C Chulainn in the GPO:

The Mythic Imagination of Patrick Pearse

By Michael O'Meara

But where can we draw water,

Said Pearse to Connolly,
When all the wells are parched away?
O plain as plain can be
Theres nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree.
W. B. Yeats
On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, while all Europe was mobilized for the first of its terrible
civil wars, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, and several hundred militia men from the Irish
Citizen Army and the Nationalist Volunteers commandeered the General Post Office on Dublins
OConnell (then Sackville) Street.
Once a defensive parameter was established around the stately, neo-classical symbol of British
rule, the tall, lanky 37-year-old Pearse, titular head of the self-proclaimed provisional
government of the Irish Republic, appeared on the GPOs steps to read out to a small crowd of
bewildered and skeptical by-standers a proclamation.
Irishmen and Irishwomen: In the name of God and the dead generations from which she
receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag
and strikes for her freedom.
This line the entire proclamation, even is a work of art.
Some say the Uprising itself was a work of art.
***
As the GPO was being fortified on the 24th, 700 or 800 lightly-armed rebels, most with shotguns
and home-made bombs, some with rifles secretly obtained from Germany (the same gallant
ally in Europe who allied with the IRA in the next European civil war) spread out across
Dublin, occupying other public buildings and sites associated with the Crown.
The Uprising was not a direct military assault on British authority per se (the rebels lacked the
firepower). It was nevertheless an armed assertion of Irish authority an authority however
poorly armed that was nevertheless imbued with a powerful idea the idea that does not tire or
break and that imparts its mantle of strength upon those in its service the idea of destiny
(Francis Parker Yockey).
***
The English garrison in Ireland, larger than the garrison that held India, was caught entirely

off-guard by the insurrection.

There was good reason for this.
In 1914 the Irish Parliamentary Party had not only pledged to support the British government, as
Germany challenged its supremacy on the killing fields of Flanders and Northern France, the
party called on its paramilitary wing, the 170,000 strong Irish Volunteers, to enlist in the British
army. (The ten to twenty thousand Volunteers who refused to follow the IPPs lead, those
rechristened the Nationalist Volunteers, were to be the Uprisings principal military arm,
though their mobilization, for reasons too complicated to explain here, was countermanded at the
last moment).
The Irish people, one of the most dispossessed and economically distressful of Europes peoples,
were enjoying a brief spell of good times, as employment and agriculture flourished in the wake
of the British war effort.
Westminster had also promised to implement Home Rule, once the war ended.
Ireland never seemed more securely in English hands.
***
The rebellion was greeted with surprise and rage by both the British government and the Irish
population.
This would change, as the government turned the rebels into martyrs, snatching political defeat
from the jaws of military victory.
In the view of much of the world, especially among the popular classes of nationalist-minded
Irish-America, the forces of the crown were seen as reacting with characteristic English brutality,
as their powerful naval guns pounded Britains second most important city, destroying the GPO
and much of the citys heart, as well as wounding or killing a thousand civilians
James Connolly, that most Aryan of Marxists, had thought the British forces, beholden to
English capital, would never turn their guns on their own commercial property: Little did he
know and little did he realize that his sophisticated understanding of urban warfare would
crumble before this fact.
Ground troops, supported by field artillery, then suppressed the lingering rebellion on the streets
though not before Pearse ordered a general surrender, once it was clear civilians were the
main victim of Britains crushing counter-attack.
***
Like most of the six armed rebellions the Irish had raised in the previous 200 years, there was a
good deal of futility and desperation in the Easter Uprising begun on Monday and
extinguished, at least so everyone thought, by the following Saturday.
Pearse, Connolly, and much of the Irish Republican Brotherhood responsible for the insurrection
had, in fact, no illusion that they would succeed or even survive the Uprising.

