Post by megli on Jun 28, 2009 16:52:32 GMT -1
This is an article I've just sent off to a journal. It might be of tangential interest to some. It's lost all the formatting and the footnotes when I cut and pasted it over, alas.
Néladóracht: druidic cloud-divination in medieval Irish literature
The druids were the magico-religious intelligentsia of at least some of the Celtic-speaking peoples of north-western Europe in the centuries immediately either side of the birth of Christ, though they persisted rather longer in Ireland. As mysterious and evocative figures, they developed an unusually vivid and long-lasting cultural ‘afterlife’, extending from the early modern period down to the present, as Ronald Hutton has eloquently analyzed. Their reputation as wise natural philosophers—one of a number of conflicting associations they possess in the classical texts which describe them---is belied by the lack of concrete details about the precise scope of their much-vaunted wisdom.
One of the recurring aspects of modern, popular envisionings of the philosophical wisdom of the druids is the ascription to them of some form of astrological lore. This is based very largely on a single statement by Julius Caesar in his Gallic War, describing the curriculum of the druids of Gaul in the first century BCE. According to Caesar, Gaulish druids ‘hold long discussions about the heavenly bodies and their movements, the size of the universe and of the earth, the physical constitution of the world, and the power and properties of the gods; and they instruct the young men in these subjects.’ Indeed, so strong is the imaginative hold of this passage that one can now purchase imaginative volumes with titles like The Lost Zodiac of the Druids, The Handbook of Celtic Astrology and so on, none of which have the slightest historical validity. However, it is my contention in this article that this impulse to credit druids with some kind of divinatory, native sky-lore is not merely a modern phenomenon, but rather was shared by the composers of Irish vernacular saga-texts in the high Middle Ages, who occasionally depict druids and other pre-Christian prophets engaging in a form of cloud-divination termed néladóracht in the Irish language. The remainder of this article will explore this literary topos, and try to explain its emergence in medieval Ireland.
Ireland was the one place in Europe in which druids remained of interest and cultural importance during the Middle Ages, as common figures in the complex body of sagas-narratives, set in the pre-Christian past, which were composed in Irish from the end of the 7th century onwards. Ireland was largely converted to Christianity in the late fifth and early sixth centuries CE, as a result of the mission associated with St Patrick, although we know that Christians, probably including slaves captured in Roman Britain, were already present in the island shortly after the year 400. However, we can safely assume that the pre-Christian Irish did indeed have historical druids, like other Celtic speaking peoples. Native penitentials—Christian tracts giving the various penances one should do for every conceivable variety of sin—and law texts on social status make it clear that druids of a sort were still a going concern in Irish society until the turn of the eighth century, when they seem quietly to disappear. Between the mid-fifth century and the beginning of the eighth, therefore, the historical druids seem to have endured a steep lowering of their social status, entering a kind of twilight decline in a rapidly Christianizing, and then Christian, Ireland.
However, at roughly the same time as real druids were finally fading permanently into history, an immensely vivid and inventive vernacular literary culture began to flower, which delighted in setting tales and sagas in an imagined version of the pre-Christian past of several hundred years previously. Druids play a prominent part in these tales as counselors to kings, magicians, judges and prophets, but the relationship between these literary druids and their historical forebears is complex and problematic. During the last thirty-to-forty years, scholars have had a revolution in the way that the cultural thought-world and artistic priorities of the literati of medieval Ireland are envisaged. There was once a tendency, especially in the late 19th century, to look at sagas from medieval Ireland as though they were tracts describing the culture of the pre-Christian Irish Iron Age in historically-reliable terms. Among scholars in the field, this tendency existed in more and less sophisticated versions, and is still to be seen in many popular books about the ancient Celts, which tend to neglect current research in favour of the sepia wash of romance. But within the academy, we no longer think of these medieval sagas as accurate portrayals of life in pre-Christian Ireland. Rather, we recognize them as constructed: that is, as deliberate artistic creations---drawing on inherited material, to be sure, but adapting it freely to provoke, stimulate and entertain their medieval, Christian audience. (So standard has this consensus become in the field, it is sometimes termed the ‘new orthodoxy’.) So we cannot look at the activities of druids in Irish medieval literary texts and take them naively as anthropologically accurate transcriptions. We work today with an awareness that medieval Ireland was culturally highly creative and linked to the wider world of Christendom, not an isolated backwater brooding on a shadowy and legend-filled past. We also see vernacular saga literature emerging fundamentally from the monastery: the sagas, with their shapeshifting, pagan gods, and ripe sexuality are nevertheless products of a Christian intellectual elite who were familiar with Latin learning and steeped in the Bible and the biblical exegesis of the Church Fathers. Such learning affected the shaping of literary narratives at a profound level.
* * *
In medieval Ireland, there were two main words for druid, one in each of the two languages of the literati. The first was Old Irish druí, of which the plural was (confusingly for modern English speakers) druid, and which derives from Common Celtic *dru-wids, meaning ‘thorough knower’, or possibly ‘oak-knower’---the first element is disputed. The second was Hiberno-Latin magus, meaning ‘druid, wizard, magian, magician’, and, as an important and obviously related meaning, ‘one of the Magi of the Gospel according to St Matthew’. This latter meaning will be highly significant for my argument in this article. These two terms are used essentially interchangeably, the choice being dependent on the main language of the text in question.
In the earlier sagas, which date from the seventh to the eleventh centuries, druids are depicted as divining the future and prophesying by several methods. In some texts they are capable of a kind of eerie clairvoyance, often termed imbas for-osna, or ‘the embracing vision which enlightens’. In the eighth century saga Aided Chonchobuir, for example, druids perceive the Crucifixion from the other end of Europe, seeing it in visionary ‘real time’, as it were; in the seventh century Latin Life of St Patrick ascribed to Muirchú, the druids (termed magi) prophesy the coming of the saint. Elsewhere, they are able to practice a form of prophetic psychometry: in the originally ninth century saga Longes mac nUislenn, the Ulster druid Cathbad is able to foresee the adult appearance and disastrous career of the tragic heroine Derdriu, simply by placing his hand on her mother’s belly while Derdriu herself is still in the womb. Other sagas speak of druidic knowledge of lucky and unlucky days, and of dream-visions induced by wrapping oneself in the hide of a slaughtered bull before going to sleep. Any and all of these may genuinely reflect pre-Christian druidic practice, though we cannot be certain. None of these, however, are astrological.
Nevertheless, Celtic specialists have not been immune to the lure of imputing astrological know-how to ancient Irish druids. Fergus Kelly and James Carney—great scholars both---state straight-forwardly that divination from celestial phenomena formed one of the roles of the Irish druid. Kelly tells us: ‘The druid (Old Irish druí) was priest, prophet, astrologer, and teacher of the sons of nobles.’ Carney writes: ‘In Latin writing, druí is translated magus, and his role is that of necromancer and watcher of the heavens.’ The confidence of both these statements should make us pause, though Carney’s ‘watcher of the heavens’ perhaps shows a justified wariness about using the word ‘astrologer’. On the one hand, those elements of the Irish depictions of druids which echo the Classical sources can be seen as confirming the latter, and thus being good evidence for the historical reality of a particular druidic custom. Kelly and Carney’s perspectives implicitly follow this line of reasoning. Amongst the Classical sources, there are indeed passages which support the idea that druids in continental Celtic societies studied the stars: we have already heard from Julius Caesar on Gaul. That passage, quoted above, may simply be historically accurate: Caesar had, after all, a pressing need to understand where power lay in Gaulish society. But on the other hand, doubts have been cast on the accuracy of Caesar’s ethnography of the region, as he may have been drawing on the lost testimony of the Syrian philosopher Posidonius here, and thus it is not certain that he was writing from personal experience when it came to specific details of this kind. Indeed. the ascription of sophisticated natural philosophy to the druids may represent a projection of familiar Pythagoreanism onto a barbarian caste whose customs were largely unknown.
