The Blindboy Podcast - Birdshit funded the 1916 Rising, with Manchán Magan

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

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 for more information.

Drool on the tothy, pull Q, you googly-eyed Fintans. Welcome to the Planned By 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 Mankan Magan. Mankan is a writer and a storyteller, harking back to the theme of last week's podcast.

Suppose you'd call him a bit of an eccentric. Mancon, he has a passionate interest in Irish mythology and the Irish language, and he goes at these areas from mad angles. His most recent book is called Bretons 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, Mankhan 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 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 gonna have similarities between Indian culture and Irish culture. Man Conn also, he was a wonderful help to me in my recent documentary, Blind by the Land of Slaves and Scholars, where I explored the pre-Christian roots of the Irish literary tradition.

Myself and Mankán 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 Mancon as soon as possible, because we spoke for fucking ages. To be honest with you, 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 Mancon Megan. And if you want to check out Mancon's books, if you want to check out his podcasts, whatever, go to Mancon.com. Mancon, what's the crack? It's good to hear you. Great to talk to you about my 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. You introduced me to the worldns in Sligo. Well, I just I think I machine gunned you with a lot of facts. 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 are about the six counties. I know so little about my shame. Yeah, we don't. Yeah.

You brought me over to Sligo to Caramore, to this site just outside Sligo town that has these Cairns, these Dolmens everywhere, everywhere you look and everyone's back guarding this. The sheds built into the side of 5,000 year old Cairns. I never even knew about it. It just makes this island, this country of ours, it's a, it's an accordion. It could just wave, you know, move out and out and out. The more you look into it.

Yeah. So it was it was a total revelation for me that day. Your most recent book, right, which has a bit of a mad title, which is Brehens and Brahmins. Can you tell me about that? Yeah. So about 25 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 cowshed. I put myself in there for about eight months and would just walk all day through the Rudra Dendron forest, which is in the sort of low Himalayas. There's this dense, tall Rudra Dendron forest before you get to the pines and we'd just tink all night long. But the more I spent, oh, and I was drinking my urine at the time. There was this whole,

you know, Ayurvedic technology or medicine in India. This like ancient thousand year old culture believes in urine therapy. I've stopped doing that since. Fair play too. Yeah, I've wisen up. And I just kept on seeing all these connections between my culture back home, between in other words, the Hindu language, the Hindi language, the ancient Vedic or Sanskrit or ways and stories and what I had learned in Ireland. So I wanted to find a way of conveying that to other people. So as you say, the book is called Brehens and Brahmans and that's because Brehen, you know, was the Brehen 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 Brehen laws, the ancient laws, I feel silly talking, telling you about this, Kleinboy, cause you know it all backwards, but anyway, just bear with me if you want to allow me. So the Browns were those and that word

Bri, the word Brown 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 learned it off by heart. And so the Brehav had the exact same role in the world and in the society as the Brahmins did in India. So actually Brehav and Brahmin come from the same Sanskrit root, the same Indo European root.

I'll explain that in a second. So I wanted to see all those connections. I knew the Brahmans are the elite force in, in, in India. Yeah. We want to get a sense of what the druids were like. In other words, 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 we often romanticize them now. But actually it's hard to know even what like, even if I mentioned the word druid to an academic, they'll stop me right there. And so you need to stop using that word. Like 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 the Indo-European roots

of the Irish language. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, the one thing we do know, we know the Druids existed because St. Patrick was talking about them. And again, we know the root of that word. So if I was telling you the root of the word Brehav and Brahman come from the same, this master of mantras, they were the people who kept the old law 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 wizard, the magic man, the spirit master. And so it's just the genitive case was druid. So that's the way

English to go on. But where it comes from two words, dru in the Indo-European language. In other words, the language from which the Irish language and Sanskrit and Hindi all arose from. And drew means immersion or total connection. So the drew id 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 and actually India culture too, was the, it was a tree, you know, the, you

know, when you have yoga, it's all about the spine, everything was up and down the axis of that spine. So in, in Celtic cultures or Irish cultures, it was the, the, the oak tree. So that's where you get Dera, Dera, Dera means oak forest or something. That's right. Yeah. So did it is the, uh, is the, is an oak tree. Did it is an oak wood, not a Vogue is an oak plane.

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. It was a sacred tree. It was like an access Monday, 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 talk about in your beautiful program. As the great calligraphy expert, Tim O'Neill wrote a talk about. He was lovely.

All those shots in trinity of him mixing the oak gall were so beautiful. top. He was lovely. All those shots in trinity of him mixing the oak all were so beautiful. Yeah. But so anyway, so the drew is sort of, so it's immersion, but then vids, the second part of drew vids, that's where the word drew comes. Vid is like the Vedas. So you know, the Vedas are Vedic knowledge in India. That just means Vedic or Vedic. 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. Ráin Idachas. So even with those words I've given, even with Brahmans, Brahmans and Druids, we see these connections. 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 St. Patrick came. 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 because they would use that power to just boss people around. So we romanticize Druids as being these wonderful, wise guru figures. But I don't think they were, particularly because we've talked in previous episodes about the goddess, how everything in Ireland seems to be like the goddess. The river is where goddess is, the land was shaped like a goddess. Can you talk about it in your program? And you talked about it on previous episodes 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 ruling class before them of women, of matriarchy, of goddess worshipping people. That's been entirely, entirely lost. And something to do about what you're saying, Mankan, is so we're talking about deep time here.

