Between this World and the Other...
Stories of Cavan, the Himalayas and the Yeti
There is a way we have in Ireland of being between this world and the other. In the Dreamtime way, yes, as John Moriarty puts it.
Ireland is and has been a foreign country,
It is a country we are exiles in,
It is a country we are all dispersed wild geese in.
The Battle of Kinsale was lost by both sides.
The Battle of the Boyne was lost by both sides.
We are all O’Neills and O’Donnells,
We are all Owen Roes exiled overseas in Ireland.
Inis Fail in India
Inis Fail in England,
Inis Fail in Ireland
We will bury you in the Mandukya Upanishad.
To be buried in the Upanishads, now that was something, in a poem about Eriú. I got so immersed into the world I was sent to by Lama O, that I felt exiled from myself. I didn’t really know who I was. I was lost. It wasn’t that I could see other worlds, it was that I was constantly shifting timelines, being stuck like a crow who carries messages between worlds but who doesn’t remember which world they are actually from. So it can be for messengers. Not that I have any great message for the world.
Once I had a dream about John Moriarty. In the dream I was by a pile of stones, and John Moriarty appeared and I said to him ‘Where can I find the Gods?’ And he said “That way”, pointing into the distance. That dream has always stayed with me. Now the thing about Moriarty is that I didn’t know him, but my friend Michael Morris did, and they would talk on the phone for hours and by the afternoons after furious writings and thinkings, John would expire, and Michael Morris would pretty much do the same. I lived in a cottage with Michael, down the road from a Buddhist centre in Cavan for a couple of years. We were trying to be devout and yet we were mavericks- especially Michael, who taught me to be even more of a maverick. We were concerned we’d just found another religion, and that was a horror for Michael, who got trapped in a monastery in the Sperrin mountains from a young age, and came out of it and married, as he said, ‘the first thing he saw in a skirt’.
Michael Morris, like John Moriarty, had a vast mind and it never let him rest. He was surrounded wherever he lived, by shelves and shelves and shelves of files. He lived fairly nomadically, so it wasn’t convenient. These ideas didn’t become books, as they did with Moriarty. They remained the files that towered over him on shelves, that spilled out from under the table, that haunted him. “Oh look at all this,” he’d say, “what am I to do?” I wanted to say write a book, but he never seemed to get there. Somebody in Donegal asked me once what did Michael Morris do… I told him he was an anthropologist, a composer, a soundman… “Oh you mean he’s on the dole..” said the Donegal man, giggling. It wasn’t that Michael wasn’t a genius, it was just that writing wasn’t his thing. Sound was. He was literally obsessed with sound. He was a wonderful composer- here is the Coolin Air arranged by himself on his album Eriú’s Child.
But that’s another story…
Michael’s files had Nothing to do with tax returns, nothing to do with anything really other than the eternal research he did into the mystic traditions like Sufism, Navajo, Hopi, Vedanta, and most of all, Ireland and its Tuatha de Danann, the tribe of the Goddess Danu. And Buddhism, thought the only thing worthwhile was Kuan Yin the female Buddha of compassion. Anyway it was while I was there living in the bogs of Cavan, in Cloncurkney, I was sent to India, by Lama O. I was to go to Dharmsala to study Tibetan, to become Lama O’s translator. A great honour, and a great burden. I didn’t want to be a nun stuck in a Dharma centre. Why couldn’t I learn the language and collect stories, and bring their exile into focus?
Extract from Pema and the Yak:
I grew tired of Dharmsala quickly, realising I was not going to be an erudite translator. My teacher was a big lad called Lhawang, who tried to drill the language into us.
So ok, I had to make a plan. A scholarly old chap called Raj, rumoured to have been a spy, told me to get out of Dharmsala before the rains came, the place would be covered in mould. Coming from an old house licked with mouldy walls, I wanted to flee. I hated rain. I was from the wrong country.
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“Go to the Hills’ said Raj, chuckling outside the library ‘Where it is dry as a bone’.
So that is what I did.
A half a year later, back at the ranch, in the Buddhist centre, with Michael Morris down the lane in Cloncurkeny, I was in a strange state, living between the Himalayas and Cavan, displaced, between two worlds… between to wildly different languages. I was depressed, anxious and confused. I tried to write a book about a man from Stonybatter who ran away to Mellifont Abbey, but it flopped. I didn’t get beyond chapter five. The book that wouldn’t leave me alone was this one.
