Welcome to Fae-Touched Hell, Telling the Cath Maige Tuired, Part 2

In which we pause to visit the Faery mounds for a linguistic inquiry into the Irish Cath Maige Tuired, PART 2.

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Transcript

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Die Gwitch hello August Halcha and welcome, Musician Keening Cave. This is the Keening Cave, the language of Irish Mythology Podcast. Thanks for being here. This is a podcast about remembering our myths and their power. On the Keening Cave we are neither indifferent to scholarship, nor are we antiquarian, but we see myths as tails with teeth. We see myths as the living language of our peoples weave with this land and the land of all of her spirits too. What is a keening, you ask? A keening or a queen is a ritualized wailing, a singing, a storytelling to usher the grief of the living and the soul of the dead through the spirit road. They are our blood weave, stretching us in two directions. Weft, myths connect us with one another. They are living teth of white webby fascia and mycelial threads that interlace the circle of kinship. Warp, myths connect us with Creator. They lift our eyes to the stars. This is the Keenan Cave. It is remembering, it is living Irish mythology, mourning the laws that modernity in its colonialism made us let go. It is also ascending, and it is here that we lead off with the fireside retelling, and then we unfasten the tale together to a study of language, archaeology, history, and the sacred. I am your host, D. Firth Griffith. I'm a bastard of bards, a Marqueo, horse friend, and learning Shanaqui. Swishia slum buongiatakota Ligna Chinahogan. Sit down, take off your coat, come and feel the fire. Tune in to our Substack, the Keening Cave, the language of Irish mythology, to read this entire episode in its fullness, other essays, footnotes, and downloadable resources. That's it. Off we go. Like sun gloaming up through sharp curtains of clouds, we are fine to take in the moment's breath, fit to pause before we can continue our dark night telling and linguistic study of the Kahmatura. It is first that we must hold hands and visit the fairy mounds. We must unclean our hands in the spirit soil of earth and ask some hard questions. Balance is memory with legs. Myths are big wisdom stories that root us with magnificent mycilia, those fat and hairy tendril tales giving and gaining within the mother's wet black stratum, this sacred etymological ecology. This holy ground, where the dead walk in bone suits of syllabaries adjunct to their own, so that we may not just speak them, sing them, keen them, but be spoken by them, as Heidegger might say. Myth is walking with the dead on legs made of words. Decolonization is not the dead's mission, neither is it myths. To decolonize is to salute the colonizer. It is a fet for kings, a triumphus for tyrants. Neither is it reindigenization, for we have yet a taste of memory, of ceremony, of the root lace living in the wet red cambials of culture. Our myths ask us that we open them up, tearing ungently this cage of bones, their dark passage tomb, and open them into their words, this blood linguistic, this ancestor genetic, so that we may look the dead in the face, and then have strength and honor enough to turn to the fetid Caesars and tell them, let Rome in Tiber melt, and then to stand up tall and set the flame, for memory is stronger than might. Imbalance is denying, it is delarity, this malignant calamity, pathenogenic to healing pain, pathenogenic to balancing the body's shape and form. Balance is holding the millions dead, the millennia of sleeping masses, the generations of pains and failures and greed and starvation welling up like corpses on the battlefield of Klanthar. But it is not doing this alone. The dead that walk with words are here to take us with them, here to make us aware, to make us whole, to make us alive. Yes, death is good at this. They are about reclaiming what was taken, showing it to, and they are about giving us the words to stand tall. Words to counsel grief, words to remind us that we were imperialism's testing ground, and that this is okay, for the gods are at work and this is their land. Words to incite flame magic. Death, she is good at this. Death, she is good. Yes, words have that power. They have legs like that, faces and voices and wet red bones and moist webs of yellow white fascia too. Words are the dead clothed in clay. There are words, if only I knew them, as Sean Rodin writes. If only we knew them like fairies. Words walk amongst us like fairies. The next reading in the Kahmature might possibly be the most rigid aspect of the story. It is thick, and its tendrils seem to reach out to violate the purity of poetry, of mythological prose. To understand it, or rather to open the lodge flap of our first meeting with the long ago peoples and cite the shifting shadows inside, the thin firelight flicking visions of talking dead, on thick drapery of hide and hair. We need a larger introduction, and we need to examine our images, our words too. Welcome to Fay Touch Tell. Modern writing is intoxicated with sensitivity, readers, and scrility. Authors intent on reeling wide readership or fearful of being cancelled, as they say, are careful to watch their words, and then, strangely, are careless as they employ fairy fetish collocations in their arts ravaging dolly of tropes that run amuck about the sacred space of living culture. Fairies are cool if you need some magic, satire, or sex, to suck in readers or