Searching for Imbas

Fireflies at Absolute Zero

2012-01-21T21:57:00.000-08:00

The final draft of my poetry collection, Fireflies at Absolute Zero, was sent off to Hiraeth Press this past week, while I was buried under the unusually heavy snowfall here in the Pacific Northwest. It was a lovely way to spend a couple of snowed-in days, which I otherwise would not have enjoyed very much. I don't care for the snow, which is one of the reasons why I live on the Salish Sea and not in the Berkshires where I grew up.

I was asked for a short description of the book, an author bio, and a photo, all of which I also sent along. Hiraeth will be updating their website sometime later this year with an announcement about the book. They currently have notices about projects up to August of this year on their news page. Tentative release is set for the last half of October or possibly November 1st of 2012.

To say I'm excited about the book is an understatement. I am, however, also nervous about the whole thing. I think most authors are at this point in the process. Most of my pre-print work is done. Now I have to wait on back cover blurbs, reviews, cover art, and all the rest of the things that go along with getting the book into print and ready for distribution. Once the book actually comes out, I'll need to do readings and signings and such. If you're interested in having me come to your area for a reading and signing (not just for this book, but with others as well), please let me know and we'll see what we can arrange.

Jason and Leslie at Hiraeth have been absolutely wonderful so far. I have great faith in them to make the best possible book from the manuscript I've sent them. I can't wait to see what they come up with for cover art - the cover is such an important aspect of the book. You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but I have certainly been turned off by cover art and prejudiced against the content of a book by a bad cover. To me, a bad cover speaks of carelessness from the press or incompetence in an independent author. A good cover can intrigue and excite a potential reader, and it may turn the tide between picking the book up off the shelf and not doing so. The covers I've seen on Hiraeth's volumes are beautiful and definitely catch the eye.

Poetry is always such a personal genre of writing. Whether or not one likes it is a matter of deeply personal taste. Something that thrills one reader will bore another to tears. I think the best any of us can do as poets is to speak from our hearts about things that matter to us and to do so in the most honest way possible. To do so with eloquence and power is the essence of poetic art. I hope that I have done this and that my work will appeal not just to the Pagan community of which I am a part, but to the wider world as well.

Irish Lessons in Seattle

2011-12-10T01:10:00.001-08:00

Caera, one of the members of the local CR community, is offering Irish lessons in Seattle starting in January. Here's the information:

I will be teaching Irish Language Classes for Beginners, on Wednesday evenings in 2012, beginning Wednesday, January 4th. Classes will run from 7pm to 8pm. Cost is $40 for the month of January paid in full (at the first class), or $15 per drop-in. I will be providing materials for at least the first few classes; you will want to bring a notebook and a pen, and if you'd like you may bring a recording device if it is nonintrusive. This class will go over reading and pronunciation, but will have a focus on speaking Gaeilge as a living language.

There are no prerequisites. If you have never tried to learn any Gaelic language ever, you are welcome to take this class. If you have tried a bit on your own but not gotten very far, you are welcome to take this class. If you had some a long time ago but would like a refresher, you are welcome to take this class. If you have Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig), but no Irish (Gaeilge), and would like to fix that, you are welcome to take this class. If you can already converse fluently as Gaeilge, please email me at caerasinger@gmail.com and we can talk about setting up a conversation group (and you are probably well beyond this class).

Classes will be held at Edge of the Circle (bookstore), on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Their full address is 701 East Pike St, Seattle, WA 98122, and phone number for the shop is (206)726-1999. Classes will be held in their meeting room downstairs.

If you have any questions about the classes themselves, please feel free to contact the teacher at caerasinger@gmail.com -- Thank you.

This is a great opportunity to meet like-minded others, and to learn to speak Irish. Come and join us!

Accepted for Mandragora!

2011-11-26T15:44:00.001-08:00

I got notice today from Ruby Sara, an editor at Scarlet Imprint, that an essay and two of my poems have been accepted for the new anthology on esoteric poesis, Mandragora. This is a sequel to the beautiful anthology Datura, now out in paperback.

My essay, "Burying the Poet: Brigid, Poetry, and the Visionary in Gaelic Poetic Traditions," deals with incubatory and initiatory themes in filidecht and other related European poetic traditions. I was very excited to work on a project of that nature and I hope that the material presented in the essay will be inspiring to people following the path of filidecht. Due to the nature of the publication, I didn't use footnotes, but the material is findable and I intend to use a good bit of it as I work on a book on filidecht over time.

Two of my poems, "Lost Text" and "On the Origin of Dreams" were also accepted, much to my delight.

The books from Scarlet Imprint are always beautiful visually and they are physically sensual. The silk-bound hardcover of Datura has to be held to be believed. The contents are equally beautiful, thoughtful, and inspiring.

I'm very pleased to be included in this new anthology. No publication date has yet been announced, but I am guessing we'll be seeing it by late 2012.

My schedule at PantheaCon 2012

2011-11-25T19:00:00.001-08:00

The PantheaCon schedule for February 2012 is now live on the PantheaCon website.

I have three planned appearances this year:

Friday, 11pm:

Celtic Reconstructionist Rituals: A Look at the Nuts and Bolts

We will examine rituals used by the Seattle CR community as examples of ritual construction for vigils and shorter rites. With scripts in hand, we'll deconstruct these texts and the elements involved, and discuss how and why these rituals were created and how they evolved. These living examples can provide inspiration for creation of rituals for other local groups or individuals.

Saturday, 3pm:

Sisters of Seshat's Moon Ritual. The Sisters of Seshat is a feminist ceremonial magic group based on material in Brandy Williams's excellent and thought-provoking book The Woman Magician. I still owe Brandy a review for that book. I was extremely impressed.

Sunday, 7pm:

Brigid and Sarasvati: Goddesses of Poetry and Inspiration

Imbas flows in many forms. Poetry, music and other creative arts lie within the purview of Brigid of Ireland. India's Sarasvati is similar to her in many ways. Join Erynn Rowan Laurie in exploring the mythic and poetic intersections between these two Goddesses and their poetic gifts to their devotees.

I hope I'll see you at the con! I'm very much looking forward to participating this coming year.

On the use of juniper for purification

2011-11-05T12:23:00.000-07:00

I've been asked a few times recently about why I use juniper, why do a purification at all before doing ritual, and whether this is some sort of Christian influence on the tradition.

I'll address the last question first. A lot of non-Christian (and, in fact, uninfluenced by Christianity) traditions do purifications before they do ritual. Siberian shamans (Ulchi, Nanai, etc) purify with smoke. Lakota people purify with smoke. Shinto purifies with water. Many other traditions to purifications of varying kinds. They do them for a lot of different reasons.

Purifications like this don't imply that we are evil or sin-filled or unfit to stand before the Gods. A pre-ritual purification can be viewed in the same way as wiping your feet before you walk into someone's house or taking off your shoes at the door -- sometimes we carry stuff with us that we don't want to bring into a ritual space on our bodies or our clothing. It's not a value judgment about us as human beings, it's just a way to remove any unwanted influences before we enter ritual space, however we are defining that.

The reason I use juniper in particular is because it was used in Scotland. We don't know if they did this every time anyone did ritual, but for a lot of people, doing something like this before ritual is a comforting thing, or a signal that we are entering ritual space. In Scotland, juniper was burned on New Years morning in enough quantity to fill the entire house or byre. I don't want to suffocate my whole house and make all the smoke alarms go off, so using a little of it at the beginning of a ritual was something I considered a reasonable adaptation of the tradition. It was also burned on the quarter days (Imbolc, Beltaine, Lughnassadh, Samhain) for the same reasons.

Here is a quote from F. Marian McNeill's The Silver Bough (link to ebook edition) regarding that tradition:

Juniper, or the mountain yew, was burned by the Highlanders both in the house and in the byre as a purification rite on New Year's morning. Like all magical plants, it had to be pulled in a particular manner. The Druids, as we have seen, had considerable medical skill. They knew all that was known of botany and chemistry, and to them fell the selection of the herbs for the mystic cauldron. These were gathered at certain phases of the moon. Magical rites were employed in the culling; sexual abstinence, silence, a certain method of uprooting, and occasionally sacrifice were necessary. Long after the disappearance of the Druids, herbs found by sacred streams were used to cure wounds and bruises and other ills, and traces of the rites and runes linger in folk tradition. Juniper, for instance, to be effective, had to be pulled by the roots, with its branches made into four bundles and taken between the five fingers, whilst the incantation was repeated:

I will pull the bounteous yew,
Through the five bent ribs of Christ,
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,
Against drowning, danger, and confusion.

As with so many Gaelic prayers, we can take the form and consider which of the Pagan deities would suit the situation. Miach seems a very reasonable deity for the second line here, given that all of the healing herbs were said to grow from his cairn. The third line might work well with Dían Cécht, Miach, and Airmed, if you are so inclined.

John Gregorson Campbell, in several places in The Gaelic Otherworld, says:

Juniper, pulled in a particular manner, was burned before cattle and put in cows' tails.

Juniper (Iubhar-Beinne, literally Mountain Yew): This plant is a protection by land and sea, and no house in which it is will take fire.

Shrovetide [the Tuesday before Lent] was one of the great days for 'saining' cattle, juniper being burned before them, while other superstitious precautions were taken to keep them free from harm.

The Carmina Gadelica offers:

Iubhar beinne [juniper] and caorran, mountain ash or rowan, were burnt on the doorstep of the byre on the first day of the quarter, on Beltaine Day and Hallowmas. The byre lintel was sprinkled with wine, or failing wine, with human urine. ... This was done to safeguard the cattle from mischance, mishap, and each other's horns.

Milliken and Bridgewater, in Flora Celtica: Plants and People in Scotland say:

Juniper is another tree whose branches were sometimes hung above the doors and windows on auspicious days, or burned in the fire. Juniper burning, which formed part of the New Year rituals in some parts of the country, seemed to have a dual purpose. Not only was it supposed to ward off witches and evil spirits but, at a more practical level, it cleansed the house of pests and diseases. The branches were dried beside the fire the night before, and when all the windows and doors were shut, fires were lit in each room until the whole house was full of their acrid smoke. When the coughing and sputtering inhabitants could stand it no longer, the windows were opened and the process was repeated in the stables. Interestingly, the smoke of burning juniper is also used for spiritual cleansing in Nepal, where it plays a key part in puja ceremonies such as those held before attempts to climb Mount Everest.

I don't have any particular investment in warding off witches, given that a lot of my friends fall into that category, but warding off evil spirits, bad luck, illness, danger, fires, and general klutziness seems like a pretty good reason to follow this tradition. Besides, juniper smells wonderful, and it grows abundantly around here, just as it does in the Highlands of Scotland.

Juniper was also known in Irish and Gaelic as aiteal. This Irish gardening website claims:

The stems and branches which provide support for the trees foliage and berries are covered in rich, brownish red bark, which can be seen to shred, curl and peel away in strips from the mature tree. Under the bark, you will find the pinkish white water-filled sapwood similarly aromatic to the pungent foliage. The interior brown heartwood is quite soft and has few if any wood working uses, apart from veneering; instead, it was used for burning because of its scent. The ancient Celts burned the wood of the Juniper at their autumn (Samhain) festival for purification, as an aid to allow contact with the dead.

I haven't seen other references to the Irish or Scottish use of juniper for contact with the spirits of the dead, but this may well come from traditions in other parts of the world and have been attached to "ancient Celtic" uses for the plant, given that it was burned at the quarter days, one of which is Samhain. If anyone has further information about where this particular reference might have come from, please let me know. I'd be interested to see the sources on it!

Disability and Religious Diversity now available!

2011-10-27T18:30:00.000-07:00

I just received my contributor's copy of Disability and Religious Diversity in the mail from the publisher! I hadn't been expecting to see it until next week, at least, but here it is.

You can get it from Palgrave Macmillan if you are interested. My paper in this book is titled "Since Feathers Have Grown on My Body: Madness, Art and Healing in Celtic Reconstructionist Spirituality" and addresses the similarities I see in the narratives of the geilta in Gaelic and other Celtic mythologies and the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I'll actually be speaking at a class at University of Washington, Bothell on November 1st about this topic. The class is Medicine, Illness, and Culture, taught by an acquaintance of mine. She was fascinated by the paper when I described it to her, and so I provided her with a text copy before the book came out so that she could include it as part of the class reading material for this quarter.

Today I also got notice that contributors to Datura will be receiving a free contributor's copy of the paperback edition, which is very exciting to me, needless to say. If you were interested in the beautiful hardbound edition but could not afford a copy, this is your chance to get some excellent poetry and essays on "esoteric poesis" from Scarlet Imprint. I was delighted to be included in this wonderful anthology and I'm sure that you'll enjoy it.

Datura in paperback and Circle of Stones report

2011-10-26T22:34:00.000-07:00

I got notification today from Ruby Sara, the editor of Datura, that the anthology is now available in paperback. This is a much more affordable edition than the hardbound, of which only a few copies remain. The book contains two of my poems and an essay.

The book can be ordered from Scarlet Imprint.

I've had the reprint of Circle of Stones on hold, awaiting a much improved pronunciation guide for the Irish and Gaelic in the text, and that has now been finished. I should be able to get the text back to my publisher within the next week or so for layout. The projected publication date is May of 2012. When the reprint goes live, I'll be removing the original PDF edition from my website. I will keep everyone updated on the progress of the reprint.

A spell of protection

2011-10-25T23:50:00.000-07:00

In honor of those holding the line tonight, in Oakland and wherever else they may be.

There is a lorica prayer written probably sometime in the 8th century, around the same time that the familiar prayer known as "St. Patrick's Breastplate" or "The Deer's Cry" was composed. It feels remarkably Pagan, despite its date. With very little editing, it can be made entirely Pagan. I offer this translation, from John Carey's King of Mysteries: Early Irish Religious Writings. It is called Cétnad n-Aíse: A Chant of Long Life, or Fer Fio's Cry.

~~~~

May Fer Fio's cry protect me upon the road, as I make my circuit of the Plain of Life.

I invoke the seven daughters of the sea
who form the threads of the long-lived youths.
May three deaths be taken from me,
may three life-times be granted me,
may seven waves of luck be poured out for me.
May spectres not harm me upon my rounds
in the breastplate of Laisrén, without injury.
My fame is not bound to perish.
May long life come to me,
may death not come to me
until I am old.

I invoke my silver warrior,
who has not died, who will not die.
May time be granted me
with the virtue of findruine.
May my shape be made golden,
may my rank be ennobled,
may my strength be magnified.
May my burial be not swift,
may death not come to me upon the road,
may my journey be confirmed.
May the senseless snake not sieze me,
nor the harsh grey worm,
nor the senseless beetle.
May no thief destroy me,
nor a company of women,
nor a company of warriors.
May an extension of time be granted me by the King of all things.

I invoke Senach of the seven ages,
whom fairy women fostered
on the breasts of inspiration.
May my seven candles be not quenched.
I am an impregnable fortress,
I am an immovable rock,
I am a precious stone,
I am a weekly blessing.
May I live a hundred times a hundred years,
each hundred of them in turn.
I summon their benefits to me;
may the grace of the holy spirit be upon me.

~~~~

May all who are fighting for justice and equity in these difficult times be protected. May they be blessed. May their strength be magnified. May they be an impregnable fortress and an immovable rock. My heart is with you, even though my body cannot be.

Muirgeilt

2011-10-21T16:43:00.000-07:00

She was Lí Ban once, before the flooding of Lough Neagh.

She tended a sacred well, keeping the door to its enclosure locked to prevent the waters from rising. The well she guarded had been magically created by the hooves of a horse given to Eochaidh, her father, by Oengus mac ind Óg. Eochaidh had been warned that if the horse ever stopped moving, destruction was sure to follow, and Eochaidh knew that the well was dangerous because it flowed forth from where the horse had stopped.

The story says that Lí Ban one day forgot to lock the door, and the waters of the well rose and flooded the countryside, creating Lough Neagh and sweeping everyone away, killing almost everyone but Lí Ban herself, and her lapdog. She took shelter in the enclosure that had guarded the well and remained there for a year, safe beneath the waves. At the end of the year, and the end of her rope, Lí Ban uttered a wish that she might be a salmon, so that she could swim with the fish outside in the water; she was transformed into a salmon with a woman's head and shoulders, and her lapdog became an otter.

After three hundred years, Beoan, a disciple of St. Comgall, was traveling along the coast with his company and heard the voice of a woman chanting. He looked down from his boat into the water and asked who was singing and Lí Ban responded to him. They conversed and, after he returned from his sojourn in Rome, he brought boats and nets and raised Lí Ban from the waters. They kept her in a boat filled with water and took her around the countryside. During these travels, her lapdog was killed and she fell into despair.

At the church of Beoan, Lí Ban was told she could either live a very long life there, or die and immediately be taken up into heaven. Tired of life and still grieving, she chose death, and was given the name Muirgeilt. Some sources translate it as "sea-wanderer" but, as we have seen before in our explorations of the geilta here and in some of my other writing, it can equally be translated as "sea-mad one." A saint on the Irish calendar, her feast day is January 27th.

Like Suibhne, she is a poet, singing songs and chanting poems in her exile. Where Suibhne grew feathers during his years in the wilderness, Muirgeilt became part salmon, silver with scales. They were both profoundly alone in the world. None of her poems were recorded; we have only Beoan's report that she chanted and sang, the acts of a poet. She did not consume the salmon -- she became the salmon. She embodied wild wisdom, originating from a sacred well.

Lí Ban shares a name with the sister of Fand, who is the wife of Manannán mac Lir, the sea god and the keeper of mists. We find her in the tale The Sickbed of Cú Chulainn, where she and Fand bring the warrior into the Otherworld to fight a battle for them. This Lí Ban is not known for her poetry, but she, like Fand, is another shapeshifter, appearing as a seabird. The intense liminality of shapeshifting, of taking on the partial form of a bird or a fish, or of total transformation into another species, is deeply resonant of the place of the geilt in Irish society. They lurk at the edges of civilization, half-wild, steeped in creative power. They are unpredictable, taking on new shapes and redefining the human. They touch upon both human and animal nature, partaking of both.

Part of what I find fascinating about Muirgeilt is that, while her name contains the element geilt, she does not appear to be mad in the same sense that Suibhne is. They share an exile from their own people and the trauma of death all around them, but their isolation is different in quality. There is more desperation in Suibhne, and a certain sense of resignation in Muirgeilt. Both of them wander the wilderness -- his of the forest and hers of the sea. Both of them are poets, even if we never see an example of Muirgeilt's work. There is a sad erasure of women's words here, but we can imagine her sea-songs and laments. We can imagine the wisdom she must have possessed. We can reclaim her salmon-human flesh from Christian sainthood and take her as a teacher from beyond the ninth wave.

