Yes, this is a reboot of Dewognatos. Again. Call me Arrin! Male pronouns. Gaulish Reconstructionst Polytheist. Geek in All things. Private replies and follows will come from my RP Blog. Expect pagan stuff, art, fandom, Skyrim modding, music,...
Oh hey I guess this blog is active again. XD This blog is not actually active again, just to warn you all. I’m keeping it as a sideblog, which is where I thought that post was to! I hope you all are having wonderful days.
Do you happen to have any links for specifically Brythonic Celt information? Having a little difficulty sorting through which things belong to which Celtic beliefs
I don’t use a lot of online resources, since those tend to be dodgy in the extreme haha. But I can recommend some books! You may be able to get these through the library, or a university library network if you have access to that. Some of them are easily found on Amazon and Ebay too.
Some sites:
So Brythonic gets a little wishy-washy in terms of definition because sometimes you are talking about Welsh mythology and sometimes you are talking about Iron Age Brittonic religion. Linguistically, though, Welsh developed out of Gallo-Brittonic, something that’s really obvious when you look at names changing over centuries. When most people talk about Brythonic religion they’re talking about Welsh mythology and looking back to Brittonic Iron Age religion as a filter to figure out what religion would have been like in earlier time periods than the Mabinogion dates to. I recommend this site and this site on the Mabinogion because it gives nice historical analyses of what political stuff was going on at the time to inspire the stories, that helps in sorting out what’s what.
Tacitus wrote about the Britons in Agricola, and I find it’s generally always best to go to those sources and read them, because a lot of books will talk about these quotes assuming that you know the original context. Lots of information. Caesar’s account when he briefly tries to invade Britain (Chapters 12-14 unless tactics are your thing in which case keep reading) in the Gallic War gives a little bit of information too, but as always, take with a grain of salt. Something to keep in mind with Roman writers is that they were always pushing some kind of propaganda for a war machine when writing about their enemies, and most Roman writers actually did not visit the places they wrote about and were relying on hearsay. So take everything with a healthy heaping of salt. For example, all that stuff talking about how the Britons had tattoos? All of it just quoting a single line from Caesar, which may equally be translated as “All the Britons decorate themselves in blue glass” which was, in fact, an archaeologically attested fashion, since blue bangles and blue enamel was popular in Britain. And nowhere does he actually mention woad! It’s something added into a lot of translations but isn’t there in the actua Latin. So yeah, use your own judgment, proceed with caution. There are definitely other writers talking about Britain, but I don’t know them as well unfortunately. :/
Finally, this lovely webpage has a dropdown which will let you check if a god or goddess is attested in Britain or not. This is a big help in sorting out if someone is relying on Pan-Celticism or not when they say a god was worshiped in a specific pantheon. I find Wikipedia is not terrible at talking about deities, so long as you also check out the sources at the bottom. The best site for this no longer exists sadly. :c
And some books:
Pagan Celtic Britain by Anne Ross is the de facto Brythonic Celtic religion book, as far as I know. I hear only good things about it, though I’m still working on reading through it. (Gaul is my focus so I’m more help there than here haha.)
The Ancient Celts by Barry Cunliffe and The Celts by Simon James are great general overview books, just be wary of Pan-Celticisim. That’s the notion that all Celtic cultures are the same, that there’s just one Celtic culture and one Celtic religion, and that isn’t true. A lot of myths about the ancient Britons start because someone took something from Gaul and said it applied to Britain. (Examples of that I can think of: 1. They fought naked! [Nope, a couple Gauls at the Battle of Telamon took off some clothing so they didn’t have to fight the underbrush and it got turned into semi-mythology by the Romans, most Britons and Gauls for that matter would have worn clothing or chainmail into battle], 2. The Britons had no kings and elected their leaders! [No, this is true of Gaul but not of Britain, in Britain they still had kings and queens over their tribes].) Anyway, Barry Cunliffe has written a lot about Iron Age Britain so if you can find more of his academic books, those are a safe bet. He does have some questionable theories though, and some of his books haven’t been updated since the ‘70′s, so it strays into the occasional Pan-Celticism.
