The New Irish

 Our Irish language columnist Gearóid Ó Colmáin on the strange allure of the oak tree throughout history... 

In the sun-soaked field behind my house stands an old oak tree. Seemingly unencumbered by the blooming whitethorns and ambitious sycamores that vie with it for attention, its stately branches and robust leaves command a space all for itself, an audible space that rustles softly in the breezes of all seasons.

There’s something uncanny about the oak tree that defies expression, something about its manners, its ethereal presence that exudes more than mere tranquility. One is almost tempted to use words like ‘wisdom’ or ‘stoicism’… But can a tree be wise? What can trees teach us and why is the oak different? Before you accuse me of being ‘out of me tree’, I will try to explain.

It is said that in the beginning there was darkness upon the volcanic earth until a drop of water trickled furtively from the barren soil. This trickle gathered pace, becoming Danu, the goddess of the divine waters pouring her self over the earth. Soon the volcanoes were cooled and hardened into mountains, the darkness was lifted from the sky and the earth’s crust began to breath. Then a tree sprang from the animated soil, an oak tree. Primeval men named it Bile. When Danu and Bile mated, two acorns fell to the ground, bringing forth Dagda, “The Good God” and Brigantu or Brigit – breos-saighit – meaning “fiery arrow” or  “The Exalted One”. And thus, we are told, a great and steady migration of mankind began under the guidance of the meandering waters of Danubius, today’s Donau or Danube.   

The story as we have it in Ireland says that Danu’s destination was an island on the western fringes of Europe, Inis Fáil, the isle of destiny, and her children became known as the Tuatha De Danann, the children of Danu.   

What if a ‘fiery arrow’ were to pierce our effete imaginations and we were to know ourselves again as children of Danu? Would this be a hopelessly romantic mysticism, or a repossession of lost words re-fashioned and re-minted to form a new currency of understanding?  Of course, language can never represent all of reality; our words are mere indicators that help us to drive in the dark. That is why our perception of the beauty of nature reduces our sentences paltry noises hurled at a world of thunderous magnitude.

For the Greeks, too, the oak was sacred. Zeus, that capricious King of the Gods, could often be heard in leafy whisperings from the oak trees of Dodona. There, the oak tree was associated with rain. Priests on Mount Lycaeus often dipped an oak branch in a sacred spring in the hope that clouds would clash and water would flow. But what would we in the watery land of Danu know of drought? Is it conceivable that we should have to hope for rain? Is it conceivable that a certain form of human thinking could have precipitated such an ecological catastrophe? Could this form of thinking have begun when the Greeks abandoned the sanctuaries of the rituals of the oak for the ‘logos’, the form of human reason that made today’s world the way it is, a mode of reason bent on the destruction of nature?  

It is difficult for us moderns to grasp that ineffable sense of wonder that created the gods. We are too advanced in rationality and critical thinking to enter into this mythological mode of being; our sense of the real is irrevocably different. In the modern world mathematics has replaced mythology, and equations leave no room for doubt or mystery. The word ‘myth’ – from the Greek ‘mythos’ – is cognate with the word ‘mystery’, which comes from a Greek verb meaning ‘to close the eye or the mouth’. Myths are humanity’s emotional response to the world, attempts to say the unsayable, to see the invisible. When we look at Van Gogh’s flowers, we are entranced by the painting’s visceral power, its terrible beauty, but we do not ask if the painted object on the wall is “real” or whether it “exists”. What is real is our experience of it in this representation. Art, like mythology, gives form to that which is experienced or imagined, intuitions that cannot be explained.

There was a time when Europe was full of trees – a vast Black Forest that enveloped and overwhelmed human beings. The Germans also believed in the oak tree. One should remember Germany every Thursday, for it was Thor, the god of thunder and rain – the German equivalent of Zeus – who gave his name to the fourth day of the week. The Slavs knew him by the ancient name of Perun, and for the Lithuanians, one of the most astonishing linguistic groups of the world, he was known as Perkuns. The Lithuanians ran around the forest fire spilling beer into the flames in the hope of enticing the oak god to dance in the form of rain. The biblical Abraham also built his altar at the oak grove of Shechem. Many words and customs, but still the persistence of the oak and the hope of fertility.