Thus we must approach classical texts describing druidic star-knowledge with some wariness, despite their aura of plausibility. This applies particularly to their use as comparanda for references to druids in the Irish medieval literature, especially when one tries to create a picture the practices of the historical druids thereby. In fact, there is only one reference from early medieval Ireland to a druid studying the stars, found in the mid-seventh century Vita Prima S. Brigitae, the earliest Latin life of St Brigit, Ireland’s mother-saint. Born to the slave-girl of a druid, Brigit’s birth is accompanied by miraculous phenomena, which the druid observes in person:
One night this druid (magus) was keeping watch, as was his custom, contemplating the stars of heaven, and throughout the entire night he saw a blazing column of fire rising out of the hut in which the slave-girl (ancilla) was sleeping with her daughter, and he called to him another man, and he saw the same thing.
It is this very passage that Kelly cites as his evidence that Irish druids were ‘astrologers’. Again, it is possible that this was indeed the case, and that these lines, written at a time when druids seem still to have existed in Ireland, do preserve genuine information about them. But if so, this is the sole passage to ascribe this kind of activity to an Irish druid, and a number of objections can be raised. First---in an excellent example of how interpretations of medieval Irish images of druids can be unconsciously coloured by our knowledge of the Classical accounts---it is not clear whether watching the stars through the night is to be taken as a custom of magi in general, or just of this particular magus. Secondly, if we do take the passage as implying that one of the roles of the druidic class was to study the stars, once again we cannot necessarily take this as reliable historical information. Finally, the detail is part of the narration of a natal mirabilium, and is, I suspect, intended to be taken as one of a series of deliberate echoes in the passage of Matthew’s account of Christ’s nativity. The pillar of fire over the hut clearly recalls the star of Bethlehem over the stable, and just as Matthew has the Magi following a star, the author of the Vita Prima has one magus scanning the stars.
Matthew’s Gospel does not make it explicit whether the Magi were astrologers, of course, but from early on Irish churchmen had one weighty source available to them which strongly stated that they were---namely the Etymologiae, Isidore of Seville’s great seventh-century encyclopedia, which we know was highly esteemed in Ireland within a few decades of its composition. Isidore devotes a section of the Etymologiae to the subdivisions of magi, as sinister and diabolically-inspired pagan diviners, drawing, as usual, on a wide variety of biblical and classical sources. Those who predict the future by the stars form an important category:
Astrologi are so called because they make auguries from the stars. For they describe the births of human beings by means of the twelve signs of heaven, and through the movement of the stars they attempt to foretell the habits, roles, and fates of those who are born - that is, who will have been born in what sort of sign, or what fate he who is born may have in life. These are they who are commonly called mathematici. But originally these same star-interpreters were termed magi; thus it is said that they were the ones in the Gospel who announced that Christ had been born.
It has long been recognised that the magi of Muirchú’s Life of Patrick, clearly meant to be druids, were deliberately paralleled to the wicked priests and magicians of the Old Testament; and given Isidore’s tremendous influence upon Irish learning from the mid-seventh century, it would be unsurprising to find Brigit’s hagiographer drawing upon the former’s description of pagan magicians to flesh out his magus. Thus, we are not obliged to take the Vita Prima at face value as evidence—the only evidence---for the astrological skills of Irish druids, as there is another possible and plausible explanation. Druidic astrology, at least in Ireland, is likely to be a mirage.
* * *
Carney described the historical druids as ‘watchers of the sky’, which is prudently imprecise on the issue of what it was that they were actually scrutinizing. But in the eleventh century or twelfth century, a new skill—cloud divination---seems to have been added to the divinatory repertoire of the literary druid. Cloud-divination is both reminiscent of astrology and yet dissimilar to it; I aim to show below that its appearance as a druidic skill in literary texts in this period reflects developments in the meaning of the word magus in Ireland, and in particular its semantic superimposition of the senses ‘pagan Irish diviner’, on the one hand, and ‘heaven-scanning, Christ-child-visiting wise man’, on the other. Examples of cloud-divination occur in at least five surviving vernacular texts of the high and late Middle Ages (from the twelfth century to the fifteenth), of which I am going to discuss three here. These are a hagiographical work, the so-called ‘Irish Life of Columba’, plus two saga-narratives, Acallam na Senórach and the Stowe version of Táin Bó Cúailnge. I will describe each of these texts briefly here in turn as they are unlikely to be familiar to non-specialists.
The ‘Irish Life of Columba’ is a Middle Irish vita of St Columba or Colum Cille of Iona, Ireland’s third great saint after Patrick and Brigit, who died in 597 CE. (It is not to be confused with Adomnán’s much more famous Latin Life of the saint, produced on Iona around a century after Columba’s death.) Máire Herbert has shown that the Irish Life was probably produced at Derry, in what is now Northern Ireland, around 1150, at the point when that monastery assumed the headship of the various interdependent foundations associated with the saint’s patronal authority. Herbert also points out that the Life was thus undoubtedly intended for an Irish audience, and that it is a sophisticated piece of work which continually looks to literary exemplars. Turning our second text, the splendidly autumnal Acallam na Senórach--- recently translated as ‘Tales of the Elders of Ireland’---we find a novel-length, intricately complex collection of essentially secular tales about the great Gaelic hero Fionn mac Cumhail (Finn Mac Cool) and his associates, dated to the turn of the 13th century. It is the longest tale extant in medieval Irish, and synthesizes earlier material in a way congruent with the sophisticated tastes of high medieval audiences. As with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Acallam situates multiple lesser stories within an overarching frame-tale, according to which a few straggling heroic warriors from Ireland’s pre-Christian past live on mysteriously, eventually meeting St Patrick and describing their past exploits to him, as well as those of Fionn, their lord. Finally, the Stowe Táin Bó Cúailnge is a very late medieval redaction of the greatest of all Irish sagas, the famous ‘Cattle-Raid of Cooley’, which exists in several versions, all zestfully ultraviolent. The story details the epic clash between the Ulstermen, with their champion Cú Chulainn, and the armies of the rest of Ireland under the formidable Queen Medb of Connaught and her husband Aillil. The version of the tale that has historically been most often translated for a general audience dates to the twelfth century, and is found in the Book of Leinster; but a starker and more direct eighth-century version survives in two other manuscripts, the twelfth century Leabhar na hUidhre and the late fourteenth century Yellow Book of Lecan, albeit in a seriously flawed form in both cases. In more recent times, it is this less flowery, earlier version that has formed the basis for the excellent translations of Thomas Kinsella and Ciarán Carson. The Stowe Táin, however, is yet another version of the story, forming a late recension probably dating to the 15th century, and one which has attracted rather less critical comment.
The example of cloud-divination in the Irish Life of Columba is somewhat ambiguous, but it is likely to be the earliest example of the topos extant. The passage in question purports to describe an incident during Columba’s early boyhood in the north of Ireland. When the time is coming for Columba to begin to learn to read, Cruithnechán, the boy’s priestly guardian, makes suitable enquiries in the district:
… the priest went to a prophet (fáith) who was in the land to ask him when it would be right for the boy to begin. When the prophet had examined the sky, this is what he said: ‘Write his alphabet for him now.’
Here there seems to be no contradiction between an ecclesiastical role and consulting a secular prophet, who performs what seems likely to be cloud-divination. It is notable that it is a fáith, a ‘prophet’, who is visited here, not a druí, or druid. However it is clear that the role of the fáith was synonymous to an extent with that of the druí, as the ancient linkage of the druides or druidae with the vates (directly cognate with Irish fáith and of the same meaning) suggests.
