CYCLE EIGHT

1. GAELIC VIS-À-VIS HURLING. If the guitar is akin to Association Football, then the musical instrument one would most likely associate with Gaelic Football is surely the violin, that World-denying vacuous instrument which suggests a correlation with the Virgin Mary and thus, by implication, a Christian Hell. For Gaelic Football, like the violin, is manifestly a Christian sport, but one, so I believe, which owes a lot more to the Devil (of World-denying vacuity) than ever it does to God (the Holy Spirit). If Gaelic Football corresponds to a Christian - and thus specifically Catholic - Hell, then the sport which most corresponds to a Christian Heaven can only be Hurling, whose use of hurleys (the hurling sticks) with which to strike the sliothar (or hurling ball) confirms a masculine bias in keeping with what I can only conclude to be a superhuman resolve, one aptly reflective of a kind of sporting loyalty to the Holy Ghost. Thus where Gaelic Football is the Hell of Christian football, one necessarily sensitive to the virginal/vacuous dimension of its goal-structure, Hurling is just as assuredly its heavenly counterpart, and thus a game not for the subhumanly Damned but, on the contrary, for the superhumanly Saved - in short, for Supermen. Now their musical instruments are more likely to be accordions or uilleann pipes than violins!

2. CHRISTIAN TRIPLICITY. There remains an alternative possibility, with regard to the above, and that is to make Camogie and/or the female version of Gaelic Football synonymous with the Virgin Mary, and thus push Gaelic Football-proper into the more elevated position of being a sort of sporting parallel to or paradigm of the 'Christ Child', as though intermediate between the Hell of Camogie and the Heaven of Hurling. This theory would at least have the merit of approaching 'Christian sports' on an equally tripartite basis to how we approached the 'Heathen sports' of Rugby League, Rugby Union, and Association Football, thus allowing for a progression from Camogie at the bottom to Hurling at the top via Gaelic Football which, contrary to my initial theory, would effectively be the 'Christian' equivalent of Rugby Union, that intermediate sport between Rugby League and Association Football. One would also have to revise one's musical-instrument analogy accordingly, reserving to Gaelic Football the likelihood of an accordion and/or harmonium parallel in between the vacuous sensuality of violins and the 'plenumous' spirituality, so to speak, of uilleann pipes.

3. INTERMEDIATE STATUS. If the subfeminine realm of the Virgin Mary is more specifically gender-based than the 'feminine' realm of the Mother, then the same most hold for any sporting analogies one may care to draw in relation to this Christian/Heathen dichotomy. Thus it would not do to place Gaelic Football, simply because it is a form of football, next to Association Football, as though it signified a subfeminine alternative to the latter. There is certainly World denial in Gaelic Football, but there is also a transcendental element which suggests if not a supermasculine then, at any rate, a quasi-supermasculine dimension correlative with the intermediate standing, between the Virgin and the Holy Ghost, of the 'Christ Child'.