Decolonizing St. Patrick’s Day

by Gavin Mounsey | Mar 9, 2025

St. Patrick’s day is just around the corner, so I wanted to get a head start and post this now to promote discussion leading up to the day.

Firstly, I just wanna say, I have enjoyed my fair share of green pints while singing and dancing to someone playing the fiddle in Irish pubs in my day, and I have some Irish blood in my veins, so St. Patrick’s day held a dear place in my heart for many years (and in many ways it always will).

So, why write a piece on Decolonizing St Patrick’s day then you ask?

Here it is…

We have all been colonized my friends.

I am talking about Multi-generational scale colonization, sacred poems and teachings of our forefathers erased, redacted, burned and buried by imperialistic anthropocentric thugs.

Our indigenous ancestors were dehumanized, their sacred lands colonized, their traditions and native language made illegal and their venerated medicine men and women demeaned as “savages”, “pagans” and “witches”. Our ancestors were ethnically cleansed, assimilated, demonized, dehumanized and our great great great great grandparents that survived through that, adapting to a new imposed culture as children, were told a story that paints ancestral Earth honoring lineages as “dirty”, “uncivilized”, “heathens” and “barbarians”.

This psychological warfare story was written into text books that were hammered into young minds in schools all over the world. Later, it was written into the scripts of movies and it was aggressively promoted in churches by future generations of preachers (whom had also been colonized and brainwashed, raised to believe an incomplete and distorted version of who their indigenous ancestors were).

“But I thought St. Patties Day was about celebrating Celtic culture?” you say..

Here it is in a nutshell:

St. Patrick’s Day is as much about celebrating Celtic culture as Columbus Day is about celebrating Cherokee culture.

Someone that claims to respect the ancestral Gaelic culture of Ireland nominating Saint Patrick as a hero figure makes about as much sense as a Puebloan person that says they respect their ancestral ways nominating Hernán Cortés as their hero.

Gaelic native Irish culture was not perfect (no culture is) but it was (and is) beautiful and deserves to be celebrated and honored, however, I ask you this:

Does raising our glass to the name of a man that we are told was instrumental in laying the ground work for imperialistic regimes to stamp out and replace native Irish animistic culture with Emperor Constantine’s war mongering anthropocentric Roman religion make sense?

depiction of St. Patrick the Roman Elitist and Imperialist (looking like he is about to beat someone over the head with that cross)

I think there is a lot of cognitive dissonance with this day where people have internalized the propaganda of their ancestor’s conquers while also simultaneously claiming they respect and revere their ancestor’s culture.

I know I can speak from my own experience in falling for the ubiquitous brainwashing material that portrays the Druids and the Gaelic culture as “primitive” and “uncivilized” (with images of nasty sorcerers doing human sacrifices and bloodthirsty barbarians killing all the time) so I also experienced this cognitive dissonance in my life.

It is also worth noting that the dehumanization of Gaelic peoples that fled their British/Roman Catholic oppressors in Ireland to come here to Turtle Island also continued to face similar attacks on their culture from Canadian and American nationalists. So there was immense pressure, both in Ireland, and here on Turtle Island, for Gaelic people to self-censor, forget their ancestral ways and strive to blend in as “white” capitalist nationalists.

An American (anti-Irish, anti-immigrant) Propaganda Piece, depicting of a ape-like Irish rioters (1867):

A depiction of an Irish riot (1867) USA. Illustration was intended to show Irish American men (with ape-like features) attacking helpless innocent police officers on St. Patrick’s Day, 1867 in New York City.

In reality, pre-colonial Gaelic culture may not have been a utopia, but their social technologies were quite advanced compared to many other cultures at the time.

The truth is that ancient Gaelic culture was far from perfect, but in terms of social technologies, ecological ethos, botanical knowledge, poetry, linguistics and women’s rights, the Druids and their Brehon successors were leaps and bounds beyond many cultures of Europe at the time.

So it all boils down to this:

I suppose if one looks down on indigenous Gaelic culture as “primitive”, “savage” and “uncivilized” and one looks at the worldview of the elite in the Roman empire (and the war mongering anthropocentric Constantine distorted version of Christianity they sought to push onto the world) as “Pure”, “Morally Superior”, “Dignified” and “Civilized”, than raising a glass to Saint Patrick does make perfect sense.

So, if when you celebrate St. Patties day you are knowingly cheering for Constantine’s Roman Christendom conquering the Gaels and squashing their culture, than in that case there would be no cognitive dissonance involved. It would simply be the case of a person choosing to swear fealty to Roman Imperialism and being honest about it.

The propagandists would like to convolute Constantine’s religion with the teachings of Jesus, but the version of the bible he allowed to go forward was more about co-opting Christianity to be able to project a pro-imperialist and pro-violence (statist) message, as well as to maintain control over the people than it was about “treat your neighbour as you want to be treated”.

In the context of the Roman flavor of Christianity that was pushed onto the people in places like Ireland, Scotland and Wales, we are talking about the version of the teachings that were shaped by emperor Constantine in the year 300 AD.

from Old Ways, Old Secrets By Jo Kerrigan

He used something called the Council of Nicaea to distort the teachings of people like Jesus, Mary and Thomas. It was convened (and controlled) by the Roman Emperor Constantine I (who was an unbaptized Roman guy that lived hundreds of years after Jesus’s murder). He cooked up that whole “holy trinity” deal as it is much easier for people to swallow (it is ego flattering to think of God in a human form and most humans love to have their ego stroked) and it also means that people could subsequently distort and/or completely fabricate what Jesus had said and then declare it as “coming strait from God’s mouth” to maintain their control over other human beings.

