On this day...

Wishing you all a very merry Burns' Night!

In honour of the day, I thought I'd share with you a very rare specimen of haggis, Haggis scota, which can be found at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow:

I'm sure you'll agree it's magnificent...(I used to have a haggis toy as a kid, but it was white and looked more like a tribble).

If you're partaking this evening, do enjoy your haggis, neeps 'n' tatties. I recommend trying it with a whisky and cheese sauce, if that's your thing. Yum.

The Cailleach and the hunter

From The Emmet, 1823:

The Cailleach...had the most unlimited power over the elements. When a hunter kindled a fire in a sheeling to warm his benumbed limbs, after the fatigues of the chase, this sublime being although in a mountain of Perthshire strode in a moment from hill to hill, and was with the hunter at his blazing fire in a twinkling, though it had been kindled by him in the distant mountains of Ross-shire. She always attempted to destroy him whom she thus so unexpectedly and unwelcomely visited; and the means which she had recourse to for this purpose were various. She was much afraid of a dog and a loaded gun; and as these were companions which every hunter had along with him, she was not so successful in the trade of slaying as she naturally wished. The following song was sung by her one evening to scare a hunter from killing her deer. As the hunter was in the act of levelling his piece at a large stag that grazed in a green meadow between two mountains, she suddenly made her appearance on the frowning brow of a large precipice, and recited or sung as follows, and it almost is unnecessary to mention, that the hunter made the decentest speed possible towards the low grounds, when the last strain came rolling to his ear on the evening breeze...

Tiny hunter cease to roam,

O'er the piny heights where I make my dwelling; 

Tempt the roaring foam, 

Of ocean when high the trouble waves are swelling, 

But here where I hold my sway, 

O'er deep glen and mountain gray, 

Dare not venture night or day -

Tiny mortal roam not here! 

I am monarch of the deer,

Which bound over all these green mountains;

I partake of their cheer, 

The crystal stream so clear, 

And the cresses that fringe the blue fountains: 

Tis I that deform heaven's face with the storm, 

And sublime on the dark clouds career.

I revel 'mid the elemental war, 

At rest within my misty car, 

And send my voice in hollow moans afar, 

Down the dusky glen among the dwellings of men; 

And fill them with terror and fear!

Cease, then, my piny heights to climb,

Pollute not my green knoll of thyme, 

Where I hold my august court,

And with my fairy subjects sport, 

When the moon at her noon, 

Pours her silver stream of light, 

O'er the blue bosom of the silent night!

Tremble mortal, at my power, 

Leave my sacred dominion! 

Ere I cause the heavens lower, 

And whelm thee with a fearful shower, 

For sport to my fairy minions!

Hence away! child of clay, 

Go tempt the roaring foam, 

Of ocean, when high the troubled waves are swelling; 

But ne'er again stray where I hold my sway,

O'er the piny heights that I make my dwelling!

Signs

Last week, as I was taking the dogs out for a walk with kids in tow, I stumbled across a dead crow, lying in the middle of the pavement. Now that, I thought, can't be a good sign.

With a lot of thought and worrying and gnawing at the innards of my mind, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't so much a sign of impending doom for myself (though I'm still not ruling that out), but that it maybe has more to do with the recent storms that have caused so much devastation and damage in the area. The storms have been nothing like I've ever seen before, and perhaps this crow was a sign to tell me that this place is hurting, and it needs something from me.

Here, mostly stuck on the sofa in pain at the moment, I've not been doing as much to maintain my obligations to this area, and if it takes a dead crow to give me a good kick up the arse, then it's perhaps time to take a hint that I really need to pick things up. During the storms I made offerings to the Cailleachan, the Storm Hags who unleash their fury in the wind and the rain, the raging waves and the rising streams. I watched the storms and breathed them in, at times I got caught up in the energy and the fury, and marvelled in what nature can do sometimes. I prayed and I sang, and on my rounds the other week, I took in the damage.

On a day to day basis, though, I think it's safe to say that I've mostly been wallowing on the sofa; the past few weeks or so haven't been great, as far as keeping on top of the chronic pain issues have gone. I've been so busy wallowing (and trying to escape at the same time, but running in the wrong direction), perhaps, that I've dropped the ball, and I need to get back on an even keel. Instead of wallowing, I need to get up and do.

So that's what I'm trying to do, getting back to concentrating on my daily devotions; my prayers and offerings, maintaining and rebuilding my relationship with this land that have otherwise been a little fudged recently. Balance must be restored, and my mistakes must be owned and owned up to.

But that's not what this post is about, really; I'm more thinking about signs in general...It's a tricky subject when it comes to a religion that otherwise emphasises that which can be found in books. There's no manual, when it comes to signs. There's nothing set in stone. For once, instead of nosing into a book and burying into research, it's something that we have to turn inwards to for answers. That can be difficult for a lot of folks, I think, and the whole mystical side of practice is something I've struggled with myself, on and off. After I finally had a bit of a breakthrough with it all, and finally got to grips with it, a dear friend said to me, "Welcome to the crazy."

