the song, you can take those emotions that you are feeling and you can give them out to somebody so that they feel it. And that's your third stage. So that goes, I think, for all sorts of singing. I've done a lot of training and singing, I'm a trained vocal teacher, I've done millions of workshops, I've done I've worked with some of the greatest singers, you know, I've worked with opera singers, I've worked with folk singers, I've worked with Irish singers. So it's like I've had an enormous amount of experience, and that and this is what I find in any great singing, uh, this is what you'll find that they've got to that third stage. So that's what I b re realized when I was 40. I was about the second stage, and I needed to move towards the third. So I did begin to record in Irish round about that time in my 40s. I've always been younger than I look. People didn't realise I was in my forties when I was doing my first albums, you know. And so I did a stream of albums of Irish song. Now I can listen to them now and I think, hmm, yeah, I would sing them a little differently now. Because the other thing about Irish singing is it's never the same, and this is very, very pertinent to the king. There's a huge amount of improvisation that goes on. And so you have to be skilled to be able to improvise. Improvisation isn't just, you know, any old thing that comes out, it's it's a skill and it's an art, and keening is a special art, a very special art. Keening for people who aren't familiar with it, I mean, I I've spoken to a few people over the last week who've actually known literally nothing about Keening, they didn't know what it was. However, the word has gone into the English language since COVID. Pre-COVID, it was very rare to hear of anybody outside Ireland talking about Keening. I remember the first time I heard it was when I was in the States and I was listening to uh uh an afternoon programme and uh very well known country Western singer was being interviewed, and the singer said how you know how difficult it could be to be on tour, and at one stage they they were held up because there was a car accident and so they all got out of the van to see what was happening, and she said there was a woman sitting at the side of the road over the body of her husband, and she was wailing. Well that's keening, and that's the bit that people don't get. People think that just wailing of any kind is keening, it's not, it demands a bed dead body. It's it's is a part of a funeral rite, it's a rite of passage. That's what it is, it's not just random. And what what I d describe uh in the book and what and what I the way I describe it is this the kind of two, if you like, and I'm talking about modern modern practice, there are sort of two branches, if you like. There's what I call organic keening and there's ritual keening. Now, organic keening is the sort of thing that was happening with this woman she was just letting it all go, her her her just total grief just pouring out okay, over this uh over this husband or boyfriend who had just been lost. And it's this it's the sort of grief. I don't know if you've seen the movie Hampnet. No, not yet. That was a great movie out there. And Jessie Bookley at one stage keens over her son and she does exactly this. She does the organic keening. I discover this is how I discovered Keening. Going back to my childhood, it was not spoken about any more than the fairies were spoken about. So if they were sp if there was anything spoken about these, it would be in whispers. So by the time I got to 40, I knew that keening had something to do with death, but that was all that I knew. That was it. Now I had encountered death in ways, but not in close ways until my mother died. And that was when I was 41. And it was very traumatic. And you know, my family said, you know, we're gonna have a wake for her, and they seemed to know more about the wake than I did. They knew exactly what to do. I didn't know what to do. I I knew what to do with my mum when you know when she was passing over, but I didn't know what to do with with with the actual waking. But basically the wake in my mum's times, which was 1995, it was just one night. So she was brought home from the hospital, she was the ho an open coffin so people would come in, pay their respects, the family would keep feeding them tea, and all all the neighbors would come in loads and loads of sandwiches and things like that. So that's what was happening all night. So the idea of waking with the body means literally sitting with the body. So different people would sit with the body at different times. And then in the morning the the undertaker came and the priest came, and you know, the priest did the final rites. And then the undertaker uh hammered down the lid, and at that point this scream began in the middle of my stomach. And it was like you know, they're like you know when you're going to sni sneeze and there's an inevitability about it, and you know it's gonna happen, you know. It was like that. I'd never experienced anything quite like it. It was very, very strong, it was in my solar plexus, and I could just feel it coming up and out of my mouth, and it was like I became disembodied from it, and it was this monstrous whale, and everything in my heart, everything in my soul, everything inside me was doing this, and my head was going, You can't do this, this is not respectful, this is considered you know unacceptable, you can't do this. So I ran around the back of the house and I proceeded to scream my head off. That was an organic keen. Now, two years later, I was in America, I moved, and I was making the album Celtic Requiem, which is the the main one on Spotify that gets it's got a bit of millennium and a half hits or something. I don't know. They never pay you, so I don't know. Or they pay you very little, you know, it's but but I can't say never, but it's extremely minuscule. So so I didn't really take any notice. And I it was only then it was brought to my attention that there were all these hits in this in this album. So I began to listen to it again. We didn't do it for Sony, we did it for Windham Hill, which was a wonderful little company, and then got grow it got went through the mill when Wyndham Hill sold up and blah blah blah, I ended up with Sony. So I don't have any control over it. But when I listened to it again, I thought, well, why didn't I catch this? It's all about death. The entire thing is about death. And I knew that what I'd done was I'd spent two years after my mum died researching Irish songs you know that would fit into Celtic Requiem. You know, the original name was Celtic Chant. But what happened was I it I just kept being drawn to these songs about death. And then, you know, it by you know, a series of coincidences which I don't believe in, but I don't believe in coincidence. I believe there are paths that you are shown and you can go off on one or other of them. But anyway, uh it ended up with in Wyndham Hill. Well, it was at those times it was big boom boxes and things like that, you know, it was all those, you know, it was uh the early nine late nineties. It stuck, the needle stuck, or the C it was a CD CD, he couldn't make a move. The the boss came in to ask a question, and at that moment it unstuck. You know I think three of them were involved and it unstuck. They all sat down and the boss just listened and he said one Celtic Requiem and that was the name of it. We hadn't named it that, but it was absolutely right, it was the the correct name. Now in that album I did a little keening. I didn't know that's what I was doing exactly because I didn't know what keening really was. I'd heard of it and I'd begun to think, is what I did at my mum when my mum died, was that keen was that it? So I thought, right. I was doing Latin songs, a lot of Latin songs, and I took the Latin Requiem, which is a short thing, you know, a short prayer, and I created a new tune for it, you know, or levels of tune for it. It's called Requiem. It then goes through a monastic chant, and then I went into the Keenaning. Now I didn't really know what I was doing, I just opened my mouth and I thought of that time with my mum, and I brought it up in myself again, and the minute I did, all of this stuff came out. So when I finished and I went round out of the booth, and the the the the engineer and the uh producer were sitting there with with their mouths firmly on the ground, and I said, What was that? Wow. I remember this is in California. I said, I was keening. And they said, America's not ready for this. Now that was twenty five years ago.

unknown 22:31

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

Boy, is America ready for it now.

SPEAKER_05 22:36

Oh my gosh. And since COVID, as you said, so that's pretty poignant. And uh, you know, like we're sitting here in a heat wave right now, and you know, Europe is just immersed in a heat wave, and we're feeling that it's not just the death of loved ones, but it's a dying of the world as we know it. We're experiencing that. I'm curious, Mary, does keening as a ritual or even organic keening have a place in all aspects of grief, or do we have to have the dead body?