By the end of the fourth century, Constantine’s Roman Church was as big as all the empire. It wasn’t obvious whether, in this close association between Church and state, the Church had conquered the empire, or the empire had conquered the Church. As the Empire began to crumble, the Roman elite migrated to positions in the Church, and it took on an even more important governmental and role oppressing all animist indigenous cultures. In Britain, as in many parts of Northern Europe where the civil structures of Roman authority had evaporated, the Roman Church was the only significant Roman institution left, and thanks to the wonders of edicts such as the Doctrine of Discovery, it still persists today.

Constantine (and his fellow Roman imperialist thugs) did not like the Gnostic Gospels (such as the Gospel of Thomas) for it encouraged people to look within and develop their own direct connect with the divine (without the middle men of the Church) so those teachings were censored from his new version of the Bible.

Many of the Gnostic teachings aligned with the indigenous worldview of seeking to know the Creator through developing one’s spiritual organs of perception, spending time within the forest to know the design of the Creator and then forming an understanding and ethics from the inside out (not the outside in, as the Catholic Church wanted to impose).

The Roman manipulated version of Christianity was (and is) a weapon to breed dependency, infantilisation, fear and allow them a vector through which their imperialist successors could whisper in the ears of indigenous peoples all over the world, including the Gael (with threats of eternal damnation, guilt and fear) and bend them to do the Roman church’s bidding.

As Henna Maria stated in her presentation at The People’s Reset this year

“This is why there is such a systemic attempt to destroy all indigenous culture and replace it with a sterile one world government. It is an attempt to completely desoul and degenerate humanity. In addition, Energetic and physical influences like our bloodline, frequency of our environment, quality of our terrain, purity of our water, air, food, soil and climate inform and build the energetic, emotional, physical body. These influences dictate what kind of a temple we are building to house our soul. And if the vessel is not built well, there are certain elements of the soul which cannot be expressed.

Hinder the temple, disable the soul. So to summarize, There are two different ways we are being malnourished, impoverished, degraded, demoralized and dehumanized today through the culture which molds the soul and through the physical and energetic influences which build the body.

Since our modern culture has been stripped from nearly all elements which actually facilitate the growth of a soul from infancy to spiritual maturity, there is hardly any true culture left in the West.

But when we understand the law of cause and effect, we can begin to change the cause. In the Gospel of Thomas, Verse 70, Yeshua the Christ says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you”.

This is a master key. This is a golden key to healing humanity.”

Some people have chosen to throw the memory of their indigenous ancestors under the proverbial bus, internalizing the dehumanizing narratives inculcated into them through multi-generational propaganda systems imposed onto our modern day lives by statist regimes.

Unpacking the broader history behind Saint Patrick’s Day makes for a difficult conversation. The legend of Saint Patrick represents the first colonial story of Ireland. He was a 5th-century Roman missionary whose goal was to convert the Gaelic speaking people of the land now called “Ireland” (then referred to as “Hibernia” by the Greeks) to Christianity.

St. Patrick was not Irish. He was a Romano-Briton meaning he came from an elite Roman family living in Roman colonial Britain.

Institutionalized propaganda from the Catholic Church will tell you did so with a sense of humility and grace though upon further investigation, the real character of his crusade would more accurately describe him as a warlike bishop with delusions of grandeur.

Did he lead a willing congregation, or was the original Druidic faith of Ireland forcibly stamped out?

We are told that he was taken into slavery at 16 years of age and sold in Ireland where he worked as a sheepherder for 6 years but sheep did not exist back then – so he would have been a goatherder… It was during his time as a slave sheep / goat minder that the church tells us he began to have religious visions. These visions re-enforced (so we are told) his Catholic Faith. During one of these visions he heard voices that told him where he could find a getaway ship. He escaped, went to France where he became a priest and later on he returned to France to become a bishop.

Pope Celestine gave Maewyn Succat or Magonus Saccatus the name of Patrick. The Pope gave him the mission of bringing the anthropocentric imperialistic Catholic religion to Ireland. He gave him many relics and other gifts, and gave him the name “Patercius” or “Patritius”. This name is derived from two Latin words pater civium meaning the father of his people. The designation is like Patricus, a Latin / Roman upper class name similar to Patrician. Rome had three classes – Patrician, Plebeian and Paganus. Patrician was the ruling class, while Plebeian was the working and middle class leaving Paganus to be the name / rank for all those who did not obey the rule of Rome. Thus, Patrick, was given his title to indicate he was deemed as one of the Roman elite class.

The saint called Paddy/Pat/Patrick was not Irish. Historians agree that Patrick was born in 373 CE giving two possible locations – Dumbarton in Scotland or on the west coast of Roman Britain i.e. Wales.

In Roman Christian Propaganda versions of events, Patrick is given credit for “driving the snakes out of Ireland”. In reality, the ‘snakes’ were intended to refer to (and demonize/dehumanize) the Druids, who (the church propaganda triumphantly claims) “were discredited and finally driven underground with the coming of Christianity”.

In truth, Christianity already existed (to a smaller extent) in Ireland before Patrick got there and Druidism remained strong all the way up to the Norman invasion.

