Occult Nationalism and the Irish Revival - Dr Mark Williams by Zoom

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

Occult Nationalism and the Irish Revival – Mon 14 March 2022

This third talk turns to writers in English, and looks at how the Irish gods were resuscitated and reimagined in modernity as symbols of national identity. We will be focusing on the poet and magician W. B. Yeats and his friend the mystic George Russell (‘AE’), who attempted to contact the ancient divinities of Ireland in vision and to found an occult order which would persuade them to intervene in a conflicted present.

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