(3) Where the Bodies are Buried in Armagh, and How I Dealt with It: Armagh Cathedrals

This is the third of four posts: Emain Macha, the Myth of Emain Macha, Armagh Cathedrals, and Armagh Monuments.

You learn something about Irish history when you notice the oldest towns are not on the coast—Dublin, Cork, Limerick—but in the wide cattle country of the interior: Tulsk, Cashel, Kildare, Armagh. When Christian missionaries arrived in Ireland they built their churches and settlements near centers of political power, where kings lived surrounded by beautiful fields and plains.

The first church in Armagh wasn’t at Emain Macha, but within sight of it, about two miles away in what is now Armagh town. As the story goes, St. Patrick did the proper thing to make his new gathering place, and dug a ditch around it. 

Is this medieval-sized street and wall around St Patrick’s cathedral that same ditch?

St. Patricks Cathedral, Church of Ireland

The church Patrick built is long gone, and the gathering place on this hilltop was contested and burned down over the centuries. The present church is a restored version of what was here in the thirteenth century. It naturally presides over a Market Square. Because shopping comes before prayer.

That cross is standing in for the original one, which we will see later.
Armagh people often wear orange because it is the county GAA color.

 

In the UK you can drink alcohol everywhere, so you often see signs like this, where the right to drink in public is contested.

 

I hope to visit the North more often, but I often encounter irritating invisible borders there. For example, the Church of Ireland offers an app that serves as your guide to the cathedral’s attractions. But installation failed with “not available in my region.” My region being a phone with the Ireland country code instead of the UK one.

So I was on my own, interpreting the monuments filtered through my perspective as an American Apostate.

Sacred Ireland includes two interesting details about the nave: 

The core of the building dates back to the 13th century, though the outside has been coated with a 19th century sandstone plaster. Apparently Thackeray is said to have remarked, “it is as neat and trim as a lady’s dressing room.” … If you stand at the back of the nave, you will notice that the central aisle does not run straight up to the altar. It tilts at the chancel. This was a medieval building practice in deference to the tilt of Christ’s head on the cross.

(I have something to say about the tilting of the nave relative to the altar when I’m laying on my back in a court tomb.) 

I decided to look up that Thackeray quote to see what else he had to say about Armagh in Irish Sketchbook, his travelogue of pre-famine Ireland. I reproduce them here because the typography is to be appreciated as much as the words.

(Courtesy of that one last great treasure of the early internet, Archive.org. They need your contribution right now.)

How cool that Thackeray predicted people would someday fly here in an “aerial machine.”  

The diocese provides this 360 view of the interior from the choir, which is where I was standing when I took that picture of the altar. Unfortunately, this is the only view they have. Maybe there are more in the app which I'm not allowed to download. I guess I'm still bitter about that.

The old high cross that once presided in the market square is stored at the back of the church—or, what’s left of it after repeatedly being “thrown down,” and “lifted up.”

Next to the cross, is the list of every Archbishop from the beginning of time.
No saints in that window, just the biblical Nativity . 

When I first came to Ireland it surprised me that Anglicans didn't give back all the ancient Catholic churches after the English left in the 1920s. The next thing that surprised me is where I expect to see a statue of a saint, the Anglicans display a stone memorializing a rich man.

The cathedral contains some statues, but they are effigy tombs of powerful men, stretched out on biers, hands on their chests, erect in prayer. I don’t know what the ritual would be at these monuments, since these Protestants don’t believe the dead are available for intercession services. Seems to be the same political and religious idolatry, but without the magic.

The church’s crypt is the oldest section, but we didn’t ask to be allowed inside it as we were too weirded out by the austere patriarchy.

The only feminine thing in the cathedral was this tea towel.

 

As we left, we walked out to see the garden. The churchyard has a few old gravestones, the highlight being this:

Artemis thought it was another dick memorial, but I hoped it was a nipple. 

On reflection, I think she’s right.

Unless it's a mushroom.

The garden was rather unimaginative and utilitarian like the rest of this place, but I think these were the first passion flowers I've seen in Ireland.

So we kissed. 

Artemis is usually quite equitable about religions, given her background in theology. As we left the Church of Ireland cathedral, Artemis said something in a tone of disappointment and shock. She said, "it was a monument to men who hated Catholics."

On reflection, I think she’s right.

St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Cathedral

The institution St. Patrick established lived on, with the tradition that whoever was the head of the church in Armagh was the head of all the churches in Ireland. But what happens when there is a schism?

