“…in ancient days first of the long-haired nations, on whose necks once flowed the auburn locks in pride supreme; And those who pacify with blood accursed savage Teutates, Hesus’ horrid shrines, and Taranis’ altars cruel as were those loved by Diana, goddess of the north; All these now rest in peace. And you, ye Bards, whose martial lays send down to distant times the fame of valorous deeds in battle done, pour forth in safety more abundant song. While you, ye Druids, when the war was done, to mysteries strange and hateful rites returned: To you alone ’tis given the gods and stars to know or not to know; secluded groves your dwelling-place, and forests far remote. If what ye sing be true, the shades of men seek not the dismal homes of Erebus or death’s pale kingdoms; but the breath of life still rules these bodies in another age…” Lucan – Pharsalia 1stC AD

Wild and semi-wild pigs played an important part in the rural economies and philosophies of the peoples of the Atlantic Iron Age. Europe (including Ireland) was once extensively forested, and the Eurasian Wild Boar (Sus scrofa) roamed and thrived in this environment. It was from these that most local varieties of domestic pig were bred, but domestic pigs only began to diverge seriously in appearance from their wild cousins during the course of the 18thC when foreign conquest and trade and the acceleration of agricultural breeding programmes introduced new external genetic traits. The Irish ‘Greyhound Pigs’ and Manx ‘Purrs’ (which had largely died out by the early 19thC) were such throwbacks to the Wild Boar, whose long snouts, long legs and hairy bodies were ideally suited to a semi-wild existence of foraging. Indeed, these formed the majority of wild pigs in Ireland and Mann, which were commonly found before the agricultural reforms of the late 18thC.

“… In the mountains they have also a small breed of swine called purrs or wild swine; not that they are ferae natura or wild, for every man knows his own; but because they are bred and live continually in the mountains without coming to their houses, and both these and the wild sheep are counted incomparable meat…” (Account of the Isle of Man by Bishop Thomas Wilson – from the 1722 edition of William Camden’s Britannia produced by Edmund Gibson, Lambeth.)

The same form of swine-husbandry was still prevalent in Ireland during this period, in continuity with methods extending right back into prehistory. As well as allowing the ‘fat of the land’ to infuse the pigs, turning them away in herds allowed the more domestic breeds to mate with the population of wilder varieties, which in turn encouraged genetic diversity and disease-hardiness. The appearance of these semi-wild Irish pigs was evidently not to the taste of Gerald of Wales who visited Ireland (as a high church official) in the wake of the armies of the Angevin king Henry II’s conquest of  Ireland during the 1180’s:

“… in no part of the world have I seen such abundance of boars and forest hogs. They are, however, small, misshapen, wary, no less degenerated by their ferocity and venomousness than by the formation of their bodies… ” Topographia Hiberniae, Giraldus Cambrensis (‘Gerald of Wales’ or Gerald de Barri).

These hogs, so vital to the supply of invading armies, were the ward of Ireland’s swineherds (muccoi/mucced/muiceadh) who looked after them in the forests. By this period (and especially with the ingress of Norman feudal culture), the memory of the importance of the office of swineherd was largely set in the pre-conversion era before the 5th/6thC, as evinced by the number of tales in which these colourful characters featured. At this time swineherds were evidently powerful and influential men.

The earliest encounter between christianity and swineherds is recorded in Muirchú moccu Machtheni‘s account of the christianisation of Ireland in his ‘Life of Patrick’ from the 7thC CE:

” …He and those who were with him in the boat landed at Inber Sláne, hid their small craft, and went a short distance inland in order to rest there. They were found by the swineherd of a man who was good by nature, although a pagan, whose name was Díchu. He lived in the place where there is now the barn named after Patrick. The swineherd, thinking they were thieves or robbers, went to tell his master Díchu (about them), and led him upon them unawares. Díchu had come with intent to kill them, but when he saw the face of holy Patrick the Lord changed his mind for the better, and Patrick preached the faith to him, and there and then he believed Patrick—the first man to do so—and the holy man stayed with him for a few days… ” (trans. L. Bieler)

Here, the swineherd is the first point of human contact between Patrick’s mission and an Irish pagan. Patrick goes on to convert the swineherd’s master, Dichu, who becomes the first Irish saint, and is sometimes characterised as the swineherd in some medieval martyrologies. Muirchú’s preamble to Patrick’s arrival contains a passage proclaiming that the druids of the King of Tara prophesied Patrick’s coming and the apparent downfall of paganism:

