Barefoot pilgrims braved the rocks today and climbed Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s Holy Mountain.
Thousands made it to the top for 8am mass with Archbishop Neary. Here is a video taken a couple of days before:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxQaq3dv9nk
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-uu0U-DxuM&list=UUmh7DUX-UQu5bPglakEaD4w
Up to 30,000 pilgrims made the journey to the summit of Croagh Patrick in Co Mayo today to make the pilgrimage of Reek Sunday: the last Sunday in July, which replaced the feast of Harvest and the Sun God Llugh when Saint Patrick exorcized the mountain around 432AD. He displaced Corra the goddess of the mountain, calling her a she-demon, 
consigning her to the lough below, and he warned the Irish to abjure the worship of the Sun which also took place on the Mountain from the Bohea Stone nearby on the two days every year of the Rolling Sun. He then started the conversion of Ireland.
And by weird coincidence I went to the Baptism of a little girl, a lovely genuine family and community event of a girl child with such spiritual energies, and I found very unexpectedly that the Church, St. Mary of the Angels in Batley in Yorkshire, had a great statue of Saint Patrick which had been donated by the poor Irish migrant workers to Yorkshire in the 1860s, and there was a magazine in the porch all about Reek Sunday pilgrimage.
Yet this was the very same Mountain that my mother was given the penance of climbing: bare-foot for the sin of having given birth to me.
This was after her parish priest at the Church of Christ the King, Letterfrack, in County Galway, nearby, had blackmailed her that she was forced to give me up for adoption or he would be ‘reluctantly compelled to tell her mother of her lapse from virtue’. I have the papers in evidence.
And we were in a convent orphanage that year run by the Bon Secours nuns. And by another coincidence, this is the same order of nuns that ran the orphanage at Tuam near the Holy Mountain, where the skeletons of 796 orphans have been discovered, who died of malnutrition and disease at the same time as we were in my Bon Secours orphanage.
You can see the Archbishop of Tuam whose responsibilities included that orphanage: he is blessing the faithful in the attached photos.
The first mass of the day commenced at the summit at 8am and Mayo Mountain Rescue reported 17 casualties, four of whom had to be stretchered from the mountain, while two more required evacuation by helicopter. Most of the injuries were broken bones and strains, while one person suffered a head injury and another man was airlifted to Galway with chest pains.
The last Sunday in July has been a day of Christian pilgrimage to the mountain for more than 1,500 years and this year’s event drew people from all over the world to southwest Mayo. It was a place of Irish pilgrimage for four thousand years before that.
See my website www.druidforestschool.com where I call for goddess and god to be restored the summit of the Holy Mountain from which Saint Patrick cast them down. And read my novel Druid, available from Amazon.
