The Last Of The High Kings

The Hill of Tara is a modest peak, 500 feet above sea level, situated about six miles from the Meath town of Navan. The hill rises gently amid acres of upland pasture, its flanks a wilderness of scar, tor, knap, brae, wold, fell and other peculiar topographical phenomena that you would normally only encounter if you were to stray onto the vast, untamed tracts of a rolling thesaurus.
On a bright summer s day, Tara would make the perfect location for a picnic with your loved ones or, if necessary, your family. It is a very, very different proposition on a savage Saturday night in late October, with a howling hurricane threatening to blow whole stretches of Leinster to Hell, if not to Connacht. And it is on precisely such a night that I join a congregation of hardy pagans, witches and druids as they celebrate the Celtic festival of Samhain, the pre-Christian New Year s Eve.
The moment I step off the early evening bus, I am concussed by a gale. That s as close to Tara as I go, shouts the bus driver with a gloating smirk. I hope you had your Weetabix this morning. As he pulls out onto the motorway, his wheels raise a tidal wave from the gutter.
Squalls of wind and rain rip open my overcoat and frisk me from my armpits to my ankles. My cheeks billow and bloat sideways in the whirl-blast; I feel like a Loony Tune that s been whacked in the face with a shovel. I try to stand firm for a moment at the crossroads to grasp my bearings but I m propelled up a muddy laneway by a bulldozing gust before I know what s happened.
Fortunately, I m catapulted in the right direction. A man in a purple felt hat stops and gives me a lift (he s also in a purple Ford Escort). It s not yet 7.30pm but already the roads are virtually deserted. Fallen electricity poles have caused a local power-cut, and the muted glow of a candle burning in the odd window is the only proof that this part of the country is even inhabited.
It s going to be a ferocious night, one of the worst of the year, I believe, the man in the hat reassures me, as I shiver and drip on his backseat. It s a night for sitting in by the fire. I hope you had your Ready Brek this morning.
He drops me off by the turnstile leading onto the tourist trail, outside the converted church that serves as the Tara interpretative centre. The Dznta sign on the door suggests that the centre is closed (or at least that s my interpretation).
It s pitch dark and I can see no sign of pagan life or light anywhere on the horizon. Having clambered over the gates, I strive to stay close to the high stone wall for shelter and support but it s impossible. I am tossed about in the tempest like a dirty sock in a washing machine.
If one were prone to such thoughts, it s a night when it s easy to believe that the planet is wreaking some sort of angry vengeance on humanity. The Hill of Tara itself seems alive with fury and ferocity. In the beam of a flashlamp, the grass looks ink-black, hostile and alien. The rabbit holes and badger burrows are treacherous, loath to release any foot they snare.
Gradually, I discern the silhouettes of two approaching figures, their shapes only marginally less murky than the background from which they emerge. One of them is carrying a lantern on a stick, the swinging beacon guttering in the gale.
I scramble over to meet them. They speak to me but I haven t a clue what they re saying, what with the caterwauling storm and the fact that my ears are liquefied and sizzling like eggs on a frying pan. Turning, they beckon me to follow. I resolve that if either of these people ask if I had had a bowl of cereal for breakfast, I will strangle them both with my bare hands.
The two men lead the way and I straggle behind. Through the gloom, I can see that they are dressed like twin bargain bins in a second-hand clothes store. They re draped with thick furs, woollen shawls and what are known in the rag trade as rags. One is wearing sandals, the other is in bare feet.
After about ten minutes of silent hiking, we come to a track which snakes up and over a bluff escarpment. In the basin at the other side, there is an astonishing scene: a neat and orderly campsite, almost impervious to the weather conditions.
A ring of tents wobble in the cyclone like giant jellies but hold their ground. A row of flags bearing Celtic insignia flap and snap as though there is nothing whipping about but a bracing breeze. In the centre of the glen, an enormous fire dances in the air like a living thing. Zigzag pillars of smoke waft into the atmosphere and the flames are a primitive strobe lamp, casting erratic washes of light hither and thither.
About a dozen men and women sit around the fire on tree trunks and bulky branches, laughing and talking. Immediately I appear, a brawny, bull-necked bloke leaps to his feet. He moves like a wrecking ball. He s attired in sheepskin pelts, a fox fur cloak, Donegal tweed breeches and a green cap, and wears a dagger at his waist. He has an unruly moustache and his cheekbones are as bristly as a hairy chest.
Judging by his mean-hombre expression, I half expect this guy to lunge forward and pummel me to a bloody mist. Instead, he produces a bottle and tankard from under his cloak, and pours me a draught of warm, mulled wine. He then hands me a wooden spike on which he has skewered a small roast potato and a testicular chunk of hot sausage.
