Everybody needs a break, climb a mountain or jump in a lake. Thus spake Christy Moore in Lisdoonvarna , that awesomely capacious litany of eternal truths. And, whether one chooses potholin in a cavern or Joe Dolan in a tavern, Frijiliana or the Galway races, a place of rest and recreation is indeed a primal necessity for all of us.
Irish families have Mosney. Irish couples have the Ring of Kerry. Irish singles have Torremolinos. Irish artists have Annaghmakerrig House. Irish politicians have Leinster House. But the question we have gathered here to ask is: Where do Irish pagans go for their holidays?
The answer is Teach Shinanna, in Shanraw, County Leitrim, an adventure playground for Earth-worshippers and Celticophiles, located about seven miles from Drumsna, amid the lakes, bogs and callows just outside the village of Keshcarrigan. Most weekends between the spring equinox and the festival of Samhain (Halloween), the house and its gardens are alive with the hoots and hollers of men, women and children lost in the serious business of play. Games without frontiers.
With its roundhouse, labyrinth, calendar tree circle, sweat lodge, fire centre, well house and assorted other rides and attractions from the repertoire of Celtic carnival, this Leitrim homestead is a veritable Neverland for witches and druids, a EuroDisney-on-the-Shannon. But you will also find others there, citizens of every faith and none, in fervent search of peace n quiet, fun n frolics or a combination of both. As far as they are all concerned, Woodstock, Knock or the feast of Cana could not hold a match to Teach Shinanna.
Fable and legend are the bricks from which this amusement park is built. It takes its name from a character in The Book of Leinster called Sinann, a granddaughter of Lmr (the unscrupulous father who famously allowed his children to swan around a Westmeath lake unsupervised for 300 years). Sinann was a woman of the Tuatha Di Danann (the people of the goddess Danu, believed by some to have been natives of Atlantis) who breached the water supply protocol of her time by approaching a secret well alone, and thus causing the reservoir to rise up and overflow in anger. The upside of her dreadful eau pas was that the spring s raging flood eventually became the source of the river we know today as the Shannon.
The Shinanna estate comprises 18 acres (nine of which are under broad-leafed trees) on the flanks of Sidhebeag, a celebrated fairy hill crowned with an ancient stone cairn that is said to hold the remains of Fionn MacCumhaill. Sliabh an Iarainn, a nearby mountain, is the peak on top of which the Tuatha Di Danann first landed in Ireland, having descended from the rain clouds that were their favoured mode of transport; the Nimbus Eireann service.
The Dream Weaving weekend workshops at Teach Shinanna are the brainchild of Chris Thompson, a British woman in her late 40s who bought the property five years ago. Chris is a former infant teacher, with a keen interest in archetypal psychology, self-development therapy and, above all else, Celtic mythology. She is loathe to describe herself as either a witch or a pagan, and prefers the term storyteller.
I have a goddess-centred spirituality which is very strong, she asserts. We are pantheistic beings. You could say that my goddess is Sinann, I work with that energy. I find working with the land here very much like working within a fairy atmosphere. I m not asking other people to believe that. Whatever anybody else finds that it is, it is. There is no system of spiritual beliefs being thrown at people. I m not going to frighten anybody or upset anybody by calling myself a storyteller. That s the way I like it. Storytellers interpret life for people.
Everything that happens in and around Teach Shinanna, Chris insists, stems from a desire to free creativity. Her ambition is to have the grounds seen as a network of sacred spaces.
By sacred, I mean the word s literal meaning, set aside, set apart for a specific purpose, she affirms. The grove is set apart for the purpose of celebration, education, working with the spirits of the trees, acquiring knowledge about the trees and the old Celtic calendar system. The labyrinth is a sacred space for walking on inner journeys, for personal myth-making. The fire-centre is a sacred space to enable us to focus on the elements of spirit.
The most important thing we do here is to work on releasing aspects of one s personality through Celtic myth and legend. Myths and legends are not just, as they are often taught in schools, pseudo-history or interesting things that may have happened in the past. They re not even heritage. They are the signposts that actually help people to access their interior, creative lives. A bit like the Aboriginal Dreamtime which isn t then, isn t now, it just is.
In unlocking those stories, you find all sorts of things that help people to work with day to day problems, day to day situations. These stories work, they can be transformative. All drama should be transformative. Our lives are a series of dramas, a series of rites of passage, a series of changes. Working with the stories through art, craft, dramatic representation and personal ritual-making enables people to tap parts of themselves that they wouldn t otherwise tap. It s also the most incredible fun.
In 1990, Chris Thompson was the head of an infants school in Kingston-Upon-Thames, in Surrey. Like many of those preparing to enter a third decade in the teaching profession, she was feeling burnt out and eager to escape. Her eldest son had reached adulthood and had gone away to university. Her other two children were much younger and not yet of school-going age.
That s a good time to shift perceptions, she says. It was then or never. Somebody said to me, What would you do if you could do anything you liked? . Out of the blue, I said I d build an Iron Age roundhouse and live in it! I meant it as a bit of a joke. But they said, Go on, do it! . I couldn t think of a good reason not to. So, I handed in my notice, went home and put the house on the market.
Together with her partner, Chris prepared a brief text entitled The Celtic Living Project, outlining her background, her aspirations and her ambition to find new ways of living the old ways. She circulated about a hundred copies of this document, to magazines, communities and individuals involved in the wider Celtic and pre-Christian movement throughout Britain and Ireland. It was throwing a dream to the wind and just following it, she proclaims. In doing that, you can t be a slave to your vision. You have to allow your vision to change and evolve and transform itself.
A potential site for her Celtic idyll soon emerged, but in Kingston, only a few miles away from the house she had just sold. She turned it down flat. No thank you, she guffaws. That would have led me into the dry, dull bones of Heritage, not into the living myth. Heritage has become too much of a business in England. Anyway, I couldn t afford to do what I m doing here in England. There is the little matter of land price, apart from anything else.
Also, I felt stultified by the Protestant ethic in England. I like working among Catholics better than with extreme Protestants. They re more live and let live. As long as you re not interfering with Catholicism, they don t interfere with you. Protestantism is more about proselytising a lot of the time.
So, we bought a camper van and set off to explore the Celtic fringes, to meet people, to get in touch with the land itself and with the stories on a basic, earth-roots level.
The morning she arrived in Leitrim to visit friends, Chris Thompson knew she had found her Eldorado. This area just grabbed me when I first saw it, she states. It is very beautiful, and fairly untouched. Scratch the surface and the myths and legends fly out like sparks in the air. Like many people, I was very drawn to the north west because of Yeats whose fairylore was centred very strongly in this area. Here I was in the midst of some of the great stories.
For Chris Thompson, stories are energies. By sinking roots in Shanraw she felt she was buying the rights to her own private power grid. I m interested in the mythological meanings of things, she avers. I love history and archaeology but that s not the root of the creativity. Creativity is allowing the myths to work for themselves. The stories are all we ve got.
Archaeology will only tell you a very limited amount. It takes on power through myth and legend. The oral stories are more unchanged than the written ones. The stories actually tell us far more about the beliefs of people, and also therefore our own beliefs. We re no different from them, just because we live in towns now, and can turn on electric light and can go out to the shops to buy food.
Deep down inside, we re the same people, with the same psyches, the same building blocks. You can touch people on levels with myths and legends that you couldn t otherwise reach.
Within days of purchasing the house and land at Shanraw, Chris and her partner began the plotting and construction of their Celtic playground, conscientiously endeavouring to endow its design with the colour and character of local mythology. Unfortunately, Chris partner subsequently underwent a rather nasty breakdown, and no longer lives in Shanraw.
For the time being at least, Chris cannot afford to pay anyone to assist her in the running and maintenance of Teach Shinanna, and its hinterland. However, there is Adge, the man she describes as her spiritual brother, the companion and guardian to the grove.
Adge is one of a number Cornish pagans who have been living in various parts of Ireland for the best part of ten years. Brawny, burly and laconic, his bespectacled eyes barely visible through a hedgerow of hedgehog hair, he walks with a swagger that could probably frighten a bear back to its cave. And if the swagger didn t do it, the blade definitely would; Adge spends much of his time in full druidic garb, a scarifying broadsword dangling from the waist of his sack-grey robe like, well, a big fucking broadsword.
Adge is better known to most Teach Shinanna guests as The Fluid Druid, an appellation he has earned for his mastery of magical and, by all accounts, lethal brews, the ingredients of which include mead, mushrooms, belladonna and a host of secret herbs, potions and spices. A wood-carver of exceptional delicacy and skill (and master water diviner to boot), he lives some five miles from Shanraw in a roadside caravan, surrounded by his bog oak charms, wands, arrows, staffs, twists, pendants and athames (ritual knives).
