Reading John Moriarty is not a Study – it is an Adventure (Part 6)

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This is part 6 of the Irlandnews series on John Moriarty
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In today’s part of the series about Irish philosopher and writer, poet and mystic John Moriarty, Kerrywoman Amanda Carmody continues to share her memories of the great philosopher who was her beloved uncle. We asked Amanda to write about John Moriarty for Irlandnews to intoduce this deep thinker to a wider German speaking audience. Today Amanda explains how to best approach John´s work, which 18 years after his death is more relevant than ever. John Moriarty saw the state of our planet and our current multi-crises as mapped and present in all of us. His credo: We are all related to each other, humans, animals, plants and rocks and shall live peacefully together accordingly. Our beautiful planet Earth is the true paradise – we just have to learn to recognise it. Read Amanda’s advise on how to best access John Moriarty’s work.

Amanda Carmody and her mother Phyllis, sister of John Moriarty. Amanda is a niece of John Moriarty, a daughter of his youngest sister, Phyllis. She spent the first few years of her life living at the Moriarty home place at Leitrim Hill. Her connection with John began on his visits home and deepened in later years when he returned to live on the side of Mangerton mountain, near Killarney. Since his death she has immersed herself in his writing. Amanda runs a very active Facebook Community Group dedicated to the wisdom teachings of John Moriarty.

Amanda, what can we learn from John Moriarty today?

My sense is that John Moriarty was a philosopher who lived before his time and his wisdom is even more relevant in 2025 than it was thirty or forty years ago. We have come through some experiences in the past few years that have caused many people to question how we live and the destructive impact that human behaviour has on the planet and consequently for our own wellbeing. There is an increased sense that something needs to change, and it needs to happen soon.

Whilst there are major advantages and benefits to technology there are also some big challenges, and many have come to feel that the disadvantages may outweigh the benefits. There is an awareness that we are becoming more automated and dependent upon science and technology, and this is not necessarily a good thing. Are we fast becoming more machines-like in eye and mind? Are we losing a sense of meaning and real connection? Are we are losing our sense of soul? Is John Moriarty right in his diagnosis in Crossing the Kedron “Soul loss is the great calamity of our age?”

‘Led by Moses the children of Israel came into the Desert of Zin, in it their souls dried away. Led by our scientists, we have come into a ‘nothing but’ universe. In it our souls have dried away.”

Even if we do not label it soul-loss, there is not doubt that there is a low of depth on social media and a superficiality that seems to do little more than entertain. I feel that fostering a superficial way of relating and connecting is not healthy, it is not nourishing us. John urges us to ask the question: “Does my culture nourish me or does it vampire me?” I sense that a lot of people are beginning to feel that they are being vampired by the culture they find themselves in. The fact that so many young people are struggling with fear, anxiety, depression and conditions like ADHD, autism and mental health issues should be of concern, these conditions are on the increase in all developed countries.

There is a lack of elders and true wisdom teachers for the times we live in. Perhaps John Moriarty was such an elder and, in his books, and audio recordings he does offer nourishment for the soul and opens a path of reconnection. A new hero needs to emerge, young people need to want change and take the challenge. A surprising number of young people like what John has to say.

Perhaps this failure to acknowledge the yearnings of the soul in ourselves and in the world we live in is a greater loss than we care to acknowledge. Our indigenous forefathers lived from the belief that the land of Ireland was a goddess once named Fóladh. Fóladh is as much a state of mind as it is a place. From this way of seeing the earth it would be impossible to look at the land and see the monetary value of it, to look at river water and see only the molecular composition of it. A change in perception is what is required, John explains in this video clip from the RTE archives (click on photo):

“It isn’t things that are bound.’ John writes in Horsehead Nebula Neighing.

“It is our ways of seeing things and knowing things that are bound. There is, however, a place of transformation. It is known to the owls and the nightjars. So, who knows! We might wake up one morning having somehow or somewhere acquired both the courage and the capacity to see what is there, to be blessed by what is there, when we open our Fern Hill door and the whole world tells us, in its ordinariness tells us that the Grail Quest is accomplished. Fern Hill regained. Paradise regained. Within our eyes and minds regained.”

Amanda, what is your favourite text by John Moriarty?

