#Celtic#FolkloreSunday: In the #Scottish highlands holly and gorse were sacred trees of the #Cailleach Bheur, a blue hag, who was associated with #winter and the protection of animals during the season. She was reborn every All Hallows Eve and brought back the winter weather with her magical staff, which froze the ground with every tap. On Beltane Eve she returned to the Earth, throwing her staff beneath a gorse bush before turning to stone.
Source: https://druidry.org/resources/furze
#Celtic#MythologyMonday for #EarthDay2024: #Tailtiu gave her life to clearing ‘a great plain’. To Ali Isaac „it seems possible that the great plain referred to signifies the landscape; Tailtiu came from the great plain and spent her life serving it, and returned to it after death. She is a daughter of the landscape. In other words, not a harvest goddess, but an earth goddess. She shaped the land just as the #Cailleach did."
Source: aliisaac+the-cailleach-project@substack.com
#Celtic#LegendaryWednesday: „The #Cailleach was also possessed by a venomous temper that led the goddess to blast all vegetation with her magick wand as the year wanes.“
Source: Wade MacMorrighan „Rekindling the Rites of Imbolg“
#Celtic#FolkloreSunday: The #Cailleach has handed over to #Brigid, yet she is unsettled, and does not sleep. She is struggling to adjust. Meanwhile, Brigid is stirring into wakefulness, taking her time to come to full cosciousness, and into her power. There is turbulence as they slip between roles. We see it in the weather, we feel it in ourselves.
Source: https://aliisaac.substack.com/
#Celtic#InternationalWomensDay: #Spring is not the moment of regeneration that we think it is; the #Cailleach is not the grandmother we presume her to be. She has been gestating all the activity of burgeoning new life deep underground throughout the long winter. We are ignorant of it because we can only appreciate that which we can see and touch, such as the green shoots of spring bursting out of the ground with the arrival of Brigid. An Cailleach, the pregnant mother, has done her work; now she hands over to Brigid, the foster mother, to rear her offspring.
Source: https://substack.com/@aliisaac
#Celtic#FolkloreSunday: The #Cailleach was both ageless and immortal; as winter gave way to spring, she would take a drought that returned her to youth. In #Manx legend, she spent half the year as a young woman and the other half as a old crone—she was only known as the Cailleach during the latter half. In #Ireland, she had seven periods of youth, after which she remained old permanently.
Source: https://mythopedia.com/topics/cailleach
#Celtic#TempleThursday: Beira, the queen of winter, had Bride imprisoned at Ben Nevis. When Angus Og, the God of Summer, found her, winter had to give way to #spring. The painting ´The Coming of Bride` by John Duncan is full of spring flowers: primroses, azaleas, laburnum, lilac, tulips and grape hyacinth. #Imbolc
Source: Angus and Bride - Folklore Scotland
#Celtic#MythologyMonday: During the bleak period of winter #Brighid is held a captive prisoner at Ben Nevis as she awaits her hero, the youthful god Aengus mac Óg who would appear to represent the winter solstice sun returned from the Underworld. It is after he beholds Brighid in a vision that he sets out on his milk white steed from his #Otherworld Island drenched in perpetual summer to rescue the imprisoned goddess. The #Cailleach attempts to stop him at each step of his journey, however, it is in vain as Aengus secures Brighid’s freedom at #Imbolc. As the Cailleach storms away in a fury she flings her wand with one last gasp of resentment towards the roots of a holly bush as a final curse when #spring once again returns.
Source: Wade MacMorrighan „Rekindling the Rites of #Imbolg“
#Celtic#MythologyMonday: „Another in kind parable portrays #Brighid and the #Cailleach not as imminent challengers, but as two sides of the same coin. As the season of #winter draws to a close the Cailleach again journeys to the #Otherworld island of Tír na n-Óg where she searches a deep wood for the magickal Well of Youth. At the moment when the dawn sun crests over the horizon she bends to drink its bubbling waters from the crevice of a rock and emerges renewed as the fair goddess Brighid. Where her enchanted wand once caused all vegetation to wither and die, it now transformed the dormant brown grass into vivid green shoots surmounted by the yellow and white flowers of #spring.“ #Imbolc
Source: Wade MacMorrighan „Rekindling the Rites of Imbolg“ https://twitter.com/RubyFaesRealm/status/1620681046210785281
#Celtic#FolkloreThursday: Manchán Magan, author of Thirty-Two Words for Field, described the #Cailleach as: “the personification of winter … her veil may have represented the land being clad in frost and snow. In #Scotland and the North of #Ireland her method for hastening winter was flying and beating back the summer vegetation with her cudgel … [s]he’d stir up strong winds or set the sea spewing by belting the sky and the earth. Her primary impetus wasn’t so much malevolence as a wish to agitate, to incite change - an awareness that things require an animating force.”
