In most places, the phrase to “get your goat (up)” means only to be annoyed. In Killorglin, Co Kerry, however, it has a whole other significance.
There, the annual August 10th coronation of a mountain puck is traditionally accompanied by his elevation on to a platform from which he rules the fair named after him for three days.
But getting the goat up has proved controversial in recent years. When Puck Fair returned in 2022 after a Covid-induced sabbatical, it was to a heatwave that heightened sensitivities about animal welfare.
Last year, as a result, the goat made only short, token visits to the platform, at the start and end of festivities. Organisers said the fair had to “evolve” in the face of changing concerns.
A Fair Fouled? – Frank McNally on the case for returning Killorglin’s King Puck to his lofty platform
Jump Around - Frank McNally on the other James Connolly
Great Leap Backward – Frank McNally on the continuing decline of the ‘Jumping Irishman’
Claims to flame – Frank McNally on yet another Dublin siege and the story of the Catacombs, now and then
I was reminded of all this by an email from a Kerryman long exiled in California, who wrote recently inquiring, inter alia, if I’d ever heard of a woman named Muriel Rukeyser.
I hadn’t, but as I know now, she was a much-admired American poet, novelist and political activist of the last century. And at the height of her career, in 1965, she took time out to visit Puck Fair, before writing a short but deeply felt book about it, The Orgy.
By happy coincidence, that was also the year my Kerry Californian was first immersed in the event. Or, as he puts it, “a year when I surely fell in the gutter as a young boy during that legendary festival in Killorglin town”.
I’m not sure if his gutter was real or metaphorical (although the ubiquity of cattle manure is indeed a theme of The Orgy).
In any case, his chance discovery of Rukeyser’s book struck a deep chord, recalling the fair’s almost spiritual importance to him and many others, as the Kerry equivalent of Thanksgiving, when scattered families reunited under the god-like goat’s blessing.
He was there yet again a few years ago when the event celebrated its official 400th anniversary, still untamed: “But what Cromwell and other dangers could not curb has been achieved by the animal welfare lobby, who seem to have emasculated the spirit of the Puck Fair as an omnipresent entity,” he laments. “Now we stand as the Holy Mass without the real presence.”
If that seems overstated, the fair’s possible religious significance is also the subject of one of the addenda to Rukeyser’s book.
She includes an essay by the Anglo-Indian historian and anthropologist Margaret Murray (1863-1963), who believed Puck Fair was “the most interesting modern survival of the Horned God”, an ancient ritual most of which was now “irretrievably lost”.
Murray claimed that the name Puck “is a derivative from the Slavonic word Bog, which means God” and added: “I suggest that part of the original ceremony was the deification and crowning of a new king… and that the feasting and other rites practised at that time were emblematic of his power as the giver of food and all other forms of fertility.”
But speaking of fertility, anyone with literal expectations of Rukeyser’s book title may be disappointed. There is little or no sex in The Orgy.
Indeed, despite her affection for the people described in it, Rukeyser writes that “…in Kerry women you see a lack of love. Frigid women. Children got on them by drunken men. They’re used for heavy work. Sex is disconnected. It’s all loathing…”
The author does, meanwhile, draw upon her own sexuality, which was complex. During the early days of the Spanish Civil War, she had been in love with a German communist, soon after killed.
Later, in Berkeley, California, she became the single mother of a son who was 17 by the time she visited Kerry. But she was also bisexual and had a long relationship with her female literary agent.
This may be the friend “who sent me here” and to whom she writes a letter after the fair, describing the event’s “tragic, penetrating beauty, music and filth, cattle and drunkenness, the Gypsies, the goat and the marvellous children. It had a heavy dark beauty, a misery too, and all the time the implication of some bright release. [That] came, but in ways that was not part of the design.”
Not everyone enjoyed her poetic and profoundly personal book as much as my correspondent. It was reviewed for The Irish Times by another Kerryman, Liam MacGabhann, who first professed his admiration for Rukeyser’s lifetime CV.
But of her elliptical references to a troubled love life, he suggested they revealed a woman “begging for sympathy for some great want in herself… about which she is as loquacious as a Kerry ploughman being asked by a Special Branch man about the local murder”.
As for the “frigid” natives, he wrote: “I resent her taking all the travail of a mysterious love life out on hardworking Kerry women.”
Then again, MacGabhann was openly cynical about the Killorglin bacchanalia, which he thought most Kerry people regarded as a “tourist gimmick”.
By contrast, the fair retains all its ritualistic resonance for my emailer from Silicon Valley. Or at least it would do if the reformers left it alone. He ends his correspondence with a rallying cry: “The goat goes back up!”