Boasts, Oaths, and Rewilding Ourselves

 Throughout the ancient world there was a type of magical speech called a boast, one our culture has almost entirely forgotten how to hear. Say the word now and you conjure blowhards and braggarts, marketers and politicians. It was not always so.

In a time before supply chains, skyscrapers, and Costco, our ancestors lived without writing. Reputation was the only durable shape a life could take, the single mark dividing a trusted member of the community from an exile. Words had to carry what ink and paper could not, and those words were shared in that quasi-magical boast. The boast did four kinds of work.

First, it sowed the seeds of everlasting fame. Warriors traded their lives for a name, and poets alchemized that name into immortality.

In a related and second function, boast could also carry elements of an oath, though the two are different speech acts. A boast asserts what you are or what you have done; the world as it stands can prove or disprove you. An oath binds  what you will do, and promise of future great deeds. You make it true by keeping it. 

The boast is the credential that earns you the right to be heard. The oath is the mortgage taken out against that credential, honor spent in advance so that it must be earned back. That marriage of boast and oath deserves an essay of its own, and it will get one, because it lives at the heart of Lughnassadh. For now, just hold the distinction.

The third function is the only one still thriving among us. A boast can be ritualized aggression, combat waged in words. Loki gave us the finest mythic example in the Lokasenna, insulting his way through the entire Norse pantheon and asserting his superiority over each god in turn. Rappers, boxers, lawyers, and the choreographed combatants of professional wrestling still work the same way, using trash talk to unsettle an opponent and set the stage for victory.

But it is the fourth function I found the most intriguing. A boast can be an act of evocation and self-transformation, kin to the blessing and the curse. Like the the shamanic song you sing of what you are becoming that creates the transformation you are working. This form centers on the cosmological "I am," and it is where the Celtic boasts largely live. When Lugh, or later Amergin of the Milesians, speaks those two words, he is calling a new relationship into being and reshaping the world around him.

All four run on the same current: spoken words act directly on the speaker, the community, and the wider world.

Nowhere is that transformative power on fuller display than in the Song of Amergin, the boast by which the Milesians, the first Gaels, took Ireland from the Tuatha Dé Danann.

I am the stag of seven fights, 

I am the vulture on the cliff, 

I am a dewdrop, 

I am the fairest of flowers, 

I am the boar for boldness, 

I am a salmon in a pool, 

I am a lake on the plain, 

I am the word of knowledge, 

I am the point of a weapon, 

I am a god who fashions fire for a head. 

Who smoothes the ruggedness of a mountain? 

Who is he who announces the ages of the Moon? 

And who, the place where falls the sunset? (Graves Translation)

Amergin's song claims identity with everything. By singing himself coextensive with wind, wave, stag, and salmon, he takes possession of Ireland, not by force, but by self-identification. Yet the taking still required negotiation. 

The Tuatha, caught off guard by the invasion, demanded the Milesians withdraw nine waves out from the shore and attempt their landing again. Beyond the ninth wave and back, the invaders then meet the three sovereignty goddesses, Fódla, Banba, and Ériu, and agree to name the land Eire in Ériu's honor.

Through the Song, Amergin applies to be made one with Ireland, and Ériu grants the request on one condition: her name must be invoked and kept. He sang as an applicant.

And yet this radical identification from the human side still serves an invasion. Notice, in the grammar we just learned, what is missing. Amergin's song is all credential. He proves his standing, the land consents, and the Milesians take. Nowhere in the story do they swear the reciprocal oath, the binding promise of what they will do for the land in return. The boast was sung. The following oath was never taken.

The Milesian landing may have been a gentle invasion, that seemed successful because the land itself consented, but it became an invasion nonetheless because they never swore their oaths back to the land. Amergin was all boast and no oath. His orientation to Ireland was, at its core, one-sided. The Milesians and their subsequent generations still took and offered less in return, and we are living inside its consequences.

The Fomorian gaze, which sees the more-than-human world as a resource to be extracted and, in our time, sacrificed to the temple of endless economic growth, has driven us to the edge of ruin. We are the children of an extractive culture that rooted out its own indigenous ways of knowing in Europe long before it exported the behavior to faraway shores.

If we want to re-indigenize ourselves, not by taking stories that belong to other peoples but by retelling and living forward our own pre-capitalist stories of how to be with the biome, Amergin offers something many of us were told we lacked: 

In that consciousness, any legitimate dwelling in a place requires the land's consent, though it is earlier, Lugh who gives the fullest version of a regenerative relationship of mutual benefit rather than a deed of ownership.

Still, Amergin teaches an orientation: kinship, consent, identity braided into the biome. But his embodiment of ecological kinship carries a risk. Without the skill of surrender we are incomplete. We must surrender to right action, to doing what we must for the good of the web of life although we are a tiny part of the cosmic whole, and doing so despite that it can feel hopeless and we’ll likely not live to see the result. To feel our connection to the world and stop there is to drift into handwaving mysticism that serves nothing.