Welcome stranger, he says, refilling the tankard when it has barely left my lips. Happy Samhain! Have a drink and join the party.
It turns out that the toastmaster s name is Martin. The emblem of the braying wolf on his cap attests to his membership of Cz Glas, the Dublin-based Celtic battle re-enactment unit, in which he holds the rank of captain.
Not everyone in Cz Glas is pagan, and vice versa. However, the remarkable growth in the popularity of battle re-enactment (there are a half dozen fighting clans in the republic alone) has been mirrored by a tremendous upsurge of interest in pre-Christian lifestyles and spirituality. As far as we know, there are now pagan groups in Cork, Clare, Leitrim, Sligo, Wexford, Meath and Dublin.
An awful lot of people are getting more and more curious about Celtic paganism, asserts Martin, leaning towards the fire, his shoulders raised against the cold. It s a natural progression. People start researching how the Celts lived, how they dressed, how they fought, how they built their stockades and forts, how they made their equipment. It s only natural to ask what did they believe in. How did they see the greater picture?
The wardrobe of those in the encampment includes twice as many furs, jerkins and tunics as oilskins or anoraks. The Cz Glas boys and girls (females routinely participated in inter-tribal combat in Celtic times) are the more impressively clad among the assembly. The most elegant is an Oriental guy called Mike, a Malaysian-born martial arts expert who has lived in Dublin for over 15 years, and was one of the founding fathers of Cz Glas. His robes are black and heavily-padded, topped off with a cape that shines like satin in the firelight.
For most of these gladiators, battle re-enactment is more than a hobby, it s a vocation. When not rolling about in the muck of tournament, they spend one half of their free time drilling themselves in the use of swords, spears, claymores and war hammers, and the other half scouring junk shops and charity sales for the right props and duds.
The amazing thing about Celtic wool and fur costumes is how incredibly warm they are, Martin avers. Rain just doesn t get through a real fur mantle. The synthetic stuff doesn t stand up to the weather, it falls asunder, and is no real protection. Most people in the clans make their own clothes. You beg, borrow and steal bits and pieces where you can.
A lot of the people involved in paganism are vegetarians and into animal rights. We try only to use old fur that s been used before. If we can get old fur coats and adapt them into clan gear, that s ideal. The way the Celts lived off the land 1,000 years ago, they had to kill to survive, but they honoured the spirit of the animals they took and used every part of them, for food and clothing. We don t kill for sport.
The atmosphere around the campsite is genial and jolly. It is extraordinary how pleasant it can feel to be out in a furious hurricane provided one is adequately insulated and in close proximity to a roaring fire. This cosy sensation is greatly enhanced by the beer, wine and mead which flow like Niagaras, and the uninterrupted supply of joints the size of baguettes.
Fortunately, when it comes to a soundtrack, the pagans prefer folk music to anything from the dreaded New Age canon (is there a more heinous locution in the English language than the phrase the haunting sound of the pan pipes?). They sing songs by Christy Moore, Moving Hearts, Clannad and The Bothy Band, and play a number of Davy Spillane tapes. A couple of people also desultorily rap bodhrans and bongos.
As I sit oiling my inner motor with Heineken s finest liquid engineering, my eyes are drawn to a short, muscular man sitting alone with his thoughts in the smoky shadows beyond the flames. My gaze is attracted towards him not so much by his raw animal magnetism as by the glint of light off his gigantic golden brooch.
This is Albert Coen, one of the most zealous pagans in the country and the impetus behind an information group entitled CROW, Celtic Revival Of Witchcraft. By day, Albert runs his own city centre recording studio, Sonic, on Gardiner Row, and has been involved in the music business for almost 20 years. A former drummer, he has bashed the skins for such diverse outfits as Sacre Blue, Rocky De Valera & The Gravediggers, Paranoid Visions and Caliban.
A keen student of ethnic and Native American spiritualities and tribal philosophies, Albert has been into paganism since his early teens. He is proud to be a witch, and is one of the few Irish pagans willing to go public about his beliefs.
I known pagans who are Gardam, solicitors, social workers, mechanics, shop assistants, artists, musicians, writers, the lot, he professes. They do want to come out because of the ill-founded prejudice against paganism. There are some pretty influential people in very high-powered jobs in this country who for their own sakes and the sakes of their family have to keep their paganism very privately.
