Did I Meet a Former Self at Cashel?
Did I Meet a Former Self at Cashel?
So there I was, young and bouncy, tripping happily up the hill to Cashel, a place of majesty and mystery, where eons ago Irish Kings and Queens ruled by the Brehon Laws that were among the most human and humane laws ever written.
Cashel was the stuff of legends, so I was expecting to fall in love with the great castle that loomed ahead of me at the end of my climb, even though all that was left was a mighty ruin… crumbling evidence of the grandeur that had once ruled a kingdom. How much of Ireland’s turbulent history had been witnessed by these formidable walls in nearly a thousand years?
A Vision
I was feeling oddly disoriented as I climbed. The higher the elevation, the more certain I was that something wasn’t right. Was it me or was it the place, I asked myself? The past and present seemed to be overlapping somehow and bot
h were slipping in and out of focus.
The small pleasant man who seemed to be the general factotem of the place asked if something was amiss.
“I’m not sure,” I answered. “It just looks wrong to me. I think I’m looking for the little church and the scriptorium.” That was peculiar…I didn’t even know if there was a scriptorium here.
I spoke hesitantly, not knowing why in the world I’d said that, but suddenly needing to know where it was.
“Oh, you mean Cormac’s Chapel,” he answered knowingly. “What’s left of it is behind the larger structure. Let me show you the way.”
Cormac’s Chapel
He led me beyond the great ruin of the castle to a chapel with a whitewashed
interior… it had been hidden by the larger structure.
I stared around me again, bewildered and by now, quite off balance. “But where are all the beautiful paintings?” I asked, staring up into the dead white walls a
nd ceiling of the church’s knave. In my “other vision” the place was alive with religious paintings that covered the walls and ceiling.
“Oh, well now, lass,” he answered sadly, “and weren’t they all painted over when Cromwell marched through with his blackguard soldiers? He said the paintings were sinful Papist heresy and painted over every last one.”
Who am I…?
I nodded acceptance of that explanation, as a second wave of unnerving disorientation folded over me. Weirdly, my 28-year-old body was taking on decades in some way I couldn’t fathom. Born with a caul, into a psychic-ly inclined Irish family who took such things in stride, I’d had many clairvoyant experiences in life like those of Cait in LARK’S LABYRINTH and Maggie in BLESS THE CHILD but had never felt so aged by any of them!
Now, my knees ached, my back felt arthritic, I was chilled to the bone. I was experiencing myself as a woman of middle age. I had morphed, it seemed – I was taller, older, less agile, less fecund and far more tired! I felt worried and anxious and seemed clad in a floor length woolen dress of some homespun woolen fabric, thoroughly bilocated now to another time.
In the here and now, I was staring at the remnants of an ancient spiral staircase and wondering how I would reach the scriptorium above.
The Scriptorium
The guide cocked his head to look at me quizzically. After all, he was Irish, too, and Second Sight was an accepted gift that could show up at the oddest times, so perhaps he guessed.
“Some say King Carmac died in
the scriptorium at the top of that old stair,” he said. “’Twas a woman who found him but there’s some controversy about whether he was married or celibate. He was a Bishop, part-time, but the boundaries in those days were different from now.”
In a heartbeat, a scene coalesced for me and I was suffused with such sorrow, I thought I might faint if I didn’t get outside, so I stumbled through the door, taking off my shoes to ground myself as I sometimes have to do after a psychic vision. (Chocolate also does the grounding trick. Most of the mystics I know carry some, just in case.)
I have no idea if this vision was true or even if the woman in it was me! Perhaps the essence of some long ago scene simply still clung there and I had picked up it’s frequency. Whatever the case, all these years later, and now knowing from experience, just how valid were the physical changes I had experienced that day, the event is still vivid in my memory.
Conclusion?
The veil between the worlds is thinner in Ireland than elsewhere. There’s a fluidity to the energy not quite like any other I’ve experienced. You just never know what will bleed through from history.
But I can tell you this: I was in my 20’s when this happened and I had never before realized or even imagined what being 20 or 30 years older would feel like. I know now we don’t catalogue on a day to day basis the myriad losses and infirmities as they accumulate with the years. But to go from 25 to 45 in a matter of minutes makes the differences abundantly clear. It was a revelation that’s helped me to understand that what befalls us is tempered not just by location and circumstance but by the physicality of our own age as an observer.
The Cashel Connection
I’ve wondered since – did I meet myself that day in an earlier incarnation at Cashel? Or had my fertile imagination simply conjured the scene from bits and pieces I’d read about the storied fortress through the years?
I’ll never know for certain. But what has stayed with me through the several decades since that moment is the fact that I was not merely seeing the event unfold, but I was feeling it so viscerally. It made me realize how carelessly we accept the perfection of youth, never knowing the losses that will come with age.
It was a good lesson… I don’t think I ever took youth or my body for granted after that strange experience. Afterwards, I found myself saying prayers for the soul of a weary king, slumped over a writing desk in a long ago scriptorium, as if I’d known him well in life.
I say them still.
