To mark the feast of Saint Patrick, below is an 1894 article syndicated in the Australian press looking at our national patron and the ways in which popular devotion to him was expressed. The writer begins by mentioning historical sources the Book of Armagh and the saint's Tripartite Life, translated in 1887 by scholar Whitley Stokes. He moves on however, to the Victorian preoccupation with 'pagan survivals' attributing the practices at holy wells and other pilgrimage sites to the continuation of pagan rituals. In his view paganism, which was a unified religion stretching from Europe to parts of Africa and Asia, was able to cling on in Ireland thanks to the strength of 'druidism', plus Ireland's curious ability to make immigrants to its shores 'suffer themselves to become more Hibernian than the Irish'. The story of Victor, 'the angel of the Scotic race' is also dismissed as 'Odinic' in character because the author feels 'sure that there is a close affinity between these fables and Teutonic mythology.' In the concluding paragraphs the writer lists sites associated with Patrician pilgrimage and describes with particular fascination the traditions of Croagh Patrick. It's clear from the air of condescension that pervades this piece that the writer belongs to a different social class and background than the people to whom these traditions belonged. Victorian antiquarian journals are filled with such articles written by gentlemen who struggled to explain traditional religious practices. Influenced by contemporary theories on pagan survivals, coupled with racial theories on the superiority of the rational Anglo-Saxon and his reformed church, they dismissed traditional Irish Catholic devotion as peasant superstition of the worst kind. Indeed, some Catholic church leaders and the Catholic gentlemen who wrote articles for the journals of their local antiquarian society themselves often struggled to understand and explain folk religion. Others, however, such as Archbishop John Healy of Tuam (1841-1918) embraced and sought to integrate traditional devotion. Archbishop Healy not only contributed a weighty tome on Saint Patrick and his writings, but he restored the Croagh Patrick pilgimage, albeit he undertook it on horseback rather than barefoot. So this article provides a fascinating snapshot in time into Victorian attitudes towards our national patron and how he was honoured. Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig oraibh go léir!
SAINT PATRICK.
WHO HE WAS AND HOW HE WAS HONORED.
We
take the following extracts from an interesting article which appeared
in the Chronicle on Friday:—
At Trinity College, Dublin, there exists a venerable and precious volume, the Book of Armagh —so venerable as to
its date and its contents that, in the year 807. when it was transcribed
in its present form, it was often obscure to the transcriber; so
precious that it contains 'the oldest and most authentic notices’ of the
national saint ' now in existence'—his title-deeds to credit, in fact,
and the sources from which all other biographies, such as the 'Tripartite Life,’ recently translated by Dr Whitley Stokes, have been
formed. In his critical preface to the latter, the last-named Irish
scholar sums up what he regards as facts concerning Patrick.
He was
born in the latter half of the fourth century, and was reared a
Christian. He had relatives in ‘the Britains’ (i.e. Great Britain)
which he calls his patria. His father Calpornius, son of Potitus, was
both a deacon and a decurio, and therefore belonged to a Roman colony. .
. His father lived at Bannauem Taberniae, a place probably on the
west coast of North Britain, and there, in his sixteenth year, Patrick
was taken captive.. His captors, took him to Ireland. . where he was
employed in herding sheep. . . . After six years he ran away from his master, . . . and after a three days’ voyage . . journeyed home through
a desert. A few years afterwards he dreamed that he was summoned to
Ireland, and, giving up his home, his parents, and his status as a free
born man, he went to preach the gospel to the Irish tribes. . . .
Subsequently be travelled through ‘the Gauls,’ and Italy, and spent some time in the islands of the Tyrrhene Sea. . . . He was ordained a
deacon, and, at sometime in his career, was a bishop. Almost worn out,
we find him again in Ireland, travelling through the remotest parts of
the country. ‘The Lord’s flock,’ he says, ‘was increasing rapidly,’ and
he could not count the sons of the Scots, and the kinglet’s daughters
who were becoming monks and virgins of Christ. He ordained clergy, and
taught at least one priest from his infancy; but his success excited the
jealousy of the rhetoricans of ‘the Gauls,’ in which country (France)
he had brethren (fratres).
Of the reality of the existence of this
Patrick, son of Calporn, we feel not. the shadow of a doubt. But he was
not the only Patrick, and, as time went on, traditions of one other
Patrick at least came to be comingled with his own. We have before us
the names of ten other contemporary Patricks, all ecclesiastics, and
spread over Wales, Ireland, France, Spain, and Italy. The name appears
to be that of a grade or order in the church, rather than a proper name
in the usual sense. Thus Palladius is called also Patrick in the Book
of Armagh, and the Patrick (whichever he may have been) is represented
as styling Declan ‘the Patrick of the Desu,’ and Ailbhe ‘the Patrick of
Munster.’ When Patrick sojourned in the cave in an island in the
Tyrrhene Sea he found three other Patricks there.
The writer goes on
to deal with ‘Pagan Patrick worship.’ In the name of the saint, from
time immemorial, there has been a system of worship which, though
accepted by Christians, was not of Christian origin. It was a part and
parcel of a vast substratum of Paganism, once covering the face of
Western Europe, and traceable also in the Mediterranean, in North
Africa, and portions of Asia.