Digging into the dark history of St. Patrick’s Day, we uncover some unsettling truths. St. Patrick himself, a figure often celebrated for his missionary work, played a key role in the Catholic Church’s campaign to eradicate the animist Gaelic (Druidic) traditions in Ireland. As a result, the non-Christian population was persecuted and subjected to horrific acts of violence. St. Patrick and his followers committed crimes against the Gaels, such as forced conversions, destruction of sacred sites, and execution of those who refused to abandon their beliefs.

This brutal campaign against the pagans led to the loss of a beautiful and thriving culture. Ireland’s Gaelic traditions were steeped in rich mythology, art, and spirituality, and the forced conversions by St. Patrick, his followers (and the other agents of the Roman Church in subsequent centuries) stripped away these elements of Irish heritage. The devastation caused by this religious crusade is a harrowing chapter in Ireland’s history that often goes unacknowledged in contemporary St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, and qualifies as an attempt at ethnic cleansing or cultural genocide by modern standards.

The Catholic Church’s campaign in Ireland was part of a broader strategy to spread Constantine’s distorted version of Christianity throughout Europe and beyond. As noted above, Pope Celestine I commissioned St. Patrick to convert the Irish population and during this era the Church was known to use various methods to establish its dominance over other religious practices, including the use of violence and coercion. Other regions, such as the Iberian Peninsula and Northern Europe, experienced similar campaigns of forced conversion and suppression of non-Christian beliefs. The Church’s actions in Ireland were part of a larger pattern of religious imperialism that sought to eradicate alternative spiritual systems.

In contrast to the Constantine influenced Roman Church’s brutal tactics, Druidic ways of knowing were generally a more tolerant and diverse belief system. Animist cultures were characterized by their acceptance of not only a divine Creator, but also a recognition of the living Earth as sentient, multiple spiritual beings, nature worship, and diverse rituals. There was no centralized authority, such as the Catholic Church, imposing a single dogma or orthodoxy. This difference highlights the stark contrast between the inclusive and open nature of animist spiritual worldviews and the hierarchical, dogmatic approach of the Church.

Christian historians (who have of course, themselves been colonized by Constantine’s imperialistic distorted teachings) have often been accused of distorting the history of St. Patrick’s mission in Ireland, glossing over the violent and coercive aspects of the conversion process. By framing St. Patrick as a benevolent, peaceful missionary who brought Emperor Constantine’s Christianity to the Irish people, they downplay the negative impact his actions had on Ireland’s Animistic pre-colonial cultural heritage.

This selective retelling of history serves to validate the Church’s actions and perpetuates a sanitized narrative that celebrates St. Patrick’s Day without acknowledging the cultural devastation it represents.

Most say Patrick deserves credit for establishing Christianity in Ireland, and in the following centuries it either ousted or assimilated the older indigenous animist beliefs. Animist (Druidic) festivals and holidays were co-opted (colonized) and crammed into Christian holy days trappings (in an effort to make Christianity easier to swallow for the locals) and many of the local god and goddess stories converted into tales of Irish saints. The most famous example is the Celtic goddess Brigit, or Bride, who is now known in the Christian Church as St. Brigit, Ireland’s premier female saint.

from Old Ways, Old Secrets By Jo Kerrigan

In my article on Designing Biocultural Refugium I stated:

Many of us with European ancestral heritage (and/or heritage linked to the places on earth that are considered to be the cradles of “civilization”) tend to think of the term “indigenous” as describing people of specific cultural and genetic backgrounds that are different from us based on where we currently live. In truth, indigeneity is a facet of each and everyone of our ancestral bloodlines (regardless of skin colour, genetic heritage or nationality).

Long before people were swearing allegiance to kings, queens and flags they were swearing allegiance to the living Earth and our revered non-human elder kin in the kingdoms of tall rooted beings, the living rivers, the lakes and the mountain peaks.

For many of us with European Indigenous Ancestral roots, our ancestors were persecuted by various imperialistic regimes and characterized as “witches”, “savages” or “uncivilized”.

Within ancient Gaelic cultures the springs, rivers, lakes and wells were seen as beings that have a spirit and innate rights. Under their Brehon Laws (known in the Gaelic language as ‘Fénechas) the Gaels (Druids and their Brehon successors) acknowledged the living waters of the Earth had innate rights just as all human beings did (including equal rights for women, which at the time was far ahead of any other European laws for women).

Rather than build churches with walls that separate humans from the sacred inspiration and embodiment of Creator’s design, many of these ancient animistic indigenous cultures chose to recognize and/or create spaces for prayer, sacred ceremonies, knowing the will of the Divine and blessing rituals that were centered around flowing springs, sacred groves of trees and/or sacred wells.

Our ancient indigenous ancestors recognized the sacred waters of the living Earth as living beings, imbued with a spirit and deserving of the same recognition and respect as any of our other kin as such. They saw the world through a worldview of animism and biocentrism.

These sacred groves, sacred springs and sacred wells were tended reverently for millennia, in many cases becoming spectacular old growth forested habitats that simultaneously provided a space for ceremony, blessings and worship for connecting with Creator while also providing habitat for our non human kin and also protecting the waters. However, as was well documented in Fred Hageneder’s book “The Spirit of Trees: Science, Symbiosis and Inspiration“, the Christian church began an aggressive crusade to destroy these sacred groves, sacred wells and sacred spring sites in an effort to destroy the cultures of all peoples they deemed as “heathens”, “savages” and “pagans”.

Most people think of Ireland and Scotland and think of endless rolling sheep pastures, but this only serves to show us how powerful generational amnesia and the shifting baseline syndrome can be in shaping prevailing perspectives.

Look at the line in the ancient poem in the pic below where a druid is describing the lands of Ireland.

“Her forests that shed showers of nuts and all other fruit”

I have no doubt that Ireland once had beautiful food forests tended by the wise Druids and Gaelic folk that revered their “Nobles Of The Wood”.

Ireland was a land of trees in the time of Saint Patrick arriving.

Here is an account of a Druidic poem which described the pre-colonial landscape of Ireland aka Éire (which means Abundant Land).

Thus, St. Patrick and his fellow Roman imperialists, weaponized the Christian belief system to be a tool for ethnic cleansing, deforestation and cultural genocide.

Below is a video of the last remnant of ancient oak, hazel, pine, beech, rowan and apple forests in Ireland (Tomnafinnoge Woods). That type of forest would have covered over 70% of the island prior to the arrival of the Roman Imperialists (such as St. Patrick, his disciples and their successors, that gave orders to cut down all the sacred groves and forested placed where Druids gathered).

The Roman Imperialists managed to destroy a good amount of the forests, but substantial amounts remained up until the arrival of the subsequent waves of the imperialist colonial forces of the Anglo-Saxons, Norman invasion and British Crown (the British Statists were the ones that really finished the job of decimating the Irish Forests).

Even as late as 1634, these woods were estimated to cover tens of thousands of acres, but from then on they were heavily exploited especially for British Navy shipbuilding.

In 1670, the woods were reported to be still extensive, “being nine or ten miles in length’“ and a valuation in 1671 found a total of 3905 acres (1579 hectares) of woodland there.

The forest is now 160 acres in size.

The once numerous and mighty oak, hazelnut, rowan and apple food forests of “Erinn” aka Eire or “Ireland” are almost all gone now, but that does not mean we cannot replant them.

Tomnafinnoge Woods: https://odysee.com/@recipes4reciprocity:e/TomnafinnogeWoods:a

There were no doubt food forests all over, and the groves that were sacred like the forests of Brocéliande and Caledon and others that were consecrated by Celtic priests like the land in Wales dedicated to St Bueno. The evangelising Christians from Julius Caesar to St Patrick sought to destroy and desecrated many sacred groves.

Roman Church propaganda propagated the myth that St. Patrick “struck a decisive blow against the Druidism that held the nation captive” and “broke the hold of their superstition on the Celtic race”.

We are told he chased the snakes out of Ireland, but considering that he was, in essence, the vanguard tip of the spear in an imperialistic invasion of scam artists and ethnic cleaning programs that attempted to supplant native animist worldviews with anthropocentric hubristic Emperor Constantine distorted version of Roman Christianity I think it would be more accurate to say that he, in fact facilitated bringing the snakes to Ireland.

In truth, he was no more than a snake oil salesman. The product he was selling was obedience to tyrants in a crumbling empire, the Roman empire, with the promise of salvation. What the people paid in return for the lies they bought from that snake oil salesman and his fellow minions of the Roman state was induction into an exploitative, humancentric, arrogant and hypercentralized regime, which later morphed into the British crown/government, and clearcut their forests.

These Roman interlopers (that slowly morphed into their imperialistic Normand /British successors) turned the land of Éire (or “Abundant Land”) into the deforested and ecologically degraded Ireland we know today.

The Emperor Constantine distorted version of Christianity (imposed by the remnants of the Roman empire, through people like St. Patrick, and then the Christian Normans and then Christian English government tried to suppress the indigenous Irish language and spiritual traditions since the 5th century.

Early attempts (such as St. Patrick’s weak attempts to censor, distort and redact the Brehon Laws and demonize the indigenous Gael traditions/Druids) failed due to low numbers of colonizers, the culture actually absorbed them (and worked around their duplicity and attempts at ethnic cleansing through infusing their traditions into Gaelic songs, poetry and Ogham Stones. It was the Tudor family, that of King Henry the XIII, who threatened the language for the first time with any real power to do so. Moreover, the Church of England never really could set foot there among Irish speakers and stand their ground. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, colonization had taken full root and anglicization was underway.

That was far from the last time English hands reached over the Irish sea. In the 16th century, the iconic bastard man, Henry VIII (the guy with the reeeeallly bad divorces), established himself as King of Ireland and by the 17th century, Ireland had been conquered. Then, Oliver Cromwell, the cousin of Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell, led a campaign of sheer brutality against the Irish in 1649. Estimated deaths range from 200,000 to 600,000 (versus populations of 2 million and 1.4 million respectively). It was ethnic cleansing and to this day, the Irish spit at his name.

The land was confiscated from Irish landlords (especially the Catholics) and used to create the system known as the Plantations of Ireland. We think of Ireland as the place of rolling green hills, but what we don’t know is that Ireland was once heavily forested — almost all of which was cut and cleared to build English ships. The native wolves were hunted to extinction and Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic were banned.

And of course, as we all know, the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s was completely artificial. Potatoes in Ireland as an imposed monocrop were another one of the products of colonial imperialism.

Potatoes originated in the Andes of South America, where they were domesticated between 8,000 and 5,000 BC.

Spanish conquistadors “discovered” (stole) and then brought potatoes to Europe in the mid-1500s. They were later introduced to Ireland in 1589 (by a British elitist “statesman”). During the period of the Great Potato Famine in Ireland, planting based on strong “suggestions” of “advanced agricultural experts” from the centers of imperialistic statist regimes, Irish largely relied on a single potato variety, leading to a devastating vulnerability to potato blight.

There are about 5,000 potato varieties worldwide, with 3,000 of them in the Andes. The devastating failures of modern imperialistic monocrop agriculture (such as the potato famine) are a testament to how unwise it is to try and dominate and fight nature, diminishing biodiversity, in order to try and force a single plant species to grow in a large area.

In truth, even though potatoes were prominent in Ireland at the time, there were also still good quantities of forest food (as well as corn, wheat, animal products), produced on the Plantations were shipped directly to England, leaving nothing to distribute among the Irish population as 2 million people starved to death.

The Gaelic people that continued to speak their language were targeted for ethnic cleansing by the Roman Empire (which morphed into the British Crown) and its imperialistic partners in the Catholic Church.

Young Irish Gaelic mothers that were having babies out of Catholic approved marriages were kidnapped.

Institutionalized mass murder of Gaelic speaking Irish occurred. Babies of unwed Gaelic mothers were taken from them by force by the Catholic Church and killed or left to die in their concentration camps euphemistically called 18 “Mother and Baby Homes”.

In 2021, an investigation concluded that about 9,000 children died in Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland between 1922 and 1998.

Mother and Baby Homes were institutions in which approximately 80,000 unwed mothers gave birth to their children and were separated from them. Many children were then trafficked for adoption or were subject to medical experimentation. These homes were established and overseen by Catholic orders, and were closely related to the infamous Magdalene Laundries which housed and worked an estimated 30,000 women, largely on the basis of perceived sexual activity or desire. Like Mother and Baby Homes, laundries buried women in mass unmarked graves.

Very similar murderous and genocidal operations carried out by the state in conjunction with the Roman Catholic church against indigenous Gaels were being simultaneously deployed on Turtle Island (in the Canadian government’s “resedential schools”) in that same timeframe).

While the Romanized Church was working in collusion with the RCMP and Canadian government murdering children in the residential schools in Canada, over in Ireland the British Crown and same Romanized Church were doing the same thing to the Gaelic children:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220816032725/https://nbmediacoop.org/2021/07/01/after-unearthing-mass-graves-irish-settlers-must-support-decolonization/

Ireland never decolonized. Two states were formed on the island in 1922 and created divergent societal paths. Neither undertook a process of decolonization. Both societies left colonial institutions, economic logics, and legal structures in place, while on deeper levels colonial modes of being, knowing, sensing, and relating have remained normalised and intact into the present. Even a new state imagined as a ‘united’ Ireland that would bring the British-occupied ‘northern’ state into the political fold with the formally independent ‘southern’ state would mean little without wider social and cultural reckonings about how Irish modernity has generated huge inequalities and further destroyed the land. Even more vitally there would need to be a reckoning with what it means to be colonised on those deeper levels.

The modern/colonial way of relating to anything imagined as being outside the fictive enclosure of the individuated ‘self’ is one based on systemic and cultural habits of extraction and consumption that rely on historically unprecedented levels of violence against human beings, more-than-human beings, and Earth. This colonial mode of being and knowing was implanted in Ireland through centuries of violence, but we have since made it our own and scaled up the project of modernity/coloniality. We suffer profound amnesia about what once existed, accepting colonial narratives that our ancestors were ‘backwards’ and that what exists now is the only way ‘forward’.

The legacy of the polar opposite of that ancient animistic indigenous worldview was imported to Albion (and then Ireland) by imperialistic regimes such as the Roman Catholic church. What resulted involved/involves the systematic multi-generational brainwashing of the population to no longer regard the living waters as a relative, a being and kin deserving of reverence, but instead to view her as nothing more than a “resource” to be owned, extracted, commodified, bottled and sold.

“Dwayne Donald defines colonialism as “an extended process of relationship denial”, which calls us to consider then, what relationships have been and are being denied, and by who? What kind of relationships existed before this denial, how were they maintained, and why did denial become normalised over a continued maintenance rooted in the traditional ecological knowledges of a specific place? Achille Mbembe has said that our relationship to the non-human is what makes us human. What might the rivers, mountains, birds, and the spirits of so many kin driven to extinction say about the current state of the ‘human’ in Ireland, and how we maintain ecosystems of denial and domination?

It is also common to hear that Ireland cannot have been a coloniser, because we were colonised by the British Empire. However it is not an either/or. Both of these scenarios hold true; the horrors inflicted on the land and our ancestors over those many centuries, and the fact that many Irish people participated in the colonial projects of other imperial forces, and that by virtue of our phenotypic proximity to what became known as ‘Europeans’, we were afforded an ease of assimilation into the white supremacist structures of modernity that other non-white colonised peoples could never access. We also now have our own ethnically dominant nation state that is a card carrying member of the globally dominant political union of European colonial states. What we handed away for the short-term benefits of this assimilation is palpable in the profound levels of colonial amnesia in Irish society, the sustained ecocidal assault on the land, and the barely concealed self-hatred peculiar to people raised native to the tongue of their coloniser, abstracted from all ancestral memory of an-other way of knowing, an-other way of being. The story gets quite complicated when we start to consider how, after cultural assimilation into modern/colonial ways of being, and a total cosmological reconfiguration within the English language world, we effectively started colonising ourselves.

Consider what Frantz Fanon said in The Wretched of the Earth: “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverse logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts it, disfigures and destroys it.” These three verbs seem to aptly describe the state’s 2004 amendment to the National Monuments Act that allowed development projects to build over ancient ancestral sites so long as they are first excavated and emptied of objects: distortion, disfigurement, destruction. With the construction of the M3 motorway, a slightly shorter commute to the urban centre that has been the site of ever-increasing centralisation for centuries now was prioritised over sacred places of power that were revered and undisturbed for millennia in the Tara-Skryne valley. It’s a decision that only makes sense in a social order predicated on addiction to the accumulation of ‘stuff’, and that denies any relationship to or with place itself.

..While the violence of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland during the 20th century is now being documented and widely discussed in Irish society, there is little to no wider discourse on their role in colonialism elsewhere. The missions seem to still enjoy an assumption of benevolence in Irish society, when really the spiritual empire of the Catholic Church was the closest thing to an official empire that Ireland has had. The explicitly stated focus of Irish catholic missions in the 20th century was the conversion of ‘pagans’. Colonialism has been as much a story of spiritual and ontological domination by the Catholic Church as anything else, and Irish Catholic participation in this within English controlled places is something considerably overlooked in both Irish historiographies broadly and in public discourse.”

– Jimmy Ó Briain Billings (from this essay)

What I have found on my own path to decolonize my own mind and excavate my ancestral indigenous roots is that (as Lyla June states in this video) in many ways this process can present unique challenges for those of us with indigenous ancestors to Europe. In many cases, those with European ancestry are looking at one to several millennia of colonialism and brainwashing to undo and peel away before you get back to the indigenous roots of a people. The pop-culture propaganda distorts our own self-image when we begin to look into how our European indigenous ancestors lived.

Words and language are indeed powerful forms of magic and from the little bit I have learned of indigenous languages from Turtle Island (and now also having begun to learn some Gaelic and Welsh words) I can say that there is a significant difference in the type of magic wielded within their languages as compared to English.

The English language is structured to re-enforce anthropocentric delusions of grandeur, relegating all our non-human relations on earth to the demeaning status of being an “it”. Older languages with an animistic ethos of deep belonging to place do not refer to the trees, or the birds, or the fish, or the river or the mountain as an “it”, they refer to those beings as kin.

These variations in language in how we refer to the beings we share this world with may seem inconsequential to the indoctrinated self-important statist that trusts “The Science”, but ask yourself this, how much easier is it to train human beings to be willing to poison a river, or carve into a mountain for lithium or clear cut an ancient forest for profit when you raise them describing those beings as inanimate objects, rather than referring to them in the same way you would refer to a sister or a grandfather?

For instance, many in modern times have been conditioned to see the ancient Druids and their Celtic predecessors the Brehon (Breitheamh) Judges as “savages”. This is also nothing more than the sad propaganda of a hollow social, agricultural and scientifical involuntary governance Statist regime attempting to erase the cultural accomplishments and memory of those they sought to silence and dehumanize in the name of imperialistic conquest and greed.

The story below speaks of an instance where Celtic Warriors raided Delphi, Greece. It offers some interesting insight into the the linguistic expressions of their animist worldview.

The Druidic wisdom keepers encapsulated their combined memory of medicines, conflicts, natural disasters, geology, meteorology, pathways to peaceful resolution and stories that educate the listener about astronomy, mathematics and ecology into rhymed verse (often recited as part of a song with harps or flutes). Those concentrated expressions of their culture were passed down to the time of the Celts arriving and were then written down in Ogham on stone and wood to become the Brehon (Breitheamh) Laws (or Fenechus). They used verse, song and stone to create Cultural Refugia.

The year 438 is when the redaction of the Seanchus Mór began under the supervision of a committee of nine appointed by St. Patrick, “struck out of it all that clashed with the law of God” (in other words, he altered the meaning and censored entire sections of the Brehon Laws so they ensured the Church could Tax the Irish people, exploit the land and distort their perception of the natural world to a more anthropocentric worldview).

This marked the beginning of when the Roman church began attempting to erase that cultural history in the year 438 AD when monks (and St. Patrick) were sent to gather all the Brehon laws (recorded on wooden panels and stone) and transcribe them (censoring that which did not align with the Christian views of the world and our place in it). The Christian statist interlopers gathered the sacred laws of the Breitheamh in Teamhair na Rí (‘Tara of the kings’), and formerly also Liathdruim (‘the grey ridge’) and after transcribing them in what they described as a ”purified” form (meaning censored, altered and redacted) they destroyed all the original Ogham writing they could get their hands on. This attempt to steam roll the old Druidic ways and distort Brehon Law to serve as another tool for indoctrinating and assimilating the Celtic people failed as much of the Ogham which recorded the ancient knowledge was carved into large stones all over the land in hidden corners, cliffs and boulders.

The cognitive dissonance in people that conflate the St. Patrick legend with Gaelic culture is really a testament to how powerful multi-generational brainwashing can be and it speaks to the potent truth in the adage that “the victors write the history books”

The week around Saint Patrick’s Day is celebrated by some as Seachtain na Gaeilge (“Irish Language Week”) when more Irish language events are held and there is more effort to use the language.^[93]

So the Roman imperialists weaponize Constantine’s version of Christianity to wipe out the indigenous Gaelic traditions, then they morph over time into the British Crown, which makes it illegal to teach children Gaelic (under penalty of death) but there are people celebrating St. Patrick (the Roman Elitist ethnic cleansing specialist) with a Gaelic language week!? Sometimes decolonizing our minds and modern cultures is a challenging task indeed.

Thankfully despite the despotic attempts of the Roman Church and British Crown to crush Gaelic culture, our ancestors had to courage to continue to teach the young ones Gaelic in secret and “wrap their ancient wisdom in a thread of poetry” which they passed onto the bards and harpers.