SPEAKER_01 23:08

No, the dead body is part of the ritual. Part of the ritual. Okay. Yeah. The organic keening is is the is usually a traumatic uh response. It's very reactive to a dear one's death. Now, you can also hear, I mean, uh, you know, I've read about some hearing people hearing about a beloved one has died maybe overseas and they've just burst into this organic keening. So it's not necessarily, you know, it's about death, but it's not necessarily about and it's about dead people.

SPEAKER_04 23:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:38

You know, it's a moot point to people, some people do keen over their pets because they feel like they were, you know, to them as important as a dead per as a person was, you know. But strictly speaking, it's within this ritual. And so what happens is within the rite of passage of keening, the organic keen is included. It's not isolated. Okay? So the reason I say the organic thing is because people do think that sometimes when you just wail, that's keening. And that is more like the organic keening. Whereas the ritual keening is much more contained. The wake is a container. And the wake used to go on for three days and nights. It was huge. Holding grief inside does not get rid of it. You never really get rid of grief, but you learn to live with it. You integrate it. And especially the grief of love losing loved ones. So what's happening at the minute is that sort of a grief. I prefer to call it grief or lamentation. I don't like to call it keening. I like to be specific, and the reason is there are actual keeners in Ireland performing today who are who actually go to funerals and do this. So it's like I just don't I don't want it muddied. I don't want the the waters muddied around it. So lamentation, grieving, grief circles, great. But you know, keening is a bit different than a lot of these things. Now there are some keeners who teach, there are some keeners who will lead lead something, that's absolutely fine. But on the whole, people who are talking about keening circles usually are talking about lamenting or they're talking about grieving. And so I just it's just I just feel like that it's it's an honor of the actual keeners that I'm doing that I feel like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 25:41

It's a really important delineation as a wisdom keeper of a wisdom tradition, of a living tradition. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you. Thank you for mentioning that, Mary. And I'd love to go back just for a moment, because I know most of our listeners will really resonate with what you shared as to the three stages of Irish singing, which also I'm imagining is the same when you're really learning how to keen, which is first the mimicry and then getting into the embodiment where you're taking it in, into then the ability to express. Yeah, express it by kind of owning it. Yeah, owning it, owning your power with it. I think it I feel it as like your own essence is mingling with the power and essence of the song to then share it. And I feel that this could even be tenets of most wisdom traditions, most Oh, it's a tenant of all singing.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Opera singers do this, you know, jazz singers do this. Any anybody who is a great singer who moves people in a consistent way. I mean, sometimes there's a one-off or somebody is moved, which is is great, but somebody who's known for that ability, they're they're whether they know it or not, this is what they're doing. These are this is the way I've broken it down, because I had to go through those stages to understand them.

SPEAKER_05 27:06

I run a school of Tantra

Marker

SPEAKER_05 27:08

Yoga. So this is classical Tantra yoga as a living lineage. It's not neo-tantra, just to be clear. Yes. Yeah. The the tenet truly is learn the practices identically to how the teachers teach you. And then from there, you embody the practices. And then from that embodiment and only from that integrated embodiment, do you can you call yourself teacher? Can you call yourself someone who is carrying the wisdom to then have that authenticity, authenticity, and right to then share it, unadulterated? And so this is really important to me as also a lineage holder. And I just love that even the act of sharing, you've used the word transmission, right? So I'm not sure if we you talked about it in this particular context, but I've read this in some of your writings where it's actually a transmission. And this is essentially when anything is held as sacred, as like I think of it as the masterful practices that that move us, that that touch us on such a deep level and really inspire life or help aid suffering, help us be aided towards healing, towards beauty, towards empowerment, all of those things. Those powerful practices that really touch us are often a transmission. And so, yeah, so just going back to this idea of authenticity, that power and potency of it, and especially in the age of AI and just an overamount of intellectualized knowledge that cuts off the body, right? We we do have very brilliant people that are embodying so much of what we're seeking. And I think that it's it's time to seek you out, right? I think it's time to seek these people out. So myself, you, other people that are keepers of these kinds of traditions. I want to go back really quickly, though, to the singing and the power of singing and the voice and how it's how it is different or similar to the keen. So when the keen could possibly be perceived a little bit like a song.

SPEAKER_01 29:27

So keening is part of shanos singing. Shannos means old style, it means songs that were sung in the way that we've been describing, in Gaelic, not in English, but in Gaelic, because it's old style. The songs I usually say anything before the 1900s usually qualifies as Shannos. After that, there are groups now in this century who are Irish who are writing in that style, but they but they will usually say in the style of Shannobs, you know? But Shannos itself, now the Shannos singers varied all the time. There's no rules around it. And that's one of the things that's happened with with music and with singing is that writing is wonderful and it's a great way to transmit as and pass on information, etc. But it also confines, it locks in. So somebody will look at a song that's written down from the 1800s and say that's the way it should be sung. No. No. That's the way that person sung it. But a person down the road would have sung it a little differently, and a person over here would have sung it a little differently. It was close enough always to be that particular song, but it was interpreted, always interpreted differently. And so Keening is like the extreme end of Shanos. They are songs. Now there's a mixture of things and in the Shanos my pardon, in Keening, there are three stages effectively, which have been pointed out. One of the great teachers and one of the great scholars in Keening Hook, Brendan Omadagong, who passed away himself just about two or three years ago, but certainly I owe tremendous amount of of my knowledge to him, you know. And he says three distinct in a round of Keening. There is first of all the salutation. And the salutation is where the Keening woman would bend over the body and would speak to the body whisper to them, very quietly, really. People would be straining to hear, but they wouldn't hear what she's saying. And there's lots of different sort of interpretations of what she might be saying. She could be welcoming, because this the idea of the wake was this was the last hurrah for that person. And it goes way I mean the the wake goes way back, clicky cancha, which were they were the the games that were funeral games that were played at a at the tomb of a noble way pre-Christian, thousands of years ago. So it's like the roots of the roots of this particular tradition are extremely old.

SPEAKER_04 32:21

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:22

Oh yeah. Extremely old. And you know, th those were the you know, the the the bards who l uh were sort of the descendants, if you like, of the uh druids, which we know very little about. They the bards we know more about because they went right through to the 1600s. So with a bit more of information about them, and the Irish bards were not the same as the British bards. So that there was lots of things like this, but the bards also had a big piece in that 1600 years in Ireland of developing the ritual of the king. But prior to that, it was the it was the it was the funeral games, and the the bards would have this thing called the gooa, which was a kind of a uh uh I suppose a chant. I wasn't around to hear it at that time, maybe I was, but uh I don't have any memory of it. But it was a sort of a chant, and that would be begin the whole thing, the whole sort of funeral ritual, and then they would have these games. Now the games were very rough in those times, didn't involve horses and you know, fighting and all this stuff, and they came right down to the wake games, which were banned by the clergy in the 1700s, eighteen hundreds, but they came right through all those years. The keening was a part of that. The wake had this structure of the keeners being there, the borakon being there, the borakon was the person who actually organized the games. So Borakon was there and the Keeners were there, and Barakon was male and the keeners were female. So there's this balance as well going on. I mean the wake is an incredible institution. I've written I've the the the chapter I wrote in it, I've called it the cauldron of the wake, because there's so much in it, you know, and the keen was like the crown jewel in the middle of the wake. So that's the way it went into ritual, and that was the ritual that came up in the right from about uh the s seven probably from about the sixteenth, seventeen hundreds around then. Prior to that, the keen had been known as a communal uh community event and reports of that where there's evidence really that crowds of people would join in. So that came through as well into the keen. So the the Ban Queencha, the the leading woman of the of the Keeners, she would uh start off with this salutation, right? Then the next stage, there are two stages then which are interchangeable. One of them is the dirge, which is the verses, and the other one is the gull, which is the cry. So there's three stages, okay? Salutation just happens once, right? But the other two inter interweave with each other. Now, the gull is the one that most people recognize as keening because that's where the organic keen it was probably the beginning of the gull. Where the b with the band keen chish, she'll be more controlled about it. And in every area, for example, in Donegal, there's a sort of a specific uh outline for the keen. It's very different down in the Burren. So you were telling me earlier that your ancestry went both ways, and it would have been very, very different. So I'll give you an example of a Donegal king, which is from uh from Kitty Gallagher, and she made this king recently, it's become famous. Kitty Gallagher, if people want to look it up on on uh uh YouTube, is actually there. But it's basically she got it from an elderly woman. I always say elderly, maybe she wasn't elderly, we don't know. It was called the keen over a dead child. And so she it may have been the mother or it may have been another woman, but it was very, very unusual and considered very bad luck to sing outside of a wake, to sing a keen outside of a wake. But uh a collector was leaning hard on Kitty and you know, and she was a young woman and she gave this example, which is great because we've got an example of it on egal keen, you know?

