Good day readers!
And welcome to all who have subscribed in the past few weeks!
The cherry tree in my garden has finally burst into blossom which means that summer is around the corner.
In the old Irish calendar the first of May is Bealtaine (Beltane), and it is the traditional start of the Irish summer (Bealtaine is also the name for the month itself). Anyone who has been in Ireland during May knows that it is one of the few months when you can almost guarantee it will be mostly gentle, sunny days and our fields become lush waves of graduated green and sparkle with flowers. It is also the exam period in universities, so of course the weather is gorgeous when you are supposed to be studying!
It is positioned six months after our Samhain (Halloween) festival. For our ancient ancestors, who were mostly agrarian, Bealtine marked the start of long days working with animals and crops, with Samhain being the end of that season and the final harvest. The hard work during this six month period is what kept people alive during the dark, short days of winter.
In Old Irish the word for Bealtaine comes from ‘Bright Fire’, and traditionally bonfires would have been lit on Oíche Bealtaine or May Eve, on the 30th of April. As I explained in my inaugural newsletter back on the 30th of January it’s likely that our ancestors thought of sundown as the start of the day. It’s when you gathered with your family around the fire to rest after your labours, and eat and swap stories. Facing into the darkness was the beginning.
Sidebar: in Europe 30 April is also Walpurgis Night, which is considered a dangerous liminal evening, an echo of Halloween. Many countries consider it the night witches met, back when witches were the favourite scary boogeywomen of Christian societies. So it was a night to light fires and be on the lookout for strange happenings and cackles of laughter from the forest.
There are many traditions about what you should do on May Eve, including building two fires and driving all your cattle between them — it was considered a way to purify them and keep them healthy for the season. Cattle were the premier indicator of wealth going back thousands of years, so there are a lot of superstitions about taking care of them. Sometimes, if you had a particularly fine cow or horse (especially if they were white), you had to worry about protecting them from the attention of the Other Crowd.
Sidebar: I’m referring here to the Sidhe, i.e. what many would describe as ‘the fairies’, but in our tradition they are not tiny winged sprites, but mysterious, fickle, and often dangerous beings, with their own rules and interests. People had words to refer to them obliquely, such as the Other Crowd, or the Gentry, for to talk about them directly would be to attract their attention, which was to invite a chaotic, primal force into your life. People had rites to appease them, including leaving food outside regularly to show respect, which also kept their focus outside your walls.
Another thing people used to do on the first of May was to walk the circuit of their property —it was known as beating the bounds — and taking that day to repair fences and boundary markers. While this is an obvious useful task in securing your property, especially if you own animals, there is an interesting psychological trick at play too. If every year we decided to reset all our boundaries on the 1st of May then we might remember that there are certain thresholds in our lives that we must watch over and protect.
Like most Europeans we celebrate the first Monday of May as a public holiday to celebrate International Workers’ Day, and this year it falls on Bealtaine. Longer days and shorter nights often translates into our working hours increasing. There’s a sense that we should be doing more. It’s harder to stick to routines and say no to extra requests. Again, it’s about paying attention to our boundaries and protecting our limits. In Ireland the days might eventually stretch into eighteen hours of light, but you don’t have to work all of them!
In my very first newsletter I mentioned I have an interest in cults and cult behaviour. I briefly mentioned the podcast from the CBC about NXIVM, a group that sprang up in the self-help sphere (there’s also a Netflix documentary series about the organisation called The Vow). I’ve been reading stories about people who have joined cults and escaped them for a long time. I’m fascinated about what motivates them to stay in a group that is obviously controlling and manipulative.
Perhaps some backstory on me might be useful. I was raised Catholic in Ireland during a transitional time when the church’s grip on the political and social spheres was fast eroding. This interference was damaging to the country on so many levels. It is perfectly fine to be an individual who wishes to be a member of a Church, but it is entirely different for one Church to dominate and control an entire population (regardless of individual inclinations). Thankfully, I’ve seen the Church here return to the role it should inhabit: as a faith-based institution that is a choice, not a monopoly.
