Evolution
I guess Saint Patrick also helped to bring Christianity to Ireland, but who cares about that? No more snakes! Everyone can wear shorts and sandals all the time! Too bad Ireland isn’t really known for its beach weather…
I bet Australia wishes Patrick had visited them.
Ireland was once a Celtic nation, full of lore and myth about great heroes, nature spirits, faerie folk, and all manner of strange monsters and giants. Figures like Cuchulainn and Finn McCool (to use their simplified anglicized names) were once the gold standard for anyone hoping to become a heroic figure. Times change, and with the coming of Christianity the warlike and more primal culture of the Celts gave way to personalities like Saint Patrick, known for his conversions, baptisms, and driving away some snakes. Many folklorists and historians don’t actually think the snake story is meant to be literal, as snakes haven’t been present in Ireland since before the last Ice Age. Instead, it has been used as a metaphor (in more recent times) for Patrick’s influence in driving out the “evils” of Celtic paganism within the Christian religion.
For those of you unfamiliar with these two badasses, I highly suggest investigating Celtic folklore and mythology. Cuchulainn is the most prominent hero of the Ulster Cycle, a rather lengthy story about the reigns of King Conor Mac Nessa and Queen Medb. Much of the story revolves around the war between these two over a rather impressive bull (hilarious, I know) and about the amazing lengths to which Cuchulainn, the Hound of Cullan, goes in order to protect his nation. While his kinsmen are incapacitated by a curse, Cuchulainn battles Queen Medb’s invading army at fords and river crossings, engaging the enemy soldiers in single combat and defeating everyone for months until the Ulstermen are finally able to fight. Cuchulainn is shown as being exceptionally clever, strong, handsome, and brave and he even did the Hulk thing before there was a Hulk! The stories tell of him suffering from “warp spasms” that would contort his body into horrible shapes and cause him to grow in size and strength. During these spasms, he was even more terrible to fight against and he was unable to distinguish friend from foe. Cuchulainn was a very popular hero that gives us a sense of the qualities the Celts found valuable at the time.
One of the later, more refined heroes of the Celts was Finn Mac Cumhaill, or Finn McCool, and totally cool he certainly was. Finn, as a young man, assists a strange old fellow named Finnegas in catching the Salmon of Knowledge, a creature that represents pure wisdom. Having tried and failed for many years, Finnegas finally lands the fish and orders Finn to cook it but the boy accidentally burns his thumb while doing so. Putting his thumb to his mouth to ease the burn, Finn feels the flood of wisdom and knowledge from it touching the fish. Folktales often feature Finn sucking his thumb when he needs to think or to gain some special insight into a matter. Finn’s adult life is given over to the leadership of the Fianna, a band of the best warriors in the land with their own moral code, not unlike King Arthur and his round table. The Fianna had many adventures and righted many wrongs in their time and it was said that one of Finn’s men lived to be old enough to meet Saint Patrick and tell the tales of their brave deeds to him, but that is undoubtedly just folklore.
Saint Patrick and Christianity finally arrived in Ireland and with them, the Celtic culture slowly died out. There is a story about a man named Tuan Mac Cairill that brings these two disparate spiritual traditions together and shows their strengths and weaknesses. Mac Cairill is one of the first men to ever come to Ireland. His people are slowly killed off by a plague and he alone survives to a very great age. After some time, he begins to change and one day wakes to find himself a deer. This sort of thing happens time and again for two thousand years and Tuan Mac Cairill witnesses each new wave of people coming into Ireland and the old groups being wiped out or replaced. Eventually, he is reborn as a man and he meets Saint Finnian of Moville with whom he converses about the Celtic traditions and history and the new culture Christianity represents. You can see, in this story, the closeness to nature but more dangerous lifestyle of the Celts in contrast to the kind of spiritual and physical safety offered by the more modern Christian culture that was coming to Ireland from Europe. In the stories, Tuan Mac Cairill supposedly talked to Saint Patrick himself and even converted to Christianity in the end.
