☕ The Tuatha Dé Danann
I just got done (well in the last couple of months) reading a book about Celtic myths and legends and there was so much I remember hearing about when I was a kid and it was a trip down memory lane, oh man. it’s not just hearing the legends told and stuff; there were places all around me that were associated with various settings or people or objects from mythology and the Tuatha Dé Danann definitely felt much closer than just mythology.
I remember always feeling sad (and still do, if I’m honest) hearing about the time when Christianity came to Ireland and the old beliefs were dying out. there’s a lot of stuff in the legends about that, and while it’s never told in any kind of accusatory way (or at least the versions I’ve heard weren’t) there’s a sense of sadness at the decline of the old beliefs, which is pretty cool to think about when you consider that Ireland had a primarily oral history and storytelling tradition until Christian monks put all the stories down for the first time; this kind of loss still came across even with some of the Christian edits that came along (such as rewriting the Tuatha Dé Danann as kings and mortal royalty rather than gods, etc). I don’t know, I always thought that was interesting, and spoke of something greater that perhaps wasn’t recorded.
anyway, where I was going with that was that I always felt sad thinking about it, but something that’s been consistent across a lot of what I’ve read/heard is the idea that the old gods will never go away so long as there are still people to believe in them, and while I have a lot of my own beliefs and a very specific way of integrated my beliefs with the world around me, there’s a part of me that still Believes. I don’t think I could ever adequately explain why, but if you’ve ever been wandering around the Irish countryside at the right time when the light hits just right and the whole place feels ancient, you kind of get it.
send me a ☕️ and a topic and i’ll talk about how i feel about it