The Fluid Druid speaks the little that he speaks in an accent that s as broad as the berth I plan to give him (and his sword) now that I ve passed remarks on his accent. Practical work is as important to us as any form of ritual or spirituality, he drawls, in his Cornish burr. Confucius had a saying for it: After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water . That s what we do around here.
As well as the facilities grafted onto the Teach Shinanna pleasure gardens by Chris and co., the estate comes with its own bountiful array of naturally hewn slides, swings, skittle alleys and monkey bars.
Bounded on one side by an enormous quarry and on another by a deep, blue lake, these hillside fields are dotted with crags and bluffs and gnarled, entangled woodland tracts which rise out of the rugged landscape like overgrown carousels and rollercoasters. During workshop weekends, the Brobdingnagian effect is completed by the arrival of overgrown children and toddlers.
Under the watchful eye of nanny Chris, visiting members of the tree huggerati go wild in the country. They frolic in the open air, and gambol in the meadows. They chant, they dance, they throw ribbons around. They play hide-and-seek. They play tip and tig. When they feel the need for a breather, they flop down on the grass and decorate stones with finger-painting.
On some weekends, they stage Olympian decathlons. Competitors vie with each other in a series of keenly fought events that might include pillow fights, greasy pole climbs, relay races and who-can-stand-on-one-leg-while-holding-an-arm-in-the-air-the-longest contests. The ultimate challenge invariably involves the draining of chalices filled with Fluid Druid concoctions, and it is at this point that most antagonists tend to throw their towel in, if not their dinner up.
After nightfall, the group stage mass hunts on the hill, in commemoration of various chases and flights from Irish mythology.
I will take a personal item from each person and take them with me to the top of the cairn, Chris explains. I will sit up there alone with those items and a torch. At three minute intervals, everybody has to come up to me, collect their item and then chase the quarry who is hiding somewhere between the cairn and the house.
It gets people out walking in the dark for a purpose. It gets them facing the dark and working with the dark and playing in a way that they would never otherwise do. Coming to terms with those shadows that jump out at you and all that lovely scary energy is tremendously invigorating.
Chris Thompson is protectively vague about what sort of people participate in her weekend larks. The strongest representation is clearly from amid the ranks of the Irish pagan community (among whom, to our knowledge, are several Gardam, solicitors, social workers, mechanics, restaurateurs, disc jockeys and music industry figures). However, Chris is adamant that all are welcome, provided they come in good will and are prepared to respect the privacy and anonymity of others.
Adults find it difficult to play, she asserts. They have to dress it up and find ways to make excuses in order to play. Children have no such problems. Give a child a story and, before you know where you are, you ve got half a dozen children making up bits of stories, acting them out, turning the place into chaos, producing wonderful effects. If you can find ways in which adults can create a poem or uncover something of themselves, you can make astounding breakthroughs. When people come here, the masks come off and, hopefully, they re able to play. I m setting up a playground.
When I was teaching, I maintained that I never taught a child to read. You cannot actually teach reading. All you can do is provide an environment in which learning takes place. My attitude towards spirituality or self-development is I cannot teach anybody anything. But I can provide an environment in which that learning can take place.
For Chris Thompson, the most profound aspects of the Dream Weaving workshops take place behind the closed doors of Teach Shinanna itself. It is inside this rambling but cosy farmhouse that Chris leads her assemblies on journeys of shape-shifting.
We play games, simple as that, she maintains. We set everybody up to be other things. You take a card out of a jar telling you what you are: Right, you re a flower, what sort of flower are you? You re a dinosaur, what sort of dinosaur are you? .
Then, we talk to people as those characters. At one point recently, I had a printing press talking to a rose who was talking to a turtle, and they were helping each other to solve each other s problems. I think that s deep. You don t realise how deep it s gone until you start thinking about it.
By way of illustrating just how deep this shape-shifting can get, Chris recounts the case of The Brussels Sprout Affirmation Ritual (both Chris and The Fluid Druid are avid fans of The Hitchhiker s Guide To The Galaxy and the work of Terry Pratchett). This exercise involved what Chris describes as a very young and very beautiful American 16-year-old who chose to shift her shape into that of a diamond.
Where are you? asked Chris.
I m on someone s hand, in a ring, the girl replied. I m being adored.
Do you like where you are?
No!
Why not?
