In the Earth
(Out of respect to the author, no mangling snippet of the poem will be posted. Please click the link below to see the full work.)
Gather.
To the woods, for nightshade, coneflower, cornflower, pears, apples, vervain, mullein and old clay mud from under the rotting pines. The flowers bust form every corner of the meadow, a blue ocean in between islands of ancient broom bushes, and I bless every herb at the altar of the ancestors, witches and old gods.
Gods With Us
An interesting topic that crops up in Celtic pagan discussion groups from time to time is whether the Irish (or more generally Celtic) Gods and spirits travel with the people who acknowledge them, or whether they are stationary, tied as it were to specific locations. People who argue for the latter view point to the way that Irish Gods were strongly associated with specific locations and the way that they were said in some cases to be embodied by the land, such as the hills called the Paps of Anu. How, this argument says, if the Gods are so strongly connected to those places can they also be elsewhere? Now my own view takes the former side and I decided to use today’s blog to explain my viewpoint.
Brón Trogain 2014
This year we are celebrating Lughnasa by it’s older name of Brón Trogain. For my family it begins today, July 31st as we go out and start picking berries. Berry picking for several years has been the main activity of our holiday, the way we officially begin celebrating.
Luck.
Celebrating Lughnasa, Together or Alone
It is clear from my last blog that for a modern practitioner there is an abundance of material to work with in finding ways to celebrate Lughnasa. I’m going to offer several suggestions for practice that could be used for anyone with a Irish leaning, or who would like to celebrate this holy day in a Irish manner, but I leave the actual ritual up to the individual or group to design. Personally I follow a basic structure of blessing the space, invoking the ancestors, daoine sidhe, and Gods and offering to them, praying or saying something about the purpose of the ritual, making a main offering for the holiday, divination, thanking the Powers, and feasting. My own approach is Irish Reconstructionist in nature and that doubtless colors my view, but I would like to offer this to anyone of any faith who celebrates Lughnasa.
Books to share with the Kids
In the previous blog post, I mentioned I had been working on a few projects, thus causing the blog to sit without any recent update. I’d like to share those projects with you because they could be beneficial to other Celtic Recon, Druid Recon, or Irish Recon Pagan parents.
ReVamping The Blog
When I first had the brain child for this little blog, I envisioned it being constantly contributed to with blogs from other Reconstructionist Pagan parents of all different traditions who wanted to share their insight with other parents who could relate and put that information to use. As you can see, due to other projects I have been involved with and a lack of time or interest from other Recon parents, the blog has sat dormant for a very long time. I have decided to change that.
Lughnasa – Festival of the Harvest
Lughnasa is also called Lughnasadh, Lunasa, Brón Trogain, Lunsadal, Laa Luanys, Calan Awst, and Gouel an Eost, and Alexei Kondratiev conjectures that the Celts of Gaul may have called this celebration Aedrinia (Kondratiev, 1998). The many names of the holiday show it’s pan-Celtic character, and demonstrate that it could be found across the Celtic world. Several of the names for the holiday are references to the beginning of autumn or of the harvest.
a prison of my own making
I find myself in a quandary today. I woke up in prison. It’s not at if I haven’t always been here, but the reality has finally hit me. I’m in a self created, well maintained prison. And other than a quick exit, I have no idea what to do to open the gates. This […]