In order for us to really appreciate the value and meaning of modern folklore and folk practice, it really does help to have a basic grasp of the history and the culture they exist in. If we don’t, we can’t really fully appreciate or understand what’s going on. This is pretty much why this section comes last – after all the archaeology, the history, the linguistics, and the comparative studies – because it’s only once we’ve got to grips with those that we can truly understand where the folklore and folk survivals came from. Combined, they provide a foundation for us to build on in the present.
For example, a recurring theme in Gaelic tradition – in ‘folk practice,’ as some people might call it (although those kinds of labels can make it all seem patronisingly quaint, in a rather ‘backwards’ sort of way) – is the importance of protecting oneself from all kinds of dangers, both seen and unseen. These dangers are especially prominent at liminal or transitional moments – at the beginning or end of the day, at the festivals (which mark the changing of the seasons), or at important, life changing moments such as the usual births, deaths, and marriages, but also things like moving home, going on a journey, even starting a new job. These are all threshold moments, filled with potential, where danger or disaster lurks around the edges as an ever-present threat. The rites of protection that are a part and parcel of how we navigate these moments are intended to help smooth the way, and ensure the best possible outcomes, and this is something we see from the very oldest sources we have to hand, right up to the present day.
Gaelic Polytheists often refer to these protective rites and practices as saining, which is word that’s historically attested in both English and Scots (Scots being a language that evolved out of a northern dialect of Middle English, so ‘saining’ basically came with it).1 As words go, however, saining can be a bit difficult to define. This is partly because it has a slightly different definition in English dictionaries than it does in Scots dictionaries (where the latter offers a much wider range of definitions, that are frankly far more relevant to what we’re talking about here), which can be a bit confusing. This confusion is then compounded by the fact the term is rarely defined in a consistent manner in the kind of resources you might find online, which is probably, ultimately, a symptom of the fuzzy way in which the word is defined in the kind of sources they’re drawing on.2
To explain, then: Saining originally referred to the act of signing oneself with the cross, which could be done for a variety of reasons – for protection, yes, but also as an act of consecration or blessing, for example. The English definition for saining has stayed close to this original meaning, while in Scots things have become a bit more nuanced and wide-ranging. First and foremost, saining in Scots can be given to mean, ‘to bless; to protect from harm or evil by a ritual sign or act, esp. by making the sign of the cross, to consecrate, hallow,’ but it can also encompass a sense of, ‘to exorcise bad luck from oneself, to protect one’s self from harm by prayer, incantation or the like,’ and it may also refer to the act of absolving or forgiving someone, to wish them well, or to make a gesture of good will (which can serve as a method of breaking a spell, or counteracting witchcraft), or ‘to exclaim or pray for the welfare or prosperity of, esp. as a sign of gratitude.’3
Looking closely here, these definitions essentially tell us that the concept of saining is founded upon three main cornerstones, encompassing matters of protection, purification, and blessing, all rolled into one neat package, which can be visualised like this:
Each of these three main elements are all fundamental to the practice of saining in some way, although depending on the specific circumstances one of these elements may be more pronounced than the others, offering a primary focus. Based on what we can see from the rites and traditions that have been recorded, or have survived up to the present day, saining pretty much always comes back to being a matter of protection: Protection is the ultimate aim and (hoped for) outcome, and this may be achieved through the performance of a blessing, or through purification, and so on. This is why ‘protection’ is placed at the top of the triangle, while the other two form the foundation, so to speak.
According to the traditions that have been recorded, or that have survived in folk practice, the act of saining can be something as simple as offering a blessing to someone when they sneeze (in Gaelic, people might say deiseil). Saining can take the form of praying for blessing and protection (where the protection ultimately is a blessing) as part of a daily routine of practice, or performing more involved rites that rely on the need to specially procure certain items – collecting a special type of water, obtained from a ‘dead and living stream,’ for example, or going out late at night to gather juniper (which may then be burnt inside the home, in the barn and byre, and in front of/around the livestock).4 In both examples here, these act of collecting of the water or juniper are just as ritualised as the ceremonies in which they are then used. The water or the juniper can only be effective if these rituals are observed.
