~C4Chaos

Today is a rare event when St. Patrick’s Day (March 17) falls on Holy Monday. Traditionally, whenever St. Patrick’s Day celebration conflicts with the solemnity of Lent, it is moved either before or after the Holy Week. Officially, the Catholic Bishops moved the feast day to March 15. But the festival parade in Dublin pushes through today, March 17. Nowadays, business as usual has more power than the Church.  Nassim Nicholas Taleb argued that business, economics, and social sciences had replaced religion as the new opiates of the middle-classes.

Speaking of St. Patrick, he was credited of using his miraculous powers to drive away all the snakes from Ireland. But according to latest interpretations, the snakes were actually pagans. That’s right — people with different beliefs other than Catholicism or Christianity.

"According to Irish lore, Saint Patrick scattered the serpents and
drove them into the sea, though most naturalists are convinced that
larger reptiles were never part of our fauna.

"Now it’s emerged
that the myth may have come about because of a too-literal translation
of an ancient sixth century text called the Dinnshenchas.

"The text carries an account  of a sect called the Crom  Cruich, who used the symbolism of the snake.

"In
time, Crom Cruich eventually became a powerful force in Ireland, whose
followers used the snake as their symbol. And herein may lie the real
story about Saint Patrick driving out the snakes…" [read more]

This is another classic case of how folklore, theology, ideology, and biased reading of history twist and bury reality. If "historians" and theologians get this wrong about St. Patrick then imagine how screwed up the myth of Jesus is. But don’t let myths disappoint you. More often than not, the metaphors embedded in myths are more useful, as sources of wisdom, than their historical "truths." The trick is to take the literal and popular interpretations of history with a grain of salt, especially if they have no empirical evidence to back them up.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Drink responsibly, or don’t drink at all.

Too bad we’re stuck here in Sligo, four hours away from Dublin. Ah, well. We’ll just watch The Other Boleyn Girl.