Manchán Magan spoke to David Hennessy ahead of his bringing his Rewilding the Mind show to The Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith.
Manchán Magan is well known as an author and documentarian.
This weekend he brings his Rewilding the Mind talk to The Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith.
In it he asks, What if the land is speaking to us and it is just that we have forgotten how to listen?
Manchán Magan has written books on his travels in Africa, India and South America.
He also writes occasionally for The Irish Times, and presents the Almanac of Ireland podcast on Irish heritage for RTÉ.
He has made dozens of documentaries on issues of world culture for TG4, RTÉ, & Travel Channel.
His books include Thirty-Two Words For Field, Listen to the Land Speak, Tree Dogs, Banshee Fingers and Other Words For Nature, Wolf-Men and Water Hounds and his latest, Ireland in Iceland: Gaelic Remnants in a Nordic Land.
His previous acclaimed, sell-out theatrical shows include Gaeilge Tamagotchi, Arán & Im, and Slí na Samhlaíochta.
Manchán Magan told The Irish World: “I suppose Rewilding the Mind is basically a summation of the ideas in the first two books but mainly in my second book, Listen to the Land Speak.
“Rewilding the Mind is about finding ways that we can reconnect with the insights and the understandings that our ancestors would have had about their connection to the land through mythology, through archaeology, through stories.
“I suppose the key take home I really wanted to convey in the lecture was the fact that although often we think of Irish culture and heritage as to do with the likes of Finn McCool and Cuchulainn, there seems to be this whole other layer beyond that of the Goddess.
“In all of the mythology, there will be either Queen Méabh or Anya or Gráinne or Macha or Tea of Tara, the representation of the land as a female form.
“And we’ve sort of forgotten how to interact with that so during the evening, I talk about the fact that Ireland has more holy wells than any other country in the world.
“They would all have been entrance ways into The Goddess.
“I would have thought no one had any interest in these things whatsoever.
“And in truth, we really didn’t, particularly the young generation, until maybe a decade ago or maybe just after COVID.
“I don’t know why but people seem to be waking up.
“They’re feeling this call, this pull to want to connect with something more rooted, something stronger, something more in their past.
“And possibly it was during the COVID years when all of the securities, the stabilities that we would be healthy forever, that the climate wouldn’t change, that the economy would be strong, that we would have control over and sovereignty of our lives- They were all shook in the last decade.
“But the economic changes, the climate changes, I think maybe people all around the world are looking for meaning and in Ireland, I think we just sort of remember our granny’s generation had this connection.
“In 2022 I did a five week tour around North America from Memphis up to Toronto.
“And then 2023 I did five weeks from Arizona up to Vancouver.
“And then last year, I did the five weeks going around England, Wales and Scotland.
“And a lot of it is to the Irish communities in these places.
“I’m realising those communities still have a lot of these memories and stories.
“We thought these were things that were connected with poverty or our backwardness or our shame.
“And what’s amazing now is particularly younger generation on social media are becoming proud of all this.”
Does it start people conversing and getting back to nature and remembering their joy in it?
“Yeah that first book of mine, Thirty Two Words for Field.
“It’s published by Gill Publishing, a big publisher in Ireland.
“They know the market so well and they said it was going to sell 5,000 copies and would take two years to sell it- By the end, it had sold 90,000 copies.
“It wasn’t the book.
“It wasn’t me, it’s something arising in society.
“What I find in my social media is that it’s people in their 20s and 30s.
“The things I talk about, they’re so left field. They’re so marginal. They’re so liminal.
“I shouldn’t be having 75,000 followers. I shouldn’t within a month of setting up TikTok, have 20,000 followers.
“Because I’m not giving any clickbait away, but it just shows young people and people of all generations are beginning to open up to it, beginning to get curious, beginning to feel the spark of nature.
“Because for the longest time, we would disown our own myths and our own language.
“We’d say, ‘Oh, it’s up to the government to teach us language’ or ‘it failed because schools…’ never realising that we’re now free.
“We’re no longer oppressed by anyone. We can learn. We can choose to learn our language if we want.
“In the same way we use the myths a little bit but only in very limited ways.
“We teach them in schools like childish forms to the kids.
“It’s all in our own culture and it’s wonderful that rather than it being de Valera or Fianna Fáill or the school system telling us we should focus on this, it’s now coming from within.
