October 21, 2012

 

Evening

 

 

Wilson Armitage turned out to be one of those college professors who you knew had girls fighting to sign up for his classes—he was maybe 35, with a charmingly ragged haircut, a quick smile, and clothes straight from Urban Outfitters. His office was more old-fashioned than he was, full of language reference books and stacks of papers and jars of pencils; only one small laptop on the desk offering evidence of the 21^st century.

If I liked Wilson immediately, I was less sure about the man with him: Thin, fifty-something, with narrow features and a perpetual scowl. Wilson introduced him as Dr. Conor ó Cuinn, the archaeologist who had overseen the excavation at which the manuscript had been found. He’d flown over from Ireland with the actual artifact, which UCLA was still in the process of scanning. Wilson did most of the talking, but Conor never stopped staring at me. It occurred to me to wonder if he simply mistrusted women. Or perhaps American women?

Wilson started by offering me a chair, then turned his laptop around to let me look at pages of the manuscript while he talked. The photos on the screen showed a continuous scroll, broken into frames for scanning, with edges chewed and uneven; the parchment or vellum was covered in neat handwriting that I just barely recognized as Latin. The scroll had been wrapped in oiled cloth and laid within a metal box with sealed edges—a box still clutched by the bony fingers of a long-dead female corpse. A poor farmer in Northern Ireland had discovered the remains while digging peat blocks out of a bog. Fortunately he’d had enough sense to call the authorities, who’d brought in ó Cuinn. The excavation had been brief—there’d been nothing else at all in the bog—but the scroll was remarkable. The author had been named Mongfind^[6], and claimed to have been the last of the Irish Druids.

“Well, right off the bat, something’s odd,” I said, “that’s a female name, and most of the Druids were men, although there are isolated historical recordings of female Druids.”

The two professors exchanged a quick glance, and then Wilson smiled. “You’re going to be in for a few surprises, I think. According to this…exactly half the Druid caste were women, and they were essential to the Druid rituals.”

I couldn’t even answer, not right away. Half the Druids were women? “How do you know this isn’t a fraud?”

Wilson shot a glance at his Irish companion, who nodded back to him. “We’ve got everything from carbon dating to Mongfind’s body to confirm this.”

“So you think the body you found this with was Mongfind herself?”

“We believe so—Mongfind mentions several…uh, peculiarities of her body that matched up to the corpse found in the bog. We’ve even got autopsy results on the body confirming how she died, how old she was, and what she ate for her last meal. And of course, Dr. ó Cuinn is a highly regarded specialist in his field. No, the evidence is incontrovertible.”

ó Cuinn spoke up, and his brogue was thick and obvious, even with only two words spoken. “The tongue…”

Armitage made a quick grimace, then added, “Of course. One of those ‘peculiarities’ mentioned in the manuscript is that Mongfind’s tongue was cut out. The body we found had been mutilated in that manner.”

“Why was her tongue cut out?”

Armitage took a deep breath and then said, “What do you know about the conversion of the Celts to Christianity?”

I shrugged. “As much as anyone, I guess. Gregory the Great taught his missionaries the doctrine of syncretism^[7], of incorporating existing pagan practices rather than stamping them out. All Saints’ Day was probably moved from May 13^th to November 1^st to help Catholic missionaries in Ireland convert the Celts^[8].”

ó Cuinn asked, “Have you not wondered why the Celts would have so easily converted?”

In fact, I had. I figured that more often than not, conversion had been along the lines of the conquest of the Aztecs, when Cortez had ridden into their lands with a banner that read “We shall conquer under the sign of the cross” and a large force of men with superior armor, weapons, and diseases that the Aztecs couldn’t fight. “Sure, I’ve wondered that, but I figured they probably kind of bought them off with a combination of gifts and threats.”

“According to this…” Armitage gestured at the laptop screen, “…the Catholic missionaries had studied the tactics employed by Roman troops against the British Celts, and they learned. When they were ready, they moved into Ireland with a hired army and started by slaughtering all of the Celt warriors, then moved onto the Druids. Only a few escaped; the remaining Celts converted easily.”

“So you’re telling me this document reveals that early Catholic missionaries were basically mass murderers?”

“Well, more in the nature of…conquerors,” Wilson said, squirming, then riffling through a stack of printouts on his desk. “Listen to this: ‘Yesterday the Catholics offered a gift of a great man built of wicker. This figure could hold fifty men, and the Catholics suggested we should tour it from the inside. When fifty of us were within, they sealed the entrance and set the wicker man afire. The rest of us tried to save our fellows, but our enemies had sunk traps in the earth, and many of our tribe died impaled on great spikes. Those of us who suffered neither stakes nor flames were forced to listen to the dying screams of our brothers and sisters.’”

I couldn’t suppress a laugh. “This is all going to go over well with modern Catholics.”

But bitter jokes aside, my head was spinning. Hadn’t it been Caesar who had ascribed wicker men to the Celts^[9]? Yet now we had something saying the infamous giant figures were not Celtic, but had been used as a trick by Catholic missionaries…who were also ruthless invaders. “So…are you suggesting that all of the other histories…”

ó Cuinn leaned forward, his pinched features eager. “…are false, re-written by later Christian scribes who were instructed to hide the truth.”

“Why?” Even as I asked it, I knew the answer.

Wilson confirmed. “Don’t the victors in every war write the history they want? The Catholics probably weren’t comfortable with a society in which women held half the religious offices and…”

“And what?”

Wilson abruptly dropped his eyes and fidgeted; he was uneasy talking about whatever came next. I looked to ó Cuinn, who slid a USB stick across the table to me. “It might be easier if you just read what Dr. Armitage has translated thus far.”

I picked the stick up. “I can take this?”

They both nodded, so I put it in a pocket. “Okay. But…you called me in with questions about Samhain, and you haven’t even mentioned that.”

Nodding toward the stick, Wilson said, “Read that and you’ll see. According to our Druid priestess Mongfind, Samhain was a little more than a new year’s party. It was…” He trailed off, unsure, or simply unwilling to tell me.

“What?”

ó Cuinn filled in. “According to this…the Druids could perform real magic, and on Samhain they communed directly with their gods.”

I’m sure my mouth was open as I stared at ó Cuinn; I expected him to wink, or laugh.

He didn’t.