Culture

The Celts and Their Cliffs

Editor’s Note: This was the first place essay from Radix Journal’s 2015 essay contest.

Both the Irish and the Gauls believed that their ancestor was the god of the dead and, in the case of the Irish, the afterlife was off the west coast of Ireland.
~J.P Mallory, The Origins of the Irish

THE UNIVERSAL IS LOCAL

I took a weekend off to forget. Forget that I was an Identitarian. My anxiety was visceral. It hurt. But I knew I could still escape. If not the reality, its representation. I needed to get away from the headlines, the newsreaders, the internet trolls, the voices of reason, the footage of invasion… the soft whisper of “Surrender now.” I took my car, my camera and some music and made off along the still primordial coast.

My only refuge, in these moments, is the point where the ocean meets the land and for all that, one ocean and one land. I think that’s preconscious, it’s in my DNA. It is always a returning and a taking leave. A welcoming and a farewell. It’s a place I go when I’m beaten. Not to contemplate my end, but to replenish what is left of my soul.

The waves rise and crash against the cliffs of Ireland. Western Europe ends here in the Atlantic. In limestone and salt and anger. In a mass of ocean which seems to float above you on a clear day, the green blue haze sinking into the haze of the white blue sky. Forever.

I am an Identitarian because everything ends. And where a thing ends, we take the measure of it. We value life because it ends. We value the rudiments of our identity, because they are perishable.

It feels intuitive that in ancient times, a people living on a small island should look out over the surf and mist and see the gateway to another reality, an underworld, an afterlife, the horizon point of meaning. Their beginning and their end. It reminds me that universalism is a symptom of localism. To an isolated community, the surroundings constitute the universe. The sky exists to roof one’s own small patch of earth. The psychology of a people is fused unmistakably to a landscape.

The ancestral connection to a patch of earth, transforms it, makes it live in a different way. It makes it relevant. It makes it primal. This is your landscape. It belongs to your people. You have inherited it. You have a custodial responsibility towards it. Your ancestors lived and struggled here. Your children will live and struggle here. The relationship is intimate. It enflames. Beneath our Christian churches and our modern cities, there is a coarse, pagan landscape where Bronze Age warriors battled and Neolithic farmers built hulking great stone monuments to the hereafter.

We mix and share and derive our myths from other neighbouring European peoples. We live in their cultures and they live in ours. Through invasion, through blood, through religion. But for all the mixing and invading, the various peoples of Western Europe have been remarkably settled for hundreds and often thousands of years. Meaning precedes us. It precedes us in our tribe and in the turf we thread. It calls to us from the past.

WHY OUR LEADERS HAVE NOTHING INTERESTING TO SAY

I am an Identitarian because a warning light has gone off inside my head. I have come alive to a threat. Like an animal that flinches from the slaughterhouse truck. I have wandered the world, asleep, uncomfortable with other cultures and neglectful of my own. I have wandered the world, disarmed by platitudes and lies. But now I am awake.

All heroic stories are circular and one ends up where one began. The battle that I needed to fight was here all along. Behind me. Not before me. In the stories of Ireland –the myths pieced together and embellished by monks in that golden monastic age, twelve hundred years or more ago –each new wave of invaders is usurped by the next and driven finally into the sea. Giants and then gods and then men.

The concept of protecting one’s turf seems to be lost on our current leaders. But can the situation be altered? I look into the eyes of a Juncker or a Merkel or a Sutherland or a Trichet and I see no empathy. Nothing that can be reasoned with. I see what Werner Herzog saw in the American grizzly bear. A blank stare which speaks “only of a half-bored interest in food.” These flabby dead eyed technocrats are bored carnivores, the dysgenic remnants of Teutonic ice ages. And, yes we must wrestle these groveling, wrinkly, sterile beasts. We must wrestle Europe away from them. Or they will eat us. And our children.

The bear hug is treacherous. That suffices for information. It is hardly worth talking any longer about their ideology. They have much to say on the subject of identity. But identity they say, is “not for you.” They believe that the unit of society is the individual consciousness. No meaning precedes us. No God. No standards of beauty or authority. And one is cast as a villain or hero from the start. Innocent. By reason of oppression. Guilty by reason of insanity.

For all their bells and whistles, they treat the world as Marx did, as a revelation of material injustice. To be righted. To be altered. To be fixed. All natural laws must be capsized and overturned. And ultimately, the job of the present is to bury the past… But… and here’s the rub… having buried it they have nowhere to return. The circle cannot close. The hero cannot fulfill his quest. The bear will die in the cactus land. And we will have no origin. That is what they cannot give us. Or give us back.