In our second example, drawn from Acallam na Senórach, we find the warrior Oisín, son of Fionn mac Cumhail, describing the nature of a certain hill to St Patrick. The superannuated hero’s account segues into a recollection of events which happened near the hill back in the distant past. Prose gives way to six stanzas of verse in which Fionn questions his druid, Cainnelsciath, about what certain ominous clouds portend, and is duly answered:
‘“The Hill of Knowledge” is another name for it too’, said Oisín. ‘Why was it called that?’ said St Patrick. ‘Cainnelsciath, a druid of Fionn’s people, used inspect the atmosphere and prophesy for Fionn, and afterwards, he spoke to him:
- ‘Over there, Fionn’, the druid said, ‘you will find the hostel of Fatha Canann mac Mac Con mhic Mac Niadh mac Luighaidh. And do you see the three clouds which are over that spot?’ ‘Indeed, I see that’ said Fionn, and he said:
Fionn: ‘Cainnelsciath, over the hostel
I see three clouds brightly.
Tell everyone what the explanation for it is,
if it is allowed.’
Cainnelsciath: ‘I see a cloud clear as crystal,
which is over a wide-doored hostel.
There will be a lord, if the means be strong,
The chalk of shields being shattered.
I see a cloud, grey, foreboding grief.
It is between them, in the middle;
The colour of crows and of trickeries,
A battle of weapons playing.
A crimson cloud redder than summer
I see between them up above.
From battle or from wrathful reasons
comes the colour of very red blood.
I foretell that bodies will be tormented,
the destruction early in the day of a great host;
O King of Cliu who wounds every day;
I see the three clouds of woe.’
Like much medieval Irish poetry, this is somewhat opaque, but it is apparent that there is a correlation between the colour of the three clouds and the prognostications that are made from them within each stanza. The bright cloud corresponds to the surfaces of the shields whitened with chalk; the grey cloud anticipates the colour of the metal weapons, glas being often used for the colour of blades; and the red cloud obviously prefigures the blood that will be spilled in the hostel.
Our third example of cloud-divination, that from the Stowe Táin, is clearer. The redactor of this version adheres fairly closely to the 12th century Book of Leinster recension, modernizing its forms in a conservative manner. However, as the saga nears its end, the number of modernizations increases. An episode describing cloud-divining druids led by Cathbad, uber-druid of the Ulstermen, forms one of these interpolations. The hero Fergus mac Roig gives a description of one band among the assembled hosts, which consists of Cathbad along with his sons and druidic retinue:
‘I know that man’ said Fergus. ‘The Foundation of Knowledge, the Master of the Elements, The Heaven-Soaring One. The Blinder of Eyes. He who takes away the strength of the enemy though the incantations of druids, namely Cathbad the fair druid, with the druids of Ulster about him; and it is for this he makes augury in judging the elements – to ascertain therefrom how the great battle…will end. One of these clever men moreover raises his glance to heaven and scans the clouds of the sky and bears their answer to the marvellous troop that is with him. They all lift their eyes on high and watch the clouds and work their spells against the elements, so that the elements fall to warring with each other, until they discharge rain-clouds of fire downwards onto the camp and entrenchments of the men of Ireland.
The ability to manipulate the elements is the prime characteristic of druidic magic here. Again, the possibility exists that this conception is also drawn from Isidore of Seville, who explicitly tells us that the ability to agitate the elements is part of the magus’s stock-in-trade. This passage from the Táin in particular hints that cloud-divination is at times a kind of amalgam between the two primary roles of the druid in Irish medieval literature, combining prophecy with magical power over natural phenomena, particularly of the atmospheric kind.
Taking these texts together, we have a series of examples of cloud-divination, of which the earliest seem to be the Irish Life of Columba from c. 1150, which does not explicitly mention clouds, and the Acallam from late in the same century, which does. The scene of cloud-divination in the Stowe Táin is more ambiguous, and, as indicated above, could date from anywhere between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. But the lack of literary evidence for cloud-divination from before the twelfth century suggests two possibilities. First, it is not inconceivable that the néladóracht topos may have existed prior to the twelfth century, perhaps extending as far back as the Old Irish period and even beyond, as a real custom, into the pre-Christian past--but that it simply happens not to be attested in any surviving text from the early Middle Ages. (Medieval tale-lists make it dismayingly clear that a far greater corpus of Irish vernacular literature once existed than that which we now possess.) Carney’s ‘watchers of the heavens’ would seem to imply that he took this view. The second possibility is that the topos came into existence at some point in the 11th or 12th centuries. I think the latter is more likely, and I think that we can link the genesis of the topos to shifts in the connotations of the word magus during this period.
* * *
Druids and clouds are in a sense old associates in Irish literature, as one common aspect of druidic magic in the early texts is the manipulation of fogs and mist. For example, Adomnán’s Latin Life of St Columba, written about the year 700, has a marvellous scene in which Columba faces down an influential Pictish magus (i.e. druid) called Broíchán, who conjures up a thick mist over Loch Ness to obstruct the saint’s progress. The specific association with atmospheric vapours is in fact one of the few elements of the early Irish image of the druid which is not directly traceable to Isidore or to the Bible. However, the magical manipulation of mists and fogs also fits well with a certain kind of standard Christian cosmology, in which the lower atmosphere is an intermediate zone where demons as well as angels are free to work. The idea is ancient, and Augustine quotes the third century Neoplatonist Porphyry of Tyre on the subject:
In that letter, indeed, Porphyry repudiates all demons, whom he maintains to be so foolish as to be attracted by damp vapours, and therefore residing not in the ether, but in the air beneath the moon, and indeed in the moon itself.
Even if the connection of druids with mists and vapours reflects pre-Christian Irish beliefs, such beliefs would be easily conflated with the demonic associations articulated by Augustine, and which Adomnán suggests were well-known in early medieval Ireland. The connotations of magus in the late seventh and eighth centuries were already dual, and the idea of divination as one of the activities performed by such a person could be viewed in both a positive and a negative light. On the one hand, the biblical Magi offered a positive example of pagan prophets inspired to worship Christ though their knowledge of the stars; on the other, Isidore gave a vivid and full account of wicked magi, incorporating many of the details of prophecy and divinatory practice found in the Old Testament and the culture of Greece and Rome.
This duality is in fact found in the New Testament itself. Matthew’s Magi have skills that are pre-Christian and supernatural, yet they are neither evil nor destructive and are among the first to acknowledge Christ. Importantly, they opened the possibility of representing practitioners of astrology in a positive light, as can be seen in Tertullian’s famously ambivalent statement that their art was allowable before the birth of Christ, but became illicit immediately afterwards. Conversely, Simon Magus provides the New Testament paradigm for the wicked magician. Though the account of his encounter with Peter in Acts 8:9-24 is brief, he is described as a magus in the Vulgate and is chastised by the apostle for attempting to buy the power of the Holy Spirit. This story was greatly elaborated in the Acts of Peter, composed in Greek in the late second century. The majority of the text survives only in the Latin translation known as the Vercelli Acts, extant in a manuscript from the late sixth or early seventh century. In this more elaborate legend, two contests of power occur between St Peter and Simon, in the presence of the emperor Nero; in the second, the magician demonstrates his ability to fly, but crashes to his death when Peter orders the angels who hold him up to let him fall.
As noted above, the use of the term magus for the class of people termed druid in Old Irish seems to be very old. However, the equation worked both ways, so that biblical practitioners of magic could also be described in Irish with the term druí. It is clear that the Irish and Latin terms were effectively interchangeable, and thus the druid of early Irish literature existed within a network of semantic associations which bore absolutely no relation to native pre-Christian Celtic culture. For example, an Old Irish gloss on the Iannes et Mambres of 2 Timothy 3:8—the two Egyptian sorcerers who contended with Moses and Aaron---reads i. da druith aegeptaedi, or ‘i.e., two Egyptian druids’. And the standard name for Simon Magus in Irish was Símóin druí, ‘Simon the Druid’.
