Magic and Reality
By C. A. Asbrey
It would be hard to underestimate how much the early Christians adjusted the Celtic myths to fit their own ends. The pre-Christian era was melded with Old Testament characters, and the origins of new arrivals to Ireland were adjusted to place them in Bible stories. One such pseudo-history which received this treatment was the story of Cesair, the supposed granddaughter of Noah. She is said to have fled to the Western edge of the world to escape the flood, arriving with only three men, and numerous women. The numbers vary, but most legends settle for around fifty. Two men soon die, leaving one who felt unable to cope. He ran away, pursued by the women, and shapeshifts as he jumped over a cliff. Fintan turned into a one-eyed salmon, then an eagle, before changing into a hawk. He lives for another 5,500 years, and recounts Ireland’s history to the high king, Diarmait mac Cerbaill. This sounds very much like a version of Tuan mac Cairill, who recounted Ireland’s history through remembering his various reincarnations going back to the great flood. Reincarnation was not a Christian belief, so, of course, could not be used in connection with Noah’s granddaughter, hence the supernatural adjustment. Tuan’s shapeshifting was put down to being reborn as a stag, an eagle, and a salmon. When he was eaten by a pregnant woman, and became born again as her son – but it was nothing to do with Cesair, despite the fact they told pretty much the same story
Cesair wasn’t, technically speaking, an invasion. The next one came from Nemed. Nemed came from Sythia (Central Eurasia). The Nemedians also came up against the Fomorians, but managed to built two forts and clear twelve plains. When Nemed died the Fomorians oppressed them. A huge battle eventually ensued and the Nemedians escaped, after scattering into three groups. Two of the groups were to return, and rule over Ireland in later centuries.
The Fir Bolg (men of bags) ruled over Ireland as high kings for the next 37 years, dividing the country into five counties. Another group descended from the Nemdians, the Tuatha Dé Danann, defeated the Fir Bolg, but still faced problems with the Fomorians. Clearly, there is intermarriage between Fomorians and the Tuatha Dé Danann, as Lugh was a product of a dynastic marriage between the two groups. Lugh, was a god-king, and his dynasty ruled for 150 years until the Milesians arrived from Spain.
How does this reflect the real history? The peoples we now refer to as Celtic brought farming to Ireland. Genetic analysis shows that early farmers came all the way from the Eastern periphery of Europe, replacing the earliest inhabitants, who were similar to most early southern Europeans. A lot of the early DNA has disappeared, indicating that new waves brought population displacement – either death, or departure. Some early Irish were genetically distant cousins to Otzi the Iceman who was discovered In the Alps. He too carried a genetic legacy which has been swept away in Europe, but which was thought to persist in patches, due to isolation – places like Ireland and Sardinia.
These people, the people who built the stone circles and dolmen, themselves had ancestors who indisputably came from the Middle East, before they migrated west. A woman’s burial at Ballynahatty, near Belfast, was examined. She lived around 5,200 years ago, and had brown hair and eyes, and her genes show her ancestors travelled by sea to Sapin, and then up the Atlantic coast. But that journey took centuries. Her genes give us traces of the early hunter-gatherers too, but her people largely replaced them.
Her people endured the same fate. Testing on remains from Rathlin from about 1,000 years later show that her gene pool had also mostly disappeared. Their DNA is very like the modern population of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. They come from the Russian Steppes, and spread throughout Europe. Linguists say that the Celtic languages arrived about 4,300 years ago – around the time of the Rathlin bodies. Not Gaelic as we know it now, but an ancestor of the tongue. The Ballynahatty woman’s people brought farming. The Rathlin boys brought metalworking, and it looks like they wiped out the previous population, or as the myths suggest, some died of a disease to which they had no immunity.
Both the Ballynahatty woman and Rathlin men had different variants of genes causing haemochromatosis – now so common in Ireland it’s called the Irish disease. They also brought coeliac disease, cystic fibrosis, and galactosemia. The Ballynahatty woman was lactose intolerant, but 1,000 years later the Rathlin bodies were not. The myths mention Scythia, Spain, and Greece. The genetics are not inconsistent with those tales.
It does fit somewhat with the myths, but there are some intriguing details of the Celtic mythology which chime with real finds and archaeology. There are a number of very similar myths around a brother and sister, part of a dynasty of god-kings who used their coupling to start the sun cycles as part of the summer solstice celebrations. There are also tales of sisters with numerous brothers, and fathers and daughters. As the circumstances are not the same in them all, we can only assume it wasn’t unknown.