I write about her today because of a friend's dream, where I showed up dressed in a feathered cloak that was shaped like a salmon, talking to him about the significance of the ogam letter coll -- the hazel -- and a cauldron filled with coals. He was unaware of the multiple layers of resonance that the image had for me. The feathered cloak is the tugen, the mark of the fili's vocation. The geilta, after twenty years in the wilderness, begin growing feathers in a bird-transformation that bestows the tugen upon them by suffering rather than study.

The salmon shape of the cloak reminded me of Muirgeilt, and also of the strong presence of the salmon as a powerful spirit, who embodies wisdom ingested through the nuts that fall from the hazels that grow over the well of wisdom. The hazels themselves, as the subject of the dream-Erynn's discussion, are the root and source of wisdom and are a massively multi-layered symbol all on their own. They are one of the nine traditional woods used for sacred fires, and fire is also a symbol of wisdom as imbas, the fire in the head of the poet.

The three cauldrons found within the body, discussed in the Cauldron of Poesy text, are echoed by the cauldron in the dream. My friend's cauldron contained embers that he could not allow to go out, an apt metaphor for some of the things happening in his life at the moment. In the dream, I instructed him to ask a mutual friend about the use of the cauldron. The image is a striking one and I will be trying to catch up with him for a chai to talk about the whole thing.

May your dreams be intriguing.

Upcoming pilgrimage to Ireland, Summer 2012

2011-10-18T21:03:00.000-07:00

Today I talked with Jhenah and Vyviane of the Sisterhood of Avalon about our upcoming pilgrimage to Ireland. We are still very much in the planning stage, with no date set just yet, but from the looks of things, locations will include Kildare, Sligo, Newgrange, Knowth, Dowth and the Hill of Tara, Mullingar and Ardagh, among other places. We will be in Ireland for about eight days.

Now that I have locations and some idea of what's wanted, I'm in the process of contemplating the workshops and work we'll be doing there. Incubatory work will definitely be a part of this -- with luck we will have a cave to do some of the work in -- and direct work on creative projects like writing, poetry, and music. There will be work with Brigid and her flame and with the land in the places we go, as well as having good food and time for fun and for deep conversations. I'll be doing a session on the three cauldrons as a part of the material surrounding the incubatory process, and we'll be discussing and (we hope) experiencing the process of imbas in our creative work.

We are looking at having options for everything from hikes to sacred sites and talks on archaeological information, to Irish music, ritual, and time to work on writing and other creative projects with the inspirational aid of Brigid and other deities and spirits. We will also be visiting with Michael Quirke of Sligo, a storyteller and woodcarver who makes wonderful images of Irish deities and mythological figures. There will be bookshops and cultural centers and museums.

I'll keep everyone up to date with the progress of the trip as I learn more details. It looks like the pilgrimage will be 15 people at most, given the space limitations of the places we'll be going, so it will be a fairly small, intimate group of seekers. There will definitely be much more information by the time PantheaCon rolls around, so if you'll be there, you'll be able to get lots of details firsthand.

I am also hoping to be able to spend at least a couple of extra weeks after the pilgrimage in Europe, visiting friends whom I would not otherwise ever get to see. As soon as I have travel details, I'll try to be in touch with people to see about an itinerary there. If you are in Europe and might like to meet me next summer, please do let me know! I would love to meet people there!

I can't even tell you how excited I am about all this. My dignity (what little I have) is doing a happydance.

An Added Page: Imbas Forosnai by Nora K. Chadwick

2011-09-27T00:04:00.000-07:00

After I had a lengthy search and jumped through a bunch of hoops to find the online copy of Nora Chadwick's article, Imbas Forosnai, only to find that it was in three nearly inaccessible parts via the Wayback Machine, I spent today editing the text and putting it up as a page here on Searching for Imbas so that it would be much more easily findable and accessible for everyone else who might want to read it.

I've cleaned up the formatting, checked for typos, and added the footnotes missing from Molly's original transcription of the article on her Geocities site. Please feel free to pass the word, and the link.

An Added Page: Erynn's Publications

2011-09-20T02:51:00.000-07:00

I've added a new page to Searching for Imbas that contains cover graphics and purchase links and information for all the books I've written or have contributions in. You can find the new page here or in the tabs above.

Searching for Titles

2011-09-19T22:39:00.000-07:00

I'm currently considering titles for my upcoming poetry collection and haven't decided on one yet. You (yes you!) can help me make up my mind by popping over to my LiveJournal to vote on my options. This isn't a binding poll, obviously, but I do want to know what my readers think is the best of the bunch.

Thank you!

Swimming in publishing news

2011-09-17T21:31:00.000-07:00

Among all the other publication news I've gotten recently, I received confirmation today that Hiraeth Press will be publishing a volume of my poetry next fall. I haven't decided on a title for the volume as yet, but I have the contract in hand and will be looking it over soon.

This is a very exciting milestone for me. I've been having poetry published off and on for many years now, in journals and more recently in anthologies. To have a volume of my own poetry published is an honor and a pleasure. There are so many poets who never get to this point in their work. Getting poetry published, unless you do it yourself, can be a very difficult proposition, so it's a thrill to have someone interested enough in my writing to want to print it and send it out into the world.

I reviewed a nonfiction volume from Hiraeth Press a while back -- Jason Kirkey's The Salmon in the Spring, and was very impressed with both the content and the quality of the book itself. I think this bodes very well for the finished volume when they print my poetry.

I'll keep you updated as I get more information on this new volume!

PantheaCon 2012 part deux, and a new book

2011-09-15T16:26:00.000-07:00

Here's the joint session proposal involving myself and Finnchuill of Finchuill's Mast:

The Vision Poet

Poets have held roles as seers and visionaries in many archaic and traditional cultures worldwide, performing and practicing as intermediaries with the sacred. In the modern era, certain poets reclaimed/reinvented the poetry of the see-er, including Arthur Rimbaud, the Surrealists, and later the Beats. Today some of us are reconstructing archaic seer-poet traditions like that of Gaelic filidecht, along with working within the modern visionary poet lineages mentioned. Listen to two poets, Erynn Rowan Laurie and Michael Routery, talk about these practices. Writing exercises will follow, so bring something to write with.

I'd also like to announce that my article "Since Feathers Have Grown on My Body: Madness, Art, and Healing in Celtic Reconstructionist Spirituality" will be published in Disability and Religious Diversity: Cross-Cultural and Interreligious Perspectives. It is due to be released by Palgrave Macmillan on October 25th. Sadly, they've misspelled my name on the web page, and I fear they may have done so in the book as well, but I emailed the editors today to (once again) ask that they spell my name correctly. We'll see what happens.

Despite the misspelling, I'm very excited by this publication. The anthology is from an academic publisher and should bring some attention to the CR community and our theologies from the academic community. My article addresses the geilt phenomenon and its similarities to manifestations of post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans and others, taking examples from Irish, Welsh and other literatures and discussing some of my own experiences as a veteran and how the geilta have been a helpful model to me for examining my own issues with disability and "madness."

In connection with this article, I was asked to speak on this topic at an upcoming University of Washington class on "Medicine, Illness, and Culture," being taught by a friend of mine. I'm looking forward to this opportunity. It will not be the first time I've spoken on PTSD, but it will be the first time I've spoken outside of a Pagan context about the geilt connection. It will, however, be the first time this article will be used in a classroom setting as study material, which I also find very exciting.

A new ebook! Ogam: Weaving Word Wisdom

2011-09-14T23:57:00.001-07:00

My book Ogam: Weaving Word Wisdom is now available as an ebook from Smashwords. It's currently selling for $7 in a number of different electronic formats. Please feel free to pass the word to anyone you think might be interested.

A frequently asked question about ogam

2011-09-13T19:40:00.000-07:00

A question that I get asked all the time is why I pronunce the word "og-um."

The name of the early Irish alphabet can be properly spelled two ways.

The more commonly seen modern spelling is ogham, pronounced "oh-am." The Old Irish spelling, ogam, is pronounced "og-um." Both are correct. You can use either or both. I prefer the "ogam" version, but that's purely a personal preference. It doesn't reflect on a person's knowledge of the system at all (unless they try to tell you you're wrong when you use one of those spellings or pronunciations).

An update: the Esoteric Book Conference and my current writing

2011-09-08T21:25:00.001-07:00

This weekend I'll be at the Esoteric Book Conference in Seattle.

I'm not presenting anything at this conference, but I'll be seeing many of my friends and acquaintances, both local and from further afield. My publisher will be there, as will Hex Magazine, which is reprinting my Amanita muscaria article from "Shaman's Drum" in its new issue, #9.

I've been hard at work writing this past year or so. A number of projects have been finished and turned in, including my piece on geilta and PTSD, which will be published in an academic anthology from Palgrave Macmillan late this year. My essay, "Since Feathers Have Grown on My Body: Madness, Art, and Healing in Celtic Reconstructionist Spirituality," will be published as chapter three of Disability and Religious Diversity: Cross-Cultural Narratives and Inter-Religious Perspectives, edited by Michael Stoltzfus and Darla Schumm.

My first piece of fiction, "Birth," is the opening essay in The Scribing Ibis: An Anthology of Pagan Fiction in Honor of Thoth from Bibliotheca Alexandrina. I was delighted to be included in this volume, which was released late last month.

My book A Circle of Stones: Journeys and Meditations for Modern Celts is going back into print from Immanion/Megalithica, the kind folks who printed my ogam book. It should be available sometime next year. I'm negotiating to have sound files available so that people will be able to hear the pronunciations of the Irish and Gaelic prayers involved.

I'm currently finalizing my finished draft of "Queering the Flame: Brigit, Flamekeeping, and Gender in the Celtic Reconstructionist Pagan Community" for an upcoming Immanion/Megalithica anthology on queer magic. I'm very excited by the work I've done on this piece and hope that it will receive some attention. This is not the only Brigid themed work I'm engaged in at the moment; an essay I'm working on for Scarlet Imprint's next anthology on sacred poetry, Mandragora, deals with Brigid as a totemic figure for sacred poets in filidecht, and themes of visionary poetry and burial/incubation/enclosure as initiatory. It's a lot of interesting material.

I'm also at work on an article for a new esoteric magazine, "Phosphorus", dealing with issues of racism, homophobia, and misogyny in certain segments of the reconstructionist movements, focusing primarily on CR's response to Steve Akins, his forgeries/plagiarisms, and his Stormfront connections. Both the Mandragora essay and the "Phosphorus" piece are due in by Samhain. Thankfully, they don't have to be very long. I'm currently at work on the local group's Samhain ritual at the moment, as well.

Once I've got those together and dealt with my notes for next year's PantheaCon, I'll be settling in to work on my book on Brigid and flamekeeping. I believe that I've mentioned this project here before: it will be based on my own flamekeeping practice, and on the liturgy of the CR flamekeeping group, Brigid's Irregulars. Much of the work I'm doing with all of this poetic and Brigid material will be tapped into for my trip to Ireland with the Sisterhood of Avalon next year. We'll be doing a pilgrimage to a number of Brigid sites, though details are still being worked out.

I should note that my friend Finnchuilll, of Finnchuill's Mast, is putting in a joint proposal to PantheaCon involving the two of us discussing visionary poetry and doing some work with writing and visionary exercises for poets and writers interested in both the Gaelic tradition of filidecht and the connections of writing and mysticism generally. I'm very excited about this potential session and hope that we'll be able to do this for the con.

I can't exactly give excuses for my spotty posting here, but I can say that I've been exceptionally busy this past year, and I hope that the results will be exciting for more than just me!

PantheaCon Proposals, 2012

2011-08-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

This year I've sent in proposals for two sessions at PantheaCon. The theme is "Unity in Diversity" -- a response, no doubt, to issues raised at last year's con over things like Wicca-centricity of discourse, and trans-phobia in ritual.

I received a request to do a session on Brigid and imbas, which I expanded into a more cross-cultural exploration. The result is this proposal:

Brigid and Sarasvati: Goddesses of Poetry and Inspiration

Imbas flows in many forms. Poetry, music and other creative arts lie within the purview of Brigid of Ireland. India's Sarasvati is similar to her in many ways. Join Erynn Rowan Laurie in exploring the mythic and poetic intersections between these two Goddesses and their poetic gifts to their devotees.

Last year, I was heartened by the presence and participation of folks from the Hindu community at the con. They are very interested in making common cause with Pagans and other polytheists regarding our mutual problems with the politicization of the Christian overculture in the US, and in fighting unethical and coercive evangelical tactics in India and other countries. Their words were powerful and their fellowship is greatly appreciated.

I've been very interested in Sarasvati for many years and I keep an altar to her as well as to Brigid in my home. The similarities between the two deities are, in so many ways, quite striking, and I thought it would be fun to explore these similarities with others who might find it of interest. That it fits so well with the con's theme this year is a lovely perk.

The other proposal I've sent in is also a response to a specific request. I've done talks at PCon about living a CR path, and about basics of constructing CR rituals, but there are a lot of people who mostly only hear what CR isn't. We don't use four elements. We don't cast circles. We don't invoke The Goddess and The God. One of these wanted to know exactly what it is that CR ritual looks like and what it does. It was an excellent question, and one that's rarely actually discussed online, at least that I've seen. As always, there's often just too much fear of the UR DOIN IT RONG contingent. I thought that, in this setting, we could examine the particulars and demonstrate what one local group is doing, hence this proposal:

Celtic Reconstructionist Rituals: A Look at the Nuts and Bolts

We will examine rituals used by the Seattle CR community as examples of ritual construction for vigils and shorter rites. With scripts in hand, we'll deconstruct these texts and the elements involved, and discuss how and why these rituals were created and how they evolved. These living examples can provide inspiration for creation of rituals for other local groups or individuals.

Naturally, I can only address what my local group is doing. Other groups in other places will be approaching things differently, but this will at least serve to illustrate actual ritual practices and show exactly what's happening and why.

I hope I'll see some of you at PantheaCon this year!

Aisling, Ársaíocht, agus Agallamh: A Modern CR Triad

2011-04-07T18:44:00.000-07:00

Several new blogs have appeared in the past few months that would likely be of interest to folks who have read my (admittedly and shamefully infrequent) posts here. These include The Presence of the Past by Disirdottir, A Wolf-Man, Not a Wolf in Man's Clothing by Faoladh, and Finnchuill's Mast by Finnchuill.

Each of these individuals, all of whom I know and who are friends of mine, are approaching reconstructionist religions and, usually, Celtic Reconstructionist religions, as an enterprise that requires as much flexibility and attention to intuition and mysticism as it does to history and archaeology. Some people would argue that intuition has no place in reconstructionist religions, or that anyone who is researching or (horrors!) practicing more than one path can't be a "real" reconstructionist, but I would argue that the ancient world was filled with both of these ways of living and that a search for a pure, non-intuitive indigenous Pagan religion is unlikely ever to turn one up. People worshipping deities from multiple cultures happened all over the world without being the "dirty word" sort of eclecticism that some reconstructionists appear to hate, and it still occurs in many places, including in many modern reconstructionist Pagan households.

Pretty much anyone who has ever read my work knows that I am as much in favor of a mystic approach as I have been of an approach incorporating a necessary understanding of history, folklore, and the archaeological record. I proposed this when I originally founded the Nemeton email list as "aisling and archaeology." It's a phrase that still comes up from time to time in discourse with in the CR community, and I'm pleased that there are still some who remember that the concept is there.

In a conversation on Finnchuill's blog, on the post Revisiting the R Word, it was noted that an expansion of this duality needed to be brought forth and what needed to be included was "argumentation," not in the form of fighting about viewpoints, but in terms of discourse between people who might disagree but who still treat one another with respect for their knowledge and ability, as we see in The Colloquy of the Two Sages from the Irish literary tradition. In this text, two filidh fight it out for who will be the supreme poet. They each strive to gain that position, yet their discourse was a respectful one that acknowledged both parties and that they were both worthy to contend for the position. The conversation on Finnchuill's post is well worth exploring.

The triadic construction that was arrived at for the concepts we are discussing was Aisling, Ársaíocht, agus Agallamh.

Aisling is the power of vision. It's a word that means "dream" and is also one of the classes of tales memorized by the filidh in their studies. This, in the context of CR, could be classified as UPG, though aisling is a term recognized within Gaelic culture, where UPG is not. Dream, vision, Otherworld work and journeying, and oracular work all fit here. All of them were recognized and, in fact, necessary aspects of the original cultures and spiritualities of the larger Celtic world. Prophets, oracles, dreams, and diviners were an immensely important part of public life in Celtic cultures and, in fact, in all ancient cultures.

Ársaíocht is "antiquarianism" and fills in for "archaeology" in the original dyad; it stresses the importance of the past, of the physical record, of the textual and the problems of the textual within the tradition. It signifies history and tradition. It also explicitly implies (given the nature of "antiquarianism") that our knowledge of history and tradition is incomplete and ever-evolving as new discoveries are made and new theories in scholarship are proposed. Our understanding of the past is not static. When new information is brought forth, we must decide whether, or how, we are going to readjust our understandings and our practices.

Agallamh is the word used for a colloquy: a conversation, a discussion, a debate between those with knowledge that serves to generate a process of critical discernment wherein the other aspects of tradition and practice are brewed. Without learned discourse within the tradition, little can be learned and nothing can be fruitfully passed on to a new generation. This is the place where history and mysticism meet, where the insights of imbas are brought into practice, where ideas are examined critically and with respect for both the past and the needs of the present and the future.

All of these aspects must balance one another. Mysticism, history, and discussion are all important in the rediscovery and reconstruction of oral traditions like those of the Celtic peoples. If we lack one or more, we risk falling into different types of dogmas that can solidify into fundamentalisms; this is an undesirable place for us to be, as anyone can plainly see just by looking at everything happening in the world today.

Pagan literalist fundamentalisms are as appalling as any Christian or Islamic literalist fundamentalisms, even if we're not lobbing bombs at one another over it. We have to remember that "the lore says" is often just another form of "the Bible says," and remind ourselves that a phrase frequently found in that same "lore" was, "and other versions say..." The texts are no more flawless in their revelations of the Pagan past than are the various interpretations of archaeological sites that have fallen in and out of fashion over the decades.