Thanks. I think.

Signs are a tricky subject. You don't necessarily have to be gifted in seeing them per se (I mean, sometimes they're about as subtle as a brick in the face, y'know?), but at the same time, some people just aren't gifted, and that's just the way it is. I can't claim to be an expert in this, of course. I can't make any claims at proficiency. I try, because it's something that I've always been unable to avoid, in spite of the fact that once upon a time I might have tried to. It's just a part of me, and why run away from yourself?

It's the interpreting of signs that's often the hard part. It takes a kind of self-trust and self-knowledge that can be difficult to find; with signs, we have to be honest with ourselves, and sometimes it can be hard to do that. Sometimes there are things about ourselves that we don't to acknowledge, but in striving to be the best we can be, to uphold the values that we as Gaelic Polytheists hold dear...we must strive for truth, and strive for truth being at the heart of everything we do.

Struggling with those inner demons, sometimes we can receive signs that are so painfully obvious it's practically screaming the answer at us, and still we get totally the wrong end of the stick. Sometimes it's because we don't want to admit that we've been going about things wrong; that we've just received a negative sign. Sometimes, when life has thrown us more than a few lemons, the hard part can even be trusting in the fact that you've just had a good sign. Sometimes, we need a little guidance. Eventually, we might just get the hint.

At one point in my evolving Celtic Reconstructionist practices, I tried ogam for divinatory purposes, which included making my own set:

I chose to make them according to the colour correspondences associated with each letter; I respond strongly to colour, and I can't claim to be much of an expert with trees so using the more common tree correspondences seemed a bit pointless. I also tried a neutral set, with no colour or decoration:

Both sets - and others I've since experimented with - were put together from driftwood I found at the local beach after we moved to these here parts on the west coast; wood I collected as part of my efforts to settle in to this place. It involved a long process of offerings and building a relationship with the area before it felt right to even begin collecting anything from the local beach, and then I had to invest in the tools to burn the lettering and ogam into the wood before painting and/or treating with beeswax to preserve them.

The first set I connected with better, but ultimately I decided that ogam is not something that I really get on with. I experimented for a while with taking an ogam reading for the festivals, or when I felt it was necessary, for example, and while I did find them effective and useful in one sense, in another it never seemed to sit right with me. I'm beginning to think it was because I was limiting myself with them, and that as part of settling in here I needed to be looking around me for signs, familiarising myself with the locale and continuing to build on my relationship with it. Certainly my experimenting with the ogam helped me get more comfortable with engaging in the more mystical aspects of practice, though, and it helped solidify my thoughts on it all. Every now and then I think about going back to them; it seems a shame for them to sit in a cupboard, unused.

And so at least I managed to build on it. Birds, in particular (and in keeping with tradition, I think), form a large part of the signs I might see in general. Magpies are something that I feel have some sort of personal significance, but corvids in general have signficance to me and a lot of other folks.

As well as herons, owls, that kind of thing. A breeze picking up at the right time, clouds passing in front of the sun or moon at particular moments, the calling of birds or animals hanging the night air; and so on...

Sometimes signs can seem totally random. One time, I found a rainbow trout lying on the pavement outside my house. A perfectly whole trout, just randomly laying on the pavement...As things go, I figured it had to mean something, but that one I was totally stumped by... 

There have been times when the signs have been a lot more obvious, though. One morning of Là Fhèill Brìghde I got up to find that our back door was wide open; as signs for Bride having visited go, you can't get any stronger really.

Last Samhainn, I set out some offerings to my ancestors and had a few words before finishing off my devotions. As I stood back and looked up to the sky for any signs, I saw a band of the Milky Way shining bright and clear above me - beautifully - and then a shooting star travelling right in front of me, in the west towards the ancestors. It's not often I get something as clear as those kinds of signs, but when I do, it's a time when I feel infinitely amazed at the world around me.

And so, all this rambling brings me to the thought that - for me at least - looking for signs is one of the ways I can keep connected with the land around me. With the gods and spirits and ancestors. Without that connection, I'm adrift, wallowing, out of balance. Maybe sometimes it takes a dead crow to wake me up.

Or maybe...maybe I'm just a bit mental and making things up as I go along. "Welcome to the crazy," my friend said.

Indeed.

Addendum: Gorm over at Three Shouts on a Hilltop has some very good thoughts to add to the subject, which is well worth a read.

Labels (again)

This following post is something I've been pondering for a long while, and have made several attempts at getting it all out in a post only to give up and come back to it later...my brain, it just gave up; even it wasn't sure where I was going with this. Some recent conversations I've seen going on have started me thinking about all of this stuff again, though, and it's spurred me on to try and finally get these thoughts into a more coherent mess. Hopefully, I will succeed.

Mostly what I've been thinking about is the ever-popular subject of labels and how (or maybe why) people pick and choose those labels; or perhaps more to the point, what those labels are all about. There's a lot of baggage that can come with those labels sometimes, a lot of judgement values people might place on those who associate with them; a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings that come with them. We all have our biases.

