1641-1649: IRISH CONFEDERATE WARS: DOMINATION, PARTNERSHIP & THE SHADOW OF THE GODS

By Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. (Anthropology, UCLA)

 1641: IRELAND IGNITED

Ireland in 1641 trembled like a harp string stretched too tight—land seizures, sectarian humiliation, and centuries of English domination pressed the Gaelic and Old English Catholic population into desperation.

When the Catholic gentry rose in October 1641, their rebellion quickly swept Ulster, Meath, Connacht, and beyond.

Smoke drifted across frozen fields as villagers fled into bogland safety. A young Irish farmer whispered to his sister as English militia approached: “Keep low. The land remembers us—even if the Crown never did.”

English accounts exaggerated the atrocities that the Irish inflicted upon them; Irish accounts lamented English vengeance. But beneath the clashing testimonies lay one truth: centuries of domination consciousness—Enlil-ite hierarchy backed by Marduk-ian rivalry—had boiled over.

1642–1649: THE IRISH CATHOLIC CONFEDERATION—A FRAGILE PARTNERSHIP DREAM

By 1642, Irish nobles, bishops, and townsmen formed the Confederation of Kilkenny. They imagined an Ireland governed by Catholic autonomy under the crown—a delicate compromise.

Inside Kilkenny Castle’s council chamber, an elderly priest murmured: “Let us build peace with reason. Let England see we are not beasts.”

Yet class tensions undercut unity. Old Catholic elites guarded their privilege; Gaelic chieftains demanded land restitution; the rural poor cried out for relief from rents and tithes.

Nonetheless, embedded within the struggle lay the Ninmah/Great Goddess partnership consciousness.  The Irish held local assemblies, observed communal land traditions, and embraced a worldview in which the land itself held sovereignty.

The Irish Confederation fought Royalists, Parliamentarians, Scots Covenanters, and local militias—a four-sided war that Anunnaki Prince MARDUK exploited. Competing Catholic and Protestant factions each believed Yahweh backed their cause, not knowing they served rival shadows of the same celestial manipulator.

1649: CROMWELL LANDED—THE SCOURGE OF DROGHEDA

After Charles I was executed in January 1649, the Confederates allied with Royalists against the new English Commonwealth. Cromwell, Lord Protector of England and the presiding officer of the English Parliament, saw the Irish Confederation as an existential threat to his regime.

He landed at Ringsend near Dublin in August 1649 with roughly 12,000 veterans, cannons, and the iron discipline of the New Model Army. His army hit the  Irish marched the three miles to Drogheda on the banks of the River Boyne. Before the fight there, Cromwell thought: “God’s judgment falls upon this land. I am its instrument.”

At Drogheda, September 11–12, 1649)  Cromwell ordered the storming of the town. Parliamentarian troops killed nearly all defenders, including those who surrendered. Priests were cut down at St. Peter’s steeple.

An Irish defender shouted from the tower as flames rose: “If your God demands this, his throne is built on skulls!”

Word of Cromwell’s massacre at Drogheda echoed across Ireland. Cromwell employed Marduk’s strategy of terror-as-order to imprint obedience through shock.

1650: WEXFORD, KILKENNY, LIMERICK, MEELICK ISLAND & THE FALL OF THE CONFEDERACY

After Drogheda, Cromwell turned south.

Wexford (October 1649): The English perpetrated another sack here; hundreds of civilians drowned attempting escape as gunfire rained across the harbor.

Kilkenny fell in March 1650.

In October 1650, at the Battle of Meelick Island, Parliamentarian cavalry slaughtered Irish troops trying to flee across the Shannon.

A young Irish officer, cornered on the riverbank, murmured: “We fight the English—but it is the sky-gods [Anunnaki] who laugh.”

By 1650 the Confederacy lay broken; Royalist-Irish resistance eroded; famine and bubonic plague followed like carrion birds.
Guerrilla resistance persisted until 1653, but the organized war was lost.

Protestant and Catholic branches—each believing in one God—were maneuvered by Marduk’s imperatives of rivalry, while partnership speakers in villages remembered the wisdom of the Goddess: seek cooperation, practice peace.

