You may all revere my powers of procrastination. Now's grand. I accept offerings of raw cacao and tea.
All shenanigans aside, a wee while ago I went on a field trip - again with my lovely class- to the Hill of Tara (Temair in Old Irish), which features prominently in Irish tales from the Mythological Cycle, and is a site said to have been used for kingmaking.
It's also said to be the residing place of the Morrigan, who's kind of my own personal patron saint. I've been reading about her since childhood, and she's just plain badass.
Some context for kingmaking, you say?
Right - so Ancient Ireland was divided into kingdoms - lots of kingdoms. I have one lecturer who's said between 80 and 100, and another saying between 100 and 150. For the sake of this wee blog post, let's just say it's around 100. Now, each kingdom had its own "petty" king (that's 100 kings at once), but there was one king who was supreme - the "High King" or "King of Kings" - the King of Tara. This king would have participated in an elaborate ritual in order to be inaugurated, which goes something along the lines of this:
In a nutshell, the king-to-be would presumably have walked up the long straight ditch, as if he were coming out from the Earth, after which he would mount a chariot drawn by two unbroken horses that he would have to lead between two stones. Once he'd done this, he would touch the Lia Fáil (Stone of Destiny) which would then, according to myth, "cry out" if he were the rightful king.
Now, if one has a mind prone to analysis, the themes here are blatantly sexual. One of my lecturers has compared the procession and ritual to the process of childbirth, the stone crying out in pain. Another interpretation is is more pleasurable one, in which the stone cries out in ecstasy. The visuals relatively relate to the same thing, however. Irish kings, in order to actually BE rightful kings, would *ahem* engage in sexual activity with a goddess of sovereignty, or a divine embodiment of the land. So there's your imagery.
Anyway, no, we didn't recreate the ritual - although that would have been utterly brilliant.
The fascinating thing with these ritual sites is that they seem to have been built with an aerial perspective in mind. This is what the site looks like, although one obviously doesn't feel that when walking on it. The only thing you feel is the wind. So much wind....
