The Celts (1987) s02e03 Episode Script

I want you to imagine the old storyteller coming in with his black, wide awake hat into a thatched cabin in Kerry.
Now, we had scant respect for him, because we thought he was a figure of fun.
We didn't realise that he was the last of a great tradition.
But having been coaxed and duly, you know, primed, he spread his fingers between the firelight and the wall, threw the shadows on the wall, and then he began his story.
"Long, long ago, before you and I were born, "when the swallows built their nests in old man's beard "and when the geese walked barefoot, as indeed they do to this very day, "and when the streets were paved with penny loaves "with the king's heralds crying out for someone to come and eat them, "there lived in Ireland a great and good king that" Once upon a time, in that golden Celtic age, there lived, in a mystical country over the waves, the people of the goddess Danu.
Among them strode a proud young king called Midir.
His hair shone with the lustre of gold, he wore a tunic of fine cloth, his eyes were clear and clever.
Heroic and brave and fiery, Midir was a powerful king.
He fell in love with a beautiful princess, the fair Étain.
The poets sang of her, "Shapely are all till compared with Étain.
"And sweet are all till compared with Étain" No wonder Midir fell in love with her.
But Midir already had a wife, the jealous Fúamnach.
With her magic cunning, Fúamnach banished the fair Étain She turned her into a pool of water.
Magic.
Mystery.
Early man lived in awe of the elements, in fear of the unknown.
Darkness, darkness, darkness.
What are your nightmares like? The fear of fear itself? What were Neolithic man's nightmares? The primaeval darkness from which he had so recently emerged? Could we think ourselves into his terror and how he coped with it? The feeling that he was not alone, the sudden noise in a wood, the dripping of the trees, the impression of being watched.
Do you remember those frightening pictures in the books of childhood, where the trees had angry, old faces and waved their arms? Early Celtic man's first religion would have had to be a kind of personal magic, reached for, called up to ward off the shadows, to bring him light, comfort, warmth against those forces of darkness in the forest, out there The awesome forces and moods of the natural world had to be explained, or at least made approachable.
Early belief coped by placing gods where there was dread.
The gods lived in the rocks, among the mountains.
The peaks could be the breasts of goddesses.
Water had spirits too, powerful deities.
The mysterious face of water, the possibility of what lay beneath the surface, its properties of cleansing and thirst quenching, these could be attributed to a life force within or beneath it.
Water might itself be a deity or might contain one.
The roots of Celtic mythology lay deep among the natural elements.
A lot of this mythology is peculiar to the Celts in the sense that they reworked it in a way that fitted their temperament, their corporate temperament.
On the other hand, much of it In fact, I suppose, one could say the majority of the elements which go to make it up, are to be found in other mythologies throughout the world, because people throughout the world think more or less on the same lines.
And they have the same archetypal concepts and so on.
But the Celts coloured these in their own particular way.
They brought them together in new forms, new structures, and new images.
These new forms and images included the ancient reverence for beasts.
The very core of Celtic mythology was a recognition, an acceptance of the supernatural in all corners of nature, so that creatures, too, were invested with mystery and power.
They were identified, given names, made familiar.
Cernunnos was the chief of all the animals.
And the Morrigan was capable of shifting herself into a dozen different shapes, for good or for evil.
Morrigan.
Cernunnos.
Buy them off.
We all do it.
Buy off the forces we can't control.
Offer money to the gods.
Three coins in the fountain.
The Celts, though, did it, not untypically, on a rather grand scale.
Sometimes, they gathered up as much as 2,000 objects, brooches, pins, bracelets, put them all in a cauldron, and left them at the bottom of a lake, just like this one.
One particular such votive offering, in France, was looted by, wouldn't you know, the noble Romans, and their scribes later recorded it as 100,000 pounds of gold and 110,000 pounds of silver.
Now, there's a common thread running through all these votive offerings which is as much philosophical as what we would now call superstitious.
And it's this.
If you want to appease the gods, if you wish to align or deflect those forces you cannot name, then you must do something of value, something which costs you.
Make a sacrifice.
Deposits of Celtic sacrifice have been discovered all across Europe.
Military and domestic objects, utensils, weapons, ornaments, everyday possessions.
The museum exhibits which are classified Celtic were often sacrificial objects laid in earth or in water.
They may have been mundane or beautiful or prestigious or precious.
But their real value was usually spiritual.
