Tuath Tribe
The Online Newsletter of the Tuatha Dé

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In Celtic tradition this is the new year and it's always felt that way to me. The beginning of the academic year, new copy books and pencils, crisp clear air. As I'll discuss below, it's a creative time when we enter the dark, generative, reflective, more internal part of the year.

As we go into the dark, spare a thought, and some funds if you can, for those going into it with no shelter, food, medicine or water in Pakistan after the earthquake. One link to a charity helping the survivors is http://www.mercycorps.org. They're a US based charity. A UK charity helping is www.savethechildren.org.uk. If you truly can't spare money, as always, there's the great 'Hunger Site' link where you can give food for the 'cost' of a mouse click: http://www.thehungersite.com. (You'll also find other associated links there where you can click for child health care, free mammograms, rainforest preservation and more.)

My family has the tradition that Samhain, the Celtic New Year's day, is a microcosm of the rest of the year, so what you do on that day you'll be doing all year. That's why you want to be sure you spend time with loved ones, engage in other constructive activity, have the house tidy and do whatever else you wish to be able to do throughout the year.

I'll be donating money on Samhain (despite the fact that we just had to more than double our debts to replace our ancient car with a newer used car) both because we're still way better off than those people in Pakistan and as a statement of intent and trust that the coming year will bring the abundance to give as freely to the needy as I'd like.

I've got a few projects on the go. It looks like I'll be teaching a couple of exciting new classes in Open Studies at the University of Edinburgh in the spring and following autumn of 2007. One on the Magic of Harry Potter, using these books as a 'taking off point' for an exploration of spirituality, magic, literature, myth and theology. The second, kind of a follow on, Magic, Ancient and Modern, on the history and philosophy of magic, and the ways that 'magical' ideas appear from ancient times to modern physics and psychology.

The reason it will be so long is in part because these classes will take a lot of work, but also because we're expecting another baby this June. We're really delighted and grateful to Deity and the Spirits.

This does, however, mean that it's unlikely that I'll be able to be at the Oneness Gathering in Bavaria this June. (Unless my math is really off, always a possibility!) It was a high point of last year. (See my Lugnasad 2005 Newsletter). I'd definitely encourage anyone who can to attend and wish I could be there myself. Their link is http://www.the-oneness-gathering.com.  Anyone booking before the end of December will get an 'early bird' discount, see the website for full details.

Wishing you all the best for the New Year.

Le Beannachdan,
With Blessings,
Geo

  Illumination, Fear and the Sacred Now

The two polarities of the Celtic ritual year's axis were Samhain and Beltane, these two nights, along with midsummer, were known as "spirit nights" in Wales. Both had new year type features, such as divination, re-lighting all the house fires from a central ritual fire, but they had very different 'flavours.'

We first come across the festival's name on a 1^st Century BC Gaulish calendar engraved on a series of bronze tablets that was discovered in1897 in Coligny, France. The first month of the Coligny year is Samonios. Early scholars noted that this seemed to be derived from samos, 'summer.' As the seventh month was named Giamonios (from giamos, 'winter'), they assumed that they were the first months of summer and winter respectively.

However, it's clear now that Samonios means Summer's End. We begin with the end, with the descent into the dark. From death and darkness springs life and light. Creation takes shape in the dark.

Caesar says, The Gauls claim all to be descended from Father Dis [a god of death, darkness and the underworld], declaring that this is the tradition preserved by the Druids. For this reason they measure periods of time not by days but by nights; and in celebrating birthdays, the first of the month, and new year's day, they go on the principle that the day begins at night. (Conquest of Gaul, VI.18)

In practical terms it was the indoor half of year. The summer, outdoor half was when young people often lived with their herds in "bothys" or summer dwellings with the cattle herds. You stayed home more during the winter half, doing crafts, telling tales and so on.

In traditional cultures like the Pacific Northwest American Kwakiutl, there'd be winter ceremonials, presided over by the Great Cannibal of the North. In Celtic lands, "death revels" were presided over by a king figure with a blackened face and sword or sickle.

It was an ambivalent time. You had to slaughter the livestock you couldn't feed over the winter. You had a great feast, the agricultural year was over, the produce stored, mead and ale fermented, so you could can get drunk, all pleasant enough, yet there was always also an ambivalence towards the slaughtering process. Not to mention the fact that the highest human mortality was generally over the winter.

In Ireland the tradition was that the Fenian, shamanistic war-bands lived in woods during summer and were quartered on the population during winter. Samhain is the ultimate "best of times / worst of times festival." It is also the only fire festival positively indicated on the Coligny Calendar.

In terms of myths, the Mórrígan and Dagda, Mother and Father Deities, mate at Samhain, so it's a creative time. The Feis Tara, the ritual marriage of the king and the Goddess is thought to have occurred at Samhain.

The great battle of the Tuatha Dé Danann and chaotic Fomoire also happens at Samhain, so it's a time when, chaos and order vie for supremacy. People such as poets and Fionn MacCumaill, and kings like Cormac, enter the Otherworld and the dead return. So it's about exchange between worlds.