Saint Patrick has been a folk hero in Ireland for a long time and his holiday is both a spiritual and secular one. Patrick represents Christianity’s influence in Ireland, its guiding hand on Ireland’s history. While great heroes like Finn and Cuchulainn are, without a doubt, some of the coolest and most badass figures in folklore, it’s hard to argue with the historical impact that a figure like Saint Patrick had on the country.
Still, not very impressive compared to Cuchulainn or Finn McCool, if you ask me, but I guess it’s a matter of how awesome you think Christianity is.
Anyway, I’d like to wish everyone that celebrates it an early Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! Please be safe!
Discussion (41) ¬
I recall hearing somewhere that Ireland never even had snakes to begin with, which makes this even funnier.
But it’s not entirely impossible to make chasing a nuisance animal off an island look awesome. This guy pulled it off, for instance.
Yeah I actually did a little reading on this and what I came across said that natural historians believe that snakes haven’t been seen in Ireland since before the last ice age!
That’s just how awesome St. Patrick was. He drove the snakes out of Ireland retroactively.
In Ireland’s defense, he wasn’t actually Irish.
True! But Ireland did make him into a kind of hero and a subject of folklore much like the fellows in the previous panels!
The story as I have heard it is that the snakes were a metaphor for the practice of propitiating Crom Cruach with human sacrifice. I bet you knew that though.
Here’s the tru legend.
My favorite story about St Patrick is when he was converting some chieftain lord to Christianity. He stuck his staff in the ground and muttered some bible verses. When he finished and picked up his staff, he noticed that he’d accidentally rammed it through the chieftain’s foot. When he asked why the chieftain hadn’t said anything, the chieftain replied that he thought it was part of the ceremony.
Also, kudos of doing a comic about Cu Chulainn – that guy rocks. Read The Hound Of Ulster if you want to get to full story on him.
Mark is completely correct. The “snakes” St. Patrick drove out were metaphoric for pagan practices. It didn’t drive the practice out completely, obviously, but it was an early form of religious propaganda. The more you know. (But like he said, I’m sure you knew this. I’m just confirming for posterity.)
And someone else may have my soapbox now.
Interesting. I thought the ‘snakes’ he drove out were the Hiberno-Christians, who were considered heretics by Rome.
You have a typo – “Lead” instead of “Led”.
(also I like your comic)
Thanks! It was an artifact of something I’d written earlier haha
Fixed it! 🙂
Don’t laugh at St. Patrick, you could get a big bruise from his walking stick.
Snakes of course meaning, “pagans”.
So one could say that he slew the first two guys single-handedly.
*glares and grumbles*
“saint” Patrick…. ugh…
there were no snakes….that was allegorical for the Pagans…
…he wasn’t an Irish hero…he was a Catholic one…
The Irish converted *cough* from the Druidic and Pagan religions to Catholicism…and then later Protestant…
The “holiday” (holy day) was transformed later…
and en the Irish emigrated to the United States during the potato famine and later, they brought their holidays with them…
Skip a bit forward, and as what happens with a lot of holidays that become “Americanized” …. it just becomes an excuse to party, and get drunk…
…so between the rampant commercialization and the degradation of the original holiday..it’s and may others have not only lost their original meaning, but will continue to.
So pardon me if this ancient (wolf and by human terms PAGAN) spirit that lived in Ireland refuses to take any part of “St. Patrick’s” day!
*stalks off, angrily*
No, it wasn’t an allegory. That’s something that Marion Zimmer Bradley cooked up in “The Mists of Avalon.” Literally no one else has ever said that.
Marion was not the only one, Betty Rhodes and Chris Weigant also suggested that since snakes featured heavily. This of course, as you say, is not true since there appears to be no evidence of it being allegory.
