We were first brought into the mystical vortex of Newgrange, the ancient megalithic passage tomb, on August 1, 1997, at Dublin airport when the young driver of the shuttle bus posed a question after reading the name tag on our luggage. "Who's the Fitzgerald?" "We are." My son responded. "Well so am I." He said.
That was the first hint that something unusual was happening on our visit to Ireland. In the old pagan Celtic calendar, August 1st was the Feast of Lughnasa in honor of the Irish god Lugh - brother of the Dagda - the chief god of the supernatural race known as the Tuatha de Dannan. And oddly enough Newgrange was his home.
The second hint came when I asked the young man where he came from. "Oh it's a little village down past Limerick. I'm sure you've never heard of it. It's called Abbeyfeale." "That is my grandfather's village," I told him. "We're from the same place." Was this coincidence, synchronicity, or something more?
"Well, whatever you do when you're in Ireland." He said. "There's one place you must go. It's called Newgrange, Bru Oengusa in Irish - Angus's mansion on the river Boyne. I'd take you there myself, but I've got to work. It's only a twenty-minute drive from where you're headed and it is the most amazing thing you will ever see."
I knew that returning to Ireland would complete something I'd started when I'd first visited there back in 1971. But it wasn't until we were directed to Newgrange by another Fitzgerald from the same village as my family on the other side of Ireland did I realize - that something - was far more profound than anything I'd experienced in my lifetime.
Newgrange is a prehistoric monument in County Meath in Ireland, located on a rise overlooking the River Boyne, 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) west of Drogheda. It is an exceptionally grand passage tomb built during the Neolithic Period, around 3200 BC, making it older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. It is aligned on the winter-solstice sunrise. Newgrange is the main monument in the Brà º na Bà ³inne complex, a World Heritage Site that also includes the passage tombs of Knowth and Dowth, as well as other henges, burial mounds and standing stones...
Jung described the concept of synchronicity or coincidence as an "acausal connecting principle" that joined the rational ego of the senses to the Daemonic ego of the irrational "other self", which then overlapped into our reality. The Daemon was well known to the ancient philosophers as the causer of De'jà vu - the feeling of having experienced a present moment once before. To the classical Greeks, it was a supernatural spirit guide who caused coincidences to happen in order to shape our destiny. Was this message from another Fitzgerald part of an acausal connection directing me to apply our six years of research on the Fitzgerald family to something at Newgrange?
Within a few days, we'd made our way to the Boyne valley and had to shield our eyes from the glare of the quartz crystals shining in the bright sunlight. The young Fitzgerald from Abbeyfeale had been more than right. From a distance, Newgrange looked like a giant-futuristic time machine. But as we soon learned the time machine hadn't arrived from the future but had traveled five thousand years out of the past.
Originally built in the shape of an egg, its exterior was now a drum-shaped flying saucer with a faà §ade covered by eleven feet of quartz that glowed like an ancient solar timepiece in the early morning sun. In fact, even after five thousand years it still kept perfect time by focusing an intense, almost laser-like light into the darkness of Bru Oengusa for exactly seventeen minutes every winter solstice. Wealthy Romans had once made pilgrimages to it from Britain and left precious offerings of gold and jewelry to propitiate the spirits of its powerful gods, the Tuatha de 12 Danann. And it was suspected that large crowds of people had once filled its huge natural amphitheater to participate in a yearly ritual hinted at in ancient annals as involving music, magic, and "many colored Chequered Lights."
Newgrange was older than the Temples of Mycenae and the Pyramids. But like the Pyramids, which appeared to have had some ceremonial function in addition to their role as tombs, what else did this quartz palace do? Was measuring the solstice the only reason its builders had labored for years to plot the exact movement of the sun? And why, over all the other sacred sites around the world, did Joseph Campbell consider this place to be the home of the most sought-after of relics, the Holy Grail?
It wasn't until we probed Campbell's well-known book The Masks of God that pieces of the mystery of Angus's mansion began to fall into place. "By various schools of modern scholarship," Campbell wrote, "the Grail has been identified with the Dagda's caldron of plenty, the begging bowl of the Buddha in which four bowls, from four quarters, were united, the Kaaba of the Great Mosque of Mecca, and the ultimate talismanic symbol of some sort of Gnostic Manichean rite of spiritual initiation, practiced possibly by the Knights Templar."
Limited to being a "passage tomb" by modern scholars, the mansion of Angus in Irish myth was described as a place where Angus could go to visit his dead friends making it quite literally a "house" where the dead could pass in and out of supernatural reality at will. It was also a place where the living could experience what awaited them in the spirit world beyond.
Having been carbon dated to at least 3500 BCE, Bru Oengusa was far older than "Irish" or "Celtic" culture and is now thought by some to represent the zenith of a peaceful Golden Era of human existence that reached from Anatolia in the Near East across Europe into the heart of ancient Ireland. The Grail has been the object of occult quests for millennia as the divine chalice of "becoming." And according to Joseph Campbell, Bru Oengusa represented the place where it could be found, making it a sacred domain suspended between the world of matter and the realm of pure spirit.
Campbell's statement was a mythological Rosetta Stone, tying together a deep vein of mythology about the origins of human spiritual existence together with a little-understood prehistory of Europe. But as the poets and mythologists George Russell and W.B. Yeats testified, it was also a metaphor for the transubstantiation of mind and matter from the irrational ego to the rational. To their minds, the egg-shaped mansion of Oengus was where the Dagda - the ancient father/Sun God of the Tuatha De Danann - impregnated matter with light and brought forth a race of invisible beings who are to this day regarded as operating behind the scenes.
So how did this dreamlike transformation from light to matter work?
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