I remember at one point, the Butler, a man who always wore dapper waistcoats and dicky bows and who’d been through the wars with mental health (most of the people who lived at the Buddhist centre had mental health issues, in fact it was a bit of a half way house. You’d want to have seen Samye Ling monastery in Scotland in the early days… there were swarms of schizophrenics and addicts looking to take refuge. ) Anyway the Butler told me in a concerned tone that the nurses were very nice in Sligo hospital, they gave you lovely clean sheets, but I did not take his advice. It was Lama O that got me into my shadows, and out of them again.
I looked at a horse in the field one day , that belonged to the farmer. I thought to myself I’d love to ride that horse. Lama O said, without me ever verbalising the thought, that that farmer Baxter could give me a saddle and a bridle. By the afternoon, I was galloping through the meadows by the lake. Somehow, Lama O had a way of knowing things. Riding the piebald horse gave me enough adventure and adrenaline to start to moved out of my confusions, and move up to Donegal, where I worked in a coffee shop with an ambitious college friend. But living between Cavan and the Himalayas would lead to my feeling displaced on the damp island for the rest of my life (thus far).
So, Lama O would talk about the donkeys in the fields to help us understand that the nature of mind was in fact very simple. Not complicated, beneath the whirr and buzz of our ceaseless thoughts .
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Now, I have to say it was a strange experience to be living in the middle of Cavan, first of all with a man who seemed to be far more interested in the Gods than in humans, and second of all in this land where, Michael said Crom Cruach was on the rampage. Or so Michael said. He felt he’d been under his shadow in a few fields in the locality. It wasn’t going to be easy for Michael, with Crom on the rampage. You might have seen Crom in the Secret of Kells. He was represented as a dark force to be reckoned with. Now, others say he was a fertility god, and quite harmless… but there certainly seems to have been human sacrifice to Crom, and according to Michael, he was still lurking in the ditches of Cavan. Crom Cruach is described as a wizened god, hidden by mists, and is said to have been worshipped since the time of Érimón. An early High King, Tigernmas, along with three quarters of his army, is said to have died while worshipping Crom on Samhain eve, but worship continued until the cult image was destroyed.
Michael used to encounter strange things in Cavan, when he was out for walks. Like the man in the ditch he met, who, once he had passed him, charged away down the field. I myself was cycling up around Glengevlin, a kingdom that held out against the British until the 19th Century and who still have their own King. I met a farmer with a pitchfork at the edge of a wood at twighlight and he said to me ‘Where are you goin’?’ and I didn’t know what to say, so I fled away on the bike. Michael said, when I came home, ‘typical’.
Lama O had in fact brought with him his own protector deity, Namara, from Tibet and she was to contend with the likes of Crom. He knew, too there were dark forces lurking in the land in Cavan. There were other forces at work. Michael and John Moriarty used to talk about them over the phone. The Morrigú, for example.
There is something ferocious in our mythology, our cosmology. Every conqueror has done their damndest to kill it, but it never dies: famine, war, depopulation, repopulation, Taliban-like control of women and their wildness, schools that decimate the Irish children’s psyche. They’ve tried everything and they continue the onslaught, but it won’t work. The Morrigan is the Goddess of the Battlefield. John Moriarty says of her that:
’The Morrigan is any shape that pleases her. She is any shape that suits her in any situation. She is eel, she is she-elf, she is hornless red heifer, she is red mouthed scald crow. Though a people prayed to her she wouldn’t send rain in a time of drought or stand in battle with them against an invader. Worship of Morrigu, red-mouthed Morrigu, had to be pure…. In her form as scald crow, she called above me everyday, (in the Paps) circled and called, searching for afterbirths, for corpses, for carrion… ‘ (John Moriarty, Dreamtime)
She of the Crow
Frenzied in battle
Sleek, fast, marvelling as men
Fall and stagger
Off the battlefield,
Throw themselves at her feet.
Morrigú gives superb valour to Cúchulainn,
Nerves him for the cast,
Guides the course of his unerring spear.
When the sídhe woman Aoibheall came to Dunlang O’Hartigan
At the Battle of Clontarf, April 1014,
The beginning of all our woes.