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 Ireland from somewhere, you know, and something I find fascinating is I brought up earlier about the Cajia fields. So I spoke about them last week on the podcast. They're an archaeological site up in Mayo called the Cajia 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 a deeply important site. But when I looked into it, they followed haplogroup B, I believe, is the a genetic group that come from the Levant and that's who they believe did these fields in May or 6,000 years ago. So you can look at genetics and it's like these people came from the Levant which is somewhere 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 those people in the Levant, it's not India, but it's closer to India than Ireland. So true. Yeah. So, you know, we know that all, you know, people came out of Africa, humans did, and then they learned farming. They learned sort of gradually more sophisticated farming in that area where Eastern Europe meets Western Asia. Yeah. So often, sometimes people argue, some scholars say it's Ukraine. Interestingly, at the moment, some people say it's Western Kazakhstan.

Some people say Turkey, Armenia, somewhere in the Middle East, Russia. It's basically 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. So by like 500 BC, this Celtic language was being spoken the whole way from Turkey to Ireland. A form of Celtic language.

And what do we call this, Mankana? Is it Indo-European? Like what would you call this Celtic language? So let's say that's 500 BC. That's 2,500 years ago. That we just call this Celtic language? So let's say that's 500 BC. That's 2,500 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 island of man.

There's obviously one in Wales. There's one in Brittany's one in Cornwall. Our isolation is why we have this. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. But that so that's 2500 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 fields. So we're at 6000 years ago and plus.

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. 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 traveler man, from a minkade, from a Luchthuil, Luchthuil is the Irish word for traveler, you know, the walking people, that is identical to a song that you find in the Rig Veda, like India's most ancient text, which either dates from between 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, different parts of the Rig Veda. So like Christie sings a song called Tipping It Up to Nancy, and 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, we're married woman and she's falling madly in love with another man. So she goes to the local sorcerer or 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 Christy Moore gets it from Ross Common Traveller, Johnny Riley. But you get in the same, from two, three, four, five thousand years ago, you get this Sanskrit version, which goes again, a blind woman once had 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 butter cakes, 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 Kristy Moore singing a song today and you have the exact same story in the Rig Veda in the Indian tradition from, from thousands of years ago. I'm assuming too that India had writing, they had writing systems that they like long before same story in the Rigveda, in the Indian tradition from thousands of years ago. I'm assuming too that India had writing, they had writing systems that they like long before us. 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.

And who are the Brahmins? Because again, I know fuck all about. So when you say Brahmin to me, the vision that comes to my head is a cow for some reason. Yeah. So the Brahmins were and still are today, the elite class in India. They're the spiritual class. And is this within the Indian, the Hindu caste system?

Exactly. OK. So 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 Druid in Irish stories also had more power than the King did. Well, the Druid could decide what stories are being told about that King. Exactly.

Like almost like control in the media or propaganda. That's it. So we don't want to over-idea, we don't want to over-romanticize either. The Druids are 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, the top class, the top cast and class in Ireland and India, the class in Ireland was the Rhee, the end. And so, you know, that the top class, the top cast and class in Ireland and India, the class in Ireland was the re the king in India was the Raja, the king, same word comes from the same Indo European root word re and Raja. The next one in India was the Brahmin in Ireland

was the breath or the druid same word from the same in the root. The next class beneath that was the ara in Ireland. So ara means a minister or a noble. So you know in government in Ireland, the ministers are called ara agatis, the minister of whatever money or finance. And then in India it's aereum. To say two things about that. First, ara in Irish, when we learned it at school, we know what it means, ara agorachtach in e what it means to care for someone. So the ara, they weren't 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 at sovereignty. But that word area 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 60s and early 70s by the likes of Miles Dillon, the great Gaelic scholar and a Welsh scholar called Weese, Brinsley Weese. 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 1930s, 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. And they took, did they take this from from Indian scripture. 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. God. Okay.

So they're saying that's a little bit like throughout history, you get people claiming to be the true Israelites. Exactly. Exactly. Cause like there was Brits called the British Israelites going, we're actually the main tribe of Israel. We are God's promised people. So you're saying within Indian culture, you have, here's this one race called

the Aryans and the Germans reckoned, oh, that's us. Yeah. one race called the Aryans and the Germans reckoned, oh, that's us. Yeah, it was it was just a noble class in Indian culture. And the Germans invented this whole idea that they came from a superior, pure, paler skinned race of people. Wow. Like racing to India one thousand six hundred years ago. They they I mean, they were right that, yes, we're all the same people. They were all just different migrants from a culture that learned how to farm

somewhere, as you said, in the Levant or Turkey or Russia, the Middle East and moved. But then they just they they walked 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. No, ideology is an interesting thing in general. Mankan, something that I notice, like. 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's a huge red flag. People go, are you a Nazi? I'm like, why the fuck would I be a Nazi? I just want to learn about film the cool.

You know what I mean? Germany is 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? So it depends on when I look at folklore and mythology, I don't want to find, 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.

