St. Patrick Banishes the Serpents Part 1
I had always been reluctant to draw St. Patrick because I wasn’t going to portray him like a gombeen.
1997 was a busy year.
I finished major Celtic artworks like the Snow Faerie, Children of Lir: The Enchantment and The Greek Princess.
I had been feverishly working on nearly fifty incredibly intricate Celtic Mandela’s (Many of which have never been seen) and many Celtic motifs and other more commercial (yep, paying) jobs. Things were going well and I was loving my work. My life consisted of working my ass off all day, going out on Friday night until 6 am, getting up next morning for my Saturday football game (and anger venting session) then out that night again. I was prolific -and getting lots of notice internationally.
Late in 1997, I received a call from a big American company who wanted to use my work as a design on plates which was a big deal at the time. The subject was to be St. Patrick and was going to be my first real attempt to draw Ireland’s national saint and would lead to one of my best and least appreciated artworks.
Separating the real from the mythological
I have always detested how Saint Patrick has been portrayed, like some kind of meek Victorian Bishop complete with Papal sceptre, pretty green silk gown and little slippers with a ridiculous mitre on his head and the upraised hand in holy blessing.
Known from a zillion ‘holy pictures’ this rendition of a powerful, committed Celtic Briton, a kidnapped slave turned proselytiser, was a travesty of the truth and a twisted depiction of a powerful, intellectual and morally decent man, tolerant of all our most ancient beliefs who made no attempt to denounce them, but rather the opposite. He simply beatified all the old gods and goddesses -and made them Irish saints. Three hundred and sixty-five in all, both male and female, one for every day of the year, including my own favourite: a monk with eight breasts who could feed a multitude. Very useful when there are milk shortages.
All this from a wealthy teenager called Maewyn, the son of a Romano-British Celtic army officer and deacon, who was not even a believer, kidnapped by Irish reavers and pirates, forced to goat and sheep herd on the slopes of Slieve Mis (Mount Slemish) up in Antrim.
Yes, slavery was an Irish national pastime.
Remember also, we, the Irish, were a’viking long before the later and legendary Scandinavian Vikings and our endless raids into Britain and Europe attest to this.
Even Niall of the Nine Hostages, one of the most fearsome of these Irish raiders, the same man who captured Patricius as a teenager in Wales, was finally dispatched to his Valhalla by a stroke of lightning while raiding for riches and slaves on the upper reaches the Arno in the Alps.
This, the kitsch portrayal of our greatest national saint as a weird Catholic Papal legate of some kind, kitted out in an invented Irish American leprechaun outfit, was the reason I’d never drawn him in detail before. The cliché had become accepted imagery, just an insidious and idiotic as the racist, monkey-lipped, simian, apelike leprechaun in the green velvet suit and bow tie. Apologies, Notre Dame….and Irish America.
Who was the REAL Saint Patrick?
We have plenty of real and original material that has survived intact to form a fine impression of the man himself, including his own manuscript the ‘Confessio’, the Confessions of Saint Patrick himself, in his own words. All freely available on the web for those who are interested.
St. Patrick used imagery and persuasion, not violence, to convert.
Saint Patrick has always been a figure of great interest to me and someone I greatly admired for the manner in which he went about converting the Irish to Christianity. He did this without violence or subjugation but through gifts, oratory, ceremony, and image. He understood the way to the heart of the Irish was with respect for the beliefs, the carved images of wood and stone and admiration for these echoes of their ancient past.
Saint Patrick was not even the first Christian missionary to reach Ireland, he was a latecomer coming long after the early Coptic Christians from North Africa who carved out a Christian area (in Sutton and Howth where I live myself) long before the Roman church was even in existence.
After them came Patricius, our man of the moment, converter of the weird and wild Irish and the rock on which the extraordinary tolerant Celtic Christian church was founded.
The famous Shamrock
Famously, and probably fictitiously, he was said to have used the shamrock to help illustrate the concept of the Holy Trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The Shamrock was the trefoil plant symbol but it worked as an allegory because in Ireland they worshipped the triple goddesses and the triple spiral symbol of origin had been carved into rock and wood for thousands of years before.
St. Patrick used symbols to demonstrate the simplicity of the true and beautiful Christian faith and did not insist that the old Gods were heretical but incorporated them into Christianity. This is a common thread throughout our history; for example, it has been argued that St. Brigid comes from the Ancient Irish Goddess Brigid (who may have also been a triple Goddess) as she shares many similar attributes.
The Fire the keeps burning
One of the most impressive examples of this incorporation of the old beliefs into the new religion and possibly the most dangerous was Patrick’s decision to light the Bealtaine fire on a hill opposite the seat of the High King at Royal Tara. Only the King was the one allowed to light the Bealtaine fire atop the Hill of Tara but St. Patrick lit his own fire on an opposite hill, which was seen clearly from Tara. He was arrested by the kings warriors and brought before the royal court but soon convinced the king by his arguments and his knowledge of the ancient religion of the error of his ways and in the end converted the king and persuaded his court also to convert to the new religion and the rest is, indeed, history.
I like to think that St.Patrick brought a kinder form of Celtic Christianity rather than the savagery that subsequently swallowed Europe. He saw that the previous beliefs were benign and how they could be used to help convert people to Christianity.
St.Patrick was the sponge that absorbed the past without destroying it.
The two black and white skeches are from cards that never got made.
Part 2 preview
