“Irishmen and Irishwomen regard set instinctively as they regard mud” — Arnold Usher
Arnold Usher’s comment is sadly all too apt. For many of us Irish, sex is merely an instrument for procreation; with proper tillage the soil can be made fertile. But once the job is done it’s best to wash up and get back to serious matters. Business. Sport. Talk. And Drink.
Things were not always so, as Jean Markale informs us in his remarkable book, Women of the Celts. The ancient Celts, who once occupied all of Europe, were half way between an older matriarchal society and the later patriarchal Indo-European cultures. As such, their laws and customs reflect a unique equality and harmony between men and women. Celtic women enjoyed equal ownership of property and widespread sexual freedom. Far from being the subservient consorts of male deities, in the pantheon of Celtic mythology it was the goddesses, as emanations of the Great Mother, Nature herself, who were worshipped.
In Celtic society, women, by actively exercising their choice in sexual partners, became man’s initiator, transformer and deliverer. Eroticism was generated by men and women as a form of religious experience, a means whereby in the ecstatic moment of sexual union the gap between the sexes was for a blinding instant dissolved. Male and female energies participated in this mutually celebratory act. But the keeper of the keys to the sacred mystery was woman, for she ordained the rite and it was through her agency that man attained new birth and new life. In making love, one worshipped the Great Mother; it is no wonder that the Celtic concept of heaven was known as the Land of Women.
As the poet Robert Bly has shown in Iron John, his brilliant and influential mythic study of the male initiation journey, one does not easily gain the privilege and benediction of love. The boy must first become a man, as the girl a woman. For the male the pathway to woman’s temple of knowledge is a difficult one that involves confronting all the shadows of one’s secret fears, all the challenges of one’s hidden desires, all the pain of one’s grief and loss. Only then is one a man. Only then is one ready to experience the sacred mystery of love as embodied in a woman who has followed the same forbidding pathway towards her own truth.
This year’s Yeats International Theatre Festival is devoted to the theme of love and sexuality expressed in three powerful Yeats plays: Deirdre, A Full Moon in March and The Shadowy Waters. Each of the plays focuses on a transformational act in which there is a mutual exchange and absorption of male and female energies. In each play the heroine makes the decisive choice that brings into being a new order of the heart and mind. Each play demonstrates the quintessentially Celtic truth that there is a thin barrier between the mortal and immortal worlds, that sexuality is a means of piercing that barrier, and that heaven itself is incomplete without the contradictions and conflicts of human passion.
In Deirdre, (1906) Yeats presents a startlingly modern version of perhaps the most famous of all Celtic myths.
In doing so he brings to the fore a number of issues at the heart of contemporary thinking on male and female sexuality. As the play opens we learn from a chorus of women that Deirdre has chosen seven years of exile with her lover, Naoise, in preference to a forced marriage to her foster father, the elderly King Conchubar.
Promised forgiveness by Conchubar the two lovers have returned to court, though Deirdre has ominous forebodings.
Naoise, believing still in a patriarchal false code of male honor, tries to quell her fears only to find that the two are caught in a trap set by Conchubar. Ever bound to the stoic code, Naoise accepts their fate, and asks Deirdre to join him in a game of chess to while away their final moments.
Deirdre rebels – or rather, her instinct rebels—against Naoise’s passive choice and, perhaps, the game itself, an image of the ways in which men vicariously attempt to manipulate and order the world. In chess, queens are lost. She would rather be human than heroic.
In the end, however, she makes a choice that defines her destiny in heroic feminine terms. On learning of Naoise’s murder, she seduces Conchubar into letting her see him one last time.
Conchubar reluctantly submits, whereon she kills herself, having achieved a serene detachment from the petty exigencies into which she has been dragged. The meaning of the play is in the complex struggle that Deirdre has to undergo in order to become a heroine, fully possessed of her own nature. She does so not by renouncing her femininity but by adapting the same cold mask, the same calculating strategies of the male code only to subvert it. Her tragedy —like that of many contemporary feminists — is that neither she nor her beloved will live to enjoy the fruits of her bitterly sacrificial choice.