By placing objects in water, the Celts believed they were making direct contact with a source of fertility.
Water could give life, it could take it away.
Water healed, water soothed.
The worship of the all-powerful water gods was a standard practice of veneration.
Of course, it's perfectly logical, if you have been venerating gods because they are all-powerful, that in time, you'll learn to ask them for things.
And they will help you, provided you make an offering.
The votive offering.
And it could cost you an arm and a leg, so to speak.
Suppose you were ill.
Well, this is what you do.
You find your local shrine, holy place, your version of Lourdes, if you like.
Water had both curative and mystical properties.
In groves like this one - we're near Dijon in France - there were gods and goddesses living in the stream.
And you came along here and you brought with you a carving you had made of the affected or the injured organ.
It could be an arm.
It might be your leg.
It could be something to do with your sex life.
And having, perhaps, bathed carefully, you then laid the carving in the stream.
You offered it to the waters.
Now, in desperation, what do you do? You pray harder.
You carve a full statue of yourself, to let the gods see the total extent of your pain.
The troubled face, the shoulders huddled, hunched against the world.
And why? Because you have a club foot.
And likewise, you lay this carving in the water.
And you sit back and you wait for the deities in the river to say to you, "Thy faith hath made thee whole.
" Many were carved in oak heartwood, and in the extent of the pain these figures conveyed, and in the variety of ailments they portrayed, they amounted to a Celtic clinic of supplication.
200 such objects, dedicated to the goddess Sequana were found in the sacred pool at the source of the river Seine in France.
Carvings of all parts of the body, of heads, limbs, organs, the respiratory system, all complaining of illness or seeking the blessings of fertility.
When such individual worship broadened, it brought a social dimension into Celtic religion.
Shrines became centres of communal prayer and activity.
The hot spring of Bath is dominated today by its Roman associations, but long before the Romans arrived, Bath had been a Celtic sanctuary dedicated to the water goddess Sulis.
When the Romans came here to Bath, they would have found, without any doubt, that that sacred spring over there, where the water comes out, about a quarter of a million gallons a day, the hot bubbling water, that was sacred.
We know this because there are a number of coins found in there, Celtic coins.
And it must have been, to a Celt, the one place where one of the few places where you could communicate with the deities of the underworld It was your way through to the underworld.
And nearly always, these springs were presided over by female deities of some sort.
And when the Romans came, they would have no doubt asked who was here, who presided over the spring, and they would have been told Sulis.
It's a good Celtic word.
And then, I suppose, what a Roman would have done would have been to have said, "Now, what does Sulis do?" A goddess of healing, wisdom and so on.
And a Roman would have said, "That's just like Minerva.
"So let us conflate this, let us take it over, "let us call it the shrine of Sulis Minerva.
" And thereafter, they poured a great deal of money into it.
They built the baths, they built the sacred spring and the great temple behind it, all within a very short space of time.
And then, of course, it became a great tourist attraction.
And the people who came were really Romanised Celts.
So it wouldn't have changed very much.
The wicker man.
The Celts also worshipped in fire.
The Greek and Roman writers told terrible tales of this fearsome ritual.
"Some tribes have colossal images made of wickerwork," wrote Julius Caesar, "the extremities of which they fill with live men.
"They are then set on fire and the men are burnt to death.
" Women and children too, and animals, went into these huge statues of wicker.
Enormous structures, hollow and capacious.
Some accounts reported screams of ecstasy, or even of people rushing towards the flames, offering themselves to the fiery wicker man.
The places where sacrifice was offered, especially on a grand scale, have retained their mystery.
One of these ancient haunts of gods and kings dominates the history and mythology of early Ireland.
To me, one of the most dramatic sights is Emain Macha, Navan Fort, in Northern Ireland.
You have a marvellous Celt legend about how it got its name from the horse goddess Macha.
You have it as the seat of the king of Ulster, Conchobar mac Nessa.
You have a great royal house, the Cróeb Ruad, the Red Branch.
You have the Hound, the Dog, the Hound of Culann, Cú Chulainn.
The greatest hero of Irish epic, the son of the god Lugh, and the son of Conchobar's sister Deichtire.
You excavate the site and what do you find? You find three phases of a great royal house.
And in the final phase, it has turned into a sanctuary such as I imagine here at Pilsdon Pen, we had at about the same period, that is, about the turn of the Christian era.