The connotations of the word magus in medieval Ireland were also strongly affected by the growth of a body of apocryphal legend around the biblical Magi. The Magi are in fact described notoriously vaguely in Matthew’s Gospel: as the media reminds us every Christmas, it is not stated anywhere in the biblical text that there were three of them, as opposed to two, or ten. But piety, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and a legend filling in the details had reached its full form by the tenth century; this legend was well-known in Ireland from the beginning. Different racial origins, colours of vestments and names in dog-Greek, Latin and Hebrew were ascribed to the visitors to the Christchild—their number fixed at three---often with a symbolic interpretation attached. The idea that the Magi had been astrologers was widely known in Ireland, an idea likely derived, as we have seen, from Isidore. Robert McNally has exhaustively studied the early Hiberno-Latin versions of the legend, and in the late eighth century text Interrogationes vel responsiones tam de veteri quam novo testamento, we also find the explicit designation of the Magi as astrologers:
The question is posed, ‘How did the Magi recognise the birth of Christ by means of a star?’ The answer is, ‘By two methods. First, from the prophecy which Balaam spoke, a star will arise out of Jacob; secondly, because they had been astrologers and on the Calends of January then they understood what kind of star would appear from this cause in the year of Christ’s birth. It gave the Magi advance warning, so that they recognised the star with care and followed it.
In several places, Hiberno-Latin references to the Magi-legend show a distinct awareness of the double nature of the divinatory power of the magus. In another eighth century text, which McNally argues was composed in Ireland itself, we find the following statement:
The Chaldeans observe the motions of the stars. Elsewhere, Augustine declares that a variety of magi taught to what point of space the light of the star [of Bethlehem] was aiming in the world. These magi make their observations out of curiosity about the universe, not out of evil intent.
In an eighth century Irish context, we can infer that magi ‘of evil intent’ would inevitably imply druids, recalling Muirchú’s characterizations. It is telling that the author attempts to draw a distinction here between natural philosophers and malevolent magicians, reflecting an anxiety about the ambivalence of the term. And in my final example from McNally, from the eighth century Irish Liber questionum in Evangeliis, the Magi come ex lege, non ex stella, a phrase which might be rendered ‘licitly, not as a result of astrology’. The author is at pains to dismiss the idea that the Magi truly followed the star, preferring an allegorical and ecclesiological interpretation of the episode:
The Magi are not given a number because the faithful have been multiplied beyond number. They are not named, because the names of unbelief were given over to oblivion after the coming of the Faith, like wicked heretical magi.
This passage goes to the absolute heart of the ambiguity of the Irish magus, who could equally be a noble individual integral to the coming of the faith, or someone wickedly pagan.
We have already seen how the magicians of the Old Testament could be referred to in Old Irish as druids; the equation could even extend to Matthew’s Magi themselves. In the eighth century poetry of Blathmac, the Magi are termed na trí druídea co ndánaib, ‘the three gifted druids.’ And in my final quotation, the fourteenth century Leabhar Breac presents us with a version of the Magi legend in which the ‘Three Holy Kings’ have explicitly become druids. The legend is based on a very early Latin text of the apocryphal Gospel according to the Hebrews; this, together with linguistic evidence, suggests that the text itself might originally have been produced in the eleventh or twelfth centuries. The text is explicitly termed ‘The Tidings of the Druids’ in Irish (Scéla na nDruad), and it runs as follows:
On a certain day, as Joseph stood at the entrance to the house, he saw a large group approach him directly from the east. Thereupon, Joseph said to Simeon: “Son, who are these drawing near us? They seem to have come from afar”. Then Joseph went towards them, and said to Simeon: “It appears to me, son, that they practice druidic augury and divination, for they do not take a single step without looking upward, and they are arguing and conversing about something amongst themselves…their appearance, colour and attire is unlike that of our own people. They are wearing bright, flowing robes, even-coloured and crimson tunics, long red cloaks and variegated gapped shoes. From their apparel they seem like kings or leaders.
This passage is strongly reminiscent of the description from afar of Cathbad and his marvelous entourage from the Stowe version of the Táin, with the important difference that magic is absent here: both groups observe the heavens for the purposes of augury, but these Magi do not manipulate the elements. This passage in fact gives us the crux of the relationship between cloud-divination and astrology. Looked at in the context of the vernacular saga literature, the form of augury the ‘druids’ practice here would naturally be taken to be cloud-divination. But viewed in terms of the medieval legend of the Magi, it would be equally natural to take it as astrology. A kind of discreet elision has occurred, and the actual nature of the ‘druidic augury’ has been left ambiguous.
We have surveyed a wide range of evidence in the course of this article. What conclusions can we draw, therefore, about the phenomenon of cloud-divination in medieval Irish literature? Ultimately, the creation of the topos seems likely to date to the eleventh or twelfth century, and to be an unexpected consequence of interchangeability of the terms magus and druí in Irish medieval culture. It is unlikely, I think, to be a historical druidic custom inherited from the pagan past (if it were, one would surely expect it to be attested earlier that the mid-twelfth century, somewhere among all the vivid images of prophesying druids which are extant in early Irish texts.) Further, it is plain that the slippage of the connotations of magus and druí was both complex and dynamic over the centuries. From the earliest, literary druids were traditionally invested with the power of prophecy, one of the few aspects of their characterization which seems likely to reflect the activities of their historical flesh-and-blood counterparts. The star-gazing of our earliest heaven-scanning druid, in the Vita Prima of Brigit, seems to have been influenced by Isidore’s highly authoritative description of magi---and the Magi---as astrologers, in the middle of the seventh century. That druid’s ambiguous position as both a pagan wizard (bad) and as a solitary analogue to the Magi present at Christ’s birth (good), underscores the ambivalence which the term magus carried in Ireland from the beginnings of literary activity there. The druids’ traditional association with clouds and mist dovetailed well with a Christian cosmology in which the lower atmosphere was seen as demon-haunted, and thus as particularly amenable to manipulation by means of malevolent pagan magic. But, on the other hand, the Magi of the New Testament provided a useful model when Irish literati wanted to create more sympathetic images of druids, as native prophets illuminated by a certain amount of natural grace. (The druid in the Vita Prima prophetically recognizes Brigit’s sanctity, for example, but she is unable to keep down the food he provides for her, as he is, in some sense, unclean by virtue of his paganism.) So these, as it were, are our ingredients for the creation of néladóracht.
Two developments coincided with the gap between the star-gazing magus of the Vita Prima in the mid seventh century, and the earliest episodes of cloud-divination in the mid-to-late twelfth. The first was the full elaboration of the medieval legend of the Magi, which, as we have seen, the Irish knew as well as anyone; and second was a general relaxation of ecclesiastical anxieties about astrology, presaging its widespread revival in the twelfth century. Such conditions seem to have allowed the transference of the locus of divination from the stars to the clouds, perhaps as a naturalisation, undoubtedly influenced by the ancient association of druids with mists, long hallowed by the oldest layer of Irish hagiography. As a further observation on this point, it is notable that the word for ‘soothsayers’ in Isaiah 2:6 and Micah 5:11, rendered augures in and divinationes respectively in the Vulgate, is in the Hebrew text literally ‘cloud-observers’. Micah in particular is explicit in underlining divine condemnation of such people, in the context of a furious prophecy of coming destruction for the heathen, along with their witchcraft, graven idols and sacred groves: …et auferam maleficia de manu tua, et divinationes non erunt in te, or, as the Authorised Version vigorously renders it, ‘And I will cut off witchcrafts out of thine hand; and thou shalt have no more soothsayers.’ Though this is a prophecy of future destruction, learned Irish churchmen might very well have taken it allegorically as a reference to the past of their own island, where they themselves were once the heathen, with native priest-prophets who apparently worshipped idols in sacred groves. It is just possible that they were aware of the meaning of the term in Hebrew: certainly some Hebrew at least was known in early medieval Ireland. But if creating a new literary form of divination was intended to distinguish native druidic magi from the biblical ones, it failed dismally, as the semantic overlap seems to have worked both ways. The marvellous troop of Magi described in Scéla na nDruad, would, one feels, be just as at home on the battlefields of Ulster as in the biblical stable. And so it seems that at the start of Irish literary activity, druids were magi, and inherited all the negative Patristic associations to which such personages were heir; but by the end of the Middle Ages in Ireland, and probably long before, the Magi themselves had become druids. And astrology, which may well have inspired the unusual motif of cloud-divination, had become obscurely and interchangeably confused with it.