In terms of ritual it was thought that the ocean of time and fate were more accessible at this time so people often did divination. The 'dead' were consulted and commemorated. It's worth noting here that a common Irish name for the Otherworld is Tír na mBeo, the Land of the Living, and that the Áes Síd, the Otherworld Folk, tend to call themselves 'the Living' and humans, 'the dead.'

In my family people died, but they were never really gone. We'd picnic at least once a year in the cemetary to officially be sure they knew all our news. Another tradition was leaving a "mute feast" on the table for dead at night. Milk would be put out for fairies, at this and other times.

In Christian times the festival became All Saints / All Souls day. The Jesuit Karl Rahner said, "Be still, o heart, and let all whom you have loved rise from the grave of your breast."

Our modern Hallowe'en stems from Samhain, and one explanation of the traditional pumpkin lanterns (which earlier were big turnips of course, since pumpkins aren't UK natives) is that the Celts once placed the skulls of their ancestors outside their doors at this time.

The New Year is the 'sacred now' time, a time out of time that somehow stands for all time, and so, for the now, since now is the only moment of time we can actually grasp.

It's one of four fire festivals in the Celtic year. Fire symbolism relates to spiritual illumination, to the underlying awareness of Spirit through all life's transitions. It's a liminal, transitional time. Transition can be scary, hence we have assorted 'spooky' Samhain traditions. By concretising unknown scary change, or making it comical like the funny little Mexican Day of the Dead figures, we make it manageable.

There's a childlike element of play at work. Death doesn't particularly worry my toddler, Téa. She saw a dead mouse the other day and said, 'Hello mouse.' David said, 'It's dead.' She went, 'Hello dead mouse.'

The other day she was looking at the back cover of a friend's 'Fortean Times' magazine that I was looking at. Unbeknownst to me, it had a lurid image of a zombie from a game based on the 'Evil Dead' movies. She started asking, 'That?' I looked, and not sure what to say, went, 'Oh, that's one of the evil dead.' This delighted her. Later that day she was running around in the garden with a trowel pursuing the 'Evee dead! Evee dead!' Good shamanic instincts, I suppose! One wants ancestral spirits about, but certainly not vengeful or hungry ghosts.

Every time I think she's forgotten, it pops up again, like the other day in a shop with Nepalese skull masks, 'Evee dead! Evee dead!' The shopkeeper was quite amused.

Now, you might say all this funning is because children don't understand. But maybe they understand better than grown ups that it's all playing. Maybe they're close enough to our immortal origins that they remember that everything's alive and nothing ever really dies.

As 'grown-ups' it can be harder for us to cope with the fear of death. At this time we can play with and reflect on beginnings and endings, life and death, fear and desire and the now moment. Samhain, as a fire festival, conjures the power of illumination, of sacred fire, to help us cope.

Many traditions speak of illumination as liberation or freedom. An illuminated soul is not buffetted or bound by polarities. One good working definition is Joseph Campbell's: to be enlightened is to be uncompelled by fear and desire.

This doesn't mean that we don't experience fear or desire. I once heard Jetsunma Ahkon Lamo Rinpoche say that the primordial, illuminated wisdom state is like a crystal. She held a crystal before a red hanging and it looked red, then before a blue hanging and it looked blue, but the instant she moved it the colour vanished and it became clear again.

She said that when a stimulus arises an enlightened person could experience the 'colour' of that stimulus, but the second the stimulus was gone, so was the colour. Rudolph Bauer puts it that in full spiritual awareness, we don't cling to emotional affect.

Imagine that for a moment. Imagine if all your emotional responses were strictly limited to the period of their stimulus. Imagine if your grief over the loss of a relationship was limited to the instant in which you lost it. Imagine if your anger at another's unkindness was limited to the duration of their single harsh sentence. Imagine a potent focus in the now, when, almost invariably, everything is pretty much okay.

You may really react against this. "I'm in debt now!" But are the debtors actually breaking down your door at this moment? How profoundly does paying off the debts effect you day to day, other than gazing in horror at numbers on a sheet of paper once a month?

"I don't have what I want now!" But are you actually dying from the lack of it?

"I am ill now!" But it hasn't killed you yet or you wouldn't be reading. This may sound harsh, but it's meant to be helpful. Gen, my daughters' God/dess mother, has been holding a fairly advanced cancer at bay for years now. I asked her how she coped with the fear. She said she focussed in the now. Even though she doesn't feel a hundred percent great, she simply tells herself that the things she really fears aren't actually happening now. If it works for her, it can work for anyone.

"I am alone now!" This is a toughie — but the fact is that you're not. Deity is present in all creation, including in the angels, totems and other spiritual allies that surround you. I teach shamanic techniques to help people become aware that they're never alone and banish the dreadful illusion of isolation. Of course, though isolation is in fact an illusion, and nothing that ever was can ever truly be lost in Spirit, the pain loss causes can feel quite real.

Becoming Greater Than Our Grief

In Shakespeare's Richard II, the king laments, "If only I were as great as my grief." Awareness, and to a larger extent, illumination, makes us greater than our grief. We no longer entirely collapse into despair when loss happens and so, we're able to bear it more nobly.