I have had many favourites over the years, and they have tended to change as I myself have changed, as I continually grow and outgrow my previous ways of seeing and understanding. The Hatching Hen is written at the start of his book Nostos. I feel personally connected to this passage through my mother Phyllis and grandmother Mary, it has never lost its charm for me over the years.

“One night Jameen picked up a boot of mine and saw that it needed a new half sole. He asked me to bring him the hammer, the last, the tack and a strip of leather from the right drawer of the dresser. Instantly and emphatically, my mother said no, pointing to a hen hatching eggs in a wooden butter box under the table. No, she said, that will have to wait for another night. Didn’t we know, she asked, that the sound of hammering might kill the chicks in the eggs.
Again, three or four days later, hearing Chris hammering outside in the hayshed, she went to the door and called out to him to stop at once. In our house we lived from the belief that the sound of iron on iron was lethal. In our house the metallurgical ages gave way to a hatching hen.

Seeing a magpie’s nest in a tree on the quays, I knew what my mother would do. In the interest of developing life, she’d switch off the city. Every engine in it she’d switch off. She’d switch off the industrial ages, leaving the world as natural as it was and as silent as was before metal banged on metal. In the modern city, Dublin or London, I knew it. I had grown up in the house of the hatching hen.”

 

The other passage is about enflaith, which means Birdreign. There is something about this quote from the end of John’s second part of the autobiography What The Curlew Said that summons us to grow and outgrow for the sake of a better way forward.

“As I understood it, taking my cue from Blake, Night Journey to Buddh Gaia might have been called Europe: A Prophecy. And Invoking Ireland might have been called Ireland: A Prophecy. The questions I was asking were: What at its very best can Europe be and what at its very best can Ireland be?. . .

Given the time to do so I articulate a vision, ecumenical across all boundaries. I call it Ailiu Iath n-hErend, in English, Invoking Ireland. Not that I would ever initiate a violent revolution in the streets. I am happy to live by Christ’s command to St Peter to put up his sword.

Christ’s Passion not the Labours of Hercules.

A country in which all of its dragon energies are still alive in the land and our minds not shrivelled to intellects, that is what I was seeking to imagine and enact.

Yeats again:

‘I know now that revelation is from the self, but from that age-long memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nests and that genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our trivial daily mind.’

This, when it is the norm, is the Birdreign, in depth.

It is what I finally wished to call the book, The Birdreign, but by the time I proposed it, it was already too late: Amhairghin’s Song, Manannán’s Gita at Sea and the monologues of Fintan mac Bochra and Ollamh Fódhla and Grainne’s love dirge were in the machines.

In giving the book this title I was suggesting that it has relevance outside Ireland. In it, among other things that I do, I give the Palaeolithic Birdman a handup. I seek, in other words, to reinstitute a universal ecumenical consciousness at the heart of things. I substitute we-awareness for us-and-them awareness. Conaire Mór walking to Tara is the revived Birdman walking to Tara. The Birdreign emanating across all boundaries natural and tribal from Tara is we-awareness emanating across all boundaries natural and tribal from Tara. And the hope is that it will keep going, re-establishing itself everywhere, all around the planet.

Out of Ireland,

The Birdreign.

Becoming missioners again, we, the Irish, should carry the idea into all lands.”

 

JOHN MORIARTY – BACKGROUND INFO

John Moriarty was an Irish writer and philosopher acknowledged for his profound insights and mystical perspective on modern life. He was born on February 2, 1938 in County Kerry and died there on June 1, 2007.

More information about John Moriarty and his complete works in English can be found here:

* Amanda Carmody runs a very active Facebook community group with daily posts on John Moriarty. Because it’s for a good cause, here’s – as an exception to our policy – a link from Irlandnews to the John Moriarty Facebook-Group. Click.
* The website of the John Moriarty Institute: www.johnmoriarty.ie. The website informs about John´s life and work.
* The Lilliput Press: John Moriarty’s books (so far all in English) are published by the Irish publishing house The Lilliput Press in Dublin. You get a good overview of John’s books and audio books on the publisher’s website. Website: Click.

Amanda, which approach to John Moriarty’s work would you recommend to readers who are beginning to engage with him?

