Bleeding Statues and Political Trickery
War, bleeding statues and eschewed visions in Templemore
It’s that time of year again. When the Virgin Mary gave birth to a baby boy without Joseph doing a thing. Lincoln Andrews (2013) in ‘Born of a Virgin?’ states absurdly that ‘the ancient world had no understanding that male semen and female ovum were both needed to form a fetus; this cultural milieu was conducive to miraculous birth stories.’ It’s no different, of course, Mary being impregnated by the Holy Spirit, than the pagan stories of the impregnation of mortal women by deities in the Greco-Roman world. Or, in the East, the Buddha’s mother Maya, conceiving him when she dreamed that a white elephant entered her right side (1976.402) and gave birth to him in a standing position while grasping a tree in a garden (1987.417. 1).
It may not have been too long after the birth of Christ that the Bhagavad Purana in the Vedic Scriptures had already nailed it all down, almost as precisely as modern embryology. It’s estimated by ‘academics’ that the Bhagavad Purana was composed around the 6th Century, but that it may have been as early as the 1st Century, and the scripture itself states that it was spoken to Prikshit 5,000 years ago. How can we (or at least ‘academics’) be so sure that ‘the ancient world had no understanding that male semen and female ovum were both needed to form a fetus’? Such nonsense.
“On the first night, the sperm and ovum mix, and on the fifth night the mixture ferments into a bubble. On the tenth night it develops into a form like a plum, and after that, it gradually turns into a lump of flesh or an egg, as the case may be.”
kalalaḿ tv eka-rātreṇa pañca-rātreṇa budbudam
daśāhena tu karkandhūḥ peśy aṇḍaḿ vā tataḥ param
bhagavad purana 3-31-2
Anyway, that is the kind of controversy pregnancy and birth generates. Even today. That’s why it might be a neater thing to have babies gestated in laboratories. Not so much fun, but better in the ‘scientists’ eyes to have it all done this way. Tidier. ‘For the next decade or two it will be far more effective to use gene sequencing to select the most intelligent embyro for test tube babies. There are likely a few thousand genes that make up the genetic basis of intelligence.’ Parps Brian Wang in Next Big Future.
Back to the Virgin Mary, who used neither test tubes nor, apparently, Joseph’s semen to produce her rather famous son, Jesus Christ. Mary has a particular air, one that is beyond this world. She is not corporeal, but ethereal, usually pale (despite being middle eastern) and dressed in white and blue robes. She will be seen with a halo of stars, and sometimes standing upon the serpent, because she has no earthly need for kundalini cosmic energy to create. Her holy presence combined with God’s, ignites the fruit of her womb. The essential feminine principle is negated.
She’s a little like Kuan Yin the Chinese female Buddha of Compassion and Mercy.But Kuan Yin knows the power of Dragons, and I imagine Mary would be terrified of them.
She’s not dominating the dragon, but riding the waves with it. the East know the power of dragons. The West, as we see with Mary stamping on the serpent, does not.
Virgin Mary crushing serpent (Satan):
"She shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." (Genesis 3:15)
The vanquishing of serpents is a popular hobby for Christians. Edward Conze, the Buddhist Scholar, said the the serpent was revered in the East, and Condemned in the West. And that it was in those countries that revered the Dragon, that Buddhism flourished. Clearly that did not happen in the West, where it is considered a heroic act to slay a dragon, or to chase snakes out of Ireland. Whereas in the East, in particular in Buddhism, sacred texts were guarded by Naga serpent beings until such a time as humans were ready to consume them. The Prajnaparamita texts of Mahayana Buddhism, known as ‘the Perfection of Wisdom’ were guarded by the Naga serpents in their watery realm until they were given to the great philosopher and teacher Nagarjuna around the 2nd Century. The Diamond Sutra (Vajracchedikā Prajñāpārami) and the Heart Sutra (Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya) are the most famous of these Sutras, whose wisdom promises liberation from the suffering of samsara. Many, despite this wisdom being brought to the world, choose to stay in Plato’s cave.
“OH SARIPUTRA, THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE VOIDNESS OF All DHARMAS ARE NON-ARISING, NON-CEASING, NON-DEFILED, NON-PURE, NON-INCREASING, NON-DECREASING."
Emptiness is the substance of all dharmas. There is no death, birth, no defilement, no purity, no increase or decrease. What holds true for the Dharma of Skandha applies equally to the rest of dharmas, and therefore all dharmas are void.Others may know the encapsulation of the whole Sutra: “form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.’
Chasing snakes out of Ireland was a mean feat by Patrick, especially since there weren’t any there to begin with. Not surprisingly, visions of the Virgin Mary are common in Ireland. Many statues of her have been seen, bleeding or crying. Think of Knock. The Knock Shrine vision occurred on August 21, 1879, at about 8 o'clock. Our Lady (the Virgin Mary), St. Joseph, and St. John the Evangelist appeared in a blaze of Heavenly light at the south gable of Knock Parish Church in Mayo.
About a hundred years ago, during the War of Independence in Ireland (1919-21), a strange thing happened in a town called Templemore in Tipperary. I first heard about it from my father, who told me that cabs left in their droves from his mother’s family home and village in Hacketstown, Co. Carlow to see the Marian visions and related miracles occuring in that town. For more about this, read my book about Kevin Barry, Yours Til Hell Freezes.
Now it happened that Templemore had a great big RIC barracks in it, and that made the incidence of Marian visions even more interesting.
