TM: Religion
Jul. 23rd, 2007 10:20 amThey came before my time, but the stories stay, woven in with our own. They speak of defeat. Of the staff of power that caused the druids to crumble. They speak of the banishing of the snakes, of the wisdom of the divine feminine driven from our shores and replaced with the legend of the Martyr. Men had long since driven us underground, claiming the Earth as their own, but they paid us homage, as was our due. They worshipped our Mother, our Elders. They left offerings for each of us, invoking our names to bless them, bring them victory.
And then they stopped, and the new priests came, speaking of mercy and forgiveness as they took our lives and twisted them into fairytales. The Children of Lir, they said, were freed from their pagan curse by their acceptance of the true light of the Christ, but I have seen those swans still, migrating from lake to lake, and their cries are haunting, chilling.
They walked our land and they twisted the tales to suit them. What they could not erase, they changed, as with Brigid, my King’s sister, my adopted aunt. They reduced her from Goddess, and set her in stone in their cathedrals and called her “saint.” No one asked her if she wished it, but still the people prayed, and because she loved them, still she listened, and her new role was cemented. My King’s son, they called the devil, for the horns that came from his head and his cloven hooves. He led the Wild Hunt, and they named it evil—demons on parade.
We were stripped of our legacy, the stories taken from spoken word to written, twisted and altered in subtle ways by the monks, striving to make us less than. A tribe from the North, they said, defeated and driven out or disappearing by intermarriage with the Milesians. Wise. Good farmers. Technologically advanced, so that those they conquered thought they did magic. They mangled it all until very little was left, except to those who sought carefully.
They tried to kill the Old Ways, instead of blending, but the heart of the people rejected our annihilation. They knew. It caught in their hearts, and they themselves resisted the new priests, changing them as much as they were changed, until Old and New mingled across our land. Where priests search the mists for answers and pagans make the sign of the cross, and something new and unlike anywhere else was born and sustains itself on the paths through time.
There’s magic in Ireland still, in the land and in the people who remember, who will not release what they know to be true.
And then they stopped, and the new priests came, speaking of mercy and forgiveness as they took our lives and twisted them into fairytales. The Children of Lir, they said, were freed from their pagan curse by their acceptance of the true light of the Christ, but I have seen those swans still, migrating from lake to lake, and their cries are haunting, chilling.
They walked our land and they twisted the tales to suit them. What they could not erase, they changed, as with Brigid, my King’s sister, my adopted aunt. They reduced her from Goddess, and set her in stone in their cathedrals and called her “saint.” No one asked her if she wished it, but still the people prayed, and because she loved them, still she listened, and her new role was cemented. My King’s son, they called the devil, for the horns that came from his head and his cloven hooves. He led the Wild Hunt, and they named it evil—demons on parade.
We were stripped of our legacy, the stories taken from spoken word to written, twisted and altered in subtle ways by the monks, striving to make us less than. A tribe from the North, they said, defeated and driven out or disappearing by intermarriage with the Milesians. Wise. Good farmers. Technologically advanced, so that those they conquered thought they did magic. They mangled it all until very little was left, except to those who sought carefully.
They tried to kill the Old Ways, instead of blending, but the heart of the people rejected our annihilation. They knew. It caught in their hearts, and they themselves resisted the new priests, changing them as much as they were changed, until Old and New mingled across our land. Where priests search the mists for answers and pagans make the sign of the cross, and something new and unlike anywhere else was born and sustains itself on the paths through time.
There’s magic in Ireland still, in the land and in the people who remember, who will not release what they know to be true.