War, Women and Druids by Philip Freeman is a nice primary source book of quotes by various contemporaries of the Gauls and Britons talking about them. Just be wary that he does not specify if he’s talking about Gauls or Britons, so pay attention to the blurbs in between the quotes to see who the quote refers to.
And the elephant in the room hahaha, Miranda Green. Miranda Green is a prominent writer about Iron Age Celtic religions and about Britain in particular. She’s a good writer, and her books make excellent reference, especially when looking for photo references of things. However, her analysis is... famously not very good scholarship. She jumps to conclusions and comes up with conclusions that aren’t actually attested in the evidence. Her books make great references, but be wary of any statements she makes about their meaning or about the culture. I think my favorite book of hers is A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology which is basically just purely reference. I recommend her books highly as reference and just because they’re well-written, but not if you’re just starting out, because they require a bit of legwork to sort out what’s fact and what’s a theory!
But yeah my focus is Gaul, so I will be much more help there!! I hope this is helpful. A really helpful thing too will be to go to the sources section on Wikipedia pages that interest you and click through or try to find the sources in whatever libraries you have access to. It’s a lot more accurate than just reading the Wikipedia page.
And a caveat: It has been such a long time since I kept up with this stuff. I’m a few years out of date. So there may be many great resources that I’m not currently aware of out there.
So I restarted my Wordpress blog! Go check it out! For some reason I can’t load my tumblr on my browser, but once I fix that I will start porting posts over.
Does anyone know any free resources focusing on Australia for people experiencing abuse? Especially emotional abuse and abuse at the hands of a partner, and preferably not religious. If anyone can help, I’ll be eternally grateful.
Spent a tiny amount on the Gaulish Polytheism FB today and feel soothed but also stressed. I wish I knew why I felt such a disconnect between me and the greater community, and why it was happening. I think it’s one part of why I have such trouble blogging anymore.
I think I am going to continue to use Tumblr to blog. It’s not a good medium for it, and my use of sideblogs this go-around means that I can’t adequately keep track of notes and replies and follow other people easily, but it’s the only platform I’m comfortable with for now. I’ll try to keep going on that 31 days of polytheism meme.
New research shows that modern human skeletons evolved into their lightly built form only relatively recently—after the start of the Holocene about 12,000 years ago and even more recently in some human populations. The work, based on high-resolution imaging of bone joints from modern humans and chimpanzees as well as from fossils of extinct human species shows that for millions of years extinct humans had high bone density until a dramatic decrease in recent modern humans.
Published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the findings reveal a higher decrease in the density of lower limbs than in that of the upper limbs, suggesting that the transformation may be linked to humans’ shift from a foraging lifestyle to a sedentary agricultural one. Read more.
20. Inspirations: Divination and/or Magic - Your divination practices, and your view on magic according to your path, as well as the various magical practices of your faith.
I’ve had this sitting in my drafts for a while, unpublished, because I was working on rewriting it with more citations and quotations and stuff. But since juts the Divination section of that has become a whole essay to itself, I’m going to publish this as it is instead.
I had to wait a while to write this one because it's just... so completely massive. I started off sort of scholarly and slowly descend into personal experience and my own practices. If anyone wants me to expound on anything here, just let me know, and I'll try to write a post on something more specifically. This post is likely not perfect, since I didn't take a great deal of time to edit it, but hopefully it gives an idea of how I do divination and magic.
Divination
First off, let's talk about divination. There are a few major forms of divination attested as being used in Gaul: necromantic seership via dreams received by sleeping on the graves of ancestors and heroes, the throwing or laying out of lots (possibly dice given that stick dice or long dice were used in Gaul) as attested by notes about days to "cast staves" and "lay down staves" on the Coligny Calendar, and auguries taken from sacrifices and observing the natural world (at heart a recognition of patterns) as pointed out in commentaries on the druids. There is also an anecdote where Diocletian receives prophecy about when he will become Emperor from a Gaulish druidess, but the method of prophecy isn't specified--however, if the druids of Gaul were anything like the druids of the Insular Celtic cultures, divinely-inspired poetry may be a valid speculation. The book I'm currently reading on Indo-European poetry supports this linguistically, with several words for "seer" and "poet" overlapping in the language branches Gaulish belongs to.
