The Blindboy Podcast - Myth, Fantasy and Conspiracy Theory with Fin Dwyer

Episode Date: June 29, 2024

In this bonus episode I chat with Fin Dwyer from the Irish History Podcast about the relationship between Myth, Fantasy and Conspiracy Theory Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello you jaundice maras and welcome to a special bonus episode, a special treat. A bonus episode of the Blind By podcast. I told you on Wednesday's podcast that there was going to be a bonus episode this weekend. I was very sick on Wednesday with food poisoning so I promised you a bonus episode. Well here it is. This episode is brought to you by NOW to let you know about Season 2 of House of the Dragon which is streaming weekly without a contract with a NOW Entertainment membership. So every Monday there's a new episode of House of the Dragon

Season 2 on NOW. House of the Dragon Season 2, it's probably the biggest TV event of the year. Do I need to tell you what House of the Dragon is? It's a Game of Thrones spin-off. It's high drama fantasy. It's escapism. It's epic. I had Paddy Considine on the podcast a few weeks back. Paddy was in season 1. He's not in season 2 of House of the Dragon. Who is in season 2 is the magnificent Olivia Cooke, an absolutely brilliant actor who commands the screen. Season 2, it'll be about a civil war between the House of Black and Green and then the people of Westeros will have to pledge their allegiance for the side.

House of the Dragon season 2 takes place before the events of Game of Thrones, so it's a prequel as such. But the thing is, even though House of the Dragon is fantasy, the writer George R. R. Martin would most likely have found inspiration from real historical events and also mythology. Like the civil war between the House of Black and Green. What have a lot of parallels with the English Civil War are the Wars of the Roses, which were like a civil war in England in the middle of the 1400s between the House of Lancaster and the house of York. And then quite a lot of George R.R. Martin's writing. It's clearly inspired by English mythology, English and Welsh mythology, and some Norse mythology.

So that's what the focus of this week's podcast is going to be. I had a chat with Finn Dwyer. Finn Dwyer from the Irish History Podcast. Go and listen to the Irish History Podcast by the way because it's fantastic. It's one of the first podcasts they ever started listening to. Finn's a lovely chap. He's an academic, he's an academic historian. And he's a massive nerd and he's wonderful crack. And I've worked with him a lot in the past. So but in the context of the new season of House of the Dragon, myself and Finn Dwyer,

we had a very nerdy chat about why we both adore mythology and folklore as well. And we focused on what is the purpose of mythology within the human condition. We went from folklore to conspiracy theories. We'd actually agreed we were only gonna chat for half an hour, but what happened was we ended up having so much fun that we went way over time and recorded an hour and just said, fuck it, let's put out an hour

because this chat is too much fun. So please enjoy this conversation. So please enjoy this chat, which is brought to you by now. Go and watch the new season of House of the Dragon with now every Monday weekly without a contract. And all you need is a new entertainment membership. How are you Finn? What's the crack? Well, how are you doing? You're enjoying the season two of House of the Dragon. Yeah, yeah, I am. Like I'm I'm a big I was a massive Game of Thrones fan.

So I had to wait for this to come back. So I'm loving it. Yeah. Yeah. You're so you're a historian. Like you're you're you present the Irish history podcast, which is. I think it's the first podcast I ever listened to was your podcast a long, long time ago, back in 2010. Yeah. I didn't even, I think, I think literally what happened is that that day someone told me what a podcast was. And then I went, typed in Irish history and you came up and then I started listening to you.

started listening to you. But you're a historian and you're an academic. And I love Irish history. I love Irish mythology. But I'm not an academic. And the thing is for me is it's good and bad. I have a bit of freedom, Finn, in that I can be incorrect and I can talk out of my arse and there's no one there to pull me up. But with you, you have to have a bit more rigor as an actual historian. And what I'd love to know really is how does like mythology sit with you? Because House of the Dragon,

it's fantasy that I would say is inspired by mythology, many different mythology from all around the world. How does mythology sit with you as a historian? Because it's not facts. Yeah, definitely. I think maybe a good way of explaining this is where I started out. So I would have been I wouldn't say hostile to mythology, but like really skeptical and I think a lot of historians like are really comfortable maybe talking about the history

of a myth and when they can first see it written down. But if you want to get into the nitty gritty about where these myths come from, I've got into that a lot recently. As I said, I'm into, I was into the Game of Thrones books and I got into like, you know, the idea of where a dragon comes from. And I made a show on that a couple of years back. And that really got me thinking though, that you have to kind of, like, if you go back to the origins of myths, you can't have that, I suppose, demand of fact.

And you want to know the first person who wrote it down and you want to know what that person was inspired by, because that's not the way mythology works. But I think the more and more we learn about the world, the more and more we learn that myths, yes, they aren't line by line through, but a lot of them come from experiences, some of them really deep in our history, some of them more recent, but they're not, I think a lot of historians would have dismissed them once by the time has gone, Sherlock, you can tell nothing off this. But I think the more we learn about planet earth, the more we learn about

ourselves and our deep history, the more we realise there are. Maybe it's a way of tapping into our really deep history, way beyond history books, even beyond archaeology. I mean, that's what really interests me in mythology. That's what interests me in mythology as well because, so what I adore about Irish mythology in particular, and not just Irish mythology, also we'll say Aboriginal Australian mythology, it's the oral culture tradition. So like we know about Irish mythology because monks, like Christian monks, decided to write it down in the 8th century. And that's really why we have a lot of Irish mythology written down.