In a more general sense, a large part of these protective practices may be centred around the fashioning of specially-made charms, which are often meant to be made at certain times of the year, or during certain life events, perhaps. The charms may then be hung up around the home, or even sewn into the clothes of the person (or people) most in need of protection, or we might find them tied to an animal’s tail or hung up in the dairy or byre, usually above the threshold. The charms themselves are often made from simple materials that are readily available, like red or blue threads, which may be tied into a cow’s tail (to protect it from being harmed by witches, or to prevent its milk from being magically stolen),5 special herbs or (again) pieces of wood that may be collected in a ritualised manner, and then sewn into the hem of a child’s clothing, or secured in the armpit,6 or a cross made from twigs of rowan that are tied together with red thread (traditionally made at Beltaine), which may then be hung up above the main threshold of the home to protect it from various supernatural dangers in the coming year.7 We could also include the fashioning of the cros Bríde (‘Brigid’s cross’) at Imbolc, as well – a special cross that may be woven from freshly collected rushes, from straw, or other materials that might be available, which is then hung up in the home, as a special prayer is said, to protect the house against fire and (again) more supernatural, otherworldly dangers.8
All of these examples are fairly simple, and they might even seem to be rather ‘pagan’ in feel, but our evidence for them mostly comes from sources that are relatively modern – we rarely find any written references to the charms we may be most familiar with from before the sixteenth or seventeenth century. For example, because of its associations with Brigit – widely believed to be a pagan goddess as much as a Christian saint (though how the two might relate to one another, if they do at all, is still hotly debated) – the cros Bríde has been enthusiastically embraced as part of Gaelic Polytheist practice, not least for the fact that Brigit has such a strong connection to a festival that’s clearly pagan in origin (i.e. Imbolc, one of the core festivals in our seasonal calendar, which falls on February 1). At best, however, the evidence for these crosses doesn’t go back much further than the seventeenth century, when a chaplain by the name of George Story wrote about them in 1689.9 Despite this, Thomas Mason, who published an in-depth study on the different types of cross, and the traditions associated with them, insisted that:
‘I think the evidence points to the fact that not merely the crosses but the whole ceremony is a Christianized version of a pre-Christian custom… It is a curious mixture of non-Christian charms or magic combined with Christian beliefs and legends.’10
While a number of writers have agreed with Mason on this point (suggesting, in particular, that the ‘swastika’ style of the cross could well point to Indo-European roots),11 we just don’t know for sure.
Taking the evidence purely at face value, the ‘safest’ conclusion here would be to suppose that since there’s no evidence for these charms from before the seventeenth century or so, then they aren’t likely to have originated much earlier than that. We might suppose, seeing as they’re referenced in a way that would suggest they’re a widely established tradition, that they’ve been around for a good hundred years or so, at the least. Assuming this is correct, that obviously means we couldn’t call the cros Bríde a ‘survival’ in the most direct sense of the word.
At the same time, however, these kinds of customs just aren’t the sort of thing that our early medieval monks wrote about while they were tucked away in their cosy little scriptoria, as they jotted down genealogies, legal tracts, poems, myths, or annals, and whatever else. So it could just be that we don’t see them being talked about in the historical record until a fairly late date – when it so happens that we start to find a broader range of subjects being written about in general. We also have to consider the fact that these kinds of charms aren’t the sort of thing that will be extremely obvious in the archaeological record, either. On the one hand, due to the very nature of the materials used, they don’t tend to survive for very long (in archaeological terms); on the other hand, even if they did somehow survive, their significance or purpose isn’t necessarily going to be especially obvious (and they’d probably end up squished and broken), as Aidan O’Sullivan has noted, and so we might not appreciate what we’re seeing.12 This brings us to the old chestnut – an absence of evidence is not (necessarily) evidence of absence.
We talked about some examples of these talismans and amulets in the Archaeology section, referencing the finds of Neolithic flints or axes in close proximity to (often underneath) the hearth in domestic settlement sites that have been dated to as early as the Iron Age, into the medieval period and beyond. It’s believed that at least some of these flints may have served a protective purpose, and this interpretation is partly based on more recent folklore where these flints (or ‘elf shot’) were often carried around or placed in milk pails or butter churns for much the same reason. More to the point, however, it’s the fact that these finds are located in positions that would suggest a ‘magical’ purpose rather than a purely practical one, mainly because if they’re buried under the hearth, secreted in the walls or foundations, or secured in the rafters, then they’re hardly going to be accessible for daily use. They don’t offer any structural benefit, either, so a ‘magical’ or ‘ritual’ explanation seems most likely. Looking at the evidence from an Indo-European perspective – or a universal one, even – we can see that protective charms are a hugely important practice in just about every culture. To think the pre-Christian Gaels wouldn’t have done the same would be truly remarkable.13
On the whole, then, even if the protective charms that have come to us today – the cros Bríde (Irish: ‘Brigid’s cross’), the crois-chaorainn (Gaelic: ‘rowan cross’), or the specially procured herbs or twigs that were then hung up or sewn into clothes – aren’t all that old, they could still be seen as part of a broader pattern of belief, and an expression of a truly ancient kind of practice. As the flints or axes suggest, and as the arguments surrounding the tradition of the cros Bríde may also point towards, the use of protective charms does seem to be genuinely ancient, and we could argue that even if these charms don’t have an especially ancient pedigree in their own right, they’re still part of a broader continuum of belief and practice. In that respect, it could be argued that they do represent a survival in practice, in a very general sense, at least.