For the skill of surrender, we can turn to Ireland's distant cousins, because Amergin's is not the only "I am" boast in the family.

The Irish share deep roots with the people of India. Before either country became what it is today, they shared ancestors, the Proto-Indo-Europeans of 4500 to 6000 years ago. Some of their descendants settled India; others wandered into Europe, Ireland among their farthest landfalls. Ireland's relative isolation as an island helped preserve striking parallels in the mythology, the "I am" boast among them.

Druids and brahmins are cousins too, orally trained priest-poets whose memorized words carried legal and cosmological force alike. In both traditions truth is a power that upholds the world: the Vedic rta, the Irish fír flathemon, the ruler's truth that keeps the land fertile. The Vedic ‘I am’ boasts carry similarities and some additional elements, but also come from the opposite perspective: the cosmic, rather than Amergin’s personal register.

The Bhagavad Gita arrives some two thousand years after the Proto-Indo-European breakup, so direct comparison is off the table, but the thematic notes carry through: Poets whose speech is power; sovereignty as a marriage between ruler and land; and truth as a cosmic force. The cultural content poured into these shared containers diverges, and that divergence is exactly what makes the comparison worth the trouble.

Long ago I read the Bhagavad Gita and recognized a familiar shape in a boast Krishna speaks to Arjuna. As the Gita opens, a grief-stricken Arjuna stands between two armies at Kurukshetra, kin on both sides, and he collapses.

Arjuna will not fight; better to be killed than to murder teachers and cousins. Krishna, serving as his charioteer, spends eighteen chapters answering him. His revelations move through three registers: you are not the body and cannot kill what is real (the deathless self); your dharma, or duty, as a warrior in a just cause binds you regardless of your feelings; and, your duty is to act without attachment to the fruits of action, thereby making the deed an offering.

In Chapter ten, Krishna pulls back the curtain on the cosmic order to the stricken Arjuna through is own boast:

"I am seated in the heart of all living entities. 

I am the beginning, middle, and end of all beings. 

Amongst the twelve sons of Aditi I am Vishnu; amongst luminous objects I am the sun. 

Know Me to be Marichi amongst the maruts, and the moon amongst the stars in the night sky. 

Amongst the senses I am the mind; amongst the living beings I am consciousness. 

I am Prahlad amongst the demons; amongst all that controls I am time. 

Know me to be the lion amongst animals, and Garud amongst the birds. 

Amongst purifiers, I am the wind, and amongst wielders of weapons, I am Lord Ram. 

Of water creatures, I am the crocodile, and of flowing rivers, I am the Ganges. 

I am the all-devouring death, and I am the origin of those things that are yet to be. 

Amongst feminine qualities I am fame, prosperity, fine speech, memory, intelligence, courage, and forgiveness. 

I am the generating seed of all living beings, O Arjun. No creature moving or non-moving can exist without Me." - Excerpts from the Gita

With a dizzying perspective of the universe, Arjuna surrenders to his dharma and fights in the war that slaughters his kin. Nothing outside him has changed, but his relationship to all of it has. He performs his duty as an offering, releasing the outcome to the gods. It is, in the end, a lesson in right action and detachment.

Arjuna teaches the practice of sustained, non-attached action amid grief and complicity, "forced" or otherwise. Without Amergin beside him, though, the lesson can curdle into fatalism or grim duty, because we are not the gods.

We see ourselves inside an incomprehensibly vast whole, across a deep eternity where, yes, we are all already dead, and yet we are one with it, so some part of us is eternal. Then we must come back down to this pale blue dot.

Arjuna eventually begged Krishna to resume his friendly form, to return to earth, because humans are not built to live at that altitude. A moment of oneness with everything does not absolve us of caring, of compassion, of doing the right thing here, where our actions bring suffering or relieve it. Look at the Buddha. He peeled back the curtain, met the deep time of the universe, and vowed to keep returning, precisely because the human scale does matter.

My greatest struggle with the Gita has always been the tension between what felt to me like nihilist surrender, where nothing counts because everything is already dead, and the necessity of our obligations to each other and the web of life, which is what grounds the whole teaching. To be human and in touch with the divine is to live those obligations while surrendering the result. We own only our right action, never the outcome.

If these two traditions grew from one root, why did they flower so differently? The full answer runs beyond this essay, but part of it is brutal and simple: in Ireland the chains of transmission were severed, and the "I am" boast stopped developing. In India, the Vedic poets' "I am" escaped the priestly classes and became a truth anyone could realize, internalized down an unbroken line as the culture shifted around it.

