Last night I attended a wonderful concert of Scottish folk music, performed by Julie Fowlis and her accompanying band of fiddle, guitar, and bouzouki. Ms. Fowlis plays the whistles as well as she sings. It was a glorious testimony to the creativity and endurance of the folk who live, work, and play in Scotland’s Western Isles (where I hear the whiskey is almost as good as the song).
Yesterday morning on my way to class I was reading a review in The New Republic of a new book on W. B. Yeats by R. F. Foster. As many know, Yeats had one foot in the occult and the other on planet earth. What I did not know, though I have heard various assertions about Celtic spirituality over the years, was that Yeats may have picked up an interest in the occult and supernatural from Irish Protestant culture. According to the review:
As far back as 1989, Foster was publishing arresting reflectiosn on the role of the occult in Irish Protestant culture, and this subject generatesthe most original chapter in his new book, tracking the Irish sources of Yeats’s interest in magic, secret socities, seances, and the supernatural.
“Twenty years ago,” Foster writes, “I suggested some patterns behind the atttraction of the occult for Irish Protestant writers,” ascribing that attraction in part to “Protestant insecurity and self-interrogation” in a country where elaborate Catholic and folk supernatural beliefs dominated. Foster’s chapter takes the reader on a rapid ride from stories of the supernatural to Swedenborg to the (adult) Irish fairies, establishing the theme of “a parallel world which can be entered by concentrated mental and spiritual exercise, and whose denizens engage in activities which both mirror and illuminate our own — and affect our destinies.”
So, to all of those Celtic Protestant readers out there, how much is there to this observation about Irish Protestantism? I don’t ask this to wind anyone up. When would I ever do that? I am genuinely curious and Foster’s hunch about the dominant Roman Catholic presence in Ireland makes sense. I should also mention that Foster’s book seems fairly responsible in its judgments. In Foster’s own words:
Current criticism tends to read the effusive literary productions of this era through theses such as the picaresque, or racial “othering,” or a colonized discourse which can be paralleled elsewhere in the British Empire. It might be more profitable to look at what the Irish Romantics wanted to do, what they thought they were doing, whom they admired, and how they expressed their nationalism, or sense of nationality . . . And these texts, written by Protestant Unionists determined to claim an Irish identity, were key influences on the young Yeats.
(Thus, ends my Facebook moment.)
Old Life 