ON the last day of January, as the countryside flooded and the mood of our nation worsened, I sat in the dungeon of a castle on the Carlow-Wexford border and received a healing from a neo-pagan priestess.

The setting was the temple sanctuary of the Fellowship of Isis, a new religious group (or "cult", if you're in a derogatory mood). Dressed in red robes and a tiara, the priestess pressed my eyes and whispered advice. Although I can't reveal what she said, for any affected by these troubled times I recommend a blessing from the daughters of Isis.

"Who's Isis?" my friend Aisling had asked that morning.

"An Egyptian fertility goddess," I replied, "whose worship was popular among the Romans in the first century BC, and was revived in rural Ireland in the mid- Seventies by an ex-Anglican vicar and his sister."

"Oh," said Aisling, not looking up from her book. "You mean a cult. And why are you going?"

"To talk to Olivia, the high-priestess and co-founder, and for a ceremony celebrating Imbolc, the Celtic new-year feast day."

"Oh. Why?"

"Look, it's hard to explain. They give you a healing, for nothing. And some wine gums. It's fun. Plus, there's the materialism of the Celtic Tiger, and the decline of Catholic values, each of which has left a spiritual void."

"A spiritual void?"

"Yeah. Don't you have one?"

"I don't know."

"Have you checked?"

"No."

Poor Aisling. I left her to study her embryology textbook and hopped on my ride down south.

*******

CLONEGAL Castle, home to the Durdin-Robertsons since Stuart times, has an unassuming entrance: moss-covered pillars and small iron gates give way to a thinning gravel driveway, beyond which an avenue of yew trees extends around the house. As I got out of the car, a gigantic dog came and flapped its tongue all over my hand. It was raining and freezing, and I was glad when I could step inside.

A massive, goggle-eyed crocodile, hanging from the ceiling, was the first thing to meet my gaze. When my hostess revealed herself, she began to talk almost at once. I was amazed from the first moment by her energy: Olivia Robertson is, after all, older than the Irish state. I followed her past pharaoh's masks and statues of svelte Egyptian cats and into a drawing room. She cranked up a gas heater and readied herself for a few questions: firstly, how would she begin her life's story?

"My life is like a figure 8," she began, "with a flow that moves from the bottom to the top."

I sat, intrigued and sometimes puzzled, as Olivia recounted her journey through the 20th century. It was clear that the decisive moment came halfway through, when she had a vision of a woman "dressed in an evening gown, with a V-shaped split. That was in the Fifties, but I had two awakenings before that".

Born on a Friday 13, one year after Padraig Pearse was executed and just before the end of the First World War, Olivia enjoyed a colourful upbringing. Her first awakening, she says, was of the mind. "My intellectual life began quite young, and was brought about by my father. He was a Freemason, and a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society."

She was surrounded by literature and painting, antique-filled interiors, and plenty of parlour spirituality. Visitors to the house included Yeats and George Russell, or, as he liked to be known, Æ. She remembers Maud Gonne, striding around the house like "a statue of the goddess Demeter".

Æ was less impressive. "He just sat there and spoke about skyscrapers, Æ. This great mystic, and that was all he wanted to talk about!"

"Skyscrapers. That's kind of phallic, isn't it?" I suggested, using a term I figured might have negative connotations for high priestesses.

"Well, exactly!"

During the Second World War she worked as a nurse. After the war she returned to Ireland to work with children and young families in Dublin tenements. "That was the awakening of my heart," she says, "quite different from the mind."

Olivia's compassion for the urchins of the inner city comes across in her first book, St Malachy's Court. Two novels and a memoir followed. I could have asked her more about her books -- and about her sweethearts -- but Olivia made it clear that the love of her life had been the mysterious lady in the evening gown.

"And that was Isis, right?" I asked.

"Correct. Although I didn't know it then. It was when my father died that I really began to develop as a psychic."

Together with Derry, her late brother, who had also heard the call of the goddess, she set up the Fellowship of Isis in the family seat. The group was popular enough to begin with, but, as Olivia explained, "The female principal is more photogenic. When the first photographs of me in my robes appeared, we had people coming from all over the world!"

They soon attracted a good number of "ordinary Irish psychics," and, running out of room upstairs, they created the underground temple. Nowadays, the web site gets hundreds of thousands of hits a week.

"Everyone is welcome -- we have monks, rabbis, Muslims from 31 Arab countries, even Jesuits. All of them want to worship the goddess, and they are free to do so in secret. Many people are psychic, you know. I think you may be psychic."

I turned to watch the flames throb in the heater, wondering what to say. I decided to ask her to give some advice for those awakening to their supernatural powers in present-day Ireland.

"It's important not to be frightened! Many people become paranoid, when they discover their psychic abilities. When the world is dark, you must look to the light."

It sounded like good sense to me. I asked her what she thought of the country's economic rise and fall, and of the receding cash flow that was plunging so many Celtic Tiger alpha-males into disarray. Olivia laughed, good-naturedly, at the foibles of a young nation. "I'm so sorry that they've lost all their lovely money! But they got to enjoy it while it lasted, no?"