References
1 ‘Sain.’ Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary.
2 Cf. K. Price NicDhàna et al, The CR FAQ: An Introduction to Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism (Leverett, 2007), 183.
‘Saining is a Scots word for blessing, protecting or consecrating.’ From ‘Saining’ on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saining).
‘Sain, sian or seun is a practice that is intended to bestow protection onto an object, a place or a person in order to ward away evil influences or intent.’ From ‘Saining’ on Tairis.
‘Saining is the Scottish Folk magic act of purification.’ From ‘Saining Not Smudging — Purification and Lustration in Scottish Folk Magic Practice’ on Cailleach’s Herbarium.
3 ‘Sain v., n.’ Dictionary of the Scots Language (2004).
Although not a Goidelic term (Scots is a Germanic language), ‘saining’ perfectly encapsulates the way in which the protective rites or actions it describes are fundamentally reliant upon blessings. Linguistically speaking, ‘saining’ is cognate with the Old Irish sén (meaning ‘a sign; omen, augury, portent,’ but also ‘a charm, incantation,’ or ‘a favourable sign, a blessing; good luck, success, prosperity, happiness’), and the English sign, from the Latin signum. We don’t tend to use the Old Irish sén, or any of its modern equivalents in the Gaelic languages today, because saining offers a more nuanced meaning here, which perfectly encapsulates everything we’re talking about here. To a degree, ‘saining’ is also an easier label to use, because it doesn’t require an understanding of a Gaelic language, making things a little bit more accessible to beginners or casual readers.
See: eDIL s.v. 1 sén or dil.ie/37092
4 In talking about Yuletide celebrations in Shetland, F. Marian McNeill noted that saining was an important part of the traditions. Going on to explain what saining meant, she added, ‘To sain meant originally to sign the goblet, before drinking, with the sign of Thor’s hammer; later the sign of the cross was substituted.’ Really, though, the ‘sign of Thor’s hammer’ pretty much is the sign of the cross, so there’s hardly much of a difference here. There’s a slight whiff of McNeill deliberately amping up the pagan overtones to all of this, but either way this doesn’t have much to do with specifically Gaelic practices.
F. M. McNeill, The Silver Bough Volume Three: A Calendar of Scottish National Festivals: Hallowe’en to Yule (1961), 113; 131; F. M. McNeill, The Silver Bough Volume One (1957), 80-1; W. G. Stewart, The Popular Superstitions, &c. of the Highlanders of Scotland (1823), 249-254;
5 Ronald Black, The Gaelic Otherworld (2005), 557.
6 Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica: Hymns and Incantations Volume II (1900), 96-97.
7 Ronald Black, The Gaelic Otherworld (2005), 431-432; 553.
8 Seán Ó Duinn, The Rites of Brigid: Goddess and Saint (2005), 121-135.
9 Though as John O’Sullivan notes, Story said they were made at Corpus Christi, which comes some months after Imbolc. O’Sullivan is of the opinion that Story was just mistaken on that point; everything else fits. O’Sullivan, ‘St Brigid’s Crosses,’ in Folk Life 11:1 (1973), 62.
10 Thomas H. Mason, ‘St. Brigid’s Crosses,’ in The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 75:3 (1945), 166.
11 Seán Ó Duinn, The Rites of Brigid: Goddess and Saint (2005), 121-135; E. Estyn Evans, Irish Folk Ways (1957), 215-216; 268-269.
12 In particular, consider these observations from Aidan O’Sullivan:
‘If archaeology is the discipline of things, exploring how people interacted with each other through material culture, we might ask then, how might we identify magical amulets and talismans in the archaeological record? In modern Irish folklore,such objects could variously be pieces of metal,some string tied into a particular knot, a horseshoe, a twig of rowan-wood, rags, and pebbles (Evans 1957, 303–06). We can imagine how difficult the task is for archaeologists to identify amulets or talismans in the past, when we think about how such objects or substances could have been perceived to have magical properties, but might be utterly indistinguishable for us from the surrounding material culture. In some early Irish sources, there are references to the dlaí fulla or ‘magic wisp’ of grass, and more recently iron was often used toward off bad luck. How would an archaeologist identify a handful of grass, or an oxidised lump of iron, as a magical item?’
Aidan O’Sullivan, ‘Magic in Early Medieval Ireland: Some Observations from Archaeological Evidence,’ in Ulster Journal of Archaeology 74 (2017-2018), 109.
13 Aidan O’Sullivan, ‘Magic in Early Medieval Ireland: Some Observations from Archaeological Evidence,’ in Ulster Journal of Archaeology 74 (2017-2018), 113-114.
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