Faery Healing Journey
For the Season of Beltaine

Here is an earth healing meditation that may be done for the Beltaine Season. Although the first of May has come and gone, (Hey! I was busy with my birthday! Okay?), the seasonal energy of summer has just begun, so this meditation is appropriate now and may be repeated weekly till the approach of Lughnasahd/Lammas.

Create a small altar and place a candle in the center, with matches nearby. This altar is your Faery Hearth, and the candle is your Faery Hearthfire; it represents the flame of being as it burns in the faery realm.

Settle yourself comfortably before your Faery Altar and light the Faery Hearth candle which is in the center of the altar.... As you gaze at this center flame, breathing slowly in and out, you find that you are becoming more relaxed, calm and serene with each breath. You focus your attention on the candle, then close your eyes, seeing the candle with your inner vision. As you do this, you feel yourself sinking down into the Earth, passing down through the surface layers of soil, sand and clay, and going down, deep, and deeper, ever deeper, into the Earth.

At length, you find that you have come to rest in a clearing surrounded by trees. In the Center of this Grove is an enormous tree.

From its base, a mass of gnarled roots sprawl thickly over and into the ground; its wide-spreading branches form a canopy high overhead. There is an opening in the trunk which leads inside the tree’s trunk. You walk into this opening, and find that you are in a small cave, which is suffused with green golden light. The light seems to radiate from the rough wooden walls of the tree-cave. As you observe this, the light seems to swirl towards you, and around you, and it begins to move you, whirling you, spiraling you downward into the ground, through the surface soil, and into the land itself. You pass easily through the many layers of soil and rock, moving downward with the green-golden light, which whirls you around and around as it carries you downward. At last you land upon what feels to be soft earth....

You open your eyes and look around. Directly before you burns a fire within a hearth. The hearth is a beautiful large bowl of burnished copper, which rests upon an emerald studded stand. The flame within it reaches upward as far as the eye can see. You gaze around and see the gently rounded walls which rise around you, sparkling with many-colored stones and crystals, which glow and gleam with light, now rosy, now ruby red, now shot with sparkles of emerald.

You realize that you are within the heart-shaped Glen of Precious Stones, which lies at the heart-center of the Faery Realm, standing before the fire of the Faery Hearth. From this Glen, four gateways—formed by the intertwined, arching growth of two slender trees—lead out into the Four Faery Convocations of Finias, Gorias, Murias and Falias. You turn to look at each of them briefly, and through each arched tree gateway you can see a different landscape ... You turn back to the Hearth and gaze into the flames.

You call now upon your Faery Allies, and ask that they be with you here, and assist you. Immediately, they come to you.....

Now you move to the Eastern Tree Gateway (or Southern, Western, Northern), and as you do so, you feel the presence of the Faery hosts of the Shining Ones, the Tuatha De Danaan, and the King, Queen and Sage of that Convocation, on the other side of the gate.

You stand at the Threshold of the Gateway, and ask them to come in. When you say this, they begin to march through it and into the Glen of Precious Stones, assembling themselves around the Faery Hearth.

When they have all gathered there, you speak to them, telling them what you want to do, and you ask for their assistance. They may have suggestions to offer you, so listen carefully to the answers you are receiving.

Now bring your attention to the Faery Hearth and the flame that burns within. Watch and feel as the flame expands outward, encompassing you and all the beings who stand with you at the hearth. You feel your own inner flame blend with this larger flame, and you feel the inner flame of the other beings do likewise, until you aware of One Flame, which burns in many colors. You feel this flame burning in your heart, and radiating out of you at the same time. Your awareness expands and you allow yourself to be aware of the Land around you and above you. As you do this, you feel the One Flame leap outward to encompass the Land. You envision all the features of the landscape, and notice how their inner flames are touched and enlivened by the One Flame. You realize that the One Flame carries the energy and imprint of the primal and pristine land of the Faery Convocation within it, and these energies are now being planted and impressed into the Land....

