Origins_and_Religion_from_Barra

[CAM:] Canon Angus MacQueen
[TC:] Tracy Chipman

[CAM:] There were are. The people we came from go right back to the time when they believed that the God… the bounty was actually the elements. And the… deferring to the elements has followed our people right back through 
Druid times, through Pictish times. That you believed that, first of all, there is a… they always believed that there was a being who made the rhythm, the rhythm of life, which, if you will sit on the shore you will realise, is actually music, it’s like a symphony, it’s like a piece of music. Everything fits in. You have the main things happening: the spring, summer, autumn, winter. You have the spring tides and the neap tides. You have the morning and the night. And everything fits into that. Now this superior being, first of all, created these islands in the west with a rim of gold round them, which is the richness of the fish, the shellfish and so on. 
In very early times, they lived mostly off shellfish, they had not yet learned how to use nets properly, but when they did, it was a basic sort of net in which they would catch, not only fish, but seabirds – anything that was near the shore. As succeeding waves of people came, the original people were small people, and they eventually, the little people, the small people were pushed further and further off the agricultural land, right down towards the shore. And they would eat and come out just at night. They would go and pick shellfish. They would have basic herbs like silverweed, wild thyme, all these native herbs, and they had, they would pound them in a… with a mortar and pestle stone, of course, and they would dry all the seeds and all the roots, and they would mix that with shellfish. And history has proved that they had the most balanced diet in the world. They were small, they were wiry and they were a strong people and they were happy people because their God never let them down. The elements looked after their lives. The wind came at the right time to ripen the food. The spring came when the… life was brought alive again after the restful winter of nature, and then it went on through the spring into a summer into the winter.
And the winter was the nicest time of all, because they would generally live underground and light and dark did notmatter all that much. But the winter was a celebrating time when you ate and drank everything you had preserved from the harvest. And so you had a marvelous little people. There were waves and waves of people and eventually people of normal size arrived. These little people lived undergound and they had very basic needs. They would have skins to lie on, they would have skins to wear, pelts of various kinds. And they were a musical people, and also they were, a very intelligent people who knew how to harness nature. 
So, that was the sort of background of these Hebrides, that was the sorts of things that were happening. From all that, later things would reveal that there were people, strange little people living underground and they would hear this beautiful music, especially on a moonlit night. So the next wave of people coming in would wander offto the machair, to the shore and they would come to the sand dunes which was… and they would hear the music coming out of these places. And they would probe sometimes deeper and they would find the entry and go in and look. And they would be entertained by the happy little people who lived, close to nature, underground. And there would be times when they would be a bit bewitched by the drink. The little people, you see, would come out during the night and take the ears of corn and they would ferment them and turn them into a fine alcohol. They would take anything, they would milk the cows at night and sometimes the lady or, would come out in the morning and find the cow was bewitched. Not at all, it had been milked during the night. Then there was the stories of the changeling. Easily… easily understood when they would be at the harvest on the machair, and they would leave the baby under… sheafs of corn and come back later to find a little, dirty, old man there where they had put their baby. And so it’s possible that these things all took place in history. That these little people might have put one of their old people who were useless and stolen that nice little baby in its place. Believe it or not, it’s not important. So generally you have then all this mystery about it, and recent times of course have proved, go to Lewis, go anywhere and you’ll find these wheel-houses and combinations of many wheel-houses, wheel-house villages, of these kinds everywhere throughout the Hebrides. 
Also, during that particular period were the souterrain, the other kind of souterrain where there were… We discovered ones here just a few years ago. And there were many stories about them and they would only be about a foot deep, a foot and a half wide, and they would go back several, several yards underground. Many theories, the nicest one I heard was that during the slave trade in Athens and Rome, remember we had a very shallow seas round us. During that slave trade that… the Mediterranean type of boat, which would be a house on a very broad wooden base, and there would have one big lug sail, and there would be no hurry. But they could come right close to shore and we do know that they did come and steal the young, strong, young people and sell them in Athens and Rome. And that, when the locals would get used to the idea, that they would say to themselves, well, if they saw the sail coming, the enemy sail, they would put their wives and children in, crawling in backwards, and the men of the house would be, sort of, above ground keeping any eye on everything. They could live in these souterrains, which were just tunnels, they could live in them for days, as long as it took. So they had that basic sort of intelligent approach to the big world outside, but they were happy. 