It's obviously possible to fall too far into the idea that what we get from our practices of aisling and imbas should apply universally, but this is where agallamh will serve to curb the worst excesses and bring one back to balance. Individual practice has a lot more space in it for these things, but public and community practice can both be deeply enriched by inspiration. The answer is not to crush any and all manifestations of mysticism within reconstructionist religions because there is a risk that one might be wrong (by far the most common response I have seen), but to examine these manifestations both critically and respectfully in light of what is known, then make a decision.

Talk without action, study without practice, leads only to spiritual masturbation which, generally speaking, isn't pretty and should only be done in your own space with those who have consented to be present. Debate simply for the sake of debate, or argument just to stir people up, is useless and annoys nearly everyone. It certainly doesn't contribute to building either community or practice. If you're only going to stand there arguing, get out of the way while the rest of us do the work.

In the end, the practice of filidecht requires mysticism, the study of history, and discourse. A fili who was unable to access the Otherworldly spark of imbas was no fili at all.

2010-09-04T18:07:00.000-07:00

I just finished registering for PCon and have submitted a proposal for one session. I'm only proposing one this year, as I usually end up helping out with a bunch of other stuff, and I'd like to take it slightly easier this year. My current state of achy exhaustion probably has something to do with this, but I'm definitely going to the con because I get to see a lot of folks I only see once a year, and even when things are exhausting and I have car trouble getting down there, I end up having a fantastic time.

This year's proposed session is Living a Celtic Reconstructionist Path, which is in line with the theme of Walking Your Talk. Here's what I submitted:

A spiritual path is not just about belief, it's about daily life and an approach to that life. Join author Erynn Rowan Laurie for a talk on living a CR path, from thoughts on ritual and community to living Celtic virtues and approaching reading, music and food as ways to deepen our connections to the spiritual worlds.

If there's something else that you would really really like to see me present, I might submit another proposal, so let me know!

OBOD Druid Retreat in September

2010-07-11T23:32:00.001-07:00

My friends in the Circle of Coll, a local Seattle OBOD group, have asked me to come and teach a workshop at their festival this September out on Anderson Island, in Puget Sound. I agreed, and will be doing a workshop on the three cauldrons, much like the one I taught at Eight Winds a few weeks ago.

There's still time to register if you'd like to go. You can find the information here. Anderson Island is a small island only reachable by ferry. I haven't been there yet but am looking forward to it. It will be a camping festival with a small group and it should be a lot of fun. The retreat will run over the weekend of September 17-19th and my workshop will be on Saturday afternoon.

I had a great time with the ADF folks down at Eight Winds this year. The folks in Sacramento have asked me to come down and visit and I'll try to make it down there this fall sometime if at all possible. I wrote up a few bits over on my LJ about the Eight Winds festival, including some photos from the event. The weather down in the Columbia Gorge was fantastic -- it was the first real summer weather I've had all year. There was sun and warmth and the company and conversations were wonderful. I've been invited to go back again next year when the festival is being held in Tahoe and I've already said I'll be attending. More on that next spring when the event planning is further along.

Eight Winds Festival

2010-03-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

The kind folks of ADF Northwest have asked me once again to speak at their Eight Winds Festival this summer. This year's festival will be taking place in the Columbia Gorge in Washington state. It's a beautiful area.

I had a great time at last year's festival, on the Redwood Coast of California.

This year one of the activities I'll be taking part in will be an open conversation with Skip Ellison about ogam. He's the author of a book on ogam that primarily uses the tree ogam paradigm, but which also has really nice illustrations of all the ogam scales from the Book of Ballymote in a convenient and inexpensive package. This should be a really fun and informative discussion, and I've had quite a few folks (including Skip) express some real enthusiasm for the idea.

I'll also be doing other workshops or classes but I haven't firmed that up just yet. I'll be sure to let folks know as soon as I've got class descriptions!

Erynn at PantheaCon

2010-01-27T15:42:00.000-08:00

Time once again for the ~~Great Assigning~~ announcement of PantheaCon's official schedule.

The home page for PantheaCon has the official schedule up now. Here's my schedule for the weekend in San Jose:

Saturday, February 13

3:30 - Silicon Valley: Warrior Return Ritual panel

7:00 - San Jose: Constructing CR Ritual

Sunday, February 14

1:30 - San Juan/San Carlos: Immanion Authors panel

7:00 - Santa Clara: Women's Voices in Magic panel

9:00 - Fir: Yes they are! Meeting the Queerest of Gods (backup for Hanuman)

Monday, February 15

1:30 - Fir: Ekklesía Antínoou Lupercalia/Communalia

I'll be there for the entire festival, as usual, and will have 10 copies of my book with me for sale after my sessions, thanks to the generosity of one of my readers. I don't currently have any book signings scheduled, but that could easily change -- I signed up for two of them while I was at the con last year. I may sign up for a reading slot and do ogam readings in the merch room as well. I haven't decided yet. I hope to see many of you there!

The Warrior Return

2010-01-18T14:44:00.001-08:00

This past weekend the local schmooze folks held the Warrior Return Ritual for one of our number who returned from Iraq recently. We held our vigil at the house of a friend of mine, who has a yurt temple in the back yard, a hot tub for the dunking, and a goodish sized area for the vigiland to choose from in setting up their "camp".

Having been through the ritual myself as the vigiland last summer, I had a reasonable idea of what to expect, though I knew participating as support staff would be a very different experience than that of vigiland. That supposition turned out to be quite true.

I'm still recovering physically from the overnighter, but that's my usual modus operandi for vigil rituals. Overall, it seemed successful from our end and the vigiland said that morning that we could talk about his experience sometime soon. I really want to do this before PantheaCon, as the schmooze is presenting a panel on the return ritual that will bookend the sending-out ritual from last year. It will be good to be able to discuss it from the perspective of having both performed the vigil and supported the vigil.

Given that I'm still recovering, I'm also still processing my impressions and experiences. By the end of the week I should have something together to share with everyone about this ritual and will be posting it both here and on my LJ. All-nighters are always a bit mind-bending. This one was no exception.

Samhain

2009-10-19T02:17:00.001-07:00

The year fades into rain and mist and early darkness as Samhain approaches in the Pacific Northwest. There's a sombre beauty about it that leaves me restless and, paradoxically, wanting to curl up by a fire with a good book. My body responds to the weather changes with more aches and less energy, yet I do enjoy some aspects of the season.

This year has been particularly hot and dry throughout the summer and the return of the rain has been welcome, bringing more green with it even as the trees turn and the leaves fall. Soup shows up more often on my stove, warming me for the longer nights.

And my friends and I are preparing for our upcoming Samhain vigil. Every year we get together and create an altar for our ancestors and beloved dead, bringing photos and mementos of those who have gone before us, bringing platters of food and cups of drink for them, offering food and drink to the spirits and deities into the fire as well. And we sit through the night reading traditional tales.

The stories get sillier as the hour grows later. Catalogues of names and repeated phrases take on a call-and-response element as they occur again and again. "You do not rule me! Clouds of blood will come to you!" becomes a wonderfully funny element in the story of Da Derga's Hostel when Chris reads it. Burnishing swords from a tale in the Mabinogi is transformed into a risque double-entendre fit for a drag queen, complete with lascivious gestures. "Oh, burnish it like you burnish your own!"

Some groups hold a silent dinner, but this isn't our tradition. Samhain is the night when the season of storytelling begins -- the Otherworlds enter our own on this night, and we make our visits into them as well. It is fitting that we dedicate the night to song and story, to feasting, to carving tiny lanterns of turnips and setting them on the altar to blaze with tealights inside.

It is the time of the night-watch; those within the ring of light from the fire are safe as the Otherworlds break through. We can touch that reality without being pulled in permanently, against our will. To stay up the whole night is a sacrifice for most of us. We'll have been up all day, going about our usual business, but the night we give to showing our dedication to our spiritual pursuits and to our small shared community.

Our vigil is not an ordeal -- it can be a lot of fun -- but it is a sacrifice. Certainly about four in the morning, most of us wish we could be home in bed. To commit to an all-night ritual is unusual for most people in our society, but the people in our group do find value in it. We continue, holding together before the fire as we face the changing of the year, seeking the blessing of our deities and our ancestors, expressing our desire as generations have before us to be here again, at this same time next year, in good health and prosperity.

It's a good feeling.

PantheaCon 2010

2009-09-28T17:53:00.000-07:00

I've just finished up the process of submitting a couple of proposals for PantheaCon 2010, for February next year. One is a discussion of the basics of creating Celtic Reconstructionist ritual. I'll have examples of the rituals our local group has done as well as solitary work that I do, with some thoughts for folks about using source materials in developing on-the-ground practice.

This sense of how to develop ritual is something that is a much-lamented lack in many parts of the CR community. People rarely talk or post about their or their group's rituals, so examples are few and far between. Many people don't even try, for fear of "doing it wrong." I'm hoping that by opening up the process and showing how our local group goes through its own trials and errors, its own successes and evolutions, it will help others find ways to allow themselves space for both research and creative innovation.

The other submission for this coming year is a panel discussion on Warrior Return rituals, focusing on the ritual that was done for me earlier this summer and that will be done for one of our members recently returned from Iraq. One of our panelists will be an ADF member who is both a disabled vet and a veterans advocate and social worker.

We'll be addressing issues of ritual reintegration of warriors into their communities when they return home, as well as giving a very nice example of a ritual brought together with texts from original Gaelic sources and innovative research. As someone who has experienced the ritual, I can speak to its effect on my own perceptions of self and community.

Taken together, a workshop on CR ritual construction and a panel on how one of these rituals was performed and how it serves the community will be a powerful statement of what CR can be.

Ecology, mythology, and psychology

2009-08-29T15:12:00.000-07:00

This week I finished reading a manuscript that was sent to me for a cover blurb. The book is about Celtic (and specifically Irish) myth seen through an ecopsychological lens. Jason Kirkey, the author, does a fine job of separating and respecting the varying strands of Celtic spirituality and making clear that the essence of his book is about creating a new, ecopsychological interpretation of Irish myth as a potential antidote to some of the poisons of modern techno-obsessed and eco-destructive society. I was very excited to read this book, due out sometime around Samhain from Jason's new press, Hiraeth, based out of San Francisco.

The book, The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality, doesn't fall into the traps that so many other modern books on Celtic spirituality tend to. There is a recognition for and a respect of the native traditions as they were historically and as they are expressed in folk practice today. Jason's account of Celtic spirituality is not overlaid on a Wiccan blueprint but acknowledges the views of cosmology and holiness that are expressed in the texts and the tales themselves. He has spent time actually living in Ireland and has come to know the landscape and the people there, having had some profound experiences that he carried home to the US with him.

As an ecopsych author, he is familiar with the leading names in the field, from Theodore Roszak to Gary Snyder and beyond, and has a deft touch with both his quotes and his interpretations. His goal is not to go back to the iron age or to (re)create a Celtic spirituality, but to reinterpret Irish myth, primarily the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, with a modern ecological eye. My personal feeling is that he gives a little too much attention to 2MT as a seasonal myth, but it is in line with his contention that more things should be interpreted with a view to helping us understand once more that we are part of the world rather than separate from it. He offers exercises at the end of several chapters that are based in his understanding of Buddhist practice but phrased in ways that will resonate and be understandable to those of us working with a Gaelic paradigm.

Jason doesn't talk down to his readers but invites them into his worldview, opening doors and offering views from unusual perspectives. His understanding is spiritual at its heart without losing sight of scientific, social, and ecological realities. His treatment of CR, modern druidism, and the living folk traditions is consistent and even-handed and he makes it clear throughout the text where he is speaking of the tradition and where he is coming to his own conclusions and offering his own interpretations. Most of the "Celtic" spirituality authors out there today could take some serious lessons from Jason's honesty and openness.

When I originally printed out the manuscript for a read, I was a bit concerned at the abundant references to Frank MacEowen Owen and Tom Cowan, both of whom in my opinion tend to push their own modern views of Celtic spirituality as historic truth. I tend to avoid their books for this reason. Jason studied with both of them but manages to move beyond them in separating opinion from historical fact and for this I applaud him and have a great deal of respect for the work he's done here.

When this book comes out, I can definitely recommend adding it to your list, particularly if ecopsychology and a spirituality of place are important in your own practice. Five hazels out of five.

Why write about entheogens?

2009-08-02T15:17:00.001-07:00

In my earlier post about ritual failure, an anonymous person took it upon hirself to suggest that "you don't need" entheogens and that I should look to the work of RJ Stewart and John and Caitlin Matthews for all the techniques of "the old bards" that I would ever need. Anonymous isn't opposed to entheogens per se and I don't disagree with this. Yet there are reasons one might experiment with such things.

Kenneth talks in the comments about working with the spirit of the entheogenic plant or fungus as a part of the ritual. This is absolutely one good reason why someone might work with entheogens. It is, in fact, one of the reasons that I do so as well. Touching the living spirit of such a powerful being is an profound experience when it works. And yes, once you've got to that state, you may or may not ever need to actually use the entheogen again to re-experience it or to have a good, solid contact with that spirit.

This, though, was immaterial to the point I was trying to make in that post. My point there was that failure of ritual can help us learn a lot of different and useful lessons. Failing means retooling the work and trying again, or repeating the experiment to see if something about the set and setting were problematic. Failing means reevaluating where you are and where you're headed. Failing means dealing with disappointment and losing the sense of being a special snowflake whose every action is fraught with spiritual significance. Failing means recognizing we're human and that we make mistakes, or that even if we haven't made a mistake, sometimes things just don't work the way we expect them to. Failure offers us chances to grow and mature.

What really rather gripes me, though, is anonymous's assumption that I've never read either anything by Stewart or the Matthews' (I have a great deal of their stuff on my foo-Celtic shelf) or anything from the original Gaelic and Welsh source material. I've read a lot of sources on Gaelic pre-Christian religion and culture. I've read a lot of the medieval manuscripts in translation. I've even done translations of materials from Old Irish myself, for my own understanding. Hell, I've had my translation of the Cauldron of Poesy published at least twice. A lot of my work has been translated into other languages.

Much of what the Matthews' reprint is 19th century scholarship, outdated in the mid- to late-20th century. While there are occasional useful nuggets in their reprints, I've already read the vast majority of what they're offering. And I disagree with a lot of their interpretations and uses of the material. I don't find RJ Stewart's ceremonial magic approach to the materials very useful for my own work either. While the Matthews' do a somewhat better job of dealing with Celtic spiritual material than, say, DJ Conway, Edain McCoy, or Douglas Monroe, it doesn't mean they are presenting the source material without their own particular filter -- in their case, usually, Celtic "shamanism", which is a rant in and of itself.

Certainly neither the Matthews' nor Stewart talk about deity in any polytheistic fashion. The Matthews', in their Western Mystery Tradition books, refer to the Celtic deities as "unregenerate godforms," whatever the hell that's supposed to mean, and warn against working with them. Perhaps this is their way of saying the deities are dangerous. If that's the case, so is fire. So is the sea. So is walking out your door every morning to go to work. Should we stop heating our houses, cooking our food, and going outside because it might be dangerous? People are dangerous, too. Even our closest friends and the people we love might hurt us from time to time. Do we stop having friends and family because of this, or do we learn to deal with their rough edges and accept them for who they are?

Ultimately, I write about entheogens because I find them useful in some ritual circumstances. I write about them to show that there are many ways to define and practice rituals. I discuss my experiences, both successful and failed, in order to demonstrate that effects vary and that not everything is going to work every time. In modern US culture it's hard to find people openly discussing that kind of work. Discussions go on in closed fora and between friends in private. There are books out there but the good ones can be hard to find. And to neglect such an ancient source of access to ritual states of consciousness and such powerful potential spiritual allies is to cut oneself off from the potential for powerful learning and spiritual experiences.

Yes, there are dangers inherent in the path. People have averse reactions to entheogens just as they do to any other substance they may put in their bodies. For some people, being in the vicinity of onions is a life-threatening experience. Strawberries have killed people.

Important things to remember are to research thoroughly, to exercise due caution, and to understand that these things will not always work as advertised. Sure, you don't "need" to use entheogens in a spiritual practice. One doesn't "need" a lot of things that are or can be useful. It doesn't mean they should never be used by responsible adults. And it doesn't mean that non-entheogenic practices can't get you where you want to go as well, depending on your goals. Humans are curious creatures. We are interested in new experiences and are prone to experimentation in all fields of life. Ritual is like sex, in the end analysis. Different things work for different people and my kink may not be your cuppa. The important thing is that we all try to get to our goal, by whatever pathway pleases us best.

Thoughts on Ritual and Homecoming

2009-07-30T13:19:00.001-07:00

On July 18th the local CR schmooze held a ritual. The focus of this rite was a vigil of return for a warrior who has returned from duty. As most of you probably know, I was enlisted in the US Navy from 1979-1982. I was 17 when I enlisted. After leaving the service, I tried to pick up the pieces of my shattered life. It was hard and while I've been dealing with things as best I can, I'm living on a veteran's disability pension due to what happened to me during my service and afterwards. That pension is how I can write books and articles and still keep a roof over my head.

Because I was thrown out of the Navy (I tried for almost three years before they actually did it, so that was my intention), I'm not the kind of vet the military likes to talk about. Not only am I queer, I was a "disciplinary problem" and stood for captain's mast (non-judicial punishment) three times in my enlistment, as well as once being court maritaled. Needless to say, there was no recognition of my service and no one to welcome me home despite the fact that I'd given a goodly chunk of what passed for my sanity to the service of my country.

Over the last year our local group has been working with one of our members who is an active duty military man, currently serving in Iraq. We sent him off with a ritual last August and will welcome him home this August when he arrives. We've talked with the larger Pagan community at PantheaCon about the sending out ritual. This, the companion ritual, is a vigil for the warrior's return. For me, the ritual was a profound experience of welcome into a community that I have never had before. For Arlen, we hope to give him a welcome to the same community he left and hope that he won't have the same kinds of problems reintegrating with the civilian community that I've had over the years.

Our experiences of the military are very different. Arlen intends to re-enlist for another five-year hitch with an eye toward becoming a warrant officer. I hated my time in service and tried desperately to get out. Yet both of us have served, both of us have done what had to be done under the circumstances -- me during the nuclear terror of the Cold War, him under fire in battle.

