Ep 2. The Dumbledore of Irish deep-thinking on Commonage Consciousness

Moriarty, the Dumbledore of Irish deep thinking,  connects an Inuit hunting ritual to the Christian mass and from there bounces off to a memory of cattle being loaded near Galway train station. 
He addresses the notion of sinning against a blade of grass and the risks of living from the mathematical forefront of our brains

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Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Can I just tell you another little, tiny, little story,

Unknown Speaker  0:05  
another little preliminary story

Unknown Speaker  0:09  
about about approaching the Earth. Who

Unknown Speaker  0:10  
else could that be, and what else could

Unknown Speaker  0:12  
this be but

Speaker 1  0:13  
the bog Shaman manchan on Moriarty, a mini series in which I manchan Magan offer you snippets and snorts of the great Kerry philosophers, musings and ramblings in the hopes of getting you addicted.

Unknown Speaker  0:29  
This is a proselytizing podcast.

Speaker 1  0:31  
Have no doubts about it. I'm trying to capture your mind and your soul to sign them up to the wild and wayward cult of the great Dumbledore of Irish deep thinking and mind roaming the bush Prophet and bog shamer John Moriarty, let's dive in with a concept he calls commonage consciousness. The consciousness of Altamira and Lasco was common consciousness, and it seems to me that it is only in common age consciousness that the Earth can be saved. We have to take down the fences between us and animals. We have to take down the fences between us and stars. We have to acknowledge the oneness of consciousness that is in the universe. If we don't, we're going to be still in that world of us and them, and they are inferior, and we are superior. If we could only once break back into we feeling, if we could only once break back into common age consciousness, then we had a chance. We would be incredibly enriched. We would be so stupendously enriched, and so would the animals be enriched by the fact that we now could share the one Earth with them. He's talking here after recounting a long myth told to him by an elder of the Blackfoot nation. Now, we don't have time, and it's probably not culturally appropriate to go into it here, but he does go on later to expand on this idea of common age consciousness. When he refers to Altamira and Lascaux, you know, he's talking about the ritual sites of cave art from at least 17,000 years ago, and possibly long before in France and Spain. I mean, this story might have been told in the cave mouth of Altamira or in the cave mouth of Lasco, 25,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, in Europe, and then it migrated across Eurasia and went across the Bering Straits and went down and survived among the Blackfoot Indians.

Unknown Speaker  2:19  
I mean, this might well be our own story.