You find concentric circles of oaken poles, and, in the centre, you have the ramp for an enormous oaken pole.
And when the site was filled in after, perhaps, about 25 years, that oak pole must have stood out over the whole countryside like a great banner.
Here, right in the middle of the Ráith na Seanadh, the rectangular enclosure, you have a massive post hole for a similar post.
You have the same thing of the gallering in Germany.
And when I asked the excavator, Dudley Waterman, if he had found anything at Emain Macha, he said, rather sadly, "Only a dog's head.
" The Hound of Culann.
The events which occurred at the temple of Emain Macha have never been explained.
First of all, they constructed this great building, visible for miles around.
Then, they erected that huge central column made of oak.
People travelled from far and near to worship here.
And then, for some strange reason, they destroyed it.
They burned the temple down after very carefully filling it with stones, which seems an extraordinary thing to do, because the temple must have been a quite incredible piece of work, the craftsmanship, the technology of building a structure that large at that time beggars understanding, how they could do it.
So the reason must have been something quite profound.
And I think one would have to think in terms of perhaps an offering being made of the temple to the gods, to whatever god the temple was dedicated to.
In the same way as one would sacrifice an animal and then burn it, they sacrificed the temple, by burning it, to the gods.
In the groves throughout Europe, where they worshipped, other mysterious practices occurred.
They built shrines to venerate the head.
This two headed figure stands on Boa Island in County Fermanagh.
The Celts believed the head was the home of the soul, that all power and energy came from there, that the head still had potency even when severed from the body.
The cult of the severed head recurs again and again in Celtic belief, in the stories, in the legends, in the mythologies.
The carvings reflect the grimness of the cult, as evidences in shrines like Roquepertuse.
The Celts decapitated their enemies, carried their heads home in triumph, in the belief that once you had severed and enshrined an enemy's head, his spirit was vanquished too.
The severed head is absolutely the most important Celt object, you might say, in pagan Celtic religion.
For the Celts, it was the seat of the soul.
They believed it had powers of enduring life, of prophecy, of fertility, of entertaining at the Otherworld feast, of which the Celts were so inordinately fond.
And, really, I think I might sum it up by saying, as the cross to Christianity, so the severed head to what I might call Druidism, to pagan Celtic religion.
The druid was the priest, the shaman, the visionary of his tribe.
He stood apart, with his nameless but fearful practices.
He divined divine intention and kept things right with the gods.
Now, in order to do this effectively, he had to put on a show.
And the more mysterious and arcane his practices, the more powerful he became.
Because he used things from the natural life, and plants and fire and water for his wild but wise alchemies.
Now, the druids had a bad press, though, because of the modern connotations of the word druid, meaning people in long white sheets prancing around Stonehenge in the early hours of the morning.
Forget all that.
He was the profound interpreter of his religion, he was the living medium of his belief.
He did, after all, train as a druid for umpteen years.
He had to be a learned and knowledgeable man.
And he was the arbiter of his tribe's faith and morals.
In other words, the druid was a fundamental part of the Celtic system.
Il y avait, en essence There were, in effect three predominant characteristic features in Druidism.
The first was that it was a philosophy based on the observation of nature.
The second, that it was a religion of sacrifice, mystery, divination.
And its third feature was that it tended towards monotheism, even although Druidism included secondary deities.
And I would say that these secondary deities were particularly those spirits connected with the forces of nature.
qui étaient attachés aux forces de la nature.
You see, it is only 2,000 years since the Romans eliminated the druids.
A mere moment on the evolutionary clock, and certainly, not nearly enough time to wash away the stains of ancient blood.
And as sophisticated Europeans now, latter-day Celts must be absolutely appalled to think that we once decapitated our enemies and feasted on their brains.
But locked into the ancestral memory, too, is that powerful sense of ritual.
The ritual had its beginnings in antiquity.
What became Celtic belief originated in the practices of earlier peoples.
In Ireland, for example, in the valley of the River Boyne, north of Dublin, a pre-Celtic race built the passage graves at Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth.
Here, where they buried their dead, they created their own book of Genesis.
Once upon a time, and a very long time ago, there was this rock in the Atlantic.
And then it became a green and misty island, a place of trees and rivers.
Then the people started to come.
The first to arrive was Noah's granddaughter.
She perished in the Flood.
Then came Partholón.
He cleared four great plains and learnt how to brew beer.
