‘The greatest Irish thinker you’ve never read?’ ventures one Irish Times headline on John Moriarty. Beyond the hesitant hyperbole is a legitimate question about where writer, mystical philosopher, and Irish-language enthusiast and mythologist Moriarty sits—or could sit—in Ireland’s cultural canon. In one sense, the answer is clear: firmly outside it, by design and by circumstance. The title of a newly-reissued anthology of excerpts from across his full body of work is, after all, A Hut at the Edge of the Village. In his introduction, editor Martin Shaw tells readers that he chose the title to reflect an indigenous custom of bringing those who ‘start to get reckless, start to push against the confines of the tribe’ to a refuge in a dark wood or high mountain; at the fringes of their society, they are forced to encounter something new, other, and greater than themselves and their culture. Moriarty writes from this edge, in marginal musings and forms. ‘I had to write as I felt, as I thought, and if this is difficult, so be it,’ he once said. ‘There might be the odd person who’d find what I was saying worthwhile. But I knew I was writing books that were publicly both unreadable and unpublishable.’ Then again, Moriarty has always had a devoted if modest audience: he has been championed by Lilliput Press since the early 1990s, regularly gave public lectures and presented the RTÉ radio programme ‘The Blackbird and the Bell’, and, in his Guardian obituary in 2007, artist Peter Clare classed his investigations of the Irish—and universal—soul and psyche as ‘comparable to Yeats, Joyce and Beckett’. And at a moment of broader Irish cultural reckoning with the legacies of language, land, and religion, the curious work of this outsider thinker seems especially timely. Moriarty’s writing seeks to offer an antidote to modern life: the madness of capitalism, the stifling conventions of tradition, the polarisation inherent in religious and spiritual life. The value of his vision is in its pantheism, its refusal to accept the ideological exceptionalism at the heart of most religions, most systems of thought—in short, its refusal of doctrine or orthodoxy. The most obvious gift of A Hut at the Edge of the Village is that it offers a window into the life and mind of someone who eschewed society’s dictates in favour of honouring a life of solitude and deep spirituality, a writer whose work brings together wide-ranging and transcendent religious, philosophical, and literary knowledge with a deep attention to local stories, eco-consciousness, and myth.
Moriarty was one of those rare writers who dared to live out the radical philosophies he espoused. He took the kind of risks professional philosophers can only speculate about, pursuing a slow, radical simplicity incompatible with academic life and its scramble for tenure and publication. Following a Philosophy and Logic degree and a six-year stint teaching the history of European ideas at the University of Manitoba, he abandoned academia and returned to his native west of Ireland to work as a gardener, hoping one day to found a Christian monastic ‘hedge school’. In an interview just before his death in 2006, Moriarty described a time when he lived on the streets of London in an attempt to reject the capitalist system entirely. In all of this, he never tried to be a professional writer, so to speak; he was drawn to exploring his interest in the mystical and often esoteric in the forms he saw fit, without the carrot of public recognition. He published seven books across his lifespan: perhaps his best-known work is the ‘Turtle Was Gone a Long Time’ trilogy, released between 1996 and 1999, which ventures across a dizzying span of topics ranging from Ancient Egyptian eschatology to Dante’s Inferno, from the voyage of Pequod to the casting out of Ishmael. Chunks of writing from the ‘Turtle’ trilogy are included in A Hut at the Edge of the Village, accompanied by excerpts from across his range of work including his first published book, Dreamtime (1994); his alternative parallel Irish history, Invoking Ireland/Ailiu Iath n-hErend (2005); his voyage-to-the-underworld story Night Journey To Buddh Gaia (2006); and his multi-volume autobiography Nostos (2001) and What the Curlew Said: Nostos Continued (2007).
The anthology arranges excerpts from Moriarty’s writings thematically: chapters include ‘On Place’, ‘On Hugeness’, ‘On Story’, ‘On Ecology’, ‘On Christianity’, ‘On Sore Amazement’. The collaged reflections from different works can read like notebook musings and some can seem inaccessible. At times, navigating Moriarty’s rapid-fire yet lightly sketched literary and philosophical references feels like deciphering snippets. In part, though, this difficulty may stem from our growing distance from the spiritual and mythological forms of speech he invokes. In a passage taken from Night Journey To Buddh Gaia, Moriarty reflects on the ‘root language’ of the ‘big myths’ and ‘big wisdom stories’ and ‘how sad it is that we so rarely speak it or, as Heidegger might say, how sad it is that we so rarely allow ourselves to be spoken by it’. The same excerpt includes quick nods to the ‘mutations and dispersals of Babel’ and references to T. S. Eliot’s Madame Sosostris and Prufrock. Like many in the collection, the passage demands a pause (and often a search) to fully grasp its intertextual depths. Despite the sometimes frustrating cerebral gymnastics, this complexity allows Moriarty to animate ideas that are often flattened by academic abstraction. It also allows him to move deftly between contexts; the anthology is like a cauldron bubbling with Lakshmi and lotus blossoms, whirling dervishes and speechless prayer, solstice spears and sepulchral floors. As Shaw puts it, Moriarty is an ‘associative mythographer’ who writes as if speaking in a heightened delirium from the chaise longue. A Hut at the Edge of the Village feels something like the intellect of Charles Taylor crossed with the imagination of Joseph Campbell and the madcap vision of the Beguines. It is a book for those who enjoy a puzzle.