CROW provide a safe way in for people because there are some nutballs out there. There are Satanic groups, there are people who would exploit the innocent, but they re not pagans. In the last few years, I ve been instrumental in trying to dispel some of the misconceptions that people have about paganism; that we re devil-worshippers, that we re into blood-letting, that we re into ritual sacrifice, that we steal babies, that we eat human flesh, desecrate churches, abuse of children, abuse animals.
We leave ritual abuse up to the Catholic clergy, they re much better and have more experience than we have. If people are looking for sensationalism, join the Scientologists! Join a Satanic group and go slaughter a donkey on Howth Head! We don t do that, we despise people who do that kind of thing. Heavy Metal music has an awful lot to answer for.
Another Cz Glasian, Albert is swathed in a filamore, the ancient Irish kilt. This is a12-foot-long bolt of tweedy material, folded, pleated and belted around the hips. Its upper part can be worn as a cloak or a brath, pulled across the shoulder. Albert s face is smeared with eye-patches of black greasepaint, a declaration that Cz Glas are mercenaries and not a clan. He looks like Zorro sitting down, Batman s Robin standing up.
People build up their own kits, Albert attests, brandishing his arsenal. As well as weapons, everyone likes to have his or her own ritual knife, goblet, staff and wand. It s the paraphernalia, the little fetishes people like. The wand is an empowerment tool, people cut a limb from a sacred tree, like a rowan or hazel. If you re performing magic, the magic doesn t come out of the end of the wand, it comes out of the heart of the person who s doing the work. These are tools that we use to attune us mentally. It s like a priest putting on vestments before he goes out on the altar. He alters his persona for the role he s about to take on.
Aside from boasting a mighty individual armoury and a lavish collection of personal ornamentation, Albert is also a master brewer in the pagan tradition. He vints his own wines at his house in Finglas and his home-made ales and mead are much-admired.
Mead is made with honey, he explains, replenishing my eager goblet with a double measure of some-he-made-earlier. Take a straight forward wine recipe: a couple of pounds of grapes, a gallon of water, and a pound of honey. Brew the whole thing up, get it nice and hot, add a couple of pounds of sugar, a spoonful of brewer s yeast, put in a nice warm place for three or four weeks. It s the drink of Kings, literally.
Every boulder, incline and knoll on Tara has its own name. The hill was the capital of ancient Ireland, the seat of High Kings from earliest times until the 6th century. Like every great Irish landmark, its history is seamed and snarled with legend.
In mythical terms, Tara is an Aladdin s Cave. For instance, Czchulainn s shield (with his right hand attached to it) is said to be buried here. As is Fionn Mac Cumhail s fork and cooking cauldron. However, the hill has also provided archaeologists with a rich fund of authentic weaponry, torques, brooches and jewellery, dating from the Bronze Age and beyond.
The remains of forts and ramparts encircle the foothills. Pre-historic tribes gathered at Tara in times of war and invasion. It was a holy ground, a place of worship. It was also a sacred graveyard. Huge burial mounds still dot the landscape; some containing the tombs of real people, many raised in commemoration of Celtic gods and other divine figures.
The burial mounds have faintly absurd, portentous titles such as The Mound Of The Cow, The Mound Of The Hostages and The House Of The Women. The voices of the more dour pagans always drop a few octaves whenever they enunciate these hallowed words. Their painfully reverent parroting of the nomenclature is reminiscent of nothing so much as the witterings of The Knights Who Say Ni from Monty Python & The Holy Grail.
Monty Python is evidently to paganism what Deicide is to Devil-worshipping. There are numerous Python fanatics among the Tara throng, frenetic, obsessive types who delight in ostentatiously enacting entire sketches while sitting around the campfire.
One young chap is so intent on performing a song from The Holy Grail directly into my earhole that, eventually, I have to ask him to cease and desist. What I should have said, of course, was, I wave my private parts at your auntie, you tiny-brained wiper of other people s bottoms.
To the north of the Mound Of Hostages, a fat, phallic, six foot limestone pillar juts from the earth. This is known as the Stone of Fal (or Destiny), the rock which reputedly used to roar beneath the feet of every King that took possession of Ireland. Legend has it that the roar of the Stone of Fal was fearsome and shrill, frightening to behold. It was probably roaring, Get the fuck off me, King!
But there is more to the story of this hill than noisy rocks and bloodthirsty monarchs. Daniel O Connell held some of his most successful mass meetings on its brow. Tara was also the site of the first mill in Ireland, the mill of Cormac mac Airt.
Today, under the tutelage of that 20th century druid Sean Boylan, the Meath football team train on the hill. During the run up to All-Ireland season, they are regularly to be seen jogging up and down its slopes. The Meath players in turn feel a tremendous fealty to Tara and are keen to fete its noble past. Perhaps this explains why they stage their own mill during almost every game they play.