…In the days when this took place there was in those parts a great king, a fierce pagan, an emperor of non-Romans, with his royal seat at Tara, which was then the capital of the realm of the Irish, by name Loíguire son of Níall, a scion of the family that held the kingship of almost the entire island. He had around him sages and druids, fortune-tellers and sorcerers, and the inventors of every evil craft, who, according to the custom of paganism and idolatry, were able to know and foresee everything before it happened. There were two of these whom he preferred above all the others, whose names are these: Lothroch, also called Lochru, and Lucet Máel, also called Ronal; and these two, by their magical art, prophesied frequently that a foreign way of life was about to come to them, a kingdom, as it were, with an unheard-of and burdensome teaching, brought from afar over the seas, enjoined by few, received by many; it would be honoured by all, would overthrow kingdoms, kill the kings who offered resistance, seduce the crowds, destroy all their gods, banish all the works of their craft, and reign for ever. They also described the man who was to bring this way of life and to win them for it, and they prophesied about him in the following words, in the form, as it were, of a poem, which these men often recited, and especially during the two or three years immediately before the coming of Patrick. These are the words of the poem— not very intelligible, owing to the peculiarity of their language:

“… There shall arrive Shaven-Head,
with his stick bent in the head,
from his house with a hole in its head
he will chant impiety
from his table in the front of his house;
all his people will answer ‘Be it thus, be it thus’ …”

In our own language all this can be expressed more clearly. ‘When all this happens’ (the druids would say) ‘our kingdom, which is a pagan one, will fall.’ And so it happened afterwards: when Patrick came the worship of idols was abolished and the catholic Christian faith spread over our whole country…

This theme of prefiguration through the prophecies and visions of magicians seems to thread through the writings of Ireland’s early christians. Ireland’s curiously smooth transit from paganism to christianity obviously involved very little change to the social order, with hereditary religious functionaries likely continuing their traditional familial or clan vocations within the new framework. That swineherds  were considered holders of visionary and magical powers is highly interesting. Was there a connection between this office and druidism or religious hierophancy?

A good example of this theme, with obvious references to Muirchú’s prefigurative testimonies can be found in the 14thC Leabhar-na g-Ceart/Lebor na Cert, or ‘Book of Rights’ detailing the dues of the ancient kings of Cashel. It commences with fragments of an older story of the founding of Cashel (Senchas Fagbála Caisil – found in another manuscript: Dublin, Trinity College, H.3.17: V, pp. 768–73) as prophesied by the swineherds of two local magnates, whose language dates them between the 8th and 10th centuries. Here is Myles Dillon’s translation of the Lebor na Cert version, taken from CELT:

“… In the time of Corc son of Lugaid two swineherds happened to frequent that hill for a period of three months, masting their swine, for it was a ridge of forest. The names of the swineherds were Durdru, swineherd of the king of Éle, and Cularán, swineherd of the king of Múscraige. And they beheld a form as bright as the sun with a voice as sweet as the lute, blessing the hill and the place, and prophesying Patrick. And it said:

A good man shall reign
over lofty and venerable Cashel
in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Virgin
with the grace of the Holy Ghost.
A bishop stately and benign,
sage of all the world in judgement,
will fill Ireland of the angels with people of every rank
with many canonical orders in the service of gentle Christ.

That form was Patrick’s angel Victor prophesying Patrick, and proclaiming that the dignity and primacy of Ireland would be always in that place. Accordingly that is Patrick’s sanctuary and the principal stronghold of the king of Ireland. And the rent and service of the men of Ireland is due to the king of that place always, namely to the king of Cashel through the blessing of Patrick son of Calpurnius… ” (Trans. Myles Dillon)

Of course, the period of three months refers to the period between Lughnasadh and Samhain when the acorn and nut crops were lying on the forest floor and when visionary experiences might be available to errant and bored woodsmen through the use of certain drugs then available from the plant and fungal world. The name Durdru seems almost to be a metathesis of the word ‘Druid’ or variant of the old Irish word ‘Draoi‘ (magician), making the link between swineherds and magic that much more intriguing. The Senchas Fagbála Caisil text goes further in making this identification, also giving the name as ‘Druidriu’ and stating that he proclaimed the first king of Cashel (after the manner of a christian bishop), and his descendants – the Uí Druidrenn – maintained this hereditary right under the Eóganachta Kings of Cashel who ruled Munster between the 6th and 10th centuries. Cashel was, of course, one of the foremost centres of christian power in early medieval Ireland – the tale seems almost to boast of a continuity between druidism and the portable faith, which spread by associating itself with the courts of monarchs.