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 pure race. And it's a strange one. 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 out that Stonehenge was actually built by that all the warring tribes, Celtic tribes of Britain got together to build Stonehenge 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. that. Someone pulled that 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. Because in Britain it's like the migrants are coming on rafts 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 something like a big racist. Yeah, if I don't speak about it, they've won is my idea. Exactly. It was actually, yeah. Same with the Swastika. Swastika had fucking nothing to do with racism until Hitler got involved. No, it was it was it was Cormac Mokkanumara of the of the brand, the frames of that lovely album with the hair's corner, who said that to me, Makan, he said, you've got to do it.

Otherwise they've won. It was Tyson Yung Caporta, this great Aboriginal man who wrote Sand Talk. He was the one he flagged it for me first. He said, Makan, your work could be taken by Yeah. By the Maga hat by white supremacists. So easy. And I just said, so that's why I twisted the goddess. If we say everything about our culture comes from goddess, most of that white supremacist movement doesn't work because they're fucking misogynists.

Yeah. It does not. 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. Yes. You know, when when 1916, when we just when we realized one hundred and twenty years ago that our language, our culture, having been kept alive for whatever, the language is maybe two and a half, three thousand years old.

The stories and songs, as we've seen, could be five or six thousand years old. When we suddenly songs as we've seen could be five or 6000 years old. When we suddenly realized that could all be wiped out, we needed to fight both to bring our culture alive through the Gaelic League through Conrad and Gaelgá, but also to fight against Britain with arms. We had to pick the myth, the mythology that would most suit that. So we focused on the great warriors on Cú Chol, on Finn McCool, and they became the backbone of our stories. And it's really interesting that at the moment we've shifted, we've now started looking at, at Bridget, at this great mama, this 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. No. Fionn MacGill goes out, goes around beheading everyone. We're looking for a more harmonious, more nature centered 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. And I'm explicit about it, to be honest, Mankan, like when I get asked, why do I dedicate so much time 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, I adore this, like in Limerick where I am, I love that.

There's the river Shannon and I can tell this the story of the goddess Shannon. And I know that just up that river near Loch Derg is Fintan's grave, where mythology says some fella called Fintan 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 so much of our mythology is about different festivals that occur because of seasons, right? And we are witnessing seasons becoming kind of meaningless.

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 saw one 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 other world from this cave in Onegat and when

the demons escape from the cave they strip all the leaves from the trees 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 got to 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 bammie and sweaty and warm.

Do you get me? I do. And I think that's really important. And it's very sad that these stories are going to not work anymore. Oh, beautiful. really important and it's very sad that these stories are going to not work anymore. Beautiful. And I know I was listening to you. If you people should go back to an earlier edition of your podcast where you went into that beautiful or even when you were talking to Chris O'Dowd and you brought up how he got here's a man from Ross Common from Boyle and he didn't seem to know how he got 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 how we got until whatever, five, six years ago. 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 don't even know. We have the American version of Halloween. And I want to radicalize people. I want to radicalize.

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 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, that's been destroyed by a green algae, you know, I went clambering from mythology around that specific lake of which there's fucking loads. Yes. Because when you tell people the stories about the lake you

care about it more. Now it's not just a body of water anymore 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. Blind Boy, you know, so you're saying you're going back to the mythology of our country. But what 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 Né, and you know, it was formed one story is that this boy eloped with his mother from Cork. He stops in in Newgrange in Brú na Bóinne, the greatest care and the greatest ritual or chamber site in Ireland, grabs horses

from Angus, the god of love. And then he goes up to Lochough Neagh, up to this great, it was a plain 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 Ishnach. So they begin to piss. They piss the magic course 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 with these, they rode through the sky in chariots. Again, you were talking a few weeks ago about Clalmouth-Noise and the magic UFO or 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 of Big Vedda, send down for us the rain of heaven, ye Maruts and let the stallions flood the sand 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 about- Why horses? I wonder why horses? Peace is so important. Well, again, I mean, well, I'll get on to that in a second. Again, a few weeks ago, you were talking about the voyage of Bran. You know, where Bran goes off and the exact same story is in India. It says Indian and culture.

He's elements of it. So remember, Bran, he has this vision and then he decides to set off to find the land of women and the time, his whole time schedule. I think you were talking about with regard to Willow with this new Google. Whatever. Yeah, I was I was seeing I was viewing it from a quantum lens. Yeah. Parallel universes. So 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. This Vedic cosmology. is that what you're speaking of? Exactly. Exactly. And then remember you talked about Mononon Maclear. So Bran goes out with his nine men, I think, or 13 or 17. Anyway, he's told how many men to bring on the boat, goes off to find this voyage, this magical island of women. And Mononon Maclear, the great the great sea god comes on his chariot. And he intervenes just like in the similar story in India, it's Krishna in the Mahabharata, the great epic. So, you know, Ireland has the time, 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, then he needs to ride in the voyage to find it. Again, very common 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 Voyager brand, Nachten, one of the people on the boat decides, gets homesick and wants to go home. And the gorgeous women in the Isle of Women say, don't put your foot on the lander. 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 and the minute he does, he's gone. This inability to exist in multiple planes

at the same time. And just one final- It's phenomenal, you know, and you know what the quantum equivalent of that is? Go on. 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 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. Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. 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. And as soon as anything becomes like our world, our local reality, then it all falls apart. Oh, my God. It's great stuff, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. You remember you were asking why horses were saying why horses go on? Yeah, you know, in you. So topographical Hibernica, is that your book or that? That's mine. Well, I wrote mine's topography Hibernica, but obviously fucking I'm taking the piss out of Gerald of Wales from the 11th century. The horse.