But some of these mythological stories could be a lot older than the 8th century. And something I've always wondered about, something that really tickles my brain is. If you look at the Bible, you look at the epic of fucking Gilgamesh, the epic of Gilgamesh is possibly four and a half thousand years old written down. Loads of cultures have got flood mythology. Loads of cultures have got an origin story whereby a catastrophic catastrophic flood came. And what I can't stop wondering is like the ice age ended 7,000 years ago. And 7,000 years ago, there was humans walking the planet exactly like me and you,

the exact same brains and the exact same capacity for language. And sometimes I wonder is all this flood mythology, literally a memory of the ice caps melting. Yeah, I was listening to, there's a great podcast called Civilization or Fall Civilization. Oh, I love that. Yeah. Yeah. But he was making, I didn't realize it happened like this, but the Black Sea, for example, was like kind of a low lying area up until about 7,000 years ago.

And then literally the Eastern Mediterranean, like the, I suppose, the sea wall or whatever the cliffs of the Eastern Mediterranean were broken through by erosion and literally there was huge amounts of water flown into what is now the Black Sea. I think it was a bit of a lake as well. But if you think about it, there was people there, sorry, 7,000 years ago. It's not that long ago in the grand scheme of things. There was people who watched that happen and it filled up, like 7,000 years ago, it's not that long ago in the grand scheme of things. There was people who watched that happen and it filled up comparatively quickly covering an area the size of Cuba. And that happened not in the space of someone's lifetime, but

in terms of like, I don't know, weeks or months, but they're watching places where they lived fill up and maybe even paths that they used to move, places they used to move between are no longer accessible. It may have once been a hundred kilometers or something like that, and now it's like 10,000 kilometers to walk. So a climate catastrophe happening in real time for those people. Yeah. And I suppose it's such a significant event. If your world changes that dramatically, you have to, that is something you need to pass down to your children, grandchildren, because it shapes your whole world. Like I guess if you're living on the southern side of the Black Sea, you no longer go north

anymore when maybe people in your ancestors are buried to the north. All those human connections that are suddenly caught. And we know today if we try and, you know, we, we, you know, shocks like that to our daily lives. Are they have a big impact on us and you don't just like move on with your life. And it happens in a lot of different cultures at different parts of the world around the same time. Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose it doesn't have to be the same floor either. That's it. But even when the area you're speaking about the Black Sea there, right. But around, I think it's it might be 10,000 years ago, eight years ago,

there was an area known as Doggerland. Oh yeah. And Doggerland, it was it's where the the North Sea is now. So just between Denmark and the top part of Scotland, there was an area of marsh and the island of Britain was connected with Europe. And this was called Doggerland. And they found like artifacts at the bottom of the sea. And they found forests at the bottom of the sea. And people lived here.

But what happened was an ice shelf. It was during the end of the ice age, an ice shelf fell off somewhere near Denmark and the entirety of Doggerland basically flooded within about five years. So people there would have witnessed a catastrophic flood very quickly. Like. I think, though, as well, actually, sorry, just when you're saying that there's the Persian Gulf, I think, flooded around the same time as well. So you've got all these places that, and like these things, as you're saying there, essentially

Britain becomes an island or you've got two parts of like, you know, of the world that are suddenly really far apart. And I think it does go a long way to explain. But with some of the, some mythology, I think that really interests me is the stuff that goes even further back deeper in deeper into our history. So like there's like the have to be careful saying these words, because if you're running close together, you can like end up saying something you didn't mean to say.

But the cosmic hunt mythology. I've heard of the cosmic hunt. I have heard of that, but go on about the cosmic hunt. But like that's a myth all around the world that involves like, you're hunting an animal and then the animal is killed and then it becomes a constellation at the start. Yes. And, you know, people have looked at this and go, why again does this happen? And, you know, dragon mythology is the same again, that goes back into a pre history and deep into our history as a species that, but it exists then in more

recent times in parts of the world that aren't connected and before anyone puts on like the tinfoil hat and they're saying we're all connected. What? Like a lot of people like, say, Carl Jung, people like that talk about how this is really deep. These are deep, deep memories of our collective human unconscious. And the theory of that would be is that so we are human beings, we're animals, but we are animals that have a complex system of language. So Jung would argue that we have a collective unconscious,

that within the complexity of our capacity to understand language and meaning, that there's something within there that all of us share, like an instinct, like a mythological instinct. I think as well, some of it comes from like traumatic experiences as well. Wow, that that carves itself into our collective memory. Like I was reading this book on dragons that was talking about, I covered this in a show where this guy argues that some of it could go back like millions of years where like snakes, big cats, things like that are.

Before humans even, even part of our brains before we were humans. Yeah, yeah. Like it's like in a way the origins of this myth are older than us. Like, and again, this is what interests me. You know, you talked at the start there about having to deal with like, you know, really, you know, double checking everything, that kind of thing. But like with this, obviously, look, no one's ever going to really prove this one way or another. But I think it's fascinating. That's the interesting thing.

Actually, this is something I'd like to ask you. So when you're speaking about history, Finn, right, as an academic, you're either right or you're not right. And you got to get your dates correct and you got to get everything correct. And you need to speak in a way that you can cite things. But when we're speaking about the mythological. It's there's so much everything is guesswork, like even like I'm making a documentary at the moment about early Irish Christianity.

