Birdshit funded the 1916 Rising, with Manchán Magan

An exploration of the similarities between Irish and Indian mythology with many tangents in between, a conversation with the wonderful writer Manchán Magan Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Droll on the tothe pole, queue you googly-eyed fintons. Welcome to the Plinby Podcast. This week's podcast is definitely one for the regular listeners. I'm speaking to a guest this week who's been on the podcast three times, I believe, but I haven't spoken to them in two years. I'm talking about the wonderful Man Con, Megan. Man Con is a writer and a storyteller. Arcing back to the theme of last week's podcast, I suppose you'd call him a bit of an eccentric. Man Con, he has a passionate interest in Irish mythology and the Irish language, and he goes at these areas from mad angles.

• 2:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  His most recent book is called Brehens and Brahmins. It's a book about the similarities between Indian and Irish culture, specifically Indian mythology and Irish mythology. Two cultures on fucking opposite sides of the world. How could two cultures like that have anything in common? Well, Man Khan explores this through the history of the Irish language, Irish being an Indo-European language. So by tracing Irish words, he's able to find similarities between

• 2:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  really, really old Irish mythology and really old Indian mythology, which in incredibly divisive times like these, that type of thinking is quite healing and beneficial because it reminds us all, we're all just human beings. Doesn't matter where the fuck you are in the world. All of us are human beings and we all came from one small group of people. Doesn't matter if anybody looks different, if they have a different language. We're all fucking human beings. And if you go back far enough, of course, you're going to have similarities between Indian culture and Irish culture. Man Khan also, he was a wonderful help to me in my recent documentary,

• 3:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Blind by the Land of Slaves and Scholars, where I explored the pre-Christian roots of the Irish literary tradition. Myself and Man Khan had a wonderful chat about mythology while sitting in the centre of a three and a half thousand year old stone circle. So I'd like to get into the conversation with Man Khan as soon as possible, because we spoke for fucking ages. To be honest with you,

• 3:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  I forgot I was doing a podcast after about 15 minutes. After about 15 minutes, I forgot that this was a podcast episode and it just turned into. A really long conversation with a friend, with someone who I find incredibly fascinating. Someone who's a lovely, kind, a kind person who has a vast array of knowledge. And there's no pretension. He just wants to share this knowledge with whoever wants to learn. And I love people like that. I love people who have humility, humility about knowledge and information. So here's my chat with Magan Megan. And if you want to check out Magan's books,

• 4:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  if you want to check out his podcasts, whatever, go to mancan.com, M A N C H A N dot com.

• 4:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Magan, what's the crack?

• 4:48Speaker 03

  It's good to hear you. Great to talk to you, my boy.

• 4:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Last time I spoke to you, I think it was a year ago on my documentary, Slaves and Scholars. And we wandered, you and I, a drone had to videotape you and me. And we walked in circles all around the Cairns in Sligo. Well, I just, I think I machine gunned you with a lot of facts.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  You introduced me to a whole new part of this land. Like, I thought I knew Ireland, at least the Ireland that's below the Republic. Everything in Ulster, I am so, or about the six counties, I know so little about, to my shame.

• 5:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, we don't, yeah.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  You brought me over to Sligo, to Caromore, to this site just outside Sligo town that has these Cairns, these dolmens, everywhere, everywhere you look. And everyone's back on this, the sheds built into the side of 5,000 year old Cairns. I never even knew about it. It just makes us, this Ireland, this, this country of ours, it's, it's an accordion. It can just wave, you know, move out and out and out, um, the more you look into it. Yeah. So it was, it was a tug of revelation for me that day.

• 5:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Your most recent book, right, which has a bit of a mad title, which is Brehens and Brahmins.

• 6:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Can you tell me about that?

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so about twenty five years ago, I spent time up in the Himalayas in a place called Almora, which is where India, Tibet and Nepal meet. And I had just wanted to get my head out of everything. I wanted to escape from the world. So I found myself, I was looking for a cave because I'd read about all these great, you know, yogis and swamis and holy men used to find a cave in the Himalayas. I couldn't find one of those, but I found a couch yet and I put myself in there for about eight months and would just walk all day through the rhododendron forest, which is in the sort of low Himalayas, this dense, tall rhododendron forest before you get to the pines. And we'd just think all night long.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  The more I spent, oh, and I was drinking my urine at the time, there was this whole, you know, Ayurvedic technology or, you know, medicine in India, this like ancient thousand year old culture believes in urine therapy. I've stopped doing that since, but um.

• 7:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fair play to.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I wizened up.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  And I just kept on seeing all these connections between my culture back home, between, in other words, the Hindu language, Hindi language, ancient Vedic or Sanskrit or ways and stories and what I had learnt in Ireland. So I wanted to find a way of conveying that to other people. So as you say, the book is called Brehends and Brahmins and that's because Brehend, you know, was the Brehend law, was the old law system. So the Druids, the Druids were obviously the spiritual and legal rulers of our, of the people who came before Christianity. And they brought the Brehend laws, the ancient laws. I feel silly talking, telling you about this, kind boy, because you know it all backwards. But anyway, just bear with me if you want or allow me.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  So the Brahms were those and that word Bri, the word Brehend comes from Bri. And Bri means master of mantras. Basically, he was the person who could bring all the ancient knowledge that had been amassed by their people over thousands of years to the next generation. They learnt it off by heart. And so the Braav or the Bra, um, he had the exact same role in the world and in, in, in the society as the Brahmins did in India. So actually Braav and Brahman come from the same, uh, Sanskrit roots, the same Indo-European roots. I'll explain that in a second. So I wanted to see all those connections and, you know, the Brahmins are the elite force in, in, in India. So if we want to get a sense of what the Druids were like, in other words,

• 8:37Speaker 03

  when St Patrick arrived in Ireland in the fifth century, he was obsessed by these Druids, who were the spiritual and legal and scholarly elite. And, um, we often romanticise them now, but actually-

• 8:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, it's hard to know even what, like, even if I mention the word Druid to an academic, they'll stop me right there and say, you need to stop using that word. Like, it's, it's hard to, what I found when I was making that documentary is I speak to all these people who've dedicated their lives academically to studying this area. And then eventually what you find out is they're all kind of guessing, because it's like, we're all guessing about a time before writing that existed. So we're trying our best. And what you're doing is you're guessing in a different way by trying to study the roots of lan, the, the Indo-European roots of the Irish language.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah. I mean, the one thing we do know, we, we know the Druids existed because St Patrick was always talking about them. And again, we know the root of that word. So if I was telling you the root of the word, um, Braav and Brahman come from the same, this master of mantras. They were the people who kept the old lore in their heads in both Ireland and India. The Druid comes from, Druid is just, it's a word, it's the genitive of dree. And dree in Irish is the word for the, the, the, the, the wizard, the magic man, the spirit monster. And so it's just the genitive case was Druid, so that's where English took it on. But where it comes from, two words, drew, in the Indo-European language. In other words, the language from which the Irish language and

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Sanskrit and Hindi all arose from. And drew means immersion or total connection. So the Druid is the, it can also refer to the oak, because that total connection to everything, to all beings, all essence, is also the metaphor they used for that, our people. Um, and actually India culture too, was the, was a tree. You know, they, you know, when you do yoga, it's all about the spine. Everything goes up and down the axis of that spine. So in, in Celtic cultures or Irish cultures, it was the, the oak tree.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  So that drew.

• 10:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's where you get Dara, Dara, dairy means oak, a forest or something.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  That's right. Yeah. So did, did it is the, uh, is the, Dar is an oak tree, did it is an oak wood, not a vogue is an oak plain. So many of the Irish place names are connected to that oak. And it wasn't just, um, it was because the oak tree was a spirit tree, was a sacred tree, was like an axis mundi, like the Indians had. Like the, you know, the Avedic Indians, but it was also because it was the most practical tree. It was the tree that you made ink gall, as you talked about in your beautiful program. Um, as the, the great, um, calligraphy expert, Tim O'Neill wrote, uh, talks about.

• 11:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  He was lovely.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  All those shots in trinity of him mixing the oak gall were so beautiful.

• 11:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. But, um, so anyway, so the drew is sort of, so it's immersion, but then vid, the second part of drew vid, that's where the word drew it comes. Vid is like the Vedas. So you know, the Vedas are Vedic knowledge in India. That just means Vedic or Veda, it just means the wisdom or the knowledge. And Vedic or Veda is the exact same word in Irish. We have idus. Idus means education, Ryan idachus, idus. So even with those words I've given, even with Brahmins, Brahmins and Druids, we see these connections. One, one final thing I want to say is Druid, if we want to get a sense of how and who the Druids, this scholarly class were in Ireland when Saint Patrick came.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  You just need to look at the Brahmins today. They were an elite class who had more power than other people. And so they were slightly corrupt. Cause they would use that power, um, you know, to just boss people around. So we romanticized Druids as being these wonderful, you know, wise guru figures. But I don't think they were, particularly because we talked in previous episodes about the goddess, how everything in Ireland seems to have been a goddess, the goddess.

• 12:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  River is where goddesses, the land was shaped like a goddess. And you talk about it in your program and you've talked about on previous episodes of, of, of the, of the podcast. And the Druids are clearly a hierarchical figure in a patriarchal system. They're all men. There were a few Druidesses, but mostly it's male. So there must have been a, a ruling class before them of women, of matriarchy, of goddess worshiping people. That's been entirely, entirely lost.

• 12:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  And something, something too about what you're saying, Mancon is, is.

• 13:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  So we're talking about deep time here, like to the average person to say to them, the roots of the Irish language might actually be Indian is it's a tough one to take on board because you're going, how the fuck does that happen? But then when you look at genetics, like people had to come to from to Ireland from somewhere, you know, and something I find fascinating is I brought up earlier about the the Caja Fields.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I spoke about them last week on the podcast, there are these

• 13:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  an archaeological site up in Mayo called the Caja Fields, they're 6,000 years old. It's some of the world's earliest examples of field system of farming. They're in the news at the moment because Mayo County Council has decided that there's not enough interest to preserve them as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which I was really pissed off with because these are, it's a deeply important site. But when I looked into it, they followed, um, haplogroup B, I believe, is the a genetic group that come from the Levant. And that's who they they believe did these fields in Mayo 6,000 years ago. So you can look at genetics and it's like these people came from the Levant, which is somewhere

• 14:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  around the Middle East, and they are building farms in Ireland 6,000 years ago. So these people spoke something and they brought it here. And that those people in the Levant, it's not India, but it's closer to India than Ireland.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  So true, yeah. So, um, you know, we know that all, you know, people came out of Africa, um, humans did. And then they learnt farming, they learnt sort of gradually more sophisticated farming in that area where Eastern Europe meets Western Asia.