Speaker 1  2:21  
I just love the way Moriarty manages to knit everything together into one unified whole. He goes on to connect an Inuit hunting ritual to Catholic mass to the Eucharist. There's a lovely I think I once had it now, as I've got this right now about Eskimos, like where they would stand at a seals breathing hold, you know, waiting, waiting for a seal to rise, and when, when the feather that they have placed there in the seals breathing hole would move, they would know. Then the seal was right rising, and they would launch their Harpoon, and they would haul it out onto the snow, onto the ice. And then whoever had had caught the seal would call to the others who'd be standing at their seals breathing holes. And they would come, and as I remember it, they would open the side of the seal and take out the liver, and they would cut it into a few, say so, five of their five little fragments of this, and they would eat it, as was totally wrong to say eucharistically. And they will thank the seal for offering itself to be food for the people. Because all hunting peoples believe that if an animal doesn't want to be caught, you don't catch it. You know, an animal that you the true, the true, the true wound, or an animal that you kill, has decided to offer itself to be food to the people. So they will eating its river, it's liver, raw. They will talk to the spirit of the seal, and they will say to the seal, thank you for offering yourself to be food to the people. But do you now go back to that place where spirits take on a new body, take on a new body, and come back again into the world like that is so much more beautiful as way of relating to animals, isn't it? This makes him think about how we treat animals at home here in Ireland, and he recalls a moment in Galway. I mean, I was once blown Galway station waiting to go somewhere, and there's a slaughterhouse right beside Galway railway station, bus station, and a truck had come and dumped a load of cattle. What else would you call it, but a load of cattle onto a ramp there, and very shortly, they were going to be fed into the machines, into the great chainsaws, or whatever you like to call them, like they were going to be sliced. And there was one all, all Bullock there, like with her head across an iron railing, and she looked kind of stupefied away from the fields, away from the side of the mountain, and I just wanted to go over and throw my arms around that stupefied head like maybe it wasn't stupefied, and ask it to forgive us, like for what we were doing to it, because our relationship with it was all wrong. Moriarty was born in 1938 and died in 2007 he. Gave these talks in the early 1990s but for many decades before that, he had been absolutely and totally clued in to the disharmony that we've created on the planet. It caused him to quit his life and his career, an early adoptee of quietly quitting. Maybe we'll get into that in a future episode. It's so hard to keep up with him or to follow the meanderings of his eternally seeking mind. At some moment, he's like an old Catholic priest and others an Indian guru or pagan Shaman. But though he called himself primarily a Christian, he was adamantly critical of the limitations of Catholicism in general, it's small mindedness. The memory of the cattle near Galway train station made him think about the notion of sin in the Christian tradition, it is, it is common, I think, to say that you can only sin against another human being or sin against God. You cannot sin against an animal, you cannot sin against a river, constantly against a blade of grass. You can sin against anything. I mean, Christians, we have to open up and say that you can be in a state of sin towards a bed of grass. You can be in a state of sin towards the AIDS virus. To see a tree, to look at a tree and see only cubic feet of timber. That is to sin against the tree. When you see anything as smaller or less than what it is. You are sinning against it. When you see something only with an economic eye, you are sinning against it. So true. John, so true and beautifully said. The SEALs breathing a hole with a feather on top of it, so that an Inuit hunter would know when there's life beneath that stayed with him as an image, and it seeded all sorts of other ideas, mostly about those thin places, the tiny holes that allow us cross between different realms, and the shamanic ability to see through the veil, to access the insights or energies from the other side. And he thinks about how we might access what lies beyond. But maybe we do need an odd medicine man and medicine woman who, on our behalf, will be in touch with it. Not every Eskimo or Inuit will go down. Only the greatest of shaman will go down to that that floor of that floor of the ocean. So again, like when there'd be no serious breathing hole between consciousness and unconsciousness, and that would be calamity, wouldn't it, you know, so that, what is a shaman? What is a medicine man? He or a medicine person? I mean, a medicine person is someone in whom inwardly there is a seal's breathing hole so that he can be in touch with the depths of the universe in him and the depths of the psyche. And these people we need, and we need to live from those depths, because if we live from the mathematical forefront of our brain like we are in trouble, you know, we are desperately in trouble, then if we live from the mathematical forefront of our brain, we're in trouble. I hear you, John, I hear you loud and clear, my friend, and I'm sad I never got to meet you. I think back often to that day that you had lunch and Dingle with my mum and our cousin, the artist Maria Simmons Gooding, and I'll regret forever that I didn't take the time to get into the car and go meet you all, but you've left us your words and your ideas in the books and recordings. And that's good enough. It has to be if you store the listener wants to dive deeper. Shivhane Ah humma in ahrid Sayer to to immerse yourselves in his work. Check out the full recordings of his talks on one evening in Eden on digital download R as a CD box set. In terms of his books, the great mythologist Martin Shaw has written a really accessible edited highlights of his work called the hut at the edge of the village. There are two other edited selections of his work available, all of them published by Lilliput press, who champion Moriarty throughout his life in terms of his own books, dream time is a classic, as is nostos. And if you get through all that, try what the curl you said and invoking Ireland, maybe the easiest way of all of engaging with him more is to check out the Tommy Tiernan interview with him on YouTube, our past interviews with him by Joe Duffy and Marion Finucane on RT radio, Shin of William Sega foiling. That's about it from me for the moment, but I will be back with more gems from the Moriarty archive. In the meantime, one more mini Moriarty more so one's fine. Summer's day down canaway, there was a man sitting from can a man from Carna was sitting on the sea wall, sitting there smoking his pipe. A man from Cana, he knew the countryside well, like the back of his own hand, he knew this countryside. And a tourist car came along and stopped right beside him, and the man rolled down, the man who was driving the car, the tourist who was driving the car, he rolled down the window and said, Am I on the right road to Carmen? And the man from Carna took the pipe out of his mouth, and he looked down the road a long pile, and then he looked up the road a long pile. And then he looked into his own mind and into his own nature for a long time. And finally he came back out and looked at the driver, and he said, Yeah. That you are on the right road to Kana, but you turned the wrong way. You.

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