If Deirdre sets up the conflict between the masculine code of reason, structure and power versus feminine instinct, feeling and love, A Full Moon in March (1935) carries the conflict into an archetypal dimension in which the real issue is the passionate relationship between the body and soul, Yeats wrote the play in old age shortly after reading D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and after undergoing an operation to renew his sexual energy, believing that there is a direct relationship between potency and the fertile brain which conceives immortal works of art.
The subject of A Full Moon in March is stark and brutal in its elemental passion.
The setting is perhaps an underground Celtic burial chamber (a site of ancient fertility rites) to which have come two pilgrims, a Young Man and an Older Woman. Before their eyes, as in a vision, a ritual is performed involving a filthy Swincherd and a virgin Queen who is surrounded by many relies of those who have failed the lest of passion and been destroyed. Despite his appearance, something about the Swincherd (his resolution? his honesty and courage? hisself-confident virility?) touches the Queen. She would spare his life but the Swineherd taunts and teases her, ever bolder in his reckless insinuations.
At length, enraged, she has him beheaded. The second half of the play involves the Queen in a crazed, yet strangely child like dance of immolation before the severed head of the Swineherd. The head sings a song of ecstatic love, provoking the Queen to cradle it and slowly move in a dance that climaxes in their symbolic sexual union.
The form of A Full Moon in March is a series of images so vividly dramatic that we hold them in the mind as objects of contemplation.
The images call forth long-buried forces out of the human past, out of our own psyche.
The forces are, as Robert Bly would say. archetypal (constant) personifications of the primal passions that, whether male or female, we must contact and absorb to be complete human beings.
In essence, The Shadowy Waters (1911) is an evocation by Yeats of the mystical marriage he dreamed of having with Maud Gonne. The poet himself described it as expressing “the desire for a perfect and eternal union that comes to all lovers.” The play is set aboard a pirate ship lost in the dark waters of the far North. The ship is led by Forgael, a half-crazed visionary in search of a beautiful woman he has met only in a dream, but who, he believes, will teach him the secrets of immortality. The play is in the Celtic tradition of voyage literature, which symbolizes the journey of the soul towards self-realization and wisdom.
Just as the crew is about to revolt, an exotic spiceship appears out of the west.
The pirates board the ship and slay everyone but for a queen whom they take captive. The queen rages against Forgael for murdering her husband, but he casts a spell upon her with his magical harp. Dectora, for that is her name, is carried back through time and transformed into a personification of the Eternal Feminine. She then confesses her love for Forgael, but he is mortified, realizing that he has won her by a deceit and that love, if it is to be worthy of the name, must be freely given.
Yeats’ understanding of love, in the Celtic meaning of the term, arises out of the final scene in which Dectora, acting out of the wisdom of her womanly heart, teaches him that the truths and immortal experiences he has been seeking lie not beyond the world in death but in the intensity of commingled sensual and spiritual passion.
Someone has argued that the chief failing of Marxists is that they ignore the problems of the psyche while the equivalent failing of psychologists, particularly Jungians, is that they act as if the political and social realities of life do not exist at all.
The quintessentially Celtic vision of Yeats has oflen been subject to criticism from the latter perspective. What critics fail to recognize is that poetry rooted in an understanding of myth may often have a far more potent political and social effect than work of a more explicitly practical (i.e. didactic) nature.
Ernest Jones, the biographer of Freud and a noted psychologist in his own right, once wrote an incisive essay that explained the reasons why Irishmen have fought so fanatically —and, at times, foolishly – in the cause of Irish freedom. According to Jones, the political psychology of Ireland is rooted in the fact that it is an island nation, with, as a result, all the mythic resonances of home attached to images of woman, virgin, mother and womb. Scattered throughout the mythology and literature of islands such as Ireland are references to a special mystical appeal to the imagination. The very name of Ireland is associated with a variety of feminine names, including Cathleen ni Houlihan.
By tapping into the unconscious energies still associated with this numinous symbol of Ireland, Yeats created a play that, to his own astonishment, did indeed send out certain men the English shot. Trying to distance the reader from the familiar Irish-English antinomies, Jones asked: What would you do if a German assaulted your mother?”
