The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog Quotes

“Ireland is still what novelist Edna O'Brien calls a "pagan place." But that paganism does not conflict with a devout Catholicism that embraces and absorbs it, in a way that can seem mysterious, even heretical, elsewhere. In Ireland, Christianity arrived without lions and gladiators, survived without autos-da-fe and Inquisitions. The old ways were seamlessly bonded to the new, so that ancient rituals continued, ancient divinities became saints, ancient holy sites were maintained just as they had been for generations and generations.”
― Patricia Monaghan, The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit

“Hours passed, but I could not make myself leave the silent land. Feelings rushed through me like the sighing wind: remembered losses, stinging anger at feeling those losses again, panic at not knowing how to balance contradictions, piercing sorrow at the fragility of beauty. But even as those feelings surged through me, I felt something else as well, a kind of joy that is not separate from pain and that cannot exist in isolation from it, a great tearing hunger to live in this world as fully as I could, until I heard the wailing of the fairy woman at my death.”
― Patricia Monaghan, The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit

“I awaken myself to the greatest lesson Ireland offers: that I must wake up to whatever place I find myself, wake up to its seasons and weather, its heritage and special beauties, its ultimate and indisputable holiness.

I have news for you: spring comes everywhere with sweetness and hope. Summer's fullness becomes harvest, then the world sleeps through a dark time. This is the only truth: that just as Ireland is sacred, so all land is sacred, as we are all sacred. This is my news.”
― Patricia Monaghan, The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit

“Grief is a strange journey. Each time we embark upon it, it is as though we have never taken its roads before. No, I have that wrong: each grief brings us through a familiar landscape carved into unrecognizable contours. For we do not only lose another person; we lose the person we were with the one we lost.”
― Patricia Monaghan, The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit

“Egyptians built pyramids; Americans, skyscrapers; the megalithic Irish, mountain cairns. And while I admit it is impossible to be certain what Danu's people believed, the obsessive topping of Munster Hills with navel and nipples suggest they saw the land as a woman's body, the earth as feminine. And if so, what then? Did they imagine the earth acting like a woman, laughing, singing, weeping, taking a lover, nursing a child?”
― Patricia Monaghan, The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit

“In other Celtic lands, destruction of the ancient bardic orders meant the loss of history and myth as well as of poetry. But not in Ireland -- at least, not entirely. There, the melding of the Christian and the pagan began early, during the great period of Celtic monasticism. Irish monks of that period provided most of our written records of Celtic mythology. In continental Europe, evidence of Celtic beliefs is found only in sculpture; in Britain, it is found only in a few verbal shards and the occasional inscribed statue; but in Ireland we find entire epics, whole chants and songs, lengthy narratives. In the curvilinear script for which they are justly famous, Irish monks wrote down the stories, poems, place-names, and other lore of their pagan ancestors before it disappeared in the mists of history.”
― Patricia Monaghan, The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit

“The American definition of paganism is especially suspect among the Irish, too, when it seems to imply adherence to some British cult. The fact that most of the self-proclaimed "witches" in Ireland are English does not escape comment, and notice is also given to the number of American tourists who traipse through on pilgrimages to these minor celebrities and make no inquires about local beliefs.”
― Patricia Monaghan, The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit