Croagh Patrick, Mayo’s pyramidal icon

An aerial view of The Reek.?Pic: Michael McLaughlin

Holy mountain tells cross-millennial story


No trip to Mayo would be complete without a visit to the county’s best-known landmark, the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick, which overlooks splendid Clew Bay. Áine Ryan reports

IT is known as Reek Sunday. The last Sunday in July. Each year, from dawn until dusk on this day, around 30,000 people climb a holy mountain that stands on the edge of the Atlantic in County Mayo. Young and old, barefooted and booted, replicate a ritual which has roots stretching back 5,000 years to the Neolithic festival of the Corn King.
Hail, rain or scorching sunshine will not deter these trekkers. Sharp shale cuts their feet. Blackthorn sticks balance aching limbs. Friendly faces nod encouragement. Hunched shoulders cradle exhausted children.
Among the motley hordes there are Jesus look-alikes, bent over by crosses; reincarnated St Patricks, in festive green and wielding staffs; flocks of African nuns in full habits; Tibetan monks, Presbyterian pastors, atheists, archaeologists, photographers, pyschologists. Dozens of evangelists, mainly from northern Ireland, line the lower track, offering free tea, cordial, pamphlets. The only price: a sermon on true faith.
How come Mayo becomes Mecca each year on the last Sunday of July? Why do the progenies of the Celtic Tiger, whose religion of choice is materialism, flock to this pyramidal mountain? Surely the aisles of shopping malls are the new altars at which they genuflect.
Or, is it possible that all these Calvin Klein, Coco Chanel, Christian Dior and Ralph Lauren wannabees are feeling the pinch of emptiness, meaninglessness, soullessness.
The ancient holy mountain, Croagh Patrick, or simply the Reek, holds many secrets. It is a pervading bastion of thousands of years of Irish history. It is the keeper of the dark and distant recesses of the nation’s culture and spirituality. Its stern contours, and pyramidal peak, has chronicled 5,000 years of human struggle, faith, hope and despair.
The story of Reek Sunday stretches across the millennia and reveals a fascinating tale of our pre-Christian origins. It illustrates an incredible historical assimilation placing primal pagan ritual sacrifices, both human and animal, as direct precursors to the symbolic sacrifice of bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ, in the modern-day Mass.
This mountain’s pilgrim pathways have been trod by Neolithic or stone-age cultivators, Celtic cattlemen and Christain farmers.
Long before the arrival of St Patrick in 432AD this dispassionate mountain was altar to the many deities worshipped by our distant forefathers.
From around 3000 BC to the arrival of the Celts, each harvest the gods of the Tuatha de Danann were appeased and pandered to during a nine-day seasonal ritual. Nature’s elemental energies – wind, rain, sun, sea – were personified by a panoply of deities. These gods could infuriate the winds, stir up the seas, blind the sun. At a whim, they could destroy the harvest and inflict illness on a herd of animals.
Nowadays, the first station that pilgrims reach on their torturous ascent is Leacht BenΡin, a cairn (mound) of stones. You are instructed to walk around the cairn seven times, while reciting seven Our Fathers, seven Hail Marys and one Creed. This ritual has a poignant cross-millennial significance.
Five thousand years ago, it is thought that the Festival of the Corn King was held at Leacht BenΡin.
Reputedly the Corn king was a person of noble birth who offered his life to the sun god on behalf of his community in thanksgiving for the harvest. After his interment, there was a wake and funeral games lasting seven days; thus the continued ritual of the above-mentioned seven prayers. During the ancient festivities, celebrants would place a stone on his tomb. Each year many pilgrims replicate this ancient ritual by placing stones on Leacht BenΡin.
There are three other such cairns on the west side of the mountain known as Roilig Mhuire, or Virgins’ Cemetery.
After the arrival of the Celts, around 600BC, they incorporated this festival into their own seasonal rituals. The festival of Lughnasa – which is the Irish translation of August – was held on the first day of that month. It honoured the European sun god, Lugh – and was held over nine days at 52 different sites around the country, including on the sides of Croagh Patrick, or CruachΡn Aigle as it was formerly called.
The elders of this pagan society would oversee this harvest féile (festival). The Druids (priests), AosdΡna (wise-ones), Filí (poets), Brehons (lawmakers) and kings would co-ordinate the sophisticated religious ritual which also included aonachs (fairs), chariot-racing, hurling, story-telling and much music.
It is thought that both the Tailteann games and the Lammas Fair, still held annually in Ballycastle, County Antrim, originated at this ancient festival.
In later times when the symbolism of this primal festival was integrated into Christianity, the last sheaf of corn cut at the harvest was fashioned into a totem called the Cailleach or Corndolly and used to ward off the evils brought by the darkness of winter; it was also used to make the bread for the Eucharist.
For the majority of pilgrims, the reality of this country’s fragile dependence on agriculture is a remote memory. However, even up to 50 years ago – less in some areas – small farmers from all over Connacht had a deep understanding of our intrinsic relationship with the earth.
The story of these pilgrims was a simple one. A good year was when the hay was reeked, the turf clamped and the praties (potatoes) pitted and free of blight. A good year was when the cattle and sheep had been sold at the May and November fairs, held in every village and town in Ireland.
When our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents said their prayers and performed their penitential exercises, their faith was simple. When they bowed their heads, or donned their mantillas, it was in thanks. Thanks for the small things.
When they finally reached that conical summit, walked 15 times around the tiny oratory and prayed for the Pope’s intentions, as instructed in their prayer books, they were embracing a cross-millennial pageant. When they entered the church, built by 12 local men in 1905 at a cost of £100, they genuflected, knelt down and lost themselves in the demands of their rosary beads.
Each Reek Sunday Mass is celebrated hourly in this oratory. Young men in designer boots, girls in pink platform sandals, children in multi-coloured wellingtons, teenagers with inflamed bleeding feet, the elderly with a palpable sense of familiarity, crush into this historic house of prayer. They come from all over the country. They travel from all over the world. The one thing they have in common – a search for meaning. And where better to find it than at the top of a mountain.
This annual gig on The Reek – unlike rock concerts such as Oxegen, Slane, or Marlay Park – needs no expensive marketing campaign. While it may have developed a certain commercial element with its ‘I climbed Croagh Patrick’ T-shirts and burger-and-chips stalls, commerciality is not at its core, it is not economically driven.
Rather, it is testament to the persistent need for the transcendent, for community, for belonging. Maybe one thing has changed: it has become a spiritual odyssey rather than a penitential pilgrimage.

Discovering ‘the mystery’
Long-time curate of nearby Ballintubber Abbey, Father Frank Fahey encapsulates the pilgrimage perfectly: “There is an innate longing within us all to discover ‘the mystery’, the meaning of life. And the decline in the number of churchgoers is irrelevant to this basic human need. When we climb to the top of a mountain, and especially a mountain with such a rich spiritual history, we can behold the edge of the world, the horizon. We can distinguish Hy Brazil, Tír na nÓg, the elusive other-world of metaphysics.”

Famine monument
The dark spectre of the potato famine
of the 1840s has largely been consigned to the realms of history in modern Ireland. In recent years, a bronze sculpture of a replica coffin-ship, its symbolic sails the skeletal bodies of famine victims, has been placed at the foot of the mountain. It is a monument to the millions who died and fled the country.