For the pagan, Tara is a site of tremendous ritual significance, a corridor linking the present with the fabled days of yore. The High Kings of Tara were also High Priests, pagan shamen who lead the way in paying homage to the Celtic gods. There was a long-standing prohibition against the lighting of sacred fires in the district until the druids of Tara had first kindled theirs. Contemporary witches and druids see themselves as the remnants of that priesthood.
Its practitioners do not regard paganism as a religion, but rather a spirituality, a way to see the world. They maintain that if a human being was brought up unschooled, in a natural environment, without indoctrination into any religion or contact with any religious people, he or she would inevitably become pagan. Unfortunately, he or she would also be a deaf mute yak herder in darkest Siberia.
Pagans do not believe in a single God , a white, elderly, heterosexual male with unkempt facial hair. Nor do they believe in the Devil, Original Sin, saints or any such man-made constructs. While rejecting the idea of a god personified, pagans do defer to a higher power, a divine guiding power.
They are the ultimate tree-huggers. They worship the Earth Mother Goddess (female energy) and the Horned God (male energy) as manifest in every aspect of nature, and in all living things.
They do not claim to have faith because they are surrounded by what they consider irrefutable proof of the reality of their deities, to wit the trees, the grass, the stars etc. Nature is the bloodcells of the creator, they exult.
The term witchcraft comes from an old Saxon word wiccy, meaning to bend or to shape. The wiccys were the people who could bend or shape nature through their spell work, adduces Albert Coen. They were the people you went to if you needed a problem sorting out, infertility, sickness, whatever. They performed a combination of herbalism and magic.
For pagans, difference does not logically entail inferiority. All sincere religions, they contend, are distinct paths to the same truth. The only facet of organised religion to which they explicitly object is dogmatic hierarchies. They respect the notion of karma, expect to experience an afterlife and see reincarnation as a definite possibility.
We have only one commandment, enthuses Albert Coen. If it harm none, do what you wilt! Christianity is a religion of thou-shalt-not. Paganism is a spiritual path of do-what-you-want but do not wantonly hurt another creature. We are only here for a set period of time as caretakers of the Earth. We must tread lightly.
There are four main Sabbats (feast days), glorifying the cycle of the seasons, in the Celtic pagan year: Imbolg (February), Bealtaine (May), Lughnasa (Mid-Summer) and Samhain (Early-Winter). The movement of the Sun in relation to the Earth is marked with observance of the two equinoxes and two solstices. Witches, in particular, also honour the lunar calendar, getting together at full moon for magical workings which they call Esbats.
The gathering on Tara tonight is to mark the most solemn festival of all, the full moon rite before Samhain (pronounced sough-en) aka Oiche Samhna, All Hallow s Night or Halloween.
Samhain literally means the end of summer. In pre-Christian Ireland, it was the time when the people gave thanksgiving to the Earth for its bounty and steeled themselves for the hardship of the barren winter ahead. The crops were harvested, the last of the livestock had been slaughtered and the meat had been salted and stored. Samhain therefore was an excuse for a hooley, but also an opportunity for veneration and sacrifice, through which the gods could be appeased.
As the Earth entered what the Celts considered to be her death mode, it was also a night for remembering the deceased, the ones that have gone over to the other side. The tradition was that the veil between this world and the next was at its thinnest underneath the full moon before Samhain. By summoning up the dead, it was believed that they could be called back to join in the festivities.
On this night, we think back to the summer, proclaims Albert Coen. When you re lying down in a summer meadow, the decay of winter is just an inch beneath you. For new life, for growth, there must be death. We re part of that cycle. Paganism is a fertility religion, a religion which venerates the regenerative forces in nature. We venerate the cycle of the year as the planet revolves, the cycle of life: growth followed by death followed by life anew.
Standing barefoot in a place like Tara is not everyone s idea of a good time, but being aware of the Earth beneath you, being aware of the energies that are Mother Earth travelling up through you, empowering you feeling your connection with the Earth and all things in nature that s what we get out of it. There is no feeling like it.
The only thing new is the history we don t know. The truth is that we were all pagans once. The notion that Catholicism, or even Christianity, is innate to either the character or the people of Ireland is an unsustainable nonsense. Scratch the topsoil of Irish Christianity, declaimed a witch to me at Tara, and you come at once to the bedrock of paganism.
There are all sorts of examples which illustrate this point. Take marriage. Under the Brehon Laws (the ancient Irish legal system which prevailed well into the 17th century), husbands and wives were free to divorce. Couples married provisionally for a year and a day. At the end of that time, they returned to their pagan priest and declared whether or not they wanted to renew their vows for another period. If they chose not to, they simply turned their backs on each other and walked away.