I do not wish to upset Catholics reading this. I respect people’s choices of spirituality, and I also appreciate the importance of community, ritual and acts of charity. While I'm areligious I’m not without a spiritual approach.1 What I am going to describe is my relationship to the hierarchy and dogma of the Church, which as a child started off as a kind of fuzzy benevolence and over time became increasingly confusing, and finally off-putting.
Children are weirdly logical. That’s why they ask blunt and direct questions. They don’t understand nuance or abstract notions. They will accept the idea of a happy sky family that watches over them and loves them unconditionally. Once you get into categories of dividing people into who deserves saving in the afterlife it gets a bit too much for them to understand, especially when it contradicts a fundamental tenet that ‘God loves everyone’. Throw hell and eternal sorching damnation into the equation and it’s too much scary fodder for nascent imaginations.
The death of my first grandfather when I was five years old threw me into my first existential crisis. At the time the Catholic Church preached the concept of purgatory, which was a place the dead inhabited until their remaining family ‘prayed them out’ to counter the sins still weighing on their souls (only exceptional people could live as a human and not die in some state of sin). The deceased would eventually pass into the grace of heaven, but no one knew when. Since there was no time in purgatory… that meant stasis until our prayers liberated them.2
This worried me deeply. I liked my grandfather and imagined him stuck in nebulous darkness, waiting for release. I was taught in a convent school run by nuns and lay people, and daily prayer and religious education was the water I swam in. However, I quickly learned that asking questions — and I was one of those annoying students who asked questions —was not welcomed when the nuns’ rote responses didn’t satisfy the query.
I can point to this as being the first chink in my acceptance of doctrine. Over time I became more sceptical. As I entered the ‘know it all’ phase of my teen years (ah, that insuffrable arrogance of the young) I’d had enough. It didn’t help that I was always fobbed off with ‘you have to take it on faith’ to shut down difficult questions. Faith in what? The Vatican? By sixteeen I’d determined I wanted nothing more to do with the Church. On a fundamental level I decided that any institution that did not grant me equal rights did not deserve my loyalty. In this regard nothing has changed. I parted ways with the Church.
My time in university, when I studied history with modules on the genesis of the Judaic/Christian traditions and the riotous medieval era that lead to the Protestant/Catholic schism, cemented my distrust of taking the opinion of experts ‘on faith’. What are the primary sources? Who wrote those sources? What are the competing theories? Who wrote them and with what agenda? Who is an expert and what qualifies them?
Humans yearn for meaning, and we are exceptionally good at generating stories to try and make sense of the world and figure out ways to get on with one another (or reasons not to like an entire group of people). I started this piece discussing folklore in Ireland around Bealtaine. These rites were accepted as vital for a long time, yet today many view them as quaint delusion.
In the 1970s, the era of cult fever, the Jonestown Massacre was an unimaginable catstrophe. 918 people — including children and babies — were murdered because of their paranoid leader, Jim Jones. I remember as a kid watching Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones — the first TV series based on the tragedy — and being riveted. I suspect I keep coming back to the issues raised around cult conformity based on the impact this story made upon me.
My experience and study has made me wary about dogma and dogmatic thinking. I have always tried to check myself if I find myself falling into simplistic ‘us or them’ thinking. Nothing is ever this straightforward. Yet, I have spotted this drift in myself now and again. There is a huge appeal in discovering a charismatic teacher/expert/guru who will confidently inform you this is the way.
Personally, I think it stems from a profound desire from childhood to have a parental figure who will care for you, guide you, and make all the hard decisions in life easier. There is no escape from the reality and responsibility of being an adult: you must figure things out, find healthy supports, and realise you’ll mess up occasionally. Forgiving yourself for your mistakes and errors in judgement might be the hardest part.