Then came the Nemed and the Fir Bolgs.
They had to fight the Fomoire, an awful breed of one-eyed demons.
And then came the mighty, mystical Tuatha Dé Danann, the people of the goddess Danu.
They were magicians, and they took the place over.
In one great battle, they defeated the resident Fir Bolgs.
In another, they finally slew the dreaded Fomoire.
Until the first Gaels arrived, the permanent inhabitants of Ireland.
They were the sons of M í I, soldiers from Spain, and, in yet another great battle, they overcame the Tuatha Dé Danann.
And this resulted in the first partition of Ireland, because the Gaels and the Tuatha Dé Danann divided the country between them, but with a difference.
The Gaels took everything above the earth and the Tuatha Dé Danann, everything beneath the ground.
They came to live down here in the Irish underworld.
And in time, they became the little people, the fairies.
The mythology of the Celts had as much importance for them as their religion.
In other words, all of their life was suffused by religion and by mythology.
A modern person tends to think of mythology and religion as being somehow separate from the rest of life.
But amongst the Celts, of course, and indeed, amongst the Irish, and the other Celtic people down until relatively recent times, religion and life were completely intermingled.
There was no differentiation between them, so that the whole force of mythology and the whole function of mythology in early society was to give life meaning.
And it gave all aspects of life meaning.
Thus, a sight like the legendary Hill of Tara became much more than just the seat of the High King of Ireland.
In terms of the kingship, Tara was as symbolic as it was practical.
In fact, it was probably more important to possess Tara than actually to live here.
But it was the place of the selection and the inauguration of the kings.
And, according to one set of legends, this was done by a series of trial by ordeal.
There was, for example, a royal chariot which ejected the wrong candidate.
Or there was the royal cloak, which grew two sizes too big for the unsuitable man.
Or then there was a pair of stones just a hand's breadth apart, but which suddenly opened magically to let the correct person speed through in his chariot.
And above all else, there was this.
The Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny.
This is the stone that roared out under the rightful king.
Away to the north of Tara, Tory Island, off Donegal, was another breeding ground for gods and heroes.
In his prison here, the awful Balor of the one baleful eye incarcerated his beautiful daughter Eithne, and so paved the way for a new and important mythological figure, the god who was also a man.
Isn't it strange? Isn't it bizarre that a people who now observe so powerfully a religion shot through with moral purity should have their ancestral beliefs so steeped in blood and copulation, promiscuity among the gods.
For the legend of Balor's prison continues, or one version of it does, like this.
When he imprisoned Eithne, he put into the cave with her 12 women.
One day, along came a champion, magically assisted, to free them.
But he mated with all the women.
Balor heard of it, took all the babies, wrapped them in a cloth, and dropped them in the sea, where they all perished except one.
Those who perished became the ancestors of the seals.
The one who made it to the mainland was called Lugh.
There, he became a helper to a smith.
And to this forge, many years later, came Balor, boasting to the smith of his evil deeds.
Lugh overheard him, took an iron from the fire, and thrust it deep into the baleful eye, killing Balor outright at once.
Thus was born Lugh Lámhfhada, Lugh of the Long Hand and Arm, one of the greatest of all the heroes and gods in the entire Celtic mythology.
Lugh's full title was Lugh Lámhfhada, or Lugh of the Long Arm.
Not only had he a long arm, but he had mighty leaps, and it was said that he crossed Ireland in leaps and bounds, and that he had no need to ride a horse, he was so good at the jumping.
Seven mile was the shortest leap that he ever took, from that up to 14.
And it's recorded one time that he took a leap off Benbulben down there and that he landed over on the Maamturks in Connemara.
But actually, most of this leaping ability and these athletic feats as a god were transferred to his great son, Cú Chulainn, who was a mad god and the greatest warrior of all the Celtic mythology.
And so was born the Celtic Apollo, the mighty Cú Chulainn, the Hound of Ulster, a champion, a miracle worker, a man god.
In the great epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, The Cattle Raid of Cooley, Cú Chulainn had his finest hour.
This is the high point of Celtic mythology, as it were, the scriptures of the pagan god become man.
Queen Medb of Connacht sought to possess the one great prize she didn't own, the Brown Bull of Cooley.
No matter how many mighty warriors she paraded before Cú Chulainn, he slew them all.
Finally, he was so grievously wounded that he strapped himself to a rock.