Two St. Patrick’s cathedrals, that’s what.

(It’s more complicated than that, like all Irish history. This blog is for entertainment purposes only.)

This cathedral looks old because we’re fortunate that the great 19th-century rebuilding of Ireland’s Catholic churches took place during the Gothic Revival and Arts & Crafts Movements. The front door of the Catholic cathedral looks across the valley to the other St. Pat’s and literally turns its back on Emain Macha.

Recognize that square tower?

St. Malachy and St. Patrick. More about them later.

The structure of this church is traditional, with a courtyard in front, an entry, the long room of the nave, an altar in the middle, and then another sacred space behind the altar in the apse. Along the edges are the aisles, where you can circumambulate.

This plan annotated on the cathdral's website. 

The organ above the vestibule.

Near the altar is a statue to a relatively recent saint, canonized in 1975. Oliver Plunkett worked very hard to maintain the Roman Catholic church in Ireland in the 1640s and 50s, but now he's a martyr.

St. Oliver Plunkett, leaning in.

His main shrine is in Drogheda, and I have seen his pelvis bone with my own eyes. Those red hanging things are the former hats of nameless cardinals. Even cardinals don't get effigy tombs.

Facing the altar is this girl group trinity: Sts. Therese, Bridget, and Fidelma. Terese and Bridget are well known, but Fidelma less so. I need to learn more about her because apparently there is an entire genre of medieval murder mysteries featuring St. Fidelma the detective and they sound delicious.

 The Mary Chapel in the apse, behind the altar, is magnificent.

As I sat in contemplation, I reflected on how well this all works. I remembered how the medieval catholic church exploited all the cult methods (social pressure, fasting, lights, music, intermittent reward, humiliation) to keep and gain followers. It works because our minds are ready to receive it.

We know very little about early Irish Christianity, so I will use that absence of evidence to ponder my own interpretations. Before St. Patrick brought a religion and an episcopacy, Ireland already had its holy hermits both male and female, whose humble huts became later became the shrines and abbeys we still visit. (We visited one later that same day and I'll tell you about it.)

I'm one of those lunatics who think there's a sacred mushroom secret at the beginning of the Christian church. (Ask me about it sometime if you have a spare five hours.) Psilocybe  grow everywhere in Ireland, and that’s the kind of secret the Church would anathamized without ever mentioning its root cause. The entertaining mind control of medieval Christianity is a but simulacrum of the mushroom's gift.

That's what I come up with, anyway. At the foot of these saints, under that glorious window.

Sts. Peter with his crozier and Malachy with his sword.

I am well aware that every installation of Stations of the Cross is a kind of high-relief snuff film. But in every Catholic church, I look to see how my favorite, "Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus," is interpreted.

This one is particularly good. "Veronica Offers Jesus a Towel" sounds like a prosaic translation from Irish.

I was taught that every Catholic church contains a relic in the altar, preferably of the patron saint. 

(I often wondered what saint's bone was under our altar at Our Lady of Victory in Fresno. Robert Oppenheimer and a tiny bit of uranium?)

And by relic, I mean the bones of someone who was known and loved and honored, but now details of their story are obscure so people think the bones are magic.

There are no St. Patrick’s relics in this church. As you might guess, his relics have been contested. For complicated reasons, the relics of St. Patrick were never in Armagh, but Downpatrick, a two-day walk distant.

As you might guess, the altar contains relics of Malachy and Oliver Plunket.

At the re-dedication of the cathedral on 13 June 1982 an historic feature of the ceremony was the placing of a portion of St Malachy’s relics from France together with a relic of St Oliver Plunkett in the new altar. (ArmaghArchdiocese.org)

St. Malachy was 12th century reformer who arrived with the Normans and imposed Roman Catholicism and its culture (like a celibate priesthood) on the Irish. Apparently, he used a sword, as depicted in the Mary chapel. Many Irish protestants are still bitter about this, which is why they consider the present Church of Ireland the real deal, and of course kept the old churches.

Although these two churches contain bones, we don't call them tombs. There are many ancient gathering places in Ireland, and because modern people found bones inside, they called them tombs. Perhaps they were like these churches, where people gathered —maybe on the same day they came to town for the fair. Perhaps they were beautiful inside, where you listened to stories, contemplated beauty, and felt connected with all things.

We left the cathedrals and headed out to the countryside, toward magic bones and Otherworld.

This is the third of four posts: Emain Macha, the Myth of Emain Macha, Armagh Cathedrals, and Armagh Monuments.