• 14:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  So often, sometimes people argue, some scholars say it's Ukraine, interestingly at the moment. Some people say it's it's Western Kazakhstan, some people say Turkey, Armenia, somewhere in the Middle East, Russia. It's basically that, yeah, that whole line between Eastern Europe and Western Asia. And then the knowledge spread, it spread westwards the whole way through Europe and then eastwards to India. Like five hundred B C, this Celtic language was being spoken the whole way from Turkey to Ireland. A form of Celtic language.

• 15:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what do we call this, Mancon? Is it Indo-European? Like, what would you call this Celtic language?

• 15:25Speaker 03

  So let's say that's five hundred B C, that's two thousand five hundred years ago, that we just call it Celtic languages. And Irish is a Celtic language, is one of the last surviving Celtic languages. There's one on the Isle of Man, there's obviously one in Wales, there's one in Brittany, there's one in Cornwall.

• 15:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, so our isolation is why we have this.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly.

• 15:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  But that, so that's two thousand five hundred years ago, but that arose, that Celtic language arose from an original proto Indo-European language. So the first language was spoken in the area where they were learning farming. And so that's the language, this has happened, as you said, before the time of the Cade of Fields, so around six thousand years ago and plus. And that language moved eastwards to India, westwards to Ireland. But not only the language, so did the stories, the mindset, the folklore, the songs, everything.

• 16:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Uh huh.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  And that's why you can find today Christie Moore, Ireland's great folk singer, singing a song that he says he got from a traveller man, from a minkay, from a lucht shool. You know, lucht shool is the Irish for traveller, you know, the walking people. That is identical to a song that you find in the Rigveda, like India's most ancient texts, which either dates from between three thousand and five thousand years ago, different parts of the Rigveda. So like Christie sings a song called Tippen it up to Nancy. And you know, there's lines in it, give him eggs and marrow bones and make him suck them all before he has the last one sucked, he won't see you at all. So it's about this, this woman, a married woman, and she's fallen madly in love with another man.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  So she goes to the local sorcerer, the local, you know, wise man to say, I need you to blind my husband so that I can have an affair with this man. Okay, so.

• 17:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  So Christie Moore gets it from Roscommon traveller, Johnny Riley. And, but you get in the same, you know, from two, three, four, five thousand years ago, you get this Sanskrit version, which goes, again, a blind, a woman wants to have an affair. She goes to her local, actually this time a statue of a goddess and asks her to blind her husband. And she says, give him butter and buttercakes, then he'll pleasantly go blind. The same idea, the same story. And that's because we're all the same people. We all come from that same beginning. We have Christie Moore singing a song today and you have the exact same story in the Rigveda, in the Indian tradition from thousands of years ago.

• 17:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm assuming too that India had writing, they had writing systems, that they like long before us.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  They had, but they had an oral tradition just like we did too. They had writing far older than us, but they also had the oral system going and they had like the, you know, the Brahmins that would keep their knowledge orally because just.

• 18:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  And who were the Brahmins? Cause again, I know fuck all about. So when you say Brahman to me, the vision that comes to my head is a cow for some reason.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the Brahmins were and still are today, the elite class in India. They're the spiritual class.

• 18:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  And is this within the Indian, the Hindu caste system?

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. So, um, and they were identical to the Druids. In other words, they were the poets of the society. They were the spiritual rulers of the society and they had more power in some ways than the king did. And as you know, the Druids in Irish stories also had more power than the king did.

• 18:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  When the Druid could decide what stories are being told about that king.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 18:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like almost like controlling the media or propaganda.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  That's it. So we don't want to over, I don't, we don't want to over romanticize either the Druids or the Brahmins. Because if they were so similar, then we have a good sense of they were just an elite class in the end who were looking out for themselves, at least towards the end. And so, you know, that the top class, the top caste and class in Ireland and India, the class in Ireland was the Re, the king. In India was the Rajah, the king. Same word comes from the same Indo-European root word, Re and Rajah. The next one in India was the Brahman, in Ireland was the Braav or the Druid. Same word from the same in the root. The next class beneath that was the Arda in Ireland. So Arda means a minister or a noble. So you know, in government in Ireland, the ministers are called Arda, Aragus,

• 19:34Speaker 03

  the minister of, of whatever money or finance. And then in India, it's Arium. And just to to say two things about that. First, ara in Irish, when we learn it at school, we know what it means, ara a churt de rhin agant, to care for someone. So the ara, they weren't some some sort of elite noble. They were the caretakers of the people beneath them and also of the land beneath them. They were the caretakers of the land, realizing the land sovereignty. But that word Aryan is the real problem word. That's the reason why my book, Brahms and Brahman, is the first book on this subject of linking Ireland and India in a long time, because amazing research was done in the sixties and early seventies by the likes

• 20:15Speaker 03

  of Miles Dillon, the great Gaelic scholar, and a Welsh scholar called Weas, Brinsley Weas. But none of that, you know, it's known about in academic circles, but they don't talk about it elsewhere because that word Aryan, because during the nineteen thirties, Hitler and the Nazi Party came up with this totally wrong idea that the Germans arose from this pure Nazi sort of Aryan people who descended from the superior race of sort of Aryan Nordic people.

• 20:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  And they took, did they take this from from Indian scripture?

• 20:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so they they noticed the same thing that I'm saying, that we actually, all of our people in Europe and Asia stem from the same Indo-European speaking people.

• 20:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, so they're saying that's a little bit like throughout history, you get people claiming to be the true Israelites.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 21:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Exactly, because like there was Brits called the British Israelites going, we're actually the the main tribe of Israel. We are God's promised people. So you're saying within within Indian culture, you have, here's this one race called the Aryans and and the Germans reckoned, oh, that's us.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was it was just a noble class in in Indian culture, and the Germans invented this whole idea that they came from a superior, pure, paler-skinned race of people.

• 21:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow, okay.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  By grace into India, one thousand six hundred years ago. They they, I mean, they were right that, yes, we're all the same people, that we're all just different migrants from a culture that learned how to farm somewhere, as you said, in the Levant or Turkey or Russia in the Middle East and moved. But then they just, they they worked it to say that they were purer than everyone else and that they had a right. And so since then, no one can go near that ideology.

• 22:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's an interesting thing in general, Mancon, something that I notice, like.

• 22:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  I fucking adore Irish mythology, Irish folklore. I feel very safe exploring this because I go at it from a perspective of biodiversity. Then there's other countries like America. If you're in America and you have a big interest in European folklore, that's a huge red flag. Yeah. People go, are you a Nazi? I'm like, why the fuck would I be a Nazi? I just wanna learn about film McCool. Do you know what I mean? Mm hmm. Germany's similar. Like I was speaking to a wonderful storyteller, Claire Murphy, and she was saying that like, Germans just don't like talking about their folklore because of what was done to it. You know what I mean? Yeah. So it depends on, when I look at folklore and mythology, I don't want to find,

• 22:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  I don't want any of this to tell me that I'm better than someone else. I just want to learn about, I, I, I'm a writer. Yeah. I love the fact that the landscape can inform stories. That's all I care about, but I'm not searching for, here's proof that I'm descended from some, from some pure race and it's, it's a strange one. Even, even there last week, Mancon, right? I think it was, it might have been The Telegraph. It was one of the right wing British newspapers. There was a story in one of the right wing British newspapers that they found out that Stonehenge was actually built by, that all the warring tribes, Celtic tribes of Britain got together to build Stonehenge

• 23:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  because they were afraid of migrants coming from the sea. Now, someone just pulled that out of their arse. There's no evidence for that. Someone pulled that out, out of their arse and guessed what Stonehenge was for. But what you see there is Stonehenge that exists. Someone is creating a narrative around Stonehenge that suits with racism today. Cause in Britain, it's like the migrants are coming on raft from the sea. So they're going, well, that's what Stonehenge was. It was British white unity with this threat of an invader from the outside. And it's so, it must be a difficult one for you then, if you're saying you're finding words like Aryan going, how do I speak about this without sounding like, like a big racist?

• 24:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, if I don't speak about it, they've won, is my idea.

• 24:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Exactly.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  It was actually, yeah.

• 24:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Same with the swastika. Swastika had fucking nothing to do with racism until Hitler got involved.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  No, it was, it was Cormac Mochanumara of the, of the brand, the Frames, of that lovely album with the hairs corner who said that to me, Mochan. He said, you've got to do it, otherwise they, they've won. It was Tyson Yunkaporta, this great Aboriginal man who wrote Sand Talk. He was the one, he flagged it for me first. He said, Mochan, your work could be taken, yeah, by the MAGA hat, by white supremacists so easy. And I just said, so that's why I twisted the goddess. If, if we say everything about our culture comes from the goddess, most of that white supremacist movement does not want.

• 24:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Doesn't work because they're fucking misogynists.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, does not want. But like you and I are guilty of this too, or at least I am. I am reinterpreting the mythology at the moment from an ecological, almost matriarchal perspective.

• 25:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  You know, when, when 1916, when we just, when we realised 120 years ago, that our language, our culture, having been kept alive for whatever the language is, maybe two and a half, 3,000 years old. The stories and songs, as we've seen, could be five or 6,000 years old. When we suddenly realised that could all be wiped out, we needed to fight, both to bring our culture alive through the Gaelic League, through Conde de Guelga, but also to fight against Britain with arms. We had to pick the myths, the mythology that would most suit that. So we, we, we focused on the great warriors, on Kuchalan, on Finn McCool, and they became the backbone of our stories.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  It's really interesting that at the moment we've shifted, we've now started looking at, at Bridget, at this great mama, Pacha Mama, this Mother Earth goddess, who is truly ancient, who can also be found in Indian culture as well, to be said. And this is the, you know, whatever, last year, the year before, the government made a bank holiday, a national day for this goddess. And it just shows how we're twisting. We no longer need the big testosterone male warrior.