The theme of swineherds as magicians is part of the narrative associated with perhaps the most famous and celebrated of the Irish epic tales of the middle ages, namely the Táin Bó Cúailnge or ‘Cattle Raid of Cooley‘. It exists in parts in several important manuscripts – the Lebor na hUidre (‘Book of the Dun Cow’ created at the Abbey of Clonmacnoise in the 12thC), the Leabhar Buidhe Leacáin (‘Yellow Book of Lecan’ from the 14thC) and as fragments and side-tales in the 12thC Book of Leinster. The 12thC saw a flourishing in northern European literature and story-telling relating to the former pagan era, ensuring that further copies of original written variants were reproduced and survive to this day. This may have been a factor of the ingress of continental courtly culture and its interaction with the bardic traditions of Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

Although the linguistic style of the 12thC copies of the Táin are identifiable with 8th/9thC Irish, the subject matter is set in the pre-christian Iron Age, containing a number of motifs identifiable across Europe’s Pre-Roman cultures of the 1st millenium BCE, so it is generally believed to originate in this period. Chariot warfare, magical bulls and fairy queens all make an appearance alongside the brave celtic warriors who contest on liminal river banks and sacred hilltops like so many rutting stags. The prize of the battles is the fertility of the land, embodied in the form of the two bulls Donn Cúailnge and Finnbhennach, whose genesis is dealt with in a tale peripheral to the main story, known as De Chophur in dá Mucado – ‘Contest of the Two Swineherds’ – found in the aforementioned Book of Leinster.

Contest of the Two Swineherds:

Similar to the visionary swineherds of the Lebor na Cert and Senchas Fagbála Caisil texts, the two contesting ‘swineherds’ in the origin-story are actually two powerful magicians, whose job is to guard the flocks of semi-wild swine of two great lords when they are annually sent out to ‘pasture’ and fatten on the nut-crops of Ireland’s wild forests. The story revolves around their attempts to outdo one another in feats of magic, resulting in their successive transformations into combatting birds, sea-creatures, stags, men-at-arms, as two spirits (scáth) and finally worms which slither into the source-rivers of their masters’ territories where they are consumed by cows who become pregnant with the two bulls, who represent the final incarnation of the magicians. The pagan themes in this are striking.

These two bulls come to represent the goal for the warring parties of the Táin Bó (‘cattle-raid’): Conchobar Mac Nessa and Medb and Aillil of Connacht. The tale’s narratives are of the contests of men and women – consciously mirroring the territorial rutting of the animal kingdom. The subtext of having the magicians reincarnate as bulls in De Chophur in dá Mucado might be a medieval christian attempt to suggest that the pagan spirit lay at the heart of the inter-tribal warfare which appeared to be Ireland and the continental Celtic Iron Ages’s perennial curse, albeit that the pagan theme of regeneration through death was not entirely alien to christian doctrine…

As swineherds, these two wizards or druids represent the conduit between mankind and the ‘fat of the land’ – that on the backs of their hogs, who are fattened freely in the wilds. That the two start out sharing their masters’ forests to indulge each another’s pigs contains a message of unity, that is destroyed when they are set against each other in contests which ultimately create the two bulls, who become totemic prizes driving human (or Tuatha Dé Danann) folly. This was ultimately the folly which broke the back of Iron Age Celtic culture, after all…

Collectio Canonum Hibernensis

The ecclesiastical manuscript collection known as Collectio Canonum Hibernensis (dating from the 8thC CE) contains among its collection of continental and insular church statutes some interesting comments about the origins of customs in the Celtic church. One of the more fascinating of these claims that the ear-to-ear frontal tonsure of the early ‘Celtic’ church was copied from that worn by the swineherd of St Patrick’s (eventually converted) adversary Lóegaire mac Néill, King of Tara. In a note erroneously attributed to Gildas, the text says:

