Without doubt one of the most beloved artifacts residing within the Irish heritage sector today is the mummified remains of Takbuti at the Ulster Museum on Belfast's Stranmillis Road.
Like many thousands of children who grew up amid the violent social transformations affecting the city in the Seventies, a trip to see the genuinely unsettling black-skulled mummy - alongside visits to the Palm House, Tropical Ravine and indeed the Ulster 71 exhibition in the adjoining Botanic Gardens - is lodged with deep affection in the memory of our communally shared lost youth.
Takabuti was brought from Egypt to Ireland in 1834 by Thomas Greg of Holywood in County Down. She has thus been resident in East Ulster through famine and economic depression, industrialisation surges and deindustrialisation waves and two bloody civil wars involving various triangulations of bad guys and good guys. Also Northern Ireland's national engagement in a global military conflict which incorporated significant aerial bombardment of central and suburban Belfast by the German Luftwaffe that left over 900 Protestant and Catholic civilians murdered.
Last week I visited the museum again with my Scandinavian partner to have a look at their display on the historic Viking footprint in Ireland following upon the initial attack against Rathlin Island monastery in the Straits of Moyle in 795. Perhaps because of the regional strength of the Irish kings this was much less engaged by way of physical settlement in the North of Ireland in comparison to other quarters of the country where the Vikings from Denmark and Norway founded major coastal towns and cities such as Wexford, Limerick and Dublin.
Within Ulster itself Viking encampments were situated at Strangford and Carlingford on the beautiful County Down coastline as well as on Lough Neagh near the site of Shane's Castle and up upon the western shore of Lough Foyle. The great abbeys at Movilla and Bangor were destroyed in Viking raids and violent assaults were also set fast against churches on Fermanagh's Lough Erne and the ecclesiastical capital of Armagh.
I found it especially interesting to discover how the original name for Country Antrim's Larne Lough was Ulfreksfjordr since I had reread only last month in Jonathan Bardon's wonderful 1992 Ulster history how the name of the province itself came from the Norse Uladztir which in turn was based on the Irish words Ulaidh and Tir.
I found it especially interesting to discover how the original name for Country Antrim's Larne Lough was Ulfreksfjordr since I had reread only last month in Jonathan Bardon's wonderful 1992 Ulster history how the name of the province itself came from the Norse Uladztir which in turn was based on the Irish words Ulaidh and Tir.
Just beside the small display of Viking ephemera at the museum is a section on the Irish Bronze Age and a wonderful installation piece where one can look through a square hole in the white wall and see delightfully crafted models of human figures across the ages and as positioned around the same sobering burial pit.
At first we see a family from our ancient kindred gathered mournfully around the graveside at sunset and with the grandfather's corpse placed in a foetal position for his journey into Celtic or Pictish eternity. Suddenly the lights extinguish across the landscape and having travelled through a mysterious otherworldly prism of time and space we are now watching a modern archaeological dig on a sunny day. Two late 20th Century alpha male researchers living the career dream are looking down into the Ulster soil at the skeletal remains of the long-interred farmer or craftsman.
When I was at university in the late Eighties I used to spend a lot of time in the museum but cannot actually recall seeing this particular display or furthermore if it would have been there even during my childhood visits in the previous decade. It is a wonderful encapsulation of not only the fleetingness of human existence and family life but also the sheer density of Irish folk culture as transfused every day from this island's complex, ethnically heterogeneous and fraught past into the equally volatile present.
Over the past few months I have visited some extraordinary passage grave, standing stone and holy well sites across counties Down, Tyrone and Fermanagh. The emotional connectivity with our shared folk past that one can experience at these coastal, forest or moorland locations has never felt stronger in many ways - so untrammeled and unsullied in this world of avarice, lack of direction and blanket idiocy.
Thomas Sheridan’s intriguing fourth book The Druid Code is an extraordinary deconstruction of ancient British and Irish history as relating to the complexity of such megalithic remains across the British Archipelago, Northern Europe and the Mediterranean. It also traces the passage of druidic ritual into witchcraft and specifically Irish freemasonry - it is hugely recommended. Most interestingly, and prefiguring the selection of Northern Ireland for the location shooting of Game of Thrones, there was in fact an outdoor heritage park based on early Ulster history located near Omagh during the Nineties. Resembling a physical manifestation of a Horslips Celtic Rock concept album it is long defunct.
The sense of continuity and timelessness in Ulster life that the museum tableau represents was discussed here in an earlier blogpost on the Belfast artist John Luke. Whether the degrading excesses of selective historical amnesia in Ireland is broadly cancelled out by the continual warmth and welcome of the native people and the staggering beauty of the landscape of course remains impossible to conclusively configure.