• 26:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  No.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  Finn McCool who goes out, goes around beheading everyone. We're looking for a more harmonious, more nature centred leader to find in our mythology. It's just what every generation does. They look towards the myths and find new wisdom for them in it.

• 26:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I'm explicit about it, to be honest, Mochan. Like when, when I get asked, why do I dedicate so much time to, to speaking about Irish mythology on my podcast? I straight up say. There's nothing nationalistic about these stories. These are stories about the fucking land. Like, I adore that. Like, in Limerick, where I am, I love that. There's the River Shannon, and I can tell the story of the goddess Shannon. And I know that just up that river, near Loch Darg, is Finton's cave.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or, sorry, Finton's grave, where mythology says some fella called Finton came on a boat with Noah, and then he turned into a salmon for a thousand years to escape a biblical flood. I like that those stories tell me about the landscape that I live in. I like that. Like, one thing that's very crucial at the moment, too, is

• 27:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  so much of our mythology is about different festivals that occur because of seasons, right? And we are witnessing seasons becoming kind of meaningless.

• 27:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Winter didn't feel like this 10 years ago. There's a new sweatiness, there's a new heat. We are the first generation that's experiencing winter, autumn and spring in Ireland as being slightly different because of climate change. And at what point are our stories going to become meaningless? Like, if you think of the Halloween story, the Halloween story, which Samhain, and you see that coming out of Onigat Cave in Roscommon. And that story basically says that sometime around the end of October, demons escaped from the other world, from this cave in Onigat. And when the demons escaped from the cave, they strip all the leaves from the trees,

• 28:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  and they kill all the animals, and they cover everything in frost. So that story there basically says, every fucking year around this time, winter comes. That's what that means. Winter comes, it gets absolutely freezing, you can't plant anything, and you gotta make sure that you have food every single year. So that's why we have this story. We are living right now where that story isn't relevant anymore, because October 31st is bamy and sweaty and warm.

• 29:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you get me?

• 29:00Speaker 03

  I do, I do.

• 29:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I think that's really important, and it's very sad that these stories are gonna not work anymore.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Oh, beautiful. And I know, I was listening, you, if, for you, people should go back to an earlier edition of your podcast where you went into that beautifully, or even when you were talking to Chris O'Dowd and you brought up Awanagat, and here's a man from Roscommon, from Boyle, and he didn't seem to know Awanagat, like one of the most important sites in Ireland. It's such an exciting time where we all are beginning to relearn our country. I knew nothing about Awanagat until, whatever, five, six years ago.

• 29:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  And isn't it amazing that we can take that for granted, that we, isn't it astounding that we have this, this celebration called Halloween all around the world? And it's like, oh, you mean that thing that happened there up in fucking Roscommon out of a cave? And we, and we don't even know, we, we have the American version of Halloween. And I want to radicalize people. I want to, I want people to care about the stories that come from the landscape, that come from the earth and the soil of this land, so that, so that we care about, I care about that river. Like even, I can't fucking remember now, but that bloody lake up there in the north of Ireland, the biggest lake on this island.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Loch Ne, yeah, yeah.

• 30:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's been destroyed by Green Alge, you know? I went clambering for mythology around that specific lake, of which there's fucking loads.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because when you tell people the stories about the lake, you care about it more. Now, now it's not just a body of water anymore. It's, it's, it's an important site where stories happened. And when you tell people your stories are going to disappear, it seems to mean more than your landscape is going to disappear.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  Blind boy, you know, so you're saying you're going back to the mythology of our country. But I realized, and that's what I was doing, and what I'm realizing now, particularly, you know, working more with indigenous elders around the world, they have the same stories we have. So when you're talking about like Loch Ne, Loch Ne, and you know, it was formed one for a story of this.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  This boy eloped with his mother from Cork. He stops in in Newgrange, in Bruinaboina, the greatest cairn, the greatest ritual or chamber site in Ireland, grabs horses from Angus, the god of love. And then he goes up to to Loch Ne, up to this great, it was a plain at the time, an open plain, um, well, it was forested and then became cleared. And then he drops his horses there, but he forgets to bring the horses back to Ischnach so that they begin to piss. They piss the magic horse of Angus and he pisses so much that the whole of the lake is full. Now, you can find the same thing in Indian tradition. It's the Maruts, the Maruts were these, they rode through the sky in chariots.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  Again, you were talking a few weeks ago about Clam McNeice and the, the, the magic, um, sort of UFO or these, this boat like thing in the sky. India has the same idea, but the Maruts ride through the chariots and then they said, there's this thing, there's this line again in the old text, the big Vedda. Send down for us the rain of heaven, ye Maruts, and let the stallions flood descend in torrents. The same idea that horses will piss out of the sky and will fill the land with being. So, you know, a few weeks ago, you were talking-

• 32:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Why horses piss? I wonder why horses piss is so important.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  Well, again, I mean, well, I'll get on to that in a second. Um, again, a few weeks ago, you were talking about Bran, the voyage of Bran. You know, where Bran goes off and it's the exact same story is in India, or it says Indian in culture, at least elements of it. So you remember Bran, he has this vision and then he decides to set off to find the land of, of women and the time, his whole time schedule. I think you were talking about with regard to Willow with this new Google, whatever.

• 32:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, I was, I was seeing, I was viewing it from a quantum lens.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Parallel universes.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  So in, in Indian tradition, they have an idea of lokas and lokas are celestial realms in the mythology in which time flows differently from the mortal world, world. There is time dilation, dilation. Exactly what happens-

• 33:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is this Vedic cosmology is that what you're speaking about?

• 33:08Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. And then you remember you talked about Hamannamunan on MacLeir. So Bran goes out with his nine men, I think, I had about, or thirteen or seventeen, anyway, he's, he's told how many men to bring on the boat, goes off to find this voyage, this magical island of women. And Magan Maclear, the great sea god, comes across on his chariot. And he intervenes, just like in the similar story in India, it's Krishna in the Mahabharata, in the great epic. So, you know, Ireland has the Taenbo Koolen, the great epic story about cattle raiding. India, its most famous epic story is the Mahabharata, also about cattle raiding. And in Bran, you remember his initial vision, he has this vision where he sees the island of women.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Then he needs to go out in the voyage to find it. Again, very common in Indian stories. You'll have the main character, suddenly having a Darshan experience, which is an experience with the divine. And then him needing to follow that vision that he has. And again, you talk about in the voyage of Bran, Nachten, one of the people on the boat decides, gets homesick and wants to go home. And, you know, the gorgeous women in the Isle of, on the Isle of Women say, don't put your foot on the land or if you do, you'll turn to dust. Again, you'll find in Indian mythology, so often like that, a person will try and come back from the magical world.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  And the minute, the minute he does, he's gone. You, this inability to exist in multiple planes at the same time.

• 34:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's fucking phenomenal, you know. And you know what the quantum equivalent of that is?

• 34:43Speaker 03

  Go on.

• 34:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  So quantum computer chips. So the quantum computer chip can only do its thing when it's at a temperature that's close to absolute zero. So that's a temperature that doesn't exist on earth. It's a coldness that you and I can't even comprehend. But inside a quantum computer, that's what they do. They super cool it to this, this temperature that's close to absolute zero. And only then can the quantum chip do its quantum business. But the second that temperature rises and becomes close to what we would consider normal here on earth, then it all falls apart.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know what I mean?

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's why if you see a quantum computer, they're the maddest looking things. They look like big copper chandeliers. It's not what you'd imagine. If someone brought you into where a quantum computer is, it's this big, giant, beautiful copper chandelier. And that's all the tubes, the tubes that are needed to cool this thing down so that the quantum chip can do its thing to a temperature that's almost absolute zero. And I believe absolute zero is a theoretical temperature. There's no way to actually reach it. So they bring it to as close to that as possible. And then they can start to exploit these quantum states. And again, it just reminds me of, it just sounds very much that there needs to be these conditions present.

• 36:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  And as soon as anything becomes like our world, our local reality, then it all falls apart.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Whoa, my God.

• 36:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's great stuff, isn't it?

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. You remember you were asking why horses? You were saying why horses?

• 36:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go on, yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  You know, so Topographic of Hibernica, is that your book or Garrett?

• 36:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's mine. Well, I wrote, mine's Topography of Hibernica, but obviously fucking, I'm taking the piss out of Gerald Awey's from the 11th century.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  The horse, so again, I mean, you've talked about, you've described how in Giraldis Combrances or Gerald of Wales, he describes.

• 36:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fucking the horses, having sex with horses.

• 36:42Speaker 03

  Exactly. He describes a king in Donegal copulating with this white mare and then he kills it as part of this inauguration ritual. Then the horse is boiled in a cauldron and then the king bathes in the cauldron. And then he eats the horse flesh and he drinks the broth. And in one way, you know, what you were trying to make clear in your book is that it was pure propaganda. It was just anti-Irish propaganda showing.

• 37:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  And also the Gregorian reforms, which had come in about 50 years before Gerald of Wales, the Pope had decided, right? That the way to spot a pagan is whether they eat horse meat. So that's, that's in the water then. So if whatever tribe in Europe is eating the flesh of a horse, these people are to be considered savages and pagans. That's where you get Gerald's deliberate trope there.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Right. But we know that he didn't just make it up. And, you know, there was this sense that the horse represent, the mare, the female horse represented the land. So Saint Mulling, Saint Mulling, this early Christian saint from the sixth or seventh century, he refers to the ritual at one point when the saint is offered this cauldron of horse flesh to eat and drink by some pagans. And he refuses. And it's almost a symbol of their too by barbaric. I'm not going to do that. Okay. So that is a thing that existed in Irish culture at some point. And maybe it was used to brand this as barbarians in, as you say, the twelfth or thirteenth century, but it was there. But you find the same in India. So the Ashva Maida, which is one of the grandest of the, of the vedic religious rites.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  In other words, of the Hindi or Hindu religious rites is the sacrifice of a stallion, not a mare, but a stallion at the inauguration of a king. And it's recorded in numerous texts, including the, the Shattha Brahmana. Brahmana is just a collection of old lore. And both the king and the horse were bathed in the Indian tradition. Then the horse is suffocated and then the queen lays down and pretends to have intercourse with the, with the horse. So then the, the horse is then dismembered and used in sacrificial offerings, in other words, given to people. Now, this in the fifth or sixth century A D, Buddha, the Buddha Siddhartha, he condemns it. But it continued for centuries more. Some scholars think that it went right up until the 11th century. A very similar ritual in Ireland and India.