SPEAKER_03 36:42

So it's quite harrowing.

SPEAKER_04 36:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:48

Because what's happening in this king, and you'll hear there's a song, basically the w the woman is saying, uh, how could I how could you have left me? What am I going to do? I'm all alone now, I'm not going to manage, you know, uh uh if only if only I had you in the morning. If only I had you, if only you were with me in the morning, you know? So I again in again in the style, if you like, I've also improvised pieces of it. So I've used it as a basis, this particular cane. I sing it more or less like it is, but there are variations. Though I should say two important uh important things about the keen is it has vocables. The vocables are usually a home or a roo. You've probably come across vocables in your own work. You know, words with meaning but a very specific meaning, and they're certainly not conversational, and it points to a certain ritual. And so the keen has certain vocables and a roo, a hone, olaloo, all gone, those are those are the main ones.

SPEAKER_05 37:59

So we would think of them for those maybe who don't have a context for that, just listening, you might just hear them as sounds, like the vocables might be like, yeah, like uh a combination of vowels or consonants, and they don't have any literal translation, but you can feel moved by them. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 38:18

Exactly. And some some say that the keen vocables are shields for the soul, for the soul leaving the body. So they're very powerful. I love that. Very, very powerful. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 38:32

Yeah. Shields and directions directives. Directions, perhaps. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm curious, real quick, Mary, to ask you if it doesn't take you off of the story, but it feels to be the Keener's were almost the midwives of death. Oh, totally. And they were often midwives of life.

SPEAKER_01 38:52

And of life. So they brought in life and they took out life. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Ver yeah, because the remember, we're talking about small community, villages, village communities. Sometimes people wouldn't have gone more than six miles in their lifetime because they weren't rich enough to have a donkey. So they'd walk maybe six miles there somewhere, you know, whatever. But you know, it's totally different community to the one that we live in now. Totally different. And people helped each other. And there was uh, and this is an important piece when it comes to modern grieving, there was support. That's so crucial. So, you know, what worries me a lot is when people go to these weekend things and then there is no support. So, you know, they're just left with their feelings, which mightn't really surface for a couple of weeks. And that worries me. So I think that the the the the the the setup that there was gave that's part of the cauldron. It's part of the limitations, it helps.

SPEAKER_05 39:58

Absolutely. Even just the organic keen, which I'd love to uh give you a little story on this too, but that organic left alone on its own can lend itself to being lost in the grief, right? The unruly amount of emotion that can start to arise can be like an ocean of death. How do you manage that? So to have that, you know, just the wailing uncontrolled, unab, you know, just whenever there would be death could just trigger a lot of emotion in everyone listening as well, instead of it honing in the direction towards healing, towards acceptance and towards integration.

SPEAKER_01 40:38

So one of the things about the wet you know, about the ritual keen holding that is in the ritual keen, everybody is focused on the body, they're not focused on themselves. That's very important. So there's this communal uh focus on the person who has passed away. Another part of it is the eulogy, you know, so it's about that person, that community thing is very, very supportive. And the other thing about the the actors in the and I I call them actors for you know because they have a role in the ritual is that they they can actually help to extricate the grief and hold it. I mean the b the the the the Keenan women were amazing. They were amazing what they could do and they would hold that grief they would bring it out of people and they would encourage people in the dirge to be angry because anger is a part of grief. So, you know, they would encourage somebody to go up to the corpse who was perhaps married or you know, maybe it was a woman whose husband had died and they'd six children. You know, how's she gonna live? And so she would ask these questions and she would be angry and they would encourage her to be angry and yell at the corpse. How dare you die? How dare you? What do you mean? What how how am I supposed to support these children? Get all of that stuff out.

SPEAKER_05 42:10

That was you know, three days and nights. Oh, I love that was going to be one of my questions. Can keen other feelings like fear, doubt, or yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:21

Oh yes, all of it. Whatever you felt. And you know, even with you know even with like uh somebody who wasn't liked in the community, who maybe had been a wife beater, for example, was one of the examples that was given by somebody, they would still be keened. But the wood you know and then you know, the third part, the gall was magical. I mean the gall wasn't just wailing, the gaul was about lifting up the spirit. It was about helping the spirit out of the body into the other world. I mean it's a very m shamanic uh idea. And yeah, there's quite a lot about that in in the book. Um start off anyway. Yeah, that so it was it was an extremely important part. But it sounded like they called it the wild Irish cry, and that's what it sounded like. And the whole way to the funeral, two of the keeners would sit on top of the coffin, on top of the cart. There'd usually be a donkey in a cart from the village somewhere, and they would this the keeners would sit on top of that, and they would encourage all the way to the funeral grounds, they would be keeny with this sound, and the whole of the crowd, and there could be up to a thousand people, would be copying them. So it was an all back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. So it was it was a it was a huge ritual that went on.

SPEAKER_04 43:49

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 43:52

Mary, I have a a question about the three distinct aspects of the keen, where we have the salutations, which is the whispering to the body, to the corpse, we have the dirge, and then we have the gall. So in that arc, we have the recognition of here's the dead body, here's the death. This is uh, you know, basically stepping out of you and honoring this individual that now is at the you know has has its life ended into the dirge, which is this the part of just the allowing for the emotions to really be seen, heard, felt? Is that what a dirge is? What's a dirge?

