my ‘sacred’ boots, which have crawled through souterrains, walked up sacred hills, cleaned a holy well, and delved deep into the Morrigan’s cave
I left for Ireland on October 25th, to help co-facilitate a Morrigan sacred sites tour. I was very excited, and had high expectations of connecting more deeply with the Morrigan, Badb, and Macha on their own sacred ground at places where their…
Suidigud Tellaich Temra
23. ‘A Findtain,’ arse, ‘& Éri cía gabad ca rabad inde?’
‘Ní ansa,’ ar Fintan, ‘Íaruss fis. tuadus cath. airthis bláth.
teissus séis. fortius flaith.’
‘Is fír ém, a Findtain,’ ar Tréfhuilngid, ‘’ at senchaid saineamail.
Is amlaid robái & bias co bráth béos, .i.
24. A fis, a forus, a foirceatol, a bág, a breithemnus, a
comgne, a cómairle, a scéla, a seanchasa, a…
"[A]n pucadh da ngairir an spioraid phriobhaideach" – Lucerna Fidelium
(the púca he was called the secret spirit)
The Púca – also called by a wide array of variant names including Phooka, Pooka, Pwca [Welsh], Bucca [Cornish] and Puck [English] – is a type of being found in folklore across hundreds of years. Some even connect Shakespeare’s character Puck to the folkloric Púca, although…
The familiar spirit, often simply called the familiar, is one of the most well known companions of the classical witch. When most people think of the traditional witch’s familiar they automatically imagine a demonic one, however there is a long history of fairies taking the role of the familiar spirit with some witches in Europe, just as some witches met not with the Devil but with the Queen of…
In November of 2015 I wrote a blog titled ‘The Influence of Fiction and Hollywood on Paganism’. It was mostly me discussing my own opinions on the way that I have seen media change, or at least influence, pagan beliefs over the decades. Lately different discussions on social media have gotten me thinking that I might want to do a similar blog about the effects of popculture and fiction on fairy…
Iron horse shoe above a door
Many of the old folktales – as well as the new modern day experiences – show us reasons why people feared and respected the Good People. Living side by side with the Otherworld necessitated not only the wisdom to know how to properly interact if you happened upon Themselves, but also created a wide array of methods to defend against those with malicious…
There are many things about modern spirituality that perplex me but one that I may have mentioned before is the immediate trust that people give to spirits. I know I’ve mentioned it in my books and in classes so I decided it was about time to devote a blog post to the subject. The most savvy, smart people seem to throw all their critical thinking skills out the window when dealing with…
A couple years ago I wrote a blog called "Experiencing the OtherCrowd" which aimed to share some of my personal experiences with Themselves, the idea being that often people of a more Reconstructionist bent don’t talk much about those sorts of things. I had also wanted to show some of my own interactions to give people an idea of what modern fairy experiences could be like since much of the time…
Today is Bron Trogain, better known by most pagans as Lughnasadh (Lunasa) or Lammas. Its a multifacted holiday for me, with Irish aspects as well as Fairy aspects. But I like the layers and complexity and I like that it isn’t something simple, something easy to sum up in a quick ritual and move on from.
I always know when we are approaching this holiday, simply by watching the world around me…
By many accounts the beings of Fairy are divided into two courts, the Seelie and Unseelie. This is often simplified as the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fairies, or as F. Marian McNeill says the ‘gude wichts’* and the ‘wicked wichts’ and was initially a Lowland Scottish belief that later spread (McNeill, 1956). I think we lose the nuances between the two when we try to reduce them into such blunt terms as…