All they can give us is realised wholes. In the here and the now. Bruce Jenner, Aylan Kurdi, Michael Brown. Moments. Snapshots in a hyper-real present. Requiring no assimilation. No explanation. No history. No future. This is what I see in Merkel’s eyes. This childless wench presiding over childlessness. Nothing but the present. And the present is nothing. The bear hug is the hug of death.

What do people like this have to say, I wonder? Once you cast aside their silly slogans, what wisdom can they possibly communicate? Because Habermas was wrong. Communication is not a means of emancipation for an oppressed subject. It is the quest for origins. Every conversation you will ever have, every encounter, from the most banal to the most exotic, will see you plumbing the depths of some beginning. What seems to be the problem? How can I help you? What happened at school? Can you explain this transaction? Who are you? Where are you from? What’s your name? And so on, forever.

THE FUNERAL AND THE DEATH OF AUTHENTICITY

I don’t think I was ever very Leftwing. But I had strayed after college. I liked to think I was a Left-conservative which was how Norman Mailer styled himself. But like Mailer perhaps, I was fooling with labels. My drift was definitely leftward. And towards nihilism. I had to see a cherished grandmother in the ground before the rot ended. And the Right slammed into me like a wall. I had a black eye but I was home.

We had a good old rural Irish Catholic funeral. The English are sometimes bewildered by how quick Irish funerals are. If you die on Monday morning you’ll be waked on Tuesday and buried on Wednesday. That’s a lot of religion, heartache and hard drinking to fit into three days admittedly. She was buried in an isolated hillside graveyard with crooked headstones and some so old the names are no longer visible. They’re just misshapen chunks of limestone. As is the custom, the neighbors dig the grave with shovels and picks. This tends to surprise some outsiders and even people from other parts of the country, more conditioned to professional burial staff or JCB diggers. When the coffin is lowered everyone waits while the dirt is thrown back in. Any bones uncovered in the digging are reconstituted. Nobody is quite sure how many family members have been buried in that plot. And I guess nobody wants to know. I think it’s important to see the earth being piled in. It’s cathartic if nothing else.

The experience remains something of a reference point to me. A reference point for what I hate about this world and what I love. Quite a lot is lost when someone dies. Her generation was the last in Ireland to come of age in a world without electricity. The last living connection to pre-industrial modernity. The last connection to crushing subsistence labor, to oral storytelling and candlelit nights, to rural superstition and medieval fatalism. What one can salvage from a religion is justified at these moments. As the family stands around the coffin chanting the decades of the rosary, one person leading, everyone else following, one is struck by the atavistic wisdom incubated in archaic rituals. As the tears and sobbing slowly subsides, the room calms and unites, the old, the middle-aged, the young… The monotony of the words, repeated endlessly, becomes affirming. Not spiritual really. Visceral. Like a wheel following a groove in the road. A verifiable phenomenon, testable, repeatable, carried on through centuries, a mechanism for exorcising grief. One wishes one could believe. One wonders how many people in the room believe. One cannot say. One cannot ask. One does not want to know. One knows in any case that the true believers are dwindling. Perhaps the last true believer is lying there in that coffin. One wonders if the mechanism described will survive another twenty years or so… I have my doubts. But I knew authenticity when I saw it. And they cannot take that away from me.

POSSESSION IS NINE TENTHS OF THE LAW

I wander up the coast. Driving and trekking and taking photographs. Peering over precipices. Now and then I stand alone. Close to the edge. On a cliff, crumbling as it is, year by year, millimetre by millimetre. Not free. Not emancipated. Not whole. But part of something whole. Something is welcoming me. And bidding me farewell. Meaning is always catching up with us. Preconscious. Life, a series of destinations, rather than a journey. We are always arriving. The traveling has already been done, the journey taken, over eons and by other vessels. Men and women, strange but close to us. Molecules in time and space.

This horizon, the one I’m looking at right now, is my eternity. And this topsoil is the future of my people. It is that or it is nothing. It is that or we have no future. No place to stand and no heart to fight. There are no universal cultures. Culture rises like basalt on a sea plain, out of a place and a people. Out of territory and ethnicity. There is more culture in a dog pissing against a tree than there is in a lot of contemporary art and for this same reason.

Without a strong identity one cannot take ownership of what is yours. Or pride in it. And how then can you create or give birth to anything? Identity is a claim one makes. And culture is the tree that grows in the claim.

The Irish have long stared into the Atlantic and the Atlantic has stared back. It has a claim on us and we on it. It is the entrance to the afterlife, the receptacle of the dead, where Donn the son of Mil perished off the rocky coast of Kerry. It means something to us by the geography of our relation to it. A geography of time and place and intuition. A geography that negotiates death.