SPEAKER_01 44:35

It's just verse. Verse. So it's so basically what what would happen is going back to the example I just said, the woman who'd left, who'd lost her husband, she would come up to the body and she'd say, How could you leave me? What were what what were you thinking? The Van Kinsha would immediately turn that into a chant. Oh what? That's I mean they were phenomenal. What they did. The that's why I said the art, you know, amazing art what they did. And she would turn it into a chant, and then her Maracinsha, the women the other women who'd be with her around the body, they would they would sh you know echo that sound. And so would the community. And so it'd be you know, there was a uh I saw a copy of a chant from a ma, and it's literally That's very, very plain going along, you know? And that was from the 1800s, you know? Whereas a keen from the eighteen hundreds, another one that was written down by Joyce, would be, and this was like from the Limerick area, so it was the south, not the north, but it'd be uh something like ho hoo. It'd be something like that. And that's what the Van Kingchos sing. See, so it's quite song-like. It makes you shiver. Yeah. And then what happened was so those they were sort of separate elements. And then what happened, they kind of got fused. So when it came to the later times, you'd you'd find that the the verse and the gall, the gall became a chorus and the verse was like a verse of a song or so that sort of the was the way it seemed to get fused. And certainly by the time uh it came up to the 1900s, that's that's what it was like. And then there were the sacred kings, which were the few keens that were allowed because they were sacred, it was a very clever uh ploy on the part of the Irish because Keenan was banned. Keening was banned in the 1600s, the 1700s, the 1800s, right? And the clergy would go out with w horse whips and and literally whi whip Keeners if they saw them doing it. And this is what was happening. So, you know, the Sacred Keens were a great way around this problem because what they would do is they would sing about Christ but not just about Christ, more about his mother. Now, this is what's very interesting about the Sacred Keens because they are usually about the mother of Christ rather than Christ. And so it's about the suffering of a woman rather than the suffering of a man. So it's very interesting what happens in those. And there aren't too many of them, there are a couple of them, and they sort of overrolled this uh you know what what would you call it? I can't think of the right word, but they they would over override what the priests were saying that this is this is pagan, heathen, uh barbaric, those were the words that were used. Pagan's interesting because pagan is a word that just meant country person. That's all it meant originally. Yeah, that was it. Roman ca when Roman c you know, but sixty years after Christ's death, sixty, seventy years after his death, in Rome this Catholicism began, you know? And anybody who wasn't within the city walls, who wasn't in joining in in this, was pagan. They were on the outside. And gradually it more and more and more and more and more denigrated into what it is or has been, you know. But yeah, so so there's the there's so much really in this stuff, broke, you know.

SPEAKER_05 48:56

I know I have a thousand questions for you. I I love that it was, I think just last week someone was talking about I'm I'm here in Italy right now, and the ice cream cones that you get, or gelato cones, uh actually came from machines left here after World War I, I believe it was, might have been World War II, but then the Italians started to make gelato. And then before the round cones to put the gelato in were made, they had these wafers. And the wafers were actually produced first by the people in Kildare of you know St. Bridget's Kildare monasteries, I guess, or you know, uh area and region. And so we were talking about how, and it was this Italian man, he does, he runs this agrotourism little Airbnb just right down the hill, and he was saying how intelligent were the Irish because they didn't allow all of their culture to be completely wiped out. They, as storytellers, knew how to spin a story to make that story work for bringing in the Christianity in a way that, yes, Mother Mary can be included in this midwifing to death without it having being labeled pagan, for example, which is beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 50:17

Yeah, that's exactly what happened. So, I mean, and you find this anyway in in Irish song. I mean, I I did a class yesterday in Irish song, which was about transmission. Transmission being not necessarily supernatural, but just but just handing down generation to generation how song transmits. And I, you know, and I did an example of two songs from the 1500s, which hold so much information, which would have been lost, because in the oral tradition it would have just dissipated. But because it's been locked into a song and people sing that song, then it's you know, the information comes up again. So it's it's it was a tremendous way to pass on information and it's it's it's a social history. I always feel songs are social history, you know, just tells you what was happening at a particular time in that place, you know?

SPEAKER_05 51:13

So and the keys of importance, the keys of value to not lose, which is and I'm almost just well, not even almost. I'm I'm really upset and a little, I'm totally sad about the fact that we don't have this three-day wake experience, three-day, three-night. I love the power of threes. You've continuously, you know, you always bring in the power of threes, but having this ability to have such a an in-depth orchestration of honoring death and not letting the grief of it stick to you, stick to your bones, stick to the nerve, stick to a community in a way that creates more, even more healthy community at the other end of it. I'm just I'm curious, Mary, what your thoughts are. First of all, about how and what this did to the Irish people when this was severed, and then the genius of it coming back right now. What are your thoughts about?

SPEAKER_01 52:13

Well, I'm gonna have to say this. I think it's about the fall of the Catholic Church. Oh, goodness. Okay. I now I was raised Catholic. I was a very fervent Catholic. I mean, I was I was the little girl who at six years of age climbed out of the window to go to Mass before my parents would know that I was doing that, you know. And my two-year-old sister. My two-year-old sister kept saying, because we were poor and we were all sharing beds, she was saying, you know, where you going, where are you going? And I said, Not going anywhere. You're going, you're all right, I'm coming, all right. And I came, you know, and I took and there was snow on the ground. And of course my poor mother was out of her mind, because she went down to wake up her two children and my empty bed. And I had taken my sister to bed. And sixty years later, my sister says to me, Next time you want to save your soul, just save your own soul and don't drag me through the snow.

SPEAKER_04 53:10

That's a great quote.

SPEAKER_01 53:14

Save your own soul and don't drag me through the snow. That's great. But you know, I was really fervent. Incredibly fervent. And I, you know, that you know, that I'm through all the rituals, through the the Irish rituals, uh the Catholic rituals and all that. And I really believed in it. And then I went to London University and I was there about two, three months, I think. Yeah, it was November and I'd gone there. I'd gone there in the September, I think. And it was Sunday morning, I thought, I'm not going to go to Mass. And then it suddenly dawned on me, nobody cared. Now, you couldn't have said that at home. You couldn't even have said it, especially given the political situation I was in at home, you couldn't do it because religion over in Ireland, uh in Northern Ireland during that time was about identity. And it that's h how it had been all through Ireland, actually about identity. But the priests got their got their heel in really round about the Middle Ages. And when the bards went, then there was a vacuum and they filled it up. And that's when they started making up all this stuff that wasn't really actually anywhere except in their head. And, you know, uh I remember that time it was like what, you know, shamanic said, you know, the go you go through a death. That was my first death, as it were. I mean it was like I thought I was going to die because I suddenly realized nobody would notice if I was in church or not. Because I was in England, which was considered a pagan country, not not a Catholic country, or a Protestant country, you know. And it was it was it was quite terrifying for me, because I had nobody to talk to about it. I had nobody to you know, it took a while. So and from that point then I began to just investigate lots of religions. And I studied Buddhism for a long time, and I'm I've got a great I wouldn't say I'd practice Buddhism, but I have great respect and honour for it. I have great respect and honour for all true religions actually. And so I kind of went around Hinduism as another one that I was I loved the Hindu chant, that kind of a thing. So I was for years that's what I did. And I think that gave me a a very broad outline. So when the church began to fall in the 1990s, especially in Ireland, because of all the scandals that came up, the amount of abuse that had happened, the babies, you know, who had been I mean, just the tomb baby, it's just horrendous. All of that started unraveling, and there was a big reaction. But then what do you do? This is what this is why I told you the little anecdote about my own experience. You suddenly have a void. That's what I remember that day, I'll never forget that day, that Sunday, thinking nobody cares. And it was like suddenly I was saying, Who am I? What am I? I mean it was a crisis, a major, major, major uh supernatural crisis that happened to me, spiritual crisis that happened to me, uh, when I was 18. And from there I started to build up. But it could have gone another way. You know? And I think when that happened en masse in Ireland, suddenly everything you believed in, everything that you've you know, that you've prayed with, that you've been with, that you you know, it was just too much for so many people. And so there was a time of I think grieving, but then there was a time of which is now happening, the rebuilding. So what can we believe in? Humans need to believe. That's one ex that's one thing that I have come to the conclusion of. Belief and faith are incredibly important markers for us as humans. Life is hard. I don't know anybody who's going to turn around and say life is easy. Life is hard. It may not be obvious and jealousy may happen because it's not obvious, but it is hard. It's hard for everybody. There are challenges all the time. My own philosophy is that it's a huge, big school, and we're here to learn. That's my own philosophy. And that's what life is about. It's about learning and learning more. And so it's your duty to try to learn if you can. And I think that's what's going on right now. We're moving into the other age. That's the other interesting thing. You know, we were in uh uh you know, astronomically, we were in the age of Pisces for for the last two thousand years, round the age around the time of Christ. So that's when Christianity came in. But it was the age of Pisces, and Christ was even called the Fisher of Man, you know? Yep. Now I'm a great Christ fan. I mean, to me, what the Catholic Church did and Christ are very different things. I am a great in awe of Christ, Mother Mary, all those wonderful, wonderful, but for me, supernatural leaders, you know. But you know, we come into the age of Aquarius, the whole thing crumbles again. Now, what's Aquarius about? Aquarius, of course, is about community, and it's not about being led by one person or two or leaders. It's not autocratic, it's about unity and it's about sharing and it's about equality, and so very different values. So I think that's another reason this is all happening. So I think we've got the two things happening.

