This is the first of four posts: Emain Macha, the Myth of Emain Macha, Armagh Cathedrals, and Armagh Monuments.
We went to Armagh.
With Sacred Ireland in hand, we visited two cathedrals, three court tombs, a women’s abbey, and holy well (where I performed an act of magic or perhaps low-key vandalism).
But our first destination was the mysterious Emain Macha. On the two-hour drive from our house we listened to a podcast by "Story Archeologists" Chris Thompson and Isolde ÓBrolacháin Carmody as they explored myths relating to the goddess Macha.
(Eamhain Mhacha is pronounced something like “eh-vah’in mah-ka.”)
If you want to listen to the podcast, you can subscribe. Once you’re looking at all their episodes in your podcast player, look for "Mythical Women Revisited, Macha" released in November 2015.
In their discussion of the myths of Macha, Chris Thomson said something so extraordinary I can’t stop thinking of it. It has changed my understanding of history, religion, politics — and therefore everything.
Thomson proposed that in neolithic times, just after people began practicing agriculture, before people ever gathered for religious events, they gathered to trade.
This seems obvious, but archeologists usually tell us that ancient gathering places were used for religious and political activities, and marketplaces grew up around those high-status activities. (Jesus throwing the money-changers out of the temple is an example of a similar assumption by religious authorities.)
But Thompson pointed out that the oldest known gathering place is Göbekli Tepe in the mountains north of the Euphrates. The archeologist who excavated it called it the Oldest Temple and the center of a Cult of the Dead although no tombs or graves have been found. We know it is not a city because although people visited for more than a thousand years, no one ever lived there.
If Göbekli Tepe is not a temple or a graveyard, what did people do there? Chris Thompson didn't say this exactly, but I think they went to the fair.
Out of season, the fairgrounds are empty warehouses covered in tattered advertisements, slightly odorous animal pens, sloping lawns facing an vacant stage, and an empty promenade. If you show up a week—or thousand years— after the fair, you would have no idea what goes on there.
But if you arrive at fair time, you would see excited people arriving from everywhere full of anticipation and desires. They show off their turnips, pie, new dresses, pigs. They race horses, wander down the midway, listen to music, and dance—both vertically and horizontally.
When you visit these ancient monuments, Göbekli Tepe, or a hill in Ireland, you read that people watched priests perform a miracle, or the aristocracy crown a king. If the common people did what they always do—sell their stuff all day and dance all night—that was the side show, not the main stage.
If you want to listen to the podcast, you can subscribe. Once you’re looking at all their episodes in your podcast player, look for "Mythical Women Revisited, Macha" released in November 2015.
In their discussion of the myths of Macha, Chris Thomson said something so extraordinary I can’t stop thinking of it. It has changed my understanding of history, religion, politics — and therefore everything.
Thomson proposed that in neolithic times, just after people began practicing agriculture, before people ever gathered for religious events, they gathered to trade.
This seems obvious, but archeologists usually tell us that ancient gathering places were used for religious and political activities, and marketplaces grew up around those high-status activities. (Jesus throwing the money-changers out of the temple is an example of a similar assumption by religious authorities.)
But Thompson pointed out that the oldest known gathering place is Göbekli Tepe in the mountains north of the Euphrates. The archeologist who excavated it called it the Oldest Temple and the center of a Cult of the Dead although no tombs or graves have been found. We know it is not a city because although people visited for more than a thousand years, no one ever lived there.
If Göbekli Tepe is not a temple or a graveyard, what did people do there? Chris Thompson didn't say this exactly, but I think they went to the fair.
Out of season, the fairgrounds are empty warehouses covered in tattered advertisements, slightly odorous animal pens, sloping lawns facing an vacant stage, and an empty promenade. If you show up a week—or thousand years— after the fair, you would have no idea what goes on there.
But if you arrive at fair time, you would see excited people arriving from everywhere full of anticipation and desires. They show off their turnips, pie, new dresses, pigs. They race horses, wander down the midway, listen to music, and dance—both vertically and horizontally.
When you visit these ancient monuments, Göbekli Tepe, or a hill in Ireland, you read that people watched priests perform a miracle, or the aristocracy crown a king. If the common people did what they always do—sell their stuff all day and dance all night—that was the side show, not the main stage.
That can't be right. Göbekli Tepe shows us we gathered long before we were told to worship a god or a king. Only later did the priests and the kings co-opt these gatherings for ritual and regalia.
This has been my long-winded way to say that I think Emain Macha is where early Irish farmers went to the fair.
This has been my long-winded way to say that I think Emain Macha is where early Irish farmers went to the fair.
These next few photos are from the Monumental Ireland FB group, which I recommend if you like this sort of thing.
Like Göbekli Tepe, Emain Macha isn’t graveyard, but the Visitors’ Center displays this skull: 
That drawing shows a palisade and a forest of pillars surrounding a central pillar. Did it have a roof? Was it a temple? Was it a stadium?
That’s
the skull of a Barbary ape, from Gibraltar. What was a monkey doing in
distant Northern Island? Performing in the freak show, that's what.
No mystery there. Emain Macha keeps a bigger secret, and that’s this:
No mystery there. Emain Macha keeps a bigger secret, and that’s this:
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| My crappy photo from the exhibit. |
Under the influence of the notion that marketplaces precede churches, that looks
like the fairgrounds to me. A huge gathering place, inside a wall so high you can’t see out, like IKEA. Everyone enters from one door. You walk around
and around visiting one shop after another, and you forget you’ve ever lived anywhere else. It’s an otherworldly experience. Finally, you meet
the other members of your family at the central pillar, pay your sales tax,
and leave exhausted with new stuff.
There is evidence of earlier structures, but this one was built about 500 years before St. Patrick arrived, used maybe once, filled with rocks, burnt, and buried. What remains is the hillside we visited.
There is evidence of earlier structures, but this one was built about 500 years before St. Patrick arrived, used maybe once, filled with rocks, burnt, and buried. What remains is the hillside we visited.
In the first century BC, a huge timber roundhouse-like structure was built on the same spot. It was 40 metres in diameter and consisted of an outer wall and four inner rings of posts (probably holding up a roof), which circled a huge central pillar. This oak pillar has been dated by dendrochronology to the year 95 BC and could have stood about 13 metres tall. The building had a western entrance, toward the setting sun, which suggests it was not a dwelling. A ditch and bank were dug around it. There is evidence that the huge ditch and bank that encircles the hill was dug at about the same time. Not long after it was built, the building was filled with thousands of stones, to a height of nearly 3 metres. This stone cairn was flat-topped and split into wedges, resembling a spoked wheel when seen from above. There is some evidence that the stones came from an older monument in the area, perhaps a passage tomb. The building was then deliberately burnt down before being covered in a mound of earth. It was made up of many soil types, suggesting that soil was brought from surrounding areas. (wikipedia)
As mentioned, the ditch is 250m in diameter; I felt compelled to circumambulate.
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Dealing with the mysteries. Why is it called Emain Macha? Macha is the goddess of this region and her name, as I understand it, implies fertile land of high-value, one that horses thrive on, like the Curragh. |
Emain Macha means “Macha’s twins” and one of the stories of its naming is the story of a king abusing the customs of the fair, the bounty of the land, and the awful curse that resulted.
That story deserves its own post, so I wrote it.
The long years rolled on and the hill remained a gathering place. Kings were crowned, taxes collected, stories told. Then St. Patrick arrived.
This is the first of four posts: Emain Macha, the Myth of Emain Macha, Armagh Cathedrals, and Armagh Monuments.
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