What is the difference between religion and mythology?
They are very interrelated. That’s a very good question — both of them deal with the sacred and the fundamental questions. And I think that they’re very bound up. In the case of the Celts, we know about their mythology but we don’t actually know what their belief system was. We can presume that they believed in an afterlife from their stories about the happy other world that features throughout all these stories. So, what I would say is that mythology is very bound up with religion, and perhaps we could say it is a form of religion, but the stories are entertainment. But the truths would be a fundamental. Legends are a simplified way of dealing with mythology. And what we have in The Names Upon the Harp are legends that embody mythology, which in turn is connected to religion. The Celts didn’t believe in churches. Their sacred places were places like oak woods and lakes. And Derry city — Doire in Irish — means oak tree or oak wood. And a lot of place names have Derry in them because th