It was the sons of Mil who crossed the sea and took Ireland from the Tuatha Dé Danaan, defeating them and casting them into the underworld, to lurk as sídhe or faeries. Think of it, this tale set down by scholars over a thousand years ago, built out of folklore and myth, folk memory and folk history. An origins story. And those same faeries haunted the landscape of rural Ireland up until the mid-twentieth century, when electricity finally and irrevocably banished them. Not to the underworld. But to oblivion.

Think of that line from Equus, by Peter Shaffer, “… life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods…” And think of every lonely journey you’ve ever made, and every nook or corner you’ve ever stowed a secret in. The extinction of rare animals worries us, makes headlines, but not the extinction of our people. Or our gods. Gods die. Gods lose their potency. People forget them or dismiss them or discard them…. The job of forgetting takes one generation only. And remember, to lose your gods, to lose your forms of affirmation, is to die a living death. And to make of that deathliness, your legacy.

A thousand years ago last April, the Dalcassions broke the Vikings on the beaches of Clontarf. A hundred years ago next year, a band of school teachers, poets, aristocrats and socialists enacted blood sacrifice on the streets of Dublin, for some glittering hopeless vision of the future. A Republic which did materialise and was, like all quenched desires, an anti-climax. But what now? And what forever after?

What will come after us? Who will retain our myths, pursue our passions, recite our songs? Who will feel the weight of centuries and millennia at the sight of our dreary wet hillsides? Who will tremble before our cliffs, our dolmens, our churchyards, our poetry? If not we. For we die when our gods die. Our gods die when we die.

AMAIRGEN’S SONG AND THE FIRST IRISH IDENTITARIAN

It was Amairgen, poet/priest/King, who led the Millesians with his brothers towards the shores of Ireland. It is written that they came from Sythia to Egypt to Spain. And that their uncle spotted Ireland on a clear day from a high tower.

It is written that Amairgen claimed Ireland for the Gaels. By song. The Tuatha Dé Danaan, the godlike people in possession of the island, conjured a cloud of mist to see off the invaders. Amairgen sang. And in singing the mist dispelled. And they prevailed.

David Adams put it thusly: “The poet, in a sense, sings the new Ireland of the Celts into existence, containing within himself, like Krishna-Vishnu in the Bhagavadgita or the persona of the poems of Walt Whitman, all the elements of creation.”

There are various accounts of the song, all of which preserve the same essential meaning. It is the primal realisation of all awakened peoples. Sacred knowledge guarded by priestly castes. The revelation that we are parts of a whole… But the universal is only ever accessible to us through local gods. The specific. The intimate. Eternity is in the detail. It is tribal. It becomes us. It welcomes us. It bids us farewell… Let it not be a final farewell.

The sea’s wind am I,
The ocean’s wave,
The sea’s roar,
The Bull of the Seven Fights,
The vulture on the cliff,
The drop of dew,
The fairest flower,
The boldest boar,
The salmon in the pool,
The lake on the plain,
The skillful word,
The weapon’s point,
The god who makes fire I am.

14 Comments

  • The Roman touch never … NEVER … made it to the shores of Ireland. The culture, the adminstration, etc were virtually unknown to the inhabitants. The Romans were flatly scared to pieces by the stories they heard of the wild, vicious, often naked, savages roaming the isle. The Scots were scary enough… thus Hadrian’s Wall.
    The Legions were very, very far from home and it was decided at the imperial level not to waste the resources invading the barbarian wasteland.
    So, the evangelizing by St Patrick, et al was very organic and dynamic.
    It was its own germination in a vacuum.
    Thus, historical Irish Christianity and ties to the Mother Church were very specific and unique.
    Now, just another chance for fat broads to get drunk.

  • Even Irish and Italian Catholics, who some people erroneously disparage as subversive “others” like Jews, voted in the majority for Trump. Contrasted with Hispanic Catholics who voted in majority against Trump and for Hillary. Race is the great dividing line.

    Interracial liberalism is maladaptive. Liberalism only works within a white context. In an interracial context it does not exist in any meaningful way as the DNA is forever changed and you get 2nd or 3rd world shitholes like in Latin America.

    If anyone wants to target white ethnics, then start with the Polish and French, who were the first to emancipate Jews.

  • A Sci-Fi Idea.

    There is a white community. It seems safe, secure, prosperous. and nice. But something is not quite right.

    It turns out it is not an autonomous white community. It is a ‘farmed’ white community.

    YES!! In the future, the non-white globalist masters have decided to ‘farm’ white communities and grow them… to eventually take from them.

    Backstory. There was this great project of spreading globalism all over the world. It pushed non-white hordes into every white nation. The problem was all this Diversity began to bring down the modern world. With demise of white societies, there loomed the demise of nice thing that only white people could make, or Stuff Only Whites Make(SOWM).

    It turned out only white folks could sustain productivity and civilization, without which non-whites can’t have good stuff. So, if non-whites totally take over white societies, it will be the end of not only whiteness but nice stuff made by whiteness.