His enemies only perceived that he was dead when the goddess of death perched on his shoulder.
And so, he was transported to the Otherworld.
The Celts seem to have thought of the afterlife as being, very largely, a continuation of their actual, present life.
It's very difficult to disentangle the two, one from the other.
And by and large, the picture is of people, particularly nobles and warriors and kings, who passed from this life into the other under a variety of different circumstances and by different ways, and carry on the same kind of life that they have had in this existence, but on a more enhanced level.
And obviously, in some instances, a much better existence.
In there, there is sweet music.
This cave, as all caves were, is the entrance to the Otherworld.
Another such cave in the legends of Cú Chulainn had before its entrance three trees of purple crystal in which the birds sing softly without ceasing.
If a man out hunting went into that cave, he would, in the sweet and pleasant land, be feasting, gazing upon beauty, consorting with warriors and gods, and he would be there for a year and a day, but in reality, he would only have departed from his earthly companions for a moment or two.
Now, what the cave represents is a duality in the Celtic psyche, an awareness of the available miracles in time and space, a belief in the imagination that things are and can be what you make of them.
The Celtic afterlife was colourful and enchanting.
People who came to this Otherworld mixed with gods and heroes.
Their revels never ended.
It was T í r na nÓg, the Land of Eternal Youth, a place of celebration, where reality and dreams mixed and responsibilities never impinged.
This was Nirvana, Valhalla, Elysium, a happy and carefree place, free from suffering, old age or ailment.
A place of magic, of plenty, of music.
Jerusalem Jerusalem Convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum Christianity, when it arrived, had many of the attributes of Celtic paganism.
It had ritual, it had legend, it had rites and runes and holy men to practise them.
It had, as its central figure, a miracle worker, the son of a god.
It had its roots in ancient beliefs.
It, too, offered a code for living.
And an afterlife.
Jerusalem Furthermore, it was brought to the Celts by men who were consumed with their sense of divine mission.
Jerusalem Jerusalem They were warriors, but in a Christian sense, and very courageous, and very enthusiastic.
And they were very effective missionaries.
And, of course, they had to fight against the many gods.
And you find in the writings of Ninian, Patrick, Columba, terrific stress on unity - even when they talk about the Trinity, they stress the unity of the Trinity.
Sounds illogical, but one can see what they're It's a propaganda thing against the many against polytheism, the many gods which were pre Celtic pre-Christian gods.
When he came to the shore, this land was strewn o'er By witchcraft and dark necromancy Deluged, you may say, in their dark, evil way Most pleasing to Beelzebub's fancy This champion of Christ did their demons expel He lifted his staff on their idols, they fell Their imps of perdition, he sent them to hell And he showed us the road that would lead to man seeing The right way to live and the true way to die in And none would be saved but were sanctified by him When St Patrick's day was a-dawning.
Now, most of my songs have about 66 verses, or maybe 99, but in this case, we confine it to one.
When Christian monk met pagan Celt, who assimilated whom? Christian philosophy and pagan mythology had much in common.
And the new evangelists were quick to adapt to local tradition, custom and belief.
The conversion of the Celts was a merging as much as a submerging.
Many of the pagan myths were written down and acknowledged.
The connection between pagan myth and Christian legend is an extremely complex one.
In fact, of course, the past never dies, and the myths merely get transformed.
And so what you get is a very complex and very early mixture of native tradition and ecclesiastical tradition and, of course, the stuff they picked up from the Christian fathers.
They were very interested, for example, in producing an explanation of their own origins, of their racial origins and dynastic origins.
And they had perfectly good examples in the Old Testament.
In fact, the Irish were very upset to find they were missing from the Old Testament, missing from the list of the peoples of the world in Genesis.
And they proceeded to get down to work and produce a legend which accounted for them as being the descendants of Japheth.
And they were, of course they had a representative, they said, at the Tower of Babel, a scholar called Fénius Farsaid, and he selected the best elements of all the languages of the world, they said, and out of these he constructed Irish.
And this is clearly expressed in eighth-, ninth-century texts.
When the monks began to write down the legends and the mythologies, what were they doing? I believe that, consciously and unconsciously, they were doing a number of things.
First of all, instinctively, they were reaching for the roots of belief deep in the oral tradition where gods and giants walked.
Secondly, they were organising morality, or, at least, the expression of it, because the behaviour patterns in the stories, the valour, the truth, the heroism, the family attitudes, these were, after all, moral standards.