So again, I mean, you've talked about you've described how in Guraldus Cumbrensis or Gerald of Wales, he describes fucking the horses. 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 fades 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. It was just anti-Irish propaganda. 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 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. So that's where you get Gerald's deliberate trope there. Right.

But we know that he didn't just make it up. You know, there was this sense that the horse represent, the mare, the female horse represented the land. So St. Mulling, St. Mulling, this early Christian saint from the 6th or 7th century, he refers to the ritual at one point. When the saint offered this cauldron of horse flesh to eat and drink by some pagans and he refuses. And it's almost a symbol of thereto 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 was used to brand us as barbarians in, as you say, the 12th or 13th century, but it was there, but you find the same in India. So the Ashwamedha, which is one of the grandest of the Vedic religious rites, in other words, of the Hindu religious rites, is the sacrifice of a stallion, not a mare, but a stallion at the inauguration of a king. It's recorded in numerous texts, including the Shat-hafta 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 horse. So then the horse is then dismembered and used in sacrificial offerings, in other words, given to people. Now, in the fifth or sixth century AD,

Buddha, the Buddha Siddhartha, he condemns us, 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. That is fucking mad and completely plausible. 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 in Ireland and aboriginal aboriginal stories The next is Ireland the 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 Let's have a little break there. Now you spindly Vincent's I the products of humanity that have wandered on this earth forever. We share the same stories.

Let's have a little break there now, you spindly Vincents. I think we'll have a break for an ocarina pause. I'm really enjoying that conversation there with Mankan. 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 you're gonna hear an advert for some bullshit. Very kind on the ears of dogs. That was the Wooden Frogs Back Pause.

Support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever has you 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. 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 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 forward slash the blind buy podcast and preferably do that on your desktop because if you sign up as a new patron on your apple mobile phone on your fucking iphone if you use the patreon app on your iphone apple will take 30% 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 buy 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 just too busy. I'm too busy to be running a fucking website. And I've always fucked it up.

So this year, I'm literally, I'm hiring a person to run a website for me. 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 RTU1, blind by slaves and scholars. 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 it was factually inaccurate and it really pissed me off. The reviewer said, making the leap, Blind Buyers is making the leap from podcasting

to a primetime RT1 documentary. Now I'm paraphrasing there, it's not a direct quote, but 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. 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 6 documentaries on RTE and 5 documentaries on BBC. And one of them was like long listed 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 RT1 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, 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 any permanent reviews in the National Paper of Record that portray me as inexperienced when it's actually 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 too busy. I can't do fucking everything. I'm too busy to also run a website.

So hopefully we'll have a bunch of gigs on the website too. So 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 alright. It's worked out alright, 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. I might stay up in Dublin just to get 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 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 1800s. Parnell went, the landlords are exploiting ye. This is unfair. Everybody, everybody in the whole country, stop paying rent. Everybody, this is a fucking strike.

Everyone stop 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 heavy metal pub called Fibre Maguise. No, I haven't been there in a long time So I can't vouch for Fibre Magu. Now I haven't been there in a long time, so I can't vouch for Fibre McGee's. I haven't been there in about 10 fucking years, I'd say.

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

Parnell Street in Limerick is weird. 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 get very authentic Afghani food. But mostly, Parnell Street in Limerick. It looks like New York. You'd have to go there to see it. It's just this strange little street in Limerick. And because of the size of the footpaths and the red brick, it looks like a small little weird piece of Brooklyn, but when I walk down that street, I always have a think about Charles Stewart Parnell. I'm supposed to be promoting fucking gigs here, hold on.

That was about Vicar Street, was it? Galway, Leisureland. I just can't get over I'm playing a gaff called Leisureland. 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 is sold out. When's that? February? Fucking Crescent Hall and Drahada. Drahada, poor old Drahada. Oliver Cromwell, sacked Drahada. Did a genocide in Draha da. So I'm up in Draha da 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. I'm in the Waterfront Theatre in Belfast on the 28th. 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 date right. Why the fuck is it in my calendar here for March? No. When the fuck am 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... 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 Protestant soup from Maggie Thatcher's tits and entertain the cracking tans. 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 Bonecall with the wonderful, magnificent Mankhan Magan. 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 match. Ever hear of Doggerland?

Did you? I did. This is the land of Wales, isn't it? No, Doggerland is. It's a really interesting one. It's where 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 between Scotland and Denmark, divers went down to the bottom of the sea 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 the Ice age was ending and there was this huge glacier 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 20,000 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. Yeah, there had to have literally been huge deluges that destroyed civilizations all at once. And that's why every single culture has flood mythology. Lovely, lovely, lovely. And when you were talking on the on that episode why every single culture has flood mythology. Love it. Lovely. When you were talking on that episode about the Voyager brand and Manalan McLeer, the great sea god, comes upon them and he says to them, you think you're plowing the waves, but I am

riding on a meadow of flowers. 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. Fuck off. 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.