“It’s definitely a positive thing.
“Again, any archaeological site that you find in Ireland, from the burial tombs to the sacred ritual sites, they would have been found throughout Europe but again, they had mass industrialisation.
“They had industrial intensive farming so they were destroyed, but they’re here so it’s time we awaken to these things.
“In the ICC there will be this sense of excitement because every time we talk, every time we gather together, us who are interested, there is this excitement.
“But there’s almost an onus on us to reconnect and to find out about these things ourselves.
“Then we can maybe act as the spark or the catalyst for other places who have lost it.”
Did the Celtic Tiger and all that development do a lot of damage the connection though?
“I think that step was vital.
“I remember in West Kerry in the 70s, there was no option.
“There was no sense of freedom.
“There was a bus from Tralee to London every day.
“That was the only way out.
“There was no opportunities, no potential.
“It was a grim world.
“I left school in ’89.
“There was no job, no chance of a job.
“Ireland was in deep recession.
“You were never going to get a reconnection, a pride in our own language and our own culture when we were still poor, when we were still downtrodden, when we knew we had to send our children away.
“That moment that the Irish pound reached parity with sterling was key, we had pride.
“We thought, ‘Actually we’re rich again’.
“And maybe that seems nouveau riche and crass but actually, it took that because we were people who were impoverished and downtrodden for so long so of course we were going to be a bit bling in the first few years of it.”
You spoke of language. Of course you have long been an advocate of it. What has it been like to see the recent resurgence in the language, has it taken you by surprise?
“It really has, yeah.
“I suppose we always had a sense that there couldn’t be a government initiative.
“I mean the government and the EU have pumped money into so many different organisations for the language but that’s not the way you revive a language.
“It was only going to happen if there was this creative upsurge, this sense inside of people that they were missing something, that the language wanted to come out.
“It’s the máthairtheanga, the mother tongue.
“That is a non-rational thing.
“That’s a deeply emotive idea.
“When you think of a mother tongue, it’s the same way when you have a whole beach full of seals and the mother seal hears her young seal cry above others.
“It’s beyond rational so the fact that it’s coming through this creative field, no one could have predicted it but it’s gorgeous.
“I was just down in West Kerry among my people there.
“And they all know every road around Kilburn, that and Springfield, Massachusetts.
“They’re parishes of the Gaeltacht.
“That first generation that went to America, went to London, they had to turn their back on the Irish language particularly and the myths.
“They maybe kept the music alive in the dance halls and the pubs at night but they lost the language. They left the language.
“What’s lovely is these Ciorcai Comhrá, these conversation circles that are happening in all the Irish centres and they’re so well attended.
“But the fact that people are taking this challenge upon themselves to start speaking the language again and it means the older folk who came over in the 50s, the 60s, 70s, who never dared speak Irish now can come and find a place where it’s not seen as a thing of either poverty and oppression or a thing connected with the IRA and republicanism but actually, it’s a proud sort of badge or status symbol of our heritage.
“I can be positive about some aspects of the language but if you go to the Gaeltacht areas, still it faces such challenges there.
“You can see it turn around in cities.
“You can see it’s becoming cooler but in the meantime, the real richness is in the Gaeltacht and their fishing way of life and their traditional farming way of life has been decimated.
“There’s definitely challenges still in the Gaeltacht areas.”
You have travelled as far as Australia and made connections with the Aboriginal people there.
Do we share a lot with such cultures?
“Yeah.
“Initially I would never have thought so.
“I would never have thought so at all.
“I just thought, ‘Okay, they are indigenous people whereas we are this modern white farming nation in the EU’.
“But when I did the first show in Canada, these Cree elders came along, and then these poor Potawatomi elders, and then in Seattle came Duwamish and Squamish elders.
“And they say, ‘We have the same stories. We have the same insights as you do’.
“And it was only in 2023 I went to Australia because there was an Irish Aboriginal festival.
“I’d never even really considered Aboriginal culture.
“I started telling my stories and the elders said, ‘We have similar stories’ whether it’s about the rivers being goddesses or the rivers moulding the land.
“I’ve been utterly humbled by elders taking me under their wing and teaching me these things.
“I’m really only at the first steps of understanding and also knowing that often we as immigrants weren’t all that great with indigenous people.