A preference for this enlightened brand of matrimony was evident among ordinary Irish citizens long after the imposition of, first, Catholic and, later, Saxon law on the populace. Marriage in the church didn t even become legal in Ireland until the 1300s. Therefore, though denied legal status in contemporary society, it is the pagans with their handfasting nuptial ceremonies who are the real upholders of those much-vaunted traditional Irish values.
Pagan races inhabited these islands (and continental Europe) for thousands of years before the Christians arrived. Shame and guilt about carnality is consequently a relatively new phenomenon among the Irish.
As modern pagans gleefully attest, this country was essentially an open-air knocking shop until the Christians got their sweaty paws on the levers of authority. Bealtaine festivals were especially notorious. The likelihood is that most of our ancestors were conceived during these saturnalian sprees in what were known as merry-begots, carnivals of revelry and lust.
It was believed that a child procreated at this time was divine, the offspring of the gods. Young lovers would run up the mountains or down the valleys and copulate for hours. Intercourse in fields was encouraged as a method of re-fertilising the land, and assuring the growth of healthy crops. I am reliably informed that, to this very day, there are dozens of pagan farmers all over Ireland who swear by this form of organic husbandry.
Throughout Europe, the onslaught of Christianity meant the persecution of pagans. The Roman empire was determined to enforce brand loyalty to its concept of God, with the help of dungeon, fire and sword. But it didn t work. The Celtic people, especially, clung to their old ways, staunchly resisting the Jesus jihad.
Around the turn of the millennium, the Church launched what was to become an extremely effective black propaganda campaign against paganism. The Christian spindoctors deftest agit-prop coup was to endow their anti-Christ figure, the Devil, with horns, when no-one was watching. They then highlighted the prominence of horned figures among the pantheon of pagan gods, glossing over the inconvenient detail of horns being a venerable old Celtic symbol representing spiritual power and the magnificence of nature.
There is no mention in the Bible of Satan having horns. Indeed, there is a statue of Moses with horns in The Vatican. In early Christian art, horns were actually a prototype for what was to become the halo. However, the association of pagans with horns and of horns with Beelzebub was a neat and durable equation. Right into the 1990s, you will find people who assume that pagans are Satanists, irrespective of the fact that, as defiant non-Christians, they believe in neither God nor Satan.
Up to the Middle Ages, in most pagan communities, medicine was the prerogative of women; women were the herbalists, the midwives, the potion mixers. The Christians put their inherent abhorrence of all things female to good use by demonising these women as agents of evil. What ensued was The Burning Times.
Historians estimate that up to nine million individuals were put to death during the witch-hunt hysteria that spread through Europe between the start of the 15th century and the end of the 18th, the overwhelming majority of them women. As the shadow of the pyres and the gallows grew longer and longer, paganism went underground.
It was not to re-emerge in any substantial manner until the 1950s, when the British Witchcraft Act was finally repealed, and people like Alex Sanders and Gerald Gardiner came forward and openly proclaimed themselves witches.
In Ireland, the pre-Christian beliefs were never obliterated. Here, the Church managed to successfully bottle and cork the genie by absorbing huge reservoirs of pagan practice into their own doctrine. Even a catechism junkie like myself was amazed to discover precisely how much of the one, true apostolic faith was brazenly cribbed from the pagans.
Where to begin? For a start, the global Christian church stole the Celtic pagan calendar. Stretching back for several millennia, the feast of Yule had been celebrated on the shortest day of the year; from that day onwards, the sun commenced its climb, the daylight hours got longer and the skies were regenerated. The pre-Christians saw this as the re-birth of the sun god. The Christians came long and decreed that the festival should mark the birth of the Son of God.
Easter was originally the time set aside for honouring the goddess Esther. It was a full moon Esbat at which eggs (pagan fertility symbols) were exchanged as gifts. Even, after it had been appropriated by the Church, the date of Easter was, and is, determined by the lunar timetable.
In Ireland, the pagan druids of antiquity, such as Columba, became monks . The feast days, legends and mythical powers associated with the pagan goddess Brmd were simply hijacked by the Church and ascribed to a Saint Brigid. Dozens of other pagan feast days were also subsumed in this manner, as were pagan healing wells, pagan rituals (such as the famous bread n wine palaver), and destinations of pagan pilgrimage, most notably the mountain now known as Croagh Patrick.
