Celtic Women's Spirituality: Accessing the Cauldron of Life - Edain McCoy 1998
Magick and Witchcraft
Belief in magick is one of the defining tenets of Pagan faiths, the Celtic ones included. By “magick,” we mean that we recognize in ourselves the ability to alter our reality as we will. The methods and catalysts used to make these changes—or spellcrafting, as it is often called—are many, and each one is a particular favorite of someone. But no matter which outside sources are tapped—oils, herbs, stones, or other materials—the true magick remains within. Only by our will, visualization, and effort do we find our success.152
The power of magick was recognized but denied by the early church which thoroughly condemned it and those who practice it. On the one hand, they claimed there was no magick; on the other, they were swift to punish those caught doing it. If there was no power in magick, the grand effort to eradicate it would make no sense. To overcome this problem, the church decreed that no human could possess magickal powers, only supernatural beings. Therefore only God or his anti-self, Satan, could work magick or grant the power to do so to others.153 And since God was unlikely to do this—with the exception of a few church-approved miracles here and there—then those who made magick must be in league with Satan and should be destroyed for the good of the entire community.
The name applied to these magickians who worked outside the bounds of church approval was Witch. Even today the words “Witch” and “Witchcraft” are what we might call “loaded terms,” even among many Pagans. Tossing them out into a conversation is sure to create havoc, no matter what the venue. The route by which “Witch” came into the English language has been argued ad nauseum, but it is likely that it came from one of two sources, or a blending of both. One source is the Old English word wyk, meaning “to bend or shape,” a term that speaks clearly of a Witch’s magickal abilities to create change. It is also where the word Wicca comes from. Originally the religion known as Wicca was an Anglo-Welsh version of Paganism, codified in the early part of the twentieth century, but the term is now liberally applied to a variety of Pagan traditions with roots in western Europe. The other source of “Witch” is the Anglo-Saxon wit, meaning “to have knowledge or wisdom,” which is where the country term for Witch, “wise woman,” came from.
Today a Witch is a follower of one of the old Pagan religions of western Europe, and Witchcraft is both her religion and her art.154 Many Pagans are not Witches, and it is a label they do not like for a variety of reasons. When it comes to Celtic Paganism there seems to be a fairly even split in this preference. Many women who have found their way back to religions where the Goddess is supreme have reclaimed the word Witch as a title of honor, using it, along with hag, harridan, virago, and others, to make statements about ourselves and our beliefs that are truly positive, even though the rest of the world conceptualizes them in a negative way.
The diabolization of the word Witch came during the Middle Ages, when the church sought to tighten its grip on the lives of Europeans by formally condemning anyone who practiced any art that could be construed as Pagan. Considering that vestiges of the old faiths are still with us today, and that many modern church and synagogue celebrations were forced to adopt elements of Pagan practice to make them acceptable to the masses, this must have been a daunting task for the churchmen. Among the offenses that were considered evidence of Witchcraft were any form of natural healing, taking walks in the woods, harvesting non-culinary herbs, and celebrating any part of the old cherished festivals.
The traditional healers at this time were the women who used herbs and plants to make their curatives. Healing became a crime under church law, a deliberate attempt to thwart the will of God. Using a mistranslation of an old Hebrew word, the churchman labeled these women Witches and, using a host of fabricated or ridiculous bodies of “evidence,” condemned them to die. The Biblical authority they cited for this right to break the “thou shalt not kill” commandment was a passage in Exodus that said, “Thou shalt not suffer a Witch to live.”
It is popular knowledge among Pagans today that this is a mistranslation. The original word in the old Hebrew texts was m’ra ay lah, soning was a dreadful crime in the centuries before forensic medicine could ferret out even the faintest traces of toxins in the body, and history is littered with the names of famous people thought to have been poisoning victims, but whose murders cannot be proven. It has been assumed that this mistranslation was done during the reign of England’s King James I (1603—1625), simply because he had many other subtle alterations performed on his Bible (the ever popular King James Version) to make points he wished to make, or to authorize aggression against vestiges of the old religion.
As I was writing this chapter I asked my husband, Mark, to look up this passage in a Hebrew Bible and tell me what word he found there. I was so sure he would find m’ra ay lah. He came back from his search with a puzzled frown and told me the word he found was m’khashayfah, one that means sorceress, but is often translated as Witch.