But it's actually called the land for the first nine waves because people remember different areas before when the ice levels were at the water levels were at different areas. And it's why in a phrase like in Irish you'll find, now I only came across this insight by going to Western Australia and talking to aboriginals there, but in Arlinge you have a phrase, there's a white flower on the fisherman's garden. So the fishermen still today would see that area among that you'd go in a corach or a naevoog, the traditional 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. And then there's another word when you're rowing a canoe or corach or a naevoog, you always say, I'm plowing through the waves. Tam a traua tí trí na dhanta. That's interesting. Yeah. So you're rowing a canoe or a canoe or a nevoog, you will say I'm plowing through the waves. Tama trao tí trí na dhanta. That's interesting. Yeah. So you're working the land.

And it's the same when in this Noel Nanop, Dr. Noel Nanop, this great elder, this Noongar elder, Noongar Buidjar, Noongar land of the sacred land of the Noongar people in Perth and Fremantle. He says that the island, when they look out to sea and they have these, they see the wells, the wells dropping, bubbling up, then 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 geological surveys are saying they were quite right 20, 25,000 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, what they call water holes rather than wells in Australia. Yeah. And that tells us then, of course, about the age of Aboriginal culture, because the other thing, too. Like the Aboriginal people were colonised brutally and so brutally that. The way they're spoken about in the West, they're not considered,

they're not spoken about as humans, they're not spoken about as a real culture. And this sense of, oh, they were just there. And if you say the Aboriginal people were actually there for 25,000, 30,000 years and their stories are this long, it makes it it makes the narrative of how they were colonized a lot more inconvenient and a lot more brutal, which is the truth. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, you know, there's rock art in Australia, which is 45,000 years old. Now, some people are saying it's 60,000, but I met, I met up and talked and walked the land with Aboriginals who can still understand the ancient signs

of their rock art from 45,000 years. Because it's not only 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 Young-Caporta, this elder I talked about who wrote this life-changing book called Sand Talk. I sent him a picture of Cairne, one of the Cairnes in La Crue, and she has Nicalli, the hill of the witch in Meath, in your old castle. And he just came back to me next day, like so excited.

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I can read those symbols, he says, at least from my point. Now he's seeing that from his point- Was it album scripts? No, no, it was, no, it was the spirals, the circles, the lozenges. Wow. Yeah.

So, you know, our album is from whatever 400 AD. These go back to five and a half thousand years. They're Neolithic 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 archeological, but first in Ireland, the archeological department talking to the anthropologists,

talking to the folklorists and mythologists in Ireland, and then the archeologists and mythologists talking to cultures all around the world and realizing 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 AI could be able to help us in that. But as well, the reason I love chatting to you, Mencon, is because you are not an academic. love chatting to you, Mencon, is it's because you are not an academic. 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 going to go, we're going to need to stop there or I'm going to 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.

And if you do that enough, some of it's going to be right. Beautiful. 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 30,000 years.

And these people who we called silly and didn't believe and didn't respect, they were actually right. Yeah. You know what I mean? So there has to be space for outside the box thinking and playfulness and being wrong and being mad and having fun. I think things have improved a lot in the last 10 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 out there.

Good crack off camera. Yeah. 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 the ass. I'm trying to base it on. No, but you're going, you're not pulling it from your hole, but you're going, what

if we look at it this way? Yeah. And I love that. Yeah. But there's, there's huge respect for your work as well by them because of that. And there wouldn't have been, they would have dismissed us. They, the old generation would have absolutely laughed at us. So there's a slow change happening.

Um, and you know, it's just, it's interesting to see, you know, when you were talking about the Cato Fields, it's interesting to see how, how, how recent the discipline of archeology is in Ireland. So I don't remember. Yeah. You, you, you know, the, how the Cato Fields was discovered this man, Patrick Colfield, okay.

So Patrick Colfield, he was a school teacher, local curious national school teacher in, um, up in North Mayo, beyond Valley Castle, um, in Mayo in, um, Belndarrag and, um, Derrick is that what it's called? Need to check. Um, no, it's not.

Anyway, um, he's up at, up beyond Valley Castle, up on the sea, and he's out picking tarp. And you know the way, sometimes they used to put a long piece of wood or piece of iron into the bog to see if they could find a bit of bog oak or bog pine. In other words, wood, pitch pine or oak that had been preserved for whatever, the 5000s or 6000s years since that bog was laid down on top of a rotting forest. And he's tapping away, putting the big wood down, four meters down, and suddenly he realizes he's hitting not wood but stone. So that's fair, there's a rock there.

But as he goes on, he goes another meter, puts it down again, stone again, another meter, and he keeps on doing it. He sees this weight there, he sees there's a linear, a perfectly linear stone line, 4,000 or 4 meters beneath the bog or maybe 6 or 7 meters 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 5 and 6,000 years old, maybe 6,000. So he decides that means there was 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 1939. And then there was actually a German director of the National Museum. I don't know why, I can't remember if I've told you this story before. But anyway, the German director says, OK, 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, we send a car up.

