Day Five: Ireland

I'm going to be perfectly honest here: until yesterday, I knew almost nothing about Irish mythology. In fact, I don't remember ever even thinking about whether they have mythology. Except for Halloween, of course.

Here's the Halloween story, which is actually proven and not just a myth: According to the Catholic Church, November 1st is "All Saints' Day." The way that works is more or less that every day of the year is some saint's day, but November 1st is one humongous holiday to celebrate everybody at once since you probably forgot one or two throughout the year. On All Saints' Day, you're supposed to be on your absolute best behavior. Way back in *checks wikipedia* the 5th century, Catholic missionaries went to Ireland and started setting up churches. The people that lived in Ireland, the Druids, were fairly open-minded about this new religion, but there were still some that didn't like the idea of being good one day. So it became a tradition that every year on October 31st, the night before All Saints' Day, they would do as many bad things as they could. This included making enormous wooden cages in the shapes of people and animals, shoving sick people, old people and criminals inside, and setting them on fire. (Also, after these fires all that would be left was bones, which is where we get the word bonfire.)

Okay, back to mythology class. I don't know about everyone else, but I found the origins-of-Ireland story to be a bit confusing. What I got out of it was that Ireland was constantly taken over by different groups with each group being less godly, the first legal case ended with an adulturous woman winning, and finally the ancestors of Irish people showed up. One of them wanted to be on good terms with the goddess whose body is Ireland, but another one thought they didn't owe her anything. I wish it had said more about how
that worked out for them in the long run.

The big deal with this particular myth was that it introduced the idea of a supreme goddess and a matriarchal or matrifocal society, which I'll discuss more in my next post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geX8IVBv4wk&feature=related