Category: Folk Tales
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Ancient Irish Star Lore: The Pleiades, Fairies and the Ancestral Dead
All art by Samuel Palmer “Things don’t always look as they seem. Some stars, for example, look like bright pinholes, but when you get them pegged under a microscope you find you’re looking at a globular cluster—a million stars that, to us, presents as a single entity.” Jodi Picoult When it comes to ancient Ireland,…
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Into the Summerlands: The Afterlife of Fairies
All art by Aubrey Vincent Beardsley “The world is filled with invisible realities.” William Segal One belief of those we call the Celts was that when a person dies in this world they are reborn in the Otherworld. Likewise, when a person dies in the Otherworld they are reborn in this one. There are of…
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Fairy Paths and Ghost Roads
All art by Eugène Grasset “Down the hill I went, and then,I forgot the ways of men,For night-scents, heady and damp and coolWakened ecstasy ” Sara Teasdale A few posts back I wrote about the secret fairy-paths of the air, and how a person might inadvertently get whisked away being caught up in the fairy…
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The Secret Fairy Paths of the Air
All art by Don Blanding “There are no happy endings… There are no endings, happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories which are just part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others stories – perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years…
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Ireland’s First Witch Burning: Petronilla de Meath
Cover art by dawndraphoto.com There is a famous Jonathan Swift quote about how the law impacts upon the rich and poor in unequal measure which reads… “Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but lets wasps and hornets break through.” This interpretation was certainly the case three centuries earlier when Irish law decreed…