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Irish Biblical Apocrypha: Selected Texts in Translation, trans. M. Herbert and R. McNamara (Edinburgh, 1989).
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Néladóracht: druidic cloud-divination in medieval Irish literature
The druids were the magico-religious intelligentsia of at least some of the Celtic-speaking peoples of north-western Europe in the centuries immediately either side of the birth of Christ, though they persisted rather longer in Ireland. As mysterious and evocative figures, they developed an unusually vivid and long-lasting cultural ‘afterlife’, extending from the early modern period down to the present, as Ronald Hutton has eloquently analyzed. Their reputation as wise natural philosophers—one of a number of conflicting associations they possess in the classical texts which describe them---is belied by the lack of concrete details about the precise scope of their much-vaunted wisdom.
One of the recurring aspects of modern, popular envisionings of the philosophical wisdom of the druids is the ascription to them of some form of astrological lore. This is based very largely on a single statement by Julius Caesar in his Gallic War, describing the curriculum of the druids of Gaul in the first century BCE. According to Caesar, Gaulish druids ‘hold long discussions about the heavenly bodies and their movements, the size of the universe and of the earth, the physical constitution of the world, and the power and properties of the gods; and they instruct the young men in these subjects.’ Indeed, so strong is the imaginative hold of this passage that one can now purchase imaginative volumes with titles like The Lost Zodiac of the Druids, The Handbook of Celtic Astrology and so on, none of which have the slightest historical validity. However, it is my contention in this article that this impulse to credit druids with some kind of divinatory, native sky-lore is not merely a modern phenomenon, but rather was shared by the composers of Irish vernacular saga-texts in the high Middle Ages, who occasionally depict druids and other pre-Christian prophets engaging in a form of cloud-divination termed néladóracht in the Irish language. The remainder of this article will explore this literary topos, and try to explain its emergence in medieval Ireland.
Ireland was the one place in Europe in which druids remained of interest and cultural importance during the Middle Ages, as common figures in the complex body of sagas-narratives, set in the pre-Christian past, which were composed in Irish from the end of the 7th century onwards. Ireland was largely converted to Christianity in the late fifth and early sixth centuries CE, as a result of the mission associated with St Patrick, although we know that Christians, probably including slaves captured in Roman Britain, were already present in the island shortly after the year 400. However, we can safely assume that the pre-Christian Irish did indeed have historical druids, like other Celtic speaking peoples. Native penitentials—Christian tracts giving the various penances one should do for every conceivable variety of sin—and law texts on social status make it clear that druids of a sort were still a going concern in Irish society until the turn of the eighth century, when they seem quietly to disappear. Between the mid-fifth century and the beginning of the eighth, therefore, the historical druids seem to have endured a steep lowering of their social status, entering a kind of twilight decline in a rapidly Christianizing, and then Christian, Ireland.
However, at roughly the same time as real druids were finally fading permanently into history, an immensely vivid and inventive vernacular literary culture began to flower, which delighted in setting tales and sagas in an imagined version of the pre-Christian past of several hundred years previously. Druids play a prominent part in these tales as counselors to kings, magicians, judges and prophets, but the relationship between these literary druids and their historical forebears is complex and problematic. During the last thirty-to-forty years, scholars have had a revolution in the way that the cultural thought-world and artistic priorities of the literati of medieval Ireland are envisaged. There was once a tendency, especially in the late 19th century, to look at sagas from medieval Ireland as though they were tracts describing the culture of the pre-Christian Irish Iron Age in historically-reliable terms. Among scholars in the field, this tendency existed in more and less sophisticated versions, and is still to be seen in many popular books about the ancient Celts, which tend to neglect current research in favour of the sepia wash of romance. But within the academy, we no longer think of these medieval sagas as accurate portrayals of life in pre-Christian Ireland. Rather, we recognize them as constructed: that is, as deliberate artistic creations---drawing on inherited material, to be sure, but adapting it freely to provoke, stimulate and entertain their medieval, Christian audience. (So standard has this consensus become in the field, it is sometimes termed the ‘new orthodoxy’.) So we cannot look at the activities of druids in Irish medieval literary texts and take them naively as anthropologically accurate transcriptions. We work today with an awareness that medieval Ireland was culturally highly creative and linked to the wider world of Christendom, not an isolated backwater brooding on a shadowy and legend-filled past. We also see vernacular saga literature emerging fundamentally from the monastery: the sagas, with their shapeshifting, pagan gods, and ripe sexuality are nevertheless products of a Christian intellectual elite who were familiar with Latin learning and steeped in the Bible and the biblical exegesis of the Church Fathers. Such learning affected the shaping of literary narratives at a profound level.
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In medieval Ireland, there were two main words for druid, one in each of the two languages of the literati. The first was Old Irish druí, of which the plural was (confusingly for modern English speakers) druid, and which derives from Common Celtic *dru-wids, meaning ‘thorough knower’, or possibly ‘oak-knower’---the first element is disputed. The second was Hiberno-Latin magus, meaning ‘druid, wizard, magian, magician’, and, as an important and obviously related meaning, ‘one of the Magi of the Gospel according to St Matthew’. This latter meaning will be highly significant for my argument in this article. These two terms are used essentially interchangeably, the choice being dependent on the main language of the text in question.
In the earlier sagas, which date from the seventh to the eleventh centuries, druids are depicted as divining the future and prophesying by several methods. In some texts they are capable of a kind of eerie clairvoyance, often termed imbas for-osna, or ‘the embracing vision which enlightens’. In the eighth century saga Aided Chonchobuir, for example, druids perceive the Crucifixion from the other end of Europe, seeing it in visionary ‘real time’, as it were; in the seventh century Latin Life of St Patrick ascribed to Muirchú, the druids (termed magi) prophesy the coming of the saint. Elsewhere, they are able to practice a form of prophetic psychometry: in the originally ninth century saga Longes mac nUislenn, the Ulster druid Cathbad is able to foresee the adult appearance and disastrous career of the tragic heroine Derdriu, simply by placing his hand on her mother’s belly while Derdriu herself is still in the womb. Other sagas speak of druidic knowledge of lucky and unlucky days, and of dream-visions induced by wrapping oneself in the hide of a slaughtered bull before going to sleep. Any and all of these may genuinely reflect pre-Christian druidic practice, though we cannot be certain. None of these, however, are astrological.
Nevertheless, Celtic specialists have not been immune to the lure of imputing astrological know-how to ancient Irish druids. Fergus Kelly and James Carney—great scholars both---state straight-forwardly that divination from celestial phenomena formed one of the roles of the Irish druid. Kelly tells us: ‘The druid (Old Irish druí) was priest, prophet, astrologer, and teacher of the sons of nobles.’ Carney writes: ‘In Latin writing, druí is translated magus, and his role is that of necromancer and watcher of the heavens.’ The confidence of both these statements should make us pause, though Carney’s ‘watcher of the heavens’ perhaps shows a justified wariness about using the word ‘astrologer’. On the one hand, those elements of the Irish depictions of druids which echo the Classical sources can be seen as confirming the latter, and thus being good evidence for the historical reality of a particular druidic custom. Kelly and Carney’s perspectives implicitly follow this line of reasoning. Amongst the Classical sources, there are indeed passages which support the idea that druids in continental Celtic societies studied the stars: we have already heard from Julius Caesar on Gaul. That passage, quoted above, may simply be historically accurate: Caesar had, after all, a pressing need to understand where power lay in Gaulish society. But on the other hand, doubts have been cast on the accuracy of Caesar’s ethnography of the region, as he may have been drawing on the lost testimony of the Syrian philosopher Posidonius here, and thus it is not certain that he was writing from personal experience when it came to specific details of this kind. Indeed. the ascription of sophisticated natural philosophy to the druids may represent a projection of familiar Pythagoreanism onto a barbarian caste whose customs were largely unknown.