to fit your story into best-selling genres. They are stylish if you need something to root the culturally broad claim of your Celtic-inspired fantasy book. But let us not forget that even J. R. R. Tolkien, perhaps my favorite author, had some difficulty here. In his essay, On Fairy Stories, Tolkien defends the image of fairies in literature, writing that fairy stories are those of imagined wonder. He writes about the tangible rawness of fairy fantasy for humankind, that it represents more than heroes or villains or spirits for children's stories, but offers profound explorations of human nature and desire in adult literature as well. A story image, weaving nature in humanities, sub-creation. It all goes well, and proceeds for pages and pages, just a little bit on, from discussing their power, Tolkien's words open up before us like a cracked sternum. Elves are not primarily concerned with us, nor we with them. Our fates are sundered, and our paths seldom meet. In other words, they are not living like we are living. Ours is a path that is banked by gravel and weeds and dikes, but theirs is a best-selling fantasy story here to teach us, here to guide us, here to help us escape from what authors like Tolkien feared most. The machine. They are natural subjects for our use. He writes, History often resembles myth, because they are both, ultimately, of the same stuff. This moment in Tolkien's writing is perhaps the most quoted, though it presents a problem. Tolkien is not equating myths and history, and I don't estimate that he is saying that myths are true because they are history, or history is true because it can be found in myths. No, a careful reading of this essay and a relatively topical inspective of this particular independent and dependent clause yields a purpose more simple than the maths of equation. Tolkien presents myths as mirrors, and human history is the image in that mirror. Myths show us ourselves, and perhaps that is what Tolkien means when he concludes their semblance by equating not the things themselves, myth and history, but their stuffs, asking us to question what is myth and history made of? Perhaps Tolkien would say something like History is the truth of human action, or perhaps the painful truth of human inaction. After discussing our sundering paths in the history of myth, Tolkien champs on, supping on tidy fares of the chef's special, truth, the kinsman of utility. Fairies, he writes, are true, even if they are only creations of man's mind, true only as reflecting in a particular way one of man's visions of truth. Truth is a vision, and Tolkien is saying, if he is saying anything at all, that truth is a wet red image untethered to the pulse of means, untethered to the life of real things. It is lungs full of breath but missing the body. Fairies are true because the human mind needs them to be true. Fairies are true because the effect of their consideration is true. Fairies are true because they make our stories powerful. Fairies are true because the utility is true. But fairies are not true. They are not real, not actually present in the land of myth and mud as living animate spirits. They are not real by themselves. They are slaves to human need, like earth to agriculture, like earth to commercial greed, like earth. They are not real, like the wind is real, like that tree is real, like the hum thrum of love pulsating the smile of a child is real. Most today, in the many days that came before, are sentimental, and excavate fairies from this time and place, lifting their earthen forms enriched by golden veins of spirit lace for the riches within. This appears to be Tolkien's stance, and I think it also the stance of many of us when it comes to mythology and its fantasy. We are quick to give fairies the clothes of utility, because when they don the accoutrements of human need, they help us wield the militant virtue of truth. It seems that the definition of truth here, or why history often resembles myth, is whatever is useful for humanity in our culture's rebirth or renewal, its renewal back into the age prior to trench warfare and the great rings of power. But I said militant. Why is the virtue of truth militant? You ask. Fantasy books, like the Lord of the Rings, are well sat in medieval Europe's knighted stage, and plays where the noble and the good and the true wield weapons for damsels, for maidens, for morality, entice and seat the masses. They sell bucketfuls of popcorn. Even Shakespeare deigned not enter this story stage of fairies without proffering a certain sense of militantism. In a midsummer's night dream, though a lighthearted comedy, the play's general chaos rides the back of a wild stallion herd of fairies, from Oberon to Puck to Tatiana herself, who incite supernatural mischief and embody the violent force of nature that enthemes the play's turbulence. It could be said that fairies are true because they remind us of or reflect the image of, biblical angels, or sainted actors. But the day that fairies become sainted actors is the day of doom for them. It is their demise. If they are truly seen, they will perish from our culture's vernacular. Their images will rot in the dark, unseen halls of our ornate museums. But if we merely hold their reflection, they will live forever. And so Tolkien puts them not in our earth, but his middle earth. In some sense, he protects them from the church. He protects them from us. How strange this appears when fairies exist only for us, but to save them, to use them for truth, we must hide them away in foreign