Where the gods go

A hot sun beat down upon flowering gorse and flowerless heather; and on every side except the east, where there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level horizon and brown boglands with a few green places and here and there the glitter of water. One could imagine that had it been twilight and not early afternoon, and had there been vapours drifting and frothing where there were now but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring in one, as few places even in Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar to Celtic romance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as with Gothic nations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great spaces and windy light.

– W.B. Yeats

Statue of Celtic hero Cuchulainn by Oliver Sheppard in the window of the GPO, Dublin – commemorating the 1916 rising.

Yeats introduced the book of Celtic mythology Gods and Fighting Men this way, depicting how he saw Ireland and showing us why these myths of fairies and otherworldly creatures have been so popular for so long.

He goes on to talk about the change of mythology over time, particularly the changes to Celtic mythology. As with all things, stories change over time. With the oncoming of Christianity, Celtic gods were transformed by word of mouth into kings. During a time when all stories were oral stories and no one was writing anything down, the myths were so fundamentally changed that it’s difficult to look back and see what they had been before. There’s too much fog, now, for us to see.

But you can still see the hint of the other-world in these stories. These kings who aren’t quite kings, ruling over people in the mist shrouded hills. Folk tales and mythology from Ireland have a special quality to them, a source–as Yeats said–in great spaces and windy light, where the veil between god, fey creatures and human kind is thin and anyone could  just trip through it one day.

Reading the myths now, I’m reminded of popular historical fictions that take characters of myth and present them in a realistic way, the way Miller’s The Song of Achilles does, or Renault’s The King Must Die does. We take these figures that are larger than life and we find a way to fit them into what we know, and what we believe the parameters of our are, and in doing so a part of that magic is brought into our world with them.

I’m reminded, too, of the popularity of Urban Fantasy today and the way we long to contextualize these magical things and bring them through the veil and into our world.

These myths and stories never leave us. We’re constantly reinventing them to fit in our lives, to try to poke and see where that supposed veil is at its thinnest so we can pull some of that old magic back through.