SPEAKER_05 59:06

I had a couple of things

Marker

SPEAKER_05 59:07

that I just wanted to close with. I know that we're kind of close time. Yeah. One of the uh just hits that I felt in my body when you were sharing your first experience of your mother dying from your solar plexus, this deep dream or wail started to emerge. And my history is actually as a midwife. So I studied midwifery, I attended many birds, and unfortunately, we had a lot of breach birds, and I even experienced a stillbirth that was what shifted me to move into the yogic and just a different spiritual path. But yeah, the interesting thing I would share, Mary, is during this time I had a lot of, we were talking earlier before hopping on this call, this like inner eye knowing of things, right? When maybe our physical sight goes away, or we're just already attuned to this more inner eye seeing. And I have times in life where I'm really clear on some other world experience or some deep truth that wants to come through. And during this time, I had a few things that happened. One was I had this golden dream. I like to call them the golden dreams when you know they're just alive and they sparkle. I don't know if it was a past life or what it was, but I was with a a bunch of women and we were grieving uh the death of children. It was actually a number of children, babies in like in the in the water, unfortunately. And I remember the term that I had, because I had never used the word or heard of the word keening before, was I was a whaler. I was a whaler in a past life. Like it really felt like I had that visceral experience of being a whaler in a past life. And then fast forward just a little bit later, and my only of one child, my only child, when I gave birth to her, it was before I knew of my Irish ancestry and before I knew of anything of Irish icons or symbols or literally anything. And my baby was born breach, and I was with a granny midwife who didn't have, she didn't believe in like neonatal resuscitation with oxygen machines and bringing me to the hospital. So we were just very rustically in my home in the living room, in a little water bath set up in the living room. And the baby was stuck. She was like kind of turned over in the wrong kind of way. Anyway, it wound up being like 30 hours. Everyone was worried. I was just wearing a stethoscope because I knew just enough to be know that she was okay because I could hear her heartbeat, but that things were going on that I was probably should be afraid of. But I just trusted. And what I remember is the moment that she actually came into the world, it was very similar to what you experienced from the deepest place of my solar plexus, a scream, and it just came up out of me and bellowed in a way where visually I saw clouds part, and it was the Sheila in a gig that I had no idea, I'd never seen her before, but it was Sheila after Sheila after Sheila after Sheila. My midwife said later, it was the woman of many vulvas, but I felt them as the whole lineage of my ancestry, all the women with me, clouds parted, the scream came, and my daughter was birthed, like all in this one like lightning bolt of a moment. And so your experience at the funeral of your mom, or the wake, I guess you would say, felt to me very similar to the experience that I felt in the rawness of birth. And that's that's where I was, yeah, just I'm in awe of that gateway between life and death. And then I would say, just fast forward a little bit later, where uh the stillbirth that I was that I had attended was actually it was so sad, but it was actually very beautiful too. Um a very spiritual woman. Her whole house was set up as an altar, many altars everywhere. And it was just the same midwife who had attended my birth. I was studying with her, City Opio, and then she and uh and her husband. So when the baby was not breathing, he was born with a smile on his face. He was glowing, the sweetest little boy. The the very next thing that happened was the the papa started to wail. And at the time I remember he's howling like a wolf. And I just, it was so beautiful because it felt like he was taking what all of our shock was. I couldn't talk. Uh, the midwife was frozen, the mama was just buried in grief and just absorbed with the baby. But it was so beautiful and powerful to feel the energy of this man howling. And so I don't know, I just I wanted to share all of those with you. And oh, because then fast forward again, where I reached out to you, and this is after I'd already studied with you in your fairy song, but I reached out to you because you had been talking about, I don't know what it was. I think you were just announcing a course was coming, and we had just had this big Hurricane Helene destroy our communities. And what I found very naturally was I would go out into the woods and I started to do vocables, but I was making them up. I didn't realize that there were particular ones that I could use until I reached out to you and I said, you know, Mary, do you have, you know, this thing happened. I found myself doing this. And I I wrote down what you what you wrote back to me because I think it's very interesting. You said that you don't teach keening as an improvised art, but you teach keening as songs that have been preserved for centuries, and you teach about the history and the context of the keen, which gives it format and philosophy. And that was what your book was going to be about. But again, the organic way was just fine and to do it. And but what I found was it in its organic way was too uncontrolled. I found that when I would keen, I got more depressed. It felt like I opened up to the world of sadness around me, all the dead bodies, and because there were a lot, we had a lot, unfortunately. And what it felt to me is we have a brokenness and a severance, which we could even see as a sickness of not grieving in our communities that is making it too hard for just one person to do alone.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:01

