The lore and love and specificity associated with Irish places grow directly from Ireland's residual paganism. "Scratch a bit at the thin topsoil of Irish Catholicism," the saying goes, "and you soon come to the solid bedrock of Irish paganism." Ireland is still what novelist Edna O'Brien calls a "pagan place." But that paganism does not conflict with a devout Catholicism that embraces and absorbs it, in a way that can seem mysterious, even heretical, elsewhere. In Ireland, Christianity arrived without lions and gladiators, survived without autos-da-fé and Inquisitions. The old ways were seamlessly bonded to the new, so that ancient rituals continued, ancient divinities became saints, ancient holy sites were maintained just as they had been for generations and generations.

Thus the goddess remains alive in Ireland even in the first years of the third millennium of the Christian era. But that sentence is inexact. For the goddess does not merely remain alive in Ireland-she is Ireland. "Ireland has always been a woman," says Edna O'Brien, "a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow, a bride, a harlot, and, of course, the gaunt Hag." The island still bears her ancient name: Éire, from Ériu, an ancestral goddess whom the invading Celts met and adopted (or did she adopt them?) around 400 B.C.E. Ireland is the goddess. She is every field still fertile a thousand years after its first cultivation. She is every river that still floods with salmon despite millennia of fishing. She is the dancing pattern of the seasons, the fecundity of sheep and cattle, the messages written in the migratory flight of birds. She is the sun's heat stored deep in the dark bogs. She is the refreshment of pure water and of golden ale. She is living nature, and she has never been forgotten in Ireland.

This residual Irish paganism is, perforce, polytheistic, because what monotheism leaves out is the goddess. There has never been a religion that had a goddess but no god, in the way that monotheisms have gods but no goddesses. But the difference between mono- and polytheisms does not end with number and gender of divinities. As Celticist Miranda Green argues, polytheism involves a close relationship between the sacred and the profane, especially in relation to the natural world. Where monotheism imagines god as transcending nature, as separate from this world, polytheism-paganism, if you will-sees nature as holy. Every stream has its special connection with divinity and thus is pictured as a unique and individual god or goddess. As the Greeks expressed it, every tree has its dryad, every rock its oread, every ocean wave its nereid. Paradoxically, such polytheism often sees nature as a whole-called Gaia by the scientist James Lovelock, after the Greek goddess of earth-as divine. In Ireland, that divinity is unquestionably feminine.

This paganism remains a part of Irish life today. Celtic spirituality did not just bring together the goddess of the land with the god of the cross; it brought together a deep love of nature, the heritage of paganism, with the new social ideals of Christianity. What resulted is a Church that has always been subtly different from the Roman one. Subtly? Perhaps radically. Sometimes I fancy that the Irish have not yet heard the news that Augustine bested Pelagius. Sixteen hundred years ago, the Archbishop of Hippo waged a war of words on the Celtic monk who preached that the world we see and hear and touch and taste was created, just as it is, by god. Therefore, Pelagius said, we must learn to love this world, just as it is. Sex is good; why else would god have created us as sexual beings? Death has a purpose; why else would god have made us mortal? The sky, whether blue or slate, is there when we lift our heads. Water is there, clear and cool, to quench our thirst. Life is good, Pelagius said. We only have to love it, as god intended.

This was the "happy heresy" that Augustine, infuriated by his inability to control his sexual urges, set out to crush. And crush it he did; we have the African Saint Augustine, but no Celtic Saint Pelagius. Yet in Ireland, love of the natural world continued to be the baseline of spiritual experience. The passionate joy of life in a mortal body in a world of changing seasons floods Irish poetry, including that written by monks and clerics. "I have news for you," goes the first Irish poem I learned, "the stag calls, snows fall, summer goes ... Cold catches birds' wings, ice covers all things, this is my news." I immediately loved-and still love-the tension between the first and final lines and the rest of the poem. News? What can be new about the commonness of life? But that anonymous poet of the ninth century reminds us of the only real news we can ever know: the glorious sensual specificity, the absolute newness, of each moment we experience in our unique and living bodies.