You sense when this is accomplished, and simultaneously, you become aware that the Faery hosts are moving back through the Gateway, returning to their own realm. The gates grow misty and seem to fade from view. You return your attention to the Fire that burns within the Faery Hearth, and as you gaze within it, you see the land above, below, and around you suffused with Spirit, and glowing with life and vitality. You find that the green gold light has begun to swirl around you again. It lifts you up, and swirls around and around, upward; you find yourself passing from the Glen of Precious Stones, and upward through layers of soil and pebbles, till finally you emerge once again upon the surface of the land, finding yourself in the place from which you had begun......

Take a deep breath, and allow yourself a few moments to return yourself to normal waking consciousness, and then you open your eyes. You are back.

It all comes down to the Mother and her Child



The story is told over and over around the world in various ways, but it always comes back to the Mother and her Child. Even in Christian mythos the reference is to "round yon virgin, mother and child."

Who is this Christ Child born of the Virgin Mother—Mary—at the winter solstice, the time of the year’s longest night? It is Child of Promise: Light born from the Darkness, Manifestation born from the Unmanifest, Life born from the Void—the Void which is not empty, but rather, full of potentialities. This child is the light of renewed life, who is born into the death and darkness of winter.

And who is the Mother who gives birth to the child? She is the Mare (pronounced: mah-ray, or mah-ree), Mari, the dark and vast bitter sea of space—the Virgin Mother Void from which all things are born. The correlate on earth is the ancient sea (from the Latin mare) from which all life came forth—life-forms as numerous as the stars in the sky or the grains of salt in the that same primordial sea.

Solstice Eve—the night before the Solstice (this year December 20th)—is Mother Night, so called in the old Germanic Traditions where the Goddess Holda was honored. This is the night we celebrate HER—First Mother, the Great Mother of all manifest life. This is the time of her confinement; the time when she labors to give birth to the Light, the light which will enable life. From the watery womb of darkness is born the fiery spark of light.

On this night we reconnect with the eternal truth of beginnings—of light emerging from darkness, of spirit taking on substance, of life birthed into being. And on this Solstice Eve night we honor First Mother, as we remember how she gave birth to light, and thus to the universe, and all that is.

Sometime on December 21nd (depending on your local time) will come the moment of solstice—of the sun seeming to stand still—that three day pause before movement seemingly begins again on Christmas Day, when the Child of Light and Promise has fully emerged and the cycle of life starts anew. And so we celebrate the fact that now is Horus is born from Isis, Adonis from Myrrha, Mithras from Anahita the Immaculate One, and Christ Jesus from the Virgin Mary.

In a way, each of us is this Child of Light, the Child of Promise—Jesus, Adonis, Mithras, Horus. Each of us is light born from our precious Dark Mother. The spark of life and light of mind and intelligence are our heritage—within each of us to use as we will—because we are all sparks from that first Divine Flame and therefore, we, too, are Divinity as it manifests on this plane of matter/mother, our Mother Earth.

When the Christmas carol says, Veiled in flesh the godhead see, hail the incarnate deity, it is really speaking not just of Jesus, the Christ Child, but of us all—the divine concealed in a robe of substance; spirit contracted down from its expanded and rarified state into a more dense, material one. Every winter solstice brings us a fresh realization of this truth, and a fresh opportunity to reconnect with our own divine source and self.

It came upon a midnight clear...... This time of the year relates to midnight because it is truly the darkest hour of the year. Darkness precedes and gives birth to the light.

How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given…... The wondrous gift of life birthed from First Mother begins in the silent darkness.

We hear the Christmas Angels, the great glad tidings tell…... As light emerges so does sound. And so the voice of the Divine speaks in the form of Angels—the beings traditionally said to be messengers of the Divine—as they proclaim this sacred, auspicious beginning, this holy birth.

The Mother Mary is the ma-re, the matrix, the bitter sea (known in the Qabala as Binah) from which all creation (matter) arises. Mary births the light.... Maria (the dark and bitter sea), births the Christos (the anointed one), who is Light Incarnate—spirit in substance.

I realize that this might sound like it’s all “past tense.” As if it may have happened years ago and is now complete. But please realize that it is an ongoing process, because creation is an ongoing process that expresses itself continuously through the cycles of conception, gestation, birth, growth, decay, death, and rebirth. And the circling Cycle of the Seasons reminds us of this, expressing this eternal truth, over and over as the earth makes its yearly journey around the sun.

