MENTE Y EL MUNDO
2.2. Irreductibilidad de las entidades emergentes
The most ubiquitous myth about Lough Derg is that of the serpent, whose blood gives the Red Lake, Lough Derg, its name. The story of the serpent
is also one of Lough Derg’s creation myths and circulated in several itera-tions that all share a common pattern. The most frequent of these, found in several lay histories of the purgatory, tells the tale of the legendary Celtic warrior Fin Mac Coul (English: Fin McCool) who wrestles a gigantic and deadly lake serpent. (See fig. 2-1.) Despite his heroism, it takes a Christian, St. Patrick, to actually render the serpent powerless as a demonstration of his faith and God’s strength. Pictures of the serpent appear on medieval maps of Lough Derg, and Henry Jones records pilgrim’s stories about the serpent, as well as their seeing its “teeth,” in 1647. The following is recounted by nineteenth-century antiquarian Thomas Wright. The myth begins with an old witch who lives on the island with her son. Her son is a giant who devours people and spreads terror throughout the land. The local king calls upon the mighty Fin Mac Coul to rid the island of the witch.43
When Fin arrives he bravely fights the giant and dismembers the giant’s mother, the witch. A warrior of Fin’s party impetuously throws the bones of the witch into the lake, whereupon a worm escapes that “imme-diately rushed out [as] an enormous beast, so terrible, that all the party, figure 2-1 Serpent. Hibernia/British Library, London, UK/© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/The Bridgeman Art Library.
heroes as they were, lost no time in hiding themselves from its fury.” (See fig. 2-1.) The roving serpent then swallowed hundreds of the local towns-people “whole.” Fin, recognizing a certain weak mole on the beast, was able to stab it and as it struggled, its blood leaked into the lake water, which then turned red. Wright concludes, “There the beast lay writhing and bellowing with pain, till St. Patrick came and found it, and, to show the power of the faith he was preaching, ordered it to go to the bottom of the lake, where he effectually secured it.”44
The motif of a powerful female figure and her son, associated with an ocean or lake, is found in a variety of ancient creation stories including the Babylonian Enuma Elish, perhaps the most famous of this type. In this story, a warrior, Marduk, dismembers the evil goddess Tiamat to create the earth. Tiamat gives birth to serpents. More familiar to the Irish and English visitors to Lough Derg would be the story of Beowulf, which also features an evil mother and her cannibal son, who are killed by the hero Beowulf. The story also features a dragon/serpent. After he kills the mother and her son, Beowulf then slays a dragon.45 With respect to geo-graphical locations and their myths, Eliade is helpful. He argued that cre-ation myths around geographical loccre-ations establish them as places at “the center of the world.”46 In the Lough Derg/Red Lake myth, two representa-tives of Ireland, the Celtic warrior Fin Mac Coul and St. Patrick, establish dominance over a place and subdue a serpent and a powerful but evil woman, the witch.
All of the elements of a creation myth are present—the powerful woman who is dismembered, the serpent and the hero, or, in this case, heroes. The Celtic warrior Mac Coul cannot entirely subdue the serpent and requires the help of St. Patrick. Each hero is a representative of Ireland, one a Celtic warrior, the other the later arriving Christian saint. Blood figures promi-nently in the myth. The serpent’s blood colors the lake red, giving the lake its name, and the two islands subsequently float on a lake of blood. It is tempting to interpret this aspect of the myth as a blood sacrifice. At its most basic level, a blood sacrifice opens and solidifies a connection be-tween gods and humans. The continuation of the myth supports this link, as God opens the cave as a place where humans can literally peer into the afterlife and otherworld.
Another creation myth of Lough Derg relates how St. Patrick is having difficulty converting the Irish. Perplexed as to how to convince the inhabit-ants of the truth of Christianity, Patrick bends down and traces the ground with a stick, a scene strikingly reminiscent of the Gospel account of Jesus
and the woman adulterer. God allows Patrick to trace a hole in the ground that opens a pit of fire, a direct link to purgatory and hell. When the people witness the sputtering flames of hell and hear the wails of those being tormented, it is said that they are readily converted.