By then I was upset. I had always trusted in the original Hebrew and in what I had been told my whole life—that the original Hebrew word was “poisoner.” What could have happened? At first I simply assumed that the acceptance of this translation was so widespread that it had somehow found its way into the Hebrew texts, but that just didn’t correlate with the care I know had been taken by Hebrew scholars in translating and commenting on their Bible. I managed to find a few commentaries, mostly in very recent sources, that alluded to the fact that this passage had undergone some alterations over time, but still could find no source that would make a definitive statement.
Finally Mark sat down with a piece of paper and began doing some enlight ening manipulations with the Hebrew alphabet. This manipulation is an old Kaballistic art known as gematria, usually a practice linked to numerology, but many variations on the manipulation exist. Mark did graduate work at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and is an amateur Kaballist, who remembers being in a class where he had learned how some of the old Jewish laws were derived through gematria. One he specifically recalled was how the early Jewish leaders had disliked the bloody sort of justice they found in the “eye for an eye” passage, so they took the Hebrew word for eye and scrolled down one leter in the alphabet and found the word for money. This was how the idea of monetary compensation for injuries began. When Mark used a similar gematric maneuver on m’ra-ay-lah he got—surprise!—m’khashayfah.155 We can only surmise that, caught up in the same frenzy to diabolize the old ways as the church, some Jewish scribe once felt free to manipulate m’ra-ay-lah into a sorceress and then into a Witch.156
There is no more evil in Witchcraft than there is in any other religion. Its followers are just people, vulnerable to human failing. Like all other religions, Paganism/Witchcraft is based on a set of ethics, one that teaches us that we may do as we like so long as we harm no living person or thing.157 We can only do our best to live up to that tenet, and I think more Pagans/Witches make a conscious effort to do so than the followers of many other faiths who are offered weekly absolution for their transgressions. Pagans/Witches know that they must assume responsibility for their own failings, and that no absolution (short of having their harm come back to them threefold) is possible.158
Most people today, Pagan or not, are well aware of the flimsy evidence once used to convict Witches. In almost all cases, merely an accusation was the same as a conviction. Very few escaped the charges with their lives. In the Middle Ages, when true justice was a rarer commodity than it is today, the Witch trials were deliberately created so that it was impossible to get an acquittal. As in much of Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Witch hunts and trials were a common occurrence in the old Celtic lands. These communal purges served four major purposes. First, they asserted the authority of the church over the people. Second, the fear they engendered helped keep people living and acting in church-approved ways. Third, they increased the wealth of the church since, in most cases, the property of one convicted of Witchcraft reverted to the church. Finally, they allowed a community to eliminate drains on its charity, particularly elderly women, or the independent woman who was perceived as a threat to family structures. It was these women who became the primary targets of the hunts.159
A Legacy of Celtic Witches
Most of the well-known Celtic Witches of both history and legend were healers in the old country tradition. They were the wise women, the midwives, and the herbalists to whom their neighbors turned for medical assistance and, occasionally, for a love spell or protection charm. An amazing number of these women had links to the faery realms.
In Celtic terms the word faery carries the burden of multiple levels of meaning. On the one hand, the faeries are the nature spirits of the land; on the other, they are the vestiges of the old Gods and Goddesses who, according to legend, went underground to live when they could no longer dwell side by side with the humans. For the modern Celt, the world of faery is both the Otherworld and the underworld, the natural world and the inner world. These apparent dichotomies create a rich, though often confusing, backdrop for magickal exploration.160
One of the famous Celtic Witches of legend is Scotland’s Meg the Healer, who was so adept at her craft that it is said the faery folk came to her when faced with illnesses they were unable to cure. If we perceive the world of faery as being an unseen part of the natural world, Meg was one of the very few humans allowed to walk freely into the realm of faery and back again. If we choose to think of this world as an Otherworld inhabited by other spirits, then Meg became a shaman, able to travel between worlds and bring back the knowledge of one realm to aid those dwelling in the other.
Scottish folklore tells us that Meg would occasionally come across humans held captive in faeryland, and would ask a local wizard to help her release them. Again, the concept is a cloudy one. Were these trapped souls merely metaphors for those caught in an altered state of mind from which they could not escape, or were they spirits of the dead who were unable to reincarnate? A case for both Celtic concepts of faery can be successfully made here. The crafters of this bit of folklore may have meant for us to view this faery world as an Otherworld of the dead and deities because it says that when Meg died, she went there to stay permanently.