Once rounded up, the fifteen nationalist leaders of the revolt were court-martialed and shot.
Dear, dirty Dublin came, then, to resemble the war-ravaged towns and cities along the
Franco-German front, as the cause of Irish freedom seemed to suffer another damning setback.
Yet five years later, Ireland was a nation once again.
***
Like much of the Uprisings revolutionary nationalist leadership, Pearse sought a path that led
away not just from British rule, but from British modernity which, like its larger civilizational
expression, seemed to suffocate everything heroic and great in life.
Against the empires cold mechanical forces, he arrayed the powerful mythic pulse of the ancient
Gaels.
As Carl Schmitt might have described it: Against the mercantilist image of balance there
appears another vision, the warlike image of a bloody, definitive, destructive, decisive battle.
Pearse was not alone in thinking myth superior to matter.
Indeed, his Ireland was Europe in microcosm the Europe struggling against the forces of the
coming anti-Europe.
In Germany, no less than in Ireland, powerful cultural movements based on peasant mythology
and traditional culture had arisen to repulse the modern world movements which did much to
revive the spirit of Western Civilization (before it was again struck down by the ethnocidal Pax
Americana).
In Germany this movement frontally challenged the continental status quo, in Ireland it
challenged the British Empire.
Lacking a political alternative, the frustrated national unity of 19th-century Germany had
looked to increase its cultural cohesion and self-consciousness.
Like its German counterpart, Irelands Celtic Twilight was part of a larger European movement
of a romantic and romanticizing nationalism to revive the ancient Volk culture in its
struggle against the anti-national forces of money and modernity.
Though the Famine had delayed the movements advent in Ireland, it came.
The cultural phase of Irish nationalism formally began with Parnells fall in 1889. Turning away
from the personal and political tragedy of their uncrowned king, nationalists started re-thinking
their destiny in other than political terms.
If the Germans, in the cultural assertion of their nationalism, had to free themselves from the
overwhelming hegemony of French culture, the Irish had to turn away from the English, who
considered them barbarians.
In rejected liberal modernity, these barbarians sought to recapture something of the archaic,
Aryan spirit still evident in the Tin B Cuailnge and in Wagners Der Ring des Nibelungen

the spirit distilled today in Guillaume Fayes archeofuturism.

***
Before Parnell, Irish resistance to English subjugation (with the exception of OConnells
movement) had taken the form of numerous, rather badly planned military defeats.
But the Irish had little recourse, especially in law. (Indeed, the only justice for the Irishman in
Ireland came from his shillelagh, whenever it took precedent over the judges gavel).
Centuries of Irish violence and resistance had convinced the English of Irish lawlessness and of
their incapacity for self-rule.
Savage English repression begot savage Irish resistance, which, in turn, begot savage repression
and so on: The long, unfortunate, blood-soaked dialectic of Anglo-Irish relations.
The empires violence was legitimated in the name of cultural superiority. Throughout British
society, which thought itself the height of Western civilization, it was held that Ireland before the
Norman Conquest had lacked any form of civilization or High Culture even the learned David
Hume held this view. Indeed, the Irish were seen as yet fully civilized.
In British eyes this race was a lesser breed, somewhat like a nonwhite one, like wild Indians,
and imperial conflict with it was something like conflict with a savage tribe it was not the
relationship Paris had to her provinces, it was not even what the German Hapsburgs had to their
Slavic nations.
The Catholic Irish are famous in 19th-century English periodicals for their simian features.
The lawless Celts (the very word comes from the Greek for fighter), so obviously inferior to
the civilized Saxons, brought upon themselves thus the rent racking, the enclosures, and the
garrison state that came with the English occupation (the so-called Union).
***
William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, and other gifted members of the
Anglo-Irish Ascendancy had no love for the worlds workshop, longing, as they did, for the
integral community of the old manorial days.
The Irish Literary Renaissance was launched, following Parnells fall, with The Wanderings of
Oisin, in which Yeats called for a new literature, a new philosophy, and a new nationalism.
Irish folklore for Yeats was not simply Irish, but the conservator of an ancient, sacred
worldview overwhelmed by the abstract, highly differentiated, and generally ignoble forms of
modern bourgeois life (forms, as we Americans have learned, that have, among other negative
things, imbued money-changing aliens with great power over us).
For Irelands cultural nationalists, the past was a realm of meaning prefiguring a future to
rebuke the present. And a great past, which the culturalist nationalists soon enough discovered,
beckoned, as William Irwin Thompson surmised, a future fit for an exalted heritage.
The romanticized peasant, along with the medieval knight and the gentleman cavalier, were

celebrated in Yeats poetic rebellion against the modern world.