The most audacious Christian stunt was the elevation of the Virgin Mary, a woman who had never been held in high celestial esteem by the founding fathers of The Vatican empire because, well, she was a woman, and what kind of namby-pamby church do you think we re running here?
The first Christians arrived and were met with this stone wall, maintains Albert Coen. The ordinary people were saying to them, Your god is a barren god, he doesn t have a partner, a balance . So, the early Celtic Christian church raised Christ s mother to the status of being a demi-goddess. That is how she is venerated by many people in this country, even today.
Hey presto! The ransacking of the pagan bag of tricks gave the Church an off-the-peg credibility, and a ready-made pedigree. Without such credentials, the Christian fiction might otherwise have had all the shelf life of an ice cube.
You still see the figure of the Sheela-na-Gig, the fertility goddess, holding the lips of her vagina open, over very old church doors, avows Coen. Churches were built on sacred sites that were already being used by pagans. The Christians used images like the Sheela-na-Gigs to entice people into the Christian ceremonies, the implication being that one church was the same as another. It made the transition of conversion a lot easier.
To Kells, County Meath, to meet the Farrars. These are the witches that other witches call The Guvnors. A British married couple who founded their own coven in London as far back as the late 1960s, Stewart and Janet Farrar have lived in Ireland since 1976. Stewart is now 80, Janet some 30 years younger.
That the revival of Irish paganism is now so strong and becoming so self-assured is due in no small part to the Farrars. Throughout the past 20 years, they have been the confident public face of what was, and still is, a largely underground movement, providing a handrail for the nervous, role-models for the doubtful and information for the uninformed.
Most of those calling themselves witches in this country will have received at least some of their training in The Craft from Janet or Stewart. Albert Coen, for example, made his first formalised contact with paganism by contacting the Farrars after he had read an interview with them by Tony Clayton-Lea in Hot Press in, 1983.
Today, the Farrars are esteemed pillars of the community. Having lived in Ferns, Co. Wexford, Ballycroy, Co. Mayo, Swords, Co. Dublin and just outside Drogheda, Co. Louth, they have been settled in Hernes Cottage, Ethelstown, near Kells for the best part of a decade. They are on good terms with their neighbours, the Gardam and the parish priest. Last Halloween, they threw their doors open to local mothers and children who wanted to meet real witches.
Stewart and Janet earn their living by writing books on witchcraft and paganism, and lecturing in America for a couple of months every year. Stewart (whose literary background includes scriptwriting credits for TV shows such as Doctor Finlay s Casebook, Emergency Ward 10 and Crossroads) also writes novels. Janet is an holistic healer, and offers an advice service (marriage guidance, fertility tips, bereavement help) using Tarot Cards as a counselling tool. She does not tell fortunes.
In recent years, Janet and Stewart s menage has been augmented by Gavin Bone, a former registered nurse, one of the growing number of young British pagans to decamp to this country.
In England, they are destroying ancient sites, Gavin fumes. They are digging up the landscape, and pagans are so helpless against it. It s got to the stage where we ve said we can t help England any longer, let s go and live in Ireland. At least we can plant a few trees here, try to heal the Earth. A lot of pagans here are involved in tree planting campaigns, trying to bring back the deciduous trees. That kind of thing is still possible in Ireland.
Situated down a manure-scented cul de sac in the heart of dairy farm country, the Farrars home is an extraordinary premises, a rambling three-bedroom bungalow ajingle and ajangle with wind chimes and strange-looking bells.
Just inside the sitting room door, I am confronted by a short, obese woman, her legs strategically cleaved apart to expose gigantic genitalia that have all the appearance of a purple leather settee, with matching cushions. Happily, she is not yet another resident of Hernes Cottage, but merely one of the myriad porcelain figurines which occupy every nook and cranny of the house.
One of the oldest representations of the witch, the most primordial concept of the goddess, is in terms of her sheer fertility, trills Janet, in her sonorous shire-tones. She represents the fecundity of Mother Earth. People think it s disgusting. Well, Mother Earth is disgusting. She has lots of children. They pop every year and we harvest them, and eat them.
The sheer sensual abandon of many of the statues in what Janet dubs her house of the 100 deities would seem to corroborate the popular perception that sex and nudity are intrinsic to the practice of witchcraft,
Nudity and sex have got nothing to do with each other, submits Janet. You ask any hospital worker and they will confirm that. Nudity, or sex, are rarely used in pagan ritual. A lot of covens these days prefer to wear ritual robes. Although, there are covens who work naked. I know two priestesses who are middle-aged and virgins. But I also know many gay witches, witches who are into the S&M scene. We ve had a transvestite witch, and a transsexual witch. But they were those things before they were witches.