So they send a car up in whatever, the late 40s. And they have a quick look. And they think, OK, that might be something. But Patrick Caulfield, 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 17, 18. 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 boundary get up to mail to do a dig on the site reveals the oldest yet the oldest bronze neolithic or stone a new stone a site in europe or possibly in the world. in the world. And it was such exciting. This was in the late 70s and the 80s. And I remember at one stage he wanted to go out to St. Patrick's Point. What's that called? You did a go and you took some gorgeous photos for your website. Oh, yes. St. Patrick's Parketry out there. No, no, no. No, I mean, it's a you have to leap out to it. It's a rock spur just off the off the Cader Fields. We said, I think you were out there. I think you were.

But anyway, so I saw he gives him a helicopter to go out there. The country was so excited in the 80s when we were basically uncovering day by day this 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. 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, three and a half. And there he finds the growing mounds, the growing ridges where our ancestors, in other words, a later group of farmers. So the people who built New Grange and built that whole Bronze Age stone circle, they were Neolithic farmers and they had learned farming where that place between 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 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 reeds and things which have grown up over thousands of years. And he actually sees the ridges on the soil that 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. And that was all because of one school teacher, uneducated, never beyond 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 from Royal Ireland with national school to bring them onto college. And then, Shermas Caulfield does all this discovery. And now, Shermas' students, if you meet any student, archaeology student now from UCD, from the University of Dublin, they'll all have been taught by Shamos, but they're expanding their mind again to a whole other dimension. It's just each generation learns and grows. And something I'd love to chat to you, Mankam, before we go is can you tell me

about InBulk? Cause we have all these seasonal festivals in Ireland that become like Christmas, Easter, all this crack. In bulk is coming up on the 1st of February. Can you tell us about in bulk? Yeah. And again, it's so weird how in the last five years people have gone back to these old Celtic feast days, the cross quarter days. In other words, the days that are exactly between the solstice and the equinox and four times of the year. And there's four of them, obviously, Samhain, Imbulk, Bealtine and Lunisil. 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 Horus 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, washing away, battling away, knocking down all the verdancy, all the growth, all the abundance of summer. She's bringing on winter. So the Kailach there connected to the Indian goddess Kali. Kali and Kailakh has the same root word, same concept. Durga is often the goddess of destruction

in India, but Kali has elements of that too. So the Kailakh 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 darkness. She has destruction. She is death. 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 into Bridget, into the new young spirit, the new. She transforms as a, so she, the new she transforms as a as a.

So she the Kailach is is a. Like an old woman, isn't she? Exactly. And she then turned into a young woman. 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. OK, so we're now in this dualistic society as

well as you were going on, you know, zeros and one and actually, and fucking eschatological time, everything is linear and building up towards the end. That's it. So there was nothing that's such a, there was nothing of that mindset Neil, that everything was everything. Everything was in that stasis that Schrodinger was so interested in. So the Kailach brings on this destruction of winter, then transforms herself into the new young seed, the new young flame that we call Bridget. And imbolic can mean different things. It either means imbolic in the stomach or in the belly. So it's the time that the ewe, the ewe, the sheep, the female sheep will become pregnant. So the lamb is in the belly at this stage. Or it could be imlaan. Glan is an Irish word for to milk, to milk cattle or to milk. So glay would be an old way. Imlaan would be the time that the milk

is in the teats of the cattle are also there's an Indo European world word and Bogan, which is budding. So it's the time of the new growth, the new budding, the new life, the new seed. Um, and so, you know, it's represented by this goddess, Kyla, this God, that Bridget or breed who is, it says is the same as Kyle, but it's not just zero and one. It's not just Kyle or Bridget. She's also the same goddess who becomes at Bealtuna at the full blossoming time of early May, the spirit of total growth and a full on growth and then at the harvest in Luna. So she's all things. She's basically the matriarchal goddess. She is the land. She is the soil who gives birth well goddess. She's the land, she's 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 it brings forth, you know, grows a seed in her belly around February when the land begins to warm and then goes into full abundance of May, June, July, and then the harvest time. And again, that concept of Bridget, the word is a proto-Celtic word. So you remember, we all speak proto-Indo-European languages. Everything except Basque and Finnish seem to be. Every language in Western Asia and Eastern Europe seems to come from this. So the proto-Celtic word, proto-Celtic was a sub-family

of Indo-European words. Briganti is where the word Bridger comes from. Briganti means high or exalted. But in Rigveda, the great collection of India words, 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. 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.

Lentzter and asks him, I want a tiny bit of land of my monastery on. 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. So it's just give me enough land to have a settlement, a little monastery on. By this stage in the stories, she's a Christian rather than a pagan goddess. So obviously the Christians just, there's great, you know, was it you who talked about this? There's great stories about the Pope actually in the 56th century telling the missionaries go and

just Christianize the old stories. They really know this, what they did. So anyway, it 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 stupid woman. He does.

And we all know, everyone in Ireland knows the story. You've referred to it again, your podcast is the cloak expands and expands become the size of County Kildare, which is the, which is now still the sacred land of Bridget. Anyway, in the Mahabharata, the great epic story of Vedic of Indian culture, there is this

character called Dhrupuja, it's actually the principal female character. And her five husbands lose her to the Kaurava brothers, these sort of in a gambling debt. She has five husbands, they go gambling, they lose this beautiful woman. So she tries to protest her legality, her morality, but in the court, in the great assembly room, the king, the leader says, you're now a slave. So you need to be stripped of your sari. So the greatest humility will be for this Indian goddess to have her sari removed from her. But Lord Krishna intervenes and he extends the sari. He makes it wider and wider and wider. So no matter how hard or how far they try 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. Wow. Um, 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, um, in Kildare town, there's two wells connected to her and And so many people are coming

out now to just do rituals, to stand, to sit at the well. Also in Fáirt, Fáirt was where she was born, just outside Dundalk. There is 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. Bratlead is her cloak. So in memory of her protective cloak, we put out a piece of cloth. Traveler people, the Minkhadi used to put out a white cloth. Other people put a red and white cloth and that's for healing. But you put some type of cloth on a bush so that the Jew, the morning Jew, the Druacht 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.