“…XI. THE ROMANS SAY: The tradition is that the tonsure of the British took its origin from Simon Magus, whose tonsure reached only from ear to ear, following the very excellence of the tonsure of sorcerers, by which only the fore part of the forehead was wont to be covered. But that the first originator of this tonsure in Ireland was a swine-herd of King Loegaire mac Neill, is made evident by the word of Patrick. From him nearly all the Irish assumed this tonsure…” (translation from Latin by Hugh Williams, 1899)

The Saxon church’s ‘Roman’ opinion that followers of Simon Magus originated the Celtic style of tonsure is directly compared here to the Irish account that Loegaire’s swineherd wore this tonsure, and was therefore probably considered a magician or sorceror. No extant hagiography of Patrick survives to confirm the Collectio Canonum Hibernensis comment, although Patrick is said by Muirchú to have worked as a swineherd himself after being enslaved in Ireland during his early life. In the 12thC hagiography of Patrick by Jocelyn of Furness (designed for the Anglo-Norman conquerors, and their Hiberno-Norse cousins in the Isle of Man), the Isle of Man was won from the pagan magician ‘Melinus’ who pretended to fly into the air after the manner of Simon Magus. Patrick evidently enjoyed visionary experiences from guiding spirits while in his captive rôle as a swineherd, albeit that the swineherd appears to have been something of an elite vocation in ancient Irish society, causing us to question Patrick’s original true vocation:

“… An angel used to come to him regularly on the seventh day of every week, and as one man talks to another so Patrick enjoyed the angel’s conversation. Even when, at the age of sixteen, Patrick had fallen into captivity and spent six years in servitude, the angel came thirty times to meet him, and he enjoyed the angel’s counsels and their conversations before he went from Ireland to the Latins. He used to pray a hundred times during the day, and a hundred times during the night. One day, when tending swine, he lost them and the angel came to him and showed him where the swine were. One day after the same angel had talked to him about many things he placed his foot on the rock of Scirit opposite Slíab and ascended in his presence, and the footprint of the angel can be seen in the rock to the present day…” (trans. L. Bieler)

So why the connection between swineherds and magic?

The era of the early Celtic christian church crosses over with that of the decay of the late Roman Empire and its western authority, which was in turn coupled to the resurgence of indigenous cultural movements within the Romanised portions of the northwest European Celtic polities. One of these in particular was that of the Armorican Bagaudae or Bacaudae of late Roman Gaul – rebellious rural insurgents who challenged the power of Imperial Rome, and who provided a cause for which 5thC christian bishop (and mentor of Patrick), Germanus of Auxerre, was able to leverage social, political and (no doubt) cultural influence. To the elements of Gaulish society opposed to Roman power, this ‘grass-roots’ movement (so far as we can tell from our biased Roman sources) might have resonated somewhat with the marginal swineherds and Déisi tribes of Ireland, from the point of view of her continentally-oriented evangelists.

The ‘swineherd’ of ancient Ireland was more akin to a more modern cowboy of America’s ‘wild west’, tasked with driving herds of pigs from domestic corrals for fattening on the ‘mast’ crop of acorns, chestnuts and beech nuts in the forests which used to cover Ireland. As well as guarding these flocks, they served (as in the tale of the arrival of Patrick’s mission) as guardians and representatives of local lords at the peripheries of their territories. Swineherds were also engaged with hunting and retrieving these pigs at the end of the masting season before the swine-slaughtering periods which were around the time of Samhain in Autumn, and in late springtime leading up to Beltain. Swineherds were therefore important guardians of a region’s wealth and territorial integrity – significant heroes with great animal-hunting and trapping skills, who worked close to the liminal and magical zone of interface with the natural world. The idea of men turned away for a period into the wilds as hunter-warriors, living by the primal laws of nature is in every way evocative of the ancient and popular narrative tradition of Fionn mac Cumhaill and his band of Fianna…

The position of ‘swineherd’ was therefore one combining the skills of both herding, hunting and trapping and was therefore far from a lowly job, but one of extreme skill, bravery and dexterity. Culturally during the European Iron Age and well into the medieval period, the boar-hunt was one of the highest acheivements of hunting skill and bravery, as these creatures were the epitome of tenacity, strength and savagery when cornered. The swineherd was, in this context, a prime embodiment of the protector-provider hero-archetype, versed in the magical mysteries of nature.