Another iteration of this story recounts how God gives St. Patrick the cave as a gift to the Irish, so that they can endure punishments on earth in order to avoid them in the next life. In this version Jesus appears to St. Patrick and shows him “a rounded pit, dark inside, and said to him that whoever, being truly repentant and armed with true faith, would enter this pit and remain for the duration of one day and one night, would be purged of all the sins of his life. Moreover, while going through it, he would see not only the torments of the wicked, but also, if he acted constantly accord-ing to the faith, the joys of the blessed.”47
Yet another version of the myth has St. Patrick ridding the island of the gods of the druids, which were also demons and haunted the island.48 As Patrick moved northward on his journey of conversion, the devils fled and hid in the cave. The Irish were so frightened by the demons that they wouldn’t even look in the direction of the infested island. When Patrick heard the tales of the demons’ orgies and mischief, he marched toward the island to rid it of the demons. Despite warnings from the inhabitants, he spent twenty-four hours fighting the demons and finally vanquished them.
“This legend makes the Station Island the final site of the struggle between Patrick and Druidical power. . . . Christian art represents the saint standing on the head of a serpent, or with a serpent coiled around the foot of his cro-zier, in allusion to the belief that he drove out from Ireland all of the snakes and reptiles. The deed is supposed to actually have been performed on Station Island.”49 The legend continues by telling how, having killed the demons, Patrick then consecrated the island as a site of penance.
These legends reveal multiple meanings. The displacement of an ear-lier Celtic and Druidic religious tradition by Christianity is an obvious motif, as Patrick “bests” the Celtic hero Fin Mac Coul by finally subduing the lake serpent. Patrick also vanquishes the gods of the Druids, who are also called “demons.” In each case, Patrick’s faith in the God of Christianity is demonstrated as a means to conquer evil, and as a way to solicit conver-sions of the Irish. Myths of heroes slaying serpents are often interpreted as indicating the replacement of an older religious tradition by a newer tradition, which overlays its own saints over previous ones.50
Beyond this interpretation is another facet that illustrates how the myths connect the pilgrim to concrete structures of the island. Returning
to Mircea Eliade’s contention that myths often overlay an experiential core, the myths of Lough Derg connect the sacred history of the cave to the penitent’s experience. The characters identified in the legends are associ-ated with physical landmarks on the islands and in the lake. Interestingly, the penitential practices align penitents not with the vanquishers like St. Patrick, but with the vanquished. A closer look at the character of the serpent sheds light on this point.
In the polemical work “Saint Patrick’s Purgatory: Containing the Descrip-tion, Origin, Progress and Demolition of That Superstitious Place” (1647), Henry Jones, a Protestant bishop of Clogher (Church of Ireland), writes about how the concrete landmarks of the islands supplement the peni-tent’s experience of their exercises and fortify their belief in the purgatory.51 After having learned of how the lake attained its red hue, Jones remarks how, as if to confirm the legend, practitioners “showed a great, knotty bone, said to be one of the left joints of that serpents tale.” Penitents pointed to several rocky protrusions that dot the lake that are referred to as the serpent’s bones. Although Jones dismisses the penitent’s association of physical artifacts as confirmation of the myths as “not suitable for serious discourse”
he did find that it was a practice commonly invoked that provided a frame-work for the penitent’s own interpretations of Lough Derg.
The serpent’s bones dot the shoreline and its blood colors the water of the lake. Within a mythological framework that takes into account sacri-ficial symbols, the serpent and the mother of the giant whose body the serpent emerged from are the sacrificial victims whose blood consecrates the purgatory. The penitents make their stations over the rock shards that are said to be the broken teeth of the serpent, and throughout the modern era part of the serpent’s bones were contained in the sanctuary on Saints Island, in a church called “Reglis.” The bones were also dis-played alongside other relics associated with St. Patrick, such as a bell that he was said to have carried. One part of the penance that remains today is that of making the stations while barefoot. Due to the rocky ter-rain, the penitents still suffer from punctured feet, which they soothe in the waters of the lake. The lake waters and stone structures called saint’s beds help pilgrims recover as through sitting on the stones and putting their feet in the water they “are healed of the sores occasioned by their going barefoot on sharp rocks and stones.”52 The mixing of their blood with the blood of the lake, or the mythic blood, places them physically and symbolically in relationship to the vanquished serpent and mother.