As part of last summer’s Yeats Festival, under the title “Tradition in Transformation,” a group of Irish artists and critics addressed the question of what it is like to function as a politically sensitive artist within the context of contemporary Ireland. The Donegal playwright Frank McGuinness opened the proceedings by proclaiming that the relationship between Northern and Southern Ireland was essentially a sexual one, “with the South in the missionary position.” This, he explained, was because of the constitutional position of the Republic that they “have a right to the North, whether they like it or not.” Invoking the memory of Yeats’ famous address to the Irish Senate on the subject of divorce, McGuinness argued that it was only natural that the most volatile political issues in recent Irish history had to do with sexual laws: contraception, abortion, censorship, the rights of homosexuals and the right to divorce. It is natural that these should be the major subject of our national debate,” said McGuinness.
“What is sexuality but the most personal and private of concerns? When there is a conscious repression of that energy everything becomes dirty, including the body politic.” And so we’re back to the issue of mud— in metaphorical terms at least. Jean Markale informs us that at a certain point in time the once sacred image of the wild boar associated in Celtic mythology with prosperity and erotic love was transformed into a sow, rooting in the earth, tearing with its fangs and tusks, eating its own young. The divine image was repressed and in its place the vilest images connected with blood and corruption were attached to the word “swine,” “pig.” in American jargon, which in turn became pejorative for woman. And this, he concludes is the crux of the problem. The “swine,” (i.e. woman) is dangerous, unhealthy and frightening.
Man keeps her submerged at the bottom of the sea, or in the depths of a cave, and his conscious mind finds as much fault with her as possible, even as he secretly wishes she would rise again. She is a reminder of all cults of the mother goddess, which were conspicuous for their lack of modesty.
Yeats, by invoking the image of the Swineherd in A Full Moon in March, is reaching deep into his Celtic roots to reinvigorate the sacred energy associated with the mother goddess. The great theme of his work is the necessity of acknowledging and integrating the primal aspects of human nature in order to complete the process of civilization. The severed head in Celtic myth and culture was a symbol of sacred wisdom, of nobility and of power.
The Swineherd, who was also capable of magical deeds, was one of the most important in the Celtic social pantheon. Shocking as the image of a severed head in sexual congress with a virgin priestess may be, Yeats believed that, in our coldly mechanistic age, only the shock of the violent can fire significant change.
In this he is at one with Robert Bly who, in his Dionysian image of the Wild Man, seeks to invoke the same primal energy embodied in the Swincherd as a model for male initiation into manhood.
The male fear of female sexual power has imposed as great a limitation on men as on women. By associating guilt and degradation with the sexual instinct and by repressing the sexuality of women in all its manifestations, men deny themselves the source of their greatest happiness. That ultimate happiness towards which man aspires has been his incentive for thousands of years. But always, as with Forgael in The Shadowy Waters, it remains outside his grasp until he comes to the recognition that, by substituting puerile fantasies for reality, he is responsible for his own frustration and suffering.
In the Celtic tradition the two sexes are inextricably linked. Man needs woman; woman needs man, Translated into mythological terms, this becomes: man needs a goddess and the goddess needs a man-a man, that is, who is in direct contact with the divine energy of his internal Wild Man. This is the teaching of Dectora, a fully realized woman and goddess of love, to Forgael. And this is what Forgael, no longer a romantic dreamer but, in the imagination of the mature Yeats, a fully initiated man, is prepared to acknowledge as a flesh-and -blood incarnation of “the perfect love” he has so long been seeking.
The harp by which Forgael conjures the woman of his dreams is itself a symbol of Ireland—or rather, Ireland as muse, the keeper of the keys to the sacred mysteries.
Poetry and music have always been synonymous with the spirit of Ireland, and in the work of contemporary Irish artists, so many of them women, whose creative genius has won world-wide recognition, we find that spirit still alive. Yeats was himself a kind of Wild Man, a shaman who, in his prophetic poems and plays, celebrated a holistic way of being in which spirituality can be lived on every human level. That in itself is the key to the extraordinary form of music theater in which his ideas are embodied—a theater rooted in poetry, myth, and, above all, a mystical concept of life in which everything is experienced sensuously, intelligently, concretely, imaginatively and erotically.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the July/August 1991 issue of Irish America. ♦
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