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…
I want to start off by acknowledging that we all see the Gods differently and I know that sometimes a person can relate to a deity in a way that is unusual (comparatively) or unique to them; maybe this is how they need to see that deity for personal reasons. What I want to address here is something that I’ve seen more and more often among people discussing the Morrigan, and that is the idea that…
Having looked at the common (but not ubiquitous) prohibition of the fairies against humans saying thank you to them, now let’s turn to another even more prevalent fairy taboo, that of secrecy. The idea with this one is that the Good People do not like to find out they have been seen, unless they are choosing to show themselves, and they prefer people not to talk too freely about benefits they…
I’ve talked before about the way that spirituality can sometimes end up affecting the way we live our lives in a blog called ‘Reshaped Living’ and I think it’s important to understand the way that personal gnosis can directly influence us. Another way that spirituality can influence our lives is with the taking on of spiritual prohibitions or directives, which may be related to our spirituality…
Most of us are familiar with the idea of classical witches selling their souls to the Devil, but there is another concept we see as well in folkloric sources: a person selling their soul to the fairies. The implication in the wider narrative is that the soul is being pledged to the Queen of Fairy but it is rarely spelled out as such. This is usually done as a combination of a required…