I want to be back in the rock, the 16-year-old announced. I want to be back before I was shaped and polished and I can never, ever get back to that rock. I can never go back to being what I was.
Chris found this exchange extremely illuminating: Here was a beautiful girl who was obviously the apple of her parents eye. She is the adornment of her parents hand, and she s just gotten to that point where she doesn t know if she can cope with their expectations. In very, very graphic terms, she has told me how she feels about herself. A therapist might spend months trying to get her to say those things. In a short game, I have gotten it out of her through the magical procedure of shape-shifting.
But where did the Brussels sprout come in?
Among the same group, there was a Brussels sprout and all the Brussels sprout wanted to do was be eaten, expounds Chris, without a hint of irony or self-deprecation. This was a very clever American writer who thought she was playing the game superficially. She wasn t. She was telling me a huge amount about herself.
Somehow, the diamond got into the Brussels sprout. The magpie or the jackdaw may have put it there. What we had now was a Brussels sprout with added value! Being part of a Brussels sprout suddenly put the girl s problems into proportion. We played around and laughed and acted it out. It shifted her somehow. She became relaxed. She s suddenly seeing a problem she wasn t aware of and she s liking the new challenge. Then, you take that into ritual. You create ritual, through chanting, through quite time. Gradually, through our affirmation of her as part of the Brussels sprout, she became happier with herself as a diamond.
Chris Thompson is coy about just how, eh, frisky her weekend workshops can become. She knows she is viewed with considerable suspicion by many of the more censorious burghers of Greater Keshcarrigan. She has no intention of popping another log in their fire, or another bullet in their chamber.
Nevertheless, she makes no apologies for the fact that she and her friends celebrate the major pre-Christian festivals at Teach Shinanna, festivals such as Imbolg, Bealtaine, Lughnasa and Samhain.
Depending on who s here with us, we celebrate at a level that is comfortable for all, she says. Levels of celebration depend on who you invite to your party, that goes for any party. It depends on who you re with. Nobody acts irresponsibly and the most important thing is that nobody is damaged or used in any way. You only go as far as anybody is ever comfortable with but that should be true of anybody working in group dynamics.
So, are we talking sky-clad bacchanalia here?
We re not particularly straight-laced, if that s what you mean, she retorts cautiously. You re not going to get me to answer that question graphically, other than to say that different people act in different ways. We are able to act freely as groups of friends because, hopefully, there is a deeper trust between us. We can be open to each other.
For us, ritual is a way of living more deeply in the planet. Doing ritual doesn t make you life any easier. It s not going to get rid of complications. We have no special knowledge. If we do have any sort of special knowledge, it s merely that we re more likely to be able to see what s happening to us, looking at the web that we re weaving from the right side of the workings instead of the wrong side. And even that only happens on occasions.
You want to know why we do it? Why do you breathe? We can t help doing it, it s so important. It s the way we live our lives.
The rituals that Chris Thompson is prepared to talk about certainly seem innocuous enough by any standards, more ludicrous than libidinous. There is, for instance, much use of home-made masks and of the labyrinth as a highway for inner journeys.
It s back to the Hitchhiker again, chuckles Chris. Answers are easy. Remember 42. The problem is you didn t ask the right question. We spent a lot of time trying to get people to ask the right questions. What is it they actually want?
We set up a font in the well house. Everybody goes to the well with their question. People can graphically do this. They re not just talking about it, they re acting it out. I m trained in group encounter work, and have years of experience with children. I asked for Joy . This is turned into a quiet chant. Then, you try to find out what is stopping you from having Joy. That s when we go to the labyrinth to face down the obstacles.
The rest of the group wear masks, one is Embarrassment, one is Perfectionism, one is Emotionality and so on. Embarrassment had to be ignored or embraced. Intellect you could just push him out of the way. Emotionality was somebody you had to make friends with and take with you, as you do in any self-development work.
Perfectionism was a hard one for all of us. Because we wouldn t be here doing this sort of work if we weren t perfectionists. The sort of people who come to these workshops tend to be perfectionists anyway. Apathy was easy to deal with he forgot to make any holes in his mask.
After a session in the labyrinth, the group usually likes nothing better that to strip off and hop in the sweat lodge, essentially a home-made sauna that stands in a corner of one of the gardens. Emerging from the sweat lodge, participants often pour buckets of cold water over their heads and shake themselves about a bit in order to cool down.
