We put the F in JFK
I didn’t have to go very far back to find the name Fitzgerald in my family closet. It’s Irish, I knew that. Luckily, Fitzgerald is one of those families which has been extensively traced. We put the F in John F. Kennedy after all.
The Fitzgeralds story started with Maurice, who was born in 1105, likely in Wales of Norman heritage. He was a Welsh Marcher, a post granted him by William the Conqueror to help secure the border between England and Wales.
The Fitzgeralds crossed over into Ireland to help the English conquer that country beginning in 1169. Once secured in Ireland, the Fitzgeralds set about becoming “more Irish than the Irish themselves.” Whenever the Irish would rebel against the British, the Fitzgeralds were there fighting the mother country. They inter-married with nobility all over Europe and when the Irish parliament meets today, it’s in a house built for a Fitzgerald.
Since Ireland was distinctly Catholic when the Fitzgeralds arrived, they likely wouldn’t have been directly exposed to Pagan practices. But the echoes would have been rippling still. Besides, the Fitzgeralds arrived from Wales, which also had a rich pagan tradition.
I was able to trace the Fitzgerald line to my line via a DNA test, and with records found on ancestry.com, I was also able to trace my Fitzgerald line back to Kildare, in the sixteenth century at least.
A few generations later and my branch of the family tree has withered into poor dirt farmers in the middle of a wilderness in southern Illinois. But it still blooms from time to time.
My great-great grandmother was Emma Fitzgerald, and there was no trace of wealth or nobility about that branch of the family. Then again, it was about a thousand years between William the Conquerer and my great-great granny, plenty of time for less successful branches to grow long as well. But at some point in the ancient past, my line connects with theirs.
The Fitzgerald family was centered in the Irish county of Kildare. According to legend, the town of Kildare was founded in the fifth century by a Catholic saint, Saint Brigid. She took up farming, worked miracles and around 480, built a church and monastery for men and women, in what became the town of Kildare. St. Brigid built numerous churches in the area, founded a school of art and became one of the top three figures in Irish Catholicism. When Brigid built her abbey, according to legend, it was on the site of a pagan temple to the goddess Brigid, who is known as the triple goddess, one of the top three gods in the Irish pantheon.
So to go hunting for a god of my ancestors, Brigid became an obvious place to start, from both a Christian and pagan mindset.
Entering a pagan world
Before you can see a god, you have to enter the world they inhabit to some degree. Gods take many forms, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you might miss it.
If you want to see the gods of the ancients, you have to start seeing with ancient eyes. That means forgetting much of what you know and most of what you believe. It means giving up your safety zone because the world our ancestors lived in was anything but safe. Look to your pets for an insight … the dog which circles to make sure the spot is safe before laying down. Or the cat who sleeps under a cabinet or in a box. We call these behaviors instinctual, but in reality, once upon a time they were learned behaviors, made necessary out of fear. They just never unlearned them.
It’s possible the ancients viewed death in some ways like animals as well. For animals, it’s not philosophical. Most animals don’t die in their beds at a ripe old age. Many of them are eaten, and that’s not a pleasant way to go. That’s a driving force in a human’s life in the pagan era as well – not dying in a horrific and painful manner. Everything you do is done with that in mind, from when to plant your seeds, to where to lay your head for the night. When you have a family, you have to consider their safety as well.
With so many ways to die, from starvation, disease without the benefit of medicine, wild animals and Romans or Vikings driving a sword into your belly, you have to realize your fate is beyond your control. That’s when you call on the gods. Communication with the gods is important.
It’s an experiential relationship with your deities, somewhat similar to Hindu beliefs. Catholics, which usurped the pagans added the hierarchy of the Church between you and God. Paganism is more like the Evangelicals, who also lived in remote places and relied on direct communication with the almighty. You pray before you do something that might be stupid, and the answer you get determines whether you live, or if it was your time to go.
As a pagan, you don’t worry about the nation, because there is no nation. Your world mainly consists of your relatives and your allies from other tribes, if you have any. It’s essential that you’re accepted by your people, because if you’re ostracized, you’re dead.
Since there is no social safety net aside from your family or tribe, you could lose everything at any time, and have to start over with no one to help. You’re living in the moment.
These are the universals. The names of the gods varied from place to place. Customs did as well, though they had common elements. The Irish used fire in their celebrations, but we’re certain that the details varied from place to place, tribe to tribe.