Thus we must approach classical texts describing druidic star-knowledge with some wariness, despite their aura of plausibility. This applies particularly to their use as comparanda for references to druids in the Irish medieval literature, especially when one tries to create a picture the practices of the historical druids thereby. In fact, there is only one reference from early medieval Ireland to a druid studying the stars, found in the mid-seventh century Vita Prima S. Brigitae, the earliest Latin life of St Brigit, Ireland’s mother-saint. Born to the slave-girl of a druid, Brigit’s birth is accompanied by miraculous phenomena, which the druid observes in person:
One night this druid (magus) was keeping watch, as was his custom, contemplating the stars of heaven, and throughout the entire night he saw a blazing column of fire rising out of the hut in which the slave-girl (ancilla) was sleeping with her daughter, and he called to him another man, and he saw the same thing.
It is this very passage that Kelly cites as his evidence that Irish druids were ‘astrologers’. Again, it is possible that this was indeed the case, and that these lines, written at a time when druids seem still to have existed in Ireland, do preserve genuine information about them. But if so, this is the sole passage to ascribe this kind of activity to an Irish druid, and a number of objections can be raised. First---in an excellent example of how interpretations of medieval Irish images of druids can be unconsciously coloured by our knowledge of the Classical accounts---it is not clear whether watching the stars through the night is to be taken as a custom of magi in general, or just of this particular magus. Secondly, if we do take the passage as implying that one of the roles of the druidic class was to study the stars, once again we cannot necessarily take this as reliable historical information. Finally, the detail is part of the narration of a natal mirabilium, and is, I suspect, intended to be taken as one of a series of deliberate echoes in the passage of Matthew’s account of Christ’s nativity. The pillar of fire over the hut clearly recalls the star of Bethlehem over the stable, and just as Matthew has the Magi following a star, the author of the Vita Prima has one magus scanning the stars.
Matthew’s Gospel does not make it explicit whether the Magi were astrologers, of course, but from early on Irish churchmen had one weighty source available to them which strongly stated that they were---namely the Etymologiae, Isidore of Seville’s great seventh-century encyclopedia, which we know was highly esteemed in Ireland within a few decades of its composition. Isidore devotes a section of the Etymologiae to the subdivisions of magi, as sinister and diabolically-inspired pagan diviners, drawing, as usual, on a wide variety of biblical and classical sources. Those who predict the future by the stars form an important category:
Astrologi are so called because they make auguries from the stars. For they describe the births of human beings by means of the twelve signs of heaven, and through the movement of the stars they attempt to foretell the habits, roles, and fates of those who are born - that is, who will have been born in what sort of sign, or what fate he who is born may have in life. These are they who are commonly called mathematici. But originally these same star-interpreters were termed magi; thus it is said that they were the ones in the Gospel who announced that Christ had been born.
It has long been recognised that the magi of Muirchú’s Life of Patrick, clearly meant to be druids, were deliberately paralleled to the wicked priests and magicians of the Old Testament; and given Isidore’s tremendous influence upon Irish learning from the mid-seventh century, it would be unsurprising to find Brigit’s hagiographer drawing upon the former’s description of pagan magicians to flesh out his magus. Thus, we are not obliged to take the Vita Prima at face value as evidence—the only evidence---for the astrological skills of Irish druids, as there is another possible and plausible explanation. Druidic astrology, at least in Ireland, is likely to be a mirage.
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Carney described the historical druids as ‘watchers of the sky’, which is prudently imprecise on the issue of what it was that they were actually scrutinizing. But in the eleventh century or twelfth century, a new skill—cloud divination---seems to have been added to the divinatory repertoire of the literary druid. Cloud-divination is both reminiscent of astrology and yet dissimilar to it; I aim to show below that its appearance as a druidic skill in literary texts in this period reflects developments in the meaning of the word magus in Ireland, and in particular its semantic superimposition of the senses ‘pagan Irish diviner’, on the one hand, and ‘heaven-scanning, Christ-child-visiting wise man’, on the other. Examples of cloud-divination occur in at least five surviving vernacular texts of the high and late Middle Ages (from the twelfth century to the fifteenth), of which I am going to discuss three here. These are a hagiographical work, the so-called ‘Irish Life of Columba’, plus two saga-narratives, Acallam na Senórach and the Stowe version of Táin Bó Cúailnge. I will describe each of these texts briefly here in turn as they are unlikely to be familiar to non-specialists.
The ‘Irish Life of Columba’ is a Middle Irish vita of St Columba or Colum Cille of Iona, Ireland’s third great saint after Patrick and Brigit, who died in 597 CE. (It is not to be confused with Adomnán’s much more famous Latin Life of the saint, produced on Iona around a century after Columba’s death.) Máire Herbert has shown that the Irish Life was probably produced at Derry, in what is now Northern Ireland, around 1150, at the point when that monastery assumed the headship of the various interdependent foundations associated with the saint’s patronal authority. Herbert also points out that the Life was thus undoubtedly intended for an Irish audience, and that it is a sophisticated piece of work which continually looks to literary exemplars. Turning our second text, the splendidly autumnal Acallam na Senórach--- recently translated as ‘Tales of the Elders of Ireland’---we find a novel-length, intricately complex collection of essentially secular tales about the great Gaelic hero Fionn mac Cumhail (Finn Mac Cool) and his associates, dated to the turn of the 13th century. It is the longest tale extant in medieval Irish, and synthesizes earlier material in a way congruent with the sophisticated tastes of high medieval audiences. As with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Acallam situates multiple lesser stories within an overarching frame-tale, according to which a few straggling heroic warriors from Ireland’s pre-Christian past live on mysteriously, eventually meeting St Patrick and describing their past exploits to him, as well as those of Fionn, their lord. Finally, the Stowe Táin Bó Cúailnge is a very late medieval redaction of the greatest of all Irish sagas, the famous ‘Cattle-Raid of Cooley’, which exists in several versions, all zestfully ultraviolent. The story details the epic clash between the Ulstermen, with their champion Cú Chulainn, and the armies of the rest of Ireland under the formidable Queen Medb of Connaught and her husband Aillil. The version of the tale that has historically been most often translated for a general audience dates to the twelfth century, and is found in the Book of Leinster; but a starker and more direct eighth-century version survives in two other manuscripts, the twelfth century Leabhar na hUidhre and the late fourteenth century Yellow Book of Lecan, albeit in a seriously flawed form in both cases. In more recent times, it is this less flowery, earlier version that has formed the basis for the excellent translations of Thomas Kinsella and Ciarán Carson. The Stowe Táin, however, is yet another version of the story, forming a late recension probably dating to the 15th century, and one which has attracted rather less critical comment.
The example of cloud-divination in the Irish Life of Columba is somewhat ambiguous, but it is likely to be the earliest example of the topos extant. The passage in question purports to describe an incident during Columba’s early boyhood in the north of Ireland. When the time is coming for Columba to begin to learn to read, Cruithnechán, the boy’s priestly guardian, makes suitable enquiries in the district:
… the priest went to a prophet (fáith) who was in the land to ask him when it would be right for the boy to begin. When the prophet had examined the sky, this is what he said: ‘Write his alphabet for him now.’
Here there seems to be no contradiction between an ecclesiastical role and consulting a secular prophet, who performs what seems likely to be cloud-divination. It is notable that it is a fáith, a ‘prophet’, who is visited here, not a druí, or druid. However it is clear that the role of the fáith was synonymous to an extent with that of the druí, as the ancient linkage of the druides or druidae with the vates (directly cognate with Irish fáith and of the same meaning) suggests.
In our second example, drawn from Acallam na Senórach, we find the warrior Oisín, son of Fionn mac Cumhail, describing the nature of a certain hill to St Patrick. The superannuated hero’s account segues into a recollection of events which happened near the hill back in the distant past. Prose gives way to six stanzas of verse in which Fionn questions his druid, Cainnelsciath, about what certain ominous clouds portend, and is duly answered:
‘“The Hill of Knowledge” is another name for it too’, said Oisín. ‘Why was it called that?’ said St Patrick. ‘Cainnelsciath, a druid of Fionn’s people, used inspect the atmosphere and prophesy for Fionn, and afterwards, he spoke to him:
- ‘Over there, Fionn’, the druid said, ‘you will find the hostel of Fatha Canann mac Mac Con mhic Mac Niadh mac Luighaidh. And do you see the three clouds which are over that spot?’ ‘Indeed, I see that’ said Fionn, and he said:
Fionn: ‘Cainnelsciath, over the hostel
I see three clouds brightly.