But later, Christianity arrived and God revealed himself to the special people, to Jews and until then nobody had known what God was like. Then suddenly, the Jews knew. The Jews thought it was only for them, that nobody else was never to know or get to know this God. And then there’s various stories of how Creation happened, how the fall of man happened and how redemption happened. And then the good news of the gospel was brought to these shores. Well we’re now just going back the best part of two millenia. Why? Because you see the, when you consider that the shores near Palestine, take Yugoslavia as an example, they never heard about Jesus Christ until the 11th century, until St. Cyril went there. Now that’s extraordinary! Because here, we already knew by before the year 400, about him because of the Roman invasion, because of the occupation of lower Britain. We knew already the story of creation and redemption had arrived on these shores as early as that. So we were fortunate, in a way, that the great Roman occupation had taken place, so we were well-versed in these things. Also, there was a tremendous movement of people, remember the historical side of the people was that they would have started off somewhere about India, somewhere in the far East, and they would have taken centuries and centuries and centuries to get across here. And if you take from them… from say the lower parts there, take Albania or Yugoslavia, and look at the faces of the women, all the way up until you reach the Russian steps, and the Baltic, and you’ll see that they’ve got the same features as the old Highland, island women. Even, you know, physically they were similar, very similar. Strong, well-built, broad-backed women. The men were not important, it was the women, because the traits, the physical traits would come through the mothers so… a good wife was of the essence in those days. 
They would have spent centuries, many generations in each place before they moved on and… until they eventually reached up the west of Spain and right up the French coast, and then over to the Isle of Man, Ireland and well Cornwall, Wales, and the Scottish islands – the seven Celtic countries. Now, they brought with them their own particular kind of culture, particularly their own music, whereas the strange music of the English ears was very, very strange, very limited. Their music, of course, was the pentatonic scale, with grace notes which exist and survive to this day, the grace notes. And that’s why they made such a terrible mess of everything when they came towards the end of the last century, when it became the darling thing of the drawing rooms in Edinburgh and London further afield, to have Celtic people singing and playing their music. Oh, and it became a little cottaged industry, people would be taken down there to entertain the intelligentsia. So, but when they came to write down the music, of course, they were restricted to what they had, they had no way of writing in the grace notes, and that’s how Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, for one, made such a foolish collection of songs, you take for example her version of the Eriskay Love Lilt which doesn’t even… it’s not even similar to the melody. Anyway, all these things put together give you a picture of a people who were wise, who had travelled far, because they had planted their song lines… all the way fom the Himalayas, right through Southern Europe, the Middle East and all the way through Southern Europe right up to here. Planting their song lines so that they could relay it physcally to where they would be from one moment of their history to another. The nearest thing we have at the moment to them would be the Aborigines, the Aborigines did a similar thing with their music and stories, and when, eventually, the tradition of the clan bard, like the MacMhuirichs of Stilligarry, and their main thing was not to write poetry, apart from praising the clan chief, but to make the epic tales. And when I was a child, the epic tale, one of the MacMhuirich tales, would take perhaps a fortnight to be told. I would sit on an old man’s knee and that would be where we will leave them tonight, and you will now go to bed, and so it went on. Now that was not something they created in this part of the Celtic world, that was something they had taken with them all the way from the far East, the telling of the great epic tales. 
And if we found other things, and eventually intermixed it with the Viking world studies, we are to be excused because they were so similar. And that is why you will immediately find things like the Valhalla, the Tìr nan Òg, the land of youth, the land below the sea. The fact that the seal is the son or daughter of the King of Lochlann under a spell, all that, and the swan is the great, beautiful Viking lady and all these kind of things, you can recognise immediately because it is all part and parcel of what we were about. Because, so as I say, from morning you woke up in the morning and the first thing you did was you celebrated the fact that you were awake one more time. Because the rest of the symphony was that spring became summer became autumn became winter, and then everything died. Until the following spring. But you kept on going because throughout the death part, your songs were going on, your stories were going on, your living was going on and when you opened your eyes, that was the first thing that happened. So each day was a celebration of food and drink and fellowship and laughter and song. That is the background of the people we belong to. So that coloured our lives and colours our lives to this very day, to this very day, I mean, it would be a childish person who would not, while opening his eyes, celebrate and watch the tide coming and going, the wind blowing and the various things that happened throughout the day. That was the sort of simple people we had, we never had to make a God, of course, I mean, you’ll find Jews and everybody else, they were making their, Indians were making icons of various kinds and totem poles and things and we never had to do that, because what we worshipped was actually what was happening in the actual elements. So hey presto!