This nationalization of the peoples heritage appealed to nationalists disgusted with things
English; its moralistic rejection of decadence and empire also appealed to the emerging Irish
Catholic lower-middle class; at the highest, most important, level, its mythic vision organically
merged with a culture that renews itself by reference to its mythology.
By the early 20th century, a new ideology gripped Ireland, Germany, and many European
nations, an ideology which defined the nation in racialist, romantic, and anti-modernist terms
centered on certain cultural polarities: viz., anti-liberal versus liberal, past v. present, agricultural
community v. industrial society, small moral nation v. decadent world empire, myth v. reason,
quality v. quantity, Gaelic v. English, German v. French, Ireland v. England, Europeans v.
Anglo-Americans, etc.
***
The hard men of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (the Fenians, the progenitors of the many
factions making up todays IRA, were very unlike the genteel Anglo-Irish artists who made
Dublin a cultural capital of the Anglophone world) but they too were part of the general revolt
against liberal civilization against the devirilizing tenets of positivist thought, against the
primacy of monetary values, against the spirit-killing effects of mechanization, massification,
and deracination, and, above all, against the empires imposition on everything native to Irish
identity.
In France, Italy, and Spain rebels opposing liberalisms realm of consummate meaninglessness
threw bombs, in Ireland, where the cult of violence was ancient, they made up an army of
bomb-throwers for it was the nation seeking to be born, ourselves alone, not the solitary
resister, who filled the rebel ranks.
Violence and self-sacrifice, as such, needed no justification in Catholic Ireland (though they
seemed totally alien and barbaric to Englands liberal Protestants).
***
Irelands brave rebels are best seen against a European backdrop.
At its center was the Sorelian myth of violence, imagining the overthrow of Cromwells cursed
regime.
This myth of violence was no ideology, but a Nietzschean assertion of will.
Its dreamscape was the apocalyptic catastrophe in which all things became possible.
Its promised violence wasnt aimless or nihilistic, like that of a Negro hoodlum, but
soteriological, seeking the salvation of mans soul in a world made especially evil by the efficacy
of science and reason.
***
Violence here in the mythic context of Pearses imagination and in the social-political world

of late 19th-century, early 20th-century Europe became a path to a new faith a path that
ran over the ruins of modernity, as it endeavored to redeem it.
The Irish cosmological view, in Patrick OFarrells study, perceived England as a secular,
unethical, money-grubbing power that had violated Caithlin Ni Houlihan the Old Woman
of Beare, Roisin Dubb, Shan Van Vocht, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Queen Sive, and all the
feminine symbols personifying Irelands perennial spirit.
In such a cosmology, national liberation was eschatological, millenarian, and, above all, mythic.
For here myth seizes the mind of the faithful as it prepares them to act. Its idea is apocalyptic,
looking toward a future that can come about only through a violent destruction of what already
exists.
Pearses myth was of a noble Ireland won by violent, resolute, virile action nothing less
would merit his blood sacrifice.
Fusing the unique synergy of millenarian Catholicism (with its martyrs), ancient pagan myth
(with its heroes), and a spirit of redemptive violence (couched in every recess of Irish culture)
his myth has since become the ideological justification for the physical force tradition of Irish
republicanism a tradition which holds that no nation can gain its freedom except through
force of arms that is, by taking it by forthrightly asserting it in the Heideggerian sense of
realizing the truth of its being.
Pearses allegiance to armed struggle came with his disgust with parliamentary politics. He
thought Parnells party had sat too long at the English table that it had come to regard Irish
nationality as a negotiable rather than a spiritual thing.
All states, he considered, rested on force. If Ireland should be freed through Home Rule, that
is, under British auspices, it would make the Irish smug and loyal and British.
With the advent of the Great War of 1914 and the Burgfrieden negotiated between the
parliamentary nationalists of the IPP and the British government, the flame of Irelands national
spirit began to dim.
The violent break with Britain, which Pearse and other revolutionary nationalists sought, was
inspired by the conviction that every compromise weakened Irelands soul and strength that
the flame had always to burn heroically that the spirit had to be pure otherwise the
sacramental lustre of the Republican cause would be lost.
***
The tradition of armed resistance of which Pearse became the leading Irish symbol was not
unique to Ireland, but part the same European tradition that inspired the Slavic Communist
storming of the Winter Palace, the same that guided the anti-liberal, fascist, and national socialist
opposition to liberalisms interwar regimes the same that appears still on the hard streets of
Northern Ireland and in the minds of a small number of exceptional Europeans.
For Pearse, the Uprising was more than a blow struck for Irish freedom, it was a revolt against
the materialistic, rationalistic, and all-too-modern world of the British Empire.