The solstice-born Child of Light is the reborn sun that will increase and grow throughout the waxing part of the year. But this Child, whose birth is commemorated in story and song, also represents the Light—born of the Galactic Mother—as shone through the lens of the current Astrological Age, which is the sign of the zodiac in which the sun rises on the morning of the spring equinox.

Thus, for the last 2000 years, the Holy Solstice Child has been the Piscean Avatar, who promised to make his disciples "Fishers of Men."

We have heard over and over that we are living in the time of the changing of the Age from the sign of Pisces to that of Aquarius. These Ages are like months of the Great Year - the 26,000 year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes, so we are going from the 'month' of Pisces into the 'month' of Aquarius. Each of these months has different energies and themes, and these are then played out and made manifest in the ongoing creation and evolution of our planetary lifestream.

The time of transition between Ages is traditionally one of confusion and chaos, as old beliefs, ways of being, patterns, and structures break down from their own dead weight to make way for the "new" that is coming through. And yet, hints and whispers of the new are often heard and felt too, although these are still in embryonic form. These transition times can be very schizophrenic, as we struggle through them, wondering which 'reality' is the real one!

And this is where we are right now, at this point in time. We are at a point very similar to that of Midwinter Solstice: already part way through the cycle of breakdown and dissolution. We are at a point where the darkness is deepest, the dissolution most severe, and the wintery, cold, watery Tide of Cleansing is sweeping things away, often in a quite terrifying way. And yet, we are also at the point where the new energies, and hints of the new patterns can be sensed, can be felt...just enough to give us the hope to hang on.

We are truly living through hard times; time when one age is dissolving and the next one is not yet fully formed. But we must live in faith that it will be formed, that we will survive, and we must contribute our good will and efforts to its formation and eventual healthy birth.

But getting through that dark time! We are helped in this task by the fact that each year as the winter solstice comes around it brings us increasing infusions of the energies of the age to come, if we can but feel their tantalizing hints in the surrounding darkness.

This coming Change of the Ages is also marked in the Mayan calendar, whose end date of December 21, 2012 is rapidly approaching. The Mayan lore says the world ends on that day, meaning that one world (or Age) ends and the next begins. But really, this 'end of the world' day is more than just one 24 hour day. This end date is affixed to a celestial event that takes several years to complete, so this energy of transition (so similar to that of the human birth process, as every mother knows) will be with us for several years to come.

The celestial event to which the Mayan legends refer is the fact that the winter solstice sunrise of Dec 21, 2012, will be exactly aligned with the dark rift of the Milky Way. This rift points directly into the galactic center, and is linked in many cosmologies with the Great Mother Goddess who births the cosmos. Poetically speaking, the visual imagery suggests the dark rift to be the birth canal of the Great Mother, from which energies from the galactic center (her womb) periodically emerge, bearing the embryonic energies and new patterns of the era which is to come.

This alignment also conjuncts the Mayan stellar configuration of the Sacred Tree, which is the spot where the ecliptic crosses the Milky Way, So one might say that the Sacred Tree of Life will be reborn or regenerated by the new energies birthed by the Great Mother. What responsibility, yet what joy, to be living during these intense times!

And with this we are brought back again to the darkness that is Mother Night, as we await with joy, this Winter Solstice Eve, the birth of the Divine Child of Light—within our planetary cycle, and within our own hearts, minds, and souls.

So, indeed, the wondrous gift is given: the Divine Light, reborn of the Dark Mother.

Yes, it really all does all come down to the Mother and her Child....

© Margie McArthur, 2004; All rights reserved.

Halloween Pictures From Previous Years


More graveyard views

The Days of the Dead


It's been a long time since I've posted. Family and housing issues have taken center stage in my life since early this year. We're finally resettled but it's only temporary, so by the time the Year Wheel turns from Winter to Spring, I will, quite likely, be packing things up again and getting ready to launch into yet another housing adventure!

But thankfully we were able to take a breather and celebrate Halloween. Traditionally, we've always done a big Halloween thing---lots of decorations, a haunted graveyard, a witch's cottage, scary music, bats, ghosts, ghouls, skeletons -- the works.