This is my account of the vigil.

~~~

Dusk came slowly that day, as it does so often at this time of year. I'd set up my tent in tall grass beyond the back gate. Last time I'd done a vigil there, I'd been eaten by mosquitos -- over 20 bites all over my body, even through thick jeans and a sweater. The tent was a blessing because there would be no fire.

After I was sent out to take my place beyond the hedge, the night was filled with loud, thumping, percussive music, punctuated by occasional cheering. Somewhere nearby, there was a concert. It continued until late into the night, but was distant enough to be little more than background to my thoughts. I'd have preferred silence but, when one does vigil ritual in the burbs, even the heavily-wooded burbs of semi-rural Redmond, one has neighbors to consider.

The questions came at small intervals, presented by people who were attempting to affect floating, disembodied heads. Dark clothing, lit features. Between the focus of my headspace in ritual and their sometimes awkward attempts, it was effective enough. At one point Phil looked like his eyes were glowing. I'm told that at several points I didn't look much of anything like myself, either; a strange silhouette armed with spear and sword, leaning forward, overshadowed by something Other.

I felt that overshadowing. Each time I rose to exit the tent, alert and armed, it covered me. There was a hyperawareness, a sense of stretching beyond the boundaries of my body to encompass the area surrounding me, knowing where everything was despite the darkness. I was on guard, taking care of the community I'd sworn so many years ago to protect.

Thirty years ago, I took an oath. I swore to protect and defend the people and constitution of the United States of America. Twenty six years ago, I "came home." Since that time I have lived on the edges of my ability, broken by my experiences in the military. I had been thrown out, by my own design. There were no ceremonies, no welcomes, barely a word beyond "thank God that's over." I don't remember the exit interview, just that I know I had to sign my DD-214, which read that I was discharged under "General, Other Than Honorable" conditions. I walked away, too numb to try to make sense of it all.

I'm not the sort of veteran the services are proud of. I fought the whole time I was in. I hated it desperately and passionately. Nobody wants to hear about the broken ones, especially the ones who were broken between shooting wars, the ones that could never fit in to begin with. The ones who weren't properly military enough. I was good at what I did -- good enough that they didn't want to get rid of me until I'd made myself such a nuisance that they had no other choice. The few times I was working in conditions I found tolerable, with people who would give me a chance, I was moved to new conditions within weeks. My reputation for trouble preceded me.

During the vigil I sat with questions that brought me face to face with who and what I am, what I did, and what it all meant. There are not adequate words for most of it. I wrote a couple of notebook pages for most of the questions. One particularly stuck with me, because it had a two-sentence answer:

What will you do if you don't get what you want?

Keep trying, just like I always have. The alternative is death.

In so many ways, this sums up my relationship to the military and to the Veterans Administration. Keep trying, or die. When they beat you down, stand back up. When they refuse you, return with a new set of forms. When they ignore you, shout down the walls. When they break you, pick up the pieces. To do otherwise is to suffer annihilation.

In my life, I have rarely gotten what I want. Often I've had to be content with other things but, in most contexts, that's okay. When it has come to the military, even the idea of compromise has been deadly to my soul. There are some things that cannot be accepted. They must be struggled for, even if that becomes the defining theme of a life.

One of the things I've struggled for all these years has been community and acceptance. I've tried to understand my place in the context of others as groups and individuals. I've stood outside so much of my life, even before I formally signed my enlistment contract. It's part of that kshatriya thing I was talking about last week -- the military displaces families. We don't belong anywhere because we don't stay long enough and when we do try to stay, we have tall barriers to surmount; being the new kid (eternally), being an unknown factor (because no one bothers to get to know you), being different (by background and by temperament).

In a small group of people last week, I found community. I am no longer outside the fence. I may walk the edge and be able to traverse it and live in the wild but I also, for once, belong inside. Welcomed in and given a place of honor, my history and my differences were accepted for what they are rather than rejected as a mark of unacceptable severance.

Good ritual changes something inside you. Those changes may not be obvious for a long time afterwards. I can feel them moving, though. This acceptance was very different than the superficial "thank you for your service" that I sometimes get these days when I note that I'm a veteran. I've never really known how to cope with that phrase. It brings too much back, and in a bad way. To be brought inside the gate, to be cooled and tempered in the waters and purified in the smoke of holy herbs, and to be placed at the head of the table for the feast in a place of honor is a distinctly different thing.

Sleep-deprived after a long night of intense focus and meditation, I was in a very different space than I usually am. Doing a vigil ritual brings it home much more deeply than a ritual that might take an hour or so, even if the content is essentially identical. The time and the effort involved intensify the effect. They separate us from the mundane much more fully. They emphasize the importance of what is happening.

Do I still identify with the geilt? Oh, yes. Yet I know I'm welcome inside the gates. My skills and talents are valued and I am valued, despite the problems I still -- and may always -- have.

Am I "cured" of my PTSD, my nightmares, my triggers? Not by a long shot. But I know how far I've come along that road and I know that I can go further. I have friends and a community who have demonstrated with their efforts and their bodies that what has happened may have marked me, but I am capable of change.

Twenty six years after the fact, I've come home.

Failures

2009-06-06T18:26:00.000-07:00

Last month I set out to do another session in the incubation chamber. I've done a few now, mostly meditation but a couple of vision-seeking/journeywork sessions as well. I had high hopes when I set out, as I'd been wanting to work with some psilocybe and amanita muscaria I'd had on hand.

I set up the space, invoked the spirits and deities, went through all the processes I go through to set the stage for the work, and waited.

There was an immense sense of presence. It was so strong it woke my roommate, who had been sleeping in his room. I felt a sense of the room breathing around me. I waited more. I sang and prayed and watched.

Yet beyond that sense of presence and breath, "nothing" happened.

I've worked with LSD a couple of times before and had some very powerful experiences with it. One I would even describe as profound. I've had some very good success with smoking salvia divinorum, though that was an entirely different quality of experience than the LSD had been. After all the accounts I'd heard and read about different types of fungal entheogens, I'd been expecting something big and consuming.

Sometimes, things don't work. They flop for whatever reason. Maybe the dried fungi were too old. Perhaps they weren't going to work with my body chemistry. Maybe there was nothing the deities or spirits wanted me to do that day beyond spend four hours in meditation and ritual. Maybe I was expecting the wrong things and was too focused on what I'd been told rather than on being in the experience.

Yet our failures teach us just as our successes do. The lessons of failure can be very valuable if we are willing to accept them and work with them. When I posted about the issue in my LJ later that day, I got several responses from folks who were glad to hear that they were not alone in having rituals that didn't work out as planned.

When ritual fails, you're not alone. It happens to all of us, from the veriest noob to the grizzled grey elder. I can't think of anyone who has never in their entire life had a ritual poop out on them at least once; some have even been spectacular in their fail. Failure, though, is a part of the human condition. We all experience it sometimes and how we deal with it is important.

In failure, we learn that the universe isn't all about us. The spirit world isn't a giant wish-granting machine where you put in your ritual and out pops the result you wanted. Life, the universe, and everything is a big place and we're just tiny motes within it. We have our roles to play, but that doesn't mean we're at center stage.

We learn a certain amount of humility in our failures. We may do everything right and still not get the result we wanted. Approaching spirit with humility and knowing that we're only a part of the greater whole is important. Pride may be a value of CR Paganism, but it should be properly placed pride and not hubris.

Failure encourages us to be resilient, to be creative, and to keep on trying. If we don't get it right the first time, perhaps something needs to be changed. Maybe we need to readjust our expectations. Maybe the conditions weren't right. Maybe we were using the wrong tools or the wrong symbol set. Maybe spirit or deity was busy elsewhere. Some things have to be worked for much harder than others and ritual is no exception to this general rule in life.

Patience comes with failure. Learning to bide our time until the next opportunity is an important lesson when dealing with not just the Otherworlds but this one as well. Planting a seed in midwinter is unlikely to be as successful as planting it in the spring, in its proper time and place.

Failure also teaches gratitude. Success won't feel like much when it's your only experience. Its value tends to decline emotionally in proportion to how routine it is. Failing shows us that success is a possibility, not a guarantee, and encourages us to make the most of success when it comes along.

When we examine the reasons for ritual failure we learn to think clearly and systematically about how we design ritual and how we understand its purposes. Taking things apart afterwards is a very helpful practice whether the ritual succeeded or not. Most of the folks I know who do public ritual have debriefings with the ritual team afterwards to discuss what went well, what didn't, and what could be improved. Examination, ideally, leads to growth.

In the wake of this particular experiment I've determined that I'd like to try again, but with fungi that are fresh rather than dried. This may have some effect on the outcome. I know I have more luck with salvia, so I'll be doing more in-depth work with that in some of its forms other than dried, unenhanced leaf to see if that will change the ritual results.

I'll pay more attention to what is happening than what I wish for, as well. There were currents I could have ridden in that ritual that I failed to because of my preconceived expectations. Rather than doing the work, I expected to be carried along.

The session was a failure in terms of what I had hoped for, yet it taught me a number of things about myself and the process of the work I'm doing, and for that I'm very grateful.

Poetry month

2009-04-16T01:00:00.000-07:00

April in the US is National Poetry Month. As a fili, this is something near and dear to my heart. Over on my LJ, I've been posting a poem a day. Some of them are short. Some of them are bad. Some of them are actually pretty good. When at the Altar of the Flame is one of the poems that has resulted so far.

I'll admit that I don't always keep up my poetic practice. My prose writing looms large in my life -- essays for anthologies, writing on my LJ about my life and about activist interests, and trying hard to get things done for my books are all important to me as well. Yet poetry, even when I'm doing it badly, gives me a way to reach more deeply into my spiritual life and helps to refine both my personal practice and my philosophies about how I see CR and what I do both privately and in community.

A month or so ago I wrote lyrics for a song for the local group. I posted those on my LJ, along with a link to the original tune I wrote them to. We've used the song a couple of times as a group and it seems to have been well-received. It's a song for acknowledging the three realms of land, sea and sky and for the three fires of the land spirits, the ancestors, and the deities. Much more remains to be done within the CR community in terms of songs and ritual poetry that doesn't have to be borrowed from the Neopagan community or from modern Druidic groups like the ADF. There's something important about creating our own liturgical materials and sharing them within our communities. Shared liturgy helps create a shared sense of community, particularly when we're all so scattered around the globe.

A lot of the secret of writing poetry is found in sitting down and writing it. Technique is important. Emotional impact is important. Rhyme and rhythm are important. But none of that matters if you don't sit down and put your pen to paper.

The music doesn't happen if you don't sing.

When at the Altar of the Flame

2009-04-15T19:35:00.000-07:00

burn juniper

plucked by your own hand

sung over with spells and charms

with the water of wells and of rasps

wash your face and hands

singing "gabhaim molta bride"

the flame is passed from hand to hand

rough, calloused fingers

used to work of forge and pen

of weaving and ploughing and toil

her hand the hand of sister

of brother

of uncle and aunt

of cousin and parent and child

her hand the hand of the world

sing to the spark between your palms

light your lamp

In Other Tongues

2009-02-28T14:33:00.000-08:00

I added a new sidebar to the blog today titled In Other Tongues that has links to CR articles and texts that I authored or co-authored. It includes translations of work into Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and Russian. It also includes a poem I composed that has proved quite popular among folks interested in Brigid.

My thanks to the many translators around the world who have undertaken such a difficult task, for getting not just my work but the work of other CR authors out there and making it available so that people in other parts of the world and who speak other languages can explore this spiritual path. It warms my heart to know that the work we're all doing being is shared with so many.

I'm hoping that soon I can add another link to this list, as the local CR schmooze has received a request to translate our warrior ritual into Spanish. Since I'm not the author, it has to be passed by everyone who did write the ritual at the next meeting in March. I have every expectation that the request will receive approval.

Just for the record, if you are interested in translating any of my work into other languages, please feel free to contact me to discuss the idea. If you have previously done a translation of my work that isn't listed here, please let me know where so I can link it. Thank you!

CR and personal syncretisms

2009-02-24T15:11:00.001-08:00

Originally posted on my LiveJournal, I felt this essay dealt with enough CR material and was important enough to my view of my life as a CR that it warranted posting here. In this post, I talk quite a bit about some of the other practices I follow in my life and deal with questions I've been asked about how I can be CR while also following other paths. I know others in the community sometimes struggle with these issues as well. Please take this as my own personal approach -- nothing here implies that anyone has to do as I do or think as I think. If you're also struggling with multiple paths and self-definition, please take this as encouragement along your way and perhaps as cause for further meditation.

Over the next week or so I'll probably be doing a short series of posts about some of the things I did at PCon this year. I wanted to start with the Ekklesía Antínoou Lupercalia ritual. There were vasty numbers of people in attendance -- 60 or so, in contrast to the smaller numbers last time, and the tiny rituals we do here in Seattle with usually 10 or fewer people.

Part of the ritual had been a Communalia, a drawing of formal alliances between the Ekklesía and other Pagan and polytheist traditions, most especially between our group and AMHA the polytheist tribal Hebrew group represented by Elisheva Nesher. Eli is a wonderful older woman, wise and forthright and delightfully funny. She's one of the people who regularly attends the con and who hangs with Diana Paxson's group when she's in town whom I find both priceless and irreplaceable. I adore her beyond all measure and bless the day when Diana and Lorrie Wood introduced us.

Phillipus has described his feelings of accomplishment and happiness for this alliance in light of the Roman emperor Hadrian's role in the Bar Kochba war and the repression of the Israelites during his otherwise reasonably enlightened reign. He is of Jewish extraction himself and so felt that it was extremely important for the Ekklesía to make strides toward building bridges between our group and those that one of our exemplary figures and deities had wronged. The other groups represented were a Dianic group led by Rabbit and a local Heathen community represented by Ember.

The ritual itself was, as is usually EA's nature, heavily liturgical with much singing and recitation. I do think that some of this could use a little more group involvement as it currently is primarily the lead ritualist and a few assistants doing most of the work. There's nothing particularly wrong with this, though I know that PCon attendees tend to expect more personal involvement in big public rituals rather than sitting on the sidelines as spectators for big chunks of it. I read the Hymn for Hecate and the Prayer Against Persecution as well as carrying two of the lotus lights as one of the Mystai in the processional.

This year Lupa ran as one of the Luperci as I did a couple of years ago, carrying on the fine EA tradition of including women as wolf-warriors in the ceremony. The race was exciting and fun, though Eli stepped out during this portion, as it involved some symbolic flogging and she has some combat-related issues with people raising a hand against others in even symbolic violence. All the ritualists did a lovely job, I think.

Some time after the ritual, Ember approached me and talked about some cultural dissonances she felt as a Heathen at a Roman-based ritual. She wondered aloud if I had been there representing for CR or was there just as myself, as one of Phillipus's friends. At the time I said I had been there just as myself but, being so tired after everything I had been doing, I hadn't thought to give her a more in-depth answer so I'm going to explore that here. It has great resonance for my practices in other non-CR religions and may help to explain some of my views on how and why I am still primarily CR in my life and self-identification despite my other allegiances. I'll also talk a little about the syncretic nature of my life, as this is an unavoidable adjunct to the discussion.

My attendance at Lupercalia was not merely as an individual or as Phillipus's friend, though my interest in Antinous started as the curiosity of a friend who wished to explore another's spirituality. I attended in my ritual function as both Mystes and Luperca. I am, if you will, what passes for an initiate into the cult of Antinous and, hopefully, only the first of many women (or people in women's bodies) to hold these titles within the group -- so Ave Lupa, Luperca Secunda!

While some people wonder if the cult of a "Gay God" has any place for women within it, I see myself as living testament of that inclusivity. Antinous to me does not represent just "gayness" but affirms all forms of queerness, however that might be defined. That queerness is not strictly about gender and sexuality, although it includes it. Antinous is a liberator not just in terms of one who liberates from death but as one who liberates from all negative forms of constraint. In this he works to free us from our preconceived notions of ourselves. He liberates us from the chains of dualistic, binary thought. He liberates us from unwanted roles into which we have been pressed in the service of conformity. He liberates us from illusion and self-deception. He liberates us from fear.

When I stand before the obelisk, a citizen of Antinoopolis, I do not enter the gates specifically as a Celtic Reconstructionist. I enter as myself -- with all that means -- as Mystes and Luperca of the Cult of Antinous who also, first and foremost, honors Celtic deities. I bring my allegiances to my Celtic deities with me, but in that space and for that time, they are part of the work being done within those sacred precincts. When the Pantheon is opened in Antinoan ritual, I install my own deities to be honored as equal to all the others within that temple according to Roman tradition, just as all others present do if they so choose. In our sacred city, there are no foreign Gods, no holy strangers; all who come are given reverence and acknowledgment.

As the old saying goes, "when in Rome, do as the Romans do." Therefore, when I am within the precincts of Antinoopolis I act as one should act within the Ekklesía's unavoidably and deliberately syncretic Greco-Roman-Egyptian framework. When I stand before my Brigid altar and light my flame, I am acting as a CR within a CR context, interacting with a specifically Celtic deity and following a specifically Celtic tradition. One does not invalidate nor compete with the other. When I go to the Shinto shrine, I am there to honor the Kami and ask for their blessings. I make the expected offerings and go through the expected motions of purification, bell-ringing, bowing, clapping, and sipping sake at the appropriate times. In this I am in no wise different from any other Shrine member, nor should I be. And in the time-honored cultural and spiritual tradition of Shinto, I follow multiple paths without feeling any particular conflict within Shinto space. I don't keep a Kamidana in my home primarily because the purity/house-cleaning requirements are rather above my current physical ability to fulfill. It is not because I would in any way feel uncomfortable with a Kamidana in my space. I also understand and respect Raven's lack of resonance with Shinto due to her own spiritual commitments and do not feel this is in any way a contradiction for either of us -- the Celtic deities she works with as her primary devotion are not the same as mine and they deal in different territories and energies. It is natural we would have different reactions based on these differences.

My life is larger than any one tradition, no matter how much I love and identify with that tradition. There are places that, by its inherent limitations, that tradition cannot take me. This doesn't make it a bad or inadequate tradition. It does not make me love that tradition or my deities any less. It doesn't make me any less dedicated to that tradition. My practice of multiple traditions doesn't somehow magically rob me of my knowledge, my experience, or my ability within any of those I do practice. It does not negate my history with other traditions that I no longer practice. It does not close a gate to future practice of further traditions, or worship of and work with other deities and spirits. I am a polyamorous polytheist -- I love and give my adoration to many Gods and Goddesses, to many spirits and ancestors.

And so I am a CR fili. I am a bangeilt. I am a priestess of Brigid and a flamekeeper. I am an Ekklesía Antínoou mystes and luperca. I am an initiate of Alexandrian Wicca and NECTW Witchcraft. I am a Shintoist. I am an animist. I am an astrologer and a tarot reader. I am a student of Ulchi shamanism. I am an informal devotee of Sarasvati and Hanuman and Ganesha. I am a disabled veteran. I am queer. I am a feminist. I am a peace activist. I am more than all of this.

