"Goddess of the Land:
symbols of sovereignty and the women of Ireland"
© by Molly ní Dana

December 1998
submitted to Ruth O'Hara, Ph.D, for 'The Irish Mind'

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Richard Dawkins,The Extended Phenotype, Oxford, 1982, cited in Sheldrake, Rupert,The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature, (Random House, Vintage Books, 1988, 1989)
This all happened in my personal life contemporaneous with the most extreme violence of the early 1970s in the North of Ireland and no one who was willing to talk about Irish ethnicities would hold still for feminism - it was all to be for the National Struggle, and I was "self-indulgent". It is both a gratification and a profound regret that this conversation was going on in Ireland at the time, yet I had no connection with it. Racism, narrowly defined as African-Americans or Latinos, and the war in Vietnam were the primary concerns of most of my contemporaries.
As an aside, I did meet and even have as clients, throughout the 1980s, both Irish American and adult immigrant Irish women. The Americans were uniformly concerned with hashing out negative family dynamics according to family therapy theories of the time, and the immigrants only ever conveyed to me the same negative family dynamics and bitter rejection of social conditions in the Republic of Ireland. Even though McKendrick’s Ethnicity & Family Therapy was published during this period, it does not seem to have hit the curriculum of local graduate schools.
These are people attempting to define, reconstruct and practice some form of the religious rituals of the pre-Christian era, based on academic historical studies. It seems to be primarily an American phenomenon, though some email addresses in Ireland are beginning to show up on the discussion lists this year. A serious difficulty that has nothing to do with religious outlook is the use of "Celtic" as some sort of genetic identity, which seems often coupled with an amazing strain of anti-Irish feeling on the part of some participants. It is my considered opinion that much of this derives from the British "Druidic Revival" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which continues, actually, to the present in British groups like Philip Carr-Gomm’s Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids(OBOD), which has been very successfully recruiting American members in recent years, and producing much of the popular "Celtic" and "Druidic" drivel currently in bookstores. "Cultural strip mining", in my view, but that’s another paper…
Ward, Margaret,Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism,(London, 1989, 1995, Pluto Press)
O’Dowd, Mary, "From Morgan to MacCurtain: Women Historians in Ireland from the 1790s to the 1990s" in Valiulis, Maryann Gialanella & Mary O’Dowd, eds,Women & Irish History, (Dublin, Wolfhound Press, 1997)
Kelly, Fergus,A Guide to Early Irish Law , Early Irish Law Series, Vol III, (Dublin, 1988, Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, 1995 reprint, Dundalgan Press, Ltd)
Nagy, Joseph Falaky,Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland, (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1997)
Devlin Glass, Frances, "The Fathers as Gatekeepers: Ancient Irish Laws and the Divorce Referendum of 1995",Canadian Women’s Studies, Vol 17, No. 3, Summer/Fall 1997
Boland, Eavon, selection from "A Kind of Star" in Donovan, Katie, A, Norman Jeffares and Brendan Kennelly, eds,Ireland’s Women: Writings Past and Present, (London, New York; Kyle Cathie, LTD, Norton, 1994, 1995)
citizenship used here as defined and explored in Valiulis, Maryann Gialanella, "Engendering Citizenship: Women’s Relationship to the State in Ireland & the United States in the Post-Sufferage Period" in Valiulis & O’Dowd,Women & Irish History, cited above.
or, to put it another way, the development of this particular morphic field…
here she cites Fausto-Sterling, 1985,Myths of Gender, (New York, Basic Books)
Eisler, Riane, "Rediscovering Our Past, Reclaiming our Future: Toward a New Paradigm for History" (p. 336) in Marler, Joan, ed.From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas,[Manchester, CT, Knowledge, Ideas & Trends, Inc., 1997]
Daly, Mary,Gynecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, [Boston, Beacon Press, 1978]
Sitchin, Zecharia,Genesis Revisited, (New York, Avon, 1990)
Shlain, Leonard,The Alphabet vs. the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image, [Viking, 1998]
Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind; Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology,[San Francisco, Chandler, 1972]
McGoldrick, Monica, John K. Pearce, Joseph Giordano (eds), Ethnicity and Family Therapy, [First Edition, New York, The Guilford Press, 1982]
generally considered to spring from the work of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas,Language of the Goddess, (NY, Harper Collins, 1989) and developed by many authors subsequently. A representative selection may be found in Marler, Joan, ed.From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas, cited above.
Boland, Eavon, "A Kind of Star" cited above
Irish "poetic fire of inspiration" which distinguishes great literary creations from simple adherence to poetic form - concisely discussed in Bergin, Osborn,Medieval Bardic Poetry, [Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1984] or at much greater length in Imbas Forosnai by Nora K. Chadwick, Scottish Gaelic Studies, vol 4, part 2, Oxford University Press (1935,) which can be found on my website by clicking on the title link above.
Elgin, Suzette Haden,Native Tongue (New York, DAW Books, 1984) see also Weedon, Chris, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, (Oxford, Basil Blackwell,1985)