Another Scottish Witch was Stine Bheag O’Tarbat, an old woman from Tarbat Ness who was believed to possess the secrets of weather magick. Control of the weather is both a power given to many faeries and to the crone as well. In some of her legends she is referred to as “Mother Tarbat,” indicating that she may have once been a mother Goddess or priestess of some sort.
In lnnishark, Ireland, midwife named Biddy Mamionn had a gift for healing. It was said that the faeries took her into their world to heal a sick child. After that, the faeries and Biddy were believed to be on good terms, and exchanged much healing lore.
This idea that Witches were on good terms with the faeries was a strong aspect of Celtic Witch lore, and in Celtic countries, seeing a woman approach a faery rath or burgh 161 was admissible evidence against her in court. Old Celtic legends say that the faeries shared their healing knowledge with those who honorably interacted with them,162 a thread that runs through almost all the legends concerning famous Celtic Witches.
Probably the most famous of all Celtic Witches is Biddy Early, a woman who lived in the mid nineteenth been the subject of several books by those seeking to separate fact from fiction. Biddy was allowed to practice her craft with little harassment from au thorities, though several entertaining stories exist about how she routed angry priests. The antiWitchcraft laws of Ireland, drafted in 1586, were still on the books and quite enforceable at the time Biddy lived,163 yet no one ever made a move to arrest her. Her neighbors appear to have looked upon her with a combination of fear and pride, and both highborn and low beat a path to her doorway seeking cures and spells.
Biddy’s claim to fame was a blue glass bottle that was supposedly a gift from the faeries, though just why they gifted her in this way is open for debate. To find a cure or spell, or to divine the future, she needed only to peer into the depths of the bottle and report to the seeker what she had seen.164 This method of scrying for magickal answers found its way into Irish folk practice. If a woman wants to find a missing person or object, she will make a cylinder with her hands and peer into it for answers. Clare legends say that before Biddy died, she tossed her famous bottle into a nearby lake, where it still rests.
Another interesting account of an Irish Witch, one that shows that the accused may have actually had some working knowledge of the old Religion, or at least of folk magick, is that of Dame Alice Kyteler. Alice was a four-time widow who lived in fourteenth century Kilkenny. Very Late one night, a neighbor man saw her outside her home, sweeping the dust from the street into her home. As she swept she chanted a rhyming couplet, something to the effect that all the wealth of the town would come to the home of her son William.165 The use of the broom, or besom, for magick is well known, and is a popular device today. The image of sweeping toward her home while chant ing a spell for wealth is a very accurate folk magickal practice.
The neighbor reported the incident, and then the local bishop took up the case. Before it was over, Alice’s children had all accused her of using sorcery to kill their fathers,166 and the various eyewitnesses claimed to have seen her cavorting with demons, divining with entrails, and making living sacrifices.167
Alice was able to escape to England, and the wrath of Kilkenny fell upon her maid, Patronilla, who died in her stead.
During this period, the folklore surrounding Witches became increasingly vicious, always allying the Witch with Satan, an entity who is wholly a construct of Christian theology and not accepted by Paganism. The physical image of the Witch grew ugly as well, the result being the modern crone like loween Witch who eats children and brews noxious potions in what was once the great cauldron of life and wisdom.
Hallmarks of Celtic Magick and Witchcraft
Celtic-style magick has several distinguishing aspects. You might want tothink of it as folk magick and spell casting with a brogue. These aspects are:
✵ The use of the sacred number three
✵ Using the power of places “in between”
✵ Power raising through traditional dance and music
✵ The use of magickal positions, gestures, or actions
✵ The unbinding of hair (for women) when casting a spell
✵ Traveling to and from the Otherworld
The last aspect, traveling to and from the Otherworld, is more a practice of Celtic shamanism than it is of any single Celtic Pagan tradition, and it will be discussed in detail in Chapter 17.
The number three as a special and sacred number to the Celts has already been discussed. It appears frequently in Celtic spells, either in the number of times a chant or gesture is repeated, in the number of catalysts used, or in the number of deities called upon. In many “modern” folk spells, especially from Catholic Brittany and Ireland, the old evocation of the Triple Goddess to seal a spell has been replaced by the summoning of the Christian trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. This Celtic reliance on the number three is also re sponsible for the popular saying, “Three’s the charm,” meaning it takes three workings of a spell to make it “take.”