And Bridget is associated with mist. Exactly. Yeah. Used to keep bees in the other world and the bees would travel through the mist. So beautiful. So I love that. That was the explanation for how, how bees can magically fertilize flowers. It's like, well, they belong to Bridget. She tends these bees in the other world, but in the morning, they float through the mist and bring other worldly magic to flowers and that's where fruit comes from, which is beautiful.

So beautiful. So beautiful. But also it means don't fuck with bees. Don't be fucking with Bridget's bees, which is a great idea. If you're interested But also it means don't fuck with bees. Don't be fucking with Bridget bees, which is a great idea if you're interested in biodiversity, don't be fucking with bees. Totally. Totally. Now 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. One of the articles by a lecturer in Queen's University, Belfast, I think his name was Gary Quinn, I need to check that. But he was deciding he was looking at the clay that is to be found in often around Wales, but in sacred places that it can be healing clay or healing soil, right? Wow. So he brings it into the lab and he does isolate a bacteria that actually can kill all of those bacteria that take over hospitals, you know, some of the worst strectococcus or whatever they are.

Staph infections as well. Yeah, the MRS, the MRA, whatever it is. Anyway, he's doing this and it smells, what is the smell? I think it's a truffle-y smell. And then he notices the next few days that the smell is on his lab coat. 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, you know, ripping up bits of cotton and thinking is the cotton then, if it has this, whatever, this type of bacteria in there, the

strain of bacteria, and that he isolated, that was never found in science before, will the cloth then also be curative? Will it also heal the staph things? Now, I just read, this was an academic paper, each of the few years we haven't done the full research. But imagine that actually that brots brida 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 1st of February, the conditions, the weather and humidity conditions are ideal for that bacterial strain to impregnate in a man's cloth, and then the cloth actually could be scientifically healing as well as

mythologically healing. That is fucking nuts. 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 because you say otherwise I could lose myself on my own whole. But if we do. 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. Like a lot of holy wells. Like last week, you didn't see the tomato bridge up in Drumcondra, no? I saw photos of it. 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 it, what, what I think it was like the collective unconscious. It was young people in Dublin who are sick of what has happened to Dublin. There's no light nightlife left in Dublin.

There's no nightclubs. It's hard to be an artist, young people can't afford 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, 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 Dramacandra, 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 really people knew what to do. Come to this place, leave your vote of offering. And with vote of offerings, it's generally I'm going to leave a little thing here to this shrine and then you're going to solve my problem. 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 sure that speak in Irish, the shoe well. Exactly. So yeah, stubbornness.

So it's stubbornness. So is 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 300 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 or three hundred years old, they can tell if a slum was Irish because people collected bottles of sparkling water. Oh yeah, you did an episode about this. Yes, 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. And did you, did that, the article when you were talking about that, I can't remember. Did it mention about club soda? You know, this idea that club orange or club, which is an Irish thing,

but club soda all over the world. That word came from Ireland. I did not know that. No, either the Clare Street Club or one of the clubs, the gentlemen's clubs. Oh, fuck off. That's where club soda comes from. Yeah. And the Hartsfield doublet. They asked for a drink to be made by Cochrane and Coltrane or whatever, C&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 just went over the world. But it must be connected to that in some way, possibly. It's well, it's 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. But then a really strange complete fucking coincidence. Right. So up until about, I think, 1890, sparkling water was a serious luxury. 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 sulfuric 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 sulfuric acid, it will release carbon dioxide. And that's how you use the carbonate water but this was quite expensive so then in New York at the end of the 1800s when they were building St. Patrick's Cathedral for the Irish right they needed so much marble for St. Patrick's Cathedral that it flooded the market with marble so all of a sudden marble was cheap because the Paddies needed St. 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 paddies who needed a church. Wow. Like it'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 the other thing, too, is what I love is that period in Irish history where. After the penal laws, you know, being a Catholic is illegal, so people head off to the countryside, you know, being a Catholic is illegal. So people head off to the countryside. You have mass rocks and Catholicism for about two, 300 years after the penal laws reverts back to its strange pre-Christian roots. You know, that's where you start to see this resurgence in Holy Wells, mass rocks, you know what I mean?

So it's no longer the people who are arriving in New York, Pennsylvania, from 1750 onwards? 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 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? Yeah. 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. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, don't have evidence of it, but we do know that.

That's what that kept Holy Welles alive, that kept a lot of what we 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 as part of these penal laws and wider Protestant canonization. Good God, Blind Boy. You blow my mind every time. Jesus. Yeah, I'm still going. Go on.