Thirdly, they were legitimising the mythologies and freezing them, putting them on display, and therefore, perhaps, saying they were over.
Fourthly, they were blurring, treating as legend the point where the Celts began, the moment of genesis.
From now on, Christianity would explain all that.
) One legend of the Christian Celts typified how Celtic story was taken over and turned to good use.
Oisín, the hero son of Fionn mac Cumhaill, had ridden off to Tír na nÓg, the Land of Eternal Youth, 300 years before Saint Patrick arrived in Ireland.
When Oisín returned, he met Patrick on the shore.
Patrick enticed him, invited him to join the Christian faith.
Oisín, still suspicious, came closer to listen.
But shortly after his feet touched the ground of the new, evangelised Ireland, all the weight of the 300 years fell upon Oisín's shoulders, and he began to disintegrate.
The message was that the old pagan world had finally disappeared into the new Christian belief.
Celtic Christianity was a powerful movement, organised and elegant.
Like the pagan religion it converted.
It recognised the natural world, too, of landscape and animals.
It acknowledged its place with man in the divine scheme.
It was literate, expressed largely in Latin.
It had texts, something which the Celts had never known.
The secrets of the druids had no currency any more.
These Christians published their mysteries for all to share.
And, unlike the druids, these Christians had no fear that the wonders of their world would lose their power when written down for all to see.
The medium was the sacred message.
Manuscripts like the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Durrow, these were more than just records of holy writ or transcriptions of the Psalms.
In both form and content, they were, in themselves, an expression of worship.
Celtic Christianity capitalised upon the greatest traditional gifts of Celtic art and expression.
It ushered in a golden age, where the Celtic artist worked in the service of a new god.
The symbols of the past did not become entirely redundant.
The new imagery also included a trinity of deities, more defined and universal than the old local godheads.
The ancient gods who had ruled the pagan world still retained some of their awe, but they were slowly forgotten, and gradually, they became no more than souvenirs.
The supremacy of Christian belief was consolidated in the monasteries, like Cluain Mhic Nóis in the heart of Ireland.
They were citadels of this new god.
Calm and peaceful, Cluain Mhic Nóis today is a still place.
After all, this was the point to which centuries of wild pagan worship had evolved, because even before Cluain Mhic Nóis was established as a monastery, all the old Celtic gods and rituals had either been absorbed into the new Christian way or laid gently to rest.
And the monastery of Cluain Mhic Nóis, in its day one of the most beautiful and one of the most influential, epitomised this new Celtic concept of worship at its richest.
The dominant image of Celtic Christianity was the Celtic cross.
In its origins, it was like the faith it symbolised.
Direct, simple, austere.
The evolution of the Celtic cross in Brittany echoes the development of Celtic Christianity.
In its intent and belief, the Breton Calvary is descended from the Celtic cross.
But it's more elaborate and ornate.
It has gathered many other influences.
It is encrusted with other ideas.
But, even still, the bits and pieces of old Celtic pagan life peep through, no matter how diligent they were.
Did the missionaries completely succeed in their efforts to eradicate the old pagan ways? II y a eu, bien sûr, la difficulté There were difficulties, but one must be aware there were several similarities between the newcomers and the local population.
In the first place, they were of the same race.
Celtic.
And they spoke what was basically the same language.
There were difficulties in the sense that the newcomers, the Christians, well, they must have urged the native people to keep away from the woods, from the sacred woods of nemeton.
And to give up the sacrifices which the druids used to carry out in the woods.
And then, on the other hand, well, it must be said that they themselves also adopted certain aspects of the old religion, the druidic religion, in particular, the gatherings around springs and around fountains.
Certain practices survive in the Celtic countries of western Europe which seem to come straight down from their pagan past.
This horse healer in Brittany, for example.
He's enacting a ritual which he claims goes back to the days of the ancient druids.
The ingredients were certainly typical.
A woodland grove, incantation, and an ancient spring whose waters, he believes, have curative powers.
People all over the country, not only in the Celtic countries, hang up horseshoes over their stables, above their doors.
I've got one in my front garden at home.
But perhaps that's understandable.
The magic of the rowan tree.
My own father, who was the most practical of people, who didn't want to know his Celtic origins, if I had ever brought hawthorn into the house, if I dared to bring it near the door of the house, he nearly went mad.
The same with the new moon.