John Moriarty is considered difficult to read. In the beginning this is certainly the case. John himself was aware of the challenges. He explains in the Dreamtime overture that:

“It resists linearity. It is a tapestry of themes and styles, and the hope is that when we come to the end and stand back, we will see that a unified picture does indeed suggest itself.  Order will be seen to emerge from chaos….and it might indeed be that in our quest for a vision by which to live, we will sometimes have to be content with the aesthetics of chaos…we aren’t perturbed when, reading a book of poems, we find that they differ one from another in theme and form.”

I initially struggled to read John Moriarty; I was in my twenties when he gifted me a signed copy of Dreamtime. I was excited to get started.  It made very little sense to me at the time, in fact I felt embarrassed because I was going to meet John and how on Earth was I going to tell him that I couldn’t make head nor tail of his book. I have since read all of John Moriarty’s books at least once. Nowadays the more they challenge me, the more I enjoy them.

Once you accept that reading John Moriarty is an adventure, that it is like walking the Camino or climbing Croagh Patrick. Sometimes it’s heavy going, it takes time to climatize to the challenging terrain. He does not make it easy, you must do the digging and overcome the inner resistance. But be assured that the views along the way are incredible, the genius is mesmerising, and you will find it nourishes the soul.

My advice is listening to John’s voice first is an advantage. He wrote as he spoke. Read lightly in the beginning, let the words and the images emerge and wash over you and don’t strain, read aloud. Reading groups are a terrific way of engaging with the books.

Reading John Moriarty is not a study, it is more of an adventure, a pilgrimage we embark on. I can only say that after years of rereading his books that I am still having aha moments and still making incredible discoveries and associations. What I find is that John Moriarty meets the reader at their own level and as the reader changes and grows there is a sense in which the stories and myths take on a new relevance. John never intended for his books to be easy or popular, he intended them to be confrontational, enlightening, exposing, and nourishing.

Amanda, there are many video clips of and about John Moriarty. Which ones would you recommend to watch?

There are some great video’s and the one that people love is Tommy Tiernan in conversation with John at his home near Killarney back in 2002:

There are many videos and films of and about John available on YouTube telling stories or doing interviews. Here a few picks, all in English language.

Dreamtime Revisited, an award winning film by Dónal Ó Céilleachair and Julius Ziz, is a ‘Walkabout in Dreamtime Ireland’ inspired by the works of Irish writer, poet and philosopher, John Moriarty considered by many “as a major writer, comparable to Yeats, Joyce and Beckett”. The film Dreamtime Revisited weaves together contemporary and archive material in a labyrinthine invocation of Moriarty’s dream-vision of Ireland; exploring the spiritual and poetic dimensions of its landscape and people. The film is available for streaming on Vimeo:

Lorna Hill’s  film is portraying the unique story of having John Moriarty as her godfather. Lorna narrates and brings you on a journey through conversations with the people who knew and were close to John Moriarty:

A Talk in Glendalough: This video by Michael Gorman closed The John Moriarty Festival in Moyvane, Co Kerry, 2024.

Simone George about John Moriarty: A precious talk from the heart delivered by Simone George in Moyvane is one of the finest I have ever heard. Simone speaks about how John Moriarty was introduced to her at the darkest most terrifying moment of her own life. This deeply personal and soulful pouring forth from her own experience received a three minute standing ovation at The John Moriarty Festival 2024. It is one of the finest tributes to John Moriarty and to the power of a woman’s heart that I have heard. It resonates with anyone who is going through their own dark night of terror and it should be shared far and wide: Click here.

You can also check out the website www.johnmoriarty.ie for more videos. They are all in English language.

Manchán Magan, Irish writer, traveller and television programme maker, has published a brilliant new podcast series based on the audio collection of John Moriarty and this is worth delving into: The 7 episodes podcast The Bog Shaman – Manchán Magan on John Moriarty.

Amanda Carmody´s memories of John Moriarty to be continued

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Photo credits: Photos 1 and 4 from top: John MacMonagle; Photo 3 from top: RT’É. Photos of  John Moriarty and family with friendly permission of Amanda Carmody; more footage is available on the website www.johnmoriarty.ie.

This story / page is available in: German