I think you've absolutely hit the nail on the head. I think the community thing is the big piece here. And that's of the of the one thing that, you know, that's why I think circles are really good. Like grief circles are really good because it just it allows it they they usually are regular, they are support. I I I have a I go to a meditation circle and there's just something about the the rhythm of that. So we know at a certain time, for one hour, this is what we're gonna be doing together, and that's it. You know. I also love yoga, I've done a lot of yoga. Unfortunately, I had a bad accident at the beginning of the year and I haven't been able to go to my yoga class, but I miss it, you know. But uh, you know, it's a similar thing, it's it's about the ritual of a community. And so I think that and I I've I I mentioned in my book, well, I do a lot of interviews actually with different people, and one of the people from New York talked about uh a group that she was joining, and where they were studying a book together on grief and then discussing it. And I think that's a brilliant way to do things. You know, so then people can then talk about their own grief, what's what's in there, and and they can share it and they can cry and it's a safe space. The point is safety. You know, the the last the last uh chapter in my book is all about that news shoots from old roots, because no, we're we we don't have lives which will allow us to have three days for a start off. Secondly, you know, some of the keening of the of the person who died, like the the most famous keen in Ireland is the keen of artillery. And every child in school learns this and they hate it because they don't really understand it. I came to it as an adult and I got the depth of it. But it's you know, at one stage his wife, because he has been Shot, his wife goes and she literally cups her hands into his blood and she says, I drank your blood. And there's a Scottish song as well, which says the exact same thing about drinking the blood. And I think it's it's a very again, a very shamanic idea of in energy, getting energy in. But I also thought, Wow, this is what they do in the Catholic Church for the last 2,000 years. Every Sunday, this is what they do. And it's, you know, and I I went through all of those rituals without realizing what they were. But there's that sort of you know, drawing in of of the blood. Although it's wine, you know, they don't use actual blood. And so, you know, I say, I don't anybody rushing out and killing somebody to get blood, you know, that's not that's not the point of this. And then, oh, I've got a dead bloody, I don't got blood. No, that's not what this is about. But learning the lessons of it, looking at the elements, looking at the fact that there was ritual, and the thing about ritual that's so important is it's always predictable. It will differ, but the the the concept that the the the the container of it is always predictable. And there are three three basic things that happen in ritual. First piece of ritual is, and this is this is not me talking now, this is one of the academics, it's um Van Genner, who's long gone, but I like everybody forgets about him, and I think he was brilliant. First one is separation, where you separate from your normal day, you separate from your normal community, whatever you you've got a specific place that you're going. That's the first one separation. The second one is liminality, which is the in-between, it's neither here nor there. And the third one is integration. So if you look, for example, at a traditional white wedding, I'm going to give that example, traditional white wedding in a church, for example. What happens? Separation. The the night before the bride and groom are separate from each other, they don't see each other until they go. So that's the first stage. They arrive at the church separately. As they go into the church, they're become into liminality because they're not single, or not they are single, but they're not going to be single in an hour's time, you know, that type of a thing. So it's all very liminal at that stage. And then the final stage is when they're joined together and they come out and everybody throws confetti on them, and they're integrated into the community now, as Mr. and Mrs., rather than, you know, whatever. Yeah, that's if the people take I know people don't take the uh the other name now, but at that time they're but they're in they're integrated into the community as a couple, they're together now. So that's a sort of a quick example of how that works, but all ritual works like that. And when things get sticky, it's when people get stuck in the lineal stage. And there isn't a clear ending. There isn't a clear integration, you know? So ritual, any groups, and I've been in many groups in my life, you know. They have, you know, there's the beginning where you will sit. I I run groups or have run groups. I'll be running one, I'll be doing actually, I'll be doing a live launch of the book in Ireland in County Mayo. That's where I'll be doing it. It's the only live one I'm doing, and the rest will be online. But anyway, you know, when when I run a group, the first thing I do is go round everybody. So everybody has something to say. Everybody needs to introduce themselves. I give a little prompt or something, you know. And so that begins to bend. Now we're not separated anymore. But when we all came in, we were separated. So then we can move into this whole liminal space together now, you know, the work that we're doing. And at the end there would always be a closure. You know? And so so you have your beginning, middle, and ending, or your the way that Van Gennep described it. And then within the ritual, another scholar picked out elements, specific elements that happen in ritual, which I think are really interesting. First of all, the space becomes a sacred space for whatever ritual it is that's going to be. So again, the example of the church, the altar is the space, you know, and it's a ritual, that's the ritual space. In the in the keening or in the death, depending on the income of people, a room will be designated. It may be the bedroom, but that might be the only space there is, and the person is left on the bed because there isn't anything else. Sometimes it's it's the sitting room if they have a sitting room or a parlor or whatever, and they'll transform that so that they clear things out of the way for make room for people, that type of thing. So there's this base, that's number one. Time in the funerals in Ireland to this day, time stops. So what used to happen was somebody would actually stop the clock. A bit like when somebody dies in hospital, time stops. Time is recorded at that time. Yeah. So that would happen. I was in Limerick in the late 19 late twenties, I mean it wasn't that long ago. And uh I was in the bus and the bus suddenly stopped like and I thought, oh my goodness, there must be an accident. It wasn't.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:32

It was a funeral coming towards us. That was about what?

SPEAKER_01 1:13:38

Yeah, about nineteen nineteen twelve or nineteen thirteen or something like that. You know, and it wasn't twenty, not nineteen twenty. I'm still not in this century. As you know from my lack of my lack of mechanicals, I'm not in the century. Yeah. But you know, so there's that. There's costume or what they call uh identity. So you can always recognise in a ritual who's the who's the you know some people I mean a lot of rituals will actually have costume, literal costume, you know. Others, I mean like y you know, will you dress in a certain way when you go to a funeral? It was always black. That was a there's you know, there's all that red is also a big colour in that. Space, there's and there's tools. There are always some form of tools. So, you know, again in the church there's the the chalice and that type of a thing. In many rituals there are something or something's passed around. So that's another piece and there's sound. The sounds will either be silence like it is in my meditation group, we don't speak for 35 minutes and it's sound or it will be singing or it will be whatever. And the last one is action, there's always a progress of action. Now that that comes from uh Robert Gri Grimes. Is it Robert Grimes? He's a uh a professor out in or he was a professor out in uh one of the universities in California. Brilliant, brilliant man, wrote book a lot about ritual. Ronald. Ronald Grimes is his name. And I do believe that that book has been that book about ritual has been re- re-released because it was out of print for a while. But he talks about these elements, and I think and it's all very applicable to the wake. You can see every single I go through the whole thing in my book with the wake, and it's all in there, all the references and everything. But I go through each one and how it plays out in the wake. And so when you've got that kind of ritual, you know what you're going to. You know that, you know, on Thursday at seven o'clock, I'm not going to be washing the dishes, I'm going to be in my group, and this is what this is how it's going to go. Now, because it's because it's you know, a group is always dynamic, that's the action, it's going to vary. Sometimes it might be uh a particular uh focus on one person, sometimes it might be a focus on a concept, you know, whatever it happens to be. So it's always going to vary, but there's that container there. I'm really into containers. I'm really into boxes and containers, limitations, you know.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:34

Mary, what was the name of the first person that you were saying is a was a a wonderful, brilliant man that Oh Van Ganop.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:44

Van Ganop. V-A-N-G-E-N-N-U-P. Okay. And uh he was he was French, I think. I can't remember. Oh yeah, yes, because the book is called Le Rite Le Rite de Passage. But it's been translated into English. So it's rites of passage, and it's a small book. It was written in uh 1907.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:07

Oh, wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:08

And a lot of now when you all purchase my book and another ad. There's about three hundred references.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:20

Oh wow, okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:22

At the back, and so on the notes, there are notes and then there's bibliography. It's a massive bibliography as well. And so all of these people are in there. But I mention them in the book with a little number, and then you can look it up on the notes. So I mean you can actually follow the trail of who's what where and how you get hold of that information. Yeah. Because I just think it's very, very important to recognize the soldiers the soldiers, the shoulders that we stand on. I think it's really important. You know, any idea that I have, well, I have some ideas, but I would say most what uh knowledge that I have is learned knowledge, you know, and so I want to honor the people who taught me. I think it's really important. And it's another thing that I know happens in yoga.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:06