She begged him to put down his sword
She said you’ll have Happiness for 200 years if you listen-
But the Morrigú had taken his soul
And he, Dunlang O’Hartigan, and Murrough and Brian Conanig,
The nobles of Eriú
His own son Turlough,
They all fell.
Sometimes it is worth dying.
Those that never fear the battlefield,
Are entrenched by mud. Mummified by it.
Like the bog men.
The Morrigan’s crow picks out their eyes
Takes them to another world
Where they see everything again.
Not a bad sacrifice, to the Morrigú.
A way to be born in another time
A way to see the wretched world with fresh, new eyes.
Maybe they watch us, now.
Maybe, defeated Fomorians even, have
Those pecked out eyes on us.
© Siofra O’Donovan, 2023
It was crows, and ravens that led some lamas and monks and nuns out of Tibet. They led them to what’s called ‘be-lung’, (hidden lands) so they could hide from the PLA in 1959. The people understood the language of the ravens. The Tibetans do have their own ferocious protector deity in tibet- Palden Lhamo, who is really just Kali in different clothes but with the same garland of skulls… she didn’t do much to protect the Tibetans when it was invaded in 1949 by the PLA, however.
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This archetype of the Ferocious, powerful hag goddess also appears in local folkloric culture in the Himalaya. After fleeing Dharmsala and its noodle bars and its eager westerners on yoga odysseys and my drilling teacher I moved up to Spiti Valley on the Tibetan border, into a monastery called Dankhar that had once been the seat of the Nono, the Spiti Kings, built on a high crag. They used to throw boiling tar from the windows onto unknown enemies. I was lucky enough to meet the King of Spiti, the Nono himself and his mother, the Rani, in Kaza.
In the evenings, after Tibetan lessons with Sherab, my Tibetan teacher, after having the crack with the monks in the kitchen over dinner, I’d go into the village and sit around the stoves with the villagers. They started to tell me stories about the bang-mo, the witch that visited Dankhar and other places, in the winters. I started to think that, even though I was speaking in a language that could not be further away in distance and sound and script from Irish, these people were people of the earth, like us. The women wore shawls that were like those of the women of Aran. They wore Tilbu baskets on their backs, for collecting dung for the fires. They sang in the fields. They told stories of the witches and the faeries…
Tibetan people came out into exile over impossibly high mountain passes. Children make the journey, even today, out of Tibet, in cheap Chinese runners. Some freeze, mid stride, and stay on the passes forever. Some arrive frost bitten in Kathmandu. Lama O, once he escaped from a Chinese labour camp in 1962, fled to Bhutan. These days Tibetans get shot on the border posts, if they are seen.
Now, as I said Lama O carried with him his protector deity to deal with the likes of Crom on Cavan land. Every Tibet who has lost their land has a dream in their head of Tibet: each one has a different memory. Just as we do. One of the most amazing people I met was Amnye, the grandfather of a nomadic family who had crossed the Chang Thang plains from Western Tibet into Ladkah, near Kashmir, in India, in 1959. He came out with a caravan of Yak and sheep and goats. Amnye’s memories were of his herds, and the things he encountered on the pasturelands. One of those was, the Yeti.
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Now, we don’t believe in yetis do we? Is he a stunted Neanderthal man that got left behind in remote mountainous areas? Do we have them in Ireland? No. We don’t have high mountain ranges. But we have other things, that we also don’t believe in, like the Sídhe. Oh you might so I do believe in them, I do. But do you? Have you seen them? What if you saw them out there one night, riding, horsemen in red frocks and flaming red hair? If you actually saw them tearing through a field, would you be the same person you are now? We used to live in fear of the sídhe, and made offerings to them out of a wish to placate them so they’d bestow good crops and weather…
John Moriarty said about the wild Sídhe horsemen of Donn Descorach:
‘Donn would’t be eclipsed by the fathom of sticks for your fire he’d be bringing.
Donn is red. And his horse are red. And we see them only, we hear the thunder and thud of them only in these moments of awful cavity when some great destiny or doom is shaping us for entry into great life.’ (John Moriarty, Dreamtime)
This first poem is the tale of the Donn Descorach, wild Sidhe horsemen, and how King Conaire tried to capture them, but failed. They are not of this world.