This year, being very tired from all the moving, we decided to scale back---no wonderful witchy cottage, only a haunted graveyard and a few skeletons and ghosts dangling from the trees. But my oldest daughter did her usual spectacular job and our decorations still managed to bring in absolute hordes of trick-or-treaters, much to our delight.

The picture above is from last year; I will post some of this year's pictures as soon as I can.

And now that the mundane celebrations are over, I've lit candles for my ancestors, for All Saints, and All Souls. May they know that we remember them, love them, and honor them. May they share their wisdom and illuminate our hearts as they show us the greater cycle of our lives, and remind us that life never ends, but only changes form.

May this dark season be deep and enriching to us all.

Blessed Be,
Margie

Soul and Spirit

The words soul and spirit are often used interchangeably, although they don’t really mean the same thing. They are, however, closely related.

Spirit is the all pervasive force of life and consciousness/awareness that flows through the universe and all things. Some have referred to it as the Great Mind; some as the Fire of Life. Soul is our individualized, personalized spark of this great spirit/mind.

The word spirit come from the Latin word spiritus, which means breath. Obviously, breath and life are intimately connected as most living things breathe or have respiration of some kind. So Spirit may also be looked as the Great Breath, as well as the Great Mind and the Fire of Life.

The Great Breath of Spirit breathes life into being, and Spirit manifests as substance, which possesses faculties of movement and animation. With life comes movement, and movement brings change; the cycle of life begins.

The word soul is derived from Old Germanic words which essentially mean quick moving in the sense of the movement of the wind. The dictionary defines soul as the vital, animating principle within human beings, possessing thought, action and emotion; an immaterial entity which enters the body when life begins and leaves at the point of death, going on to another life in the spirit realms. As such, it is seen as the central core of a person, from which one’s individuality derives.

The assignment of elements in the Western Mystery Tradition positions Air in the East, Fire in the South, Water in the West and Earth in the North. The Center of the circle is said to represent Spirit, but since Spirit permeates all, it is just as much the circumference and area of the circle as it is the center point.

In my book Wisdom of the Elements, I have assigned Soul to the Western Quarter of the Sacred Wheel of Life, while Spirit is represented at the Center, the place from which all that is manifest arises and to which it will return. For magical purposes, I choose to view the Center of the circle as representing Spirit Unmanifest, by which I mean the Great Mystery/Life Force (though perhaps it is more correct to say Spirit Manifesting, since this is an ongoing process), while looking at the rest of the circle as Spirit Manifest (the Life Force as manifested into form).

Spirit manifests itself into form through the agency of the Elements. Air gives us breath and mind; Earth gives us form and structure; we are formed within Water, which also gives us emotions, blood, lymph, and all within us that flows; and Fire infuses us with the power of spirit.

Our soul is our personal spark of that spirit, our personal piece of the Great Mind, whose Great Breath animates us and all life. The soul is also sometime referred to as the Inner Flame or Inner Fire.

It is through this personal spark of spirit, the soul, that we can access all other forms of life—animals, plants, trees, rocks, rivers, sea, land—since all have their own spark of spirit, and all these sparks are from that One Great Flame. It is with our soul (often called the spirit-body) that we are able to travel up and down the Great Tree of Life, communing soul-to-soul with other beings and other realms—from the stellar realm to the faery realm, to the ancestral realm. Our physical bodies and senses have their limits regarding where we can go and what we can do, but our soul, because it is a part of the Great Flame, the Great Mind, does not have these limits, and is capable of expanding into almost any place of which the imagination can conceive.

The human soul is an amazing thing, possessing, as it does, such a wide-ranging consciousness and capacity for depth and nuance of feeling and experience. It may be for these reasons that some schools of thought hold that humans possess more than one soul—as many as three, in fact. Other schools of thought hold that humans have but one soul, which possesses three modes of functionality that allow it to not only be aware and conscious in the normal day-to-day world, but in the invisible worlds of spirit as well.

