Friday, March 17, 2017

Make Ireland Great Again—Bring Back the Druids

St. Patrick (in halo) reclines on a hillock, while the beasts of the vision he is having frolic underneath. Wauchier de Denain, Lives of the Saints, Paris, 2nd quarter of the 13th century; British Library, Royal MS 20 D. vi, f. 213, via University of Notre Dame.






As a matter of fact, while Ireland in the 5th century probably didn't have a lot of strict rules for immigration, Patrick was not a welcome visitor when he showed up in Wicklow from his native Britain with his foreign religion, ready to overthrow the centuries-old national traditions and put everybody under the yoke of canon law, converting the local women and tearing them from their families, getting them to take the veil—he wasn't so much like a Muslim immigrant to the US today as like the rightwing fantasy of a Muslim immigrant determined to install the sharia code.

Conservative druids warned everybody about the threat Patrick posed to the Irish way of life, in prophecy:
Across the sea will come Adze-head, crazed in the head,
his cloak with hole for the head, his stick bent in the head.
He will chant impieties from a table in the front of his house;
all his people will answer: "so be it, so be it."
Even the local Christians were pissed off when he raised funds for his project from wealthy women in the community, and the local authorities wouldn't give him the equivalent of police protection when he refused to submit to them: he was robbed, nearly beaten to death, and thrown into some kind of detention, like an undocumented Mexican in the angry hands of ICE.

Still he persevered! Until he had his way, and Irish culture was completely transformed, and the minority achieved total dominance throughout the country, as he boasted:
Never before did they know of God except to serve idols and unclean things. But now, they have become the people of the Lord, and are called children of God. The sons and daughters of the leaders of the Irish are seen to be monks and virgins of Christ!
A horrifying case in point of what can happen when you fail to secure your borders—ignore it at your peril.

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