• 38:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  That is fucking mad and completely plausible.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Things don't change. The key message that I want to get, you know, my next book is Ireland and Iceland. And the next book after that is Ireland and Aboriginal, Aboriginal stories. The next is Ireland and Native American, is that we all are migrants. We're constantly moving around the planet. You can't have any exceptionalism, any nationalism. We are just the, the products of humanity that have wandered on this earth forever. We share the same stories.

• 39:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Let's have a little break there now, you spindly Vincent's. I think we'll have a break for an Ocarina pause. I'm really enjoying that conversation there with Mein Khan. I don't have an Ocarina now, but I do have a little strange wooden frog. And I can play his, his back to make a ribbit noise. So I'm going to do this and you're going to hear an advert for some bullshit.

• 39:57Speaker 04

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• 40:34Speaker 05

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• 41:18Speaker 05

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• 41:32Speaker 06

  Are you sure we don't want to do gifts this year?

• 41:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, don't worry about me. Bombas.

• 41:37Speaker 06

  Sorry, did you just say Bombas?

• 41:39Speaker 07

  No. Bombas cozy socks.

• 41:42Speaker 06

  Totally. Bombas slippers, size 8.

• 41:45Speaker 07

  Wow, so you're just...

• 41:46Speaker 06

  Pilates socks. Underwear.

• 41:48Speaker 07

  Okey-doke, got it.

• 41:50Speaker 06

  Bombas, the perfect gift for when you're not doing gifts. Visit bombas.com/audio and use code AUDIO for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash AUDIO. One purchased equals one donated, always.

• 42:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Very kind on the ears of dog.

• 42:11Speaker 05

  If you've felt stuck trying to lose weight, you're not alone. Enter Weight Loss by Hers. It's designed to support you in reaching your goals. And Hers now offers access to an affordable range of FDA-approved GLP-1 medications, including the Wegovy pill and the Wegovy pen. Even better, with a range of affordable GLP-1 options, Hers makes it simple to find an approach that fits your needs and your budget. If eligible, you'll get a treatment plan personalized to you and unlimited dosage changes as needed. It's weight loss designed to work with your life. Ready to reach your goals? Visit forhers.com/eligible to get personalized, affordable care that gets you. That's F-O-R-H-E-R-S dot com slash eligible. Forhers dot com slash eligible.

• 42:55Speaker 05

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• 43:22Speaker 07

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• 43:40Speaker 07

  The Quarter Pounder with Cheese is made with 100% fresh beef, cooked when you order it. Add hot crispy fries and an ice cold Coke, and hopefully, a lot of napkins. All for $8. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

• 44:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was the wooden frog's back paws. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever has been listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing, because this is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living, it's how I rent out my office, it's how I have all the equipment in my studio, it's how, I don't know if you've noticed there the past while, but I have a new home studio. The room that I record in at home, it's not a great room, it's very echoey.

• 44:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  I have to really, I have to really whisper into the mic when I record in this room, because if I speak anything louder than a whisper, then we get an echo and it doesn't sound right. So, I need to soundproof this fucking room. I'm gonna do this by hanging a bunch of professional acoustic curtains, and what they will do, they're gonna deaden this room so that there's no echo at all, and when I speak to you in this studio, I don't have to be whispering right up to the mic. So that's an example of something that is paid for by the listener. When you become a patron of this podcast, you're paying for me to be able to upgrade the studio, because this is, it's an independent podcast, this is an independent podcast, it's

• 45:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  all run by me, I've been doing it for seven years, and I adore it and I love it and I wouldn't have it any other way, and it's only possible because this is listener-funded. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee, once a month, that's it. But the best part is, if you can't afford that, don't worry about it, you can listen for free, you can listen for free, because the person who is paying, is paying for you to listen for free. So, everybody gets the exact same podcast and I get to earn a living. Patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. And preferably do that on your desktop, because if you sign up as a new page... On your Apple mobile phone, on your fucking iPhone.

• 46:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you use the Patreon app on your iPhone, Apple will take thirty percent because they're dirty bastards. So if you're becoming a patron, please try and do it on a fucking desktop computer, please. So now a couple of gigs, actually also before I get into the gigs, another thing that I'm investing in is a fucking website. I've tried for many years to fucking maintain a Blind Boy website that has like my bio on it, or ticket links, relevant information for people who want to find out. I've always made a bollocks of it. I'm ju- I'm just too busy, I'm too busy to be running a fucking website and I've always fucked it up.

• 47:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  So this year, I'm literally, I'm hiring a person to run a website for me. N- not just, not just for tickets, for gigs, but also for my biography, for my bio. And I'll tell you the reason I'm doing this. That documentary that I put out about a month ago on RT1, Blind Boy Slaves and Scotters, that was a pretty big documentary, that was a big RT1 documentary. And the Irish Times, which is the Irish paper of record, did a review of this documentary. It wasn't necessarily a bad review, but, but it was factually inaccurate and it really pissed me off.

• 47:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  The reviewer said, "Making the Leap, Blind Boy is, is making the leap from podcasting to a primetime RT1 documentary." Now, I'm paraphrasing there, it's not a direct quote, but the, in a disparaging way, the reviewer was suggesting that I was inexperienced at making documentaries. So he said, "It's quite a leap from podcasting to a prestige RT1 documentary." And the thing is, yes, that would be quite a fucking leap. Such a leap, it's impossible. It would never happen. Since 2015, I've made 11 documentaries on television.

• 48:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fucking 11. I didn't even know I'd made 11 until I had to count them because of that bullshit article. I've made six documentaries on RTE and five documentaries on BBC. And one of them was like, longlisted for a BAFTA. But I have to read reviews, reviews of my documentary in the paper of record, which means it doesn't disappear. A review where the reviewer can't be arsed to check basic facts. I didn't make a leap from podcasting to an RTE one documentary. I've made 11 documentaries. So I want a website where I can say that. Where the next time an Irish Times journalist can't be arsed to do a bit of digging,

• 49:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  they can just go to my website and they can see, oh, he's done 11 documentaries. Fair enough. And then I won't have, I won't have any permanent reviews in the national paper of record that portray me as inexperienced when it's actually a factually, a factually inaccurate journalist with no editorial oversight. I'm not being mean, but I don't know what else to call that. So I'm investing in a fucking website. I'm investing specifically in hiring someone who's gonna make my website and update it. I finally give up. No, I accept. I'm, I'm too busy. I can't do fucking everything. I'm too busy to also run a website.

• 49:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  So hopefully we'll have a bunch of gigs on the website too. So when I, when I read out the gigs here on the podcast, I won't have to say to you, I'm gigging in Manchester. I don't know where you can get tickets, just fucking Google it. Which is what I've been doing there for seven years. It's worked out all right. It's worked out all right, but there's probably a better way to do it. But in the meantime, here's some gigs. I don't know where you can get the tickets. You're just gonna have to Google the gigs. Here's another fucking thing. Google's after turning into a piece of shit. Google's broken now. So if I say to you, I'm gigging in Manchester, Google it. You might get fucking a Manchester gig from three years ago. But anyway, look, I'm gigging in Dublin next week in Vicar Street. That's sold out. Can't wait for that. That's gonna be a lot of fun.

• 50:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  I might stay up in Dublin just to get some. Some wonderful Chinese food in Parnell Street. Go to Parnell Street for some Chinese food and have a think about Charles Parnell. Like, we've got these, we've got a terrible housing crisis in Ireland. A rent crisis and a housing crisis and a homelessness crisis. And then we've got streets. Every fucking town and city has got a Parnell Street. And I guarantee you, if you went to most people and said, what did Charles Stewart Parnell do? A lot of people couldn't tell you. Do you know what he fucking did? He organised rent strikes all across Ireland. Charles Stewart Parnell went to the people of Ireland and said, the landlords are exploiting ye. Like, this is the fucking eighteen hundreds.

• 51:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Parnell went, the landlords are exploiting ye. This is unfair. Everybody, everybody in the whole country stopped paying rent. Everybody, this is a fucking strike. Everyone stopped paying rent. And that act of non-violent collective bargaining led to actual systemic change. So in Dublin right now, Parnell Street is, it's got some wonderful Chinese food. There's fantastic Chinese restaurants on Parnell Street. There's a lovely little Korean restaurant there. There's a gorgeous little, a heavy metal pub called Fibber McGee's. Now, I haven't been there in a long time. So I can't vouch for Fibber McGee's. I haven't been there in about ten fucking years, I'd say.

• 52:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  But anytime you're on a Parnell Street, if you go to Parnell Street in Dublin to have some, some delicious Chinese noodles, spend some time to, to reflect on Charles Stewart Parnell. Read about him, read about what he did. He organised peaceful rent strikes. Collective bargaining, all Ireland, that led to systemic change. Parnell Street in Limerick is weird.

• 52:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's, there's, there's a chip shop on it called Luigi's, which is fantastic. And then, oh, there's the Palestinian Butchers. People drive past and beep their horns and say, beep beep Free Palestine. Actually, there's the Turkmen Grill, where you'll get very authentic Afghani food, but mostly Parnell Street in Limerick. It, it looks like New York. You'd have to go there to see it. It's, it's just this strange little street in Limerick. And because of the, the size of the footpaths and the red brick, it looks like a small, little weird piece of Brooklyn. But when I walked down that street, I almost have a think about Charles Stewart Parnell. I'm supposed to be promoting fucking gigs here, hold on. That was about Vicker Street, was it?