I am human.

As Whitman said:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Meditations on a Year

2009-01-13T23:03:00.000-08:00

This week marks the first anniversary of the local Seattle CR Schmooze. We started meeting last January on second Mondays of every month and in that time we've developed a pretty solid core of about ten people who show up regularly, even if not every month. We've had several rituals outside of the monthly meetings as well. The group is composed of folks from a number of backgrounds, from people new to the Pagan community as a whole to folks who have moved on from ADF to a couple of what pass for "big names" in the CR movement. One of our number is a Ph.D. in Celtic Studies, which helps us immensely. We have people interested in Irish, Welsh and Scottish material and cultures. One of our number, the woman who had no previous exposure to the Pagan community, has become so enthusiastic for the culture and the material that she's joined a local Scots Gaelic class to learn the Gaidhlig language.

We are working on pieces of ritual for the group as a collective effort. We've done a vigil and blessing ritual for one of our number who was shipped out to Iraq last year and will be doing a welcoming home ritual when he returns late this year. We have explored different ritual formats and tried some guided meditation work together. We've shared book recommendations and meals together. We've held night-long vigils together and read stories from the corpus of traditional texts and tales. We head for a shared dinner at a nearby restaurant every month after our meeting for socializing. We've had a few incompatible people come and go. We talk on LiveJournal and on our yahoogroup together from time to time outside of our formal times together. We have running in-jokes and repeating themes in our meetings.

Our group still has a long way to go. We have a lot of work to do in developing ritual and in working with Welsh deities, as most of our work has been with the Irish material so far. We're still at a very elemental level in sharing our private work together. But we have a schedule for the year so far that runs to Samhain, with topics to work on, ritual elements to write, and discoveries to make. We're getting together later this month for a Burns supper and looking for ways to grow closer to cultural traditions that aren't strictly spiritual as we explore our interests.

In February, three of us will be presenting a panel discussion at PantheaCon in San Jose about the warrior ritual we performed, as a way to expand the dialogue with the larger community. Two of us will be participating in another panel discussion on mysticism in reconstructionist religions. I'll be teaching two workshops down there; one on advanced topics in ogam, and the other an experiential workshop on meditative techniques derived from some of the filidecht materials. This will include the guided cosmological meditation created by one of our members who won't be able to attend, but who is working on a book on CR and the Gaelic warrior tradition.

I'm excited and very proud of our small group, not just for surviving the first year -- a milestone for any Pagan group -- but for how everyone is contributing to discussion and feedback, and how we're working to create community out of a small group of disparate individuals.

I'm looking forward to the coming year. I hope that we're blessed by continuing development in our work as a group, and in our own lives.

Amanita article finally available

2008-12-23T05:14:00.000-08:00

Back in the mid-90s I was doing quite a bit of research into the potential links between mushrooms and filidecht. One of the results of that was my 1997 article, co-written with Timothy White, titled Speckled Snake, Brother of Birch: Amanita Muscaria Motifs in Celtic Legends. For a long time, I've wanted to be able to make it available online, as it has been rather influential and cited in a number of books over the years. Until this point, it's only been available by ordering the back issue of Shaman's Drum in which it appeared, or in a French translation that was previously available on my Preserving Shrine website. While the front page and the article page have not yet been updated, the article itself is available for viewing from the link above.

Early this month I spent some time scanning it and turning it into a pdf file so that the original English version is openly available to anyone wanting to read it. Please note that it was co-authored and that Timothy's position on "Celtic shamanism" is somewhat different than my own, but I felt that getting the research out there was more important than worrying about exact definitions of shamanism. I expect to also make the French translation available again sometime soon.

I think it's also important to note that the article only deals with Amanita muscaria due to space limitations. My feeling is that other fungi could very well have been involved in the seeking of knowledge, but there was no way to include everything in the article that either of us wished to present. Psilocybe species certainly do, and did, grow in Ireland and Great Britain at the time. At some point, I may expand on this material, possibly as an appendix to the book I plan to write on filidecht. That, however, is something for the future and I can't really project too much about it at this point. My research on the geilt material is occupying a great deal of my attention at the moment.

I'm pleased to be able to make the article available online, finally. I think the research deserves a much wider distribution than it has previously received. It'll be interesting to see what comes of its new availability, and the dialogue that could potentially develop around it.

Results, thoughts and meditations from Monday's work

2008-12-16T01:11:00.001-08:00

I am firmly convinced that "discipline" does not have to mean getting up at the crack of dawn. The only reason I should ever see the sunrise is because I'm getting ready to go to bed. In fact, I find that the earlier I get up, the more miserable I feel, hence the desperate unlikelihood that I will ever become a monastic in the tradition of "discipline = misery".

Getting up at 10 am, for me, is kind of a challenge. I can do it but, for the most part, I honestly don't see why I should have to put myself through that kind of pain. I'm lucky enough to live a life where I mostly only have to get up in the ante-meridian occasionally and/or because I genuinely want to. This morning I rose promptly when the alarm went off and proceeded through the shower/dress/purifications/dog-walking routine right on schedule. The fact that I was shambling like a zombie should be swept under the carpet and left unremarked, but there are no carpets in my house. More's the pity.

I got out and walked around the lake (and, incidentally, dropped off things at the post that urgently required mailing out this morning) in freezing, crisp, bright clear daylight. It was gorgeous, but the sidewalks and much of the roadways were still slicked with ice anywhere that wasn't extremely heavily trafficked. This means that crossing streets was a bit dicey. There weren't many people out during my constitutional given that most adults were at work, most kids at school, and the rest of the world was sanely inside -- unlike me.

I kept warm during the walk though my mind, like my body, wandered rather a bit during the course of my excursion. Between paying attention to my footing and soaking in the rare winter sunlight, my eyes were occupied constantly. At intervals I tried to focus my mind on songs and some chanting, though with only minimal success. I'm used to better footing when I do this sort of movement meditation and that broke my concentration frequently. Despite this, it was a lovely walk and I had a delightful time. It did help me make a complete break with my usual complacent morning routine, particularly in waiting until after I'd returned to the house to have my morning herbal tea.

By the time I got home, I was ready to sit with a hot beverage and meditate for a while until my face rejoined the land of the living. During this time, I read some excerpts from Celtic Theology: Humanity, World and God in Early Irish Writings by Thomas O'Loughlin. This belongs to my roommate but it's on my Powells wishlist of books I want to get at some point. The chapter I read was on "The Litanies: Petition, Procession, Protection" and in fact had some relevance to the ideal of walking as meditation that I was pondering while out in the snow and ice around the lake. I found the reading quite fruitful and will be pondering it with a mind to creating a litany for myself for while I'm out walking, to help introduce more formal meditative techniques to my exercise and incorporate that physical activity deliberately into my spiritual life on a more frequent basis.

Right about on time, I finished up my mint tea and the chapter and got to the cleaning up portion of the day. In addition to the sweeping and dusting of the chamber, I swept the floors in bedroom and bathroom, and in the hallway as well. After that I put fresh water and candles on all my household altars and lit them up as a meditation on allowing the sanctity of the everyday more effectively permeate my consciousness as I went about my work.

I found this was a really useful exercise because it meant that pretty much everywhere I went, there was a flame in or at the edge of my field of vision. It was a very effective reminder of my intentions and of how I try to surround myself with the memory that everything is sacred.

I sat down a little after 1 pm on the couch to decide what I wanted to do for the ritual purification and consecration. Over the next few hours I brought together some of the tropes I frequently use in ritual -- muir mas, nem nglas, talamh cé, the five rings from Scéla Éogain, and the five provinces, four winds construct from The Settling of the Manor of Tara. I also wrote bits for Manannán, Brigid, and Airmed. Given that I'll be doing some plant-based work in the chamber, it made a great deal of sense to include her in as the patron of herbal medicine and magic.

I'll admit that I napped fitfully on the couch off and on during this process for about an hour or so, given how groggy I was feeling after having got up at what is, for me, a very early hour. Unfortunately, afternoon naps often leave me feeling crankier and more creaky than not taking them, but my eyelids were at half-mast through a lot of the composition of my ritual and I didn't want to fall asleep while I was in the chamber trying to work, so napping was the better part of valor here.

By the time I got started with ritual in the chamber itself, it was about 4:45. This wasn't too much later than I estimated for a start time, so I felt I was doing well. I went into the chamber and did the ritual work of the purification and consecration, which included the prayers and some ogam sonic work. In invoking the energies of the five rings of protection, I used sonics for h-úath as a hedgerow to keep the space protected, and gort within that ring for fertile work.

Taking a leaf from some accounts of the initiation of poets with imagery of graves and rebirth, I invoked the chamber as the grave of every ignorance, the spring of every vision, and the womb of every wisdom and followed that with sonics for ailm and coll.

The ogam oracle for this part of the work was the oceanic current of Nin -- networking, connecting threads, and building bridges. This was very much in line with the intentions I was putting forth so I felt good to go on.

I should note that next time I do this, I'm not starting ritual before at least 10 pm. Trying to work when you live below people raising elephants upstairs is a bit challenging. It was at this point that I really would have given my left arm to be able to be doing this somewhere in the woods where it's quiet. Between somebody running a bath, people shouting (at dogs or kids, I wasn't sure) and galloping children, it took me a while to really get into the swing of the rest of the ritual and my concentration got jarred from time to time throughout the process.

Thus, not worrying about getting up at 10 am and not starting incubatory ritual in the chamber until 10 pm is going to be my order of the work from now on. *grumble*

I did some work with stone on the belly stuff pretty much as described in my ogam book. This was good and steadying, as well as energizing and focusing to a certain extent. It did help as I tried to push through the distractions later in the ritual.

The cauldron breathing work was nine breaths of fire in each cauldron with one deep breath between each to raise the flame up a level to the new cauldron. At the end of this I slowly let the warmth suffuse through me and felt prepared to try the next step.

The oracle for this part, concerning whether I had done enough preparatory work to continue, was chthonic edad. In this case it was about creating the tools for the journey, which was literally what I was doing in making the incubation chamber, so I felt this was a confirmation and moved on to the meditative work.

I smoked salvia (dried leaves) and kept a few of the leaves under my tongue, then lay back and let myself go into the mist. The tealight candles lit earlier in the day literally died out into darkness as I finished the pipe and set it down to go into the incubatory part of the work. Perfect timing.

The first thing I noticed was a sense of vines growing along the walls of the chamber. This lasted for a while as I contemplated the presence of Airmed. It felt very comfortable and welcoming, growing and green and protective. She's been a presence since the beginning of my explorations of Irish and Celtic spirituality and has been a guiding hand, though a much more subtle one than that of Brigid or Manannán. I was very glad to include her specifically and work with her this closely in something that was so manifestly a part of her being.

Eventually I began to feel encapsulated in a chrysalis. This seemed to generate a new stage of the meditation. I felt very safe in there despite a physical feeling of some constriction and being lightly wrapped within a winding of some sort. At that point all I had was a small blanket over my legs, so the feeling was not reflective of physical reality. The imagery of enclosure and transformation here is very significant. The creation of this space and the first meditation and journeying within it are only a beginning. It's fitting that I felt enclosed within the chrysalis, but did not get further than that during this meditation.

During this time I had a very brief flash of airships of some sort, then equally quickly flashed momentarily to skeletal images of fish and other aquatic life. This was too brief to really get more than an impression. I'm including it here in case something rings bells later.

After this, the sense of being cocooned faded and I felt more like a seed that had been planted in the ground. The chamber itself manifested as the soil I was buried within and there was a sense of sprouting and hidden growth below the ground. This led me to thinking about embodied theology, how theological discourse needs to be grounded in bodily experience and wondering about how to articulate a Gaelic-based Pagan theology of the body drawing from all the rich bodily imagery in the tales and the traditions.

Eventually this slow feeling faded and I lit another candle to make some notes. The oracle for this point was h-úath, which said I wasn't finished, so I offered prayers of thanks to the deities and to the ancestors specifically along with the spirits I usually work with. After that, the oracle was chthonic fern, a physical shelter and protection -- the goal of the work for the day.

Emerging from the chamber, I checked the time. It was about 6:15, so I'd spent nearly two hours in ritual. I think that's pretty good for a first time working this solo. I'm pleased with what I got and am thinking about what happened and what I perceived, as well as the warning to remember to thank everybody at the end. This, I suspect, is a persistent flaw in my approach to ritual that needs to be corrected.

My general feeling is that I'm on the right track. I feel I need to add a few more layers to the work I did in consecrating and dedicating the chamber itself as I do more work with it, but it does seem that places worked with consistently build up a charge of ritual energy that increases with time. I also felt that I should be working in there at least once a month at minimum for the moment. This doesn't seem to be too unusual with the other folks I know who are following similar paths. There is a lot more work to be done, but I expected this to be a bare beginning, so I'm content with my day's efforts.

I was ravenously hungry when I got out. Experience told me I should eat rather than waiting until midnight to break my food fast. Electronic communications could wait until midnight, though and I was okay with that. I used those hours to get some more reading done on topics relating to the project and to my geilt book, some of which was quite useful. A couple of the books had only an article or two that I needed to look at, so I got two of them crossed off my list and finished up Mac Mathúna's Imram Brain.

Some of the questions I have now regarding body and theology:

How is the body used as a symbol in Gaelic texts?
How is it transformed and how are those transformations experienced in age, gender and species?
How do mutilation (Bóann), monstrosity (Cú Chulainn, Suibhne, et al), and artificiality (Nuadha) inform what might be theologies of Gaelic Paganism?
How are bodies both as wholes and as parts perceived spiritually in practices of contemplation, transmission of wisdom, and presentations of spiritual and magical power?
How does an individual practitioner identify with these bodies?
What devotional practices do these potential theological theories suggest?

Food for thought. Don't expect answers anytime soon.

Incubation chamber dedication tomorrow

2008-12-14T19:09:00.001-08:00

Since my roommate will be away tomorrow and not coming home until Tuesday morning, I've decided to use that day/night to do the dedication for the incubation chamber. Today I'll be doing some work on the ritual and putting together the order of activities for the work itself. It's been a longer, much slower process getting here than I'd expected -- or wanted -- but the time has finally come to take the plunge.

Some of the hesitation has been uncertainty, I know. There are no models in CR for this at the moment, but that's not at all unusual for us. What little we know about incubatory practice describes meditation in the dark, but nothing about how or even if the spaces were prepared in any particular way beforehand or what the meditator had to do before going into the meditative state. This is where we have to experiment and create dialogue, taking some inspiration from what we might find in closely related cultures where it's available.

I'll spend some of today and probably a good part of tomorrow searching for appropriate texts from the Gaelic traditions to use as blessings and protections for the space. There will be a purification with juniper and fire. I'll do invocations of the particular deities I'll be working most closely with in that space and asking their guidance and protection for the proceedings.

Once I feel the space is properly consecrated, I'll be doing some shorter meditations in the chamber; mostly breathwork and feeling out the space in trance. I'll likely do some sonic stuff as well -- chants and songs intended to aid the process of meditation and trance.

During the day after I get up and take care of morning devotions, I'll be doing a fast of everything but liquid so as to focus my attentions and energies on the purpose of the work. I'm also considering being incommunicado online and turning the phone off for the entire period as well. Obviously I would not have the phone on during ritual proper, but removing myself from all distraction and maintaining silence aside from ritual song and speech will likely be useful as well. This means no music being played during the day. I'm just hoping the elephants upstairs will be marginally cooperative, but doing this on a Monday should mean the kids aren't there through much of the day at least.

A lot of this has been brewing in the back of my mind for the past year, though it's been difficult to set any of it down in firm terms. I'm hoping that it will feel more settled once I get into the work itself tomorrow. Tonight I'll be doing some outlining and will probably do a walk around the lake tomorrow after morning ritual in preparation for the internal focus. I need to get some contact with the outside world and with nature before I close myself up in a dark, quiet space to provide some psychological contrast, I suspect.

After I finish up the ritual work, I may let myself back online to journal a little about the process and the results. It's difficult for me to write longhand for more than a few paragraphs because of the pain it causes, so if I'm going to get the insights down about what worked and what didn't, and about what happened, it will need to be with the computer. That said, I may just write in a doc file and post on Tuesday evening, depending on what feels appropriate. For me, online activity is so much an everyday activity that separating myself from it during this period is important as a part of the fasting, though when I break the fast I may break the communication fast as well, given that they're of similar import.

Wish me luck!

The Life of the Poet

2008-12-04T22:49:00.000-08:00

The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form. That this form has to do with the relationships of sounds, rhythms, imaginative beliefs does not isolate the process from any other creation.

-- Muriel Rukuyser, from The Life of Poetry

Muriel Rukuyser's words express, in my opinion, one of the great secrets of filidecht. The poet and the poem are intertwined. Every act of writing undertaken with intention creates some subtle change within the body of the writer; it sows the seeds of evolution in mind and spirit.

Using writing to create deliberate change is an act of magic at its root. Words change the world and so by their nature they also change the self. When we look at the concept of the "connecting thread of poetry" found in the early Irish laws texts we find the rationale for how that change may be seen to take place. Tug on a thread and the rest of the web will feel it. As writers and poets, we cannot help but shift and change within ourselves as we find the words to express what's in our hearts and minds. To write, to recite, or to compose is to incubate the images we store within us and ripen them into expression.

When we contemplate the images as we work toward a poem on the page we are learning to understand them. Writing, like teaching, so often forces me to confront my knowledge so that it can be enumerated and expressed. To leave it unwritten or unsaid in some sense leaves it incomplete and untried. This is part of how writing the poem changes the poet; it creates within us a matrix for understanding that may not have previously existed.

Rukuyser speaks of how she took eight years or more to write a particular poem, starting from a brief note taken of an image, and living with that image in the course of her everyday being. As time went by, it became more nuanced. It gained accretions of experience and resonance. Eventually, words began to take form on paper, slowly thought over and edited, opened out and explored. The poet who produced the final poem was changed by that process, no longer the same person who had noted the initial, sparking image that grew into the finished piece.

What we turn our thoughts to in our writing will, in many ways, influence who and what we become. As we brew those images and experiences in our internal cauldrons we extract nourishment from them. They grow like reefs within us, changing our internal landscapes and structures. They wound us or heal us as we carry the shadows of them within. The best of our poems and our other writings recreate us and make us anew. We are reborn.