worlds and tuck them below garments of fantasy. A most ungratifying conclusion this. A vision confined to the world of academia and small hearted philosophical ponderances, where truth is handed down the liturgical ladder, with little or no access for anything. But blighted anthropomorphism to climb back up. Modernity's teeth are sunk deep, our lungs starving, past the point of return now, the wet slap of liver and bile cascading across our cheeks as we go in for the heart, that little bite of fat and blood and fibrous cords that sustain the ravenous search for truth. Reeling back from the blood mass of muscle we hold the fairy's dripping head in front of our own, like a mask that we put on if we want, if there was a fire close and answers too. Welcome to Fay Touch Tell. To briefly trip out of the scope of Irish mythology, we find this same argument in American history. George Washington makes the same case for the American religious morality in his farewell address, when he equates virtue and morality as the sacred, necessary springs of popular government, and indispensable supports for freedom, and thence urges his countrymen into the disposition and habits of religion and morality which enjoins justice and peace with the national character? For, as he asks with Tolkien like grandeur, who can doubt that the fruits of such a plan would richly repay? And can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent facility of a nation with its virtue? To Washington, religious morality seems to be a utility to national strength, like fairies to Tolkien's truth. I doubt Tolkien would ever had said so directly, but it seems uncontentious to gleam that fairies are imagined wonders, healing for humanity when they become a canvas for our self-reflection and betterment. That fairies are not concerned with us, but by imagining their wonder through fantasy and myth, we may capture their form to understand their miraculous grace, as Tolkien writes, that their stories offer us this evangelism, giving a fleeting glimpse of joy, joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. Tolkien, Lake Washington, sees the end in view in Middle Earth as the means. Fairies are captured spirits to show humanity our salvation. Their purpose is our own. They are useful to us. For Tolkien, that elfish evangelism looked like the Roman Catholic liturgy, and popes with hairy feet that loved garden and smoke long bottom leaf. For others, that salvation looks like a trope in a best-selling novel. The fantasy genre in Goodreads is a continuum of this blighted and one-way anthropomorphism. It contains thousands of titles, and every year another five hundred plus books are added to the list, and the majority of them are directly inspired by Celtic mythology. You can see this in their language, their named heroes and rage warriors, their lands and created worlds, and so much more. But this is a misnomer. There is no such thing as Celtic mythology, or pantheon of Celtic peoples. Insular Celtic mythology is not continental Celtic mythology, though yet both of these ideas are far from the spirit of the lands in which their stories erupt, for Celtic is not a term indigenous to either insular or continental locales. And yet both are further still from the living spirit ethos of Irishness, Welshness, etc., found in the bosom of true habitation of the glorious and painful past, present and future. One can see the archetype of this blunder of storytelling, this invaluable Bunbury. Go see Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and you'll understand what I mean by Bunbury, in the specimen of the Celtic horned god that is laced through so much of pagan literature today. Cernunus, as his nomenclature so guesses, is held as a Celtic antler god. Maybe that is true, but at the best, he is of the continental Celts, mainland Europe, and at the least he is a nice tale from the bowels of a Paris cathedral. Cernunus has half an inscription on a stone pillar that is missing most of its letters that is academically supported by a handful of archaeological findings that look similar across the mainland of Europe, but little to nothing, or actually nothing at all, from the Isles of the West. I appreciate the candid jolt that John and Laura at the Irish Pagan School, two scholars unparalleled, in my opinion, in the field of Irish literature and language, talk about Carnunus. They write, Cornunus is not an Irish deity, and is not connected to Irish paganism. Fool stop. Like fantasy fae queens, so much of Celtic inspired fantasy and pagan beliefs is the lumber. Of Celtic culture into one hegemony, one skeleton of some dope ass past of cool white people. But this doesn't stop at the bounds of literature or neopagan practices. When European settlers splashed into the Western Hemisphere 500 years ago, what they so thoughtfully called the New World, carrying their own trauma with them, they encountered over twelve hundred distinct nations of sovereign peoples who formed interconnected social units with around two thousand different cultures, and spoke over three hundred unique languages. Compare this with Europe at the same time, and you could say that the cultures of the old world were four percent as numerous and three percent as linguistically diverse as the indigenous of the new. And yet the language surrounding the conquest of the American colonies presents the indigenous peoples as singular savages of the wilderness. They were Indians, they were one herd of wild beasts, they were Native Americans, and like our fairies, they