Out of all the different areas of study that can help inform Gaelic Polytheist belief and practice, it’s these ‘folk’ customs and survivals that make up the most obvious or visible sources of information that we tend to draw on. This is (arguably) because they can offer us the most tangible and direct, but also the most relevant link to the pre-Christian past, and so they could be thought of as offering us a more ‘authentic’ idea of how we might be able to express the various elements and aspects of pagan or ‘traditional’ practice in a modern context.
In other words, because they represent practices that have somehow managed to survive from the pre-Christian period all the way up to the present day, in some form or manner, they may be more relevant to us. As modern expressions – or perhaps echoes – of a pre-Christian practice, it would seem fair to assume that the survivals will already fit in neatly with our modern circumstances and our everyday lives. We might find it’s easier to connect with or understand these practices, precisely because of the fact that they offer us a contemporary link with the distant past. Even if they’ve been Christianised, these survivals will probably still fit in neatly with our modern view of the world, and our modern circumstances, and so they might also be easier for us to adopt – without the need for any, or too many drastic changes.
The same might be said of practices that are well documented, but may have only recently died out in the past century or so. We might not be able to qualify them as survivals in the literal sense, but they have survived in some form, at least, even if that’s only on paper. Whatever we call these kinds of practices, in some cases we might be able to revive them. They might need a little bit more work, or more adaptations, to make them workable, but it’s often still a much easier process, with less guesswork involved.
There are a whole range of survivals we might talk about here, and these include practices such as observing ‘sunwise’ (deiseil) movements, the importance of liminal (‘in-between’) times, places, or even stances; traditions surrounding the making of offerings at certain times or places, to certain beings; and the celebration (and even the very names) of the four main festivals in the Gaelic calendar. We can point to survivals in belief, too, including cosmological concepts like the three realms of land, sea, and sky; and of course the myths and local legends that have survived might preserve genuine pre-Christian elements, which may reflect truly ancient beliefs and attitudes relating to the gods, or – at the very least – may reflect a direct evolution of those beliefs. The list goes on and there’s a lot we could cover here, but for the sake of brevity, and trying to stick to the ‘basics,’ we’ll be limiting ourselves to a few examples in the rest of this section.
In each of these examples we have evidence for them spanning pretty much the entire range of approaches we have at our disposal – from the Comparative Studies, the Linguistics and the Archaeology that can help in painting a bit of background, right through to the Historical Sources and the Folklore and Folk Survivals that can help bring the foreground into focus. We have to be careful here, though. We have to remember that just because something might seem or ‘feel’ pagan, that doesn’t make it so.
The practice of carving pumpkins or even turnip lanterns at Samhain is a case in point here: the lanterns, with their fearsome faces, might seem evocative, harking back to a bygone era – they might feel pagan in their origins (and are often claimed to be), but we don’t actually know how old the practice is. The best we can say is that neither pumpkins nor turnips (rutabaga/swede/yellow turnips) are native to Ireland, Scotland, or the Isle of Man – pumpkins come from the New World, while turnips were introduced in the seventeenth century – and although both of these vegetables could, perhaps, represent more modern adaptations of a much older practice, there’s not a whole lot of evidence that can really prove anything one way or another.
The same can be said of something like guising at Samhain as well – and its modern, American counterpart, trick-or-treating. We don’t know how old this practice is, either, except to say that the principles behind them do seem pretty damn ancient. The point here, however, is not to say that we should be purists, and that we should eschew any hint of modern or relatively recent traditions in favour of only the things that are provably pagan in origin – we’d have barely anything to go on if we did. The point is that we should be honest about what things are, and where they come from. Some things might not be survivals, but they are still folk customs that are a part and parcel of tradition now, and that’s OK. They still speak to the truth we’re ultimately searching for.
This mention of guising and how the underlying principles of the practice do seem ancient brings us on to another point: We might find certain beliefs and practices that contain certain ‘ancient’ elements or principles, but that doesn’t automatically make the specific belief or practice we’re talking about an inherently pre-Christian practice. We have a lot of prayers that reference cosmological concepts, for example, and in some cases they even mention or call upon gods (like Manannán) – referencing a range of concepts or beings who are obviously pagan in origin, despite the fact that the prayers themselves were recorded as late as the nineteenth or twentieth century. The prayers might seem rather pagan in feel, because they contain these elements, but this doesn’t mean the prayers themselves must, therefore, represent compositions that are thousands of years old. They have simply made use of motifs or concepts that have survived.
Of course, when it comes to some survivals – like the gods themselves – the traditions surrounding them aren’t static. Tradition might treat them as fallen angels, fairy beings who live in the hills, demons, or mortals from the past who had supernatural powers, more than it might treat them as gods. In their existence as fallen angels, or fairies, or whatever else they might be claimed to be, their stories have evolved and grown. Those stories and the beliefs and practices that have come to be attached to so many of the gods have still (arguably) grown out of those pagan roots, by virtue of the fact that the traditions have continued to grow around them; they have a life far beyond the time in which they were venerated as gods, and we can hardly discount the entire body of tradition that’s grown around them since Christianity arrived. To do so would leave us – again – with basically nothing.
The more recent folklore, then, is part of a much larger continuum. It may not be ‘pure’ in the pagan sense, but there’s a core truth to it, and it’s that core truth that speaks to us. It’s that core truth that we want to build on; to nurture and grow. What we end up with here isn’t going to be ancient – we do need to be clear that what we’re doing is a modern expression of something much older, and that’s not a bad thing. By the very definition of Gaelic Polytheism, what we end up with today is never going to be identical to how things once were, back in the Iron Age, because that simply isn’t what we’re striving for in the first place. What matters is that our beliefs and practices should be in some way rooted in that distant past, while they speak to the present, and this is just one of the many reasons that looking to the folklore, the folk customs, and the survivals can be so important to us: It helps us bridge the past and the present.
Eòlas 