First Bambie Thug, and now some nonsense about Saint Brigid’s Day and a pagan goddess who merely happened to have the same name. Honestly, Ireland, we get it. You have changed. Changed from what, anyway? Yeats and Synge put on record the Ireland the Catholic topcoat of which was very ancient, but was nevertheless that, a lick of paint on a profoundly pagan culture.
Catholic Ireland as most people think of it did not begin to emerge until about 1870, or reach its fullest form, never complete, until 1890 or thereabouts. From then, it did not last 100 years. It never produced a Catholic intellectual of any international importance. There is no Irish Newman; in fact, he briefly spent the least successful period of his life there. All in awe of him, and therefore with a strong sense of England as a bastion of the Faith, priests from the Church's new heartlands of the Global South are often unaware that Ireland was ever considered anything special in Her life. Perhaps it never was?
But Saint Paul’s elemental spirits, which are Saint John’s fallen angels, are real, and they are what the human race worships in the absence of Abrahamic monotheism, not as worthy of worship, which they are not, but as deserving of fear, which to an extent they are. The startlingly similar accounts and depictions of demons on different sides of the world arise from different people’s and different peoples’ encounters with the same ones. They are always there, remaining prominent in Ireland, as anywhere, for many centuries until the Faith reached its zenith, and returning to the fore, as anywhere, now that it is in retreat.
Spot on as ever.
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