    But, non-whites didn’t want let go of their power over whites.

    So, what is to be done? If non-whites totally take over white nations, then all will fail and both whites and non-whites will suffer.

    But if non-whites depart from white nations which are restored to whites, then white people will build lots of nice stuff and maybe even use their economic and military power to dominate non-whites.

    So, non-whites figure they will stay in white nations and keep the power… but ‘farm’ white communities where whites will do their wonderful things.. And when whites have made all the good stuff, the non-whites will harvest them.

    It’s like humans allow bees to make honey and then take the honey. Humans must leave bees alone to do their thing. Only after the bees have done the work can humans move in to harvest the honey.

    Same thing with dairy cows. Humans must allow cows to live, eat, and do their own stuff. Then, cows will grow big and provide milk that can be harvested by humans.

    Same with chicken and eggs. Humans must let the chickens to eat and grow up. It is then the chicken lay the eggs and humans take them.

    The trick is how to milk the whiteys and take their eggs.

    So, this sci-fi scenario is different from CAMP OF SAINTS where non-whites just invade and attack and destroy everything.

    It is more like South Africa after apartheid when blacks figured they must keep the whites as working bees who keep making the honey. And now, Zimbabwe wants the white bees back because blacks suck at making honey. Blacks want the power but they also want nice things made by whites. Blacks on their own cannot make the nice stuff. Only whites can make nice stuff. But if whites are left alone to make nice stuff, might they not use their wealth to gain power over non-whites again? So, blacks and non-whites must find a way to keep the power but make the whites make the nice stuff so that blacks can harvest it.

    Like what the Ottoman Turks. Turks weren’t good at business and wealth-creation. They were good at fighting and using brute force, like in MIDNIGHT EXPRESS. So, the Turks used Greeks and Armenians to do much of the business and create wealth for the empire. But then, the Turks took a big chunk of it.

    Now, how could white folks be ‘farmed’? If whites are allowed to make the nice stuff but then the nice stuff is taken from them, wouldn’t they lose the incentive to make nice stuff?

    So, this is what the fiendish non-whites do. Once they ‘farm’ the whites in their communities to make the nice stuff and then once they take most of the good stuff from the whites, they use some special technology to wipe out white memory of what happened. (Since non-whites aren’t smart enough to have developed and maintain such technology, they rely on cuck-white collaborators who worship the Holy Person-of-Color and believe white race must be made to do penance forever to atone for their ‘racist’ sins.)

    So, even though whites are being farm-raised and robbed, following every calamity they are made to think that their community was hit with some terrible mysterious force and must rebuild. So, they go about recreating the wealth. (People don’t lose their incentive to rebuild when the calamity seems beyond human power. It’s like people rebuild hurricanes or tsunamis even though such will happen again.)

    So white folks act like bees. After honey is taken from the bees, bees are clueless as to what happened and go about repairing the hive and reconstructing their honeycomb.

    And suppose the non-whites ‘farm’ white folks for sex as well. Non-whites are a bunch of lowlife race-mixing rapists… but they realize that they if they hump every white ho, there will be no more white women to hump since all their kids will be mulattos or mestizos.

    So, in order to have a steady and endless supply of white women, they make white men hump white women to keep producing white daughters for non-white fiends to hump. So, white men are put out to stud to hump white women to produce white ho’s for non-whites to hump.

    Anyway, over time, some white folks begin to suspect something isn’t quite right in their world. They seem to be living in their own world and making nice things for themselves… but at some point, something happens where so much of the honey is taken and whites must rebuild again.

    White Bees, White Farm, or Never Let Us Know.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj_kJcY_an0

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLOCsjCtyuM

  • I spent sometime yesterday St. Paddy’s going through my photography in Britain… it was a good day to put a video together of those photos… I gave me joy and it reminded me of my peoples across the Big Pond.

  • Staggering essay.

    “The Tuatha Dé Danaan, the godlike people in possession of the island, conjured a cloud of mist to see off the invaders. Amairgen sang. And in singing the mist dispelled. And they prevailed.”

    The globalists have conjured a mist of their own to prevent people from seeing very far or asking many questions. An essay like this lets us glimpse through the mists at who we are, where we came from, and what’s at stake if all’s forgotten.

  • Tim, this is an excellent, evocative, and engrossing essay. It gave me goosebumps, I shall return to read it several times. I was beginning to think I was the only identitarian in Ireland, it’s nice to know that I’m not alone.

    • Identity Ireland are a vehicle for Peter O’Loughlin’s ego – stay away form them and DO NOT give them your dox. I was, and am, a member since their and have never been invited to a meetup or anything of the sort, how ever they had the resources to meet the Israeli funded group “Fortress Europe” with a bunch of other Milo-tier retards.

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