*******

WHAT does the Fellowship of Isis believe in, and what happens at their underground get-togethers? Basically, they want to worship any deity going, so long as they have breasts. Olivia says her aim is to rectify the excessive privilege accorded the male in history, religion, and everything else. "People are still scandalised by the phrase 'God the Mother'," she says, "but why not God the Mother?"

The fun gets going with an improvised play, performed in the chilly conservatory. The play was called Banksters, and had as its theme the role of rogue investment bankers in the global credit-crunch. This element of the ritual is the occasion for delivering ecological messages. The apocalyptic thread of the Fellowship's teachings is joined to current affairs, and the finger is duly given to the phallocentric power-structures of society. Afterwards, it's on with your robes and tiaras, across the courtyard and down to the temple for the main event.

Picture, if you will, our subterranean scene: candles and lamps illuminate a low-roofed room filled with shrines. Most of the shrines represent female deities from around the world. My personal favourite was a sort of family-album shrine, with sumptuous David Bailey-type shots from the glory days of the Seventies -- including a few of an unknown, naked young woman meditating placidly by the banks of the Nile. Patriarchal monotheism was no match for her -- and she knew it as well.

Someone was hitting a gong. A stout woman in blue entered and seated herself on a stool in the corner, then draped a veil over her face. This was the "Oracle". She would soon begin to speak, taking the role of the Cailleach.

The what? The "Veiled One" (in old Irish) was a sort of crag-dwelling winter goddess, and, of course, a potent symbol of the Divine Feminine. The featured goddesses of the Fellowship have become more Celtic, and less Egyptian, over time.

"I am the Cailleach ... " began the Oracle, in a reasonably pre-Christian monotone.

But someone there had other ideas.

Just behind me, pressed between a partition and a couple of guys in druid's robes, was a lanky man in jeans and overcoat. In his early 40s, he had been muttering and giggling since he entered the temple, taking long blasts of white wine from a bottle in his hand. A basic understanding of these matters would make it obvious to anyone there that this unfortunate individual was in the grip of forces beyond his control.

"I am the joy of creation," intoned the Cailleach, "and the joy..."

"Joy!" the man screamed, somewhat sarcastically. "Yes! Joy!"

"Let us pray," said Olivia, "That Isis will grant him the gift of silence."

"The joy of creation is mine, and the cycles of the seasons"

"Yes, yes. Joy! Ha!"

"Shh, please," said a tourist.

"Shh!" he hissed back.

Olivia was becoming irritated. "You must be quiet," she said, "Or you must leave! Isis wills it so!" I could hear one of the druids asking him to stop. "OK, OK," he said, but as soon as the druid had turned away, he screamed again. It was time for him to go: hands and fingers pinched his sleeves and lay on his forearms, and he was ushered out. He let out a parting shot. "I've got horns on my head! Can't you see!?"

"Well," said Olivia, returning to centre-stage after seeing him out, "alcohol can bring us to heaven sometimes, but it can bring us to the other place, as well." We watched her take the floor for the finale: the high-priestesses' psychic soliloquy. One of the cloaked and crowned ladies on the ground began to play a bodhran, while another started a soft refrain that continued while Olivia spoke. It reminded me of The Doors, when Morrison would free-associate in the middle of the set as Manzarek noodled about on the organ behind him.

Olivia's voice was full of well-practised awe. She paced around in front of the altar as she spoke, gesturing up and down. On the floor, another fellowship member, Minette, was tenderly shading her friend's eyes as they listened to Olivia. What did Olivia say?

Depending on your point of view, she was bringing us on a guided trance in celebration of the Divine Feminine, making use of images derived from astrology, the natural world and spirituality, or she was filling our heads with hippy-era babble.

As for me, I knew I was watching something rare and beautiful -- catching one of the last performances of a proven New-Age genius, the equivalent of a late-career solo by Charlie Parker.

As Imbolc ended, Olivia handed out wine gums and her inner circle of Isis-experts waited around to give healings. I wasn't about to turn that down -- it was dark by the time we left.

As the car turned out of the courtyard the druids were changing back into their civvies and Olivia was giving everyone a kiss goodbye. I waved and shouted to her, but the only one who looked my way was the dog. "I'm going to miss that old lady," I said to my colleague. "She'll probably outlive you," he said. Harsh, but reasonable.

*******

BACK in Dublin, Aisling, sitting exactly where I had left her, asked me how it had gone.

"I loved it! But it was intense -- everyone was psychic, or psychotic, or both. They deliver oracles underground, then they put you in a trance and whisper things in your ear, then they give you a wine gum. And they worship God the Mother."

Aisling looked up.

"Oh really?"

"Yeah -- crazy, no?"

"Well, I don't know. Why not God the Mother?"

Why not, indeed?

The Fellowship of Isis marks every major Celtic feast day with a festival. For details, see www.fellowshipofisis. com