Necromancy in Gaul I've mentioned during writing about hero-worship, but at its heart it is, also, a method of divination. Gaulish funerals included people throwing letters to the dead on the funeral pyre - could it be these letters were meant to be answered? If so, that gives two methods of Gaulish necromancy: sleeping in graves or underground places (if the Iberian cult of Endouelicos has Gallic equivalents) and receiving dreams from the dead, or burning letters written to the dead and waiting for an answer. My best guess for how that answer would come is through observing the movement of the flame and smoke or through portents in dreams like the first form of necromancy. Dream portents were taken seriously in Gaul, and should probably be a part of a modern recon pagan's toolbox.
Use of stick dice, lots, or possibly some form of letter symbolism like runes or ogham, is attested in the Coligny Calendar, and remains a very accessible form of divination for modern pagans. Certain days are marked "prinni loudin" or "prinni laget" which mean, respectively, "play/toss/tangle staves" and "lay down staves". I have heard a few suggestions for just what these days indicate. I have a few books of varying quality on astrology in the Celtic Iron Age, one of which suggests that days marked prinni loudin were for dice-casting, and days marked prinni laget were used for divination based on boards or tables, using the Stanway Game and its ill-explained set of metal rods to explicate. Condeuios's article on dice divination suggests instead that prinni loudin meant a day was auspicious to cut and cast lots, whereas prinni laget days were inauspicious days where trees should be left alone. For method, I use a modified version of Condeuios's method, which is itself pulled from Tacitus's description of divination in Germania. Since the line between Gauls and Germans is blurrier than the Romans liked to admit, and Germanic languages have a lot of Gallic loan-words, I think this is a good source for the method of casting lots in Gaul. I have used stick dice, modern (Roman) dice, and also letter-based divinations based on Lepontic, runes, or ogham. The stick dice I use have sides of 3/4/5/6, though larger numbers are attested. For rune/letter divination I favor the Lepontic method I've come up with for myself, but I'm still in the process of developing that. I would personally love to try the board game based process in my astrology book, but it requires a knowledge of constellations that I don't quite possess yet, and is a lot of work.
Augury is by far the most common form of Gallic divination talked about in Classical sources, and is backed up through comparative lore with other Celtic cultures. The movement of birds is a common augury in Gaul, usually through observation of ravens, songbirds, or water-fowl. A specific method of Gaulish divination involves solving disputes by each member of the dispute laying down a cake for sacred ravens, whose reactions to the cakes will reveal the guilty or innocent parties. For a modern application, you might mark cakes with "yes" or "no" or with two different outcomes and leave these for birds, then see which cakes remain after a day or two; or learn bird-lore and watch the flight of birds to receive portents. Another common form of augury was sacrificing animals (and people) and divining from their death-throes and entrails. This is not a method I'd recommend for modern times, unless you own livestock and butcher your own meat. Finally, Classical writers discuss druids receiving portents from celestial phenomena, which could be the flight of birds, the movement of weather, or the constellations. I'm still researching this stuff, but it's possible that some form of Gaulish astrology existed, particularly in light of the constellations on the Magdalenenberg calendar. This form of divination would probably not have been accessible to your average person, but required the training of a druid. Still, it might not hurt to know your star-signs if astrology is something you're interested in, though Gallic astrology may not have been like the ones we have in modern times.
Magic
This is such a broad topic, I'm not sure where to begin. Common forms of magic in ancient Gaul that are attested include curse tablets, magical poetry, chants and incantations, the use of herbs, the use of talismans and ex voto images, and probably some form of battle-magic. Divination could also be called magic, but that's its whole section above.