Have you ever heard of the Scoil Ghearr (the secret Hedge Schools of Ireland)?

In these pages of Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s most recent book shown in the pics below she offers a vivid glimpse into what might be described as the Gaelic antithesis of the imperialistic “residential schools” and “boarding schools” of Turtle Island.

Many people bring colonial attitudes into Celtic culture without realizing it and this represents a sort of multi-generational cognitive dissonance that I think needs to be addressed.

It’s up to us to at first become aware of this colonization of the mind, and then make it a priority to begin to decolonize our minds, our bodies, our lives. Consider this statement from Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh⁣:

“The abandonment of a native language, to say nothing of it’s enforced abandonment, inevitably involves a disorienting rupture in cultural continuity at several levels; not only an alienation from landscape (place names) and inherited historical narratives and communal myths, but also a deep psychological trauma, at an individual and communal level, caused by the loss of a rich inherited matrix of wisdom and knowledge”.

Please try to understand this. Educating yourself on what that means is up to you. Decolonizing ourselves not only better gives us access to the regenerative ethnobotanical knowledge of our ancestors, it betters much of our lives.

Many people who claim to be drawn Celtic heritage have in fact internalized the colonizing culture’s attitudes toward Celtic civilization. They feel “safe“ dealing with aspects of the Celtic world that a certain elite in the colonies and culture has judged acceptably interesting – Celtic mythology, Celtic art, traditional music – but exclude elements that are disapproved of by the state, like language and the separate identity of living Celtic communities. English and French symbolize material and social success: Celtic languages symbolize backwardness and powerlessness. To shift one’s primary allegiance from an imperial language to a Celtic one is to transfer oneself from the world of the colonizer to the world of the colonized, a move understandably fraught with anxiety. That this is in most cases a completely unconscious attitude makes it no less far reaching in its consequences.

– Alexei Kondratiev, The Apple Branch

Many are probably not going to stop celebrating St. Patrick’s day just because they read this, and I’m not even sure if that would be the right thing to do. Maybe you could strive for something more authentic and respectful to the original indigenous culture of Ireland at least. But now when you do celebrate St. Patrick’s Day you’ll at least know that, in essence, putting the man’s name on a pedestal is mocking a people who were persecuted and robbed of their culture, and rubbing their faces in it. I just ask that you think about how that might look in any other context.

So now you are saying “Way to go Gavin, you totally wrecked my favorite day to drink beer and have a good time! Way to be a downer man!”

Well my friends, I never said that we should not celebrate on the day already set aside for honoring Gaelic and Celtic culture, I just like the idea of going about it in a Decolonized way going forward (for me personally).

Should we change the name of this day of celebrating Celtic and Gaelic culture? I do not know.

There is a word in Gaelic that I described in my essay on Involuntary Governance and Permaculture Ethics that speaks to the indigenous Gaelic worldview.

“Saoirse”, is an ancient concept that comes from the Druidic worldviews and original Brehon laws of the pre-colonial Gaelic world before the time of Emperor Constantine’s distorted version of Christianity reached the shores of Eire (aka Ireland).

In those days, the idea of freedom, honoring the non-aggression principle (or facing the consequences directly from your peers) could not be separated from the community or nature, because it was embedded in the medicine, language and culture of the Gaelic tribes and the Druids.

Saoirse means many things to different people. For some it means freedom to think, express and freedom to learn, for others it’s the freedom of imagination and the freedom of the spirit. And for some it also means freedom to set up parallel societies.

The forest and all aspects of the living Earth were seen as sacred and revered by the Druids, and their successors, the Brehon.

Considering Patrick was a Roman imperialist sent by Constantine’s church to stamp out and replace indigenous Gaelic culture, should we change the name of St. Patrick’s Day to “Saoirse” Day? or Day of the Druids perhaps?

For those of us that do have respect from the pre-colonial culture of Eire (aka Ireland) anything seems better than raising a glass to the name of a man that initiated an ethnic cleansing program in an attempt to erase indigenous Gaelic culture.

Not sure about the name of the day and I am not even sure that claiming a day of the Gregorian calendar (that is based on the supposed death date of a Roman imperialist) is the best day of the year for celebrating Gaelic culture to be honest. In any case, I am not sure if I am gonna use same day this year myself and would appreciate your feedback on the name and day.

So I am gonna contemplate the potential of creating a sort of Cultural Refugia, and perhaps choose a different day and form of celebration that honors Gaelic culture in a new way.

What that looks like for other people, is not for me to say (as I may have Irish blood, but I do not live in Ireland, I do not speak fluent Gaelic and my knowledge of pre-colonial Gaelic culture is far from encyclopedic) but I would love to hear what ideas all of you can offer in that regard (especially from any of you 24 subscribers that live in Ireland!).

For me, I am gonna still have a joyful celebration on a day (not sure which one yet) I will just choose to make it about learning more about my pre-colonial indigenous Gaelic and Druidic ancestors rather than highlighting the name of a Roman colonial imperialist.

I think i’ll make some recipes using what I have learned are some pre-colonial Gaelic foods, i’ll do some forest bathing (as the Druidic physicians were known to prescribe that for healing), try to learn a few Gaelic words and enjoy a hearty beverage.

Rather than drink the imported grain and hops based ale served in bars I think I`ll enjoy some mead.

Mead is fermented honey wine, and records show that it was enjoyed (and infused with herbs to be used medicinally) by the Druids and everyday Gaelic folk.