Pearse was not unlike Charles Pguy, who too conceived of a national myth to stand against the
modernist tide.
Pguy: Nothing is as murderous as weakness and cowardice / Nothing is as humane as
firmness.
This was Pearses thought, exactly.
***
Such a mythic conviction came, though, at a high cost, for it required a willful self-immolation
and the promise of death, however heroic.
***
Pearses conviction sprang from Irelands long history of resistance and the Aryo-European spirit
it reflected, but it also came from the old sagas, from the stories and legends of the ancient Gaels,
that celebrated the values and traditions of Irelands heroic age.
Prior to the modern age Irelands Gaelic vernacular literature was the largest of any European
peoples, except that of the Greeks and Romans.
The Irish loved to tell stories, a great many of which their monks wrote down a thousand years
ago.
Like other Gaelic-speaking nationalists, Pearse was especially affected by the Ulster Cycle of
legends and myths associated with C Chulainn the symbol of Ireland the symbol of one
powerful man standing alone against a terrible, overwhelming force the Irish Achilles
whose heroic temper was a rebuke to the corruptions and weaknesses of the modern age.
***
In August 1915, a year into the European civil war, and three-quarters of a year before the Easter
Uprising, the IRB staged a ceremonial burial for one of its own in a country where ceremonial
burials have often given birth to new forms of life.
In his funeral oration at the grave side of the dead Fenian, ODonovan Rossa, the C Chulainn
(who would soon fight his epic battle in the GPO) augured that: Life springs from death and
from the graves of patriot men and women spring nations. . . . They [the English] think that they
have pacified Ireland. They think that they have pacified half of us and intimidated the other half.
They think that they have provided against everything: but the fools, the fools, the fools! they
have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be
at peace.
Man, in Pearses mythic imagination, doesnt act on the chance of being successful, but for the
sake of doing what needs to be done. The nationalist movement, united in hatred of the English
ruling class, was full of such men.
Their doing, their sacrifice like that of Jesus on the cross or the tragic C Chulainn burying
his son in the indifferent sea tide was of utmost importance.

For everything, the rebels knew, would follow from it the slaughtered sheep brightening the
sacramental flame of their spirit.
***
Some historians claim Pearses suicidal insurrection bequeathed a sense of moral conviction
to revolutionaries all over the world.
From a military perspective, the Uprising, of course, was a categorical failure. But morally, it
became something of a world-changing force which wasnt surprising in a country like
Ireland, whose mythology had long favored ennobling failures.
As Pearse told the military tribunal that condemned him to death: We seem to have lost. We
have not lost. To refuse to fight would have been to lose. We have kept faith with the past, and
handed down a tradition to the future.
***
In the course of the extraordinary events following The Proclamation (as the rebels kept faith
with their past), mind, imagination, and myth fused into a synergetic force of unprecedented
brilliance and power the terrible beauty being born.
***
Patrick Pearse fell before the English guns soon after Easter, but the ennobling image of him
standing upright in the burning GPO lives on in the heritage he willed not just to Irishmen but to
all white men.
For of the insurgents, at least fifty of them, including Pearse himself, were of mixed
Irish-English parentage.
They fought the cruel empire not just for Irelands sake, but for the sake of redeeming, in
themselves, something of the old Aryo-Gaelic ways.
April 24, 2010
Sources:
Thomas M. Coffey, Agony at Easter: The 1916 Irish Uprising (Baltimore: Penguin, 1971).
Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (New York: Taplinger, 1978).
Sean Farrell Moran, Patrick Pearse and the Politics of Redemption (Washington: Catholic
University Press of America, 1994).
Joseph OBrien, Dear, Dirty Dublin: 18991916 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1982).
Patrick OFarrell, Irelands English Question (New York: Schocken, 1971).
Dith hgin, The Lore of Ireland (Cork: Boydell, 2006).

William Irwin Thompson, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 (New York:
Harper, 1967).