Tell everyone what the explanation for it is,
if it is allowed.’
Cainnelsciath: ‘I see a cloud clear as crystal,
which is over a wide-doored hostel.
There will be a lord, if the means be strong,
The chalk of shields being shattered.
I see a cloud, grey, foreboding grief.
It is between them, in the middle;
The colour of crows and of trickeries,
A battle of weapons playing.
A crimson cloud redder than summer
I see between them up above.
From battle or from wrathful reasons
comes the colour of very red blood.
I foretell that bodies will be tormented,
the destruction early in the day of a great host;
O King of Cliu who wounds every day;
I see the three clouds of woe.’
Like much medieval Irish poetry, this is somewhat opaque, but it is apparent that there is a correlation between the colour of the three clouds and the prognostications that are made from them within each stanza. The bright cloud corresponds to the surfaces of the shields whitened with chalk; the grey cloud anticipates the colour of the metal weapons, glas being often used for the colour of blades; and the red cloud obviously prefigures the blood that will be spilled in the hostel.
Our third example of cloud-divination, that from the Stowe Táin, is clearer. The redactor of this version adheres fairly closely to the 12th century Book of Leinster recension, modernizing its forms in a conservative manner. However, as the saga nears its end, the number of modernizations increases. An episode describing cloud-divining druids led by Cathbad, uber-druid of the Ulstermen, forms one of these interpolations. The hero Fergus mac Roig gives a description of one band among the assembled hosts, which consists of Cathbad along with his sons and druidic retinue:
‘I know that man’ said Fergus. ‘The Foundation of Knowledge, the Master of the Elements, The Heaven-Soaring One. The Blinder of Eyes. He who takes away the strength of the enemy though the incantations of druids, namely Cathbad the fair druid, with the druids of Ulster about him; and it is for this he makes augury in judging the elements – to ascertain therefrom how the great battle…will end. One of these clever men moreover raises his glance to heaven and scans the clouds of the sky and bears their answer to the marvellous troop that is with him. They all lift their eyes on high and watch the clouds and work their spells against the elements, so that the elements fall to warring with each other, until they discharge rain-clouds of fire downwards onto the camp and entrenchments of the men of Ireland.
The ability to manipulate the elements is the prime characteristic of druidic magic here. Again, the possibility exists that this conception is also drawn from Isidore of Seville, who explicitly tells us that the ability to agitate the elements is part of the magus’s stock-in-trade. This passage from the Táin in particular hints that cloud-divination is at times a kind of amalgam between the two primary roles of the druid in Irish medieval literature, combining prophecy with magical power over natural phenomena, particularly of the atmospheric kind.
Taking these texts together, we have a series of examples of cloud-divination, of which the earliest seem to be the Irish Life of Columba from c. 1150, which does not explicitly mention clouds, and the Acallam from late in the same century, which does. The scene of cloud-divination in the Stowe Táin is more ambiguous, and, as indicated above, could date from anywhere between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. But the lack of literary evidence for cloud-divination from before the twelfth century suggests two possibilities. First, it is not inconceivable that the néladóracht topos may have existed prior to the twelfth century, perhaps extending as far back as the Old Irish period and even beyond, as a real custom, into the pre-Christian past--but that it simply happens not to be attested in any surviving text from the early Middle Ages. (Medieval tale-lists make it dismayingly clear that a far greater corpus of Irish vernacular literature once existed than that which we now possess.) Carney’s ‘watchers of the heavens’ would seem to imply that he took this view. The second possibility is that the topos came into existence at some point in the 11th or 12th centuries. I think the latter is more likely, and I think that we can link the genesis of the topos to shifts in the connotations of the word magus during this period.
* * *
Druids and clouds are in a sense old associates in Irish literature, as one common aspect of druidic magic in the early texts is the manipulation of fogs and mist. For example, Adomnán’s Latin Life of St Columba, written about the year 700, has a marvellous scene in which Columba faces down an influential Pictish magus (i.e. druid) called Broíchán, who conjures up a thick mist over Loch Ness to obstruct the saint’s progress. The specific association with atmospheric vapours is in fact one of the few elements of the early Irish image of the druid which is not directly traceable to Isidore or to the Bible. However, the magical manipulation of mists and fogs also fits well with a certain kind of standard Christian cosmology, in which the lower atmosphere is an intermediate zone where demons as well as angels are free to work. The idea is ancient, and Augustine quotes the third century Neoplatonist Porphyry of Tyre on the subject:
In that letter, indeed, Porphyry repudiates all demons, whom he maintains to be so foolish as to be attracted by damp vapours, and therefore residing not in the ether, but in the air beneath the moon, and indeed in the moon itself.
Even if the connection of druids with mists and vapours reflects pre-Christian Irish beliefs, such beliefs would be easily conflated with the demonic associations articulated by Augustine, and which Adomnán suggests were well-known in early medieval Ireland. The connotations of magus in the late seventh and eighth centuries were already dual, and the idea of divination as one of the activities performed by such a person could be viewed in both a positive and a negative light. On the one hand, the biblical Magi offered a positive example of pagan prophets inspired to worship Christ though their knowledge of the stars; on the other, Isidore gave a vivid and full account of wicked magi, incorporating many of the details of prophecy and divinatory practice found in the Old Testament and the culture of Greece and Rome.
This duality is in fact found in the New Testament itself. Matthew’s Magi have skills that are pre-Christian and supernatural, yet they are neither evil nor destructive and are among the first to acknowledge Christ. Importantly, they opened the possibility of representing practitioners of astrology in a positive light, as can be seen in Tertullian’s famously ambivalent statement that their art was allowable before the birth of Christ, but became illicit immediately afterwards. Conversely, Simon Magus provides the New Testament paradigm for the wicked magician. Though the account of his encounter with Peter in Acts 8:9-24 is brief, he is described as a magus in the Vulgate and is chastised by the apostle for attempting to buy the power of the Holy Spirit. This story was greatly elaborated in the Acts of Peter, composed in Greek in the late second century. The majority of the text survives only in the Latin translation known as the Vercelli Acts, extant in a manuscript from the late sixth or early seventh century. In this more elaborate legend, two contests of power occur between St Peter and Simon, in the presence of the emperor Nero; in the second, the magician demonstrates his ability to fly, but crashes to his death when Peter orders the angels who hold him up to let him fall.
As noted above, the use of the term magus for the class of people termed druid in Old Irish seems to be very old. However, the equation worked both ways, so that biblical practitioners of magic could also be described in Irish with the term druí. It is clear that the Irish and Latin terms were effectively interchangeable, and thus the druid of early Irish literature existed within a network of semantic associations which bore absolutely no relation to native pre-Christian Celtic culture. For example, an Old Irish gloss on the Iannes et Mambres of 2 Timothy 3:8—the two Egyptian sorcerers who contended with Moses and Aaron---reads i. da druith aegeptaedi, or ‘i.e., two Egyptian druids’. And the standard name for Simon Magus in Irish was Símóin druí, ‘Simon the Druid’.