In the Feri Tradition of paganism, the three souls are called the Fetch, the Talker and the Godself. This teaching was derived from Huna—a modernized version of the old Hawaiian esoteric lore, wherein the actual concept was one of the Three Selves—low self, middle self, and high self—that correlate to the well-known metaphysical concept of low, middle and higher selves, as well as to modern psychology’s categories of unconscious (subconscious), conscious, and super conscious.

These in their turn are related to parts of the human brain.

The subconscious is a function of the instinctual, reptilian, or primitive brain, which is regarded as oldest part of the brain, controlling a lot of bodily functions of which we are not aware, holding old forgotten memories, and having to do with our very survival by appropriate response to stimuli. When it feels threatened we become fearful, and take steps toward self-preservation.

The conscious is our normal everyday conscious awareness of the world immediately around us. The associated part of the brain is the mammalian brain (often called the limbic system), which has to do with emotions, feelings, and certain bodily functions—all having to do with our ability to navigate our way through daily life. It could be said that the subconscious is actually comprised of communications between the primitive and mammalian parts of the brains.

The super conscious is the transpersonal side of us, the part that can reach beyond the self into the bigger, more abstract picture. The associated part of the brain is the neo-cortex, the most evolved part of our brain, which governs thought, learning, problem solving, speech and creativity—allowing us to stretch beyond our instincts and basic emotions into transpersonal and abstract thought and decision making. This part of us functions best when we feel secure and unafraid.

All of these are part of us. All of these functions take place in our one brain, and to my way of thinking, are part of one, wonderfully complex, wide-ranging human soul. Of course, the brain and soul are not the same thing; the physical brain functions somewhat as a control panel for the functions of the soul—the mechanism which allows the soul to express itself in physicality.

All of this psychology talk may seem very far from Soul and Spirit, but in reality, it isn’t. We are Spirit in Substance—cells in the body of God; we are God experiencing Itself. As individuals, we partake of our divinity by the use of our wonderfully structured brain and body.

These parts of self are well known in the spiritual traditions, and have been given such names as spirit body, astral body, fetch, double, doppelganger, separable soul, and the like. All refer to our ability to send part of our consciousness to the other realms, the non-physical worlds.

There are times, however, when these parts of us become fragmented, and thus out of touch with the other parts of our self and the wholeness of self—so much so that they feel like separate beings, not part of us. Our job then is to reintegrate these parts of self, so we are whole again. Interestingly, this fragmentation can also occur in a wider sense, when we perceive ourselves as completely separate from either our natural environment or the other souls with whom we share the spark and breath of life.

While this reintegration process is often seen as the job of psychology, it is also, and perhaps primarily, the job of spirituality, particularly in the latter instance. The spiritual traditions by definition deal with the beings of the Otherworlds—Gods, Goddesses, ancestors, faeries, and the like—by means of ceremony, rituals, prayer, and offerings. When we become skillful in the application of these techniques, new links to the Otherworld are formed and nurtured, our fragmentation is rewoven into a healthy unity, and our soul begins to be healed.

It is with these different parts of our brain-soul system that we can access the states of consciousness that allow us to travel inward and find that sense of relatedness again.

I feel that the spiritual work of this moment in time is the work of Reunion with all our relations. It is to make those connections with the parts of self, but also, and especially, with the other beings of nature. I include the faeries in this category... but that’s another story for another day!

Ella Young - Elfland's Ambassadress


In this season of Brigid I am reminded of something that happened years ago.

In the early 1990's I was assistant editor of an earth-mysteries magazine called Dragon’s Quest. One day a very interesting article was submitted for possible publication. It was about an author called Ella Young and was titled Carmel Magic. It was written by a man named John Thompson.

Several years prior, while doing some magical work out on the land, I’d experienced some very strong Celtic energies. I found this puzzling, since I live in central, coastal California, and one would expect that I would have picked up on energies of the native cultures of the area rather than those from thousands of miles of continent and ocean away! But nonetheless, there they were. In particular, the energies of the goddess Brigid were very strong.