The power found in “in between” places or times is another hallmark of Celtic magick, and is reflected in the casting of our circle, which puts us in a place that is neither fully in this world nor fully in another. It is also seen in the popular term for midnight, “The Witching Hour,” a moment in neither day, yet in both. In between dawn, sunset and year’s end, seashores and cave mouths, burial grounds and tree tops. All are fluid places, whose exact locations in time and space are indefin able, and contain mutable energies that we can tap into for magickal purposes. Music was also a form of magick itself, used by poets to level curses, create satires, or sing praises. All of these things produced magickal consequences in the lives of the ones to whom the music was directed. An example was when the bard Cairbre MacEtan sought to remove Bres from the High Kingship of Ireland, and did so by creating a satire so biting that it caused the king to become blemished and, under old Irish law, unable to remain king. Another king blemished through music was Connacht’s King Caier, who was deposed musically by his chief bard, Nede MacAdnai, when he was unable to keep a promise.
When we make magick we attempt to manipulate and shape the energies surrounding us. We do not want to expend a great deal of our own precious energy. These in-between times and places are great sources of magickal energies because they are on borders where worlds collide and we have access to the universal flow of power that we often see as ultimately coming from the Otherworld.
We can also raise energies to use for magick, and a favorite way of doing this for magical peoples the world over is through drumming, dance, and music. Celtic music is regaining popularity today, and the traditional goatskin drum, known in Irish as the bodhran, is more readily available than ever. Recorded and printed Celtic music is also easy to find. If you cannot find examples in your local music store, see Appendix C for places from which instruments and music can be ordered.
If I were to tell you to “assume the position” in a magickal sense, I would not be asking you to bend over to receive corporal punishment, I would be asking you to make a gesture/posture associated with the transference of magickal energy. Such gestures/postures have been known in other cultures as well, particularly in eastern mystic schools, and they are also known in the Celtic traditions.
Magickal gestures for releasing positive energies include the famous salmon leap used in battle by Cuchulain, a technique perfected under his tutor, the Goddess Scathach, and the cross-legged sitting position seen in old Celtic renderings of poets168 and of the Horned God on the Gundestrap Cauldron.169
This latter position would be an acceptable posture to use for teaching, blessing, or sending out other positive energies to someone who is with you at the time, such as a student.
There is also a Celtic tradition of women unbinding their hair in ritual or when sending out magickal energy. This image is seen in the original texts of several myths and legends, and it is an accepted part of Celtic women’s oral traditions. I have been personally acquainted with covens, some Celtic and some not, that ask their female members to wear their hair loose when coming into the circle.
One of the more curious magickal postures is that of closing one eye, and placing one arm and leg behind you so that it is unusable. This is a posture that has been associated with the leveling of curses, or the transference of negative energy. Experienced Pagans know that negative energy can have positive consequences if that which you seek to destroy is negative, such as a bad habit or illness. But in this case, the uses for which we have extant mythic reference do not seem to have this end, or else the end result is neither clearly positive nor negative, such as when the Formorians fought the Partholans in early Ireland, or when a woman who was refused hospitality cursed the Da Derga’s household.170 A disagreeable Scottish faery, called the Fachan or Peg Leg Jack, has one eye, one arm, one ear, and one leg, aligned straight down his body, and may be a vestige of the old magickal cursing posture.
One Pagan I knew hypothesized that this posture was meant to emulate a tree, to stretch the self from underworld to upperworld and everywhere in between to act as a channel for magickal energy. This theory is a good one, especially since it has a history of similar use in ceremonial magick for a protection ritual known as the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. But the telling aspect of this posture really comes through when the sun God Lugh uses it in his battle against his grandfather Balor. The original myths tell us that when he assumed this posture he resembled a bent, old woman. Ah ha! Crone power! It doesn’t take too much reading between those proverbial lines to see that the power of the crone is being emulated here.
A Sampler of Celtic Style Spells
The following spells all employ some distinguishing aspect of Celtic magick. I make no claim for their antiquity. Like most spells found in print today, they are modern in origin, but contain ancient concepts and imagery and work very well.