In theory, any labels we choose to identify with are the ones we feel fit us best (hello, obvious statement of the day...). Sometimes, though, maybe that's not so much the case. Maybe sometimes we desperately want to cling onto those labels because we think that's what we should be, but maybe it's not what we actually are and we either can't or won't admit it...yet. Maybe sometimes, those labels become so swamped in misconceptions that they get co-opted into meaning something entirely different from what they were originally intended for. Maybe sometimes people see a prestige in the label and they want to be associated with that prestige, regardless of anything else. Maybe sometimes those people aren't even aware of what it is they're doing.

There is room in this world for a huge variety of viewpoints and approaches, and like anyone else (in theory...) I choose the approach that suits me best, and so the labels as well. In a religious sense, maybe it's not even about me, but what's right for the gods, the spirits, the ancestors that I strive to build and maintain a relationship with.

Either way, it should be a case of 'if the shoe fits,' right?

When it comes to reconstructionism, though, there are a ton of misconceptions that we come up against every day - just like anything else, surely. No, it doesn't mean I'm trying to go back to the Iron Age. No, I don't want to 'live like they did.' No, it's not just an American thing. And no, I don't run screaming from the building when someone mentions UPG...

These are all things that come up again and again, here there and everywhere, among many other things. Sometimes I see folks confidently stating that since Celtic Reconstructionists inevitably have certain gaps in our knowledge as far as our practices go, we look to other cultures to fill those gaps in. I disagree with that; we might look to other cultures - neighbouring Indo-European cultures - in order to form an educated picture of what we should be looking for in certain areas, but this is not the same as taking bits from here and there just to flesh things out.

If we did do this, then it seems to me that what we end up with can't really be considered to be particularly Celtic, let alone 'Gaelic', or whatever our focus happens to be. By incorporating other cultures' traditions into our own, the lines are blurred between trying to reconstruct something, as opposed to synthesising something that is simply modern and eclectic.

Of course, no culture exists in a vacuum; there are accretions from outside influences within any culture. But these are natural accretions, exceptions, that are made from within that cultural framework, over time, and by a process that generally involves the meeting of those cultures naturally, in one way or another. The Norse influences in Scotland are a good example of this, and I think it's fair to say that these influences happened over a long time, through contact and trade before the Norse actually settled and took over parts of Scotland. They had an influence on the language, customs and traditions, but first and foremost, these are things that were adopted into the culture, not things that dominated the culture that was there already.

In the same way, what we do as Celtic Reconstructionists should be approrached on the same terms; in understanding the culture, the beliefs, and most of all the worldview that informed those beliefs. These were and are the aims of CR. More and more, though, there seems to be an increasing trend to ignore that; adopting belief and practices from within a modern, neopagan view, rather than a specific cultural context. A side effect of this is that some then end up clinging onto labels that aren't appropriate in cultural terms, but which are perfectly understood - if contradictory - in neopagan terms, but that's perhaps a different post. Either way, yes, we are a modern religion, but I think it's important to point out that neopaganism in general is not a point of reference for reconstructionism as far as practices are concerned (historically, reconstructionism emerged as a reaction against those practices, even). What we find from historical sources, archaeology, language and lore is; from the culture. That's where we should be looking.

But then, there will never be one way of doing things, or total agreement amongst people, especially when we're dealing with an extremely disparate (and highly opinionated) group; it's unreasonable to expect that to be the case. It seems that reconstructionism will always be a spectrum as much as it's a methodology, even when one end of the spectrum might seem to be totally contradictory to the other. Ultimately, there will always be some people who just don't seem to get it.

Some of us deal with the problems these lables can bring by redefining ourselves and abandoning old labels in favour of new ones, sidelining ourselves. If anything, this allow us some space to move beyond the misunderstandings and find a community that fits us better, even if the pond is much much smaller. Inevitably, though, that just means there are new labels to be misunderstood and get confused by...It's a fudge, really, not a solution.

The only thing we can really do is be mindful of the labels we use and the communities we identify with. When we wear those labels and proclaim them, we take on a responsibility to the community those labels are associated with. To misrepresent them can be seriously damaging, and result in yet more misconceptions. Likewise, it's up to everyone to be mindful of what other people mean when they use a label - do they mean the same thing as you? Otherwise discussions get messy; people talk at cross-purposes and end up bickering, only to end up realising that both sides are talking about entirely different things.

Trust me, it's infuriating.

Translated articles

Just a note for any readers whose first language is Portuguese: Two of my articles from Tairis have been translated by Brazilian blogger Aengus Miach (Leeh), over at her blog Tír Tairnge (with my permission). The direct links are:

Celbrando Là Fhèill Brìghde
Là Fhèill Brìghde

Many thanks to Leeh for all the hard work! It's great to see that there are such dedicated folks out there, across the world, doing such good work in CR; Leeh's blog is well worth checking out.