The connotations of the word magus in medieval Ireland were also strongly affected by the growth of a body of apocryphal legend around the biblical Magi. The Magi are in fact described notoriously vaguely in Matthew’s Gospel: as the media reminds us every Christmas, it is not stated anywhere in the biblical text that there were three of them, as opposed to two, or ten. But piety, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and a legend filling in the details had reached its full form by the tenth century; this legend was well-known in Ireland from the beginning. Different racial origins, colours of vestments and names in dog-Greek, Latin and Hebrew were ascribed to the visitors to the Christchild—their number fixed at three---often with a symbolic interpretation attached. The idea that the Magi had been astrologers was widely known in Ireland, an idea likely derived, as we have seen, from Isidore. Robert McNally has exhaustively studied the early Hiberno-Latin versions of the legend, and in the late eighth century text Interrogationes vel responsiones tam de veteri quam novo testamento, we also find the explicit designation of the Magi as astrologers:
The question is posed, ‘How did the Magi recognise the birth of Christ by means of a star?’ The answer is, ‘By two methods. First, from the prophecy which Balaam spoke, a star will arise out of Jacob; secondly, because they had been astrologers and on the Calends of January then they understood what kind of star would appear from this cause in the year of Christ’s birth. It gave the Magi advance warning, so that they recognised the star with care and followed it.
In several places, Hiberno-Latin references to the Magi-legend show a distinct awareness of the double nature of the divinatory power of the magus. In another eighth century text, which McNally argues was composed in Ireland itself, we find the following statement:
The Chaldeans observe the motions of the stars. Elsewhere, Augustine declares that a variety of magi taught to what point of space the light of the star [of Bethlehem] was aiming in the world. These magi make their observations out of curiosity about the universe, not out of evil intent.
In an eighth century Irish context, we can infer that magi ‘of evil intent’ would inevitably imply druids, recalling Muirchú’s characterizations. It is telling that the author attempts to draw a distinction here between natural philosophers and malevolent magicians, reflecting an anxiety about the ambivalence of the term. And in my final example from McNally, from the eighth century Irish Liber questionum in Evangeliis, the Magi come ex lege, non ex stella, a phrase which might be rendered ‘licitly, not as a result of astrology’. The author is at pains to dismiss the idea that the Magi truly followed the star, preferring an allegorical and ecclesiological interpretation of the episode:
The Magi are not given a number because the faithful have been multiplied beyond number. They are not named, because the names of unbelief were given over to oblivion after the coming of the Faith, like wicked heretical magi.
This passage goes to the absolute heart of the ambiguity of the Irish magus, who could equally be a noble individual integral to the coming of the faith, or someone wickedly pagan.
We have already seen how the magicians of the Old Testament could be referred to in Old Irish as druids; the equation could even extend to Matthew’s Magi themselves. In the eighth century poetry of Blathmac, the Magi are termed na trí druídea co ndánaib, ‘the three gifted druids.’ And in my final quotation, the fourteenth century Leabhar Breac presents us with a version of the Magi legend in which the ‘Three Holy Kings’ have explicitly become druids. The legend is based on a very early Latin text of the apocryphal Gospel according to the Hebrews; this, together with linguistic evidence, suggests that the text itself might originally have been produced in the eleventh or twelfth centuries. The text is explicitly termed ‘The Tidings of the Druids’ in Irish (Scéla na nDruad), and it runs as follows:
On a certain day, as Joseph stood at the entrance to the house, he saw a large group approach him directly from the east. Thereupon, Joseph said to Simeon: “Son, who are these drawing near us? They seem to have come from afar”. Then Joseph went towards them, and said to Simeon: “It appears to me, son, that they practice druidic augury and divination, for they do not take a single step without looking upward, and they are arguing and conversing about something amongst themselves…their appearance, colour and attire is unlike that of our own people. They are wearing bright, flowing robes, even-coloured and crimson tunics, long red cloaks and variegated gapped shoes. From their apparel they seem like kings or leaders.
This passage is strongly reminiscent of the description from afar of Cathbad and his marvelous entourage from the Stowe version of the Táin, with the important difference that magic is absent here: both groups observe the heavens for the purposes of augury, but these Magi do not manipulate the elements. This passage in fact gives us the crux of the relationship between cloud-divination and astrology. Looked at in the context of the vernacular saga literature, the form of augury the ‘druids’ practice here would naturally be taken to be cloud-divination. But viewed in terms of the medieval legend of the Magi, it would be equally natural to take it as astrology. A kind of discreet elision has occurred, and the actual nature of the ‘druidic augury’ has been left ambiguous.
We have surveyed a wide range of evidence in the course of this article. What conclusions can we draw, therefore, about the phenomenon of cloud-divination in medieval Irish literature? Ultimately, the creation of the topos seems likely to date to the eleventh or twelfth century, and to be an unexpected consequence of interchangeability of the terms magus and druí in Irish medieval culture. It is unlikely, I think, to be a historical druidic custom inherited from the pagan past (if it were, one would surely expect it to be attested earlier that the mid-twelfth century, somewhere among all the vivid images of prophesying druids which are extant in early Irish texts.) Further, it is plain that the slippage of the connotations of magus and druí was both complex and dynamic over the centuries. From the earliest, literary druids were traditionally invested with the power of prophecy, one of the few aspects of their characterization which seems likely to reflect the activities of their historical flesh-and-blood counterparts. The star-gazing of our earliest heaven-scanning druid, in the Vita Prima of Brigit, seems to have been influenced by Isidore’s highly authoritative description of magi---and the Magi---as astrologers, in the middle of the seventh century. That druid’s ambiguous position as both a pagan wizard (bad) and as a solitary analogue to the Magi present at Christ’s birth (good), underscores the ambivalence which the term magus carried in Ireland from the beginnings of literary activity there. The druids’ traditional association with clouds and mist dovetailed well with a Christian cosmology in which the lower atmosphere was seen as demon-haunted, and thus as particularly amenable to manipulation by means of malevolent pagan magic. But, on the other hand, the Magi of the New Testament provided a useful model when Irish literati wanted to create more sympathetic images of druids, as native prophets illuminated by a certain amount of natural grace. (The druid in the Vita Prima prophetically recognizes Brigit’s sanctity, for example, but she is unable to keep down the food he provides for her, as he is, in some sense, unclean by virtue of his paganism.) So these, as it were, are our ingredients for the creation of néladóracht.
Two developments coincided with the gap between the star-gazing magus of the Vita Prima in the mid seventh century, and the earliest episodes of cloud-divination in the mid-to-late twelfth. The first was the full elaboration of the medieval legend of the Magi, which, as we have seen, the Irish knew as well as anyone; and second was a general relaxation of ecclesiastical anxieties about astrology, presaging its widespread revival in the twelfth century. Such conditions seem to have allowed the transference of the locus of divination from the stars to the clouds, perhaps as a naturalisation, undoubtedly influenced by the ancient association of druids with mists, long hallowed by the oldest layer of Irish hagiography. As a further observation on this point, it is notable that the word for ‘soothsayers’ in Isaiah 2:6 and Micah 5:11, rendered augures in and divinationes respectively in the Vulgate, is in the Hebrew text literally ‘cloud-observers’. Micah in particular is explicit in underlining divine condemnation of such people, in the context of a furious prophecy of coming destruction for the heathen, along with their witchcraft, graven idols and sacred groves: …et auferam maleficia de manu tua, et divinationes non erunt in te, or, as the Authorised Version vigorously renders it, ‘And I will cut off witchcrafts out of thine hand; and thou shalt have no more soothsayers.’ Though this is a prophecy of future destruction, learned Irish churchmen might very well have taken it allegorically as a reference to the past of their own island, where they themselves were once the heathen, with native priest-prophets who apparently worshipped idols in sacred groves. It is just possible that they were aware of the meaning of the term in Hebrew: certainly some Hebrew at least was known in early medieval Ireland. But if creating a new literary form of divination was intended to distinguish native druidic magi from the biblical ones, it failed dismally, as the semantic overlap seems to have worked both ways. The marvellous troop of Magi described in Scéla na nDruad, would, one feels, be just as at home on the battlefields of Ulster as in the biblical stable. And so it seems that at the start of Irish literary activity, druids were magi, and inherited all the negative Patristic associations to which such personages were heir; but by the end of the Middle Ages in Ireland, and probably long before, the Magi themselves had become druids. And astrology, which may well have inspired the unusual motif of cloud-divination, had become obscurely and interchangeably confused with it.
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