Language and Mysticism: Celtic Mysticism Part 4
Words and Mysticism
Today, I would like to review an interesting book that weaves language and mysticism together. In this case, the language in question is Irish, or Gaeilge, as it is also widely known. Here, I will review Manchán Magan's Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape. (Gill Books, Dublin, 2020).
All of us who read and write for personal edification and enjoyment often become completely enthralled by the magic of the music of the particular combination of words the authors compose for us. We often call their style magical, lyrical, musical, sublime, majestic or awe-inspiring. Not that a whole book is like that, but significant passages therein are expressed in such a fashion at vital junctures in the story. The last two authors I reviewed in these pages, John Moriarty and John O'Donohue, had this authorial skill in abundance, and I presented the reader with examples of both.
John Henry Newman (1801 -- 1890) was a master of a sublime, Latinate and well-balanced style that enchanted me as a student; so much so that I ended up doing my Master's thesis on his work. I read him mostly for the beauty and magic of his words. Indeed, I often ended up reading aloud an exceptional passage to savour the magic in full. The beauty of his words captured his meaning superbly and was able to sustain the quality of his thought.
Again, different languages shape how we pay attention to the world, how we categorise objects, how we perceive reality, and thus give speakers and indeed learners of a new language unique angles on reality or the world. I can give the reader an example here from the Irish and Italian languages. For example, in English we say, "I am hungry," where the expression is adjectival, and it suggests that I am totally consumed by hunger; indeed, I am almost my hunger. In Irish, we say "Tá ocras orm," meaning "Hunger is on me, or weighing on me," giving a sense of the weight of the hunger I am straining under, yet I am not completely consumed by it. In Italian, the phrase is: "Ho fame," or "I have hunger," suggesting another nuance of being hungry. This time I "have" it; namely, I have some control over it. Only those who love languages can understand how each language has a unique take on reality. It may be subtle, indeed, but it is worthwhile noting these nuances if we can at all.
Linguists estimate that Inuit and related Eskimo-Aleut languages have roughly two to four core root words for snow, but can form dozens to hundreds of distinct descriptive terms from those core root words. Not unsurprisingly, their landscape, which is generally snow-ridden, offers its inhabitants many forms of snow, a variety of forms that shape their very language.
Let's go on a short diversion here before I discuss the book named above, and return to a profound passage in Anamchara by John O'Donohue on the relationship between landscape and spirituality. These two realities are deeply entwined, and when I come to review Thirty-two Words for Field, I will be mentioning the deep connection between words and landscape, and indeed their close relationship with spirituality and mysticism. O'Donohue affirms the following:
All through Celtic poetry you find the colour, power and intensity of nature. How beautifully it recognises the wind, the flowers, the breaking of the waves on the land. Celtic spirituality hallows the moon and adores the life-force of the sun... Since the Celts were a nature people, the world of nature was both a presence and a companion... One of the oldest Celtic prayers is a prayer called 'St Patrick's Breastplate'; its deeper name is 'The deer's cry': there is no separation between subjectivity and the elements. Indeed it is the very elemental forces which inform and elevate subjectivity:
I arise today// Through the strength of heaven:// Light of the sun, // Radiance of Moon, // Splendour of fire, // Speed of lightning, // Swiftness of wind, //Depth of sea, // Stability of earth, // Firmness of rock.//
(trans Kuno Meyer) p. 23 - 24
Manchán Magan (1970 – 2025) was an Irish author, travel journalist, columnist, broadcaster and documentary maker. His works covered a wide range of topics, particularly the Irish language as well as Irish culture and its Celtic roots. He also possessed a deep love for the natural world. He knitted all these aspects together through a deep love of languages, most especially his native Irish, which he learnt to love, speak and write through the summers he spent with his grandmother, uncles and aunts in the Kerry Gaeltacht. Again, like Moriarty and O'Donohue, Magan had a deep Celtic spirituality or mysticism nourished by a love of story and storytelling through the Irish language. His brother, Ruán Magan, manages an active webpage, Manchán, which is well worth exploring. Despite never meeting John Moriarty in person, Magan developed a profound connection to his work, eventually creating the podcast series Manchán on Moriarty to explore and celebrate his audio recordings and philosophical legacy. Likewise, Manchán never met the poet and philosopher John O'Donohue, though both figures deeply engaged with Irish folklore, landscape, and the spiritual heritage of the Irish language. It is indeed a lamentable loss that all three mystics died relatively young.