Moriarty’s work returns again and again to a recognition of how apparently disparate traditions are grounded in the same notion of the divine. He emphasises striking ties between Vedanta, Buddhism, and Christian mysticism. Several of the pieces invoke Vedanta, a school of Hindu philosophy concerned with the ultimate nature of reality and consciousness. Moriarty reminds us that the Vedantic way of approaching God through negation and divine union through non-attachment mirrors Christian mysticism, where a form of kenosis or self-emptying is fundamental to experiencing God’s immanence. His sense of unity in the multiplicity of spiritual traditions is perhaps clearest in an excerpt from the third volume of the Turtle trilogy. Here, he tells us of a Buddhist Zen master giving his disciple, ‘a man who despaired of the West’, a Bible, to show that peace can be found in all cultures, that divinity resides within all nothings and all nowheres, as in the instant a Zen koan opens the mind to a truth contained within seemingly opposing fields of vision. ‘The master telling him, find it in your own tradition. The master telling him, walk your own songline. The master telling him, you don’t need to go to O’Brien’s Bridge. It is under the flagstone inside your own door.’ The ‘mystical journey’, Moriarty warns, must be realised not through the intellect but the immediacy of life itself.
Shaw’s introduction to the chapter ‘On Story’ points us back to this immediacy: ‘Everyone is asking for a story, a new story, a big story. As if the wayward choreography of our life counts for nothing. As if we didn’t have the red mud of myth on our hooves to begin with.’ What follows is a piece from the Turtle trilogy that this time situates the mystical decisively outside of parochial Christian tradition and inside the land. Here, spirituality comes up against the staid values of the Catholic Church when the character Big Mike, a fisherman who has ‘had a rough crossing somewhere’, explains to a pious member of his small island village that he believes in ‘something more divine than God’. If the islanders are initially unnerved that ‘he wasn’t rowing in behind Christ’, Big Mike’s stories of the banalities of sea and turf finally make them realise that they are in the presence of a ‘kind of holiness Christianity has never recognized’. Here and elsewhere, Moriarty revels in the apparent contradictions of a divinity more divine than God, one that draws out the extraordinary within the ordinary. Even in its most Christian manifestations, Moriarty’s God is more that of the Christian mystic than of the Pauline Church, less concerned with doctrine and order than with self-transcendence and direct experience: ultimately unknowable, yet reflected everywhere and in all things.
Throughout the collection, Moriarty animates myth and legend with a vitality that folds the past into the present. Take, for instance, a passage drawn from Invoking Ireland/Ailiu Iath n-hErend, on the legendary Cormac mac Airt: ‘This lad was born to be king and who became king, did he, in heraldry flying from standard and pole and rampart-wall, declare himself to be a march-man, a man of the marches, of the march-lands, between animal and human? In his deepest, unremembered dreams, did he migrate among identities? Awake, would he sometimes be seized by dread of turning into a bear, by dread of turning into a wolf, by dread of becoming a were-bear, a were-wolf?’ Moriarty’s flinty lyricism explores tensions between human and creature, land and self, sacred and profane, giving us a constant interplay between the ancient and the contemporary. He is a fundamentally ecological thinker who transposes nuanced attention to local landscapes into a deeper recognition of the wilds of nature as spiritual sites. His eco-consciousness is nuanced and expansive, rooted in his experiences working close to the land in the west of Ireland and in his fundamental recognition of all life as interconnected.
In a piece taken from the second volume of his autobiography, Moriarty suggests two potential paths for society: the way of Prometheus, whereby we shape nature to suit us, or the way of the dolphin, whereby we shape ourselves to suit nature. Dolphins, once land creatures, yielded to nature’s evolutionary pull, allowing their bodies to curve and adapt to life underwater; this is a radical reversal of the Promethean mindset. Moriarty worries that his work as a gardener upholds the Promethean way and attempts to atone for this by surrendering ‘to nature in places deeper within me than my grip on scythe or spade, than my grip on myself’. The act of beholding the mountains of Kerry becomes for him a means of dissolving the subject-object divide between the self and its natural environment; the fierce mercy of Ireland’s countryside invalidates his entire sense of personhood. ‘That is how dangerous beauty is to the purposes and opinions around which we have constituted ourselves. And what a destiny, to find myself living in front of Torc Mountain, with the setting Sun burning in winter in the gap between it and Mangerton and burning in spring in the gap between it and Toomies.’
But neither is Moriarty naively romantic or blind to nature’s maleficence: ‘I saw genius everywhere I looked in nature, but that didn’t mean that it was everywhere benign,’ he muses. He keenly describes the grotesque realities of a life lived close to and within nature—fishing hooks, lobster pots, slashing eels, animals snapping at one another. ‘Is ours an utterly deviant planet? Or is the hauled lobster pot the astronomical norm?’ If he questions his own desire to give himself over to such a violent environment, Moriarty finally settles not on transcending this difficult world but rather embracing it.
This anthology asks us to imagine how we might live if we were to learn from Moriarty. In ways more dolphin than Promethean, one would hope—yet with the understanding that the wildness around us carries both beauty and the threat of annihilation. His writings remind us that by going to the edge of the artifice and acceleration, we can find a stillness older than belief, a self as expansive as the hills of Kerry and Connemara, and a legacy and language wiser than the modern noise that clouds it. His deep ecology and spirituality combine into a form of mysticism that is not a retreat from life but an unmediated engagement with it. It is one that asks us to awaken to the interconnectedness of all things, that invites us not to escape the world, but to reimagine it, to experience the chaotic and the ordered, the sublime and the mundane as all part of the same divine web.