Ireland never did have snakes. Snakes actually meant Pagans. He got rid of all the Pagans in Ireland, not sure how though : /
If you think Patty got rid of all the Pagans in Ireland you are very, very wrong – most of the folklore of Ireland is actually just Pagan myth couched in Christianity. Including many of Ireland’s favorite saints – see: Brigid/St. Brigid.
I want to see these three team up with Bono and the Lucky Charms dude to become Ireland’s answer to the Avengers.
Cool idea , but leave out St Pat …………hell he isn’t even Irish
, was a Romanised Brit .
Didn’t Christianity do, in a way, the same thing consumerism is doing today? Replace the national identity shaping specifics and replacing them with the trending gimmick?
Well my friends , I’m a Celtic pagan , CR to be exact . So although I have no real problems with Christians per se , i do lament what Christianity has done to our Ethnic homelands , and it’s heroic mythology . Tis a bloddy shame a preist is more famous than our mythical heroes.The damage done to Celtic societies in general is irrepairable , our great peoples will never be the same again since Christianity came to western Europe .These once powerful, strong peoples now take orders from Rome and the EU. If the ancient short sighted people had known what it’s effect would be they would have turned them back as should have the American Indians . Kilm
Saint Patrick was said to have “rid Ireland of snakes” that is true if by rid you mean brutally torture and murder hundreds of… and if by snakes you mean Pagans… it was later rephrased by the church because it sounds better to say “rid Ireland of snakes” than it does to say “killed off most of Ireland’s Pagans”
Pagans aside, I don’t know if it’s fair to say the Celtic culture died with the arrival of Saint Patrick.
The language and traditions lived on, sometimes taking on new names but the Celtic culture of Ireland lived on in full strength until the Flight of the Earls in the 1600s and even then still lives on, both with the language in the West and in smaller [but still substantial] parts of Hiberno-English speaking people in the rest of Ireland.
Patrick, definitely did what he thought was right for Ireland and did it very effectively. As an Atheist myself, while I mourn the loss of Irish Paganism, I see how it was preserved in parts within Christian tradition where it wouldn’t have if they remained pagans and were forcibly converted later. Catholicism also played a large role in Irish politics and is at least part of the reason that Ireland was able to break from the UK while Scotland and Wales remain.
But must admit when our friends the Christians came to the Celtic lands with thier ways so opposite the Celtic Pagan ways the general Celtic Mythology mostly based on Heroes and Warriors was weakened . And eventualy our people as well . Pagans in General can’t be lead around by the hand like most Christians can be . Pagans would tell the EU and Rome to shyte in their perspective hats .
I think a lot of elements of Pagan Celtic culture would also inevitably collapse once they arrived at a certain level of size or unity; difficult to imagine Cu Chulainn arriving home with the head of someone who tried to outbid him for a promotion. Also, the Celts from Celtiberian to Galatia collapsed to Rome in their times.
Further, I think it’s really important to remember that Christianity wasn’t the only factor at work on the Celts; The English have also done their share of damage Ireland hasn’t been independant for a full hundred years yet after 800 under the foreign rule.
An interesting read on this [that I haven’t finished yet] is here; http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/colloquy_ogrady.pdf
This dialogue [12th century] shows Gaelic Christianity trying to preserve and honour the pagan tradition of Celts and Saint Patrick actively interested in their stories, though he does consider them a distraction to a degree as well. It’s not perfect but I think more blame is owed to the weakening of the Gaelic language and Culture under foreign rule than to the arrival of Christianity.
Sidenote; None of this blames English people currently living there for this and current Irish-UK relations is a mess that I’m not touching. Especially not on a webcomic board.
Thank you for making it slightly more awesome to be an Irish person on the Internet today. Can’t tell you how tired I am of reading ‘St. Patty’s Day’ everywhere (it’s either St. Paddy’s Day, or St. Patrick’s Day; no actual Irish person will ever say St. Patty’s Day).