Alas in contemporary Northern Ireland the fudging of Troubles legacy issues has fundamentally overwritten the consociational higher mathematics of the 1998 settlement which provided the solitary political fix available this lifetime around for the province following the trumping of Bill Craig's voluntary coalition proposal at the 1975 Constitutional Convention in Belfast.
In turn the deeply strange economic makeup of the Northern state with its grotesque private and public sector imbalance atop desperately low salaries throws up deeper questions about the long-term logic of Irish partition in a financially globalised world and the very competence of Westminster central government in managing post-industrial UK regional economies.
In any case, and as society forges towards a point where the only employment left very soon will be programming or polishing robots, I genuinely hope that when the Irish museum sector clears out its content on some futuristic commercial purchasing platform that I can perhaps pick up the Ulster Museum's From Past To Present masterpiece for my own personal Irish archive and watch it again and again and again to the end of my mortal days.
A cold eye on life and death and no finer concentration of earth magick to be seen since Catweazle walked the soil of Albion across the ITV/UTV network in the first two years of the Nineteen Seventies. The six wee figures underscoring the core human conundrum of getting up in the morning and either living your life fully as a unique transitory soul or just surviving the end of everything good like all the rest.
At first we see a family from our ancient kindred gathered mournfully around the graveside at sunset and with the grandfather's corpse placed in a foetal position for his journey into Celtic or Pictish eternity. Suddenly the lights extinguish across the landscape and having travelled through a mysterious otherworldly prism of time and space we are now watching a modern archaeological dig on a sunny day. Two late 20th Century alpha male researchers living the career dream are looking down into the Ulster soil at the skeletal remains of the long-interred farmer or craftsman.
When I was at university in the late Eighties I used to spend a lot of time in the museum but cannot actually recall seeing this particular display or furthermore if it would have been there even during my childhood visits in the previous decade. It is a wonderful encapsulation of not only the fleetingness of human existence and family life but also the sheer density of Irish folk culture as transfused every day from this island's complex, ethnically heterogeneous and fraught past into the equally volatile present.
Over the past few months I have visited some extraordinary passage grave, standing stone and holy well sites across counties Down, Tyrone and Fermanagh. The emotional connectivity with our shared folk past that one can experience at these coastal, forest or moorland locations has never felt stronger in many ways - so untrammeled and unsullied in this world of avarice, lack of direction and blanket idiocy.
Thomas Sheridan’s intriguing fourth book The Druid Code is an extraordinary deconstruction of ancient British and Irish history as relating to the complexity of such megalithic remains across the British Archipelago, Northern Europe and the Mediterranean. It also traces the passage of druidic ritual into witchcraft and specifically Irish freemasonry - it is hugely recommended. Most interestingly, and prefiguring the selection of Northern Ireland for the location shooting of Game of Thrones, there was in fact an outdoor heritage park based on early Ulster history located near Omagh during the Nineties. Resembling a physical manifestation of a Horslips Celtic Rock concept album it is long defunct.
The sense of continuity and timelessness in Ulster life that the museum tableau represents was discussed here in an earlier blogpost on the Belfast artist John Luke. Whether the degrading excesses of selective historical amnesia in Ireland is broadly cancelled out by the continual warmth and welcome of the native people and the staggering beauty of the landscape of course remains impossible to conclusively configure.
Alas in contemporary Northern Ireland the fudging of Troubles legacy issues has fundamentally overwritten the consociational higher mathematics of the 1998 settlement which provided the solitary political fix available this lifetime around for the province following the trumping of Bill Craig's voluntary coalition proposal at the 1975 Constitutional Convention in Belfast.
In turn the deeply strange economic makeup of the Northern state with its grotesque private and public sector imbalance atop desperately low salaries throws up deeper questions about the long-term logic of Irish partition in a financially globalised world and the very competence of Westminster central government in managing post-industrial UK regional economies.
In any case, and as society forges towards a point where the only employment left very soon will be programming or polishing robots, I genuinely hope that when the Irish museum sector clears out its content on some futuristic commercial purchasing platform that I can perhaps pick up the Ulster Museum's From Past To Present masterpiece for my own personal Irish archive and watch it again and again and again to the end of my mortal days.
A cold eye on life and death and no finer concentration of earth magick to be seen since Catweazle walked the soil of Albion across the ITV/UTV network in the first two years of the Nineteen Seventies. The six wee figures underscoring the core human conundrum of getting up in the morning and either living your life fully as a unique transitory soul or just surviving the end of everything good like all the rest.
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