When the Christian message came across, how did we deal with that? We looked at it and said: 
‘Yes… mm, yes, that’s right yes, mhm, mhm. Well, that’s exactly how, that’s the sort of God we could, we believe in all the time! Nothing new.’ 
And so on, and: 
‘Ok fine, fine, we accept this, because it is what we are about. What we were always about. Nothing has changed.’ But the simple conditions would be that you take with you the things that made you a special people. That’s why in giving the Christian message they say, you take the Brits, the Brits were perfect at it. The first thing that they did if they went to Africa or anywhere to convert people to this new Christian thing, they first of all turn them into Brits. That’s the most important thing – make them into Brits. And then, as Brits, make them accept and live the sort of life, leaving aside and forgetting what they were about themselves. That was a horrendous approach to it all. We were sufficiently well-travelled and wise to know that we would hold on to whatever we wanted and whatever was precious in our heritage and our background, and so it was, that to this very day, you will find a Christian religion, by all means, but full of lovely little nuances that puts the stamp of our kind of people on it. And that is so desperately important. That is so desperately important, I mean, take any of the stories and we put flesh and blood on them. 
You look at the Christian Book for instance and it’s, the first thing you look for is the hero, the hero. Where do you find the hero in it? There is a hero. St Michael the Archangel is the one on the white steed, who absolutely threw the devil into the depths of hell, and the devil is everything that was unpleasant. Into the depths of hell, that’s the hero, so you start on the coast of France. Mont-Saint-Michel on the Breton coast. You sail across to… Cornwall and there you’ve got Mount St Michael again, on the coast, and [Kilraine/?] on the west side of England, the west side of Ireland, the west side of Wales, and so wherever the Celtics planted their song lines, you go and look, and you will find that Michael has always been traditional here, great man. We made him the Neptune of the show, in effect, he was responsible for two things: the culmination of the harvest thing, and the wealth brought in by the ocean to our shores. Through these centuries, Michael taught, Michael… a stamp which no other Christian body would ever recognise as being of any importance. Michael, ok, was important everywhere but not of this kind of importance. 
Take Bride, we give Bride all the… qualities of Dana, the goddess, and we put her in charge of the elements. She’s the one who put her elbow on the 1st of February, our first day of spring, 1st of February, she’s the one who put her elbow in and said: 
‘The water is too cold,’ 
And she got the first pangs, the first life coming in on the 1st of February, into the soil. And we were traditionally, when, in South Uist, when my father would gather with the family round the table in the little thatched cottage and he would recite the genealogy. Now that, again, goes right back to India. Who you are, I mean, ok you Americans are particularly good at looking for roots, you’re desperate to have roots because you have none since you left us, and so… what makes you, what gives you your dignity and who you are is your roots. And your roots are based also in your genealogy. Nowhere else. You are Catriona, the daughter of Angus, the daughter of Patricia so on, you see, and before you know where you are I’ve got you on the other side of the Meditteranean. That is… that is exactly what this is about. That the genealogy of Bride, by reciting her genealogy you are bringing, you are bringing alive again, by mentioning their names, all these, and you are invoking their aid as they come back to the surface, through the water, through the hills, across the oceans, and you stand and my father would invoke them all. And he would say: 
‘Now that we have invoked your aid, Holy Bride, we will not be punished. We will not suffer through the elements for the next twelve months and a day. We will not ever, ever, ever suffer. We will not be burned, we will not be set on fire, we will not be drowned we will not… the elements will have no effect upon us because we are under the patronage and the mantle and the cloak of Holy Bride.’
You see how what we’ve done in adopting, accepting Christianity, but putting our little, local stamp on it. So the next important thing that happened of course was the Reformation, and when… when everything was over and the dust settled a bit, the new Protestant thing relayed: 
‘Oh God, we must get rid of all this terrible superstition and put it under and hide it, get rid of it and just have the Good Book.’ 
Just have the Good Book, just that, which denuded – or at least they attempted – to denude and take away the flesh and… flesh off the bones and we were left with the bones of something which was relevant only, to a large extent, to a strange Jewish people being dragged all the way from… from Egypt, through long deserts and so on. And very little of it had any sort of relevance, but you see, what gave them relevance and the meaning of all this is who we are and what we are about. So are you getting the picture now of what we’ve done? 