I'm Not Dead Yet!

2008-11-24T23:47:00.000-08:00

No, really.

I've been busy with a lot of different things, from a trip to Arizona to teach a couple of brief classes at the Irish Cultural Center in Phoenix to working with the CR group that we started here in Seattle back in January. Political and other concerns had a lot of my focus this year as well, though I'm a little calmer now the elections are over.

That said, my work has been moving on apace toward my writing on filidecht and geilt, with my writing plans being slightly revised to work on the geilta book first in accordance with a suggestion from Phil. Given that a lot of my focus in filidecht is about the material surrounding the geilta, this made sense for me on a lot of levels. To get the materials on madness and trauma and how poetry works as a healing methodology in that context frees me to write more clearly about the rest of the traditions surrounding filidecht in books and articles after that.

Writing for anthologies has also taken a lot of my time and energy this year. I've got two essays coming out in an anthology due in December about cultural appropriation and Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism. After that there's another essay in an anthology on animist practice, taking a CR perspective. I have yet another essay in progress for an anthology on sacrifice in Neopaganism that's based on a lengthy email on Nemeton back in the day. All three of these will be from my publisher, Megalithica. A non-Celtic short story will be coming out next year sometime in an anthology dedicated to Thoth from Neos Alexandria.

The incubation chamber is finally ready for dedication. I had planned to do it around Samhain, but events caught up with me and I've been too overwhelmed, though I hope to do the dedication in early December after several other obligations have been dealt with. This week I'm reading a manuscript by Alf Siewers that my roommate is doing editing for, on landscape and the Otherworld in Insular Celtic imagination. It's a fascinating read and has been very useful in some regards, though I'm having to wade through a great deal of postmodernist jargon. It is, however, saying a lot about the kinds of things I believe about deity and immanence, about how the Otherworlds and the landscape interpenetrate in my spiritual consciousness, and giving me places to look as I ponder what may have been the practices of the early filidh.

In keeping up my LiveJournal, I've rather neglected this blog. This has partly been due to a lack of emotional energy on my part, though not from any lack of interest. I will admit that there have been many days when I've been driving from Seattle back to Everett thinking about something and telling myself I was going to write about it here, but my energy fled me when I got into the house and I've collapsed on the couch and grabbed a book instead. This fall has been both difficult and rewarding, given how successfully the local CR group has been going while I've been facing some of my own personal demons on a deeper level.

I do have a post in progress about deity that was sparked by a friend on LJ which I'll likely post in both places, as I think the content warrants posting here as well. I only hope I'll do the question justice in my answering.

Thanks for your patience.

Incubation Redux

2008-07-23T16:42:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I started clearing things out to turn a closet into an incubation chamber. After many months of delay due to weather and other issues, I've finally finished the painting that was necessary. The space is now nicely done in a darkish green, somewhat sagey, and very nicely relaxing. I'm letting the space air out now as I contemplate the layout of the space and what to place within it on the altars and for the work.

I've used the time since I began work on the chamber to do more reading, do more thinking, do more meditation about incubation and its processes. I feel more ready now than I did when the project began and so I also suspect that this was part of the reason for the delay -- integrating new ideas and some growth into the process.

Another good sign is that I've started at least a bit to write poetry again. For me, this is the heart of so much of my practice. It's slow right now but that's all right. I find it difficult to push against the ebb and flow of that tide and I probably shouldn't try to anyway. So much of the work of writing and poetry happens like the germination of a seed, unseen and underground. It isn't a conscious process but a slow, imperceptible unfolding. Given time it touches the surface and becomes words to be sharpened and honed.

I have cushions for the chamber, blankets for comfort. I have candles and places to put them. I have objects and images for those parts of the work that will take place in the light. I have ideas for ways to proceed. The time has come to write the framework for the rituals themselves so that vision can flow forth.

Ritual

2008-05-21T21:46:00.000-07:00

Filidecht is a path not just of contemplation but of action. It's important to remember this as we walk along the path. Like everyone else, I have to keep reminding myself sometimes, but beyond daily practice this spiritual path demands action in other ways as well. As a solitary practitioner I know that I often face a sense of emptiness when I contemplate the thought of a ritual alone, particularly given that the major festivals are primarily oriented toward families and social occasions -- feasting doesn't have quite the same panache when approached alone, certainly.

Yet it is action that makes a spiritual path a practice. There's no point in a path if no feet follow it, and path implies necessary motion. It helps to remind myself that what I'm doing is not just for myself, but for the deithe agus an-deithe as well, for the deities and the spirits with whom I share my life and whom I serve. Even if I'm the only physical body at the feast, I still have company in the form of deities, ancestors, land spirits, helping spirits. They deserve my recognition and my offerings and it is for them that I perform the actions of any given ritual.

To go through the physical work of preparing the food mindfully, laying out the altar, setting out the offerings, speaking sacred words aloud; it is this that marks a spiritual practice. Belief has some importance to me, absolutely. But practice is a primary part of what distinguishes a spiritual path from a passing fancy. No matter how splendid one's words or how high one's thoughts, if there is no action then there is no proof that those words or thoughts genuinely mean anything outside of one's own head. Ritual enacted, the actual cultivation and practice of our virtues, bringing one's life into physical harmony with community and environment, and acting mindfully in each moment are all necessary parts of creating a life that is poetic.

I know it's too easy to slip into complacency, too easy to make excuses of being too busy, too tired, too unprepared. And with CR there is so often no real pattern set to follow for personal, solitary ritual. Even groups often face challenges of what to do together if everyone follows different deities or works within different Celtic cultures. Yet the act of taking up the cup of welcome, of offering each person a taste of the drink that is shared with the Gods, is an excellent place to start. Pouring out a libation to the beings who are to be honored, speaking words aloud and calling upon their names, telling the stories of their deeds -- this is ritual.

Habit

2008-05-08T16:25:00.000-07:00

An article from the New York Times titled Can You Become a Creature of New Habit addresses something that I think is very important in the practice of filidecht, and in spiritual practice generally. The article speaks of creating new habits as a method for cultivating and maintaining creativity, particularly as we get older, when our minds might begin to fall prey to Alzheimers and other diseases or problems that affect the memory.

In a quote from the article, author Dawna Markova states, "The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder." The mind of filidecht is about that fascination with wonder. It's a poetic need in the human soul, an identification with the ever-shifting, always miraculous kaleidoscope of the universe in its glory.

Filidecht demands that we create habits of exploration. We explore language through poetry and meditation. We explore the world around us through wilderness vigil. We explore culture through song and storytelling and ritual. Imbas comes through openness and receptivity to change and it is cultivated through the development of new habits -- new rituals, new ways of thinking, new points of view based in the understandings of Gaelic language and culture.

Daily ritual practices help open and set new patterns and new habits. Such things require both discipline and generosity to oneself. We're human and as we develop these new habits and patterns we'll inevitably muck things up from time to time. The key is, like riding a bicycle, to get back up and get back on when you've fallen off.

To many Pagans, discipline is a dirty word. Yet discipline is a part of magic. No one would expect a martial artist to develop perfection of form without discipline. A fili's poems take on beauty in shape and sound with the exercise of discipline. Staying at things, doing them again and again until a habit is grounded in the mind and body, is a necessary part of filidecht and of all deep spiritual practice. Habit is essential to creating ways of doing things that become effortless through knowledge and repetition.

When the basics of practice are felt in the body, the mind can be freed to explore new dimensions and new points of view, giving the fili a place to stand that can serve as the springboard for journeys of exploration within the Otherworlds or for doing serious work in this one. Ritual habits and knowledge of lore can be a buffer zone of safety when we encounter new things. They give us an understanding of the potential behavior and expectation of Otherworldly beings. They ensure that we'll do things properly even if we're distracted, because our bodies know what to do even if the mind is engaged elsewhere. The development of steady ritual habit and pattern in order to create freedom of action may sound paradoxical, yet even the freest improvisational jazz musician needs to know the basics of musical form and function.

Cultivate new habits of ritual and beauty. Set yourself free.

Uncertainty

2008-05-01T23:23:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I encounter a lot in my practice is uncertainty. Filidecht as a formal modern CR practice is still being created and the hints about its place as a mystic and magical practice in the past are few and far between. We have bits and pieces but those pieces need to be examined pretty carefully as, even though we can see some of the ways the filid operated, we can't be certain of exactly how rituals were done or what was said.

With material like the Cauldron of Poesy text, we have some statements about cauldrons in the body and what they do, and we can infer about where they were situated. But when it comes to actual operations and getting those cauldrons to do what they're supposed to, the only thing we can really do is look at comparable systems from other cultures and do some experimentation. Will what I come up with be exactly what the pre-Christian practitioners of the art were doing? No. Will it have the same or similar results? Well, if it results in imbas as an upwelling of poetic inspiration and magical and spiritual power or enlightenment, then yes, I think the results are similar to what was intended. And if it works then this is the direction in which we should be moving.

Within CR there are a lot of branches that people find of interest. Within any given culture you're going to find householder paths, warrior paths, magical paths, healing paths, storytelling paths, and more. And each of the various Celtic cultures adds another layer onto that complexity. You're much more in luck if, for instance, your interest lies in Irish material about household traditions than if it lies in the deities and practices of Gaul. It will be much harder to understand and reconstruct Gaulish practices because of the lack of easily available material. There is no extant Gaulish literature that describes deities and myths. Most of what is known is from archaeological sources, with a few inscriptions on altars or on spell tablets. A little more is added from references to Gaulish people by Greek or Roman writings.

A lot of Irish household tradition has survived into modern folk practice, though very much changed and buried within Christianity. It is by no means a fully realized polytheistic Pagan practice at this point, but it's a good and necessary basis to grow from. For Irish Pagan mystical and spiritual practices the material is rather less plentiful and so more has to be reconstructed or created by reference to other things. It's regrettable, but it's how things are.

So what's a person without a lot of sources to do? Here's where our uncertainties lie, and this is where a lot of people get discouraged. But comparative work helps in many cases. Nearby cultures can be examined, of course, and the field of Indo-European studies has a lot of useful material. Offerings are a practice common to every culture I've ever heard of, so that's always a good place to start -- and the archaeological record often provides fairly good material on what kinds of objects and foods were offered by any individual culture or people in a given area.

But ultimately the words of our practice will always need to be our own. We can base them on material in sources like the Carmina Gadelica, but that text, wonderful as it is, doesn't cover all contingencies or address every circumstance for which we might need a ritual text. And if filidecht is about the creation of poetry, then always using someone else's words is a violation of that tradition.

We know that the tarbhfeis ritual of Ireland involved a fili who was surrounded by four people chanting truth spells, but we have no idea what the words of those spells were. We don't know if the same one was used each time, or if they were extemporaneous compositions created by each of the chanters. Imbas is what helps us to create appropriate words for situations like these and experimentation can tell us if those words work or not. We can't know until we try it.

Practice is about what works. We can theorize all we want, but until we commit something to physical ritual, until we commit words to speech, theory is all that we'll have. Uncertainty can be frightening, but it can also be fertile. In a practice involving extemporaneous poetry we won't know the words until we speak them. Without the uncertainty there's no room for spontaneity, which is the heart of poetry created in the moment. The words come out on our breath -- anál -- and vanish into the universe. We look at what happens to see if there is an effect. And we note what happens (or what doesn't) and try again.

There's no escape from uncertainty, but we can embrace it and make it a friend.

Root and branch

2008-04-17T21:11:00.001-07:00

Every so often I get email from someone asking if I'll teach them about filidecht. I do teach, so this isn't an unreasonable request. Most of the time, though, people drift away after a few weeks or a couple of months. There seem to be several reasons for this that fit into general categories.

Usually folks that wouldn't get along well with me don't make it past the first exchange of emails. I don't want to promise people anything I can't deliver, and I don't want to work with people who would grate on me and leave me frustrated and angry. I don't want to work with someone I would annoy and upset rather than inform. I don't see this as an issue. Sometimes people just don't fit together and there's no shame in that.

Sometimes it's a case of our beliefs being incompatible. I can't see teaching someone who wants to learn Celtic Wicca when that's not what I'm offering. I'm pretty up front about the actual existence of deities and spirits and don't really blend well as a teacher with folks who see deity as a higher self or an archetype. Some of the practices and exercises that I assign work from the assumption of the reality of spiritual beings and don't make much sense outside of that paradigm.

Time is a reason given by some. I understand that people are busy with their lives. We all need to put food on the table, keep a roof over our heads, and take care of any children we might have. We have responsibilities and needs that must be met. Yet one thing that, more than anything else, strengthens a person's spiritual life is a daily practice. Finding room for that might be a challenge, but it's not usually impossible. Foregoing a few minutes of television, getting up a little earlier, going to bed a little later -- these are things that can carve out more than sufficient time in a day for a regular spiritual practice. Twenty minutes or half an hour a day really isn't that much time to spend developing a relationship with your spiritual life and your deities and spirits, even for a busy person.

Others are looking for a place where they feel at home. This is a legitimate and healthy desire. However what some folks are actually looking for is a spiritual "love at first sight" experience. They want a feeling of instant belonging and while some people do find that in the spiritual paths they practice, for most people it doesn't happen that way. I know people describe finding Paganism as a sense of "coming home" but after that there's often a long search for the type of Paganism that feels like the best fit. A few weeks isn't really enough time to decide whether or not a practice is right for you, though it's certainly enough to let you know if it's desperately wrong for your life and your worldview. Instead of sticking with something for a year or so to see if it will grow on them, they head off for the next thing along the road to see if that will give them the instant feeling they're looking for. I might feel they'd benefit by giving it more time, but I'm not going to tell people they have to stay if they don't want to. That's not my task.

There are people who are enthusiastic about the idea of practice but who aren't willing to read suggested books or articles or to do research that doesn't involve a google search. Filidecht has a strong scholastic component to it and it always has. In order to practice poetry, one must read both poetry and prose to understand the context of the practice and build up a strong style of writing and speaking for personal and spiritual development. Sometimes this goes back to the time factor but in other cases it seems to be rooted in a distrust of scholarship and intellect. Our society has a very strong anti-intellectual streak in it and this often seems even stronger within Paganism, even though, as a rule, Pagans read more books than most other Americans. It's hard, though, if the only books being read are flawed sources and elaborations on yet another Wicca 101 text. Discernment is important, as is intellectual development. Being in print is no guarantee of a source's veracity and telling the wheat from the chaff takes practice.

Some folks want a fully developed path with prescribed rituals and activities that they can fall right into. Filidecht isn't at that stage of development. At this point everything is experimental, and the path demands a lot of creativity, self-motivation, and the ability to develop ritual and extrapolate from discussion, practices and reading. It's certainly not wrong to want a fully developed path. Traditional Wicca is one form of Paganism that offers exactly that. But those of us reconstructing filidecht haven't been at it long enough to have everything laid out that can then be handed to the student in bite-sized packages once a month at the full moon ritual. People who are interested in filidecht are going to have to be willing to put forth the effort to help develop the path so that some day we'll be able to offer something more complete to a new generation of students. The right people will find that an exciting adventure and be interested in helping to build toward that future.

A lot of people want a safe, comforting path. Filidecht, especially where it touches on the geilt phenomenon, is not safe. This is a path that will break you down into your component parts and reassemble you. This means that a student has to either be in a place where they have no choice but to push through it, or be willing to go through some radical transformations with no guarantee of results. Sacred madness isn't safe. Satire that calls attention to social and political folly isn't safe. There are no guarantees that you're going to come through the process whole, or even recognizable. Madness isn't a pretty thing, so generally only those of us who are already there are willing to do the work to get through it. You don't invoke it casually. Letting go of control is frightening. What are you willing to let go of?

If you're interested in filidecht, before you write to me, think about these things. Decide what it is that you want spiritually: where you are and where you want to go. What are you willing to risk? How are you willing to change? Can you be articulate in discussing your spiritual life? Are you willing to study? Are creativity and innovation important to you? Can you live with uncertainty?

I do a lot of my teaching not through set curricula but through conversation. There are some standard exercises and practices that I ask my students to do, and I need to get feedback about how those exercises and practices are progressing. I'm not condemnatory if people miss a day or are having trouble. We're all human, after all. I miss days sometimes too. That's why this is called "practice" and not "perfection." I'm certainly willing to go to great lengths for people who are genuinely working on the path. I've spent hours in instant messaging answering questions and engaging in dialogue with students. I've driven hundreds of miles to facilitate important personal rituals. I've answered the phone at obscene hours during emergencies. I demand a lot of myself as a teacher, just as I demand a lot of a student. It's a reciprocal relationship.

Some of the things I ask of students are willingness, open-mindedness, diligence, intelligence, discernment, honesty, vulnerability, courage, adaptability, and patience. While filidecht is a path of poetic nature mysticism, it is also a path of rigorous scholarship. It's a path that demands focus and attention as well as kindness and self-nurturing. We have to be willing to go down into the dark before we can let ourselves burst with bright poetry. We have to be willing to set down roots in our practice before our branches can bear fruit.

Buried

2008-03-26T17:48:00.001-07:00

Back in January I was working on a project to get the bedroom closet cleaned out for creating an incubation chamber. Everything has been moved out into the garage now, though I'm still waiting for somewhat warmer weather so I can do a second coat of paint with the windows open. The time it required to air out the bedroom after the first coat was an abject lesson in proper timing. Best to work on this kind of thing when the weather is cooperative.

Incubatory practice is still on my mind, though. It shows up again and again in hints and pieces through the literature of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Today I read an article by Patrick K. Ford from the Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies titled The Death of Aneirin about the Gododdin poem that probably originates in 7th century Wales. The article involves references to being imprisoned or buried under the earth as a potential reference to initiatory and/or incubatory ritual.

The ogam fid úr is soil and its word ogams refer to the grave and to burial and death, but this metaphor is taken up in so many places as one of incubation and initiation. Whether the poet is buried in the ground, lies within a darkened chamber with plaids over her eyes or a stone on his belly, whether she is bound up in a bag and set adrift for forty years, the themes of darkness and restriction of movement appear over and over again. Aneirin lies under the earth with a chain about his knees. Taliesin was found in a bag in a salmon weir. The poets in Scotland lay within windowless huts seeking inspiration.