• 53:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Galway Leisure Land. I just can't get over him playing a gaff called Leisure Land. I used to go there on school tours at the, is that the Aqua Dome? Is that where the Aqua Dome is? Anyway, look, Galway's sold out. When's that? February. Uh, fucking Crescent Hall in Drahada. Drahada, poor old Drahada. Oliver Cromwell sacked Drahada. Did a genocide in Drahada. So I'm up in Drahada, in the Crescent Hall, on the 21st of February. Then I'm up in Belfast. Nothing much has ever happened historically in Belfast, nothing comes to mind. Um, I'm in the Waterfront Theatre in Belfast on the 28th.

• 54:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Then I'm in Killarney. When am I in fucking Killarney? Let's see here. 7th of March, I'm in Killarney. Cork Opera House at the Cork Podcast Festival on the 13th of March. Then, this fucking Limerick gig where I can never get the, I can never get the date right. Why the fuck is it in my calendar here for March? No. When the fuck am I in Limerick? That's not till April. Look, I'm in Australia and New Zealand, that's all sold out. In March is it? Yeah. And then.

• 54:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  This is confusing shit. There's a Limerick gig, Limerick Concert Hall there in April, 23rd of April, and then a massive tour of fucking England and Scotland there in June, is it? Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, York, London, East Sussex, Norwich. I'm embarking on a mainland campaign. I'm gonna drink black Pradis and soup from Maggie Thatcher's tits and entertain the cracking tens. I'll have all those details on my website when I have a website, but in the meantime, just look it up on Google. Another odd episode this week. Look, let's go back to my, my phone call with the wonderful, magnificent man Colin, Megan.

• 55:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  This is, you're getting a long podcast this week. You're getting, if you're out for a walk, you're getting a big, long treat this week. And that's the other, did you ever hear of Doggerland, did you? I did. This is the, yeah, the land of Wales, isn't it? No, Doggerland is, it's a really interesting one. It's, it's where the, the North Sea gas field is right now. So it's between Scotland and Denmark. Yeah. So there was a stretch of land, I think it was as recent as 25,000 years ago, a stretch of land called Doggerland, which was marshy, but they found it when basically, when they struck gas and oil in that area of, between Scotland and Denmark, divers went down to the bottom of

• 56:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  the sea to, to put the big offshore rigs there. And when the divers were underneath the sea, they're like, what the fuck is this axe doing here? And they're like, why, why are there human things at the bottom of this sea in the middle of nowhere? And Doggerland is, so it was this vast civilization, like an Atlantis. I'm not saying they were advanced, but the people were living 20,000 years ago between Denmark and Scotland. And what happened and what makes this so unique and terrifying? It flooded because of one incident. So, so the ice age was ending and there was this huge glacier

• 56:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  up near Denmark and that just fell one day. It just fell and that was enough to completely suddenly in a deluge flood all of Doggerland about twenty thousand years ago. And I can't, I have to associate incidents like that that happened at the end of the ice age with flood mythology in every single culture.

• 57:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  There had to have literally been huge deluges that destroyed civilizations all at once. And that's why every single culture has flood mythology.

• 57:24Speaker 03

  Lovely, lovely, lovely. Um, when you were talking on the, on that episode about the voyage of Bran and Manalain MacLeir, the great, the great sea god, um, comes upon them and as he says to them, you think you're plowing the waves, but I am riding on a meadow of flowers.

• 57:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes.

• 57:42Speaker 03

  And what that is, I think, because just from looking at other cultures, that's also a memory of that the land off the coast.

• 57:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fuck off.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, was remembered as the land. And you get this because in Ireland, you know, it's nine waves. So fishermen would believe that beyond nine waves is wilderness, is ocean.

• 57:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 57:59Speaker 03

  But it's actually called the land for the first nine waves because people remember different areas before when the ice levels were, the water levels were at different areas. And it's why in a phrase like in Irish you'll find, and I only came across this insight by going to, um, Western Australia and talking to, um, Aboriginals there. But in Ireland you have a phrase, there's a white flower on the fisherman's garden. So fishermen still today would see that area among, that you'd go in a corach or a nevo, nutritional canvas or skin boat. That way area up to nine waves out is still considered land. The ocean gods, the goddesses are only beyond that.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  And then there's another word, when you're rowing a canoe or a corach or a nevo, you always say, I'm plowing through the waves.

• 58:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's interesting, yeah.

• 58:50Speaker 03

  So you're working the land and it's the same. When, um, when in, in, you know, this Noel Nanup, Dr. Noel Nanup, this great elder, this Ngar elder, Ngar Bujar, in the land of, uh, the sacred land of, of the Ngar people in, in, in, in, in Perth and Fremantle, um, he says that the island, when they look out to sea and they have these, they see the, the wells, the wells dropping, bubbling up and freshwater wells beneath the sea, these are sacred areas for them because they remember their people used to gather at those sacred wells before the water was flooded. And people used to laugh at them and think they were barbarians. Now the latest, um, geological surveys are saying they were quite right.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  Twenty, twenty-five thousand years ago, before this great rising of water, in fact, that was dry land, there were whole settlements there and divers going down and finding pieces. They're finding them around these wells because they were gathering places, um, what they call water holes rather than wells in, in Australia.

• 59:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. And that tells us then, of course, about the, the age of, of Aboriginal culture. Because the other thing too, like the, the Aboriginal people were colonized brutally and so brutally that the way they're spoken about in the West, they're not considered, they're not spoken about as, as humans, they're not spoken about as, as a real culture. And this sense of, oh, they were just there. And if you say the Aboriginal people were actually there for twenty-five thousand, thirty thousand years and their stories are dislonged, it makes us, it makes the, the narrative of how they were colonized a lot more inconvenient and a lot more brutal, which is the truth.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So there's, you know, there's rock art in Australia, which is forty-five thousand years old. Now, some people are saying it's sixty thousand, but I met, I were, met up and talked and walked the land with Aboriginals who can still understand the ancient signs of their rock art from forty-five thousand years. Cause it's not only a, a culture that was there back then, it's a continuous culture. It's an unbroken culture. The lore of what those symbols mean has been passed down. Now, just about maybe two months ago, this man Tyson Yunkaporta, this elder I talked about who wrote this life-changing book called Sam Talk, um, I sent him a picture of, uh, Cairn, one of the Cairns in Lough Crewe, and Sheev Nakali, the hill of the witch in, in Meath, in your old castle.

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  And he just came back to me next day, like so excited. Oh my God, oh my God, my God. I I I can read those symbols, he says, at least from my view, from his point. He can now, he's seeing that from his viewpoint.

• 1:01:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Was it Alm script, Mancon?

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  No, no, it was no, the it was the the spirals, the circles, the lozenges.

• 1:01:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, you know, Alm is from whatever, four hundred A D. These go back to five and a half thousand years. They're Neolithic uh uh rock art. He can read them. He believes from his now, that's, you know, maybe he's wrong, but it's opening up a whole thing. If we do start communicating, all of us, not just a mythology department in Ireland or in archaeological. But first in Ireland, the archaeological department, talking to the anthropologists, talking to the folklorists and mythologists in Ireland. And then the archaeologists and mythologists talking to cultures all around the world and realizing that nothing so nationalistic about it. We might get whole new revelations so that we can understand the language of rock art in Ireland. Either that, or maybe A I could could be able to to help us in that.

• 1:02:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  As well, it's it's the reason I love chatting to you, Mancon, is is it's because you are not an academic. Um, and I speak to a lot of academics and it's great crack. But what I find with academics is as soon as anything fun or mad happens in the conversation, it's shut down immediately. And you can't do that. You know, what you're saying there, there might be connection between Aboriginal language and culture and Irish culture. The average academic is just gonna go, we're gonna need to stop there or I'm gonna lose my job. And that's fair enough, but we also need to be, there needs to be space for lunatics to think outside the box. And space for people to have mad conversations and for those conversations to be wrong.

• 1:03:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  And if you do that enough, some of it's gonna be right.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  Beautiful.

• 1:03:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  And an example of it there is those Aboriginal people who were being laughed at when they're going, beyond that ocean there are watering holes and scientists going, no, there's not with your silly stories. And then it turns out when science looks into it, oh, they were right. They have unbroken stories that go back thirty thousand years. And these people who we called silly and didn't believe and didn't respect, they were actually right. You know what I mean?

• 1:03:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  So there has to be space for outside the box thinking and playfulness and being wrong and being mad and having fun.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  I think things have improved a lot in the last ten years. Like, fair enough, if you put a camera in front of a scholar, an academic scholar, they're not, they can't publicly go on.

• 1:03:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, they're good crack off camera, yeah.

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  And they're really appreciating the work you're doing and the work I'm doing. I can't believe the tolerance that is there for my work, you know, which isn't grounded in huge academic discipline. It's not, I'm not pulling it from my ass. I'm trying to base it on.

• 1:04:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, but you're, you're going, you're not pulling it from your hole, but you're going, what if we look at it this way?

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I love that.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. But there's, there is huge respect for your work as well by them because of that. And there wouldn't have been, they would have dismissed us, the old generation would have absolutely laughed at us. So there's a slow change happening. And, you know, it's just, it's interesting to see, you remember you were talking about the Cate of Fields? It's interesting to see how, how, how recent the discipline of archaeology is in Ireland. So I don't remember, no, yeah. You, you, you know how the Cate of Fields was discovered? This man, Patrick Caulfield.

• 1:04:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 1:04:50Speaker 03

  So Patrick Caulfield, he was a school teacher, a local Curious National School teacher in, um, up in North Mayo, beyond Ballycastle, um, in Mayo, in, in Belanderrick. And, um, Belanderrick, is that what it's called? Huh, need to check. Um, no, it's not. Anyway, um, he's up, up beyond Ballycastle, up on the sea. And, uh, he, he's out picking boughs, he's out picking turf. And you know the way, sometimes they used to put a long piece of wood or a piece of iron into the bog to see if they could find a bit of bog oak.