Such incestuous relationships in pseudo-divine rulers, were not uncommon in ancient times, and certainly not in Europe. The Ptolemys of Egypt were actually Macedonian descendents of the people put in place to rule Egypt for Alexander the Great, and they infamously lived in such a way. So did the Mesopotamians, and the Romans. The god-kings had a clear intention to keep power in a few hands, as well as establishing dominance by showing lesser people that they were not fit for the royal seed. Some of the stories have clearly been well-sanitized by the monks who transcribed the ancient myths. They feature accidental couplings through not knowing who their object of desire really was. Incest was unthinkable amongst the parties who converted to Christianity. However, it was such a small country, with an even smaller elite, who continued to breed amongst themselves. Bloodline was so culturally important that accident is not credible. But the message of incest remains. Excavations of megalithic necropolis of the Bru na Boinne, Newgrange showed genetic material to bear this out. A male skeleton was shown to be the offspring of first degree relatives; either parent and child, or brother and sister. And they were not the only close relatives in the tombs. There were many generations of bodies buried there, at least five hundred years worth. At least forty are related, pointing to a hereditary elite, but only one first degree relationship has been found so far. Notably, the oldest finding of a Down Syndrome baby is in the tomb. He was carefully placed in a sacred place, and had been breastfed before his death. That too is an interesting insight into the values of the society.
Shapeshifters come in abundance in Celtic mythology. The Kelpies transform from humans into horses which drag people to their deaths in deep water. Selkies transform from seals to humans, Morrigan is a war goddess who would swoop over the battlefields, devouring the bodies as a crow or a raven. She would turn into a wolf to cause cattle to stampede the enemy, and could turn into a woman of any age. Perhaps one of the most famous shapeshifters was Taliesin, the famous Welsh Bard.
Perhaps the shapeshifting makes more sense when we get inside the Celtic belief system. They were Animists. They didn’t believe they populated the living world – they were part of it. They were bound by the cycles, by the elements, and by the universe. The world was a living thing, and it wasn’t there to serve them – they were just an element in the big wheel of life. If they wanted to survive, they had to play to nature’s rules. Even certain words had extra meaning, and could be used as a powerful way to benefit humanity. Everything was cyclical, so reincarnation meant that souls never died. They could exist in a netherworld, or be born again, hence the tales of Tuan mac Cairill witnessing thousands of years of history in various animal forms. Ancestors were revered. People could take any form, from one life to another.
Guardian spirits protected water, forests, and mountains, but paradoxically the gods protected the prey as much as the hunters. These beliefs meant that they invoked the spirits when preparing to hunt, so they could gain the skills of their prey. They dressed in skins, wore masks and heads to look like the beasts, and painted them on walls, holding their grace, speed and courage in great admiration. There are a few ways in which recent discoveries help us to experience the world as they did, and understand why they believed in magic.
In 1940, a group of boys descended into a cave near the town of Montiac. Deep in the bowels they found brightly coloured animals, unfamiliar in the 20th century, painted all around the walls and roof. As they watched, the flickering from the lamplight seemed to make their heads swirl, their vision blur, and they watched as the painted beasts seemed to dance and chase around the walls. When they resurfaced, adults put it down to low oxygen. It took years before the phenomenon was looked at more closely.
In 1995 scientists discovered that if they recreated the lighting which those who created the art would have used, the art takes on a whole new perspective. Using a series of grease lamps to create a circle, they were able to view the art in a whole new way. As the flames rose and fell, they realized that by fully illuminating the work, they had missed the point entirely. When flickering lights and shadows were used, the effect was like a strobe light in a night club. The animals which were painted in a series of movements came to life, and dynamic movement was witnessed in the paintings.
“In low light, human vision degrades, and that can lead to the perception of movement even when all is still,” says Susana Martinez-Conde, the director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Ariz. “The trick may occur at two levels; one when the eye processes a dimly lit scene, and the second when the brain makes sense of that limited, flickering information.”