And I do miss the Celtic culture. You’re right, the stories were much better. Including the one about a giant in Ireland and a giant in Scotland who were having a feud, and started chucking rocks across the sea at each other, and ended up making the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim.
Love this cartoon, though I have to disagree with a few parts of the text underneath. Celtic culture didn’t die out in Ireland with the coming of Patrick — culture is far more than just religion, and many aspects of Celtic culture are still alive today. It would be more accurate to say that the Celtic Pagan religion began to decline at that point (not all at once — the Christianization of Ireland was a gradual process, beginning before Patrick’s arrival and continuing gradually over the following thousand years. But many other aspects of Celtic culture — the language, music, poetry and much more — persisted a lot longer, and much of it is still alive and well.
Also, I’m not sure how accurate it is to say that Fionn mac Cumhal was a more “refined” hero than Cuchulain, or that the Fianna followed a “strict moral code”. The Fianna were semi-outlaws, and many of Fionn’s myths revolve around breaking the established rules in some way, while Cuchulain’s myths tend to be centered around duty and honour. One of the best books about the Fianna Cycle is called The Wisdom of the Outlaw, in recognition of this aspect of Fionn’s mythos.
Finally, with regard to a point made over and over again in the comments: the idea that the snakes Patrick is supposed to have driven out represented Pagans or Druids was popular for a while with folklorists, but fell out of favour in academia quite a while ago, though it persists in popular culture (and especially among Neo-Pagans). It’s actually just a minor legend that arose, long after Patrick’s time, to explain the fact that Ireland doesn’t have any snakes (and hasn’t since at least the last Ice Age. Patrick didn’t drive anyone out of Ireland — Paganism persisted there, to some extent, for a long time after his death. His various hagiographies do include stories of him doing battled with various Druids, but that in itself makes it unlikely that people would have had to come up with some cryptic metaphor for it if he had somehow single-handedly managed to drive all the pagans out of Ireland — it’s not exactly an accomplishment they’d be wanting to hide. There’s more detail available in this article: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wildhunt/2012/03/saint-patrick-druids-snakes-and-popular-myths.html (and many other places, but that one summarizes a lot of it nicely).
There is one tale of St. Patrick where he interrupts a sacrificial ceremony for Crom Cruiach and knocks over a huge statue with a hammer and yells at everyone to go home and stop blaspheming.
Ohhh so that’s who he was. I’ll be honest with you, I pretty much thought it was some sort of made-up excuse to get really drunk and stereotype the Irish a lot.
people can become very ingenious when it comes to finding reasons for getting drunk
In Australia, we seem to have just gotten used to the snakes. Not sure wether we have been inflewenced by the snakes, but “weh”, It’s dropbears that we worry about.
Well, sure St. Patrick, did drive out snakes. He also poked holes in King’s feet with his staff during baptism, and fought off a hundred angry druids and the army of King Lioghaire at the hill of Slane.
Then there was St. Columba who started a war over a copyright dispute, tamed the Loch Ness monster, and talked to giant dead skeletons.
And let’s not forget that St. Bridget was a time traveller.
Then of course there was Brian Boru….
St. Bridget is actually the Christianized form of the once-very-popular Goddess Brigid. A few gods were so popular that they ended up being Christianized in order to facilitate conversion of the Irish people. Others were relegated to what we now refer to as the fae or sidhe (as opposed to Sidhe). Quite a demotion, I would say.
Brian Boru was Christian in name and perhaps belief but rather Pagan in behavior (multiple wives, had a habit of performing certain “superstitions” before battle, pity he signed the rights of church revenues over to Armagh after assuming High Kingship.)
We could go over the folkloric exploits of the very Pagan men of the Fianna, of Neasa (who was literally so awesome that her son Conor mac Neasa took her name rather than his father’s – though who exactly his dad was is somewhat ambiguous), etc etc etc, but that would require far more time.
Aw, I wish you had included a mention of Fionns amazingly intelligent and faithful hounds.