The easiest form of Gallic magic to see is the use of inscriptions. Magical inscriptions in Gaul usually followed the same rules of magical poetry, though not all magical tablets were written in poetic metres. Ex voto tablets could be written in prose or poetry, and often took the form of binding magic. "So and so will have boils and pains until he returns the pin he stole" etc. They were commonly used in legal debates to try to assure a specific outcome. People in Gaul used poetic inscriptions to lay curses on those who might plunder their tombs, to heal the sick and elderly, and to bind together legal covenants under magical oaths. These tablets were inscribed in lead or similar metals and deposited into sacred springs and rivers--a method I do not recommend for modern use since lead is poisonous and littering is not a very good idea. A method that might work for modern curse tablets is to write on pieces of paper or inscribe messages into clay. As with most Gaulish sacrifices, ritually destroying the object might be a part of the magic, which makes doing the same to magical tablets functionally similar to the use of sigils in modern magic. Finally, the root for this form of magic--brixtom, in Gaulish--is related to Old Norse bragr and English brag. It is meant to attack or uplift the reputation of a person, and thus control their fate. There are specific poetic metres used for this form of poetry. Iambic tetrameter seems to have been a common choice, and can also be used mneumonically as with the metre that results when you say out loud the months of the Coligny Calendar. ("Memory" and "Poetry" are linked linguistically as well - so this all comes down to poetry again.) Magical incantations, songs, and poems were also used in oral magic. An example of this can be found in a Gallo-Roman medical tract which preserves a chant for Esus in regard to throat ailments. Presumably poetic forms and the singing or chanting of poetry was also important in casting magic. Much of ancient music uses the same five or six tones, and so the limited scale of the notes themselves could be modulated for magical purposes. This is stuff archaeology can't dig up, so you would have to rely on experimentation or modern folklore to figure out how to use this properly, but... For good examples it might be worth looking into your local places of worship that still use chanting as parts of the service. It might give an idea of how to use your voice in a religious or magical context.
Related to magical tablets, but without a poetic element, are the use of icons. This form of magic seems to be classic sympathetic magic, using an image of a thing to work magic on that thing. If you suffered an eye ailment, a leg ailment, a stomach ailment, in Gaul, you would make an image of that thing in wood or metal and deposit in your local sacred spring. It's possible these icons were buried as well, but I can't think of any examples off the top of my head--however, if you're appealing to the powers of the land to heal you, the earth is as valid as the waters for a method of communication. This could also be a form of exchange magic, giving images of body parts you might otherwise give in earnest from animal sacrifice or butchery to the anderoi in exchange for their gifts. Coins and glass beads, then, may fall into this category, as they were also given in temples and in hoards for the blessings of the gods. Magical smithing probably incorporated elements of poetic recitation and the creation of talismans and symbols--and magical smithing is a thing common to Celtic cultures in general--as the craftsman god is usually also a magician. I use talismans a lot in my personal magic, making sigils and amulets and charging them with repeated poems and chants. Much of this magic is geared towards healing or cursing, traditionally, but I can also see applications for daily use like study aids (ask for a clear mind!), travel (ask for your path to be directed!), etc. Repetition of three is an important formula both in ancient Gaulish magical poetry and in modern witchcraft, so often my spells are in sets of three requests or synonyms, or repetitions of the same line three times. Most of my spells are defensive in nature, since warding is easy and useful and doesn't require a crisis at hand to solve.
After this, I use a lot of folk magic. I tend to rely on folk magic from southern Britain in particular, since I notice a lot of similarities between that and the archaeology and reconstructed or surviving lore of Gaul. Herbal magic I don't necessarily consider to be "magic." Herbs are medicine. I make a lot of herbal tea since I am small and sensitive to most medicine, and herbal tea is a milder supplement to it that sometimes produces better results for my body type and chemistry. For their magical meanings I pull from folklore or from alchemical symbolism and meanings. I'm not sure I count this as magic. I also try to use rune magic, though I prefer to use Lepontic with meanings pulled from Germanic runes and Ogham, since the others tend to be used specifically for Germanic and Gaelic contexts (though I can honestly see them applying fairly easily to Gaulish). I may also use color symbolism. Not much of this is based on archaeology purely, but the symbols may be anthropologically or culturally significant. Number is also important to me, but is something that would be better suited to its own post or post series.