John’s article solved the mystery for me. Although I knew who Ella Young was, and indeed, owned her Celtic Wonder Tales, I had no idea that she had, in the 1920s, moved to an area quite geographically close to my present location, and had passed on her legacy of Irish magic to her new friends there. I had no idea that she had gathered this group of people around her and taught them about the Old Gods—Brigid, Lugh, Dana, Manannan and the rest—and about the faery folk and the other spirits of the invisible realms. Mystic that she was, she had a strong awareness of presence of these invisible realms and the beings who inhabited them, and taught her new students that nature was sacred and must be protected, and that the plants, the trees, the land, and the ocean all contained unique spirits with whom humans could communicate and from whom they could learn. Thus, she was not only one of the earliest American pagans of the 20th century, she was an early environmentalist as well.

While in Ireland Ella had been part of a magical group called the Fellowship of the Four Jewels. The jewels referred to were the four sacred treasures of the Tuatha De Danaan of Ireland—the Sword of Light of Nuada, the Spear of Lugh, the Cauldron of the Dagda, and the Stone of Fal (also called the Stone of Destiny). These treasures, in actuality, represented the powers of the land of Ireland itself. When Ella came to the USA and connected with the sacred lands in California, she quite naturally modified her focus to the land of California, while still using the magical structures and Celtic deities with whom she had worked before. So the Fellowship of the Four Jewels became the Fellowship of Shasta, with Brigid as its main deity. Ella dearly loved Brigid, whom she looked upon as the Earth Goddess herself, and it was to Brigid that the rites of the four yearly festivals performed by the Fellowship were dedicated.

Whatever work the Fellowship had done through the years of its existence (from 1931 till Ella’s death in 1956, and from 1960 till the death of her successor Gavin Arthur in 1972), it had certainly left its energetic mark within the lands of the central coast of California!

Learning that Ella Young had lived and worked so close to my own area inspired me to search out her autobiography, Flowering Dusk. I also read other works that mentioned her. I was interested to learn that she felt the area around Point Lobos, not far south of where I live, was the center of psychic force for the entire Pacific coast of America. About Point Lobos Ella said, “There are other sacred mountains, other sacred places, but this is the most powerful. But Point Lobos is not ready to make friends with society yet. Mount Shasta is making friends; other great mountains are making friends; but not Point Lobos. That is why people should be careful when they go to Lobos.” She said that when Lobos was ready to make friends, when its force was finally released, great things would happen in America.

She felt the other power spots along the nearby central coast all emanated from the Lobos area, and she often sat beneath the gnarled cypresses of Lobos, teaching her students about the powers and spirits of the earth, including the faeries right there at Point Lobos, and the great deva with beautiful wings who guarded the place. (1)

* * * * * * *

Several months after all this some old friends from Southern California drove up to visit me. They arrived much later than I’d expected, and I asked them what had taken them so long. They said they’d decided to take the coastal route I instead of the freeway. Then they asked me if I knew about that HUGE earth energy power point on the coast north of Big Sur and a bit south of the city of Carmel. They said it felt to them like a powerful dragon was in the land there. It was so strong they felt a need to pull over, park the car, get out, and make it an offering. I knew immediately that this had to be the Point Lobos area, and told them what Ella had said about it.

Some time after that, my family and I were driving down the coast towards Big Sur for a Mother’s Day outing. My husband was driving; I had my nose in a book. Quite suddenly I became aware of a huge surge of power flowing into me. The word “dragon!” popped into my mind as my head automatically jerked around to see where the power was coming from. I found myself looking at some rolling hills quite close to the coast, and they looked for all the world like a dragon lying on its side, asleep. The energy was literally rolling out of those hills. I knew instantly that we must be in the Point Lobos area, and this was later confirmed when we passed a road sign.

Because Ella was an early environmentalist, when she moved to California and was introduced to redwood trees, she quickly formed relationships with them, and soon became very supportive of the Save the Redwoods League.

Ella Young died not long before Lughnasadh, 1956, in her home in Halcyon, CA, near San Luis Obispo. Her ashes were scattered in a redwood grove near St. Helena, in the Napa Valley. She had known her time of death was nigh, and died as she lived—a Druid Priestess.

Much of the proceeds from her literary estate were donated to the Save the Redwoods League.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading any of Ella Young’s book, start with her Celtic Wonder Tales, which may be found here.