If you want to get beyond the universals, you have to be able to tie yourself to a time and place. The best I can say is my family name showed up in Kildare a thousand years after the end of the pagan era. But in their desire to assimilate, they certainly took on the local customs, and also married into the local families. Those are my ancestors as well, though long lost to time. My pagan ancestors.
Knocking on Brigid’s Door
The simplest of things, the essentials of nature can only be seen when you shut off the 21st century. And that includes what’s become of our brains. Today some people listen to music or TV from the time they wake up till they go to bed. For most of us, it’s rare to be able to sit quietly and hear nothing but the sounds of nature. And yet that was the norm for our ancient ancestors.
The sounds of nature weren’t entertainment. They were information. Everything from the weather, to wolves to the supernatural.
The ancients learned to accept the dark. To fight the dark you needed fire, or candles, both of which required expending energy. If you didn’t need a fire, why start one just for light, when light wasn’t really something you needed? It’s not like they’re going to be sitting around reading books, which hadn’t been invented yet. Work was done in daylight hours. So the only real need for fire was warmth. Otherwise you had the moon and the stars for light.
My idea was to open up the memory bank for inherited memories. The route I take is the same for digging up any old memory. I try to forget about it, which of course is impossible, My line of thought will go flat, but there are blurbs of consciousness firing every so often, which I try to push away. But sometimes those are the interesting bits that my sub conscience pulls out of the box.
It’s usually images, sometimes a scent or a sound that triggers a memory that flashes for a second before going out. The trick is to latch onto it and see what memories might be attached. Find enough of those, and you can begin to remember the chain.
Then there are libations. From what we can tell, stretching all the way back to the Neolithic, when people gathered together to honor the ancestors, libations were served. Today there’s a theory that if you’re in an altered state, you can’t trust the results. But how can you correlate that with a people who entered an altered state to find themselves face to face with their ancestors, or their gods?
I’m confident my ancient Irish ancestors weren’t swilling Guinness and Jamesons, but it’s as close as I can come to Ireland where I live. Half or more of the human body is made up of water, and tonight, a good percentage of my physical body will be Irish. I’m becoming a part of my ancestor’s homeland, what I don’t wee out.
My date with Brigid
The moon is up when I go outside. As soon as I’m out the door I interrupt a fight between two raccoons on my garage roof. Eventually one escaped from the battle zone, and the other sat there, staring at me. I made my way to my chair down below, and was rewarded with the scents of the moon garden, Jasmine scented Woodland Tobacco and Evening Scented Stock. That alone is almost enough to invoke hallucinogenic experiences. The stars were bright, and appropriately enough for the Druids, probably half of my view was obscured by trees.
I try to turn off my mind, relax and float downstream, but there’s too much natural stimuli. My thoughts diminish, but never fully disappear, and after a while I decided nothing was happening. As I get up and break the meditative trance, thoughts come racing through, which had been held back for for a while now. I realize that through the cacophony I hear a quiet voice, asking simply, “why?” Surprisingly I sat back down and said without thinking, “because I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” The voice replied instantly. “I don’t know” I answered.
The voice gave a response, and I’ll be damned if I can remember what. But it was a conversation, albeit short, which barely registered in my modern brain. I can’t help but believe that in an earlier time, without the distraction of the present day, that conversation would have held a much stronger meaning.
We’re taught from the beginning that the voice in your head is simply your own thoughts, and when you carry on a conversation with it, you’re talking to yourself. But when did that become the standard answer? Isn’t it just as reasonable that for someone who was continually talking to their god, that the voice they heard in their head was the voice of god?
My goddess was vague, leaving me to figure it out for myself. Which is what I’d expect from a goddess. It’s also what I’d expect from my subconscious. So if I was expecting an easy answer, I was sadly mistaken.
EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s some time later, and I’m getting around to editing this story. As you know, it’s a long story and I’ve been at it a while. Knowing that it would be my project for the night, I fortified myself with Guinness again, and Tullamore Dew. At my age you try to keep it reasonable. But I’m feeling my roots and I want to nip into the next room for another shot. Above the door I see the Brigid’s Cross, and she’s not approving. I laugh at myself for thinking that, but I know it’s true. I start to get up and find myself sitting down. I laugh again. But the next shot remains in the bottle. Sometimes Brigid protects you by protecting you from yourself.
Note: Some of the images provided for this article are from Wikipedia.
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