From studying cults I know that very smart people become members. Most of us would like to say we are immune to such persuasion, but guess what, the people who come under the sway of charismatic leaders never believed this would happen to them. They’re not stupid or weak-willed. They trust in someone they like and over time they are sucked into a mire of control. When presented with evidence that their group isn’t healthy many people simply double-down rather than admit they made a mistake or were fooled.
Recently I listened to the BBC Sounds documentary, A Very British Cult, which follows another life-coaching organisation that sprang up in the early 2000s. It’s a wild ride, and a useful reminder about the problems of handing too much control to people who claim authority.
If you are interested in this subject I recommend listening to the in-depth interview on the Jordan Harbinger podcast with Steven Hassan on combating Mind Control - part one and part two. Hassan is a licensed mental health counsellor who has been educating the public about mind control, brainwashing, and destructive cults since 1976 — he was a member of the Unification Church (aka ‘The Moonies’) in the 1970s, so is very familiar with the tactics employed to exert and maintain control over people.
The number one sign that you are dealing with ‘cult-like’ thinking is divvying up the world into ‘enlightened versus unenlightened’ thinking. You are part of the smart people who know better than anyone else. There’s a quality of evangelical zeal when you discuss your interests. You and your fellow friends are assured that those who don’t agree with you are misinformed or blithering idiots (depending on how hardline you want to be). If you ever start to question the dominant position you get the cold shoulder, suspicion, or are ostracised. Becoming fearful of retribution if you become an apostate is a troubling sign.
Off the top of my head I’ve seen vegans, paleo-eaters, atheists, Mac users, Android users, Linux users, flat-earthers, UFO believers, and many more controversial belief systems demonstrate this kind of behaviour to varying degrees.
And the more I distance myself from social media the more I notice that this type of dichotomous thinking has been inculcated in us over the last decade. I’m not saying this a conspiracy. I don’t believe in a cabal trying to transform us into cultists.
Simply, the human need for certainty has been coded into the algorithms that distribute our feeds. We display our biases online and the platforms return them to us ten-fold in widescreen extremes as either comforting confirmation or violent disagreement, but rarely anything in-between. Yet most daily life is lived in the realm of in-between.
What I found striking when I listened to the above BBC documentary is that the members of the group would spend hours online with each other discussing personal development and their doctrines. They were constantly available to their leadership, neglected their real-world jobs, family and friends, and were encouraged to view their loved one’s influence as ‘toxic’. Anything that threatened to shift their gaze from their new doctrine was suspect. Their world narrowed to reality tunnels patrolled by their charismatic leader.
I wondered, how is this different from people spending hours of their day scrolling through various feeds and clicking thumbs up or thumbs down?3 Sure, there may not be one guru directing you, but there are equations designed to guide you down predictive paths.
We get a jolt of outrage at some clickbait article, then warm fuzzies from the cute puppy video. All carefully doled out at the correct moment to maintain your view.
The purveyors of information want your allegiance to the feed, and curate your streams to maintain your engagement.
Are we all members of the Cult of Attention?
I’m aware of the irony of writing this online, part of a platform which is designed to offer writers a stage and an audience. Yet starting this Substack has been entirely fuelled by a deep instinct to broaden my writing practice and engage with topics outside of the genre fiction I write. To stop thinking in a series of 280-word bursts. To open up and out. To risk…
Maybe that’s the useful tradition I can learn from my peasent past: regularly check the boundaries you have set in your imaginative landscape. Are they too cramped? Did someone else dictate their position? Have they been trampled or knocked down? Are they necessary?
And remember, every fence needs a gate.
I’ve always liked the quote by Robert Anton Wilson: ‘I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.’
I’m not mentioning limbo, where unbaptised babies went, which was perpetual. The concept was officially withdrawn in 2007 (but dropped from Catechism in 1992). Centuries of worry and crisis reversed with a 41-page document written by theologions. Of course, other doctrine has been reversed or upheld by the appointed experts in the Church over the centuries. One doctrine updates another. Take it on faith.
I include myself!
The Cult of Attention
Really enjoyed this piece!
Thanks for the share! ❤️