Pagan Ireland - From Cult to Conversion by Dr Mark Williams by Zoom

Talk Series: The Gods of Ireland: Ireland’s native pantheon in literature and lore

From Cult to Conversion – Mon 17 Jan 2022

This first talk introduces what we know of Irish pre-Christian religion through archaeology, before turning to the process of conversion to Christianity in the fifth and sixth centuries. We will look at how at least some pagan deities were ‘reincarnated’ as literary characters in the new cultural landscape of a Christian Ireland, focusing on the mysterious mist-cloaked sea-god, Manannán mac Lir, who gives his name to the Isle of Man.

Dr Mark Williams is Fellow and Tutor in English at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. He is a specialist in the medieval languages and literatures of Wales and Ireland, and the author of Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton, 2016), and The Celtic Myths that Shaped the Way We Think (Thames & Hudson, 2021). He is in training as a Jungian psychoanalyst