And we're looking and I'm speaking to the experts and we're looking at. OK, we know a lot of our Irish mythology. We know this because it was written down by Christian monks, Irish Christian monks in the 8th century. But a lot of them are going, how do we know they didn't make that up? How do we really know that the time wasn't just something that a monk wrote in the eighth century. It's hard to really know that did this exist before the person wrote it down? You're kind of guessing. Yeah, I think I suppose taking it a step back before that, what really, I don't know, I think what really tuned me on to some of this is that, you know, you see you got, cause like, how do you know that guy

wrote it down, but then you see similar stories that are not, you know, they have similar outlines of mythology that exist in other parts of the world. Or, you know, certainly, Joe, it's an analogy from, I was going to say linguistics, but I'm extending my knowledge beyond what it is. But you know, like, I don't know, you learn that thing that like that language is all across the European, Eurasian continents are kind of, you know, they're linked. So like you have the Indo-European roots. Yeah. So like there's Greek and Irish, Rex and Latin and then Raj and Sanskrit.

And they obviously have a same. Mankan, Mankan Magan is big into that. Mankan is obsessed with tracing the Indo-European roots of the Irish language. And he sees so many parallels between mythology from the Middle East and mythology that that's here. And he says the language is the key. least and mythology that's here. And he says the language is the key. And if you, that's what makes me wonder where, how far back this stuff goes.

So like, I think, I suppose if you think of the language before, I don't know, before people knew Sanskrit, before people would have had a better understanding of Latin, those connections weren't necessarily made because you lived in Ireland, you said the word re and you probably thought you were unique enough in that. But it's the same, I think, as our understanding and knowledge of obviously of cultures around the world, but also then in terms of our prehistory and deep history, as we get a better understanding of that, and as we've talked already about things like geology, we start to see that this stuff, though, may be traced back to these common experiences

really far back. Now I think it gets a bit tricky when we talk about maybe the more generalised ones, like you know, this was the warrior myth, things like that. Like how, you know, could that be a singular experience or is that just a common experience that humans will, given the types of society and where we emerged from, that it was almost inevitable something like that would come up or is it something more specific that we're dealing with there? Also with a lot of mythology, it's a way to map the land and to remember things in the absence of writing. There was a fascinating thing happened recently, it was in the 90s.

But so Aboriginal Australian people, they had an oral culture, so they didn't have writing. And Aboriginal Australian people have a way of telling mythology. They use things like called song lines. So the way that an Aboriginal Australian or certain Aboriginal Australians will tell a story is that they walk a journey and they will. It's like the story is held in the land. There'd be a mountain over there.

There'd be something, a star in the sky. And if they follow this path, they'll remember this big, long story. And there was geologists off the west coast of Australia, and they were looking for ancient watering holes, but they knew that these watering holes were submerged by the sea because they were so old and the geologists were looking for it with modern technology. But the local indigenous Australian people, they knew about these watering holes off the coast because they were present in their mythology.

So that tells us that the stories they're telling are possibly forty thousand years old, because otherwise, why would they know about this area off the coast? That's now covered in sea. And it was one of those. It was a cosmic hunt. It was a cosmic hunt story. It was it was a story, a songline story in Aboriginal culture about a hunt that takes place across the sky between different stars. Sorry, I'm actually losing my train of thought.

But this is where I find all this stuff. It's almost my instinct pushes against this because you're like, you know, like when you think about these things, I think from the culture we come from, which is not particularly good at long term planning and perceiving the world in, you know, we have very short understandings of life in general, you know, in terms of it's not, we don't say, for example, the way we plan our world, we like, I think a lot of people commenting this today that, you know, and dealing with something like climate change, we're not able to plan even decades ahead. So we've this short. So I think we, to an extent, will naturally push back against this idea of

knowledge passed down over what seems incredible spans. And I think I suppose we've also lived through really phenomenal changes, like over the last, say, two, 300 years. So like not just in Ireland, but all across Europe, things like the industrial revolution, but then in Ireland, things like the famine, emigration, all these things, and they break up knowledge. So I think we find it really, really difficult. Or certainly I do.

I find it really difficult to relate to this because you're going to, how could someone pass down a story with a degree of coherency over that time scale? Over thousands and thousands of years. Yeah, like when we can't really, you know, if you read. The argument, the argument with indigenous Australians is that before the European colonizers came, they had an unbroken culture. Oh, for sure. Yeah, like even I think you can see that, though, Oh, for sure. Yeah. Like even I think you can see that though.

And even in like in the medieval world, even there's a much longer sense of time. I think you can see that. And if you got someone from 1920 and plot them into our world right now with iPhones, they would just go, what the fuck is this? But if you got someone from the year 1000. And showed them this? But if you got someone from the year one thousand. And showed them or sorry, if you got someone from, yeah, if you got someone from like the year when Christ was born and then showed them the year one thousand, not a huge amount has changed. People are still on horseback.

Yeah, I think I think it's a historian, Mark Block, that talked about like even clothing didn't change that much over, you know, to talk about centuries. Yes. Where the styles of clothing, whereas, you know, you don't even have to go 10, 15 years and people are dressing considerably different. You know, like there's historians out there today that'll tell you if you go back 200 years, I'll pick the clothing style that's because of fashion, but fashion as a concept is new. And I think that makes all this kind of under, to a degree, undermines the knowledge systems like mythology because

you know, history fits well into it because you know, things are written down, you can date them, you can point to them, you can put them in this rapidly moving, you know, rapidly moving world. You know, they can be given a very specific point in that. Whereas if you're talking about almost like, I don't know, knowledge is a river that's just kind of flowing along, that like, it's very hard for us to, or certainly I find it very hard to comprehend this. The Indigenous Australian example of they knew about something the geologists were looking for. That makes me go, holy fuck, maybe they do actually have stories that are 60,000 years old. But it's even if you talk about what we're talking about there, like the flood, and you're talking about a period of time 7,000 years ago when the Black Sea, for example, flooded.

And if you look at where the Black Sea is located in terms of biblical history, it's obviously in the southern shores of the Black Sea are not that far from where this happened. But that's still an extraordinary amount of time to pass. And I think again, you know, skeptics, the time where skeptics go, all this is like just stories made up, like, you know, in the centuries before Jesus Christ or whatever in the Old Testament, or maybe a bit further back. But the idea that these were actually specific events. I, I, I, for me, my, in my gut, I just think there are definitely stories about ancient floods because the end of the ice age wasn't that long ago. You're talking 7,000 years ago and that's not that long ago.

And people, of course, people remember floods. I mean, I think it's a no brainer. Oh, but I think something as catastrophic, I suppose, the word obviously has such an impact on people that that has to be passed down. I was thinking about this just before we record and I was thinking what traces of stories then do we have that we just don't understand because we'll never find out the event that inspired it or where that happened. And we've kind of got this like story that's been cut loose. If you want, if you want to go mad, right, if you want to go absolutely insane,

there's so much about religion, like Christianity, that it's like, I don't know, did an alien come down, call Christ? Do you know what I mean? Well, like when you ask that question there, how much of our mythology or our religious stories make us go, this is so far gone that we can't understand what this was about. And sometimes I'd be looking going, maybe a fucking alien came down. Maybe or here's the one.

This is the one that that fucks up my head all the time, Finn. Right. And I love this. So I adore Greek mythology. And one of my favorite stories from Greek mythology is. There was so Zeus, Zeus was like the king of the gods. He was number one. I'm going to fuck up this story a bit like so, but I'm going to tell it, but not exactly. So Zeus was the the number one god on Mount Olympus, and he had a buddy called Prometheus. And Prometheus was kind of half god, and they both lived on Mount Olympus. And Mount Olympus was where the gods lived, and they were having so much crack that their life was kind of boring. So one day Prometheus turns to Zeus and

says, do you want to like, I don't know, make like a little race of people to play with? Do you want to make like, I don't know, kind of like a video game where you've got all these people that are a bit like us but it's a small world and we can kind of just watch it grow? And then Zeus goes, fuck it, that sounds like a great idea, Prometheus, because I'm kind of bored. Yeah, I'd love a little world of small people. So they go about thinking, how are we going to make this small world of people? And then Zeus has second thoughts. He goes, hold on a second there, Prometheus. If we make this little video game world of people, what happens if they get smarter than us?

If they get smarter than us, then they might try and kill us. And then Prometheus is like, no, no, it'll be grand. It'll be grand. It'll be fun. They're tiny. And then Zeus is like, no fucking way. I'm not comfortable with this. Do you know what I'm going to do, Prometheus? OK, let's build this video game world full of people that we watch over, but I'm going to limit them.

I'm going to make them basically Neanderthals. There's going to be a bunch of people, but they're they're kind of stupid. So Prometheus says, OK, let's do it. So Zeus and Prometheus make our world, right? They make our world. And it's populated by these Neanderthal type people. And then after a while, like time passes very differently on Mount Olympus and here in this video game world that you and I live in. And after a while Prometheus starts to feel sorry for the little Neanderthals. He starts to feel

real sorry for him and he's like Jesus they're freezing cold, they're eating raw meat, they're not having a lot of fun. So Prometheus goes behind Zeus' back and gives those Neanderthals fire. And then as soon as he gives them fire, their civilization starts to expand. And then what happens, because time is passing very differently, time is passing quickly in the human world, they start to get mad smart and mad clever and they start to build towns and they start to build cities. And now Zeus is watching going, I don't like the fucking look at this Prometheus.

Why did you give him fire? And then what happens is they start to make art and statues and then Zeus goes, fuck that. These cons are getting way too smart. They're going gonna kill us so what Zeus does is he goes how do I stop this so he finds a woman a human woman who's living in this video game world and her name is Pandora and he gives Pandora a box because he knows that these little people that they've created are very curious and he gives Pandora a box a bit like Eve in the Bible and says,

there's a lovely box there, Pandora. Don't fucking open it. Do not open that box. So Pandora is there in the human world and civilization is advancing rapidly. And she's like, I'm after getting a box from God, from like Zeus. Of course, I have to open it. I know I can't, but I have to. So Pandora opens the box

and what gets released is human suffering. When she opens her box, depression, jealousy, anxiety, anger is unleashed from that box. And now human civilization starts to slow down. People start killing each other. People get depression. People get despair. But the thing is, when misery was introduced to humanity, why did everyone

not just kill themselves? Because the last item that Zeus left in Pandora's box was hope. And that story there. Sounds like the start of Twitter. Yeah, but it's AI. It's everything that we're speaking about right now about whether we should create AI. The fucking exact same conversation was happening in a piece of mythology that was that that story about Zeus and Prometheus that was written down 1700 years ago.

That could be a lot older than that. So that's a story there about right now when we're creating artificial intelligence. That's literally what that fucking story is. And sometimes a magical part of my brain makes me wonder. Are we literally living in a civilization? And thus, does this story come from a time when the beings that created this computer simulation we live in? Is this their conversation? Is this the worry that they had?