"According to the hypothesis of formative causation, new social and cultural morphic fields arise in the course of human history, then through repetition become increasingly habitual. They organize particular social and cultural patterns." And further, "An interpretation of social and cultural structures in terms of morphic fields provides a different way of bridging the gulf between the "soft" and the "hard" sciences. Social and cultural fields are of a nature similar to the morphic fields that organize biological and chemical systems, although they are not, of course,reducible to these biological and chemical fields. Like the morphic fields of systems at all levels of complexity, social and cultural fields are stabilized by morphic resonance from similar systems in the past, including self-resonance from the systems own past. Thus the idea of formative causation transcends the dilemma of conventional structuralism, with its Platonic or reductionist alternatives; and it offers a potentially more fruitful approach to the understanding of cultural inheritance and the evolution of cultural habits." Sheldrake, Rupert,The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature, cited above.
"In the model of Transformational grammar known as the Standard Theory (associated most closely with Noam Chomsky), it is customary to say that [If anything can go wrong, it will.] is the surface structure of the sentence; [If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.] from which it is derived, is part of the deep structure. The steps that a given sequence goes through on its way to the surface structure - which may involve the application of a number of rules - constitute the derivation of that sequence…. A grammar would be transformational if it involves the notion of a derivation, consisting of some kind of underlying structure and steps leading from it to a surface structure, where all steps of the derivation are represented as trees, and it involves a system of rules that specify how the different stages of a derivation are related to each other…" This still-controversial linguistic theory is defined in Elgin, Suzette Haden,What is Linguistics?: Second Edition, (NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1979) p.55. Also, Grinder, John and Richard Bandler, The Structure of Magic, Vol I, (Palo Alto, Science And Behavior Books,1975) , and Chomsky, Noam, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, [Mass : M.I.T. Press,1972]
A great deal of nonsense about this topic has been written over the years, especially as it has been applied to Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), but it really is this simple, in essence, and I’ve found nothing to contradict it since John Grinder first lectured me on it at UCSC in 1971. The four simple operational rules of nominalization, distortion, insertion and deletion which govern transformation of experiential deep structure into surface structure provide an elegant and powerful analytical model for language usage.
Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, p. 41, cited above.
For example, Anderson, Bonnie S. and Judith P. Zinsser, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, Vol. I, (NY, Harper & Row, 1988) "The central thesis of this book is that gender has been the most important factor in shaping the lives of European women. Unlike men, who have been seen as divided by class, nation, or historical era, women have traditionally been viewed first as women, a separate category of being." … and… The second factor key to women is that, until very recently, all women were defined by their relationships to men… And a woman is first identified as her father’s daughter, her husband’s wife or widow, her son’s mother. No matter what the era in European history, what their class or social rank, what their nationality or ethnic group, most women have lived their lives as members of a male-dominated family. Even those who joined religious orders were defined by their rejection of earthly marriage and were seen as the "brides of Christ." As a member of a family, a woman’s primary functions and roles have been dictated by the family. Child rearing and maintenance of the household have been seen as women’s preordained, biologically appropriate tasks." (from the Introduction) True enough, at a level of facts, no doubt about it. But, and this is a very large but - when the examples specific to Ireland are marked and considered throughout the book, it begins to seem less and less helpful, or even at a deep level, entirely true. A great deal of the feminist writing about Ireland I have been able to find so far simply takes this idea of gender as primary identity and then argues the "facts" with regards historical shifts in the status of women.
Exactly the same process is frequently applied substituting the term Irish for the term women in innumerable examples, see for example Landon, Michael de L. Erin and Britannia: The Historical Background to a Modern Tragedy, (Chicago, Nelson-Hall, 1981)
Bitel, Lisa,Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender from Ancient Ireland, [Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1992]
Meek, C.E. & M.K. Simms, eds, ‘The Fragility of her Sex?’ Medieval Irishwomen in Their European Context, (Dublin, Portland, OR, Four Courts Press, 1996)
p. xx, Ireland’s Women, cited above.
Lebor Gabála, or The Book of Invasion; see also Robbins-Dexter, Miriam, "The Brown Bull of Cooley and Matriliny in Celtic Ireland" in In the Realm of the Sacred cited above, Devlin-Glass, Frances, "The Fathers as Gatekeepers" in Canadian Women’s Studies 1997, cited above.
For an interesting take on this see "The Status of Women in Medieval Ireland" by Aoife de Paor,Review, [(University College, Galway, Women’s Studies Centre) vol. 3, 1995, pp. 69-79.] Her view is that even though the differences between English Common Law and the Gaelic Irish were "glaring", the net result for women in either case was subordination to second-class status.
Moane, Geraldine, "A Womb not a Tomb: Goddess Symbols and Ancient Ireland " Canadian Women’s Studies, Vol. 17, No. 3, Summer/Fall 1997, pp. 7-10
Entire popular works still in print, such asThe Story of the Irish Race, by Seamus McManus, (Revised Edition, 41st printing, 1990 CT, Devin-Adair Company) accept the fictional early medieval Lebor Gabála (Book of Invasions) as history. I would contend that it’s value is as a form of creation myth, expressing in 8th-10th century CE symbolic form the accommodation reached by the arriving Celts approximately 500 BCE with indigenous peoples inhabiting Ireland. An extensive discussion can be found in Ó hÓgáin, Dáithi,Myth, Legend & Romance: An Encyclopedia of the Irish Folk Tradition, (New York, 1991, Prentice-Hall)

Copyright ©1998, Molly ní Dana

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Last updated 30 December 1998

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Last updated 30 December 1998