I
THE SIDHE
King Conaire rides to Tara at night.
Three horseman, red frocks, red mantles, red steeds
Shocks of red hair trailing behind them
The beauty and the strength of them bolting through the night.
Conaire said to his son, ‘who will follow them?’
Lashing his horse, spear cast between them,
They did not gain, they could not.
One red rider turned and said:
‘We ride the steeds of Donn Descorach.’
From the elf mounds.
We are dead, but alive.
The signs came: sating of raven, feeding of crow, strife, slaughter,
Sword edges wetted.
Those three red horsemen are banished, said the King.
Supreme over ghosts, though dead, they steal the living at Samhain,
Racing in, taking the best of us.
THEY LOVE LIVING MORTALS.
Their mother was Danú.
Dei Terreni, says the book of Armagh.
People of the Earth.
They give and take the milk of the cow,
They give and take ripening crops.
To them we offer poitín and oats by night,
We sate them, so no illness takes us and no crops fail.
We follow the children of Danú.
For if we don’t, we perish.
And perishing we are.
© Siofra O’Donovan, 2023
Their mother was Danú. Well, John Moriarty lived beneath the paps of Anú, the mountains of the goddess Danu. This was his home, his spiritual home. Everything came back to here, as it did in our cosmology. “John lives beneath the breasts of the Paps of Danú’ Michael Morris would say. “Its the only place he could live.”
John Moriarty, Dreamtime:
Into Tuatha De Danann dreaming. We emerged into Tuatha De Danann waking. And we were glad. We were living again in ancient Ireland. Danu, her breasts plenteous, was our Goddess. Dien Cecht was ur physician. And the path to Connla’s well was open. No religion could hold her. No cult could claim her.
THe Paps they are called. The Paps of Danú. From of old, Danú was called Mother of the Irish Gods. And that’s saying something.
That’s saying she was mother of Lugh, the Sun God.
That’s saying she was mother of Macha, the horse goddess.
That’s saying she was mother of red mouthed Morrigu, the battle Goddess.
John Moriarty, Dreamtime
Danú
The Danube, Dniper and Don rivers flow out of Danú
As She leads us back from India,
On a raging cloud
To Eriú.
Danú brought the tribes together into one:
The Tuatha De Dannann.
The tribe of light,
The tribe of knowledge,
The tribe of wisdom.
Mother of a salmon god, was Danu.
Mother of Lugh,
Mother of Macha,
Mother of Morrigú.
All seeing, all wise in the Boyne,
All wise but blind,
Unseen in her many forms.
,
She leads us to battle with the Fir Bolg,
The men of bags from Greece,
She leads us to Victory.
And back again, as Anú, Mother and giver of wealth in
Cattle, giver of sovereigns, Nuada of the silver hand.
Lost in battle of Maigh Tuaradh.
Dian Cecht made another,
Made him King again.
She was mother of Dian Cecht.
Mother of Manannan of the great Seas,
Mother of Macha of the horses
Who cursed Ulster for its cruelty
Who tore back to the hidden lands
Under the cairns
Where Aengus lived, before he found Caer
Before they entwined as two swans forever.
Soft, round, giving Danu.
Unseen but in the land, on the land, under the land.
Unheard.
Mother of all.
© Siofra O’Donovan 2023
And to the end of the tale of Tibet, let me tell you how the book came to be . A dream, in Dharmsala of a nomad called Pema and her Caravan of Yak, coming into exile.
Here is the revised edition of Pema and the Yak. Available here. For If you have lots of money you can buy the original book. It is now a rare book. $50 on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com.be/-/en/Siofra-ODonavan/dp/8177694251?language=en_GB
or here on Vedic Books.
This is wondrously beautiful. I think the Tuatha de Danann are the direct offspring of the Hyperborean Aryans who descended here from the higher realms aeons ago to battle the children of the Demiurge and his Archons.
Utterly facinating weaving of stories and mythologies from Eriú to Tibet, epic beautiful poems of the Túatha de Dannan, written by Siofra. This blog is a jewel-like gift of many facets and hues, listen to the excerpts read by Siofra from 'The time I got Lost in Shambala', perfect for armchair exploration of roads less travelled, betwixt and between. A joy!