On one occasion, this spectacle was spied upon through some bushes by a phalanx of local schoolboys. Rumours quickly spread about the weird orgies that take place in the fields around Teach Shinanna. Chris Thompson s two children, Columb (11) and Rhiannon (8), bore the brunt of the ensuing local animus and spite, and were bullied in the schoolyard.
In a bid at bridge-building with the Keshcarrigan community, Chris encouraged her kids to invite some of her children s classmates to Teach Shinann for parties and stay-overs. Before they arrived, she carefully put away any utensil or item of bric a brac whose purpose could be misinterpreted. All bar one that is.
I left the broom in the corner, she sighs. And that s what the gossip zoned in, on the recognisable, clichid symbol of witchcraft. The broom was a present from my partner. He made for me at a woodland craft course. I don t actually use it but it s there in the corner.
The rumours went around about me in the children s school again. But, it s okay. We re learning to live with it. I don t set out to challenge people for the sake of it. What s the point? Why push things at people that they re not ready for or they don t understand? That s just provocative. It s not that I m hiding but I m not into proselytising either. I don t advertise. If people want to come and find me, that s fine.
Slowly but surely, Chris Thompson believes that hostility towards her and Teach Shinanna has started to abate. Familiarity, she hopes, will breed tolerance at least.
I dress as I dress. I have a certain flamboyant style but it s not witchy. I m not dripping occult jewellery. And still I suspect that the local school wouldn t employ me as a teacher because it might upset people. I m not a Catholic but I am not opposed to any spirituality. I am not counter to Catholicism or any other religion. I will work with all people who will work with me. I believe we can all share a sense of awe, a sense of wonder, a sense of awareness of the world of which we are part.
For me. this means that I have to work in harmony with the Earth. Therefore, I have to be Green. I couldn t be anything other. I worked for ten years with the British Green Party. I am part of the matrix, so how can I destroy or even ignore that matrix?
I love going into the local church. However, I think this particular Catholic mass they do here is thoroughly boring and I cannot work with this idea of redemption and guilt. We all have a right to be here. We all are ourselves. I accept every side of our nature. I don t see it in terms of good and bad, black and white. We just see them as forces of nature.
I think that s where things have gone wrong. People have gotten so tied up with guilt that they don t value themselves. It s always got to be somebody up there or somebody out there who gives them validation. True validation has to come from within. That s all I m saying.
Chris Thompson is eager that she be seen as a thoroughly modern woman, and not some sort of throwback to the dim and distant Celtic twilight. I ve got a freezer, she declares proudly. I bought a microwave yesterday. The children watch MTV. I work in the 20th century. I couldn t do without electricity. We have to work from where we are. We can t pretend that we can go and live like people did 2,000 plus years ago, and neither do I want to. They were a red-handed lot, they were a pretty bloody lot. What was right and relevant then is not necessarily right or relevant now.
She is equally insistent that Teach Shinanna is a place of genuine practicality. Nothing about us is airy-fairy, she attests. The symbol of the grove is a sink-plunger. Sinann is a notorious stirrer of stagnant waters and puller out of plugs. If I find people who are airy-fairy and not earthed, I send them out to dig the compost heap. You wanna train in magic? Go and dig the compost heap. Wash-up, wash the floor, all these things have to be done here.
There are easier ways to find sex and drugs and rock n roll, adds the tight-lipped Adge with a slight loosening of the lip which suggests a smile not to mention an intimate knowledge of those easier ways to which he s referring.
Having opted out of the rat race, Chris Thompson and The Fluid Druid are happy to continue running in the mouse marathon. It s a struggle, contends Chris. I live on lone parents allowance, and earn what I m allowed to earn. It s hard as it is for everybody else living in the rural west. Everything gets ploughed into developing the facilities. We ve got a wide organic garden, which takes a lot of looking after. The tree plantation has 19 different species up there, and that takes a lot of work. Yes, we like to enjoy ourselves but we work damn hard too. Even when we party, I d say we re a lot quieter than the local pub.
But I live like this because I couldn t live any other way. I have to be in touch with the release of my radiant child, that something in our selves that we aren t afraid of. I am inner serene.
For me, there s no god or goddess up there telling us what to do. I don t worship gods and goddesses. I work with their energy. We have forgotten that we re mythic creatures. One of the problems that people have nowadays is that they ve lost an awareness of their mythic nature, that nature which makes them work through story, to see the meanings and patterns in things. Doing that here, I m happy. Leitrim, for me, is a kind of Heaven. n