Making a Biddy Bottle
I made a scrying bottle in the style of Biddy Early’s, and though crystal scrying has never been one of my strengths, I find it works very well. To repeat my efforts you will need a small blue glass bottle, preferably with some type of stopper-style cap (like a cork). These are fairly easy to find in gift shops, or shops that sell country decorations or antique reproductions. Mine is small, only six inches high, and cost about $2.50. You will also need a “faery oil,” a scent that is traditionally one that the faeries like. I recommend trying lilac, primrose, tuberose (a costly one!), or cedar. If you have already had experience with the faery world you may have your own ideas about this and should use them. Blends that combine faery-related elements in oils are also nice.
Take the blue bottle and psychically cleanse it by holding it under clear, running water, all the while visualizing all the previous programming that might have come into contact with it being washed away. Spend at least three nights with the bottle, holding it, stroking it, allowing your own energies to merge with it as much as possible. Many feminine mystery schools advocate mixing a few drops of your menstrual blood into any anointing mixture, if it is possible and practical. This symbol of power is linked both to you and to the Goddess and, done with the proper attitude and visualization (i.e., not seeing it as “yucky”), it can be a great spell booster for you.
On the fourth night, begin visualizing the new programming of the bottle-that of it being a scrying tool for you. At this point you should ask the blessing of the faery world on your endeavor, regardless of how you visualize these beings. Anoint the bottle with the faery oil, stroking from the outer edges in to symbolize your bringing power into the bottle.
Wrap your bottle in a white cloth and bury your bottle on a hill, set it in a garden, or put it in any other place that you feel faeries would enjoy, for three nights. The white cloth will prevent the bottle’s new energies from being grounded and lost while it connects with the world of faery. It is also customary, and courteous, to leave the faeries a gift of food. Milk, honey, and bread are favorites.
After you retrieve the bottle, discard the cloth and unstop the top. Think of a question or issue you have, and peer into its depths for the answer.
The Wishing Stone
Stones have played a large role in the spiritual life of the Celts. The pre-Celtic standing stones, the dolmens, and the Lia Fail (see Chapter 12) are all examples of this. Stones have also been used in wishing magick, which is essentially how the Blarney Stone is used today.
Another interesting wishing stone, known as the Deer Stone, can still be found at the Christian pilgrimage site of Glendalough in Ireland. Though this site is sacred to the new religion’s St. Kevin, its Pagan and Goddess origins are clear. To activate the power of the stone (related to the feminine earth element), you sit on it facing west (the direction of the Celtic Otherworld) and lean backward until your hands touch the water (the other feminine element) behind you.171 Thus you are facing the home of the Goddess, while connecting yourself simultaneously to her two manifest elements. If you can manage this feat you may make three wishes.
To make a wishing stone of your own, take a long walk in a wild place and find one that speaks to you. Take it home and place it in a glass jar with earth and water. Leave it there for three days. Every day spend some time projecting your desire or wish into the jar, toward the stone. After three days, release the stone backwards into the wild so that it can carry your wish to the Otherworld.
Song Spells
Songs play a huge role in Celtic magick. They have been used so frequently to preserve history and to pass along teachings that the Irish word for teach actually means “to sing over.” They have also been used to satirize someone in power to the point of abdication, as was mentioned earlier in this chapter. Today, as in the past, we have leaders whose blemishes need to come to light. We’ve all had a boss, club president, committee chairperson, or local politician whom we sometimes realize is a problem. If you have such a person in your life, composing a song in satire will expose his or her weaknesses, and then the natural law of “what goes around comes around” can take its course.
Making a Protection Charm
The Celts were big on offering blessings, a custom that has persisted into the modern era in rural Scotland and Ireland. Several collections of popular blessings are in print now, many of them copyright-free because they are of unknown origin and age.172 In modern Celtic Pagan traditions these are often used in conjunction with talismans to increase their efficacy.
To make a protective charm for yourself, take three leaves from trees that speak to you of having protective energies. Oak and other hardwoods or trees with prickly spikes are always good choices. Wrap these up in a cloth of gold or white (colors of protection) and tie them with a red thread (a color of warning and defense). Bless the charm in the name of the Triple Goddess, employing a traditional Celtic blessing or one you have adapted from another source.
To make the charm more Celtic, and to further imbue it with your personal energies, you may want to write or embroider a traditional Celtic or Celtic-style blessing on the cloth before wrapping it around the leaves.
