Happy St. Patrick's Day! - Debunking the Blarney

[caption id="attachment_1260" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Thank you to mclementsdesign on Flickr for the original image."][/caption]

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig!

I'm part Irish -- half of my heritage is Polish, half is a combination of French, German, Irish, and Swedish. I was also raised Catholic, which is strongly linked to that Irish side. So when St. Patrick's Day comes around, I can't help but feel pretty prideful, even if it is that small percentage. ;)

St. Patrick's Day, though, is rife with myths about snakes, wearing green, and St. Patrick being... well, Irish! I'm here to help debunk the blarney and let you know what St. Patrick's Day is really about.

Snaaaaake! Ohhhh, it's a snaaaaake...

Legend has it that St. Patrick banished snakes from Ireland by chasing them into the sea after they accosted him during a 40-day fast he was taking on top of a hill. To nitpick: as a post-glacial island, Ireland never had snakes and, as they can't fly, Ireland will never have snakes. (The same applies to New Zealand, Iceland, Greenland, and Antarctica.) So there were no snakes for St. Patrick to banish!

So why the myth? St. Patrick's core mission in Ireland was to be the island's biggest Catholic evangelist -- while Christians did live in Ireland at the time, the landscape was overwhelmingly Druid, and the Druids served as spiritual advisors to the tribal Celtic "kings" who essentially ruled the island. Despite the Romans claim over the island, they were rather lackadaisical about it, so the kings took over, fighting and raiding cattle from neighboring tribes for entertainment and exercise (all that plundering and pillaging has to be great cardio work!).

Essentially, they were never really a great influence. And as Irish schoolchildren were taught, these Druids had huge snake tattoos on their arms, a symbol for transformation, regeneration, and rebirth.

See where this is going?

As a missionary to the unconverted parts of Ireland, St. Patrick went to work supplanting the Druids, metaphorically "driving the snakes into the sea" until, by the seventh century, the Druids had pretty much disappeared from the Emerald Isle. The dominant religion had changed, from the Druid-addled landscape to the Catholic one it is today (and shares with Protestants -- more on that later). When it is pointed out that the snake-tattooed people, the Druids, are who were really driven out, the metaphor becomes clear, and as the history of the Druids faded away -- very easy, as the religion was oral-based and there was no written history on them -- the snakes remained, leaving the myth we have today.

I pinch!

There's a popular folk song about the colors of Ireland:

Oh it is the biggest mix-up that you have ever seen
My father he was orange and my mother she was green

Oh my father was an Ulsterman, proud Protestant was he
My mother was a Catholic girl, from County Cork was she
They were married in two churches, lived happily enough
Until the day that I was born and things got rather tough

You'd never think a family with a Protestant and a Catholic would ever be considered interfaith, would you? ;)

In fact, the Irish population is both Protestant and Catholic... though not without its share of strife. Starting with English imperialism, the creation of the Anglican Protestant church created fundamental religious conflict with the Irish population, which was overwhelmingly Catholic and not at all interested in conversion. It wasn't until the reign of Elizabeth I that Ireland was finally "conquered" and Protestantism became common, but that didn't stop any Catholic uprisings.

When James I seized Catholic lands in and around Ulster, the northern province of Ireland, to give to loyal Protestants in England and Scotland, Catholics in the area were evicted and many starved, leaving a few to crawl back and beg for menial jobs on their own former farms. Revolts continued around the province and across the rest of Ireland, and the brutality was incredible.

Catholicism was outlawed under the 1700's Penal Laws, and priests were banished. Catholics who continued their faith in secret were hunted and killed outright. Despite regaining legal status in the 1800s, Catholics still had to pay tithes to the Anglican church, starting a "tithe war" and continuing the cruelty between the two faiths.

In this century, the southern provinces of Ireland were liberated from English rule and Ireland became a 90% Catholic country, where divorce was outlawed (and still is today) and other Catholic-centric issues became law. The Irish Republican Army began a terrorist campaign in the 1950s in and around Ulster, forcing reunification with the south. That ended up splendidly, as you can imagine, and in retaliation, the Protestants formed their own paramilitary organizations. The British arrived to enforce peace, but their heavy-handedness only lent to more violence, often with the individual military forces terrorizing the British.

Only in recent decades has the violence started to wane and a true possibility for peace been a possibility.

Anyway, so that whole spiel was to state the actual reason for why we wear green on St. Patrick's Day. The color green is, according to recent popular tradition, left to the Catholics, while orange (which is becoming increasingly common, depending on your religious leanings) is attributed to the Protestants. If you look at the Ireland's flag, you'll notice that there's a stripe each of green and orange to represent each religion, with a stripe of white to represent the want for peace between the two.



Why the green? Originally, the color attributed to St. Patrick was blue, but green grew more popular as shamrocks were worn in celebration of St. Patrick's Day as early as the 17th century. St. Patrick is said to have used the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity to the Pagan Irish, so it's clear to see why the blue switched to green so readily.

And why the orange? In 1690, William of Orange (William III), the king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, defeating King James II (he was Catholic, you know, and he wrote a Bible translation, too!) in the Battle of the Boyne near Dublin, ensuring Protestant military dominance. See before about how that all went. While the "Orange" in his name actually referred to a province in southern France, the color reference stuck, and orange now appears on the Irish flag... and now on the backs of Irish and other Protestants on St. Patrick's Day.

St. Patrick is Irish, too! ... not really.

As for St. Patrick, he'd be rather surprised by all the hullabaloo. He wasn't even Irish! He was British! And he was in Ireland in the 5th century, long before there was any division between Catholics and Protestants! Honestly, he'd probably be pinched about a million times for some reason unbeknownst to him. (Wouldn't that be hilarious, though? I mean, seriously.)

But who knows... maybe he'd find some kinship with those in Orange, as they'd be getting their share of pinches. Who ever thought that would bring the faiths together.

So anyway.

A very happy and blessed St. Patrick's Day to everyone. If you still follow these traditions or retell the same stories, at least you know from whence they came. :) And of course, from one Irish chick to all you, the Irish or the Irish-at-heart:

May the road rise up to meet you,
may the wind be always at your back,
may the sun shine warm upon your face,
and the rain fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again,
may God (or gods or goddess or Spirit or Gaia or everyone or maybe even just me!)
hold you in the palm of [whoever's!] hand.