It's a similar team that runs again and again. Like obviously AI is our version of it. But like, you know, if you look at like gunpowder, printing press, like you go back to China, like two, three, four thousand years ago, the development of different types of technology that it's certainly, you know, in terms of say weapons gives people with limited resources, certainly huge power and they upset that the power balance and like that story. Cause it was funny as you were saying that I was thinking going, does this stuff matter anymore? Have we reached a point where mythology and the stories of the past that, you know, for tens of thousands of years were being passed down, maybe being repurposed in different

societies to fit new religious ideas. But it's the same thing, you know, being passed down, be wary of X, Y and Z. But if you want, if you were to ask me, If you were to ask me now, Finn, right, what are the mythology? What's the mythology in folklore right now that's doing that job that has people as superstitious? It's conspiracy theories. Right now, we live in a world of great fucking uncertainty. We don't really know who the goodies are, who the baddies are anymore.

And you have people like like especially since COVID, you've got people genuinely believing in conspiracy theories. You've got people thinking that COVID was artificially manufactured and as soon as they turn on 5G it's going to control our minds. You've got racist conspiracy theories that believe that immigration is a way to replace indigenous white people. You've got loads and loads of people believing pretty crit- like QAnon, QAnon is fucking nuts. QAnon thinks that there's a global cabal of people kidnapping children and that's. But would you think that's mythology or is that? I mean, I'd call it folklore, but I mean, our Pishogues, there are people who genuinely believe,

I mean, in Ireland, neighbors of yours and mine, there are people who genuinely, 100% believe that celebrities eat children so that they can get a chemical called adrenochrome that gives them eternal youth. There are also people who genuinely, 100% believe that the world is run by a race of shape shifting interdimensional lizards. And. But there's this stuff though, like, you know, we've been talking about earlier though, like this isn't going to last.

Well, so, so eating babies, right? You can trace that back a thousand years. If you look at the roots of all these conspiracy theories, they're all very anti-Semitic. So anti-Semitism, people think anti-Semitism was just World War II. No fucking way. You can trace anti-Semitism back about 1500 years all through Europe and you can go back 1500 years and you'll have moral panics in early medieval European society where they believed that Jewish people were stealing babies to eat them for eternal

youth. You know, so it's a continuation of that. I was actually doing this thing, I was doing research on the 14th century, the 14th century is another time where everything goes to shit for a while. Is that because of why? Why was that? Is that a plague? Yeah. But in the 1320s before the Black Death, like life in Europe was just really difficult. There'd been a lot of war, famine, plague, things like that. Like not the Black Death, but other plagues. But in the 1320s in reaction to this, there was a mad conspiracy theory that went through France and Spain and a bit into Germany as well that had kind of.

It. Coalesce, and just as you, as I was asking you, do you think it's relevant that these ideas just came back to me where they blamed lepers and Jews for starting diseases by poisoning wells? I mean, come on, like there's people who will say that COVID was caused by an international international cabal of secret Jewish people to control the world. The race that's in Ireland will say that there was a councillor, like literally yesterday, an Irish councillor who was recently elected, did an interview with the Sunday World where he

straight up said, well, the problem is that there's a small amount of these Jewish society and they're bringing immigrants into Ireland as a way to eradicate Irish people. This is a man who's a sitting counselor and he genuinely believes that. And that's an old, old, old myth that just changes shape all the time. Yeah. It's interesting that we've moved on because I'm just thinking as well, do you know at the start we're talking about these kind of general, you could

almost say like benign things where people are passing down stories to explain the world around them. Stuff that's, that's helpful. That's useful. Yeah. You know, and it helps you shape, you know, maybe why life is different compared to what it was like for your, your, your forebears or whatever. And then you can see there's a dark side. Now there's a darkness. A lot of mythology. Like I love mythology about Irish sacred wells, you know, in Irish mythology, there's so many stories about water and wells, like even something as simple as. The River Shannon, you know, so the River Shannon comes from the goddess River Shannon, you know, so the River Shannon comes from the goddess

Seanach and the story of Seanach is there was a little well up somewhere in the north of Ireland. It's where the mouth of the Shannon is now. And this well in Irish mythology, people believe that wells, mineral wells in particular, were a passage to the other world, the fairy world, the parallel world, the parallel universe. People believed this. So this woman, Sionach, she was a poet and she would go to this well in the north of Ireland that had bubbles in it as a way to get inspiration and knowledge as a poet. And one day she was staring into the well and she got kind of cocky and said,

I want to go to the source of these bubbles. I want to go to where these bubbles come from. It's not just good enough that I drink from this well. I want to dive to the bottom of the well where the bubbles come up from the bottom. And I want to get there so I can write the best poetry in the world, so I can get all the knowledge of the other world. So she dives into the well, swims to the bottom, goes to where the bubbles come from and then the other world gets angry. The fairies get angry and they go fuck

that. You're not entitled to this, you're a mortal. So the well and the other world gets angry and it shoots water really powerfully thousands of feet into the air and it pushes Sionach up with it and then her body slams down onto the ground and she dies, she's crushed because she was just fucked up into the air by the well and then the well keeps flowing and flowing and it carries Sionach's body all the way down from the north of Ireland through Ireland until it gets to the Atlantic and that's the River Shannon. So that there, that's a beautiful myth about a wonderful story that you remember,

but it tells you about the source of a very important body of water in Ireland. So that's the usefulness of myth there when you don't have the ability to write it. Like if you're in Limerick 2000 years ago and the Shannon is flown through your city, how the fuck are you supposed to know where that comes from? But if someone remembers the story of Shannach, then it's like, ah, it comes from up north. Okay. Maybe I can get to Donegal if I follow it. There's also an interesting thing that they record, this is putting the historians

hat back on, but you know, those things also record what was important to people at different times, you know, that I think as we move away, you know, obviously we live in such a whatever industrial post industrial world. Water was a lot more important. Yeah, exactly. A well is a source of of serious fresh water that contains minerals. That can mean life or death to someone 2000 years ago. Like I've got a tap. I can go and buy water and give a, I don't need any.