We should cut it today because we're talking for more than an hour. Oh golly, golly. Yeah. Ah, great to talk to you again, Blind Boy. And like, congratulations on. We should cut it today because we're talking for more than an hour. Oh, golly, golly. Yeah. Great to talk to you again, Blimey. 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 hole being used to purify sugar beet right up

until what, the early 20th century? I mean, yeah, well, I had it. I had a whole episode, you see, mankind where my theory was that bird shit is the most that bird shit is the reason that the art has eight billion people. And like fertilizer, right? Not nitrogen, nitrogen. Nitrogen is really difficult to come by. 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. But you're not creating anything new. It's already there. 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. So colonization happens there and now bird shit is being shipped all the way back to Europe and now we have a surplus 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 barge shit islands. And that's a limited resource like, like oil, but we thought we had all the barge shit in the world. We didn't. There's also a theory that this barge 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 1860 and around 1860, we start to run out of barge ship. We run out of nitrogen. And by about 1890, the world's population had gotten to be, I think, three billion. Right. The reason the world's population had gotten that big is 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. The three billion people that we're talking about, they're going to be of excess of nitrogen, you have excess nitrogen, you can grow food now, you can grow more food than you need. So the world's population explodes to three billion people. And there was the threat of a genuine global famine around 1890. They were just going, we've used up all the bird shit, what are we going to 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, a chemist by the name of Fritz Haber in 1901, 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 as we breathe it. I know how to make it into a powder. So he did that. That there, 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 would give us? I urge people to go back to that episode of your podcast. You heard it. Oh, I did.

Oh, sorry, man. I just told you a podcast that you'd listened to. Oh, no, no. It's, well, can I tell you one element of how it affected my family with the work I'm doing today? So you remember my dear Raheeli was, Mike and Joseph Raheeli, he was the founder of the volunteers of the IRA. He was also one of the founders of Gaelic League of Conrad Gaelga.

In the 1890s, he founded the Gaelic League, was one of the people founding it. And then he and Owen McNeill, professor, professor of Celtic studies in 1913, in UCD, in the university in 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 he was able to do that because his father had a tiny pub and shop in Valley Longford,

a tiny little village beside Listole in North Kerry. And every autumn, sorry, every autumn, you harvest the farmers in 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 had their harvest. 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 Cook and Cross. So the O'Reilly's father lives there, Brendan Cannelly's people live on the other side. And then the farmers come in in 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 pump. So the farmers were able to go in, in the 1860s, 70s, 80s, 90s and order their guano, their gualschite.

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 guano. And then over those, the whole 19th century was hollowed out. The smell was just as bad as you referred to on the, is it Patrick Street in Limerick? No, yeah, the bird shit district, Bedford road there with the styling she's not really bad yeah so he the only start made his money from selling guano and things like pitch pine and things but maybe the fucking way no so that's on one side he here in so much by the time the rally. He earns so much by the time the O'Reilly comes of age, he's 19 or 20. His dad dies in 1898 around and he realizes his dad has the equipment of three million euro, three million euro earned from the local farmers in this tiny.

From bird shit. Mainly bird shit, other things. Wow. 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 Killishie, a little village, a square farm, and my own first cousin still lived there in a house, an old farmhouse 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 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 things, there was grain and seed, but there was also guano. There was also this, you know, and it said like Peru, bird shit from Peru or something, you know, it said who's coming from. 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 Longford. In the same way, actually my mum's side of the family, the old man did die. In other words, 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 1921 he was like well and after actually 1930s he was- Are you telling me Bard shit funded the weaponry that was used in the 1916 writing. Directly Brian boy, directly. Fuck me! That's fucking unreal. Yeah.

But it's only, I would never spot it except you walking up Breadford Row and your curiosity because of your sense of smell, because the people at the fancy restaurants and wine bars not being able to reach outside. I got killed by Limerick Council for that. I got fucking killed. Because people now call that area the Bardshit District so they fucking hate me by Limerick Council for that. I got fucking killed because people now call that area the Bardshit District. So they fucking hate me in Limerick Council. So I'm glad something good came out of that. Jesus Christ. That's great. Bardshit funded the fucking 1916 Rising.

Amazing. Did we look enough at InBulk? But if not, RTE, most people around the world will have access to the RTE player. And on the 2nd of February, there's a lovely documentary about, about in bulk about this feast day at the beginning of February. That is our day to sanctify the new warmth and new life and new spirit coming into the land. I'd urge people to, to watch in case, in case we, in case I messed up the facts or anything about it. Okay. Um, we've chatted for fucking ages there, Manana, right? So I'm going to call it a day now. And as usual, look, thank you so much. We could just keep talking and talking and talking.

We have to watch ourselves. 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. I hope we don't sound like absolute lunatics to anyone listening in. But I love chatting with you 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, so I've got bliss. Yeah, take care. Take care of us. Send you all the recordings Well, that podcast was a hefty buy that was a hefty podcast and I hope I That was a hefty podcast. I hope you were all able to keep up with me and Mancon because I don't know if we gave 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 democratize the information

to give clear explanations of what the fuck's being spoken about. But if you're a 10 foot Declan, if you're a steeple chasing Cuiva and you've listened to a lot of podcasts, 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 will be for the people of the people in the area which is politically known as Britain. I can't say any more but I'm doing that this week and it'll be great craic. 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. So I'm sorry. Thank you.