Full Text:
ONCE AGAIN THE WORLD CRACKS OPEN AND AFTER THE SENSATION WE FEAR FOR A MOMENT THAT SPRING MAY NOT COME SO WE PLEAD TO THE SEASON FOR DEEP DOWN WE TRULY BELIEVE THE PLANET IS LISTENING.
Imbolc is a time to think ahead, to clear the pathways to our desires and ambitions for the year. It is a celebration that is intrinsically woven with the divine figure of Brigid who not only offers blessings on a successful year of producing and growing, but also brings safety to your home and the loved ones it houses. It is a reasonably domestic celebration, centred around spring cleaning, and making offerings to leave at the door or the window.
It can leak out into the streets, and in some small towns in Co Kerry they still pass folk through Brigid’s Belt to cleanse them of the things they wish to leave behind and to bring good fortune for the coming year. But, as with any marker that asks you to project into the future, the present and past also sing. Balancing in harmony the resounding chord that ties together our human concept of time in order to let us move through the world.
To imagine things to come you must check in with yourself in the present. Feel your weight, your breath, take note of the things that ache, the things that need more love and the things that need to go. You must also look back, at the hurts the grief and the regrets that you would like to put away and at the lessons you should learn to carry forward.
Like many folk last year, I did a lot of looking back. At the empty spaces left everywhere in a year we all had to grind to a halt. It was a year of so many endings and the collective grief that has been gathering behind the closed doors of the nation is so palpable it seems to have grown a taste. It will be our job as artists to help process all of this.
My way of dealing with change has so often been to look back beyond the confines of my own lifetime. I’m drawn by resonant old stories that chime with me so deeply they make my bones sing. Grown into the mythology of my own body are characters I have invoked and evoked.
I have invoked and evoked tales from the Mabinigion, where ancient memories are housed in the transformative poesis of a far older understanding of the world. From Viking sagas where characters that only break into the record for a page, steal my imagination and curiosity away from the kings whose deeds have turned these accounts into tomes. From the things left unsaid and untold in historical records, particularly those pertaining to the persecution of women from the locale of my birth, like the Essex Witches. Women persecuted pre and post the terrible scourge of the self proclaimed Witchfinder General.
The one that has really settled in is Boudicca. Reduced to icon status as a ‘patriotic’ dissident, cast lifeless in the bronze stasis of a Victorian ideal fixed to stare up the Thames, forever blistering hot as a vengeful warrior queen. She slips inside my skin with ease to explore more daily ways of being, taking as many nuances, regaining as much humanity as she can. I wilfully share my flesh.
These stories and characters have survived so long precisely because they possess so much wisdom about how people navigate in times of change. But many contemporary readers, listeners, spectators, are only caught in the web of their knowledge for a moment before wriggling free. I suppose it is far easier to consign them to excitements and entertainments than to carry the weight and responsibility of learning with them. After all, these stories are so old humanity must have progressed beyond their lessons?
But we have not. There is always something to be learned by holding a conversation with these ancients. I refuse to put them down so easily.
And so,
Boudicca lights a candle in the window for Cartimandua
Whose tribe carried Brigid over to Ireland
A perpetual flame for 20 candles
Homage to the church of the oak tree
And something older
I cannot talk of Imbolc without talking of Brigid. And I cannot talk of Brigid without talking about Ireland. And I cannot register any reference to that island without thinking of one of my closest friends, a friend who has also connected with, and channelled the story of, an ancient celtic queen. Cartimandua. of the Brigantes tribe.
The name Brigantes refers to the goddess, the entity of Brigid. So it is not too great a conjecture to think that at the turning of the season away from winter each year Boudicca too would have thought of Brigid and perhaps even invited her into her own home.
Now Cartimandua and Boudicca were roughly contemporaneous but, where Boudicca is well documented as a rebel raging against the roman state, Cartimandua looks to have been reluctant to rock the boat. I am sure they would have known of one another but it is a leap too far to imagine that they would have been friends in their own lifetimes.
However, they both bear the same fate of having been passed down through his/story without any real agency in the telling of their own stories. They have both been contorted and distilled into clumsy symbols that rob them of their own humanity. This has been happening since they were written into being by Roman historians and was really blown up by the Victorians to celebrate their own queen. They have both been used to serve purpose as patriotic emblems of state or effigies of Britishness that that evoke romantic or fierce ideals of womanhood that are essentially still pinned to the expectations of men and impossible to live up to.
So in my imagination they now get on like a house on fire, pardon the pun.
And I like to buy into these synchronicites. The connection between my self and treasured friend, between the two celtic queens and their relationship with each of us. They form comforting connections that knit the foundations of my worldview together, that allow me to make the creative links, leaps and flourishes that feed a well-told story. And a story well told may live with the people that hear it for long enough to pass on some grain of truth or usefulness.
Returning to Brigid now and this homage to the Church of the Oak Tree. The story goes that the worship, the imaginative spirit, of Brigid was carried over the Irish sea by the Brigantes, way back when.
