folklore

The Fae Café

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 7 Comments

I had a really weird dream on Sunday morning where I was going for a hike with a group of people. We stopped at a café among some trees. One of the group looked askance at the pancakes, but he and another person ate them. It turned out that the café was an outpost of the Fae and the pancakes were faery food so they were now in thrall to the Queen of Elfhame. (Not a person who normally shows up in my dreams.) I lucid-dreamed my way back into the dream and rescued them by reciting the Old English Nine Herbs Charm (later I reflected that Wið fǣrstice — against elf shot — would’ve been a better choice).

This is a pretty good approximation of what the Queen of Elfhame looked like in my dream

The language of flowers

/ Yvonne Aburrow

Back in the day, people would send bouquets fraught with meaning. You could buy little handbooks with lists of the language of flowers, so you could anxiously decipher the bouquet sent to you. You’d better hope that you and the sender were using the same system, because some of these meanings are different than the ones on other lists… Thank goodness we have emojis nowadays!

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Anarchic Yule

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 9 Comments

Yule is a distinct festival, often overshadowed by its younger sibling, Christmas. If you’re a Pagan or have Pagan leanings, the chances are that everything you love about Christmas is actually because it’s a Yule thing. If you love the tree, the holly, the greenery being brought into the house, the feasting, and the reciprocity of thoughtful gift giving (as opposed to obligatory gift giving dictated by social norms), then you love Yule. Yule is not “Christmas with the serial numbers filed off”, and Christmas isn’t “Yule with added Baby Jesus”, Yule is far more exciting and wild and numinous than that.

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Books I read in December 2021

/ Yvonne Aburrow

This month has been an odd mixture. I finally finished Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals, which I started in November. And I read Rewards and Fairies which is quite a melancholy book. I also finally got hold of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows in book form, for which I’ve been waiting for a long time, but it’s more of a dipping book. I read Esmond in India and found it a bit depressing. Then I read a collection of interviews with Ursula K Le Guin.

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Celtic festival names

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 7 Comments

Some time back I posted a video about cultural appropriation and Lora O’Brien pointed out that the modern Wiccan and Pagan usage of Sabbat names is appropriated from Irish culture and language.

Gerald Gardner and other early Wiccans did not use the Irish names for these festivals — that happened later. Wicca is not a Celtic religion.

It does seem wrong to lift these festivals out of context. There are other old names for these festivals in England and Wales (the Scots Gaelic has similar names to the Irish Gaelic, but pronounced differently).

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