Irish Folk Healing
The Irish shared a belief with many ancient people that the creator put no illness on the earth for which there was not also a cure. It was the job of healers to find these cures and pass them along for the good of the people they served.
The Irish have a plethora of Goddesses related to healing. The most well known is Airmid, daughter of the Tuatha De Dannan’s God of medicine, Diancecht. She and her brother, Miach, crafted the silver hand of the Tuatha king Nuada of the Silver Arm so that this blemish would not keep him from ruling. After this, Diancecht killed Miach in a fit of jealousy. Airmid tended her brother’s grave by harvesting on it all the world’s herbs. There she “spoke” with the herbs to catalog their healing properties, and they told her the cures for all the earth’s illnesses. One by one, she placed them on her spread cloak, in an order that would cause her to remember their properties. When jealous Diancecht saw this display, he shook out the cloak and scattered away the healing knowledge. Legends tell us that there was no illness for which Airmid had not found a cure, and that those cures for all our ills are still out there somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered.
Goddesses who are linked with the imagery of regenerative symbols of snakes or eggs are also good candidates for healing Goddesses, as well as being fertility deities.173 The two functions are closely linked. What was the replace ment of Nuada’s arm but a healing that involved regeneration? One such Goddess who embodies all these images is Sirona, an earth Goddess often de picted with snakes and eggs.174
Before attempting any self healing a physician. With some effort you can find a good one who practices a holistic form of medicine and is sympathetic to including natural remedies in her pre scriptions. Make sure both you and your doctor are aware of how any sub stance(s) will react (interact) with your body chemistry or other medicines you are taking. Unfortunately, most members of the modern medical estab lishment are something like Diancecht, outwardly scorning the use of the old natural medicines while instinctively recognizing their worth. Until they can find a way to patent these natural remedies and make a vulgarly large profit from their use, don’t count on them being found on pharmacy shelves any time soon.175
Many popular Irish healing charms show links to the old religions with their emphasis on the number three, the evocation of a triple deity—though usually now the Christian trinity rather than the Triple Goddess—and elements of animals and the earth. Following are some of the more interesting, or, if you prefer, more entertaining of these healing charms, which were in ac tive use until at least the early twentieth century.
✵ Toothaches can be cured by crawling to a holy well on your knees while praying to the Goddess. Once at the well, immerse your face three times, then leave a small white stone at the well before you leave.
✵ To help heal a broken bone, take a black thread and wrap it fully around the break three times. Sprinkle the tie with holy water—one Pagan version of this is lightly salted blessed water—in the name of the trinity of your choice. Do this every morning upon waking for three days, then discard the thread.
✵ To break a fever, write the name of a deity on a piece of paper nine times and feed it to a wild animal who will carry it away.
✵ Cramps of all sorts can be cured by taking three hairs from the tail of a black cat and three from the tail of a white horse, and weaving them into your belt. Wear this until the pain subsides, or wear it overnight to prevent midnight leg cramping.
✵ Remove warts, moles, blemishes, and other skin abrasions by rubbing them with mud made from the earth under which an unburied coffin has lain.
✵ Any pain can be removed by rubbing it with a turnip that has been cut in half. Chanting a prayer to the Goddess may be done in tandem with this. When the pain is in the turnip, pin the two halves back together and bury it. Make a large ’X’ over the spot where it is buried and the pain should be buried with it.
✵ To cure a stomachache, take some scrapings from the horn of a black cow, and some from a white cow, and put these into a tea.
✵ Passing your body nine times through a large hole in a stone is supposed to cure a large number of ailments, including infertility.
Augury and Divination
Divination is the art of reading either the future or the unknown past with cards, crystals, stones, sticks/wands, or other objects. Augury is the art of using nature’s signs—birds’ flight, cloud formations, tree limb movements, and so on—to do the same. More precisely, augury was a method of deciding a specific course of action that would be revealed through these signs, and was an art at which women were believed. to excel.176 Augury was popular among the early Celts, who had a priestly class of men and women who eventually mastered these arts. Divination is probably the more popular of the two today among Pagans, thanks to the easy accessibility of tarot cards and rune stones.
Celtic priestesses were thought to possess prophetic gifts, which made augury come naturally to them,177 and several myths show us women who gave word of impending battles or death, such as the women/faeries who foretold for Queen Maeve her victory over Ulster and her own demise.