were both the idols and the shadow demons of rugged Americanism that were most useful in art, but never religion, society, or politicking. The European lumping settler mythology and the hegemony of Celtic inspired works is as backwards as old Winnie Churchill walking into a Dublin pub and calling all the patties and mics fine English chaps. Because hell, why not? And swigging back drops of shot Irish whiskey, singing cockles and mussels, like lads off to Easter service in the morn, when really he has the Imperial military stationed outside, and English Brigadier General Lau ready to skewer some savage rebels on a stick. Irish mythology and its fee and its gods are perceived as a singular substrate that is true because it is useful. But in reality, we know that the diverse array of living particulars are really comprised of churchills and Easter rebellions and whiskey wars and continental people who know nothing about Irishness, in the same way that the Irish know nothing about the Gauls who fought with Rome against the Carthaginians' bestial wit, Hannibal, or maybe even the second rate, Hamilcar. You take your pick, and it knows nothing about the diversity of languages, spoken by cauldrons of gods and land spirits and holy wells that are so particular, so grounded to place, that to lift them up into some hegemony is to destroy the spirit and form of the land herself. What is the cause, you ask? Imperial colonialism wrought its way like bellows over flame, not so much due to a lost nuance or the fallen human capacity for complexity or kindness as it did, I think, a separation, this great cleft of a canyon between the spirit of the land and the peoples of the land. Today and in the many days that surround this one, we see fairies as helpful figures. We call them Fey and give their fantastic comportments a figure to sexualize, sentimentalize, or seduce for our own ends. Ends such as the generally positive betterment of humanity, or ends more perilous, such as a bigger book deal. But in all cases, we further the separation, the chasm, the great void. We disconnect when we are disconnected. We colonize when we are colonized. And when publishers say inspired by Celtic mythology, what they really mean is it's quite possibly the worst pageant who ever cavort the stage with fate tropes and overwritten characters who are enemies to lovers, or who slop vests or slowburn passions chalk full of rage, or weak damsels written by some plague of ungrounded writers with ancestor issues, or who write battles fought by seven foot-tall dudes donning gorilla dicks. But Jesus, does it plant people in their seats? If you have followed my writings for any fabric of time, you will be oh so familiar, and maybe quite bored, with my enduring contentions with the state of story. Modern fantasy publishers love when the fee touch the shit out of humans, both in horror, rage, fantasy, and fantasy romance too. But one cannot lift a hand without moving and being moved by hosts of she or the land spirits. As Yates writes, for the visible world is merely their skin. And so what happens when we reel up the Ye Shi out of the dark waters, calling them true insofar as they are helpful to us, who sharpened tropes and clear markets and fictionalize their forms? What happens when the land's spirit becomes nothing but helpful motifs? When they become true only in their use. It concludes to this. We capture the fee because their truth is useful and utilitarian to our needs, and we encase the pain and glory of ancient diverse peoples, because complexity is the menace of utility, and delay with the land is easy without honor. When we take fairies from the mounds and mold them into human utility, spiritual or otherwise, we take them from who they are, a shape of earth, always moving, always in motion, in transition. We give form to the formless. Their characters may help excavate us from our prison, as Tolkien wrote, but that does not mean it is honorable. Culturally appropriating our ceremonies may help your understanding of some metaphysical inquiry, but that doesn't mean it is kind, honorable, or invariably necessary to cultivate the eternal good lace of kinship. Your face becomes but a wall of flesh, like graves walking, but never talking. It is for us to ask, are fairies otherworldly spirits interwoven within the fascia fabric of earth that affect and are affected by the mother pulse? Or are they images that help us see our truth? Tolkien has planted his feet. What about you? What happens when all we want from Asi is self-development, national character or identity, salvation or a book deal? What happens when we uproot the gods and lump them into a pile of useful figures and tell the Aishi to sit for a while? We paint their form without ever understanding their shape, without ever asking for their permission. This is the central question of part two of our reading of the Kahmature, and its exploration is the necessary foreplay for the Fey touched. In the next episode, we will explore the Kahmature, word for word, to attempt to meet the Eshi in their own mounds, in their own times, and smoke the long bottom leaf at their fire. Not ours. The answer, I think, if we are blessed to receive it, will be pointedly inconvenient and ponderously leaden, and probably entirely non utilitarian. It is hard to call on the name of Iru when she looks like a fetish of distorted forms with legs widely marketable and spread and sold as a fee queen. Iru is not for sale. Join us next time as we continue with this telling of the Kahmatoet.