• 1:05:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  Or bog pine. You know, there was wood, pitch pine that had, or oak that had been preserved for the whatever, the five thousand or six thousand years since that bog was laid down on top of a rotten forest. And he, he's tapping away, putting the big wood down, four meters down. And suddenly he realises he's sitting not wood but stone. So that's fair. There's a rock there. But as he goes on, he goes another metre, puts it down again, stone again, another metre, and he keeps on doing this. He's this weight there. He said, there's a linear, a perfectly linear stone line, four thousand or four metres beneath the bog, or maybe six, seven metres below. And he thinks that can only be a wall. And he knows that bog, the way bog is laid down a few inches every year, that has to be between five and six thousand years old,

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  maybe six and a half thousand. So he decides that means there's a wall here six thousand years ago. And he says, but there's no evidence in the whole of Europe of there being walls, of the remains of basically Stone Age walls from that long ago. So he sends a letter down to the National Museum in about nineteen thirty nine. And then the, it was actually a German director of the National Museum. I might, can't remember if I tell you this story before. But anyway, the, the German director says, okay, that's very interesting. But rationing has just come on in the war. We don't have enough petrol to send a car up. But after the war was send a car up. So they send a car up in whenever the late forties, or the late forties. And they have a quick look. And they think, okay, that might be something. But Patrick Caulfield,

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  they don't have the money or the resources or the mindset to do anything else. So meanwhile, Patrick Caulfield's son becomes of age, he becomes seventeen, eighteen. He goes to UCD, and they just opened an archaeology department. So he goes, studies archaeology. Within a few years later, he's the professor of the whole Department of Archaeology in UCD. The first thing he does is go up to Ballon d'Or, get up to, to Mayo, to do a dig on the site. And he reveals the oldest, um, yeah, the oldest bronze, uh, Neolithic or, or Stone Age, new Stone Age site in Europe, or possibly in the world. And it was such exciting. This was in the late seventies and the eighties. And I remember at one stage, he wanted to go out

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  to, um, St Patrick's Point. What's that called? You did a go, you took some gorgeous photos for your website. That.

• 1:07:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, yes. St Patrick's Parkery out there.

• 1:07:35Speaker 03

  No, no, don't think that. No. Um, I mean, it's a, you have to leap out to it. It's a rock spur just off the, off the Kedda Fields. At least I think you were out there. But anyway, um, so Charles, how he gives him a helicopter to go out there. The country was so excited in the eighties when we were basically uncovering day by day this uh Neolithic stone setup. And not only did he find that, but near his own home place, he found a Bronze Age site. Okay, so there wasn't as much bog um on earth, he reveals it. So it's not Neolithic, it's not from five or six thousand years ago, it's from four thousand years ago, or three and a half. And there he finds finds the growing mounds, the growing ridges, where our ancestors, in other words, a later group of farmers.

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  So the people who built Newgrange and built that whole Bronze Age uh stone circle, they were Neolithic farmers. And they had learned farming where that place between Western, uh e- eastern Europe and Western Asia, brought their culture with them, an Indo-European culture. Then later, in the Bronze Age, more sophisticated farmers who had brought technology of bronze came, and he finds their remains of their farming fields, and they have grain ridges. And he sees the ridges, because he clears away the bog, which is, you know, this moss and dead weeds and things which have grown up over such, over thousands of years. And he actually sees the ridges on the soil where they molded up to put the emmer on the einkorn, the early types of wheat. In fact, he even finds traces of those in the land.

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  And that was all because of one school teacher, you know, uneducated, never beyond, you know, probably secondary school, Patrick Caulfield. He has an inkling by prodding the land, his son then gets an education because Ireland becomes rich enough to give people who are just, you know, from Royal Ireland with national school to bring them on to college. And then um Seamus Caulfield does all this discovery. And now Seamus's students, if you meet any um student, archaeology student now from UCD, from the University of Dublin, they'll all have been taught by Seamus, but they're expanding their mind again to a whole other dimension. It's just each generation learns and grows.

• 1:09:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  And something I'd love to chat to you, Mancon, before we go, is can you tell me about Imbalk? Because we have all these. Seasonal festivals in Ireland that become like Christmas, Easter, all this crack. Imbolc is coming up on the first of February. Can you tell us about Imbolc?

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. And again, it's so weird how in the last five years, people have gone back to these old Celtic

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  feast days, the cross-quarter days. In other words, the days that are exactly between the solstice and the equinox four times of the year. And there's four of them, obviously, Samhain, Imbolc, Bieltena and Lunasum. So you sort of need to start with the first one to get a sense of it. And that Samhain is, as you remembered, as you mentioned, that's around the first of November, the first few days of November. And it's the end of the harvest and the preparation of winter. And it's often communicated by the fact that the Kailach, the great land sovereignty goddess, she comes through the land. Again, just like the witch on her stick, on her broom,

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  washing away, battling away, knocking down all the verdancy, all the growth, all the the abundance of summer. She's bringing on winter. So the Kailach there, connected to the Indian goddess Kali. Kali and Kailach has the same root word, same concept. Durga is often the goddess of destruction in Indian, but Kali has elements of that too. So the Kailach comes, destroys all the greenery of life. She makes sure that the sun stays beneath the horizon for long periods of winter. So she is darkness, she is destruction, she is death. Yeah. You can think of her as a bad thing, as an evil force, but in fact, no. She then transforms on, now we say it's the first day of February, but it was around the third, between the third and the sixth, the first week of February,

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  into Brigid, into the new young spirit, the new young.

• 1:11:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  She transforms as a, so she, the Kailach is a, like an old woman, isn't she?

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:11:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  And she then turns into a young woman.

• 1:11:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, because you see, in these ancient traditions, like the yin yang, you know, thing in India, nothing is ever just one thing, it's everything.

• 1:11:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 1:11:44Speaker 03

  We're now in this dualistic society, as well as you were going on, you know, zeros and one.

• 1:11:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, and fucking eschatological time, everything is linear and building up towards the end.

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

  That's it. So there was nothing, that's such an eschat, there was nothing of that mindset in the old day. Everything was everything, everything was in that stasis that Schrodinger was so interested in. So the Kailach, you know, brings on this destruction of winter, then transforms herself into the new young seed, the new young flame.

• 1:12:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  That we call Bridget. She's the, and embolic can mean different things. It either means embolic in the stomach or in the belly. So it's the time that the ewe, the yew, the sheep, the female sheep will become pregnant. So the lamb is in the belly at this stage. Or it could be imlan. Glan is an Irish word for to milk, to milk cattle or to milk. So glae would be an old way, imlae, so it would be the time that the milk is in the teats of the cattle. Or also, there's an Indo-European word, word embolgin, which is budding. So it's the time of the new growth, the new budding, the new life, the new seed. And so, you know, it's represented by this goddess Kailach, this goddess Bridget or Breed,

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  who is, as it says, is the same as Kailach, but it's not just zero and one. It's not just Kailach or Bridget. She's also the same goddess who becomes at Bialtsuna, at the full blossoming time of early May, the spirit of total growth and a full on growth, and then of the harvest in lunacy. So she is all things. She's basically the matriarchal goddess. She is the land, she is the soil, who gives birth, well, starts in darkness of nothingness, of blackness, of bleakness, grows a seed in her belly, brings forth new life. So brings forth, you know, grows a seed in her belly around February, when the land begins to warm, and then goes into full, a full abundance of.

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  Of May, June, July, and then the harvest time. And, and again, that concept of Bridget, the word is a proto Celtic word. So you remember, we're all, we all speak proto Indo European languages. Everything except, except Basque and Finnish seem to be, every language in Western Asia and Eastern Europe and Europe seems to come from this. So the proto Celtic word, proto Celtic was a, a sub, a sub family of Indo European words. Um, Briganti is where the word Bridget comes from. Briganti means high or exalted. But in Rigveda, the Rigveda, the great, you know, connection of India word, you have a goddess of the dawn known as the Ushas, who's referred to as Brati, meaning exalted one or her highness. Same concept, same word.

• 1:14:30Speaker 03

  In the same way, as you know, one of the great stories of Bridget, how we show what she was able to do about spreading the new warmth and life on the land. Remember she comes to Kildare, goes to the king of Leinster and asks him, I want a tiny bit of land of my monastery on. So she is the last element of the old female matriarchal culture of that wisdom. And she go, by this stage, the kings have taken over, the males have taken over. She goes to the king, says, just give me enough land to have a settlement, a little monastery on. Uh, by this stage, in the stories, she's a Christian rather than a pagan goddess. So obviously Christians just, um, there's great, you know, was it you talked about this? There's great stories about the Pope, actually in the fifth, sixth century, telling the missionaries, go and just Christianize the old stories.

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  We know this, what they did. So anyway, goes to King Leinster and the King Leinster refuses. So she says, can I have just enough for my cloak? Just enough to cover what my cloak will. And he thinks, fair enough, stupid woman. And he does, and we all know, everyone in Ireland knows the story. You've referred to it again. Your podcast is the cloak, uh, expands and expands to become the size of County Kildare, which is the, which is now still the sacred land of Bridget, of the land. But anyway, in the Mahabhatta, the great epic story of Vedic of Indian culture, there is this character called Dhrupid. It's actually the principal female character. And her five husbands lose her to the Kuarava brothers, these sort of gambling debt. They, she has five husbands, they go gambling, they lose this beautiful woman.

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  So she tries to protest her legality, her morality. But in the court, in the great assembly room, she, the king, the leader says, you're now a slave. So you need to be stripped of your saree. So the greatest humility would be for this Indian goddess to have her saree removed from her. But Lord Krishna intervenes and he extends the saree, he makes it wider and wider and wider. So no matter how hard or how far they tried to pull it off her, she is still clothed. The same story about the great exalted one, this great goddess, having the cloak protecting her and covering her. Beautiful.

• 1:16:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  And still today, you know, what do we do with Bridget today? What do I do anyway? Well, in Kildare, you know, you go to the local, in Kildare town, there's two wells connected to her. And so many people are coming out now to just do ritual, to stand, to sit at the well. Also in Fahrt, Fahrt was where she was born, just outside Dundalk. There is her, her place, there's a well and there's a shrine to her there. But the nicest thing, the best thing that I like is, again, in so many indigenous cultures, you'll find something very similar. Bratley is her cloak. So in memory of her protective cloak, we put out a piece of cloth. Traveller people, the M'Keady used to put out a white cloth.

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  Other people put a red and white cloth and that's for healing, which you put some type of cloth on a bush. So that the dew, the morning dew, the drúacht in Irish, can land on that cloth. And it can sanctify the cloth. And then that cloth is used for healing, for strength all year round.