I was gonna say, as a as a true authentic lineage holder, we always give credit where credit's due. We always recognize, yeah, where the source of wisdom is coming and honor that source, because yes, we have ideas and we we also have the muse coming through us, but a lot of it is, like you said, it's learned experience.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:24

And it's the glue. I mean, the reason that I wrote this book was that I, after I told you at the beginning about my own journey into it, but I began academically going with this thing about the keen uh from 19 no 20 again, 2008, 20 and 2009. That's when I began to academically dive into it with an MA, and then I went on to do a PhD. And so the PhD was about other world song, but it came right back to the keen, and I said and what had happened was I had difficulties finding information. And I had to, and it was all scrappy. So excellent information, but there was no book that held all the information. So I'd find a paper about this aspect, I'd find a paper about that aspect, you know, that type of a thing. And so I kind of glued it together in this book. I wanted I wanted to have and I also took out the academic language and put in lay language so so it was easier for people to read it. You know, and some of the feedback from the review has been exactly that. This is really we can read this, we can understand this. Whereas if you but I will always reference the paper where I found it, but I would just translate it a bit. And the some Irish stuff that I translate into English and things like that, you know. But that's that's what the book is was about, was about like putting this all in one place so people could see that this is what the king means, and here are the influences of it, here's the the whole background to it, and here's the context of it, and you know, and then at the end, what can you take from it? It's not going to be like it was, but what pieces can you take and with reverence, you know, build into your grief work? That's sort of what the book is like. No.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:19

That was my final well Well, I have two more questions for you, and and I think you've just answered the one is what do we do with the book? So if there is a preservation that's needed for actual keening in the three days and three nights of the week experience, which has largely been lost and forgotten, some people are doing it, but what yeah, what do you see as how your book can blossom into society?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:44

Well, I I uh the way the way I do it is is first of all, honoring the fact that there's still our keening and the tradition for what it is, knowing what the tradition is, uh, and working in a group. But but be very clear about the group. You know, do you feel safe? Is there somebody who knows what they're doing in the group? That's the key part. Because the things get out of hand when somebody doesn't know what they're doing. Absolutely. And suddenly I mean, I I had my own experience of that in my early days, way before because I used to run voice workshops. We didn't call it caning workshops or something like that. Nobody talked about cleaning. But I used to always say, if you're going to get your voice, really get your voice, it's like an onion, and you've got to peel away the layers. And what happens when you peel away layers of onions? You're streaming. So I used to say, if I don't get two good criers at my workshop, then I'm afraid I have failed, you know. When somebody'd start to cry and say, sorry, no, it's great. But I knew what I was doing, I knew how to handle it. I'd done counselling, I knew what to do. You know, so I think it's really important that y you work with somebody who knows what to do. And if you haven't got that, then that idea of working with a book, I think is brilliant. There's one in the I can't remember his name at the minute, but he took talks about the gates of death. And it's a very readable book, and it's definitely in my in my bibliography, and I can't remember the name, but I'm afraid. But this was the book that they were using, and I've heard about another group, a man's group actually, using this group as well, using this particular group as well. Francis something. That's all I can remember at the minute. Francis maybe I I can't I can't remember the second name. But it's but that's really good because it kind of brings people through it as it were. You know, and you'd but using that in a group so that you take, you know, not even a chapter, but just a few paragraphs at a time and talk about it. And and and it's gonna somebody is going to be affected. And then when you do another one, somebody else is going to be affected. But but ritualize it by having it always at the same time, you know, this kind of a thing. So that's the stuff I feel we can take away from this.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:56

So there's support and there is permission.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:01

But the permission has got to be within a container. It can't just be willy-nilly.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:07

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:08

You know, and so the crying has got to be contained, because a lot of people can't handle it. So it was like, you know, when when I was screaming my head off, you know, people were shocked. Because it was you've been trained to be no, you solemn, this is solemn, and and this wild screaming is not solemn. Well, the wild screaming was just is the stuff that gets you through quicker.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:34

Yes, that's the same experience I had that I had post-Tolene was I gathered a group of women, we went into the woods, and I was sharing with them that this kind of the organic keening was moving through me, and it made them all very uncomfortable. I think it was like one or two of them were like, yeah, let's do it, and were walking with me, and we were kind of, you know, doing vocabules together. But I would say out of, you know, the seven or eight women that were there, because we didn't have a structure and it was so raw, we were all, you know, we were in the woods where half of the woods had been destroyed by the the little baby tornadoes that were spit out around the hurricane. So it yeah, it was just really it was really raw.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:14

I mean, in the in that pay pa uh that last chapter as well, I talk a lot about uh a wonderful young woman coming up called Michelle Collins, who is doing PhD on the keen at the minute. She's taking a baby break at the minute, but she's I mean, she's wonderful, and she's from Cork, and uh she did a really nice master's, which is online, and I also give reference to that. Very insightful. But you know, she set up this three-layered sort of uh I don't know, workshop where there were literally three layers, was it in a town hall or somewhere like that? But you know, in one there was there was one about some of the history just around place, but then the next one there was the sound, there was all the sounds of Keening, different sounds, and then there was one with veils, you know, where you could just separate yourself off. So and she talks about the things that she's gone to. So there's a lot of examples in that last chapter about what people have done. And you know, and then and then you just gotta be creative on top of that. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna sit and uh you know start telling people what to do. You you've got to work it out for yourself. But these are the I call them the guidelines. Yeah, wonderful. Use these guidelines so that you have an idea. And you know, and also question, do a bit of questioning. I mean, language does change, but are we content to, you know, and this is and I just leave these with open open question marks. You know, are we content to call all lamenting caning? Is is that is that something now where language is gone? Is that what we want to do? Or do we want to honour, you know, the differences? That sort of a thing. So I just leave it up to people to decide what they want to do. And I also point out how the Irish, and this is where they're very smart, and maybe it's smart, maybe it's just doleful, but there are so many songs which preserve Keening with people they don't even realize. So I'll go through a whole pile of those. That, you know, I think it's about ten of them or something. That, you know, that these are songs that people they're not called Keens, they're not even called laments half the time. But what's happening, but you will find the O sound in there a lot, or a con, you'll hear hear hear a hone, you know, or ochone, and that's pure so pure keening vocable. So, and and they're in the song. So, you know, it's all those sorts of things.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:44

That's so beautiful. Okay, my last question for you is a bit esoteric. Is this really the last last? The last question for you, and it pertains to the the inner eye and the threshold, that kind of liminal space. And just I want to begin it with just my huge, heartfelt gratitude for the work that you've done. I feel you are, and it sounds like a few other people, you know, maybe in the outskirts that I'm not aware of just yet, but you feel to be spearheading this remembrance of a tradition that has been lost by a culture who lost so much. And I can feel that, and it feels like the, you know, the ancestral realm, the the other world realm, it feels like there's a big repair that's happening with the work that you're doing. And so I just wanted to say thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:37

