As we’re getting into October and people are turning their attention to Samhain I’m starting to see discussion and references to the meeting between the Morrigan and the Dagda at the river Unshin showing up here and there. This is one of those stories from myth that often suffers from ‘telephone game syndrome’, that is people who haven’t actually read or heard the story themselves taking a…
Quick Guide to Common Folklore Related Terms
Today I wanted to offer a quick and very rough guide to terms used around material connected to folklore. I find that this subject can be very confusing for people and hope this may help a bit with that. Disclaimer that these definitions are based in my own understanding of these concepts as an amateur folklorist.Folklore – according to Oxford dictionary folklore is "the traditional beliefs,…
Cana Cludhmor – Inventing an Irish Goddess
I saw a post on Twitter, under the folklore Thursday hashtag, claiming that the Irish goddess of music and the harp is Cana Cludhmor, which was a new one on me, so I decided to research the idea and that figure. I wasn’t familiar with her as a name of any of the Tuatha De Danann, Fomoirians, or Fir Bolg, or from the Ulster or Fenian myth cycles but I am certainly not infallible nor do I know…
A Charm Against the Evil Eye
The Carmina Gadelica has a series of charms which all deal with the evil eye, that is the curse laid upon a person by another who wishes them ill or looks upon them with envy. This one is my personal favorite and I have modified it slightly to be more pagan; the original can be found here. I love the imagery it presents and find it reminiscent of the Song of Amergin. Anyone who has read…
7 Dangerous Fairies
Despite the common modern perception of fairies as lovely and helpful folklore offers a wide range of dangerous Fairy beings who represented a real threat to any humans they happened to encounter. I’d like to offer a list of 7 such dangerous beings here, although there are of course many more than that found across the folklore. These are definitely not the sorts of fairies one would want to…
Feri, Faery Wicca, Fairy Witchcraft…Which is Which?
There are several very similarly named traditions of witchcraft connected to fairies out there and this has long caused confusion. Which, given the subject relates to fairies, is perhaps inevitable or at least predictable. Nonetheless I thought that today it would be helpful to offer as much clarity on this as possible by briefly discussing the different traditions to illustrate how they are…
Why Do We Envision Fairies As Tiny?
fairy from the movie LabyrinthFor many people today the word fairy immediately invokes images like the picture above, of a tiny winged being. In today’s post I want to discuss specifically the idea of fairies as tiny, because its so pervasive and yet largely a popculture concept, albeit an early modern one. So, why do we envision fairies as tiny?The fairies of folklore – historic and modern -…
Recommended Translations of Irish Myths
Responding to a social media question: What are my favorite translations of [old/middle] Irish material?I don’t know that I necessarily have favorite translations, per se, so much as favorite translators. So if I have a choice I tend to look for work by Kuno Meyers or Elizabeth Gray when possible because they are two of my favorites. Meyers because he footnoted like nobody’s business and he’s…
Co-Walkers, Fetches, and Fylgja
I often see a lot of confusion in modern paganism between three related but distinct concepts: the co-walker, fetch, and fylgja. These three concepts come from different cultures and can be described by some contemporary writers as equivalents however when we look more closely at the concepts within the root cultures it becomes clear that they are not so much equivalents as loosely similar…
10 Red Flags in Spiritual Books
I’ve written before about 7 Warning Signs of a Bad Fairy Source but I wanted to expand a bit here and look more generally at red flags of books that may be problematic. Some of these things will overlap with the previous list and many won’t but I think they all are important criteria for judging whether a book or other source might not be solid, especially in today’s world where material is…