Anything in nature can be taken as a sign that foretells the future, speaks of the past, points us in the right direction, or underscores a current concern. There are no set ground rules for any of these signs, which is what makes au, gury a personal art that can only be mastered with time and careful cataloging of results. While many symbols can be called archetypes, universal patterns that have similar meanings for all people, a great many others can only be accurately interpreted by the person seeing them.
To begin your study of augury, select a part of nature you wish to study more closely. Some suggestions are:
Cloud formations
Birds in flight
Tree movements in the wind
The behavior of burrowing animals
Animal tracks in the wild
The growth pattern of your own garden
The nighttime sounds of animals
Get a spiralbound notebook and, each time you go out to gaze at your chosen natural phenomenon, make notes about what you see and how you think this ought to be interpreted. Sometimes these associations will be readily apparent, but at other times they will take closer examination.
For example, reading cloud formations, an art known as nephomancy, is as popular today as it was in the past. People simply enjoy having time to lie about gazing at the clouds and looking for symbols within them. The movements, coloring, and changes in the clouds can also have meanings. I find that the sudden silvering of a dark cloud is a sure sign of impending victory or sue, cess, while rising clouds mean that the situation I am concerned about has moved out of my hands.
Lots of Celtic lore surrounds animals. Their movements, noises, and appearance can be taken as omens about the future. Howling dogs at night have always been seen as harbingers of death or illness, and owls, once sacred as birds of the crone Goddess, are viewed today as omens of bad luck. Carefully making records of your own observations will show you how these sounds and movements are to be interpreted by you.
Whichever nature sign(s) you choose for your own venture into augury, you will notice that over time, and with consistent effort, you will have written in your book the causes and effects noted after each observation and will be able to compile a detailed listing of what each symbol, movement, formation, or other occurrence means. If you need a jump start through a book on symbolic dream interpretation, but please don’t rely on this for the long term. These books are just too general to do you much good.
In terms of general divination, or of using non-naturally occurring formations to foretell the future, one of the most controversial among the Celts is that of using entrails or blood ritually taken from an animal. The most likely uses of these types of divination were to predict the outcome of battles, or to help judge the guilt or innocence of someone. That the Druids practiced some forms of divination using living sacrifices is pretty much a given; that we modern Pagans do not want to use living sacrifices is another. We can use the form of these old divination practices without actually harming living things by making creative alterations—that’s what we women are best at!
For blood we can substitute water. The water can be dyed red with food coloring or wine if you desire so that it has the appearance of blood. This divination works best when attempting to reveal the identity of an unknown per son who has done some known harm to someone you care about. While it can help you discover the identity of an offender, it should not replace the criminal justice system. If you have been the victim of a criminal act, consult a lawyer or call the police. Never attempt to right these matters on your own or you will only make the situation worse. Magick can certainly help assist you in gaining justice through the proper channels, but it is not a cure-all.
For this divination you will need to be outdoors, in a dry area where you will be able to see your water markings. Dry soil or sandy areas are both good, but don’t discount using the ugly and toxic blacktop of your driveway. While the surface isn’t very magickal, it makes a good background for reading water spots. You will also need a shallow bowl a little larger than the palm of your hand, and some sidewalk chalk or water soluble paint.
When you have chosen your working surface, draw on it a circle about three feet in diameter. In the center draw a smaller circle about four inches in diameter. The smaller circle represents the person whose guilt or innocence you are trying to determine, and the larger circle represents the complete situation, both the known and unknown elements. Further divide the circle into quarters to represent the divisions of truths, lies, the self, and others. Finally, around the outer perimeter make several more four-inch circles to represent others who may be guilty and are unknown. Feel free to name one or two of these if other suspects are known to you.
Sit in front of this circle with the bowl of water held in front of you, resting in the palm of one hand. Hold the other hand over the water and focus on the water being the catalyst for finding answers. When you feel you are properly focused on the issue, take your free hand and slam it down into the water, allowing it to splatter where it may. This is as close as you can get to mimicking the action of slicing the jugular vein.