I would love that if that is what's happening, that makes me happy. It's never been a conscious, you know, thing for me to say I'm repairing. I think I I feel that would be way too arrogant to say that myself. So I think, you know, I I have great interest in this. What I had interest in it long before other people had interest in it. And so they used to say to me, You're just really morbid, you know. But I was fascinated and I was digging up stuff all the time, you know. And then suddenly with COVID, the whole thing just burst, burst out. And I I would I would not say I was in the league because I I I'd like to honour the I mean, Brendan Amadigan, I mentioned Angela Partridge. She's another person, she's Angela Burke, she's well we call her Partridge Burke, because I'm not sure which is her married name, but I mean she would still be with us and wonderful researcher, and lots and lots, she also did a lot about poetry, Irish poetry and women's poetry, but she and she wrote an amazing book under the under the name Angela Burke, which is The Burning of Bridget Cleary, which is phenomenal. It's about it's about fairy lore, actually. But she has written a lot about the Keene as well. So there are Patricia Lysack, she wrote a fabulous book called The Banshee, which is tracing all the history of that, which actually goes into the Keening as well. So there are there are marvelous scholars out there who've been scurrying away behind the scenes for a very, very long time and not really getting the the you know the the recognition I feel. So I I like to sort of g give it out for them and there are others that I haven't named as well, you know, there are other people who you know but because yesterday somebody said the same thing to me, and I it comes as a surprise to be honest, you know, oh you're spearheading. I'm thinking I'm not spearheading anything, I'm just I just d f feel drawn to this, and and I do feel that there is a very strong ancestral line to it. And and I I'll tell you something I've told nobody before, which is I think I'm being guided very, very much by an aunt of mine who passed away in childbirth when she was 28, who I never knew, who my mother adored and And always talked about. And this aunt this is so strange. About two months ago I was looking for a picture, a big box of photographs, and I came across this photograph of my mother's family, the entire family, and it included this aunt. She was about nine years of age, and her mother, who was my grandmother, was very pregnant at the time and died in childbirth herself, right? So it was the this ancestral thing. I found out from my mother that this particular aunt had been a nurse, and in Ireland babies who were born out of wedlock wedlock were treated awfully. So what she did was she stood for as as in baptism all the unnamed babies so that they could have a Christian burial. That's what she did. And I looked at this photograph and I saw a picture of her at eight, and then I saw the picture of me at eight, and I went, Oh my god. So I feel that although I remember I felt her when my mum was dying, I felt her in the room, I felt mum's other sister in the room, and I felt a lot of people there, but I remember turning to one corner and saying, you know, I've never met you, but I do feel you now. It was so visceral her energy. So and and she died in uh the 30s, I think. 1930s, a long time ago. You know. But yeah, I do feel that and I've been feeling all along there's been some sort of guidance, and the coincidence about this photograph was I looked on the back, the date was that this photograph was taken of this huge family was exactly to the day, 100 years before I'd looked at it. Of course it was, right? Of course it was. Yes, of course it was. And it's just oh to be really that sort of a thing. But that's what makes me think that she's she's somehow guiding it, that ancestral thing. Because that's what she was doing with these babies. I felt that she was really honoring the ancestral line of these babies. Oh my gosh, yes, that's huge. What an incredible thing to do. You know, and so I I but when I when I saw my eight-year-old self and saw her, I thought, it's the same face.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:33

Oh my god, of course.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:35

You know, now she didn't live to the age that I've lived, obviously she died when she was twenty-eight. But her husband, who adored her, and who was my godfather actually, he ended up in a mental hospital at the end of his life, and my my mother took me to visit him. And I walked in, I was twenty-eight, and he opened up his arms and he said, You've come, you've come at last. Yeah. And we came out and I said, Mum, what the hell was that about? She said, Because you look like Nana. Well and you know, it's just I mean, it's just recently all this stuff has just come into me, and I'm putting it together and you know that finding that photograph was amazing. But seeing seeing the face was even more amazing. And realizing that's what I looked like. So she would probably have looked similar to me. Lord help her. But you know, but it was just sort of amazing. So I think that I think that there has been guidance. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:33:36

Yes. When you have the exact date like that, I mean, that's obviously a sign. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:44

Hundred years to the day. I mean, I'd seen this photograph before and I hadn't really taken any notice of it. But I was looking for something else. I dug out the one of me at eight, which was relevant to what I was looking for, and then I saw this one. Oh no, oh my goodness. Oh my goodness, you know.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:03

Oh my goodness. This is the power of being a visionary and a seer is just yeah, you get to experience the magic of life. Okay, don't laugh at me because I asked one more question for you. It will be the last one. I'm gonna hold you to that. Okay, and I and I wonder if anyone has asked you this, but Mary, will you have a traditional keening at your own death? It's funny you say that.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:32

There's a there's a graveyard near here. I like I like graveyards. I'm very morbid, but I I there's something about graveyards, which really I like, you know, and I like going through them. And I was thinking the other day, although I do want to be buried in Ireland, I I'm clear that I want to be buried, not cremated, and I'm clear that I want to be buried in Ireland in my hometown. I doubt that there will be. I doubt it, but I was thinking it would be really nice if I could be keened. And I was thinking of, you know, that but there are not that many people who can do it. You know?

SPEAKER_05 1:35:05

Not yet. Your book is out. Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah. And then you could be perhaps maybe even living by example with your aunt there because you know she'll be there too. Yeah. That you will have this experience that then really could set the tone for maybe the three-day, three-night experiences coming back. I mean, can you I can imagine that. I'm also a visionary. I can absolutely imagine the momentum of healing that your your experience could offer the world, which is, I know, in your own interests, is the community benefit.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:43

Yeah. Yeah. I I do know one keener and actually interviewed her for my book, and she'd be about my age, and she's down in uh Galway. But uh it's mostly hidden. She's out there a bit more, you know, and she's very, very good at what she does. Uh, but she learned it from her aunt. And Keeny, and that's another thing when you asked about the songs and keening, Bob Quinn in his book, The The Atlantean The Irish Atlantean, he says you can't teach Shanos, but you can learn it. And that applies absolutely to the Keen. You can't really teach it, but it's by mimicry and then by embodying and all of those sorts of things. So, you know, when I when I do sing uh Keen's people do get moved, you know. And people some have said to me, Oh, would you come and Keenan? I would say, I don't consider myself a Keener, I don't consider that I have that badge, you know. But I what I can do is sing some of the songs that I know were sung by Keeners. I can do that, you know. And so that's that's as far as I go. But the whole shamanic piece of the transference, you see, was taken over by the priests. And they do a great job. I'm not absolutely not, you know, anything and and not all priests are terrible by any manner of means, but you know, they they do a great job. I mean, I've been, you know, been at funerals where I've been very, you know, entranced by it, knowing, yes, you know, the incense and the and the particular prayers, and and again it's ritual, and that particular ritual that they do is very, very powerful and it helps the transmigration of the body, there's no doubt about that. But I've also had the experience of shamanically going in to free a couple of people who got stuck along the way. And I've had that experience too. And I seem to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_05 1:37:48

You're quite gifted, I don't I don't doubt them.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:51

Well, and I would say, you know, it's just as a gift that I've discovered in later life, maybe that particular gift, you know. I was too busy trying to be a rock singer in my earlier days. That didn't quite work out.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:06

You had bigger, better things ahead of you.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:10

Maybe. Apparently, I was told that I would come into my own when I was older. I was told that by psychic. So, you know, I guess that's how that's happening. So that is your last question. You don't get to ask any more. It's been a total delight speaking with you, though.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:27

Absolutely, Mary. Thank you so much for joining and for sharing all that you have experienced and the things that you know and are caring about the Keenan tradition. Thank you, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:37

Well, thank you for inviting me.