The very first story, The Earthshapers (my favorite), tells of Brigid’s role in the shaping of the earth into a fair and beautiful place.

Enjoy!

Brigid’s Blessings to all!

(1) Rosalind Sharpe-Wall, A Wild Coast and Lonely, pp 187-188, Worldwide Publishing/Tetra, San Carlos, CA

~Oimelc, Imbolc, and the Feast of Brigid~


This evening the Feast of Brigid begins, so I’d like to share a bit about this wonderful goddess.

Brigid, beloved Celtic goddess, was well-known throughout the British Isles as the three-aspected goddess of poetry, smithcraft and healing. Occasionally the three aspects were portrayed as three sisters, all named Brigid—an example of the “triple” form so beloved of the Celts. She was sometimes said to be the daughter of the Dagda, the “All-Father” of the Tuatha De Danaan. In Ireland she was known as Brigid, in Scotland, as Brigid or Bride, and in Britain, she was known as Brigantia, goddess of the Brigantes of Northern England. Her name means Exalted One.

In spite of the fact that not many tales seem to have survived about her, she looms larger than life in the psyche of the Celts of the British Isles, and it is likely that her legends were juxtaposed onto those of the early Irish Christian saint of the same name, who, in Wales, was known as St. Ffraid.

Brigid’s feast day, which fell on February 1, was known as Oimelc or Imbolg. Cormac’s Glossary tells us that Oimelc means ewe’s milk and refers to the fact that this is the time lambs are born. Because of this, Brigid is associated with milk and the animals that give milk.

Imbolc is variously translated as “in the belly” (a time of quickening/birthing) or “washing up.” Taken together, these names inform us that this festival was one of lactation and cleansing. Interestingly, the word “February” comes from to the Roman “Februa” which was a festival of washing and purification.

Brigid was, and is, the goddess of poetry, smithcraft, and healing, and the Fire that is behind them all—

Poetry: The fire of the mind and mind’s inspiration that sparks and ignites the poet’s creativity, Smithcraft: The tempering fire of the forge and the skill of the craftsman/woman.
Healing: The fires of life and body that must burn properly so that life may continue, and healing occur.

Each of these show themselves to be fires of creation and transformation. Thus, she is the pre-eminent deity-saint of Celtic Healing.

The stories, but particularly the customs and lore about Brigid in either her Pagan or Christian guise, inform us that we are dealing with a very powerful Being, one of the Old Ones, deeply connected with the primal powers of Life itself —fire, water, air, earth, origination, creation, formation, and manifestation, fertility and abundance. (from Faery Healing, Chapter 1)

The legends of Brigid show her to be associated with that borderlands/liminality/ threshold state, which clearly links her to the Otherworlds, including faery. Her association with liminal states is shown in her St. Brigid legends by the fact that she was born at sunrise, and while her mother was straddling a threshold; it is shown in her Goddess legends by the fact that she was of the Tuatha De Danann, yet married to a Fomorian.

Brigid is associated with water as well as fire, and many healing wells are sacred to her throughout the British Isles, including a well near Glastonbury, and most well known, the well near Kildare in Ireland.

Places where water emerges from the earth are always considered thresholds between the worlds, the underworld and middleworld, in this case. As a goddess of healing associated with seership and liminal states of being, she is uniquely suited to be the especial matron goddess of Faery Healing. (from Faery Healing, Chapter 15)

Brigid is, above all, the goddess of the hearthfire, and this is a good time of year to ask for her blessings on your own home’s hearth-and heart-center. Light a candle to Brigid tonight, and ask for her blessings.


Blessings of the growing light to you,
Blessings of the pure white snowdrop to you,
Blessings of the newborn lambs to you.
And may Brigid’s blessings bring you
Inspiration and deep healing.

Blessings,
Margie

The Faery Gazette

The first issue of the Faery Gazette is ready, and has been sent to subscribers. Anyone interested can subscribe by going to this page of my website

http://www.faeryhealing.com/faery_healing.htm

and emailing me by clicking the link that says "Receive the free quarterly Faery Gazette Newsletter."

The way my life seems to work, it probably won't be quarterly....

Happy December, everyone!