• 1:17:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  And Bridget is associated with mist.

• 1:17:40Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:17:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  She used to keep bees in the other world and the bees would travel through the mist.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  So beautiful, so like.

• 1:17:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  I love that. That was the explanation for how, how bees can magically fertilize flowers. It's like, well, they belong to Bridget and she tends these bees in the other world. But in the morning, they float through the mist and bring otherworldly magic to flowers. And that's where fruit comes from, which is beautiful.

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  So beautiful, so beautiful.

• 1:18:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  But also it means. Don't fuck with bees, don't be fucking with British bees, which is a great idea if you're interested in biodiversity, don't be fucking with bees.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  Totally, totally. Now, there's a, there's a great book by Celeste Ray, who's an expert on holy wells in Ireland. And she put together a collection of books about holy wells, okay. But one of the articles by a lecturer in Queen's University Belfast, I think his name was Gary Quim, I need to check that. But he was deciding, he was looking at that clay that is to be found in, often around wells, but in sacred places, that it can be healing clay or healing soil, right?

• 1:18:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:18:39Speaker 03

  So he brings it into the lab and he does isolate a bacteria that actually can kill all of those bacteria that, that take over hospitals. You know, some of the worst streptococcus or whatever they are.

• 1:18:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Staph infections, wow, yeah.

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  The M R, the M R S, the M R A, whatever it is, thing. Anyway, he's doing this and it smells, what is the smell? I think it's a truffly smell. And then he notices the next few days that the smell is on his lab coat.

• 1:19:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Uh huh.

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  So then he realizes, oh my God, this bacteria likes cotton. It goes to cotton and it stick, impregnates itself into cotton. So then he started, uh, you know, ripping up bits of cotton and thinking, is the cotton then, if it has this, the whatever, this type of bacteria in it, the strain of bacteria. And that he isolated, that was never found in science before, will, will the cloth then also be curative? Will it also, um, as you heal the staff things? Now, I just read, this was an academic paper he did a few years ago, he hadn't done the full research.

• 1:19:42Speaker 03

  But imagine that actually that bratia are the little cuties, the little ribbons that we tie to wells. If we're now going to find that somehow the dew around the first of February, that the, the conditions, the weather and humidity conditions are ideal for that bacterial strain to impregnate him on his cloth. And then the cloth actually could be scientifically healing as well as mythologically healing.

• 1:20:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  That is fucking nuts.

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  I know, I know. I can't wait. You know, I have this podcast called The Almanac of Ireland. I can't wait to get him on the Almanac, like that. I just love this cutting edge where you mix mythology with science. Cause you say, otherwise I could lose myself on my own hole.

• 1:20:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, it's that shit we were talking about. You need to have people who are willing to speak about what we consider to be irrational.

• 1:20:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  A lot of holy wells, like, like last week. You didn't see the tomato bridge up in Drumcondra, no?

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  I saw photos of it, so.

• 1:20:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  So that to me, like, that's just vote of offerings. That felt deeply Irish. People, I know it's silly and people are having crack, but the tradition of we are bringing objects to this bridge. For me, what I think it was, like the collective unconscious,

• 1:20:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  it was young people in Dublin who were sick of what has happened to Dublin. There's no nightlife left in Dublin, there's no nightclubs, it's hard to be an artist, young people can't afford to to live up there. And what people are left with really are restaurants that they review. That seems to be youth culture at the moment. And they put these tomatoes on the bridge. It happened out of nowhere. Then someone declared it a shrine on Google. And then people were leaving reviews for the pop up tomato shrine. And it felt like a pop up restaurant version of something we've been doing for thousands of years. And then I traced, just three minutes up the road, is a holy well.

• 1:21:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  St Catherine's Well in Drumcondra, which is now gone, but it was underneath somebody's house. And we know that this well was pagan because I went looking it up. There used to be a tradition that if you drank water from St Catherine's Well in Drumcondra, if you drank it from a human skull, it would cure your eyes of any ailment. You know, and it's just three minutes up the road. And I know it's a big stretch to compare young people leaving tomatoes on a bridge with the ancient practice of holy wells, but it's fucking similar. It's there in the culture. It felt, people knew what to do. Come to this place, leave your vote of offering. And with vote of offerings, it's generally, I'm gonna leave a little thing here to this shrine and then you're gonna solve my problem.

• 1:22:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know what I mean? And when they look into eye wells, because there's a lot of these, these, you'd know the word, I'm shit at speaking Irish, the shool well.

• 1:22:33Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, yeah, tuberous soul.

• 1:22:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's tuberous souls, right? Zinc, zinc is what's it, whatever little minerals are coming up, there's a high amount of zinc. And zinc is fantastic for conjunctivitis. All these things we take for granted because we can walk into a chemist. But three hundred years ago, if you've got zinc coming out of the ground, you're sorted for the eyes. Like another thing I really looked at, this is amazing, is I might have said this to you before, but in America, around New York, Pennsylvania. When they do archaeology there and they're trying to find the site of an old, if they're looking at old slums, slums that might be two, three hundred years old. They can tell if a slum was Irish because people collected bottles of sparkling water.

• 1:23:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, you did, you did an episode about this.

• 1:23:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes.

• 1:23:21Speaker 03

  This was fascinating.

• 1:23:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, it's just fucking sparkling water, carbonated water, but the Irish people were like, no, this tastes like that well at home. And that well at home was mineral water, was mineral water. That's what it might, you know, the zinc or the copper would leave a little bit zinging in your tongue. And some of these wells were effervescent. And the Irish people, when they, when they met with American capitalism and they met with artificially carbonated water. They felt, I know I can buy this in the shop, but it feels really sacred, so I can't throw this bottle out. I have to keep this bottle. And then you dig up land in Pennsylvania and you find all these old fucking sparkling water bottles because the Irish thought they were holy. You know, it's amazing.

• 1:24:05Speaker 03

  And did you, did that, the article where you were talking about that, I can't remember, did it mention about club soda? Do you know this idea that club orange or club, which is an Irish thing, but club soda all over the world? Did that word came from Ireland?

• 1:24:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  I did not know that, no.

• 1:24:17Speaker 03

  The, either the Kildare Street Club or one of the clubs, the gentlemen's clubs in Stevens Green.

• 1:24:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's where club soda comes from.

• 1:24:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the heart of Dublin. They asked for a drink to be made by Cochrane and Colton or whatever, C and C, which was the main fizzy drinks company in Ireland, mineral company in Ireland. And they made this drink for the club called club soda. Yeah. And now that's just went over the world, but it must be connected to that in some way, possibly.

• 1:24:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's, well, we've a strange little sparkling water thing going on with Ireland. So we, like, obviously we've got the holy wells. And mineral water is, it's minerals from the bottom of the earth. Yeah. But then a really strange, a complete fucking coincidence, right? So up until about, I think, eighteen ninety. Yeah. Sparkling water was a serious luxury. To, to, to get water and to artificially carbonate it was a very difficult thing to do. And it was very expensive because what you needed was sulphuric acid and marble dust, right? So marble is very expensive, obviously. So if you can dust up a lot of marble, crush it down and mix this with sulphuric acid, it will release carbon dioxide.

• 1:25:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's how you use the carbonate water. But this was quite expensive. So then in New York, at the end of the eighteen hundreds, when they were building Saint Patrick's Cathedral for the Irish, right?

• 1:25:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  They needed so much marble for Saint Patrick's Cathedral that it flooded the market with marble. So all of a sudden marble was cheap because the paddy's needed Saint Patrick Cathedral. And then you started to see all these little pharmacies pop up where they're suddenly serving sparkling carbonated water at an affordable price because the market was flooded with marble because of the paddy's who needed a church. Wow. Like, it's, that's just something, a connection I spotted, sheer coincidence. But it's, it's, it's just mad that these same people are the ones who were hoarding sparkling water because they believe it to have religious qualities because of some fucking well back home. And, and the other thing too is, what I love is that period in Irish history where after the penal laws.

• 1:26:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Hmm. You know, being a Catholic is illegal, so people head off to the countryside. You have mass rocks and, and Catholicism for about two, three hundred years after the penal laws reverts back to its strange pre-Christian roots. Hmm. You know, that's where you start to see this resurgence in holy wells and mass rocks, you know what I mean? And these are the people who are leaving, these are the people who are arriving in New York, Pennsylvania from seventeen fifty onwards.

• 1:26:49Speaker 03

  It's gone feral, basically. The religion is no longer in, under the control of Rome, of the Vatican, of the Pope. And it's just whatever, it's really mixing back into whatever bush religion or pagan tradition.

• 1:27:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Around like penal law period. And again, of course, like, I'd want to learn more about it, but one of the consequences of the penal laws is no one was allowed to write. You know what I mean?

• 1:27:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  So you don't have literature about these. And as well, it's illegal. So who's going to write down about the illegal mass last night? When there's literal, when there's English people in the country whose job is called priest hunter, you're not going to write about the mass that you had last night in a bush.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 1:27:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:27:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  We don't have evidence of it, but we do know that that's what that kept Holy Wells alive. That kept a lot of what we'd call pagan beliefs alive, because you could no longer go to the church anymore. The church didn't exist and the monasteries were being burnt down.

• 1:27:46Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:27:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  As part of these penal laws and wider Protestant canonization.

• 1:27:51Speaker 03

  Hmm. Good God, Blind Boy. You blow my mind every time. Um, Jesus. Yeah, I'm still going.

• 1:28:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, we, we should, we should cut it today because we're talking for more than an hour.

• 1:28:05Speaker 03

  Oh, golly, golly. Yeah. Ah, great to talk to you again, Blind Boy. And like, congratulations on the work. The amount of things you're unearthing. And it's just because you are exhaustively researching new stuff that just hasn't been aired. Like, I'm still getting over that whole thing of the bones being used, milled up bones from hull being used to, to purify sugar beet, right up until, what, the early 20th century?

• 1:28:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. Well, I had it, I had a whole episode, you see, Man Con, where my, my theory was that bird shit is the most, bird shit is the reason that the earth has eight billion people.