Ancients hunters knew that our eyes undergo a switch when we slip into darkness, but they didn’t understand the science behind it. They knew how to play with it, though, in camouflage and art. Blue wode made people disappear in the darkness better than black. In bright light, eyes primarily rely on the colour-sensitive cones, but in low light the cones don’t have enough photons to work with and black and white gradients, picked up by the rods, take over. Hunters and soldiers know that shadows become harder to distinguish from actual objects in the dark, and the boundaries between things disappear, unless they move. Then the mind can make more sense of an outine. Images straight ahead of us look out of focus, as if they were seen in our peripheral vision. Early humans viewing cave paintings by firelight might have been that a deer with multiple heads, for example, resembled a single, animated beast, much like a series of flickering images. This experiment worked in successive caves and images.
Marc Azéma, a Paleolithic researcher and filmmaker at the University of Toulouse in France, has found two primary techniques that Paleolithic artists used to imply motion; juxtaposition of successive images—the technique used for the deer head—and superimposition. Rather than appearing in sequence, variations of an image pile on top of one another in superimposition to lend a sense of motion. Superimposition has been found in caves across France and Spain.
Vision is just one way to experience the paintings, but add percussion, melody, and chanting, and it can build into an adrenaline-packed ride. Flutes formed from mammoth and bird bones have been found in Europe, dating back between 42,000 to 45,000 years ago. Bullroarers consist of blade of wood swung around on a string to make a howling sound, and have been found in the Ukraine in Palaeolithic digs. They were sacred instruments to the ancients Greek, But what about percussion instruments?
There may have been a reason why the stones used to build Stonehenge’s inner circle were moved 180 miles from Wales, beyond the need to extend the unity of a religious group or clan. The stones themselves ring like a bell when struck. In fact, percussionists have played full pieces on them. They sound so much like bells that churches in the region used them as their bells until the 1700s. A nearby village is named Maenclochog, meaning ringing stones. When they were tested, the rocks still rang, even though they have been weathered for millennia or sunk into the ground. Archaeologists even found marks where it appeared the rocks had been repeatedly struck.
See and hear and example here. https://www.walesonline.co.uk/whats-on/music-nightlife-news/mystical-story-magical-singing-stones-17736056 (Copy the link to use.)
Couple all of that sound, light-play, and music, with drugs and alcohol, and people experienced a mind-blowing cocktail of experiences. And they did have drugs and alcohol. This is proved in both the botanical finds, and in coprolites. Mushrooms were a favourite, and they went to extremes to get high. Fly Agaric, the red and white spotted mushroom, is highly toxic to humans, but a powerful hallucinogenic. However, when fed to reindeer, and their urine drunk, it filters out the poison and allows people to get safely out of their heads. It’s thought to relate to the legend of Santa’s reindeer. There’s also evidence that paintings in extreme depths in caving systems were a place of ritualistic communing, or some kind of rite of passage. They are reached through such tight passages that oxygen levels dropped very quickly, especially in the presence of a naked flame. Induced hypoxia is a well-known method of reaching different states of consciousness, one often used in autoerotic practices. Hypoxia is a theory posited about the Oracle at Delphi, being built over vents pouring out noxious gas.
And then there were just plain tricks. Priests all over the ancient world used sleight-of-hand, misdirection, hidden pulley, trapdoors, and even electricity to make people believe they had potent powers. Ventriloquism was originally seen as a religious practice, and was used in ancient times. The Greeks called it gastromancy. It would be naive to suppose that ancient Western Europe was any different. Conjuring tricks and sleight of hand have been documented since the 2700 BCE The first named practitioner was Dedi in ancient Egypt. And he must have learned it from someone undocumented. Electricity was also used to strike fear into people, with people having built working capacitors from the description of the Arc of the Covenant. It explains why people were struck by lightening when they tried to touch it, and Nicola Tesla called Moses, “a skilled electrician, far ahead of his time.” And virtually every one of his “miracles” and “plagues” can be attributed to some sort of device in his possession that allowed him and his brother Aaron to safely manipulate electromagnetic energy, if not to a natural phenomenon.
Keeping secrets was a powerful tool too. Those able to predict eclipses, turn what looked like ordinary stones into metal, or cure ailments, were seen as having special powers, and many records show that the elites kept such knowledge close. Such information was power, and if people wanted it, they had to keep you around – and stay in your favour.
What is magic? The dictionary defines it as the power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces. We can see that all kinds of real influences can influence our perceptions of events or circumstances, and who am I to argue that’s not pretty much the same thing? So, all in all, our distant ancestors had good reason to see the world as a magical place. They believed the evidence of their own eyes and ears, and simply had a different way of explaining the very real phenomena they encountered.