1652: ACT FOR THE SETTLEMENT OF IRELAND—THE GREAT DISPOSSESSION

The Act for the Settlement of Ireland (1652) reshaped the island for centuries.

Catholics (around 85–90% of the population) lost almost all their land.

Those permitted to remain were pushed to the poorest western counties—“To Hell or to Connacht.” Large estates went to English Protestant soldiers, speculators, and creditors.

A dispossessed Irish widow told her son: “The land was our mother. They have stripped her skin from us.”

Harman identifies the English subjugation of Ireland as a classic instance of class dispossession during a revolutionary crisis, in which elites redirect upheaval onto colonized peoples.

Zinn views the English conquest as the template for later English and American settler-colonial domination—a pattern of taking land by law, force, and famine.

The English redistribution of estates echoes Enlilite-Mardukian territorial control, mirroring ancient imperial land-seizure policies imposed on Sumer, Akkad, and Canaan.

1653–1689: RESISTANCE, MEMORY & THE LONG SHADOW

Though Parliament declared the war ended in 1653, Ireland entered a new era of militarized rule, restricted Catholic worship, banned political participation, and economic repression.

But partnership currents survived.

In hidden groves, families kept old goddess rites alive—Earth-mother memory, land as kin, clan as mutual care.
Monks taught children secretly.
Women preserved songs of justice.

One girl whispered during a forbidden wake:

“We survive because we remember who we are.”

AFTERMATH TO THE PRESENT: FROM CROMWELL TO PARTITION

The Cromwellian conquest sowed the seeds of three centuries of division.

• Restoration (1660): some land returned, but mostly to elite Catholic nobles.
• Williamite Wars (1689–1691): William of Orange’s victory set the stage for Protestant Ascendancy, locking land, power, and law into minority control. (next episode will detail how Orange “stole” Northern Ireland.)
• Penal Laws (1695–1709): Catholics barred from arms, office, and land inheritance.
• 19th century: repeated famines, culminating in the Great Hunger (1845–1852).
• 20th century: Partition (1920), Civil War (1922), and the long Troubles (1968–1998).
• 21st century: The Good Friday Agreement gave hope, but Brexit reopened old fissures.

Yet, beneath dominator structures, partnership endured in Ireland’s communal traditions, storytelling, and resilient sense of kinship.

As a modern Irish historian said to students:

“We are a small island, but we carry the memory of a thousand years of refusing to bow.”

ANUNNAKI ANALYSIS: WHO PLAYED WHICH GOD’S GAME?

Royalists + Confederates (initially separate; later allied)

• Saw monarchy or Catholic kingship as sacred.
• Enlilite hierarchy: obedience, ritual, top-down authority.
• Mardukian manipulation: rivalry among elites, playing factions off one another.

Parliamentarians & Cromwellians

• Enlilite disciplinarian ethos.
• Mardukian chaos-through-reform: demolishing aristocracy while installing military rule.

Gaelic Irish (rural communities)

• Partnership lineage of Ninmah/Enki: land as shared mother, clan as cooperative federation.
• Targeted precisely because they represented a different social logic.

Poor on all sides

• Harman: backbone of armies, yet denied land and voice.
• Zinn: sacrificed to elite struggles.
• Hartmann: caught between dominator empires, carrying small embers of cooperative culture.

CHART OF FACTIONS & ALIGNMENTS
WHAT HARMAN, HARTMANN, AND ZINN SAY

Chris Harman (A People’s History of the World) offers interpretive keys: the wars of the 1640s were class revolutions shaped by elite manipulation. Ireland acted as a safety valve for violence, where the English ruling classes redirected social crisis outward. Cromwell’s conquest exemplifies revolution from above, suppressing revolution from below.

Thom Hartmann focuses on the dominator vs partnership dynamic.  He writes that Ireland under English rule is a case study in domination consciousness—land seizure, hierarchy, and religious absolutism. The Gaelic clan system preserved partnership residues—mutual obligation and land stewardship. England suppressed Ireland because partnership cultures threaten hierarchical power.

Howard Zinn cites Ireland to argue that English colonization of Ireland served as a prototype for British colonization of America. The patterns—land confiscation, criminalizing native culture, rewarding settlers—became the American colonial model. He sees Cromwellian Ireland as a textbook example of elite interests directing mass violence.

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