After the last article I put up on the website - which ended up receiving an amazing amount of attention - thanks to some generous plugging by Erynn - I really thought that I'd kind of covered all I could think of on the subject; there were bits I'd originally intended to expand on but didn't find any place for them in the articles as I wrote them.
I'd figured that the next article to write was obvious and inevitable - the next stop was the daoine sìth (I'll try to avoid the 'f' word). I've had a bugger of a time writing it, though. From putting my back out and the drugs preventing me from being able to concentrate enough to research and write, to just realising that I was going about it all wrong, it's been a long time coming, and a process that's kinda reminiscent of pulling teeth.
I realised that the subject was too narrow considering the focus I'd been taking as far as the gods and the other two are concerned. I'd done gods, I'd done ancestors, but I hadn't done anything about the spirits, and so I had to scrap my original idea and take things in a different direction, broadening the scope a little. I'm not entirely sure that I'm happy with the end result, to be honest - I'm limited by lack of experience in being able to talk much about dealing with foreign spirits in other countries, for one. But this is what I ended up with:
Gods and Spirits
It's something that's been on my mind a lot this year so far, though. I might still get round to covering the daoine sìth in a separate article, but in some ways it's not going to be easy because I've already done a lot here there and everywhere else. A lot of it will inevitably be repetitious, but it's difficult to figure out just what needs to be repeated.
Ho hum. Lots of things need doing. So little time to do it...
Oh this is an excellent article! Very helpful and I enjoyed reading it. :)
ReplyDeleteI remember the first time I came across De ocus ande...its meaning was a bit of a head-scratcher for me. I took the assumption that it meant "everyone else" {i.e. spirits of the place, ancestors, et. al}.
I'm glad you enjoyed it!
ReplyDeleteI think the catch-all of 'everyone else' for the andé works well; they all blend into one another at some point. I probably should have put something about that, actually :p