The Irish boasts got a salvage operation instead. Christianity interrupted the line of transmission, and as scribes copied the old stories down, the "I am" became something a character once said rather than something a living priesthood invoked. The practice hardened into a museum piece. Yet the monks chose to copy it. We cannot know their reasons for certain, but monastic scribes sometimes preserved what they could map onto their own scriptures, and Amergin's litany had an obvious biblical cousin: God's whirlwind speech in the book of Job, and when paired with Krishna’s dialogue with Arjuna, gives an earthbound container for touching the cosmic.

The whirlwind speech is the most eco-spiritual passage in the Bible. After God tests Job, and Job passes, he demands that God answer for his suffering. God answers out of a storm, not with an explanation but with an interrogation that echoes the "I am" boasts.

"Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: 

'Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man. I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements, surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?'" (Job 38:1-7)

Interrogated from the eye of a storm, Job is put back in his place, and humanity is decentered from the work of creation. It is a hard, beautiful lesson in humility before the biome and across deep time. It also answers the temptation Krishna's revelation can plant in us, the whisper that visiting the cosmic order excuses us from the consequences of our actions. Job never gets the god's eye view on loan. You were not there when the foundations were laid, the storm says, and in saying it binds him, and us, to our place outside the cosmic vantage point, which is where we belong, because our lives and actions can only resound in the here and now.

So the Song of Amergin reaches us already filtered through Christian hands, and the filtering did not stop there. Robert Graves embellished it further in The White Goddess. Anyone seeking to resurrect the "old ways" will find no pure, unadulterated original, only a weave of Christian preservation and Gravesian invention, which together give the boast its current cultural flavor.

I argue this is more than fine. If we mean to re-indigenize ourselves in a way that actually shifts our thinking rather than performing a shift, our revival of the boast should carry these threads, because they are strands in the tapestry of who we now are, and our stories were meant to grow alongside us. The Amergin we have is fragmentary, filtered, and rebuilt. No unbroken lineage stands behind it, and I find it all the more beautiful and all the more useful for that, because it and we are downstream of the same rupture. Pretending the rupture away sits structurally too close to the fundamentalism it critiques for my taste. Held honestly, the broken song becomes a model for this exact moment, if we tend it forward.

And the tending is the work:

fold in who we are now, and story our way into a neo-indigenous place of our own for those of us of Celtic descent. The same rebuilding process would hold true for any culture with an indigenous descent severed at some point in its history.

With Amergin and Arjuna as two sides of one practice, we have a framework: belong to the place you live, and work for it in line with your dharma, because the work is right and the land needs it, not because any result is guaranteed.

From Amergin, the "I am" claiming kinship and oneness, and the willingness to listen for what the land says back rather than possessing it without consent. To give as much as we take. How often do our rituals ask what the biome needs of us, then hold the silence long enough for an answer?

Yet while we are kin to all living things past and present, we remain individuals, and that must stay in focus. Dwelling overlong in oneness serves no one. We have work to do! Nor can we collapse entirely into the self. From Job comes the hard check on our self-importance, the bone-deep humility of knowing that we, as individuals and as a species, are small players in the web of life, and that the living world belongs to itself. It was never for us alone.

From the Gita, finally, comes the third thread, the boast in its function as a vow. Krishna's litany and the whirlwind speech both show us our place; our duty to right action tells us how to act from it. In this era of tipping points we do the work of repairing our relation to the biome without ever knowing how the repair pays off.

A caution here: read a certain way, both texts can slide toward nihilism and inaction, toward the claim that Arjuna is nothing and the goal of spirituality is the erasure of the self. That was never the intent. The teaching was always about knowing your place in the whole and acting with obligation to all of creation. Your dharma. Your song of “I am”.

Woven together, a modern "I am" boast would sing of membership in the web of life. It would be sung by people who know they are one piece of creation, who grieve what we have broken, and who take up the obligation to mend what we can, knowing we will likely never see the mending finished. It would hold the claims of oneness, the openness to being interrogated back by the biome, and Arjuna's surrender to what must be done.

But a boast, even one woven from three such threads, is only half the grammar. It is the credential, the song of who we are. It still wants the mortgage, the binding word about what we will do. Amergin sang the song and never swore the oath, and we have been living in that gap ever since. Our ancestors kept a festival built precisely for closing it, a season when the community's words became sacred obligations, sworn on the grave of a goddess who gave everything to the land. That festival is Lughnassadh, and it is where I will take this in the next post.

My urban fantasy series The Last Battle of Moytura, began on the foundations of key gaps in the Celtic myths that always bothered me.  Some were simply missing story elements, others were things I could see played forward into modern sensibilities, could explain our current unhealthy relationship with the biome and each other.

Amergin's failure to obligate himself to the earth, to swear his oath to give back to the land he was taking, is one of those little details I move forward into the present.  In a way this orientation to the biome is what creates the villain in the series, Badb Catha, who has sworn to save the world from humanity.

You can grab a prequel novelette to that series by clicking the image: