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Aspects of nature in early Irish religion: an essay in the phenomenology of religion

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LowMAC_1993redux.pdf (49.39Mb)
Date
1993
Author
Low, Mary A. C.
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Abstract
 
 
Research into a wide range of early Irish literature has yielded a large number of texts in which nature and the Sacred are clearly linked in some way. By comparing and contrasting these various nature texts with each other and with attitudes to nature in the Bible and elsewhere, it is possible to arrive at a basic understanding of the religious significance of nature in early Irish Christianity and, to some extent, in pre-christian Irish religion.
 
The primal religions of Ireland and early Israel had many features in common. Both saw the land, water, trees, sun, fire and other aspects of nature as potentially revealing the presence and activity of the Divine. The term 'sacramental universe' is appropriate to both, and neither distinguished sharply between the spiritual and the physical. How did they come by this integrated world-view? There are of course theories of symbolism and sacramentology which one might p call upon in an attempt to explain the experience but such abstract conceptions belong to a different time and place. To say that they used their primal imagination is also to import ideas from another world, but at least they are ideas which have been formed in dialogue with surviving primal religions. Exactly what primal imagination is (as distinct from what it believes) and how it operates is another matter.
 
It is none the less an important question. Did the people who approached the Divine in and through nature, address an external reality, or a projection, or a delusion or what? We asked similar questions in relation to the girls #10 claimed to have seen the fairywoman on Knockainy, but the answers are far from clear. What is clear however, is that in Ireland as in Israel, the life-giving energy of nature was seen as having a supernatural source or sources, upon which human beings were ultimately dependent. This was a cause of wonder and also of fear. Both cultures sometimes expressed a deep ambivalence towards the Divine.
 
Yahweh and the deities of pre-christian Ireland represent very different conceptions of God and the cosmos. However, the primal imagination which we have seen at work in parts of the Hebrew Bible, together with the wealth of nature imagery found throughout the Bible as a whole, may have helped the early Irish Christians to retain some of their own traditional attitudes towards nature, as they made the transition from a primal to a more universal faith.
 
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/1842/34970
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