The, um, all that stuff could become important again soon. No, no, where does fresh water, but, um, the, yeah, no, it is an interesting insight into that world. As I say, like, you know, that we can find it hard to go just because so much has changed, like even things like just the way time works. That was like our our clocks, all that kind of stuff. But even even the concept like I looked into this and it's a tough one to get your head around.

But this concept of linear time. People say that that really only came into being with Christianity. Religions that were eschatological, religions that at their core were about the end times and that there were certain cultures and maybe Ireland was one of them where people did not have linear time. They had time that was much more cyclical. They had a cyclical time that was a bit like the seasons and nature. Even some people who speak about the other world in Irish mythology,

and some people go, is this a heaven? And I say, it's not really a heaven. It's somewhere else that's happening at the same time that's parallel. That linear time wasn't necessarily something that people were thinking about. Because how do you think about linear time when you don't have clocks, when you don't have writing? Yeah, like it's even up until up until about the 13th century, every hour was actually a different length.

Because it was, yeah, Yeah. They used to divide the, they used to divide, like they used to divide a day into an equal number of hours, but obviously that changes then, sorry, equal number of daylight and nighttime hours. You have 12 hours of daylight, 12 hours of nighttime, but that only is 12 equal hours once or twice a year. And then the rest, so summer, you have really long daylight hours because there's still only 12 of them. And in winter you have really long nighttime hours. But it's what you're saying. People didn't need, hours weren't that important

if you worked like in agriculture where most people worked up until the 19th century. What was important is daylight and night. What was important was what season it was, what was important is daylight and night. Yes. What was important was what season it was, what the weather was. All these things were far more important. You know, the rhythms of your life were set by, you know, those things and meal times, you know, were dictated. You know, people were in tune. Like, you know, there's John Minton singing, it's a great story from the Ireland and Ireland's where the people there used to measure the time, but just

watching the shadow cast by a doorpost and they'd know then what time dinner was but then if the sun didn't come out and then there was no shadow, dinner could be three hours earlier, three hours later, it's just when people felt hungry. But I think that all is that thing of just how far we have moved away from this world. The importance, like we have the luxury of these being interesting stories. Yeah. Or maybe our ancestors didn't have that luxury. These were very deeply important things that held knowledge.

That said, just what you're talking about there, the same ones emerge in times of fear and anxiety. There's a theory as well that like, if you look at the rise of Christianity in Ireland in the fifth or sixth century, that Christianity became popular because it was in the context of the collapse of Rome. The collapse of Rome, like Rome was this highly functioning advanced society that existed through a lot of Europe. And then at the fourth century, it just fell apart and people couldn't. Someone in Italy couldn't ring someone up in England and go, here, Rome is collapsing.

So it just gradually the infrastructure went away and you had this period of deep uncertainty and money disappeared and writing disappeared and warlords emerged. And there's a theory that in the context of this, that's why Christianity took a hold in Ireland because people thought the world was ending. It felt like the world was ending because Rome was collapsing. I mean, Christianity is an end times religion. Christianity, it's got lovely messages about compassion,

but ultimately Christianity is, the war is going to end lads and you better follow this Christ fella because when the rapture comes, you're going to burn in fucking hell and it's just around the corner. So you're going to follow Christ or not. I mean, that's the Christianity at the core of it. End times, etiological stuff. There's going to be a comeback now then. Oh, big time, big time. that etiological stuff. There's going to be a comeback now then.

Oh, big time, big time. But if you look at a lot of these conspiracy theories, I'm talking about QAnon, the great replacement. If you follow the fucking money of who's funding this stuff and funding the disinformation, a lot of it goes back to real hardcore right wing conservative American Christians, real the type of people who believe the arts is 4000 years old. That's who's funding us. That's a great leak. You get deep into the conspiracy theories, right? The deeper you get, a lot of it points towards Jesus as salvation. I mean, it's terrible. It's terrifying.

The world is run by evil elites. They're eating babies. It's terrible. It's awful. But Christ, he'll lead you to the, just follow Christ. It's like they're, it's like they're astroturfing at the end times. There's like, I was thinking about this recently. There's a, the 700th anniversary of the Glekenny witchcraft trial.

It's one of the first Witchcraft trial. Yes. The first Witchcraft trial in Ireland took place in 1434. And I didn't know we had many witches in Ireland. I thought that was more of a Protestant thing. We had it, like there was actually a phase of it in the 14th century, but, and then it stops. So there's not that many in Ireland, but the ones that do happen happen really early in the context of European witch trials.

But the 700th anniversary of that is on, and I've been involved in a couple of things in Kilkenny to mark this. And I was thinking about, you know, all the things, the background and, you know, kind of witches and where this idea comes from. And again, it's kind of, we've touched on some of it already, but like this idea, these certain ideas come to the fore when people are really fearful about the future and they lash out and you can see like, you know, so even those I'm talking about, which trials in Ireland in the 14th century, but you can see it in ones in Scotland in the 1590s and then in England or in America, rather, or the United States

or New England as it was in the 1690s, they're all happening in when the same thing is going on. People are really scared about the future. There's uncertainty, there's warfare, and you're really fearful about what comes next. And a lot of the people doing this would never have once dreamed of doing these things, you know, maybe 20 years earlier when they live much more, more stable times and I think, yeah, it comes back to the fragility. A collective terror. Well, I mean, a good example of that right now.