“In Australia, we were in the police force and there’s a lot of stories of us doing the English bidding on the aboriginals and mistreating them.
“The residential schools in Canada were set up by an Irishman.
“We know we wiped out the indigenous in Argentina.
“We weren’t great in the United States either.
“So we have blood on our hands to a degree, and I don’t think Ireland can call itself an indigenous land now considering we have polluted all our rivers with nitrates, we are doing such harm to our soil just eroding it and killing the worms.
“I think there’s an element of an indigenous mindset still within our folklore, our songs, our stories, and it’s there to be delved into and to be brought forward again.
“I would just hesitantly, and tentatively, say Ireland has elements of indigeneity in us.
“When I talk to the Aboriginal people in Australia or the First Nations in Canada or the Native Americans in the States, they all say they too have lost huge amounts of their culture.
“They just say, ‘You need to go back out onto the land and just sit there and wait.
“The land, the ancestors want to communicate with you.
“So I tell people, ‘Go out to the passage tombs, the ring forts, the burial sites. Go to the wells. Go to the holy wells that we’re so lucky to have been preserved despite everything.
“And go to the rivers and just open yourselves up to it.
“It can be an uncomfortable feeling at first because it’s not something we’re used to.
“All of us have now been taught by the rational, logical education system to block out the sense of the instinctive or the sense of the spirit world but it is still there.
“That’s what I do.”
Would you like to see greater action than that? Perhaps something on a government level..
“In 2016 I ran for general election for the Green Party in Longford/ Westmeath.
“And at the time I thought, ‘Okay, maybe it is the political path I should go through’.
“But since then I’ve thought, ‘No, I think this is something beyond politics’.
“There was this feeling that there would be a time where- and all the ancestors predicted it- there would be a time where people would feel the call of the earth, of the water, of the spirit.
“I think that might be happening.
“I can’t see any other logical reason for my success, for why people are fascinated.
“I think there’s another world, the world of politics, the world of doom and gloom, the world of climate change and catastrophisation, but I’m ploughing a different field.
“I’m trying to get people to hear, to tune into that call of the ancestors.
“I think there’s definitely a place for the other people but me, I’m a lone dreamer.
“What I want to do is, if anything, just to connect us to those people, all the different cultures.”
I recently interviewed Seán Ronayne who was featured in a BBC film as he sought to record the sound of every bird in Ireland.
Are you aware of him and what he has been doing, inspiring people to, again, reconnect with nature?
“It’s a prime example.
“There’s no logical sense.
“I’m a total oddball happily ignored by the world for 30 years because there was no place for me.
“In the same way Seán just didn’t fit into the world, felt alienated, felt lost in the world, and the world just embraced him again.
“There’s no logical reason why this man is a movie star in a way.
“It was me who said to him, ‘You need to do a tour’.
“Because his movie did well and he was being invited to festival after festival.
“I said, ‘No, don’t just wait for invitations. You need to set up a tour’.
“Because every night, he can’t leave the building.
“People are so enthused, so excited.
“The same time I’ll give my lecture but then there’ll be another 50 minutes of people wanting to talk, wanting to share their stories.
“It’s not logical.
“I was at a festival two weeks ago, me and Seán going around, it was not quite the Beatles but that level of excitement: Two oddball, marginal, idealistic weirdos and yet, we’re in an era where the likes of Manchán and Seán Ronayne sell out 600 seater places like the Everyman in Cork.
“It’s crazy, it’s ridiculous but it’s wonderful.”
COVID is a big part of that, isn’t it in that people really took solace in nature in that time..
“You’re so right.
“Something happened during COVID.
“We had no choice but to go for a brief walk or a cycle or swim, and the endorphins rushed to us.
“We felt the land, we felt the Spirit.
“We just felt that sense of connection that nature gives you when you spend time in it.
“And we’re not willing to go back.
“It was like a drug.
“It was like a key that was opened within us.
“Everything was changed.
“We’re not going to go back into our biddable little boxes to sit in our offices all day.
“We’ve felt the call of the wild.”
Rewilding the Mind: Reconnecting to the Goddess of the Earth, an Evening with Manchán Magan is at The Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith on Saturday 14 June.
For more information and to book, click here.
For more information about Manchán, click here.
Ireland in Iceland: Gaelic Remnants in a Nordic Land by Manchán Magan is out now.