In General
Here are some guiding principles of magic in a Gaulish context:
Magical poetry forms the basis of magic; spoken word and rhythm and repetition are important
Three and multiples of three are important formulas for magical ritual and incantations
Exchange is important; this is the principle behind using representative icons, and the principle behind breaking them - a "life" for a "life"
Craftsmanship and magic go hand in hand
Certain days are auspicious or inauspicious for magic
Necromancy is always valid
To turn to the right is auspicious and powerful for good; to turn to the left is inauspicious and powerful for harm; and there is no moral judgment against causing someone harm for magic - if Ogmios is any indication magic was seen as a form of combat/heroism and therefore harm is still honorable
Alright, deleted my tiny meltdown about blogging platforms last night. Sorry that was all over your dashboards. Hope you all have good days from here on out.
There’s a possibility I’ll return to pagan blogging sometime, I just don’t know what the best way to do it is. Tumblr may be an option still, it’s just not a very good one for me, especially since this is now a sideblog instead of a main blog and so I don’t get frequent notifications for this blog. :/
Wait, so Myst was made using HyperCard - did the vocabulary of “linking” to places come from the terminology of hyperlinks themselves? Because if so, that’s really interesting - that the technology used to create the story directly influenced not only the content, but also a major part of the central idea of the story and the fabric of the world it takes place in.
And I guess, by extension, this makes the Art a really complicated fantasy-world W3C HTML standard or something.
Layering technique for vibrant greens, using Dr Ph. Martin’s Hydrus liquid watercolours. 3 colours used - Turquoise Blue, Hansa Yellow Medium and Blue Aqua :)
fuck me yes.
When I saw this all I could think about is how you can basically use this technique with any primary colors. You want a purple color, okay lets layer some reds and blues. You like orange? Alright lets layer some reds and yellows.
Generally this is a really great technique and I will deff be experimenting with this in the future.
This is a reminder that, statistically, half of your professors are adjuncts, which means that they work part time, at an average of $2500 per course (not per credit hour, per COURSE, for an ENTIRE SEMESTER), which in some areas amounts to less than minimum wage. In order to make ends meet, many adjuncts work at multiple campuses, teaching up to seven classes at a time. They have to be re-hired every semester. They have to wait until the registration period is over before finding out if they will get any classes to teach. They make up substantially more than half of the instructional workforce at some institutions, but they have no role in governance, no voice with the administration. In many cases, they have no library or computer privileges, no professional support, and no office in which to meet with you.
Adjunct faculty are disproportionately women and people of color.
If you think this likely has an impact on the quality of the education for which you are paying increasingly exorbitant tuition, then you are correct. You and your parents owe it to yourselves to find out what your university’s adjunct hiring practices are. If you are a high school student considering higher education, ask administrators for this information and let them know that it matters to you. Support the efforts of adjuncts to unionize. Universities in the US increasingly operate on the retail model of education. They see students and parents as the customer, and the best way to get them to change is to let them know that the customer is not happy.
from what i was told by contract professors, my university took student course evaluations very seriously and they had an impact on whether professors’ contracts would be renewed or whether they had a chance of moving into a tenure track position. i don’t know if this is the case at every institution. but by my third year of university, i established a personal policy of giving glowing course evals to any adjunct/contract professor who wasn’t a complete dick or completely incompetent (and in so doing discovered that the complete dicks/completely incompentent profs that i encountered were, without exception, tenured and on the sunshine list).
even if the contract prof who taught my class was only so-so, the question i always asked myself was always how did this professor perform relative to their below poverty-line wages? and the answer was literally always 15 out of 10, how the fuck did they manage to pull this off with this much grace and humour?
what i wish i’d learned much, much earlier in my university career: if you have an adjunct professor that you love, ask them if there are ways you can best support them professionally, whether it be filling out course evals or signing petitions or making sure to email them 72 hours before you need an answer or putting pressure on the university or showing up at the picket lines when their union is on strike! you might be surprised by the small low-effort practical steps you can take to make their lives a little easier.
Holy shit. My current fave teacher is an adjunct i believe and they were giving him a hard time getting copies of things for the class during summer. I heard this word on monday and look what we have here…
pixelskylines
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
discoholicmusic
ellievsbear
