Australian Celtic Festival Newsletter – August 2020

In Glen Innes Highlands, we are blessed to experience the changing seasons in many ways, from the snowy cold of winter to the blazing heat of summer, in the magnificent colours of the trees in and about our town, in the red and golden autumn displays enjoyed during the Australian Celtic Festival to their budding and flowering blossoms of springtime, as well as in the beautiful Australian natives like wattles in spring to bluebells throughout the summer, not to mention the seasonal changes of local birdlife of parrots, honeyeaters and wrens.

The changing seasons were tremendously important to the Celtic speaking people, who like our own region today, had such a strong dependence on agriculture. Rather than marking the seasons from equinoxes and solstices, the Celtic tradition – celebrated in abundance throughout its mythologies and poetry – marked the changing seasons from the ‘cross-quarters’, the halfway times between the equal daylight times of the equinoxes and the extreme long and short daylight times of the solstices.

From Maytime’s festival of Beltaine, August’s Lughnasadh, November’s Samhain and February’s Imbolc, the four seasons were marked, at the beginning of Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring. Each season at its opening is tinged with the aspect of the season to come and developing to fullness before giving way to the next season. In Australia, being in the Southern Hemisphere, these seasons are offset by half a year, so that at the early May timing of the Australian Celtic Festival, it is the time of Southern Samhain.

Right now, in August we are enjoying the onset of Springtime, as the sunshine becomes distinctly stronger and warmer – despite the cold of winter bursting through and keeping temperatures brisk. In Australia, the cross-quarter of Imbolc has come to be held at the opening of August, with all the attributes of the Celtic Imbolc festival held at the start of February marked by St Brigit’s Day.

Imbolc, or its identically pronounced variant Oimelc, holds in its name the meaning of washing, lactating and purification. In the Irish myth Tochmarc Emer, Emer tells Cú Chulaind that ‘Oimell is the beginning of spring, the time when the sheep come out and are milked’, giving a strong seasonal sense for the time. Imbolc is regarded as deriving from Imb + folc ‘washing all around’. St Brigit patron of this period ‘was born at sunrise neither within nor without a house, bathed in milk’ as recorded by Douglas Hyde in 1899 in his Literary History of Ireland, bringing milk and washing together as a theme of purification.

St Brigit as an Irish patron saint brings her name through from Brigid, daughter of the Dagda. Brigid, recorded in the ninth century Cormac’s Glossary,  ‘was a goddess whom poets worshipped, for very great and very noble was her superintendence, therefore call they her goddess of poets by this name, whose sisters were Brigit, woman of smith-work, and Brigit, woman of healing, namely goddesses – from whose names Brigit meant to all ‘goddess’. She is ancient, her name meaning ‘Exhalted’, from the Sanskrit Brihari, and throughout the Celtic realms she was known: in Britain ‘Brigantia’ and Gaul ‘Brigindoni’.

Her father the Dagda owned a harp that called the seasons into being: He sang as he played this instrument “Come, oak of the two cries! Come, hand of fourfold music! Come summer! Come winter! Sounds of harps and bellows and pipes!” Brigid as a pure goddess of springtime stands in myth as the younger form of Modron the mother, whose time is in the summer.

At the Australian standing Stones, the Solar Noon array marks the shadow cast at the height of the sun every day, and has markers for the equinoxes and solstices, and monthly increments along the path. At the natural midday, the sun casts its shortest shadow of the day, and the shadow points to true south. At the winter solstice, the longest such shadow is cast, while at the summer solstice the shortest shadow is cast. The shadow lengthens and shortens during the passage of the year, but the length of the shadow does not change in a simple, linear way.

     

The cross quarters may be observed to see how long the shadow is, and there is a lovely proportion displayed in the distance between the equinox and solstice markers. At the start of May, during the Australian Celtic Festival, the length of the shadow falls 2/3 of the distance between the March equinox and winter solstice positions: this is the cross-quarter of Samhain in Australia. The final third of length grows to the extreme solstice position, and as the days grow longer again, at Imbolc the shadow has shortened by a third of the length back to the equinox. This means that 2/3 of the distance remains to shorten back to the equinox position in September. So while half a year elapses, from equinox to equinox, the path of the shadow can be divided into three equal lengths from equinox to cross-quarter, out to the extreme length and back to the next cross-quarter, and back to the equinox position again. This three-fold division is not only beautiful in proportion – it makes for a very useful way for farmers to know when the turn of the seasons will take place.

Across the Celtic world, the return of light and the hint of warmth was a great celebration to be had, and in one form or another the springtime in the form of the goddess Brigid was called to bring her promise of new life and purification. One form from Ireland goes along the form as follows, dancing around the house, a symbolic coming of spring:
‘Go on your knees, open your eyes, and let Brigit in! She is welcome! She is welcome! She is welcome! And in through the south door, Brigid would come in, and winter was gone, and all was well: Wonder! She is welcome, we see, so a toast!

“Mush! Se beatha agus a slainte!”

Read more on Imbolc at the author’s website Caer Australis https://caeraustralis.com.au/oimelc.htm

John Rhys Jones
Friend of the Festival