The Rite Of The Lie

April 9th, 2007 The Lewis of long ago was a wild place, a wooly place, a place without tea. It is true that in some small pockets and folds of the rumpled land, some latent need for mankind to civilise had led the villagers to make brews of dried seaweed and a very popular thistle-based infusion called Mess Cailleen – so-named for its inventor, Untidy Kathleen. By and large though, tea was not widely available and so we islanders had to devise other civilising rituals around which to organise our days.

One of these rituals was the Rite of the Lie. It took place every morning at around 11 o?clock. Improbable sandwiches were served and people stopped work for half an hour to sit in the buzzing heather, relax, and tell each other outrageous whoppers. Over on the mainland the saying went that your Lewisman was true of heart, noble in nose, and honest as the day was long (provided the day was only 23 and a half hours long).

Although the practice arose spontaneously, the civilising principle behind the Rite Of The Lie was that people should have a chance to get rid of the fantasical before fantastical pressure built up within us, and we started to believe in everything anyone told us. (Rural, isolated peoples everywhere are particularly vulnerable to this.) It would get us pondering the big questions for the remainder of the day, making our manual labours pass more quickly. Wandering ministers (known affectionately as the Roving Revs) would travel about the moors making sure people were getting the answers to these questions right of their own free will, naturally – questions about the nature of truth, the existence of God, the nature of man, and, of course, things of a more practical nature too, such as, does Kenny Tweedy?s observation that Guinness does not get rusty when you leave it out in the rain mean that in fact it is not full of strength-giving iron?

The island mind is as fertile as dungy loam and so great were some of the whoppers told, and with such boldness and conviction, that some mornings the sun would snuff itself out for a minute or two, convinced momentarily by someone swearing, with compelling arguments to back the point, that day was, in fact, night. Each person was allowed to insert 2 lies per rite; all the rest of the conversation had to be true. There were no other rules. Great lies and small slanders were given the same weight. ?False lies? were commonly employed as red herrings to wrong-foot and create distrust in the listener. For example, if someone were to say that Ceardy Calum (Unattractive Malcolm) got lucky with Marina Cleeps Mor (Busty Marina) 3 times behind his peatstack before the cock crowed on Sunday morning, and also said that Uig was tipped to win the Cup), well – these two things were so improbable that, if the person went on to say that people South of Perth had webbed feet and built great cathedrals to celebrate moustaches, you would have little choice but to believe him. They are odd down South.

Peigi Morag Mackenzie of Brue was a champion at the lie-rite, an acknowledged high priestess of the art who regularly won the annual Lie Of The Land. Her best-remembered unsolved lie, although not by any means her best in terms of artistry, split the island irascibly in two and debate rages to this day as to its truth.

That day she said three things. Bracketed between the assertions that custard boils at the same temperature that sadness melts; and that clouds are the cigar-puffs of God?s nostrils and the reason we have so many clouds in Lewis compared to say, Tahiti, is because God likes to hang out and smoke with us more than anyone else in the whole world; Peigi Morag said this: Death is the mother of beauty.

What she meant, and subsequently argued for, was that divinity was to be found here, on Earth, because only here, where death threatened everything, could beauty be truly appreciated. In heaven, on the other hand, where there is no death and beauty is eternal, we just could not appreciate beauty as much – we would take it for granted. Poignancy, an important part of beauty, would be missing in heaven. We ought to look at Earth, she said, as the only paradise we will know and, as part of our duty to God, try to ensure it is indeed a paradise for all peoples.

She developed this idea, she claimed, while out roaming with her beloved sheep, looking at them in all their moods and tufty splendours; looking at the world too, and all its moods and tufty splendours. We didn?t pay proper attention to any of the nature around us, she said. The sheep were talking, we just weren?t listening (unfortunately, she got a bit earnest and weepy at this point.)

For a while, before the synod elders were called in, a good many people were persuaded by her argument. But holy men were alarmed! Outraged! Went purple! Peigi-Morag was arrested and brought to trial for heresy.

At the trial, the mainland press learned many unexpected things about Hebrideanonians. They learned we have a complicated relationship with custard, the complexity increasing as you progress from the Inner to Outer Hebrides. (And when you leave Skye for the outer isles, make no mistake, you are making progress.) They learned that happiness and sadness do indeed mingle yellowley in island bowls in proportions reflective of how much pudding is left at any given instant multiplied by Planck?s Constant. At Peigi-Morag?s trial though, her assertion that custard boils at the same temperature that sadness melts was judged as an ambiguous statement because noone had a thermometer for custard (Aonghais Gle-Mhor – Very Big Angus, is on record as saying that he had a thermometer for happiness under his sporran, adding, heh, heh, heh. But the judge deemed it inadmissable evidence. Later, his 15 children would become known as The Evidence, and his wife – behind her back – as Mrs. Admissable.)

It was clear, of course, that God prefers Lewis people to any one else in the world (why else would he have put the Garden of Eden in Garyvard?) so the jury found the God?s Nostril/clouds maxim to be the Truth. As an Ambiguous – like the custard ruling – was counted as a Truth, that meant that the Beauty in Death one must, must, according to the 2-lie rule, be a lie. A lie! A lie! Poor Peigi-Morag insisted that that one was the truth, adding – in a sentence that did her cause little good – that God did like the Tahitians better than Lewisfolk. But the elders shook their magisterial wattles menacingly at the jury, terrifying them into obeisance. The forces had gathered against her. She was sunk.

Peigi-Morag MacKenzie pleaded no no no in the manner of Amy Winehouse but that only turned the jury, who were more of a Wayne Newton crowd, further against her. Ostensibly, she was not sentenced for the substance of her ?lie? although everyone knew the case wouldn?t even have come to trial but for it; the question she posed was just too big for the church powers to countenance. They didn?t want the people thinking that. Instead, her conviction was for the crime of Not Telling Her Full Allotment of Lies – only one in a 30 minute period – and she was sentenced to death by boredom and booked on a passage to Middlesborough that night.

But Peigi-Morag would not accept Middlesborough as her fate. That afternoon, before the ferry came to take her away, she was allowed a compassionate visit to her sheep for the last time. Breaking from her guards suddenly, she ran to the edge of the cliff where she had warned her beloved flock never to wander. Without a look back she leapt over the stile and flung herself far out over the bay, screaming tunefully ?They tried to send me to Middlesborough, but I said no no no!?

Her remains were scraped off the rocks at the foot of the cliff and buried in unconsecrated ground with no headstone. Rumour has it that the Rangers Supporters Club unwittingly built their meeting-house/bar on her remains but, as her ghost is only ever seen when the Rangers Supporters are well wellied, (any hour after 6pm) most people believe that these are more your Johnnie Walker type hauntings, and little attention is paid. It is true though that Rangers has never won a match against Middlesborough at home or away. Make of that what you will.

But that is all in the past. She is dead, locked up in the moody, greeny-blue, bipolar tomb we call Earth. It is only left for us to decide if Peigi-Morag was right or wrong about Death being the mother of beauty.