People get very, very distressed, English people, if they see the new moon through glass, if they don't acknowledge the new moon.
The lines remained blurred.
The Christian myths proliferated in just the same way and just as extensively as the pagan ones had done.
The parish church of my childhood, for instance, was called Kilfeacle - cill, a church, fiacail, a tooth.
Why? Because Saint Patrick lost a tooth there, and, naturally, founded a church.
The man, God bless him, must have been a dental miracle.
How many variations of the word Kilfeacle are there all over Ireland? And this chapel here, Rosslyn, 15th century, four square Christian, Scottish Episcopal, Edinburgh's a few miles down the road.
This building is peopled with little carvings that could have come straight from the days of the pagan gods.
So, at what point, then, did paganism end? It petered out.
I wouldn't like to be the one that said that Christianity wiped out utterly all pagan ritual.
I've been splashed too often with holy water to insist on that point.
The parish of Faughart in the east of Ireland venerates the memory of a local saint, Brigid.
Rainwater lodged in the crevice of a rock possesses properties which many believe will cure eye ailments.
Nearby, another oddly shaped stone is believed to cure headaches.
Ireland is littered with such ancient local shrines.
The domestic, the familiar, everyday lives of the Celts, were very often invested with the supernatural.
This rock, for example, beneath my feet, was traditionally ceremonial ground.
Here, the ancient princes and chieftains of Donegal were either inaugurated or proclaimed.
And it overlooks a holy well.
Here, at Tobar an Duin, Doon Well, a saint is venerated.
But once again, the source of the veneration is water.
And nearby, something you find at hundreds of similar holy wells.
Pilgrims leave possessions.
A bizarre collection of objects they leave behind them, including some of the artefacts connected with their ailments, and, in some cases, money, and they tie rags on the holy bush.
And even though they may be here to revere a Christian saint, by leaving behind them something of themselves, either in thanksgiving or in supplication, they're observing that most ancient principle of worship.
The principle of sacrifice.
I think it's true to say that the Celts embraced Christianity with considerable ease.
How completely they embraced it is another matter, because it's quite obvious, of course, that quite a lot of paganism survived the advent of Christianity and survived for a long time.
Some people would say that it's only in recent times that Ireland has become completely Christian.
But what defines "completely Christian"? In the parish of Gleann Cholm Cille in County Donegal, there is a devotion called the patterns.
They are carried out in locations where the Christian and pagan traditions exist side by side.
These people of Gleann Cholm Cille recite rosaries in the Gaelic language and then they walk in a penitential ritual to a phallic shaped granite stone which bears ancient markings.
But however fervently Catholic the worshippers feel themselves to be, they are, in part, observing one of a thousand ancient fertility rites practised by their prehistoric, pre-Christian Celtic ancestors.
Some of these rites have been kept alive by being absorbed into Christian practice.
Some have been allowed to lapse, but lingered on till comparatively recently.
In the island of Lewis, there's well-documented evidence that they appeased the fertility god Seonaidh as late as 1790.
They used to brew ale at home, select one person who had to wade out to the sea to his armpits, pour the ale very ostentatiously into the sea and shout in a loud voice, "Seonaidh, help us with our crofts for the next year," and then they went to a church.
It shows you the mixture of paganism and Christianity.
And then, went into the fields and had a mad orgy for the rest of the night.
Now, that lasted till about 1790.
Croagh Patrick, a single peak on the Atlantic seaboard of western Ireland.
Every summer, on the Sunday nearest the first of August, thousands of pilgrims, barefooted, climb this big mountain.
They're paying homage to Saint Patrick, who is said to have fasted here for 40 days.
But the first of August was also the feast of the great god Lugh.
Father of Cú Chulainn, mighty among the deities of all the Celts.
Are the old gods who walked the mountains and the old pagan fears and legends they stirred still lurking? Who can say? We may use the word pagan as a description of the ancient Celts, but have a care.
What were you doing on the night before November the first? Did you put on a mask to frighten people? Did you hollow out a turnip and put a candle inside? So frequently in our daily lives, we reenact habits and customs that have come down to us directly from those pagan Celts.
Their Hallowe'en was called Samhain, and it was the most potent festival in the entire Celtic calendar.
It was their seasonal observation of the onset of winter, and it was the one night of the year when the earth opened up and the spirits were permitted to come forth and walk the dark land, and the fields and the woods were filled with ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night.