The Druids made a type of medicinal mead infused with native herbs and spices called “sm Metheglin” (Etymology. From Gaelic “meddyglyn”, from meddyg (“doctor, healer”) (from Latin medicus) + llyn (“liquor”) (cognate with Irish lionn and Gaelic leann).

Since the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Normands and British were so thorough in destroying most of the records of traditions in the land of Ireland, we do not have any exact recipes, but we can extrapolate based on what we do know of pre-colonial indigenous Gaelic etnobotanica and create our own recipes that would include some of the same healing herbs they used in those times.

Here is my recipe for basic mead, you can use this as a template to brew your own “Metheglin” (spiced and herb infused Druidic mead) for next year (and/or for other appropriate Gaelic celebrations).

Here are another few Mead Recipes to play with for inspiration as well:

We have fragments of herbal knowledge passed on in song, verse and carved into stone that tell us of some of the trees and herbs which were part of the Druidic pharmacopoeia which can offer us some inspiration for making medicinal mead, other medicines and foods.

Here is a short list of trees and herbs which are said to have been used by Druidic physicians in pre-colonial Ireland:

The Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris)
Oak trees (Irish aka Sessile Oak/Quercus petraea and the Pedunculate aka English Oak-Quercus robur)
Hazel Trees (Corylus avellana)
Irish moss (Chondrus crispus)
Juniper (Juniperus communis)
Birch leaves and sap (from both Downy Birch/Betula pubescens and Silver Birch/Betula pendula)

from To Speak for the Trees : My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest by Diana Beresford-Kroeger
Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris)
Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria)
Crab Apples (Malus sylvestris)
Rowan aka European ash (Fraxinus excelsior) berries
Blackberries (Rubus fruticosus) aka “bramble berries”
Heather (Calluna vulgaris)
Dulse – (Palmaria palmanta)
various mosses (such as Huperzia selago) and lichens
Brookweed (Samolus valerandi)
Golden Root (Rhodiola rosea) found in The Burren, a region in North County Clare as well as on the peaks of Slievemore and Croaghaun.
Agrimony (Agrimonia eupatoria)
Goldenrod (Solidago virgaurea)
Burdock (both “lesser burdock”/Arctium minus and “greater burdock”/Arctium lappa
Stinging Nettles (Urtica dioica)
Vervain (Verbena officinalis)
Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna)
Elderberry (Sambucus nigra)

We also know that the Druids liked their sea vegetables so any dish made with Dulse/Palmaria palmata, Irish moss (Chondrus crispus) (or a similar seaweed) would make a nice pairing for your Druidic herbal mead.

Here are some fun recipes on that front:

Savory Dulse Chips
Crispy Dulse Chips /
Spicy Horseradish Dulse and Kelp Chips
How to make Dulse Seaweed taste like Bacon
Smoky Dulse “Bacon”
my Cream of Pine and Mushroom Soup (which includes dulse and other sea greens)
Dulse Seaweed Soup
8 Effortless Ways To Eat Atlantic Dulse
How to Prepare Irish Moss
Irish Moss Pudding
Fruit Snack Recipe with Irish Moss

Another thing I think I will do on that day is learn to speak the names my non-human kin with words that were also spoken by my ancient ancestors, sing their songs and revive their blessings for the waters, wind and mountain peaks. Within those threads of our ancestral past we can awaken dormant seeds of knowing that weave through our bones, into our hearts and through the fabric of our souls.

Here are some glimpses into the pre-colonial traditions of the Gaels of Ireland, incase any of you with Gaelic Irish blood out there want to walk in the footsteps of your ancestors.

I recently learn about the ancient sweathouses of the Gaels (of Éire aka “Ireland”) recently and how they built permanent stone and earthen sauna/sweat lodges where the Druidic physicians would prescribe the burning of specific medicinal herbs (such as Juniper and chondrus crispus aka “Irish Moss”):

ethnobotanical info.

It appears that despite being separated by an ocean, the Gaels shared many similar traditions and worldviews to some of the ancient cultures of Turtle Island (in that they revered the water, the trees, the living Earth, cultivated/or created habitat for enhanced tidal zone foraging/gardening, used sea weed as food and medicine, and they burned sacred herbs in sweat lodges to heal, detoxify and strengthen the body and receive visions).

Perhaps it would be more apt to say that they were connected by an ocean (and their reverence for her) rather than saying they were separated.

Similar to the powerful healing properties of cedar and sage (often burned in sweat lodges here on Turtle Island) the Juniper and Irish Moss that were burned in the ancient Irish sweat lodges also offers anti-bacterial, immunomodulating, anti-viral and respiratory tract cleansing medicinal benefits. And like the Hop Tree (Ptelea trifoliata) and Ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) cultivated and used as medicine by the indigenous people of the Eastern Woodlands of Turtle Island, the Irish Moss (chondrus crispus) prescribed by Gaelic medicine women and men also had (and has) the ability to potentiate the efficacy of other medicinal plants (increasing their potency by a magnitude of ten in some cases) meaning if you eat a little bit of a another medicine plant/fungi along side one of those it goes a long way.

The pre-colonial Gaelic peoples also apparently really had a thing for wild apples.

Okay my friends that is all i`ve got for you today.

I hope you enjoyed this journey to Decolonize St. Patties Day and I hope the ideas for pre-colonial Gaelic beverages, foods and medicines I shared above inspires you to give some a try (or experiment with your local bioregional equivalent).

In closing i`ll share a slightly re-inturpreted version of the Druidic poem shared above which I think I shall read a loud as I sip on some mead and tip my hat to my ancestors this year.