Most witches, if they decide they re going to have children, like to conceive their child in a ritual circumstance, but not with the entire coven present. It is still a private thing, a sacred thing, between a man and a woman. We openly acknowledge each other s sexuality. That s why witches have a filthy sense of humour. We see the bizarre in everything.
Some witches feel that nudity in ritual brings them closer, ventures Gavin. Sometimes, there are ritual circumstances where you use nudity. Some of us use it particularly for initiation rites. The initiate is stripped of everything which is worldly, jewellery, make-up, clothes. It s a rebirth. You need to be exactly as you were when you came out of the womb. But, I can tell you, there s nothing particularly spiritual in prancing through the woods naked with just a pair of welly boots on.
The Farrars and Gavin Bone talk a lot about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and pepper their conversation with terms such as numinous archetypes. As part of the course they offer in witchcraft, they teach psychology, comparative philosophy, anatomy and physiology. They are as far removed as it possible to be from the image of the witch as some sort of Satanic sorcerer mixing concoctions of newts eyelids and babies blood in a rusty pewter goblet.
When you read of churchyards being vandalised, occult symbols being put on church doors and gravestones, this is being done by kids who ve been duped into believing that this is what paganism is all about, Janet avows. They re rebelling against the church, and against paganism. Actually, because we believe all religions are equally valid, you often find pagans sneaking out in the middle of the night to renovate statues of the Madonna that have been damaged by these misguided folk.
For most of those people, paganism is too tough to handle. Whether you re practising witchcraft or any other form of paganism, it s a philosophy that takes years of study and learning. It s like going back to university. It does not involve running around on the nights of the full moon, jumping around churchyards stark naked and bonking on tombstones.
There are pagans who like to drink, smoke dope and eat magic mushrooms, but none of that has anything to do with ritual. There are a lot of pagans working in drug counselling, and with Alcoholics Anonymous etc. They are working with people who have burnt themselves out because of too much indulgence in these things.
Stewart Farrar is not in the least surprised by the current explosion of fascination with paganism and witchcraft. Until recently, the state dictated what your religious practices were, he states. That has died now. Conventional faiths are losing their followers but people still want ritual. Rituals are just ways of concentrating the mind. The unconscious mind speaks to the conscious mind through dreams and the conscious mind speaks to the unconscious mind through ritual.
But there s a disillusionment with the New Age movement. The difference between New Age and pagan is one decimal point. A New Ager will charge you #100 for a service where a pagan will charge you #10.
Under the banner of PINE (Pagan Information Network Eire), the Farrars have been disseminating information to interested parties for some time now. Gavin Bone has just set up an Internet network on paganism. Over the coming months and years, both he and the Farrars expect to see a campaign begin to have paganism recognised as a legitimate religion and Wiccans (witches) accorded the same rights as any other clergy.
We ll be looking for funeral rights, marriage rights and medical rights for pagans, predicts Gavin. At the moment, pagans have to go to registry office to be married, even after a handfasting with a priest or priestess. Paganism as your religion won t be accepted on hospital forms. These are the things we ll be looking to see changed. Under the EEC constitution, there s no reason why we can t be recognised as a legal religion. It s simply a question of repealing antiquated laws.
As part of their bid for respectability, Gavin, Janet and Stewart are among those working their magic behind the scenes of the geopolitical stage. There s a lot of us working on the peace process, reveals Gavin, with a sombre sigh. We re apolitical. We don t take sides. In our ritual peace work, we use a peace pyramid, made for us by an American police officer. It s a small glass pyramid which we hope to fill with stones from troublespots all over the world. We have stones from war-torn cities like Sarajevo and Belfast, a piece of the Berlin Wall, stones from places where there ve been earthquakes, wars or famine.
By the time we get it completely filled, pledges Janet, we hope to have peace in this country. Then I want to approach Mary Robinson about burying it in the grounds of Aras an Uachtarain and plant an oak tree on top of it, on behalf of all the pagans in the world.
Let s sacrifice a 16-year-old virgin, bellows a hoarse voice from beyond the Tara campfire.
Where would you find a 16-year-old virgin in this day and age! comes the reply.
At around 10pm, the pagans decide to commence their ceremonial. The gusts are still fierce, each one quilted with a cold so cruel it could crack your bones like they were sprigs. The full moon, the focal point of tonight s devotion, is only sporadically visible behind the sulphurous-looking and fast-scudding clouds.
Nevertheless, there is a lot of booze being consumed around the fireside and it is deemed prudent to get started before the assembly gets too snockered to tell the difference between a badger burrow and a hole in the ground.