What is apparent is that illumination comes from within. External objects of meditation -- images, fire, the stars in the sky -- are not a focus in this particular practice. Blindness is its metaphor. To be blind in one eye is to see into the Otherworlds, those places that can't be seen with the physical eyes in this realm. Darkness opens a door.

When we look at what the filidh sought when they went to sit on a burial mound we see the same thing -- poetry, madness, death. Madness is what pursues us, death transforms us, poetry arises as the fili arises out of the darkness of the incubatory chamber of the symbolic grave. The search for poetic inspiration brings death to our old life, our old personality, and a new spirit, alive with imbas, is born.

Clarity

2008-03-11T17:57:00.001-07:00

My last post generated some confusion and a number of comments and I wanted to be very clear about what I was saying.

There are apparently some folks out there who would insist that CR can only be practiced by itself and that a CR person can never honor any deities from any other culture. I think this is bullshit, pure and simple. I believe that, as polytheists, it's our responsibility to properly honor any deities or spirits who come knocking, in their proper context. In some cases, if your home is small, you may only have space enough for one altar, and in those cases, it's okay for deities to share space even though you're honoring them separately. If all you have is a windowsill for your altar, that's all you have, and it doesn't make you not-CR if you have Thoth on that altar beside Lugh and Epona and Dian Cécht. We all know they're not the same deity and they aren't approached in the same ways or with the same ceremonies and offerings.

Eclecticism and syncretism are kneejerk words for a lot of people, myself included. This is because a lot of us have seen them used as an excuse for the worst possible mashing together that ends up with things like thinking Kali and the Cailleach are the same Goddess because they're "crone Goddesses" (which is more bullshit) and their names sound similar. This is right out of the Barbara Walker school of confused monism. This is not eclecticism or syncretism being done properly. It's laziness and self-delusion.

If we look at the definitions of eclectic and syncretic, we can see that both are necessary if we're going to reconstruct, recover, or otherwise (re)create a group of modern Celtic paths that are full and workable in our time and for our lives today. The little hints we have about the internal cauldrons that are a part of Gaelic filidecht are going to be nearly impossible to reconstruct without some reference to Hindu understandings of chakras, despite the fact that the cauldrons and the chakras are obviously not the same thing. We don't have enough in the Gaelic material to go on without those outside references. People on a CR warrior path inevitably seem to end up studying eastern martial arts at some point because that's where most of the information is. This is slowly changing as more information becomes available about western martial arts, but it's still a basis for a lot of the modern CR warrior path and serves as an important point of comparison.

CRs can legitimately and happily be a part of religions other than CR. Polytheism recognizes all the deities and spirits, even if any given polytheist doesn't honor all of them. Honoring all of them would be impossible because there are so many, even within just the Celtic cultures alone. Remember that historical syncretisms occurred -- we have Romano-British deities, we have Gaulo-Roman deities. We have Epona who was honored by Romans. We have the mixing of cultures in Ireland and Scotland where the Norse/Germanic peoples came in and shared space and families and cities with the Gaels. Celtic cultures extended from Iceland to Spain to Anatolia, and ignoring all of that in favor of some sort of Gaelic purity movement simply does not make sense.

Pay attention to context. Pay attention to the deities who come to call on you. Respect each of them for who and what they are. Don't turn your back on one just because it's not "Celtic enough." Live your life with honor, and have fun.

You say "eclectic" and I say "syncretic" -- let's call the whole thing off!

2008-03-04T19:41:00.000-08:00

Eclecticism and syncretism are a couple of words that tend to generate a lot of heat in reconstructionist social circles. Sometimes they're used interchangeably while other times eclectic is taken to mean a much looser form of intercultural exchange while syncretism is offered as a more measured, thoughtful alternative.

We can take a look at dictionaries to help us a little. Merriam-Webster's 11th Colligiate has eclectic as:

"1. selecting what appears to be the best in various doctrines, methods, or styles."

Syncretism is defined as:

"1. the combination of different forms of belief or practice."

Both of these practices were found in the ancient world. Both were practiced by our ancestors, whoever they were and wherever they lived. It isn't eclecticism or syncretism that are, in and of themselves, a bad thing. Far from it. What a lot of us are actually concerned about is not eclectic or syncretic practices, but sloppiness and disregard for context.

Context is an extremely important part of any reconstructionist process. Language and culture influence religions and spiritual practices deeply and they help to determine what types of practices develop in different regions and for different deities or spirits. Sincerity is fine, but when you're looking at culture and custom, a sincere mistake may still be an insult and can have some serious consequences. Culture and pre-existing practice determine things as important as acceptable offerings, how one approaches deity or spirit, and often the forms used for prayer or propitiation. What is acceptable in one practice may be strictly forbidden in another, and if you are inviting deities or spirits from many cultures to your table, knowing these rules can make the difference between success and failure in your relationships with them.

In spiritual practices that regard deity or spirit as something strictly internal, this is obviously not going to be all that much of an issue. If it's all in your head, from what I can see, it doesn't matter that much what you do so long as you get the results you're looking for. But from the viewpoint of someone who believes in the external/Otherworldly existence of deity and spirit, small things can make all the difference in the world. Effort is important. History and custom are important. This doesn't mean that nothing can change, but it does mean that knowing the road signs is useful and can often keep you out of troublesome spots along your path. If the mountain is an illusion, the map doesn't matter, but if it's real, you'd best not ignore the place where it says there's a five hundred foot cliff. It makes all the the difference between whether you bring a day pack or your mountain climbing gear.

Both eclecticism and syncretism can be legitimate parts of CR and other reconstructionist religious practices. It's best when those things are approached carefully and allowed to grow organically. Time and depth of both study and practice are necessary in understanding how to enlarge a practice or invite a new deity or spirit into your life. Sometimes they come pounding at the door while at other times they approach quietly and subtly. Often this will depend on the personality of the deity or spirit in question. Sometimes it happens that we decide we need new energies in our lives or wish to cultivate new relationships to help us with goals and areas that are challenges. Like people, each spirit or deity is going to have its own areas of expertise, and sometimes going to a deity from a different culture may be the best answer for us.

It's helpful in these cases to remember that not all our deities have to get along, in much the same way that not everyone in our family or among our friends gets along with everyone else. Uncle Fred's favorite pot roast might upset your vegan best friend Clara's sensibilities. It doesn't mean you can't invite them to the same party, but it's a good idea to have things that they can each enjoy when you're feeding them if you want both of them to be happy at your table. Remember that a favorite offering for one deity might be unclean or an offense to another, and keep those things as far separated as necessary -- different altars, or even different rooms in the house might be a good idea.

Eclecticism and syncretism aren't about cooking everything together in the same pot. They're more like creating a satisfying, multicultural meal that includes favorites and harmonious dishes from many lands, with many ingredients. It takes great skill and a strong knowledge of ingredients to have it all come out right and be satisfying for everyone joining you.

Sometimes the experiments fail pretty badly, but that's a part of what it takes to create a working practice that involves deities and spirits from more than one culture. Be prepared to offer apologies if you've unintentionally offended. It goes a long way with humans and with spirits.

When it works, it can be glorious.

At the table of many Gods

2008-03-03T23:17:00.000-08:00

I practice a polytheistic path, one that recognizes and celebrates a wide variety of deities and spirits. My path recognizes that there are historical methods of interacting with these beings that we can discover and work with today. Those methods and newer ones based on fragments of older ritual and thought are centered primarily on insular Celtic, primarily Gaelic models.

I consider my practice to be primarily Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism. This, however, does not in any way prohibit me from worshipping other deities or working with spirits outside of the insular Celtic world or its paradigms. I am a polytheist. I believe that all the deities and spirits exist somewhere, that they are all real and can have an effect in the lives of their followers. There are deities and spirits that I'm not particularly interested in, but this doesn't mean I don't think they're out there.

As a polytheist and someone who does a good bit of Otherworld work, I find myself in a place where the doors are often open. Sometimes the spirits ask things of me that I expect. Other times, their requests bring me up against difficult choices and take me places that I never expected to go. A Cherokee teacher who lives locally once said to me that spirits talk to people who listen, and that our bodies and our ancestry are not of particular concern to them. This helped me immensely with an issue I struggled with for about twenty years, but it also has bearing on European and other Pagan paths.

As someone who does Otherworld work, who speaks to spirits, and who treats with deities and the dead, I often find myself in relationships with deities who are not a part of the families of insular Celtic deities. I honor Gods and Goddesses from several continents in my home. I have shrines for Sarasvati and Ganesh. I offer honor to Buddhist entities. As a child I was fascinated by the deities of Greece and Egypt. Spirits of the land -- animals, plants, places -- have no "nationality" or "race" and they are simply what they are. When I do healing or visionary work for others, it is right and necessary to speak to and honor the deities and spirits that they honor, for they often will approach me and teach me how to help the person in a way they understand.

No culture and no religion has ever sprung from a vacuum. Each spiritual path that exists in the world today -- that has ever existed -- has been influenced by its neighbors. As a polytheist, this becomes an important part of my spiritual reality. And as someone that listens to the spirits, sometimes someone new and unexpected drops by. As a good Celtic Pagan it would be a violation of my practice to refuse them hospitality, just as it would be poor form to turn away the friend of a friend who came to my door unexpectedly with an introduction and a request.

It's important for us to remember that we have room for more than one culture's deities at our table. Joy and wisdom can be found in the cross-cultural pollination of such conversations and relationships. When Garuda sits down with Exu, surely something interesting is about to happen.

By this I'm not talking about randomly inviting deities from multiple cultures to a ritual and expecting them to work together and cooperate. But if they show up at the same time unasked, perhaps there's a message there for me. The universe is a very big place, and attempting to place limits and conditions on it from my particularly small human point of view is, perhaps, an act of hubris. I'm not going to sing a chant that equates all Goddesses with one singular Goddess, but if I have relationships with Brighid and Sarasvati the fact that they have similar interests means they might be willing to come and visit at the same time. They might even be willing to share altar space if there's very little room where I live.

Polytheism, done with respect and due caution, can be a freeing way of approaching deity. If someone's knocking, don't be afraid to answer the door.

Outside

2008-02-07T13:08:00.000-08:00

One thing I've found is that when I need to get deeply into my practice of filidecht, I need to get outside.

It's not that you can't do some of it indoors. Composing a poem can take place anywhere. Most kinds of meditation work just as well indoors as out. My altars are inside my apartment and I live a primarily urban life.

Yet some things just work better outside. I find I contact the land spirits and many of the deities better when I'm away from buildings and pavement and noise. Being surrounded by trees or walking the beach speaks to me differently than sitting on a couch or lying on the floor. Intensive meditative ritual flows better for me when the only sounds around are wind and water and the songs of birds.

When I was growing up in rural western Massachusetts, I'd regularly spend all day outdoors, sometimes even in the winter with the snow hip-deep in the woods. I felt more comfortable with the local forest than with most people. I watched birds and animals, learning where they lived and what they ate and what their tracks looked like. I learned stillness and patience so that they'd come close.

Living in the city, I still need to get outside. My most intense experiences are multi-day ritual work while I'm camping and immersed in the natural world around me. For a lot of people in urban North America, opportunities to get out of the city are rare, but I believe they're essential to the practice of filidecht. Without being in the flow of the seasons, without being away from people and surrounded by trees or desert or water, without having an opportunity to observe non-human life, I think that filidecht is just a sterile exercise in poetics.

Life enclosed within the walls of a house or an office is circumscribed and restricted. While filidecht can be practiced solely within the confines of a city or in urban parks, it finds its wealth and depth in natural places away from human influence. I think it's particularly important for those of us who are working through the issues of being geilt to be able to get out into the wild as a clearing and meditative practice. This doesn't mean rejecting the human or the urban so much as it means embracing the Other and learning to see yourself as existing within that world.

Human culture carries an incredible amount of pressure within it and I feel like it's easier to clear my head and listen when I'm away from my urban environment. Staying indoors might be tempting for a lot of people, but I believe that a practice that involves work in wilderness is more effective than one that takes place entirely indoors and in urban environments.

Imbolc

2008-01-29T23:01:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted recently because the incubation chamber project has been moving slowly. It's been cold and rainy and even snowing, making airing out the bedroom and closet space a slow and unpleasant process.

I just shipped a whole trunk full of clothing and other things (most of it from the former closet space) over to Goodwill this evening, clearing up the living room where it's been piled. Within the week I'll be starting the second coat of stain, this time with an intent to texture the walls so they don't look so stark. There will be photos again when that phase of the project is finished.

Imbolc is coming soon as well -- only a few days away. This year I'll be doing ritual that involves laying out the brat Brid and the Brighid's Cross for her touch as she passes by. There will be a fire for the night, and an altar laid out. I'll have candles and songs, food laid out for her, and offered to her in the flames.

This year also, a little later in the month, I'll be getting together with some local CR folk to do a ritual for the Imbolc of Brig Ambue. Brig Ambue is "Brighid of the Cowless Warriors" -- a Goddess who integrates outsiders back into the tribe. My friend Phil put together the ritual, which we'll be doing on the 11th (close to the old calendar Imbolc) and again at PantheaCon this year.

Imbolc is not entirely about the domestic cult, just as Brighid is not entirely a domestic Goddess. In some ways the holiday is similar to the Roman lupercalia, a festival of purification and renewal. This is what the Brig Ambue ritual signifies and incorporates; it brings in those parts of us that had gone walkabout, renews ties between the wild and the domestic, eases tensions between outsiders and insiders. So along with the homely and healing work of the brat Brid, there will also be purification and renewal, an acceptance of the wild and outlying parts of ourselves as we move into the burgeoning light of spring.

Darkness has begun to recede here, despite the overcast days and the dreich weather. It has snowed in the past two days and the remains of snow are still on the ground. Black ice is on the parking lot. Yet the days have been longer and buds are beginning to show on the trees. The season is in flux, and soon I'll be able to open the windows and the song of frogs will fill the nights.

I'm looking forward to it.

Starting the project

2008-01-08T23:28:00.000-08:00

Today I started working on clearing out the closet that will eventually be the incubation chamber. It was full of laundry, spare bedding, old photo albums and a bunch of other things that people keep in closets, including a lot of clothes I haven't worn in years or which no longer fits. So after having cleared out the dirty laundry, I took some photos of the closet in process.

First with general storage and some bedding that needs dry cleaning rather than tossing into the washer. As you can see, it's pretty crowded in there. I moved the hook for the robe onto the bathroom door. The bedroom door, when open, covers part of the closet door, but this shouldn't be an issue for my purposes.

More likely to be difficult is the fact that the closet door opens inward. This means that nothing can be in the path of the door, including cushions and such, unless I move them before the door opens. That may be an inconvenience, depending on where I end up placing the cushions that I'll by lying on. Most likely, that will go along the back of the closet. Altar stuff will likely go along the wall on the right hand side looking in, as there is room next to the door.

The next photo is after I'd pulled out the majority of the stuff on the floor. As you can see, there's still a lot of work to do. Clothing and storage items need to be removed. I'll also need to remove the hanger bars and the shelves. The hanger bars are right at the level where I'm going to whack myself in the head if I try to stand up under them. This is a Very Bad Thing when one is in a perhaps not entirely grounded state, so it's partly a safety issue as well as one of space.

First I'd considered leaving the upper shelves, but they make the room feel claustrophobic when I'm in it and taking them out has made a big difference in how the room actually feels. There were a lot of screws and some nails to deal with. I'll be putting both the shelves and the hardware out into the garage because if I ever sell the place, I'll need to reinstall the shelves and bars for the next owner. I rather doubt they'll find much use in an incubation chamber in the master bedroom!

The third photo is of the room entirely emptied, except for the stepladder. I decided that the off-white was entirely too... something and so tomorrow I'll be painting the room with some sage-green stain. It'll mute the brightness of the room when the lights go on, and help with a more comfortable feel if I have candles burning on the altar for any reason. The bland off-white is a color I don't care for much and the incubation chamber should have as few non-ritual distractions as possible, so comfort and easiness on the eyes is important to me through this process.

I'll be having my Very Tall Roommate and possibly his boyfriend help me with the painting, and it should go quickly. It's cold out and snowed late last night, but I'll still need to open the bedroom window to air the space out while the painting is going on, as well has having the bathroom fan going to help clear the air as quickly as possible. The door to the room will need to be left open, probably for several days, to be sure that I'm not going to keep the necessary out-gassing from happening. Paint fumes are nasty stuff, and that's not the way I want to alter my consciousness. I may end up sleeping with the window open for a night or two, with a lot of extra blankets on the bed!

As you can probably see even just from the photo, having the rails and shelves out of the room changes the feel a lot. What you can't see is that I had to remove a broken light dome from the fixture. That happened quite a while ago when I was trying to get something off one of the high shelves. I'll have to replace the fixture so that I don't have a bare bulb up there on the ceiling.

Another issue is that if I'm going to have sound in the closet, I'm going to have to run an extension cord from the hallway. I have upstairs neighbors who have kids. Most of the time they're not too noticeable but now and then it's like elephants on the ceiling. I'm considering looking for cds with nature sounds on them -- not nature sounds with music but just nature sounds. Flowing water, ocean waves, or birdsong and wind in leaves would all be acceptable, so if any of you have suggestions for places to find this, that would be great.

I don't want music over the background sound because that drives a certain mood and it also presents problems when the sound loops at the end of the piece with a CD or iPod on repeat. I may also experiment with soft harp music or other instrumentals that carry an appropriate mood in them, intended for quiet contemplation or meditation. Harps are certainly a part of the tradition and if there was any sound driver for trance in the Gaelic tradition it was most likely harp, given the three harp strains of laughter, sorrow, and sleep.

I'll take suggestions on good harp pieces as well, and I'm sure some of you will have them. I'm very much open to experimenting with harp music for trance and healing work, and without a harper at my personal disposal at all hours, I'm going to have to go with recorded music. Damn the inconvenience! ;)

Practical incubation ritual

2008-01-07T20:14:00.000-08:00

Inspired by one of my Hellenic Pagan spirit-worker friends, I'm starting a project to do experimentation with incubatory vision work. She's got a room in her house that she uses for her adyton or temple and that room has a closet that she's fitted out for incubation and oracular work.