The Church of the Oak Tree in Kildare was one of the oldest Christian ‘monasteries’ established in Ireland and the town has taken its name from it.
It was connected to Brigid by one of the 20 women who established and then ran this hallowed place. She took on the name when she took up her habit and the church she belonged to gathered great fame. She is lauded for having such a great faith in god that she wilfully gave up her highly regarded looks to persuade her reluctant father to give her up to the church rather than conforming to her place as an asset to be married off.
The women of the church kept a perpetual flame running, each of them keeping vigil in turn and so things went. After Brigid’s death she was sainted. The 20 became 19 and, at a loss for what else to do, they still left her a turn to watch over the flame. Their faith was rewarded and she always kept it safe even from beyond the grave. The 19 then stayed 19, and so it went for centuries.
Since then she has become a symbol of the light, a symbol of nurturing hope and new growth. She has been celebrated as a guardian and invited to care for the dairy herds that sustained so many folk, for entire towns of people and for each of their precious homes. Enticed by offerings of milk at Imbolc and kept close with her eponymous cross, woven from reeds and hung as a talisman at the portals of the house.
She has become fully entwined with the idea of spring and has been appealed to by maidens with offerings of ribbons tied to the door in the hope that she might herald love in that year, as well as the new season.
I like that she has transformed into story but kept so many facets of personality and self that other women from history have been denied. I like that the name of the church there has a druidic ring to it. I like that the offerings made might also work for them as might wish to please the Fair Folk, and that the idea of the perpetual flame correlates with the fires that the oracles of old also nursed.
I like that she holds a space for feminine energy to gather and the chance to celebrate the power for transformation and change that womxn hold in their very being. I like that she offers an excuse to make space for new things, to open a pathway for hope
She spring cleans
And weaves with words and limbs and hopeful dreams for the spring
She is carried to a small rocky cove
Looking over the seas
Toward another shore
Where a soulmate sits knitting by the fire
And it is important that we are invited to perform this invitation, this marking of the season, with the use of ritual actions. It is important that we are allowed to take ownership of these rituals.
Long ago those observances imbued with the most power were so often elevated beyond the peripheries of individual attendance, say for communal ritual actions absorbed into public religious rites. Or they might be belittled as trinkets or oddities of tradition and pedalled out as small entertainments, reductionist distillations of cultural difference cloaked in the intent to educate or inspire.
But digging just a little deeper and selfishly following or interpreting these sorts ritual actions for our own celebrations and needs can be very powerful. When done with respect and invested with intention these sorts of ritual actions can force us to be really present, in the moment and in our own bodies. Additionally they ask us to be present in our own imaginations. In a world where we can so readily choose to consume fantasies and conjectures prescribed and created outside of our selves it seems worthwhile to grab any opportunity that might return us to the practice of flexing our own imagination.
We lead daily lives that extract us from the bodily experience, especially at this time of crisis when we have become so digitally reliant. We project disembodied versions of our selves out into the ether in a quest for connection that feeds us with dopamine from moment to moment but leaves us feeling physically bereft. If we must live in this dissociative this way then no wonder the impulse to perform radical acts of self-care is visibly on the rise.
These rituals can serve that need for introspective nurture and ground us back in our own skins. And this inward gaze offers us time to assess and attend to so many of the things that we can procrastinate over or push to aside for later. It is worth noting that the spiritual pressure in place to practice self-care, to be spiritually aware, to be purposefully present, can also be very overwhelming.
Ritual actions can also be meditative, offering a way to carve out time to switch off; from the weight of daily worry, from the pressure to figure out your needs, and the pressure to succeed in achieving your identified goals. Repetitive actions, like the weaving of reeds into a Brigid’s Cross, can be just as levelling as knitting by the fire. And I am convinced that this trance like state of focussed calm can seep into the warp and weft. Perhaps this is where their power as a talisman really lies and why they are so fondly hung above the door.
Finally, by inviting spring into our homes in this controlled way we can express the embracing of inevitable change whilst protecting and honouring the comforting stronghold of mundanity that the places we truly inhabit offer. It is the quiet reliability of our homes that allows us to feel safe. What we are really asking for with any appeal to bless these spaces, is that we can hold them in a pattern of routine that keeps the integrity of these safe spaces intact. So that we can continue to feel that at least here, in our homes, we have control of our lives.
So our homes are the space where we might also hold the most agency we ever have available to us. This openness to inviting something in is a brave action performed in the hope that by doing so we might be allowed to maintain the illusion of control a little longer. And the agency we hold in our own little sanctuaries allows us to navigate the changes that disrupt our day-to-day experience of life in our own time. It allows us to decide if, when, and how we want to change, and to identify what we can bring to the table should we want to extend these transformations beyond the threshold and out into the larger environment.
So this is the story of Imbolc I am choosing to tell. It is the underpinning of the work I have made to offer up to the season. I send it all out in to the world and, as it is all I really have in my power to do, I wait to see what returns from leaving the offering out. To the elements, to the Goddess, and to you.
