366 Celt: A Year and A Day of Celtic Wisdom and Lore. Carl McColman
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think of the gifts of the bard as unattainable to you today. Maybe the deep secrets of Taliesin (the greatest of Welsh bards) are lost, but there are other, humble ways to do your part to keep the spirit of the bard alive.
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THE PATH OF THE BARD
What would it take to be a bard today? First of all, give up on the idea of calling yourself a bard. For starters, if you haven’t studied for over a decade or mastered at least several hundred mythic poems or tales, you don’t deserve the title. But it’s okay to describe yourself as an aspiring bard. Now, what exactly do you aspire to? Poetry. Music. Song. Story. Alternative ways of seeing the world. Consider how you can integrate these art forms into your spirituality and your daily life. Remember what separates a bard from an entertainer: look at how you can use language and music not merely to show off how clever you are, but to truly bring joy and meaning to the world of spirit, and likewise to help bring the world of spirit to those who hear your artistry. Finally, if you do not wish to explore the path of the bard for yourself, then find ways to cultivate and nurture such skills in others. Listen to their stories, dance to their music, comment on their perspective. Allow the (aspiring) bards in your life to transform you.
Perhaps no single element is more important to the spirit of Celtic wisdom than myth. I don’t mean myth in the sense of “something that people falsely believe to be true” like the many urban legends that circulate around the Internet. No, the streets of America are not filled with kidney thieves, nor did Nostradamus predict the 9/11 disaster. Rather, the myth that is so essential to the Celtic world is the matter of mythology—the stories, legends, poems, ballads, and folklore that speak to a world beyond space and time, where gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, warriors and bards dwell—and where in their magical and dramatic lives, we can find insight into the mystery and majesty of our own.
Some aspects of Celtic myth and lore are commonplace: just about anyone who’s heard of Ireland has heard of banshees or leprechauns. Most everyone knows that Patrick evicted the snakes from Ireland, and that King Arthur’s knights spent the better part of their careers searching for the Holy Grail. But the layers of myth go far, far deeper. And what is often ignored when mythic stories are told or retold is what they mean—why they’re so important. Of course, sometimes such meaning is best left unsaid, so that each person may discover anew how the myths speak to him or her.
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THE PATH OF MYTHOLOGY
The single best collection of myths in the Celtic world comes from Ireland; the other significant body of myth was preserved in Wales. Both Irish and Welsh myth were committed to written form in the Middle Ages, by Christian scribes, most if not all of whom were monastic. This leads to a number of unanswerable—yet difficult—questions. Are the myths simply the product of imaginative storytellers, or do they hearken back to an ancient, pagan belief system? How many of the myths have been lost? Of the ones that survived the ages, how much pagan lore did the Christian scribes who preserved them censor, consciously or unconsciously? Of course, we’ll never be able to answer these questions definitively, although scholars have made a number of educated guesses. The good news? The written myths do seem to point to an earlier time; some of the stories preserved may have originated as early as the first century CE. The bad news: yes, there’s a lot missing. Yes, there’s no doubt that the Christians tampered with their pagan source material (the damage was worse in Wales than in Ireland). But the extent of this loss is itself shrouded in mystery. All we can do is take what we have, and attempt to understand the grandeur of the Celtic past based on fragmentary evidence. And then keep the myths alive, by telling the stories, and identifying ways to apply this ancient wisdom today.
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THE PATH OF MYTHOLOGY
As the stories, particularly in the Irish tradition, have come down to us, they are organized neither by chronology nor by key characters, but by theme. The myths include battles, invasions, wooings, visions, cattle-raids, adventures, voyages, feasts, deaths, and so forth. Modern storytellers, however, have tended to try to put the tales into some semblance of order, and so have developed a series of cycles that cover the sweep of Irish mythic history, from the first inhabitants of the land up to the semi-legendary tales of early historical kings. As might be expected, the myths begin with the exploits of gods and godlike beings; eventually such supernatural figures are reduced to fairies. But even the mortal heroes have a larger-than-life quality about them, a theme that plays out in several tales that involve time-travel: someone from the mythic era, upon encountering mortals from a later age, always finds them as small and weak compared to the robust heroes of old.
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THE PATH OF MYTHOLOGY
We have no Celtic creation myth. That may be because the Christians who preserved the myths felt it improper to recount a story that contradicted the book of Genesis. But it may also say something about the Celtic understanding of the universe—not as a stage that at some original moment was fashioned ex nihilo, but as an endlessly woven knot or spiral of existence, without beginning, without end. Irish myth begins with a series of “invasions”—stories about the first inhabitants of Ireland, who came in wave after mythic wave of settlers, invaders and conquerors. The drama mounts with each new tribe or family, culminating in three climactic battles, in which gods, heroes, demons, and finally, mortals, fight for sovereignty and ascendancy. The last of these battles sets the stage for the ongoing relationship between mortals and spirits—we humans live above the surface, while the gods/fairies/ancestors dwell in the underworld.
That first sequence of stories is called the Mythological Cycle. Next comes the Ulster Cycle, so called because most of the action takes place in Ireland’s northern province. The Ulster Cycle tells the story of Cúchulainn, the greatest of Celtic warriors, and his mighty exploits, particularly during the cattle raid of Cooley when Queen Meadbh attempts to steal a great brown bull—and Cúchulainn single-handedly opposes her.
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THE PATH OF MYTHOLOGY
In the Heroic Cycle of Irish myth we meet Fionn mac Cumhaill, who is not a god, or the son of one, but rather an ordinary boy who gains his supernatural skills by eating a magical fish. Fionn becomes the leader of a legendary band of hunter-warriors called the Fenians, whose job it is to serve as guardians of the land. Such guardianship could have spiritual as well as military implications—indeed, Fionn proves himself to the high king by successfully defeating a fairy monster that had taken to burning the great hall at Tara to the ground every year at Samhain. The tales of Fionn and the members of his war band, however, have as much to do with their own interpersonal dynamics as with enemies they must vanquish.
Then comes the Historic Cycle, fourth and final of the Irish mythic cycles. These tales are the least otherworldly of the myths, although enough interaction between the human and fairy realms takes place in these adventures to make them worthy of the best storyteller. Actual historical figures begin to show up, although often with mythic elements interwoven into their stories—like George Washington throwing the coin across the river, these tales represent the rubbing places where myth and history meet. A favorite theme in the Historic Cycle involves human encounters with otherworld beings—setting the stage, naturally enough, for the rich legacy to follow in the centuries-old fairy tradition of the common Celtic people.
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THE PATH OF MYTHOLOGY
Welsh mythology, unfortunately, is neither as comprehensive nor as coherent as its Irish counterpart. Although the oldest manuscripts are about the same age as those preserved in Ireland, the stories they contain seem either younger, or more thoroughly tampered with. Post-Celtic religious and social ideas permeate