As a modern Irish designer and engineer, Hugh Kearns believes that in addition to having had a ritual significance, Newgrange once functioned as a kind of light machine, capable - when constructed properly - of projecting images through use of its "chequered lights." To prove his theory he constructed a scale model that when tested worked to perfection. So if true, was Newgrange somehow used by ancient engineers to project the images of fallen heroes as recorded in the Irish annals? Was it really a place where Angus could go to visit his dead friends? Or, was Newgrange providing the power with its quartz crystals, solstice sun and musical tones to do something more? And was that something more, the power to access the inner workings of an organic otherworld hologram and not just its emulation.
Newgrange felt eerily familiar to us when we first saw it that day glistening in the sun. Its original purpose was clearly more than just as a burial mound and we soon learned that the origin mythology of the Fitzgerald family's arrival in Ireland mirrored its origin mythology as well. The myths that had been applied to the chief god of the Tuatha De Danann, the Dagda and his son Angus were applied to the Earl of Desmond and his son Geroid and remain alive to this day. The fact that we'd been directed there out of the blue by another Fitzgerald from my grandfather's village qualified as a genuine synchronicity (the so called book falling off the shelf) and we were eventually to discover the legendary power of the family name possessed truly mythic qualities of its own.
"The family's Irish myth-makers were capable of grafting the Geraldines onto a native historical tradition that traced their lineage back to the Greeks, while at other times and for different audiences, the family could make plausible claim to an Italian and ultimately Trojan lineage," The old adage that the Geraldines became 'more Irish than the Irish themselves' fails to capture the Geraldine experience in medieval Ireland in all its richness and variety."' Editors Peter Crooke and Sean Duffy wrote in the preface to their 2017 book, The Geraldines and Medieval Ireland, the Making of a Myth.
And so in writing our dream-inspired novel The Voice and our new book Valediction Resurrection, we found ourselves building on all the richness and variety of the mythology we could find. And ultimately we came to discover that the Fitzgerald myth was not only firmly grounded in reality but that the reality was firmly planted in an otherworld of dreams, synchronicities and coincidence""and that those coincidences are caused by something known as the Daemon.
We made the decision to investigate the Fitzgerald family based on our daughter Alissa's dream in 1991 in which Paul's deceased father visited Alissa accompanied by an eight hundred year old man in a strange plaid suit. His message was clear. Fix the memory of the family. And so as we wrote our novel The Voice the mythology of Newgrange became incorporated into the story and as we worked toward a publishing date in 2001 the importance of Newgrange as a character became clear.
Following the publication of our two books on Afghanistan in 2009 and 2011 we began working with members of the Afghan diaspora on a peace conference and recommended Newgrange as a neutral location for the Afghan people to come together. Aside from sharing a long colonial heritage with Britain and Ireland, Afghanistan shared an ancient legacy of tribal law and secular codes of moral conduct that long preceded the Christian and Islamic eras. Ireland's pre-Christian Brehon Laws provided a sophisticated set of rules for every aspect of Irish society. According to the legendary 19th century British agent Alexander Burnes - Prior to hostile European invasions, Pashtunwali was a guide for a peaceful and hospitable Afghanistan that was known to accommodate Jews and Christians, considering them both to be religions of "the book."
We believed a departure from the existing narrative was needed to change the tone of the Afghan crisis and reorient people's thinking. As part of the indigenous solution to restore the true Afghanistan, Afghans needed to allow themselves an escape from the existing extremist narrative by reconnecting to an ancient shared past. We believed this could be achieved by holding initial planning sessions at Newgrange with Afghan leaders and organizations from around the world to share their knowledge as advisors and supporters. And this proposal was totally embraced by our Afghan partners. That dream of an Afghan peace was never fulfilled.
We are resurrecting the concept centered on Newgrange as the location to celebrate the marriage of World Peace and Economic Justice as a musical concert.
-Chapter 4: Bhadshah Khan's Afghan World Peace Movement
Is not the Pashtun amenable to love and reason? He will go with you to hell if you can win his heart, but you cannot force him even to go to heaven - Badshah Khan
If anyone today could name an historical figure connected to the origin of non-violent resistance against political oppression, it would most likely be India's Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi virtually defined the idea of non-violent resistance in his struggle to free India from British colonial rule. But in 1929, a Pashtun tribal leader in nearby Afghanistan named Bhadshah Khan - a peer of Gandhi - became an important ally by inaugurating Afghanistan's indigenous non-violent movement known as the Khudai-Khidmatgar - the servants of God. Since Khan realized that God needed no service he decided that by serving God they would in fact be serving humanity and set out to remove violence from their ancient Pashtun tribal code. Known as Pashtunwali, Afghans had lived by the code's elaborate rules for millennia and continue to order their lives by it to this day.
In addition to establishing a leadership council accepted by the community, Pashtunwali laid out in detail the proper behavior for hospitality as well as what was necessary to create security for all including how and when the act of revenge was acceptable.
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