In this way the penitents reach beyond the tradition of St. Patrick to a
pre-Christian past, and the myth functions as a “vertical shaft driven into the past, disclosing deep strata of ancient symbols, potent signifiers that reinforce nationalistic sentiments.”53 Their suffering also aligns them with that of the vanquished characters of the myth, the serpent and the mother. The fact that their real blood mixes with mythic blood is one way that the myths defy easy categorizations that posit text against place, and spirit versus matter.
Another way that pilgrims connect symbolically with their place-based history and heritage is through engaging with the large stones on the islands. The stones are associated with several Irish saints. The two islands on the Red Lake that are linked to the purgatory cave are Saints Island, which is two miles northwest of a smaller and rockier island, Station Island. Two large stones near Saints Island are associated with St. Patrick and are said to be a place where he “kneeled a third of the night,” while the rest of the night he spent in the cave. In one of the stones there is a “print reported to be made of St. Patrick kneeling or standing thereupon”54 There are other large stones that are incorporated into the penitential practices as stations and that are associated with St. Davog. There are actually two men, each named St. Davog, who are connected with Saints Island. The first St. Davog, as mentioned earlier, was a disciple of St. Patrick in the fifth century. The other was of Irish descent and lived in the seventh cen-tury. Both lived on Saints Island where there was a monastery established in the sixth century.55 A large stone is called St. Davog’s chair, while six circular stones are named after the Irish saints Brigid and Brendan. The saints are said to have utilized the stones in their stations and the stones are subsequently also used by pilgrims in a similar fashion.
The myths of Lough Derg form a significant part of its story and mean-ing. They tell of a violent creation to the cave, including the sacrifice of its demonized gatekeepers, a mother and her giant son, a sea serpent and, less often referenced, Druid priests. The violence of the myths correlates to an actual violent history, at least from the time of the Norman and Danish invasions in Ireland. The myths also come alive in the sense that elements from the stories, like the blood of the mother and the serpent, and the serpent’s knotty bones, are an identifiable part of the landscape and are incorporated into the penitential exercises performed by pilgrims.
The lake is red and named for the blood of the vanquished gatekeepers and the stones are the same stones that formed beds for the saints who also prayed near them. In these ways the myths are interwoven with Lough Derg’s geography and help pilgrims engage with the place and its history.
Even today the pilgrimage is a physical experience that engages the senses. The fast has been shortened from fifteen days to just three, and the night vigil is spent in a church instead of a cave, yet it still serves to test the modern pilgrim’s fortitude. Pilgrims’ still stop at the stones as they make their way through their stations. Stained glass windows, created by Harry Clarke in the early twentieth century, provide an updated view into the otherworld and illustrate how important the landscape and material objects are to penitents. One modern pilgrim, Maeve, commented on this aspect of her experience:
I felt strongly that I was sustained and motivated and inspired by the art in Lough Derg and there was no reference made to it. For example the hardest time for me was when the Basilica doors closed for the night vigil, I felt scared, regretful, trapped. So I looked at the Harry Clarke windows and the light was so beautiful on them. As we walked in circles all night I studied each one and they are all so delicate and intricate. I looked at them for hours and they change with light as he would have planned. It was my first time in Lough Derg and it was hard, and I did not know how to approach my pil-grimage with courage, so the work of Harry Clarke, the words of Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney on Lough Derg, and the ancient, Saint’s Chair, a kind of work of outdoor sculpture in itself, if you will were the objects of consolation and motivation for me.56
The medieval penitential context, where it was believed that a penance satisfactory to God could alter one’s ultimate otherworld fate, is the most important framework for understanding how the purgatory functioned for medieval penitents and for how the purgatory cave became established as an actual location for Purgatory. It is this context that also explains why ghost tales and myths of Lough Derg, such as found in the Tractatus, incor-porate elements that refer to actual, not visionary, journeys.