When the spray settles, set the bowl to the side and examine the water droplets: where in the area they land, how many drops there are in each section, and how big the drops are. All these details help to form a picture of the truth. For example, if the majority of the water lands in or near the suspect’s circle, it may indicate guilt. However, if a large amount of water falls in the “truth” quarter, it could just as easily indicate innocence. When the drops land everywhere but on the suspect, it likely signifies innocence. However, if a copious amount of water is also sitting in the “self” quarter, it may suggest complicity or foreknowledge in the incident in question. Water concentrated principally inside the three-foot circle probably means that you are on the right track with your general suspicion. If most of the liquid lies outside the perimeter, then it is an excellent sign that none of those you suspect is at fault in the matter at hand.
152. There are many good books on the market that discuss magickal theory and physics in detail. Marion Weinstein’s Positive Magic (Custer, WA: Phoenix, 1981) is almost a modern classic. I also wrote a detailed book on natural magick called Making Magick (St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn, 1997). Many of the books by Scott Cunningham, Raymond Buckland, and Doreen Valiente are also good for beginners of magick.
153. Condren, Mary. The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion and Power in Celtic Ireland (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), 80—81.
154. A Witch may be either female or male. I use the feminine here, as I have tended to do throughout this book, because I am primarily addressing women.
155. The twenty-two-character Hebrew alphabet does not include vowels. Vowel markings that indicate what sounds the consonants are linked to are inserted above or below the characters in modem Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew does not use these markings at all, which accounts for the discrepancy in character count between these two transliterated words.
156. Modern Pagans usually draw a distinction between Witchcraft and sorcery. Witchcraft is a religion and a magickal art form that seeks to be positive in nature. Sorcery is not a religion, but a magickal practice that usually seeks to be negative in nature.
157. In modern Paganism this ethic is known as the Wiccan or Pagan Rede that states “As it harms none, do what you will.”
158. In modern Paganism this is known as the Threefold Law, a karmic principle that tells us that the energy we send out, both the positive and the negative, will return to us in meaningful ways.
159. For a more detailed discussion of the crone’s demise, see Barbara Walker’s The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom, and Power (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1985), Chapter 5, “The Crone Turns Witch,” 125—144.
160. Two books that present divergent viewpoints that occasionally overlap are Hugh Mynne’s The Faerie Way (St. Paul, Minn., Llewellyn, 1996) for the deity/faery concept, and my own A Witch’s Guide to Faery Folk (St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn, 1994) for the nature spirit/faery concept.
161. A rath is a stone formation, and a burgh is a hillock usually covered in grass or trees, under which faeries were believed to dwell.
162. Mynne, 41.
163. Unlike the English anti-Witchcraft laws that were repealed in the early 1950s, Ireland’s may still be on the books. No source seems to be able to give me a definite answer on this one, and I would greatly appreciate whatever information anyone has on this matter.
164. If you are interested in reading more about Biddy, I recommend Edward Lenihan’s In Search of Biddy Early (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1987).
165. Ashley, Leonard R.N. The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft (New York: Barricade Books, Inc., 1986), 84.
166. Seymour, St. John D. Irish Witchcraft and Demonologie (New York: Dorset Press, 1992), 28.
167. Ibid, 27—29.
168. Matthews, Caitlin. The Elements of the Celtic Tradition (Longmeade, Shaftsbury, Dorset: Element Books, 1989), 50.
169. A gold cauldron discovered in a Danish bog near the town of Gundestrap that is clearly Celtic in design and bears the image of a horned animal/nature deity.
170. Matthews, 50—51.
171. Rodgers, Michael and Marcus Losack. Glendalough: A Celtic Pilgrimage (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: The Columbia Press, 1996), 77.
172. The Carmina Gadelica, a collection of Christo-Celtic blessings collected by a musicologist and folklorist named Alexander Carmichael in the late nineteenth century, is a treasure trove of ancient blessings. Also look for various Irish blessing books to appear in bookstores around St. Patrick’s Day (March 17).
173. Green, Miranda J. Symbol arul Image in Celtic Religious Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1992), 43 and 61.
174. Ibid, 63.
175. I want to amend this statement by saying that a growing number of modem physicians are recognizing the importance of mental outlook to recovery. Many are employing techniques of positive visualization and total body relaxation, but most are a long way from actually prescribing so-called “new age” cures, such as herbal medicine, auric cleansing, or healing touch.
176. Jones, Noragh. Power of Raven, Wisdom of Serpent: Celtic Women’s Spirituality (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1994), 120.
177. Green, Miranda J. Celtic Goddesses: Warriors, Virgins arul Mothers (London: British Museum Press, 1995), 147.