Um, towards the end of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth century, there was a big revival and all kinds of people were influential like [XX] and so on, encouraged all kinds of people. And eventually we had Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica, which he wrote in conjunction with many other friends like Ailean MacDonald. And reviving and restoring the old rùns, incantations and so on. Oh, that was lovely eh, that came back. When, in my youth, in a Catholic atmosphere we kept all this alive, of course. I remember one of my earliest recollections is, on this particular day I heard a horrendous cry going up and the old lady who was two crofts along, she was weeping and I said to my father, I said: 
‘Come out quickly, Mòr is weeping.’ 
And he went out and he shouted to her, and she said the cow was dead… or dying, that it had been cursed and that someone had put the evil eye on it. And I remember distinctly going to a lady in one of the villages to have the threads made, the red threads which went on the thingmy. 
I remember all that was still in existence at the beginning of this present century, which is now dying. All that in existence before, until radio, television, electricity and things came, we were a people without books, we were a people of an oral tradition in which we, wasn’t… composed our history, uncovered our history, and a colourful history it was. Embellished, at times, for the telling of the tale, you see, the important thing for the Aborigene, the important thing for the Celt, is that the bàrd, I’m of a bardic strain, the village’s bardic strain, that the bard knows how to tell the story, that is terribly important. And if you look at St Paul, St Paul was excellent at telling the story. If you look at St Paul, and he could tell the story and it just put on, again, put flesh on the bones to make it a story worth the telling. Some of the evangelists, some of them were very pragmatic, but others could just again do that little bit of putting colour on it. And so, all these things show the kind of people we are and if we are a strange people, and of course we are a strange people, because we are a people who have fought hard to preserve our identity and when you consider this a minority culture, a minority language, that we had to wait until Europe became a broad country before they would even listen to us as having any kind of importance as a people. We have survived through it all. We have survived marvelously well. 
When I was a boy, it was forbidden by law to teach our language in the school. I had never heard the English spoken until I was five and the first day I went to school, the teacher was speaking to me in a language I did not understand, and I had to learn the English in order to add one and one and make it two. It was only much later that the law relented and allowed us to have our own language. And by the early 30s, now… it had got a bit of competition and there were stalwarts like… [XX] and others who started running camps for Gaelic-speaking children from the various islands together in summer, summer camps and things. And it was only from there that things started moving very very slowly and few of the universities would have a Celtic chair. And to this day it’s scandalous that there are only Celtic chairs, there should be, there is not a single, not one of the universities has the courage to have a Gaelic chair. 
I bring this out in a new preface to one of our books, historical books, which is being republished after a hundred years. So from all that blurb, whatever happens should not surprise you in how people tell their tales. I mean, I was brought up on the MacMhuirich tales and uh… how the people tell the tales, the important thing is is that they do know how to tell the tales. I have, in a religious broadcast a few months ago, I explained how my very first memory is of all the dolphins, whichever they were, offshore in the west, when suddenly I saw the line. For the first time in my life, I said: 
‘What is that line?’ and he said: 
‘That is the line of the horizon.’ 
And I said ‘Oh, what happens over that line?’ 
‘Oh, I’m going there very soon,’ he said. 
‘Why?’ I said. 
‘Because over that line,’ he says, ‘is the place of real and eternal youth, where everybody is happy for ever after, and I’m going there soon.’ 
I said, I got a hold of him, I remember very clearly, I got a hold of him and said:
‘Good, I’ll go with you.’ 
And he said: ‘Yes, you’ll come sometime but not now. You’re too young, it’s only old people like me who will go, but one day you will come.’ 
And I said: ‘Will you be waiting for me?’ 
He said: ‘Yes I will! And oh we will be so happy together.’ 
And he described that now, that was a simple way of telling it, so I [XX], as soon, as early as I was conscious of getting a Christian story of any sort, and it was and to this day as important, in my book, as any Christian story. Because, would I… most clergy of any Christian denomination would tell you that we should, we should wipe out all these things and just look at the New Testament and the Old Testament, and ok, you do that, but you’re very colourless, dull people. I much prefer to live a life of great celebration and joy with the elements. That’s my kind of life because it’s the life that I’m used to and I, in my little way, am planting my song lines, so that people yet to come will stand on a little rock, little tuft of [XX] and say ‘ah’. The birds there and this is where it happened. Voila! You got anything?
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…having made the scones for the tea and there would be an argument and a song and a composition about the day’s happenings, and we incorporated the new history and I mean, I rememember they were talking about fighting in the Boer War, the First World War of course and when we played games we played pontoon for matches, because when you were in the trenches, the last thing you’d better light was a match, ’cause it would mean a sniper would get you and… so there you are.
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