One August night in 1920 ‘wild scenes were witnessed in Templemore … as the Northamptonshire regiment carried out reprisals following the killing of RIC District Inspector Wilson by the IRA. Houses were attacked, shops looted and the town hall was a burned down.’ (Donal O’Donovan, Kevin Barry and his Time, 1989). No IRA men were killed but two soldiers died in the fires by accident. Then a 16 year old farm labourer called James Walsh declared he’d been visited by the Virgin Mary in his home in Curraheen, nearby. The Virgin asked him to dig a hole in the ground in his bedroom, which miraculously filled with spring water. James then declared that all three statues in his house started to bleed. He took the statues to Templemore, where many witnessed the bleeding Mary statues. That summer, 15,000 pigrims had flooded in per day came to Templemore, an RIC inspector wrote to Dublin Castle, the Crown administration. Everyone sought a cure or some miracle. However the parish priest refused to even look at the statues, which was unusual. Rev. Kiely commented ‘If it is a prank, it will fizzle out, if not, why should I stop it?’
People now believed that it was due to the Virgin Mary’s protection that none of them had been burned or shot during the RIC reprisals. The roads to the town were blocked with farm carts, ass carts, motor cars, Fords and bicycles. Such traffic had never been seen, even for the races. Pilgrims slept in the streets and wretches past help were dragged to the newsagent’s shop in the hope of a miraculous cure. An old soldier who had been shot through the right knee at the Battle of the Somme regained the use of his leg. A harnessmaker was relieved of his sciatica, and a girl in the last stages of consumption rose from her stretcher and walked. Or so it was said.
Despite this strange hiccup in the emerging war and the bizarre handling of it by the IRA, the latter were not deterred. The IRA effectively took over the area, organising traffic and helping pilgrims, but they did not appear in uniform and, miraculously, in that short time an informal truce emerged between the IRA and Crown forces. The local IRA commander James Leahy imposed a levy on traffic over the objections of the local Sinn Fein TD. Donations were also raised from the pilgrims which went to fund the IRA’s war effort. A miracle in itself.
Moving and bleeding statues were not unusual in Ireland nor in other Catholic countries like Portugal where, at Fatima where there were visions of the Virgin Mary (apparently) witnessed in 1917. By September, however, at Templemore, IRA activity resumed, and the miracles died down. It was business as usual when a group of RIC men were attacked at Goldings Cross RIC barracks on the pilgrimage route, killing Constables Noonan and Flood and wounding two others. Police and army reinforcements were brought in. Soldiers looted and desecrated sites outside Templemore associated with the pilgimage and it was rumoured the town would be ransacked. Where was the Virgin Mary now? The statues stopped bleeding. Whether the Templemore-Curaheen Virgin Mary liked it or not, a full-scale guerrilla war was in full swing. Yet, there’d been boons in the chaos with shot soldiers being healed, cripples dancing and one RIC officer had resigned to join a religious order, and a soldier converted to Catholicism. Before the frantic pilgrims had ever heard of Templemore, an RIC officer had been given a statue of the Virgin Mary, and had placed it in the barracks. It too had bled, but he hid it, fearing the crowds.
Walsh, the original witness of the bleeding statues at Templemore, was interrogated by the IRA, who had grown suspicious of him (which may eradicate any suspicions of the IRA having a hand in this whole fiasco). Dan Breen, the instigator of the War of Independence told Michael Collins, the Cheif of Intelligence during the war, that Walsh ‘was a fake’ and possibly a spy. Collins had received information from the local Catholic clergy that IRA Volunteers had engineered statues that would bleed at specific times. A statue was brought to him from Templemore. When he got it, he smashed it, and found inside it an alarm clock connected to a fountain pen that spewed sheep’s blood. When the clock struck a particular time, blood would spurt out of the statue. Oh, marvellous trickery! James Walsh emigrated to Australia in 1923, and died in 1977, having never again set foot on Irish soil.
As for Templemore, it is now the HQ of the Garda Síochana, the police force of Ireland, a place that has a history of entwinement with with the Templars and with Freemasonry. The town of Templemore was named by the Knights Templar, an order originally founded in the early 1100’s to protect pilgrims on the Crusades. In the early 1300’s they had to flee the Capet French King Philip who burned many of them at the stake for their ‘heresies’, a cruel, thin disguise for his intense jealousy of the Order’s wealth. Some took refuge in Ireland for a while, later establishing themselves in Scotland as a masonic order.
Interview by Gerry O’Neill of Thomas Sheridan about the Knights Templar and the Freemasons in Ireland:
In Ireland, the Knights Templar first settled at Templetown, County Wexford, and then Temple House, Ballymote, County Sligo, Ballintemple, Ardattin, County Carlow, Molesworth Street, Dublin and of Course Templemore. The Templars disappeared from Ireland and possibly went to Scotland where they continued to exist as a masonic order.
Apparently these ‘icons of Christian chivalry were adopted as a branch of the Freemasons in the 18th century. Their mystical associations with Solomon’s temple strongly appealed to the young bucks of Georgian Dublin. At the Freemasons's Hall in Dublin, the Knights Templar Room is a gabled hall, designed to look like a medieval chapel, and is illuminated by Gothic stained heraldic glass windows.’ https://www.facebook.com/Wistorical/photos/a.501727316601334/478575172249882/?type=3
Shall we say that the Virgin Mary has a lot to answer for. Thanks for reading and please do feel free to share, like, comment and subscribe, the magic word!
Great piece Siofra. I found the sections about the Virgin Mary particularly interesting.
Very interesting read thank you Thomas, I felt i had to get man out of my spiritual believes and had to stip it back to my soul and a higher power to feel an authentic spirituality . Thats just the jist of it obviously .