Magan began to realise, over his years of experience encountering nature through both physical interaction with the land and reflecting on that experience through the prism of the Irish language, that the key to the link between landscape and spirituality lay for him in the Irish language:
It appears, at least, as though we managed to keep some wispy thread of memory intact from our Neolithic forebears.... That knowledge is contained within the land, and over the years I've realised that the best way to access it is through the language. (p. 7)
Like Moriarty, the shaman and mystic -- and I can hear echoes of Moriarty's phraseology here -- Manchán invokes the spirit of the first well-known Milesian warrior and poet, Amergin:
To list the thirty-two words for field here would be excessive, but Magan's comment on the lack of such a variety of words to designate categories of fields and stones and so on is worth quoting in full here: "but perhaps the point is not how these words show the diversity of stones or the wealth of Irish, but how they show its losses. Most of these words are no longer known or at least are familiar only to the elderly. Each day more go missing." (p. 20) Having taught Irish for some 20 years, between 1988 and 2008, before I branched out into the AEN sector, I noticed how much the "richness" or "saibhreas na Gaeilge" had declined. Irish is both polluted and diluted by English phrases translated back into Irish. Magan lists more than 30 words for stone, most of which I was not familiar with. I will mention the word "gallán" here, as it is a large upright stone or pillar stone used in ancient stone tombs, also referred to, somewhat imprecisely, as cromlechs or dolmens in the literature. "Slinn" is a flat stone, and modern Irish uses the same word for a slate used in roofing. "Lia" is a great symbolic stone, as we find on the Hill of Tara in the designation "Lia Fáil", which is an existing stone at the Inauguration Mound on the Hill of Tara. It served as the coronation stone for High King of Ireland for many years. It is also known as the Stone of Destiny or Speaking Stone.
Manchán muses philosophically on the diminution of the Irish language in Ireland: "With barely 80, 000 speakers left, Irish is losing its body mass at a dizzying rate... Its fate seems bound to follow that of other traditional customs and practices such as doweries, dowsing and seal killing." (p. 22) However, he notes optimistically that languages which have hung on for up to 3,000 years like Irish might possibly "be equipped to express ideas otherwise impossible to express." (p. 23)
This is a learned, complex, yet paradoxically simple book, insofar as its aim is to explore the richness of the Irish language and to offer scholarly, magical and mystical guesses at the derivations of wonderful, if neglected, words. As an old Christian brother remarked to me when I was setting out as a teacher in 1980, "Unfortunately, we don't have an etymological dictionary in Irish." Magan appends a wise and erudite list of references (p. 369 -- 375) to this "sui generis" and amazing book. Like all mystics, he is a learned, yet humble scholar. Here he is on the penultimate and final page of this intriguing book, emphasising that
I should make it clear that I am no scholar of the language or of linguistics, or of anything for that matter, depite having obtained a degree ion Irish from University College, Dublin, three decades ago. This should be borne in mind as you decide how much credence to give anything I say. Irish-language scholarship is a notoriously elusive and contested discipline, and I've probably taken leaps and liberties that few experts would feel entirely comfortable with..... The best I can advise is to guage for yourself what feels true in this book and dismiss anything that seems far-fetched or outlandish. (p. 374 - 375)
This book is so rich and captivating that I could go on ad infinitum, quoting from Magan's magical and mystical opus. As an erstwhile student of theology and philosophy, I found the chapter on the netherworld especially appealing, so I'll finish by saying a few words about it. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the netherworld as the underground world of the dead or hell. From my interpretation of this chapter, Magan has one specific meaning of the word in mind, namely the afterlife, meaning a place where souls go after death, often located beneath the earth. It is a shadowy place like Hades was for the ancient Greeks, though it does not have the meaning of Hell in the Christian mind, where the damned souls suffer incredibly in eternal fire. Speaking of our departed heroes, specifically his great-granduncle, "The Ó Rahilly", a 1916 leader and martyr, Magan avers:
He's in the alltar and not the ceantar. Ceantar means place, region or locality, while alltar is the opposite: the other realm, the netherworld. In the Irish mindset the ceantar is closely shadowed by the alltar. They exist simultaneously, in all places, at all times. Our physical bodies occupy the ceantar but our minds can easily slip into the alltar. This idea that there were different levels beneath and between what we could see was once so widely accepted that it didn't even deserve mentioning, but nowadays the word alltar has almost disappeared. Only a thin veil separated the two realms, ceantar and alltar, and there were always those who could pass from one to the other. (p. 32)
Associations from the above text abound for me. One is the "thin veil" association. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801 - 1890) spoke and wrote about the "thin veil" that existed between this world and the next. In other words, it is as if there were a diaphanous veil dividing this material world from the spiritual one. Obviously, Newman, as a newly converted Catholic, saw the spiritual world as that of heaven, where the communion of saints lived in golden eternity with the Trinity. Indeed, he often felt he was in the presence of his departed sister, Mary, who had died at a young age. For him, the otherworld was a deeply spiritual one, coloured by his study of Plato, Neoplatonic philosophy, the writings of the early Christian Fathers and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, not a shadowy one like the Greeks had painted it. To borrow a phrase from Newman, for Magan, the magical and mystical world of the spirit is "luminously self-obvious." For some of us, there are moments in our lives when the world of reality opens doors in that diaphanous mist or veil between the two realities to reveal profundities or mysteries beyond our ken.
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