I know that this can be difficult, to say the least. Some losses are horrifically severe. Most actually aren't, yet we get attached to pain for many reasons. It may be a comforting limit to achievement, a perceived loyalty to a departed loved one or a way to bond with others.

We may even feel that it's wrong to be joyful in the face of the suffering in the world, or that we can't 'risk' happiness in the face of the cruel potential of loss. The greater our love for others and sensitivity to their pain or potential pain, the more we can suffer.

In the film Rumblefish, the character of the Motorcycle Boy is kind of a messiah without a cause. His father and brother are talking about him, and his brother asks if the Motorcycle Boy's crazy. "No," his dad responds, "he's not crazy. He's got a keen sensitivity. A keen sensitivity doesn't make you crazy — but it can drive you crazy. It can drive you crazy."

There are three kinds of experience of loss that, amplified or created by keen sensitivity, can drive us crazy. The first is the experience of loss after union that is part of creation's natural and necessary oscillation. The second is imaginary loss, by far the most common. The third is the unecessary loss created by human apathy and evil. The first must be borne, the second and third, countered.

There are many examples of the first. At one extreme, life lives off death. Plants grow in soil from made of things that have died or been broken. Whether we eat lettuces or lambs, we're still living off death. This is an important aspect of Samhain's symbolism.

Indian tradition discusses this in the story of Kirtimukha, the 'Face of Glory.' In the story, an awful devouring monster is consuming the world. All the Gods go to Lord Shiva for help. He creates an even more ravenous monster to devour the first one, but then the first one promises to be nice and begs mercy.

Shiva grants it, but then the second monster pipes up. "Wait a minute, you created me to be ravenous, what am I supposed to eat?" "Eat yourself." Shiva responds, and so it does, starting at the tail and working up until there's nothing left but its head. Shiva, awestruck, says, "I have never seen a better representation of physical life. Henceforward, you shall be placed above the gate to my temple, because whoever is unwilling to look at you is unwilling to enter my temple."

In short, we have to say an unsqueamish "Yes!" to the way life is now, to the basic structure of the physical universe. Celtic tradition framed existence in several ways. One was as a balance between chaos and order, another was the conflict between good and evil. Chaos, death and dissolution were seen as necessary, even generative, parts of creation, but allowing them too much scope was where evil came in.

The fact that physical death follows physical life isn't all bad. 'Freshening the mind with the thought of death,' as the samurai used to put it, can bring a sense of preciousness to our experience and focus our priorities.

It can be hardest to understand theologically when young people die. Something Patch Adams said has helped me with this. He's a physician who's used humour to work with patients, including terminally ill children.

He said that any life, even five minutes long, is a whole life with a beginning, middle and end. Whether we pass on at seven or seventy, the task is the same, to co-create as much love, joy and value as we can in each life.

Most of our losses aren't as catastrophic as the loss of a loved one through death, though they can feel terrible. We're also all different. Any failure, however apparently minor, can crystallise a lifetime of hurt. For some, wrecking a car or losing a job can precipitate terrible depression.

Divorce can take all the happiness from another person's life. When a romantic relationship ends, we lose a particular theophany, a particular avenue through which God's love has manifested to us.

There's also oscillation in ongoing relationships. After a period of closeness we may feel a need for our own space. After sex, we may want to pull back into ourselves a bit. If we accept these as natural cycles of intimacy, they needn't be experienced as catastrophic or send us chasing a new romantic theophany.

Here and Now

What if I told you of a magickal technique that would eliminate 99.9 percent of your experiences of loss? I can: now. That is, I can tell you now and 'now' is also the magickal technique. Most of our losses are illusory so simply being present in the now removes most experiences of loss.

As I mentioned, my friend Gen uses this technique successfully even in the face of cancer. She told me another incredibly valuable thing. She said that finding the lump and fearing the diagnosis actually felt worse than knowing for sure. When she knew for sure, she could take action, internally and externally, to deal with it. Not knowing, she was wrestling phantoms. In a very real way, the fear of it was worse than the cancer itself — and that was when the cancer was actually real.

Imaginary losses are the worst in many ways, not necessarily because of the degree of suffering they cause, but because that suffering is utterly baseless, useless and endless. It can waste so very much of our lives. As Mark Twain said, "I've experienced many terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened."

My great grandfather used to say, "A coward dies a thousand times, a brave man dies but once." We rehearse for misery, telling our fears like rosaries. Fears misdirect our actions to hurt us concretely as well as mentally.

It's been truly said that fear is 'false evidence appearing real.' Ruled by fear, by false evidence, we can't make true, good decisions.

The next time you find yourself frightened by spectres, at Samhain or any other time, remind yourself that these fearful projections are about as real as a child's Halloween mask, or the 'evee dead' in the garden.

Do what children do instinctively, draw your awareness into the now, get playful with your fears and chase them away with a trowel. A lot of the magic done at Samhain is about playfully chucking what you don't want, making effigies of fear or illness or death and putting them on the fire. The New Year invites us to make a fresh start, here and now, on all levels of reality, so take full advantage of the opportunity.