The worship of wells with their sacred
fishes; of lakes with their sunken cities, or their fabulous monsters
dwelling in their depths, to which offerings of butter were made; the
association of water with death and burial; the practice called the
dessil or turas, of passing in circles, counted in odd numbers around a
dolmen, or cairn, or a circular enclosure, the supposed bed or grave of
a sacred ancestor, the crawling through cavities beneath magical rocks;
the placing the hands or fingers in holes in pillar-stones and walls;
the custom of offering shreds of cloth, or of hair, or of crooked pins,
or of nails at some ‘blessed' spot; the turning a stone round the body
for purposes of cursing or otherwise; the sacred seasons of the year;
the midsummer fires; the preparations of November Eve for the visits of
the dead;— all those, and countless other observances practised in the
names of Patrick, or Bridget, or Declan, or some other saint, on their
pattern or festival days, or at the shrines set apart for their cultus,
were simply the relics of a pagan ritual, fulminated against with some
effect by the edicts of kings and the Councils of the Church in Germany,
France, and Spain, but with little or none in the ‘Sacred Island’ in
the far north-west, where Druidism, in its most barbarous guise, held
its ground secure from the onslaught of Roman legions, and where
Christian missionaries, recognising, as it would seem, that assimilation
of observances need not prejudice the doctrines of their faith,
exercised toleration, and in common with all other immigrants to the inland shores suffered themselves to become more Hibernian than the
Irish.
Coming to the ‘Christian cult,’ we learn that the observances at
Croagh Patrick on 15th August; at the wells of Struel, near
Downpatrick, on St. John’s Eve; at Holy Island, on the Shannon, at
Whitsuntide; and at Lough Derg in the late summer and autumn, are among
those specially connected with Patrick. Of these the most ancient and
famous pilgrimage was that to Croagh Patrick, the ‘Mecca of Ireland,' as
O’Donovan called it. Hither, on the appointed day —Black Crom’s
Friday—flocked devotees by thousands from all parts of the island.
Previous to climbing the path loading to the apex, the pilgrims passed
seven times round a pile of stones forming a rude altar, bearing the
name of St. Benan. This done, they crawled to the centre, a distance of
fifteen yards, on bare and bended knees, over heaps of sharp stones,
blood flowing copiously the while; but here, as in all other trials, so
intensely wrapt up were they in the enthusiasm which their task
inspired, that all sense of pain or fatigue was deadened, even in the
oldest and weakest. No cry or murmur ever escaped an Irish pilgrim’s
lips. On the altar was a cross, having reached which, they hung strips
of cloth to the transverse beam. On the stones, forming the altar,
concentric circles arc sculptured, which, to judge from a passage in the
Glossary of Cormac, were, we think, emblematical of the sun, in
connection with the worship of which it would seem that the rotatory courses, or rounds, always made ‘sun-ways,’ were instituted. They next
walked barefoot up the Casan Patruig, ‘over stones as sharp as oyster
shells with their sharp edges upwards,’ says an eye-witness. Arrived at
the summit they found themselves on the spot where, recording to the
written legend, Patrick, surrounded by birds of sable hue, strove with
the powers of darkness, until Victor, 'the angel of the Scotic race,’
came with his white birds to relieve and console him. In a truly Odinic passage (we feel sure that there is a close affinity between these
fables and Teutonic mythology), we read that ‘it was in a bird’s shape
that Victor was wont to come to Patrick,’ and that on the occasion of
one visit to him near Mount Slemish, in Antrim, ‘ he left the impression
of his feet’—bird’s claws, we suppose—‘in the rock.’
On the verge of
the apex, the pilgrims first did honor to a stone, in which was a hollow
supposed to have been made by Patrick’s knee, for, like Fin MacCumheil,
whenever his knee or his hand or his crozier (with Fin it was his
sword) touched a rock, the imprint of it remained in the surface. The
practice was for the pilgrim to place in it his own knee, bleeding from
the effect of the sharp stones over which he has crawled. Thence, once
more on their knees, the devotees crawled for twenty yards to the rude
stones which formed the altar of a little church called Teampull
Patruig, and having paid their devotions there, walked fifteen times
around it on a path which skirts the apex of the peak. Next they visited
a small enclosed space resembling, a dried up well, called Patrick’s
Bed, and if they had come there for a certain cure turned round seven
times in it, and remained there all night. This done, the ceremony was
completed by their descending the mountain by another precipitous path
to a place called the Relic Mhuire, where there are three circles, each
thirty yards in circumference, and going seven times in circuits round
each of them, repeating at the same time, in obedience to a Christian
injunction, seven aves, seven paters, and one creed, the like number of which
they had repeated at each of the foregoing ‘stations,’ with the
exception of that at the altar on the summit, where the number
prescribed was fifteen paters, fifteen aves and one creed. Space only
permits us to glance at other pilgrimages to spots connected with Patrick. At Struel, after first taking sod from Patrick’s grave at
Downpatrick, on which ‘no weed would ever grow, but only grass and
shamrock,’ the principal object of adoration was a well, which,
precisely at 12 o’clock in the night of Midsummer Eve, poured forth a
double volume of water, and was reputed to effect most miraculous cures.
To climb a hill bare-kneed, and to be 'turned’ in a rude seat, formed
of natural rocks, called ‘Patrick’s Chair,’ formed also a part of the
observances at this latter place. The most remarkable, perhaps, of all
the Irish pilgrimages was that to St. Declan’s, in the county Waterford,
whence the penance consisted in crawling through a cavity beneath a
rock on the seashore, said to have been wafted thither miraculously over
the sea with the saint’s bell upon it.
Ballarat Star (Vic. : 1865 - 1924), Friday 23 March 1894, page 1
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