This is my fourth installment of translating often untranslated material from the Cath Maige Tuired and I’d like to start with a little more background on the CMT itself. I recently read the transcript of an utterly fascinating lecture by John Carey called “A London Library, An Irish Manuscript, A British Myth? The Wanderings of ‘The Battle of Moytirra'” in which Carey traces the history of the only extant manuscript containing this vital Irish myth. One of the most important points in Carey’s lecture for the purposes of my translation project is that the manuscript for the CMT is believed by scholars to have been written by a younger scribe and one who was fond of intentionally obscuring his writing with:
Category Archives: By Land Sea and Sky
Lives Matter
There has been a trend in American society that is sending a message – a disturbing message – that some lives are more valuable than others. That some people matter more. I could point to specific cases but really there are so many examples its hard to choose which ones to include and which ones to ignore. And I don’t want this to become a debate about the details, the minutia, of one example. Because I’m not talking about just one thing here. I’m talking about all of it.
Offerings and "Elves"
Last month I taught several classes about the Daoine Maith (Good People) at the Changing Times, Changing Worlds conference and one of the most common questions I was asked was about offerings. I thought it might be helpful here to blog a bit about the most common traditional offerings and the way they have been historically understood. Probably the most common offering is …
Book Giveaway – Pagan Portals the Morrigan
Happy thanksgiving everyone. I’m doing a book giveaway for a signed copy of my new book Pagan Portals: the Morrigan when it’s released next month. If you are interested you can enter here:
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Pagan Portals the Morrigan
by Morgan Daimler
Giveaway ends December 10, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.
more NaNo
I am once again doing National Novel Writing Month this year and attempting to write the third novel in my trilogy. I may have been a smidge ambitious this time since I only just finished the second one and am, in all honesty, a bit burned out. However I’m soldiering on to get the first draft done. In the 25 days of NaNo I’ve written a bit over 54,000 words towards what I expect to be between 100 – 120,000 when its done. So I’m about halfway there. It’s been taking a lot of my attention though and as with last November the blog is suffering a bit.
more translation
I’m a bit busy but I don’t want to not blog at all, so here’s a tidbit of translation, Irish courtesy of Hennessey’s The Ancient Irish Goddess of War, translation my own.
"She Rises" A Poem to the Morrigan
[Out of respect to the author, no excerpt or mangling of her poem will be posted here. Please click through to her site to read the entire post as intended.]
Translating the Untranslated 3 – Inciting Kings
My third attempt at translating a normally untranslated portion of the Cath Maige Tuired: this excerpt occurs during the battle itself when the Morrigan appears to incite the Tuatha De Danann to win the battle. The Irish text is from Gray’s 1983 version from the Irish Texts Society. The English translation is my own, with the usual caveat that I am not fluent but am offering my best understanding of the material. Usually it ends after “Kings, arise to battle….”
tolerance and acceptance
Last weekend I attended the Changing Times, Changing Worlds conference, an annual regional conference on metaphysics in the northeast United States. I’ve done workshops at the conference 4 out of the 5 years its run and I really enjoy attending. This year was no exception, with many good workshops and panels as well as excellent conversations with both attendees and other presenters.
One of the most interesting panels I saw was “When is it okay to tell someone they are wrong?”.
excerpt from my article The Witch, the Bean Feasa, and the Fairy Doctor in Irish Culture’
The following is an excerpt from my article ‘The Witch, the Bean Feasa, and the Fairy Doctor in Irish Culture’ published in the Lughnasa/Samhain issue of Air n-Aithesc, a peer-reviewed CR journal available here: http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/779616?__r=486121
What is particularly worth noting though is the connection between Irish and Scottish witches and fairies, something that is shared with bean feasa and fairy doctors, as all three Irish folk magic practitioners are believed to gain their occult knowledge and some of their power from the Fair Folk. While the latter two use the knowledge they gain from the Other Crowd to heal or cure magical afflictions, the witch uses her fairy-given knowledge to harm. The witch knows how to use elfshot, and does so in ways that – according to the Scottish witch trial records anyway, which we must look to given the scarcity of Irish witch trials – seem to have been an attempt to use supernatural power where social power was lacking. What we find often in the Scottish trial records is socially marginalized women using fairy knowledge to curse or harm people in higher social classes or in positions of power (Hall, 2005). Often in these trial records we see witches confessing to making deals with or consorting with fairies, going to fairies for knowledge, and going to them to obtain elfshot (Hall, 2005). In the Irish we see witches, like fairies, taking the form of hares in order to steal milk from the cows and this may indicate another connection between the two (O hOgain, 1995). So similar was Irish witchcraft and fairy enchantment that one of the reasons to call in a fairy doctor was to ascertain which of the two was the source of ill luck or other magical problems so that the proper cure could be administered.
The terms bean feasa and fairy doctor are often used interchangeably and indeed there is at best a fine difference between the two. It is highly likely that the two terms, one in Irish one in English, originally were applied to a singular type of practitioner; however in the modern source material we do see a nuanced difference between how the two terms are used. The bean feasa is often called to find lost objects and discern through divination the cause and cure of ailments, from illness to butter failing to churn, whether the cause is mundane or magical (O Crualaoich, 2005). The fairy doctor, on the other hand, is called when fairy involvement is known or suspected, especially relating to afflictions caused by them, or when witchcraft is suspected, in order to discern the best cure (Wilde, 1991). The ban feasa was said to never teach her magic to others or preform her charms in front of people, while the fairy doctor could teach others, particularly passing her knowledge on to her child (Wilde, 1991; Locke, 2013). One might argue that the bean feasa is more of a general practitioner while the fairy doctor is a specialist, but both derive knowledge and power from their relationship with the Other Crowd.
Read more here