People lost a lot of people to COVID. Now, I don't mean just people who lost people to the disease of COVID, but I know people who lost friends to conspiracy theories over COVID. People who five years ago were just getting on with their lives and now they have excluded all their friends because they believe in pretty hardcore conspiracy theories that make it difficult to be friends with that person. And that's quite common. That's a way of healing though, I suppose that is it? It's a way of like the people face a really traumatic time in their lives.

Or is that being like too simplistic? I mean, it's, it's, I often, I, I, I often try to empathize. I tried to get into the shoes of someone who's completely like chem trails. There are, there's people in Ireland who truly believe that when you look up into the sky and you see the path that's been led by an airplane, there are people who 100 percent believe that those are chemicals that are being sprayed by the secret government of the world to engineer the climate, to make us think that climate change is happening.

So and if you look at who's funding that, it's fossil fuel companies. But there's a hardcore conspiracy that climate change isn't real. And what we're seeing with rising temperatures is deliberately engineered by a secret government using these chemtrails in the sky to control us. You know what I mean? And all you've got to do is walk down the road in your town and you're going to meet someone who believes that 100 percent. This is getting more and more common. And

I think the people, it's people looking for a feeling of certainty. What's very, very frightening as a human being is uncertainty. It's a very uncomfortable thing to not be certain about the future and anxiety, anxiety is when we try to create certainty and I think that's what it is for these people. The comfort that they get from conspiracy theories is certainty. At least I have something to believe. I'm terrified about climate change. I don't fully understand it. I don't get it. I can't look at the data. What do you mean my house might not be here in 50 years? That's a

difficult reality to try and navigate. So if someone can say actually climate change isn't real and those trails that are coming off the plane in the sky, that's actually what's causing climate change. It's a big conspiracy. I think for those people that alleviates their anger and their fear, and that's why they go toward that direction. And maybe in the 14th century with the witch trails, it was the same shit. I'm terrified. I don't know. The black death. Maybe it's her over there.

Is it her? Is it that woman who lives on her own? Can we kill her? Will that do something? Yeah. Are these all then like, is that what we're dealing with now? Mother 21st century mythology. I mean, I don't know what I call it mythology.

I definitely call it folklore. Like, are you familiar with Dukas? You are the definitely call it folklore. Like are you familiar with Dukas? You are the Dukas website. Like I fucking love Dukas. I've actually started using that more and more in the podcast. Like even if you're talking about something really old, primary source, primary source, just watching people in the 30s think of any event in their past. And yeah, it's just really interesting seeing just sometimes it can be totally off the wall.

Typing in something like UFO and you've got some fella up in Dunagall in 1929 and he's talking about a UFO that he saw on the air ferry for it. You know, I love that stuff. But if I think, and this is what I wonder about, like the Dukas collection happened because in the 1950s, the government went to every child in the country and said, go and speak to an old person and record their stories. What if they did that right now? And unbiased, how much of today's Dukas would be people talking about these conspiracy theories that they saw on Facebook? How much of this would be do you see those airplanes up there?

That's actually interdimensional shape shifting lizards, lizards who are actually a Jewish cabal are creating climate change through airplanes. And that's what that is. That's what would be in Dukas now. That those are the Pishogues. Those are the superstitions. Do you not think so? Yeah, no, no, no, you said, yeah it is like, of course, that will be what you'd get back.

And I'm just what I'm thinking now is that if you went to other times when mass media kind of was new, like, you know, back in the 17th century. Oh, you're talking when you have the printing press. Yeah, like all these, you start getting free sheets and that kind of stuff. And, you know, people for the first time, you know, cities and certainly in Europe, people can read enough. So you get these and people are.

What you ever hear of this? Something I'm very fascinated with, Finn, is you've never heard of chat books, have you? No. So these are fucking amazing. So during the penal laws in Ireland, so Catholic people, they couldn't get an education, they couldn't speak the Irish language, we all know what the penal laws were. You had hedge schools and in the hedge schools you've got young Catholic kids receiving a secret education. And the textbooks that these kids had were known as chapbooks.

And chapbooks were 17th century pulp novels. They were really really cheap little fan flits that were sold secretly illegally at county fairs and in these fan flits were old Irish mythology, story of Fionn Macúil, stories about more recent folk heroes and highwaymen all written in the Irish language. And these chapbooks that were sold and printed cheaply at county fairs were what kids went and learned in the fucking hedge schools. And that's an example there of mythology, folklore, like Cougholem was in there.

They were trying to hold on to Irish knowledge while the penal laws was happening, when there was a structure in place to remove that knowledge and language and to colonize the culture. And something I find really interesting is, you know, the white boys. So the white boys, who, if people don't know, they were, was a part of the Land Wars, was it? Yeah, well, yeah, like I suppose an early forerunner. There were gangs of young fellas who basically went, they dressed up in mad costumes and

they burned landlords out of it and they were violent. Those white boys, they were raised in the hedge schools and they had chapbooks as their textbooks and if you look, there's historians that argue that they were basically radicalized. They would have these stories of highwaymen and superheroes. And then when they got to 1819, that's where they were dressing up in these costumes. The white boys was a it was like their Marvel superhero. Do you reckon though, and it's the same with folklore or lore today, do we adapt lore to suit our times or can it drive change and things like that?