• 1:28:39Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:28:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  And. Like fertilizer, right? Nitrogen, nitrogen. Nitrogen is really difficult to come by. Yeah. If you think of nitrogen for farming, you can get it from manure and you can get it from grass that you leave to rot. Uh huh. But you're not creating anything new. It's, it's, it's already there. Yeah.

• 1:28:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  So nitrogen was a very difficult chemical to get your hands on if you were farming throughout human history. And then people figured out bird shit. Bird shit is a wonderful source of nitrogen, but with colonization in particular, areas around South America, near Panama, there's entire islands there that are made entirely out of bird shit. Uh huh. So colonization happens there and now bird shit is being shipped all the way back to Europe. And now we have a surplus of nitrogen, nitrogen that didn't exist before. Now we have a surplus of nitrogen because of these bird shit islands. And that's a limited resource like, like oil. But we thought we had all the bird shit in the world. We didn't. There's

• 1:29:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  also a theory that this bird shit is what brought blight to Ireland. That, cause the potatoes are from Peru, but then the Peruvian islands full of bird shit, that's what had the blight. That's one theory. But Europe anyway, starts to depend upon islands of bird shit in South America and Central America. And we're talking now going up until about eighteen sixty. And around eighteen sixty, we start to run out of bird shit. We run out of nitrogen. And by about eighteen ninety, the world's population had gotten to be, I think, three billion, right? The reason the world's population had gotten that big is

• 1:30:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  because of excess of nitrogen. You have more, you have excess nitrogen, you can grow food now. You can grow more, more food than you need. So the, the world's population explodes to three billion people. And there was the threat of a genuine global famine around eighteen ninety. Yeah. They were just going, we've used up all the bird shit. What are we gonna do? This is when they started to dig up the likes of Waterloo. All these sites where you had massive wars, where there was thousands and thousands of horses buried in particular, they started digging up all the horses' bones to get the nitrogen from them. Because like with oil, we'd run out of fucking nitrogen. And then just by sheer chance, by sheer chance,

• 1:31:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  a chemist by the name of Fritz Haber in nineteen oh one, figures out, fuck it, nitrogen is in the air. I know how to get it. So for that one chemist called Fritz Haber, figuring out how to get unlimited nitrogen from the air around us, there would have been global famine. But that, that there, taking the nitrogen from, alchemy effectively, that's a fucking alchemy. Like alchemy is all about how do we get gold? Getting nitrogen from the air is alchemy. We shouldn't be able to get it. But this Fritz Haber figured out with chemistry, there's nitrogen all around us, we breathe it, I know how to make it into a powder. So he did that. That there,

• 1:31:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  we avoided global famine, but then the world's population exploded far beyond what we're supposed to have, because now you can grow as much food as you want, because we've got unlimited nitrogen. It's also what created massive bombs. There'd be no huge gigantic bombs that could kill people if we couldn't figure out how to get nitrogen from the air. It's the reason we have a nuclear bomb, because eventually it's like, how do we build a bigger bomb than what nitrogen will give us?

• 1:32:12Speaker 03

  I urge people to go back to that episode of your podcast.

• 1:32:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  You'd heard it.

• 1:32:16Speaker 03

  Oh, I did.

• 1:32:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, sorry, man. I just told you a fucking podcast that you'd listen to.

• 1:32:19Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no. Well, can I tell you one element to how it affected my family with the work I'm doing today? So you remember my, the O'Rahealy was Michael Joseph O'Rahealy, he was the founder of the Volunteers of the IRA. He was also one of the founders of Gaelic League of Conrann Gaol. In the 1890s, he founded the Gaelic League, was one of the people founding it. And then he and Owen McNeil, Professor, Professor of Celtic Studies, in 1913, in UCD, in the University of Dublin, founded the Irish Volunteers, which became the Irish Republican Army. The reason he was, and then in 1914, he was part of the Holt Gun Running. So he bought the majority of the guns for the 1916 uprising, so that we could get our independence, so that we could keep our mythology, our language, our stories alive. The reason

• 1:33:03Speaker 03

  he was able to do that, because his father had a tiny pub and shop in Valley Langford, a tiny little village beside Listowel in North Kerry. And every autumn, sorry, every autumn, yeah, harvest, the farmers, that whole area, this is after the penal laws, the laws that had so curtailed the freedoms of Catholics in Ireland during the 18th century, after that time, they had money, they'd have their harvest, there was one time a farmer and Kerry had money at the harvest time, they'd go into this tiny pub and shop, it's just a crossroads, the great professor Brendan Cannelly from Trinity College, he lived on the opposite side of the crossroads, he wrote a book called The Cook and Cross. So, the O'Reilly's father lives there, Brendan

• 1:33:46Speaker 03

  Cannelly's people live on the other side, and then the farmers come in, in all autumn time, and there's a little tiny canal leading from the Shannon Estuary, the greatest, the greatest, biggest river in Britain and Ireland, down to the back of this pub. So, the farmers were able to go in, in the 1860s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and order their guano, their

• 1:34:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, way.

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  their gold shit. Now, in 1994, I went to Peru and took a boat trip into one of those hollowed-out caves, and they told me, this cave had been solid, solid with bird shit, or with guano, and then over those, the whole 19th century was hollowed out, hollowed out. The smell was just as bad as you referred to on the, is it Patrick Street in Limerick?

• 1:34:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, yeah, the bird shit district, Bedford Road there with the starling shit

• 1:34:29Speaker 03

  With all the posh shops.

• 1:34:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  phenomenally bad, yeah.

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he, the O'Reilly's dad, made his money from selling guano and things like pitch pine and things, but mainly the fertilizers.

• 1:34:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  No fucking way.

• 1:34:40Speaker 03

  No, so that's on one side, he, he earned so much, by the time the O'Reilly comes of age, he's 19 or 20, his dad dies in 1898 around, and he realises his dad has the equivalent of three million euro, three million euro earned from the local farmers in this tiny pub.

• 1:34:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  From bird shit.

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  Mainly bird shit, other things too.

• 1:34:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:34:59Speaker 03

  And then, that's my mother's side of the family, right? My dad's side of the family lived in Longford, and they lived by the side of the Royal Canal in Killashe, a little village, it's where our family, my uncle, my first cousin still lived there, in a house, and all farmers on the sides of the Royal Canal, and with access to the Royal Canal. So, when we needed things for the farm, throughout the 19th century, we'd get them sent down from Dublin, we'd get them sent down by the mills, and with Shackleton Mills. So, basically, I can't remember, was it the first cousin or the uncle of Ernest Shackleton who went down to the Antarctic? And I have the ledgers and the lists from Shackleton. And one of the key thing, there was grain and seed, but there was also guano. There was also this, you know, and it said like Peru, uh, bird shit from Peru or something, you know, it said where it's coming from.

• 1:35:43Speaker 03

  So that's what kept my father's side of the family alive. That's why they didn't die during the famine, because they made money selling the guano to local farmers in Langford. In the same way, my, actually my mum's side of the family, the O'Reilly side, they, the, the, the, the old man did die. And there was the O'Reilly's grandfather died during the famine. He was a rich local man and tried to look after local people and got the one of diseases and died. But he still left enough of the building that his father and his son could re- earn the three million that he then used to buy guns. And then right up until nineteen twenty one, he was like, well, and after actually nineteen thirties, he was.

• 1:36:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  You tell me bird shit funded the weaponry that was used in the nineteen sixteen rising.

• 1:36:23Speaker 03

  Directly going by directly.

• 1:36:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fuck me.

• 1:36:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's fucking unreal.

• 1:36:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's, but it's only, I would never spot it except you walking up Bradford Row and your curiosity because of your sense of smell. Because the people at the fancy restaurants and wine bars not being able to eat outside.

• 1:36:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  I got killed by Limerick Council for that. I got fucking killed because people now call that area the bird shit district. So they fucking hate me in Limerick Council, so I'm glad something good came out of that.

• 1:36:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:36:54Speaker 03

  You're finally.

• 1:36:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's great. Bird shit funded the fucking nineteen sixteen rising. Amazing.

• 1:36:59Speaker 03

  Did we look enough at Imbolc? But if we're not, the RT, most people around the world will have access to the RT player. And on the second of February, there's a lovely documentary about, about Imbolc, about this feast day at the beginning of February. That is our day to sanctify the new warmth and new life and new and spirit coming into the land. I'd urge people to, to watch it in case, in case we, in case I messed up the facts or anything about it.

• 1:37:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, um, we, we've chatted for fucking ages there, Mancon, right? So I'm gonna call it a day now and as usual, look, thank you so much.

• 1:37:30Speaker 03

  Thanks, Brian Boy.

• 1:37:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  We could just keep talking and talking and talking.

• 1:37:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  We have to watch ourselves.

• 1:37:34Speaker 03

  Indeed.

• 1:37:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's always an absolute pleasure talking to you. You have the. The things you're interested in, the way your brain works, it's the exact same as me. And I hope we don't sound like absolute lunatics to anyone listening in, but I love chatting with you.

• 1:37:47Speaker 03

  Likewise, Blind Boy, likewise. Thank you so much. And as you know, a lot of people know about my work only through you. The amount of people who come up to me, you know.

• 1:37:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  God bless.

• 1:37:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. Take care. Take care, brother. I'll send you all the recordings.

• 1:38:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, that podcast was a hefty buy. That was a hefty podcast.

• 1:38:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  I hope, I hope you were all able to keep up with me and Mancon because I don't know if we give sufficient context for a lot of the shit that we were talking about. We're both speaking about an area that we're respectively fairly nerdy about and very passionate about. And sometimes when I get carried away with myself like that, sometimes you can forget to democratise the information, to give clear explanations of what the fuck's being spoken about. But if you're, if you're a ten foot Declan, if you're a steeple chasing Quiva and you've listened to a lot of podcasts,

• 1:38:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  most of the shit we're talking about, I have covered in extreme detail in other podcasts. I'll catch you next week. I'm currently busy with a very exciting project that I can't wait to tell you about. It would be for the people of, the people in the area which is politically known as Britain. I can't say anymore, but I'm doing that this week and it'll be great, Craig. Thank you for listening. I'll catch you next week with a hot take. In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, genuflect for a worm. Dog bless.

• 1:39:36Speaker 00

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