The boar was an iconic cult animal of the Celtic tribes of Europe: As well as seeking in the cthonic realms of earth for their food, wild pigs fed and fattened on the crops of trees, which were also potent archetypal symbols of ancestral continuity and the forces of natural regeneration. Conceptually, trees were also linked to the branching nature of springs, streams, and rivers, and – to the Celts at least – notions of the regenerating and returning Otherworld realm. The appearance of boars and serpents in the art of the Celtic Iron Age hints at the cthonic mysteries – both are ‘fanged’ and hunt upon the surface and in the recesses of the earth. Both shun human contact but can be deadly when cornered. Both represented the forces of regeneration inherent in the earth’s mysteries.

The connection between Druids and Swineherds:

Reading between the lines of Ireland’s early christian stories and more secular traditions such as the Táin, it is apparent that the ‘swineherd’ may in fact be a literary codification of the Atlantic tradition’s druids. Such an identity works on many levels:

(i) Judaeo-Christian distaste for swine as ‘unclean’.

(ii) Swine-herding was prevalent over shepherding in the Irish agricultural traditions. The use of the ‘shepherd’ archetype as applied to christian missionaries must therefore, in Ireland’s case, be subverted into a similar ‘local’ archetype. Due to the biblical negativity towards swine, this metaphor never really connected with the later christian mission. The ‘event horizon’ of Patrick necessarily erases any heretical or syncretic forms of christianity existing in Ireland before his ministry, the ‘Brigitine’ church, being one example of this, another being Pelagianism: ‘Gentile’ or ‘Paganus’ were terms used by metropolitan early christians of the Roman world to describe the rural peoples who chose the Old Religions. The idea of pagan religious leaders living with their herds of ‘little pigs’ out in the wilds was almost the ideal metaphor for Ireland itself, living as it did outside of the Romanised world of late antiquity.

(iii) Swineherds are identified with magicians and both of these are identified with pagan barbarian kings. In the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the swineherd-magicians become identities of the earth’s fertility (and, to give a christian subtext to matters), with conflict and unstability. The early christian monk and author Gildas (De Excidio Brittonum) portrays the violence, conflict and instability of his age (5thC CE) as being mediated by pagans, perhaps as instruments of god’s wrath for the improper piety of christians! In contrast to this turmoil, the christianisation of Ireland under Patrick is portrayed as being a smooth transition untouched by the anxieties besetting Britain which experienced the settlement and invasions of the pagan Angles, Saxons and Jutes with considerably less ease. In Ireland, the ‘swineherds’ of the peripheries became the ‘shepherds’ working out of the seats of royal power, establishing abbeys in towns as well as far-away dysarts.

(iv) St Patrick was a swineherd in his early life in Ireland, his coming is prophesied by magicians and the first pagan he meets upon returning to Ireland is a swineherd. His ‘guardian angel’ Victor is first met when he is in Ireland working as a swineherd. Victoria was the Roman goddess of victory and overcoming death, popular in the late Empire even after the advent of christianity. She was cognate with Bellona, a war-goddess possibly influenced by or related to the Celtic war-god Belenos. The boar, savage in its own defence, was also an archetype of overcoming death among the Celtic peoples. A druid called Milúch moccu Bóin (his former captor) is the first man Patrick goes to seek out and convert upon his arrival in Ireland, according to Muirchú’s 7thC account of his ministry. Some of Patrick’s earliest successors had names invoking the memory of the wild magician-swineherds: Mochae, Mochtae and Mochua, for example…

So those ‘swineherds’ may well have just been druids – Ireland’s alternative to the ‘good shepherds’ of middle eastern and continental christianity. It appears that in order to survive the change in power which came, under christianity, to rest in kings rather than gods, that they chose (in Ireland) to become the ministers of a new religious hegemony. The focus of religious power shifted from the wilds – hilltops, forests and sacred springs, where the liminal ‘other’ was sought and mysteries expressed – into the heart of habitation. Druids and their herds of ‘little pigs’ munching upon the acorns of holy trees and drinking from sacred springs, became Abbotts and their monks feeding from another authority – that of the written word, and power not from nature, but from the world of men…