So are those guys reaching for the stories that rather than the story itself being the catalyst as such? Do you know what I mean? So this is the difficulty with Irish mythology. The difficulty with Irish mythology is the first written example, like I said, was written down by monks and the monks, and you can see it in the, not the footnotes, the marginilia. So the monks will say in the Book of the Dun Cow, you've got ninth century monks, I believe, recording the story of the time. But if you look at the marginilia, the monk has to write a disclaimer. And the disclaimer is this story here is believed by the foolish people of the land. These are pagan stories. They're not to be taken seriously.

And that's written in the marginilia. So the thing is, is with Irish mythology, first off, the early Irish church gets involved. So they change the mythology to suit Christianity and to portray it as being a little bit evil. Then with those chapbooks from the 1700s, they're being written as a way to preserve the culture because the penal laws exist and it's trying to eradicate that culture. So what happens is that the stories that survive are the masculine stories, the stories of Cú Chorin an Fionn macúil and the Fianna,

because they're trying to radicalise young men to fight the Brits. And then the same thing happens when you have the Gaelic revival. You have Irish myths effectively being retold as a way to radicalize young men to join the fucking Ra, you know what I mean, and fight the Brits. And I've had Mancon Magan on the podcast speaking about this. His ancestors were some of the people who did that. The O'Rally family, you know what I mean?

Who were deliberately using their knowledge of the Irish language to retell these stories from our mythology, but putting an angle on it that's very masculine, very warlike, and that is intended to radicalize and anger young men so that they'll fight for revolution. So what gets lost there is the feminine stories, stories of love, stories of passion, and stories that aren't about an Ireland that's consistently under threat of being conquered. You know what I mean? You can see, yeah, I think just the way, obviously we live in such a stressful

time at the moment, you know, just on a personal level, but also then kind of on a global level, it's just quite a, I think you hear a lot of people comment about that, like these days, or, you know, you kind of know you're in it when you're not the only one thinking that when you see it a lot. But anyway, what I'm kind of getting at is that I think the same thing is going to happen again. It'll be interesting over the next, you know, years to see what stories are starting to be brought out again. But we're like, you and I are chatting because of House of the Dragon, right?

That's why me and you are having this chat. Do you not view we'll say House of the Dragon or Game of Thrones or any other huge fantasy or super like the entire the past 15 years of popular culture around the world. It's not the Sopranos anymore. It was Game of Thrones. It was House of the Dragon. It was House of the Dragon. It was Lord of the Rings. And then you've got this massive superhero franchises.

That's what popular culture is for the past 15 years. Stories that are rooted in fantasy. I mean, what does that tell us about culture right now? I think it probably tells us something more about, well, I don't know. Maybe it's more about the time we live in, like, you know. I mean, House of the Dragon, it's a great way to escape because like, it's early medieval European history with a lot of dragons in it. That's like, to be honest, like you throw a sword into something and I'm there because I'm just, I just stopped thinking about like the problems

of the, of daily life and I'm just like totally tuned out for like whatever an hour a week. I'm loving it. Like, you know, and you just put a sword into something. So for me that is, but I do think these things probably have to echo something deeper or reflect something for us. Yeah. Do you know, like things are popular at certain times for reasons. And, you know, you have to be in, like, and it's obviously not just any individual series, it's trends we go through, but, uh, I don't know, maybe it's the things could be worse. Is that what we better, we better wrap it up or else we're going to talk on evening thing for sure. For sure.

And what I've got one last question for you, right? Cause we're just, you were talking about Kilkenny. Um, there's a, in Kilkenny cash castle, there's a carving, a statue carving. I think it's from the 17th century and it's the image of Keith Duffy from boys on I don't know. I have, I, I, I'll be up there soon. I must check when I go and Google it, when I go and Google it, unfortunately, the result is it's the Kilkenny people have an article about it, but the article is about me pointing it out.

So I'm trying to find out more about it. But because I'm in Kilkenny next month doing gigs, you know, so I want to go and visit this statue. You don't know anything about it. Have you? No, I don't. I have to go and visit this statue. You don't know anything about it. Have you even heard of it? No, I don't. I have to go to Kilkenny Castle soon. Go to Kilkenny Castle. Ask them for the Keith Duffy because I guarantee you they know it. There it is.

The fucking image of Keith Duffy. It's terrifying. I want to because I've had Keith Duffy on the podcast. I want to bring him to the statue. It's terrifying. What's going on? He's historical doppelganger. That's his time traveling, Kate Duffy. All right. I might catch you for a pint

actually when I'm down there. Yeah, for sure. Therefore. All right. Nice one, Finn. Thank you so much for appearing on the podcast and having chats. And thank you. Oh, I enjoyed that chat. And I hope you enjoyed this bonus podcast, this sponsored bonus podcast that was brought to you by NOW. Go and look at season 2 of House of the Dragon which is streaming weekly every Monday without

a contract. Just get a NOW Entertainment membership. I'm Sarah Milroy, director of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinberg. If you love Impressionism, you'll love what we have on view this summer at the Gallery. River of Dreams, Impressionism on the St. Lawrence, features more than 150 sublime works by some of Quebec's most beloved artists. Join us for a journey down the Saint Lawrence and see how impressionism flourished in this country a century ago. Buy your tickets today at mcmichael.com, home to the art of Canada.