Fairy taboos around food are complicated and layered, and each aspect tends to have its own rules and repercussions. For this blog we will break the prohibitions around food down into three categories and try to summarize each one as concisely as possible.
1 – Eating Food from Fairy.
The most well known prohibition around food and fairies is certainly the rule not to eat fairy food. The…
One particular bit of folklore that is still especially relevant today is that of fairy rings, also called fairy circles, elf rings, or elf circles. In Welsh they may be known as cylch y Tylwyth Teg [literally ‘circle of the Fair Family’]. The concept of these rings can be found throughout the different Celtic language speaking countries as well as the various diaspora and some Anglo-Saxon and…
There’s a good amount of discussion out there about honoring deities (or spirits) and about dedication to a deity. What I want to talk about today is something I don’t see being discussed much – when dedication ends.
An image of the German Woden
When I began my pagan path I really wasn’t aware of the idea of dedicating oneself to a deity, or several even, but over time I not only started to…
Recently in my wanderings through source material I ran across particularly interesting folk charm in the 1854 ‘Transactions of the Ossianic Society’. The entry was first in Irish and then translated into English, with some notable variances from the Irish, and dealt with a spoken charm used by a Catholic priest to expel a Leannan Si from a woman named Shighile Tabaois [Sheela Tavish].
This is…
This post is meant to offer a selection of the common terms I use in Irish with their English translations, to help readers of my blog who may not have any Irish or who may find the use of Irish placenames, euphemisms for the Good Neighbours, and other miscellaneous words confusing. Hopefully this will offer a bit of clarity.
Aitainmneacha / Place Names
An Cheathru Chaol – Carrowkeel
Brú na…
One thing that’s important for anyone who relies, to any degree, on sources outside themselves for spirituality – or anything else – is being able to judge a good source from a bad one. So today I want to just run down a quick list of ways to vett sources of any type to decide how much weight you should give to something. Even if a source isn’t perfect it may have value – or it may be immediately…
One of the Imramma, or ‘Voyage’ stories, dating to possibly the 8th century. I can only find a small portion of the text in Irish to translate but it is an interesting section and offers insight into how far back the concept existed that to live on one of the Otherworldly islands meant to be unable to return to our world without immediately dying should you touch the earth. Imram Brian Meic…
One source of much confusion is the connection – or lack thereof – between the Irish goddess the Morrigan and the Welsh Arthurian figure Morgen le Fay*. I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while but have hesitated because I am admittedly weak on the Welsh end of things and didn’t want to do a disservice to the subject. However I’ve had several people ask me recently about what connection…
The relationship between the Good People and the sacred objects and words of Christianity are complex. Some fairies are utterly unbothered by the symbols and ritual actions of the new religion, some are very concerned about their own place within Christian cosmology, while others seem to violently abhor anything relating to the ‘new’ religion. Those who show an aversion to these symbols and…
Another taboo that we see among many of the Good People relates to names. Names have power and we find in many cases both an aversion to saying the names of certain types of the Daoine Maithe as well as an avoidance of personal names. Even nicknames have power and when we look at anecdotal evidence we find that often rather than giving a name to a fairy that a person might have regular encounters…