Like most folks, I don't have room enough in my apartment for a whole temple room. I have a roommate living in my library, and the library takes up a lot of space all by itself -- there are books in every room of my house. But I do have a walk-in closet in my bedroom. So, soon I'll be working on rearranging my storage so that I can empty out that closet and create my own incubation chamber for work on some of the rituals from the Gaelic tradition that require darkness and isolation or intensive internalization. These rituals include the stone on the belly poetic incubation described by Martin Martin from the Isle of Skye in the late 17th century, the ritual of tarbhfeis (tarv-faysh or bull-feast), and the lengthy imbas forosnai (im-bus for-oss-nuh) ritual that could take as long as three or nine days.

My most intensive ritual experiences so far have been backpacking trips out to the coast in Washington and California. In both cases, I spent three nights camping and doing ritual during most of that time, even when "ritual" consisted of beachwalking while meditating and watching for potential information regarding my process. This will take my work in a different direction, but one that's necessary as a part of the practice of filidecht. Part of the work involves sensory deprivation of a sort -- isolation and darkness are definite steps in that direction. Entheogens may also have been a part of the practice of filidecht at some point in the past. The visionary experiences described certainly often read like entheogenic experiences.

If I want to be able to add fasting to the ritual preparation, I'm also going to have to look at the idea of giving up tea for a while, as caffeine withdrawal can cause bad headaches or even migraines, and going into a fast for spiritual purposes while dealing with migraines from withdrawal is just not a good way to get your visions on. Talking to a doc would probably be a good idea as well, due to my health constraints. I have fibromyalgia, migraines, PTSD and a variety of other issues including clinical depression that require a certain amount of monitoring, so hardcore fasting is something that I would absolutely have to work up to carefully rather than just jumping in and not eating for a couple of days.

In doing this kind of practical work, there will always be considerations of time, isolation, preparation, space, and ritual creation. We have rough accounts of these rituals, but the formats and ritual words are not preserved. In some cases we're told that four druids accompany the one seeking a vision, chanting "truth spells" the entire time the seeker is in trance. Human assistance may not always be available, so allowances have to be made for the "sound track" of the ritual. Precautions need to be taken in the case of both fasting and entheogen use as a solitary worker. Distractions have to somehow be kept to a minimum.

Later this week I should be posting some photos of the closet before and after clearing it out. After that, as I work on creating sacred space within it, there will probably be a few pictures of how the chamber develops. Not having a dedicated temple room may mean that I'll need to divide the closet into two "rooms" with a curtain so that there is a preparatory and post-incubation space as well as the space for the actual incubation itself. An altar, a comfortable cushion to lie on, warm blankies and other considerations need to be looked at.

As a practical thing, I also have to accept that there will be some failures and false starts on this. In the hope of encouraging and informing others, I'll be recording the flops as well as the successes. I hope that my work will inspire others to do some research and experimentation with Gaelic incubatory ritual work. The more of us who are working on it, the more likely we'll be to develop successful technologies for it within the CR community. In my opinion, more successful ritual forms equals a more diverse and stronger community.

Just as Celtic cultures have never been monolithic, I think that CR should be diverse in its practices so long as it stays true to the Celtic cultures that inspire it, even if there is syncretism and adaptation of technologies from outside the cultures. Nothing in this world has developed in utter isolation, and if one of CR's questions is "what would Celtic polytheism look like if Christianity hadn't come along", then one of those answers is very likely to be "very diverse."

"Are you a shaman?"

2008-01-04T01:24:00.001-08:00

This is possibly the most frequent question I get asked when I try to explain filidecht to other people. Sometimes I'll just say "I'm a druid" because it's easy and people will at least have some idea that I'm into something Celtic, but that carries its own set of false assumptions and baggage. And these days saying you're a druid is likely to get you the same question.

My roommate got his Ph.D. in Celtic Civilization in Cork a year or so ago. Someone asked him if, when he was finished with his course of study, he would be a Celtic shaman. It's a frustrating thing to deal with. The assumptions can be very strange sometimes. But no -- neither of us is a Celtic shaman. He's a scholar. I'm a poet with mystic tendencies.

I would say that I sometimes use techniques that could be classified as "shamanic" in my work. But then, so do some Buddhist monks, and your average person on the street doesn't consider them "shamans." For me, a big part of the issue is that Gaelic has any number of words for its pre-Christian spiritual practitioners. We really don't need to borrow words from outside. I've always felt that calling druids and filidh "shamans" made about as much sense as referring to Siberian shamans as "druids." They're not the same, no matter what John and Caitlin Matthews or D.J. Conway tell you.

I'm an animist. I'm a polytheist. I do trance work and Otherworld work and healing work and divination. To those ends, I call on spirits, ancestors and deities to help me with the work I need to do. The techniques I use vary depending on circumstances, and certainly some of the experiences I've had could be classified as "shamanic" but I can't see calling myself that with any sense of honesty. There's entirely too much baggage around the concept and it's so misunderstood that it brings up pictures in people's minds that have nothing to do with the way I do my work and how I follow my calling.

When I was at my book release a few weeks ago, a couple of people were in attendance who called themselves Celtic shamans. I don't know them, but one of them had a fake "Celtic" accent and didn't seem to realize that there were no ogam tracts in the Welsh language. He asked if I used ogam to cast my circles. I replied that I didn't use circles and didn't work that way. They were curious how I dealt with ritual, then.

"I work with spirits and the deities," I said. "I ask them for help."

"Oh, so you're a natural," the partner replied.

"No," I told her. "I worked long and hard to get where I am with this. I spent years studying and experimenting and talking with the spirits and the deities."

To my mind, shaman has become such a catch-all phrase for spiritual practitioners that it's become essentially meaningless in the Pagan community. I don't listen to drumming tapes to help me into trance. I don't have a "totem animal" or a "spirit guide." I've never done firewalking or had sensurround technicolor visionary experiences.

I go into the Otherworlds with caution, surrounded by spirits and with the permission of deity. I make offerings before and afterwards. I may sing my way there. I may go in dreams. I may use incubatory techniques based in sensory deprivation.

I talk to spirits. Sometimes they talk back. I don't usually hear words, but more often just get a sense of presence and messages or images from them that aren't in anything resembling human speech. Sometimes one of my grandmothers shows up -- no, she wasn't a shaman either. She was a Polish Catholic, thanks. Admittedly, she wasn't a particularly churchy type, and she had a few folk customs up her sleeve, but she never taught them to me. She just shows up sometimes to see how I'm doing and help take care of me when I need it. When I was back east a couple of years ago I told my uncle that I'd seen and talked to her from time to time.

"Yeah," he said. "That runs in the family."

It had been a new one on me, but my dad's notoriously close-mouthed about just about everything and that goes double for family stuff. So maybe second sight runs in the family, but my uncle tends toward tall tales, so I'm not even sure of that, to be honest.

I write poetry. I talk to spirits. Sometimes the spirits talk back.

That's what filidecht is about.

The spaces between

2007-12-30T21:26:00.000-08:00

One of the themes that arises again and again in the Gaelic corpus is that of liminality -- the places and spaces between. It may be between times or worlds or genders. It may be between sleep and waking, between day and night, between the inside and the outside.

Strange things take place there. The taibhsear (tahv-shyer) stands in the doorway, hands upon the jambs, and looks out for an omen in the first thing she sees in the morning. A fili sits on a mound and fasts, waiting until the mist rises so the spirits can appear. Lugh stands on one leg with one eye closed and one hand behind his back, half in this world and half in the other, to work his crane-magic.

Liminal spaces and liminal people are a deep part of the CR tradition. Those of us called to filidecht often find ourselves "in-between" in some way. It may be the razor's edge between sanity and oblivion. Perhaps it is a sense of being between genders, partaking of the nature of all. It might be that we are called to walk the mists between worlds, bringing back insights and vision in hopes of integration for self or community. We might look into the spaces between life and death and perceive the spirits there. In some cases, we might be poised between cultures, the child of many different deities and traditions.

In the words of Hedwig in "Tear Me Down",

There ain't much of a difference

Between a bridge and a wall

Those of us who stand in the borders, who walk the mists, might act sometimes as either or as both. As we learn, we become both the guardians and the revealers of mysteries. We become guides and challengers. Ideally, we work to integrate ourselves within both the mundane world and the Otherworlds, and help others to find their own balance in those precarious places without losing our own footing.

A fili is, in so many ways, a shape-shifter. It takes fluidity and changeability to walk between worlds. Like Suibhne, we might be called upon to grow feathers and fly. Like the fénnid (fay-nid), we might be pressed to fight in wolf-shape, battling the forces that would rage against the safety of hearth and home. Like Amairgen, we may be called upon to take up a myriad shapes, calling out a litany of what we have learned:

I am a wind on the sea

I am a wave of the ocean

I am the roar of the sea

I am a powerful stag

I am a hawk on a cliff

I am a dewdrop in the sunshine

What do we learn in our shapes? What do we learn through our transformations? What functions and services do we perform?

Am I a bridge, or a wall?

Belonging

2007-12-23T16:51:00.001-08:00

It's a normal human desire, belonging. We all want it in one way or another. We want to belong to or with other people, to belong in a place that calls out to us, belong to a group whose goals and intentions resonate with our own. We seek out belonging in shared culture, spirituality, friendship, and family. Even outsiders and radicals want to belong and seek out sympathetic others of their kind. This is part of what drives the creation of religious and spiritual movements -- the desire to belong to something greater than ourselves.

Reconstructionist religions speak to those who feel a sense of belonging to a different time and possibly to a different place. I've never talked to anyone in CR who wanted to live in iron age Ireland -- we're all pretty fond of things like central heating and indoor plumbing. Yet so many of us feel spiritually connected to that other time and place. It's not a desire to escape, either. So many of us are deeply engaged in social and political struggles, in learning about the world and humanity's place in it, in working for change in the destructive patterns in modern Western civilization. Yet we wonder if we could achieve a sense of belonging and kinship with people in the places where our deities arose, where the languages that are important to us ritually once were and sometimes still are spoken. We read and study and dream and make pilgrimages, seeking that sense of belonging and acceptance.

Alastair McIntosh addresses the idea in a brief poem from his collection Love and Revolution, entitled Scotland.

A person belongs

inasmuch as they are willing

to cherish and be cherished

by a place

and its peoples.

Alba

Buinidh neach an seo

Fhad 's a tha iad deònach

tasgadh is a bhith air an tasgadh

leis an àite

agus a mhuinntir

(translation to Gaelic by Maoilios Caimbeul)

Alastair McIntosh is originally from the Isle of Lewis, currently residing in Glasgow. He is an environmental, political and spiritual activist whose activities touch on many communities. His work and writing offers connection with the original animist, immanentist traditions of the early Celtic peoples, and an acceptance of those who would join in that reverence. Outsiders, our respect for and cherishing of the traditions and the peoples whose pre-Christian spiritual practices we wish to reconstruct and emulate is what gives us a connection to the traditions and grants us a sense of belonging.

We belong to the Earth. We belong to the deities and the spirits. We belong to ourselves and to what we cherish. When we embrace the land in a particular place, we allow ourselves to be embraced in turn -- to belong to the land and its spirits. Even when we come from far away, if we approach with respect and with love then we can be accepted there, becoming a part of that place, of those people. With love and respect, we create belonging and connections. We find our way home.

Geiltadecht

2007-12-20T21:16:00.000-08:00

One word you'll find me using frequently here and in other places is geilt. It is translated as "one who goes mad from terror, a panic-stricken fugitive from battle, a crazy person living in the woods and supposed to be endowed with the power of levitation, a lunatic." It may also be the name of some kind of bird or it might mean "grazing." The title I'm using here, geiltadecht, is a neologism to describe the practice of the geilta.

In the Buile Suibhne, the eponymous Suibhne goes mad in battle as the result of a saint's curse. The symptoms he displays are very akin to what we could today interpret as post-traumatic stress disorder. He flees from the place of battle and ends up hiding out in the forest, running from phantoms and spirits, unable to tolerate the company of others, eating only plants. Eventually he was said to have grown feathers and flown from treetop to treetop like a bird. He is not the only geilt described in the literary tradition, and there is even a valley where the geilta, the madmen, were believed to gather until their sanity was restored.

But along with this madness came poetry. The body of nature poems attributed to Suibhne Geilt is impressive and the images are striking and powerful. His visions and terrors evolved into poignant laments and strange dialogues with trees and beasts. Whether the Irish writers believed that Suibhne was actually in communication with such spirits is an open question, but the story can certainly be read in Pagan and animist ways. Suibhne himself was described as a Pagan who attempted to kill the "saint" who cursed him, presumably attempting to preserve the old order in his kingdom rather than give his power over to the church.

Other "madmen" in the Celtic literary tradition, including Myrddin and Lailoken, were regarded as prophets -- seers and possessors of a certain "crazy wisdom." Sacred madness is a current in many spiritual traditions around the world. It's found in many Native American tribes, within Hindu and Buddhist practice, as well as in Islam and Christianity. Such traditions have their gifts and their difficulties. As someone who lives on disability with a diagnosis (one among many) of post-traumatic stress, I've looked at these roles and potentials and seen them as models for my own life in much the same way that many individuals in Siberian cultures deal with healing spirit-sicknesses by falling into the spiritual world and coming out again transformed.

By pursuing poetry as a spiritual practice I've managed to find my way to a certain amount of healing and sanity. It has exorcised many of the figurative demons that made my life a misery. In seeing Suibhne's madness as a metaphor for my own experience, I've embraced the idea of the professional madwoman and claimed the title of geilt as a badge of honor for what I've gone through. I think that poetry can take suffering and illness and turn them into art and a potential for healing and growth. It's not that poetry by itself will do this -- I've done a lot of years of therapy and medication as well -- but the work of poetry can give a spiritual focus and purpose to what feels like continual chaos and destruction. In this sense, the task of the geilt is to refuse to succumb to the pain and to work through the mists to transcend that condition and bring something useful out of the fear and the misery.

Working with the arts of the fili or sacred poet, the experiences of the geilt can be mediated and expressed. Expression often helps to clarify and understand what is happening, aiding the person to get to the root of the problems and issues, whether they are physical, spiritual, emotional, or socio-political. Techniques that help to communicate with spirits and deities as well as journeying work can help with clarity and understanding as well, as can acts of divination through seeking oracles or finding omens. Rituals to embrace the madness as a part of working through it can be effective as well, reinforcing positive patterns and activities and drawing the mind out of the obsessive circles it may fall prey to without such focus.

That said, the nature of the geilt means that control is often an illusion. Interpretation and acceptance is a more fruitful path for one with these proclivities. This is not in any way suggesting "giving up" but merely a statement that the world and the Otherworlds are vaster than we can understand and we, mere humans, have very little power over some things that happen. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, though our culture values control (or the illusion of it) very highly. It can be a relief for guilt and anxiety to let go of inappropriate responsibility.

Sometimes I joke with friends that I'm only responsible for the decay rate of the hydrogen atom, hence I don't have to deal with anything else in the universe. Obviously, that's not the case, but it does serve as a reminder to me to only claim what I'm genuinely responsible for -- and as a geilt, my own sanity and spiritual work is high up on that list. There are other priorities as well, but a geilt is an outsider, someone who lurks on the boundaries of groups and societies. That inclination to solitude is part of what marks someone as geilt but can also be a part of what helps to heal the terror and the insanity of those who have been through violent experiences, through abuse, through battle or rape or overwhelming environmental events that have destroyed their ordinary daily lives.

Within the experience of geiltadecht, madness and destruction is the foundation for transformation.

In silent darkness

2007-12-13T22:48:00.000-08:00

Some of my visitors may be wondering what imbas is, and why I'm looking for it.

Ni ansa, "not hard," the early Irish would have replied. That usually tends to precede a complex and lengthy explanation for something very difficult to understand. In a way, imbas isn't hard. Looked at from other angles, it's potentially impossible to explain and it can certainly be difficult to come by.

In different sources, the word is translated as "poetic frenzy," "poetic ecstasy," "poetic wisdom," "inspiration," a "fire in the head," light that arises from incubation in darkness and silence. To me, it's the lightning feeling of words and ideas moving nearly too fast to speak; it's a sense of sudden understanding after seeking answers in study and meditation.

Imbas is traditionally the result of being born into a lineage of poets, but it is equally traditionally a thing that can be taught and learned, a thing that can be pursued, a thing that can come upon someone accidentally, as wisdom came upon Fionn mac Cumhaill when he burnt his thumb on the salmon of wisdom and put it in his mouth to still the pain. It is the flash of lightning that illuminates, leaving images in stark relief against the night landscape. It is the heat within that pushes a poet to create. It is the driving force that wakens the writer in the deeps of night with bright, transparent words that must be put down before they're gone.

It is also the result of the discipline of sitting down in front of the computer or the notebook every day, faithfully, just working through the topic on your mind. It is the resonance of carefully-crafted words that sing when spoken. It is the power of language to move and incite, to stir and to calm. Imbas is the magic in poetry and the binding power of words spoken with intent. Not the words themselves, mind you -- imbas is too subtle and slippery to be mere verbiage. Instead it's the silver flash of power that is found in the way words meet when brought together with skill and intent. It's the spark behind the words that rises like fire from the spring, filling them with meaning beyond their surface. Imbas is the power within the words, like the soul within a body, subtle but strong.

When it hits, it's like breathless dizziness. Patterns fall into place. The body heats up and can't be still. Words must come out, spoken or sung. Ideas leap and spark like stars or gems or the drops that fly from waterfalls, gleaming in the light. Things take on a significance beyond their outward appearance. Spirits speak and if we're careful and quick -- and lucky -- we can catch those words and weave them into something profound.

The search for imbas is the preparation that lays the tinder so the spark can blaze.

Brighid Dreams the Poet

2007-12-04T01:24:00.000-08:00

This is a poem I wrote in 1997, the result of meditation and a poetic exercise. It's been published a couple of times, but it does express a bit about how I see the Goddess of poets.

Brighid Dreams the Poet

I want a poet

with words of honey

and bitter dregs

of red Hungarian wine

dressed in the bones of birds

with wild

ecstatic eyes

and feet that dance the bonfire's rim

I want a poet

with many souls

souls of mice

and tigers

souls of ravenous

hungry ghosts

and the singing souls of rivers

of wallowing, bellowing buffalo

souls of moths, and geckos

I want a poet

with eyes of crystal shards

that see through flesh

and spy the hearts of trees

and mountains' bones

with thin, strong fingers

to pluck the hawthorn's bloom

in Beltain's dawning dews

I want a poet

with ballads for breath

and chants

to scatter fear from the deeps of night

or call the wren

from her nest

with spells to lay children to sleep

and bind the rising moon

I want a poet

with fur and claws

and hot, panting tongue

thirsty

and seeking the spring

May you dream of the spring.

Getting started

2007-12-02T22:10:00.000-08:00

Over on my LiveJournal, I've been writing for years about my life, my personal practice, and the books and articles I've been working on. Searching for imbas is meant to be a place where I explore the depths and particulars of the path of filidecht, the path of poetic mysticism based in the Gaelic traditions of Scotland and Ireland.

Expect occasional book reviews, essays on ritual and personal practice, divination and ogam, poems that arise out of my practice, healing work, and thoughts on what it is to be a fili in the modern world. It's a complicated subject and language and context are of critical importance for understanding.

If there's something you'd like to see addressed here as an essay topic, please feel free to comment and I'll take it under consideration.

Thanks for coming, and I hope you'll find our talks together interesting and informative. I know I'll be learning things along the way!