Source: Ali Isaac https://twitter.com/RubyFaesRealm/status/1620678633336750080
#Celtic#LegendaryWednesday: The legend of the #Cailleach, goddess of winter, can be found not only in #Ireland, but in #Scotland and the #IsleOfMan, too. She is associated with winter, and the creation of the landscape. The Cailleach displays several traits befitting the personification of winter: she herds deer, she fights spring, and her staff freezes the ground.
Source: Ali Isaac | Substack
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RT @KodingKitsune
The Cailleach, or “Veiled One,” was a Celtic goddess who ruled over the winds and winter. She is also known as as the Queen of Air and Darkness. She was a patron of animals especially wolves. She was neither good or evil in lore. #SuperstitiionSat
#MythologyMonday
After the Autumn Equinox, the Cailleach [a Gaelic deity of the winter months] may be seen washing the tartan cloth that she wears in a whirlpool - reputedly the Corryvreckan Maelstrom. Once the cloth is bleached white through washing, it becomes the snow blanket that covers the land until the spring - when, exhausted by her snow-creating exertions, the Cailleach goes into hibernation. @mythologymonday#Cailleach#CorryvreckanMaelstrom
In #Scotland Carlin, a name for the #Cailleach as a harvest divinity, was the name given to the spirit of #Samhain, the end of the harvest. The sheaf representing her was exhibited in the home to discourage #otherworldly visitors.
Source: P. Monaghan Encyclopedia of #Celtic #Mythology and #Folklore
RT @mageachain @placenamesni The last sheaf of the harvest was known as the cailleach, the granny, the churn... and in north Antrim and parts of Scotland as the carlin(g) (kerling)
„Probably because fine weather was so important during harvest time, the #Cailleach was seen as a weather spirit, sometimes called the old gloomy woman or envisioned as a crane with sticks in her beak which forecast storms.“
Source: P. Monaghan `Encyclopedia of #Celtic#Mythology and #folklore
RT @GodysseyPodcast
The Cailleach is the embodiment of winter itself, an old woman and witch who flies like a storm over Ireland and Scotland and wields a powerful hammer that can break trees during a cold snap. A trickster and almost certainly a goddess, she can bless too. #FairyTaleTuesday
#Celtic#MythologyMonday: „[T]he hag deity known as the #Cailleach takes human form at Samhain to rule the winter months, bringing in winds and wild weather. Her very steps change the land… she carries a hammer for forming valleys. A touch of her staff is enough to freeze the ground. [T]he Cailleach is thought to be the mother of the gods, the great cold originator of all things.” Katherine May - Wintering
Source: January | Welcome to H A G - by Ali Isaac - H A G (substack.com)
A roughly human-shaped figure constructed from straw at harvest time, the Corn Dolly/Maiden was often crafted from the last sheaf cut at harvest-time. Its origins are obscure but clearly mythic or ritual. In # Scottish and #Irish folklore The Dolly is associated with two figures of arguable antiquity: the #Cailleach or hag and #Brigit or the Bride, who may have been the hag’s maiden form. Often the Corn Dolly was stored in a house or barn from fall until spring, when it played a role in sowing or other rituals associated with new life.
Source: P. Monaghan Encyclopedia of #Celtic #Mythology and #Folklore
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RT @lorraineelizab6
In Scotland/#Ireland, the 1st farmer to finish the grain harvest made a corn dolly, representing the Cailleach (Queen of winter) from the last sheaf of crop. The last farmer had to care for it for the next year; so they'd have to feed/house the hag all winter! #SuperstitionSat 🌽
Nua-#CelticSoulJourney: On the Isle of Man the #Berrey Dhone (Brown Berry) lived either on top of North Barrule Mountain or inside it. Like other forms of the #Cailleach, this hag or witch was an Amazonian giant, and her rocky heelprint can still be seen on the mountainside.
Source: Ali Isaac #Celtic
Photocredits: 1. Neu-Kelte
#MythologyMonday: On the side of one hill of the #Loughcrew (Sliab na #Cailleach) complex is the Hag’s Chair. Atop that hill is a decorated cairn oriented to the sunrise on #spring and fall #Equinox.
Source: P. Monaghan Encyclopedia of #Celtic #Mythology and Folklore