By now, maybe 20 people in all have made it to the campsite. Reluctantly, we manage to drag ourselves away from the warmth and the liquor. We fall in line behind our priest, Mark, and priestess, Lisa, as they lead us up to a wide grassy plateau, the spot most popularly favoured as a ritual altar.
Both in their late 20s, Mark and Lisa were married on Tara about a year ago in a pagan nuptial rite known as a handfasting. It is the convention that the priest and priestess be either wed to each other or an established couple.
Atop the plateau, Lisa draws a broad ring in the grass with her sword, and walks three times around. It is explained to me later that the purpose of this action is to create a temple and cleanse the area of bad energies. Unfortunately, she neglected to cleanse the area of sheep shit, as I immediately discover when I take my position in the magic circle which the pagans then form on the circumference of Lisa s al fresco temple.
The next step is the invoking of the four elements. One person faces east and invites the spirit of air to stand guard over our sacred space. Another faces south and extends the same invitation to the spirit of fire. The communication to water is directed to the west, and we try to get in touch with earth via the north. None of the elements choose to RSVP.
Salt and water are mixed in a tiny, oak phial. This, apparently, is symbolic of the coming together of male and female energies. Salt to water, man to woman, god to goddess, intones Lisa as she spatters our circle with saline solution.
Mark, the priest, steps towards the west, flings his arms akimbo and calls upon the spirits of the dead to join us for the celebration. In his right hand, he holds an extremely gnarled staff with a wooden serpent coiled around its shaft and a goat s head dangling from the crook.
He recently found the skull in the woods near Tara. The goat s head is one of the most revered pagan symbols of fertility and abundant life, for everyone except the goat it originally belonged to, that is.
To accommodate within our circle any resurrected spectres or phantoms who happen by, each pagan takes a step backwards. Make room beside you for your returning ancestors and loved ones, yells Lisa over the wailing rainstorm. Mark, meanwhile, strides purposefully in figure-of-eight movements around every one of us, all the while blowing on a cow horn.
It is now time for a little pageantry. Martin, the guy who had earlier welcomed me to the campsite and an older man called Simon perform a short sketch about a traveller who meets The Grim Reaper on an isolated laneway.
The ceremony culminates with a well-known finale, the consecration of bread and wine, or, as the pagans prefer, the consecration of the lifeblood of the Great Mother.
As in its Eucharistic counterpart, the term consecration is used here as a synonym for mumbo-jumbo, hocus pocus and horseflop. Strange incantations are muttered over the comestibles by Lisa and Mark. Shading the chalice and loaf behind their hands, they mime the sprinkling of some invisible powder from between their fingertips. They try to ignite a flame but soon give up, the spirit of wind-that-would-go-through-you-for-a-short-cut having gatecrashed the proceedings. A further five minutes of verbal spells are cast on the food and drink before it is finally shared out among the waiting circle.
The bizarre preparatory protocol of this sacrament is considerably undermined by the familiarity of its taste. The wine is Le Piat D Or, the bread is Butterkrust Maltana.
And that s it! Pagan ritual may be every bit as idiotic as Christian ritual, but at least it s quicker. It s a crucial distinction, the difference between having a bullet thrown at you and being shot.
As we trudge back to the campsite and what s left of the mead stash, I ask Albert Coen if he really believes all this stuff.
Oh yes, he responds, The magic works. I tried a love spell once. There was a girl that I was quite attracted to, but she didn t seem to notice me. I worked a love spell, and I said to the Earth Mother, Give me this woman, I am crazy about her .
The spell was the love apple. On the night of a full moon, you take a nice, firm, round, ripe apple, and cut it in half. Each half is a talisman for each of the two people. You take a couple of strands of the woman s hair and a couple of strands of your own, knot them together, put them into the apple, with perhaps a sprig of wild thyme, a sprig of sage, and bind the whole thing together with a red cord or red ribbon. Then, take it out into the garden, find a nice place, dig a hole, and bury it.
As you bury it, say to the Earth Mother, As this apple decays, and nourishes the Earth, let these two people come together . You re giving something back to the earth and you re asking for something in return.
About two months after I did this, the girl and I started gravitating towards each other. We ended up in a relationship for a couple of years. But I lost my business, I lost my home, I lost my family. A lot of personal stuff happened between me and other people over her. I ended up in a bedsit with this woman but nothing else.
I got exactly what I asked for, but lost everything else. Sometimes, you have to be quite specific. n
CROW can be contacted at The Basement, I, Gardiner Row, Dublin 1.
PINE can be contacted at Hernes Cottage, Ethelstown, Kells, Co. Meath.