Tag: ancestors

How to Celebrate Lúnasa Without Causing Harm – and What to Do Instead

Lúnasa is four days away. August 1st – or the Sunday nearest to it, as our ancestors would have observed it – is almost here. (Well, let’s be honest – it’s always more of a season than a given day in Irish lore!) Given this, there is a plethora of posts around how to celebrate Lúnasa, or Lughnasadh if you’re using pre-Caighdeán Irish. So here’s my approach!

Over the last few weeks we’ve covered a lot of ground. Brigid’s water aspect in summer. The lore behind her. The figures of the Lúnasa season – Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, Crom Cruach – and what they tell us about what our ancestors understood about harvest, sacrifice, and the cost of prosperity. Now it’s time to talk about what you can actually do.

A word about fire first

Lúnasa is primarily a fire festival. That’s along with Imbolc, Bealtaine, Samhain. And some people want to celebrate Lúnasa with a flame or a bonfire.

This year – and increasingly every year – I want to ask you to think carefully before you do that outdoors.

We have had one of the driest summers in recent memory in parts of Ireland and the UK. Across southern Europe, Australia, North America, and elsewhere, wildfires have caused devastation that is increasingly connected to climate change. The same Brigid who tends the sacred flame also – as we talked about earlier in this series – has deep roots in water, in wells, in the healing and patient work of rivers and the sea.

If you’re in an area with dry conditions, a fire risk, or a hosepipe ban, please don’t light an outdoor fire to mark Lúnasa. Light a candle indoors instead. She’ll find you just as easily.

an image of a candle in a jar. OUr ancestors might have celebrated Lúnasa with bonfires, but we can adjust to help prevent wildfires!
A candle is just as good as a bonfire when you’re worried about wildfires!!

What Lúnasa actually asks of you

Putting the fire question aside, Lúnasa is fundamentally a festival of stocktaking. The harvest is beginning. What has come in? Has anything left? What did you plant in the spring – literally or metaphorically – and what has actually grown?

I use the four fire festival bank holidays in Ireland – Imbolc, Bealtaine, Lúnasa, and Samhain – as structured check-in points across the year. Lúnasa specifically is where I look at what I’m harvesting in relation to what I’ve sacrificed. Not in a punishing way. But honestly.

Am I sacrificing too much in some areas and ignoring others? What has grown that I didn’t expect? What did I plant with great intention that simply hasn’t come in – and do I need to let go of it, or keep tending it through the darker months ahead?

These are worth sitting with before the festival arrives, rather than on the day itself. Give yourself a few days to let the questions settle.

Practical ways to celebrate Lúnasa

You don’t need an elaborate ritual. You don’t need to be in Ireland, or on a hilltop, or in possession of any particular objects. Here are some things that are accessible, grounded, and genuinely connected to the tradition:

Go to the water. The seaside connection for Lúnasa is ancient and still very much alive – Irish people head to the coast on the August bank holiday without knowing quite why. Know why. Go deliberately. Wash your feet. Sit with the sea.

Put flowers in the house. Garland Sunday – the last Sunday of July – is part of the Lúnasa tradition. Flowers strewn, beauty acknowledged, the earth’s abundance honoured. A bunch of wildflowers or whatever is growing in your garden is enough.

Make or share food. The harvest festival was always communal. Cook something from scratch. Share a meal. Acknowledge that food comes from somewhere and from someone’s labour.

Do your stocktake. Sit down with your journal. Look honestly at the year so far. What has grown? Was something meant to grow but didn’t? What are you carrying into the second half of the year, and what needs to be set down?

Visit a well. If you’re in Ireland, there will be one near you. Most counties have multiple wells with Brigid associations. Visit one with intention.

Going deeper into the lore

If this series has sparked a genuine curiosity about the figures behind Lúnasa – Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, and Crom Cruach – the courses at Brigid’s Forge School are the next step. Celebrate Lúnasa with learning!

You can take each course individually at €37 each. Or, for the next week, you can get all three together as the Lúnasa Bundle for €97 – saving €14 on the individual prices. The bundle covers Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, and Crom Cruach in depth, drawing on the primary sources and sitting honestly with what we can and can’t know about figures this old.

If you’ve been reading along for the last nine weeks and the Lúnasa season has started to feel like something worth understanding properly – now is a good time.

Beannachtaí Lúnasa oraibh. Lúnasa blessings to you all.

How are you planning to mark Lúnasa this year? I’d genuinely love to hear – drop it in the comments.

Crom Dubh: The Elder God Behind Garland Sunday

Crom Dubh is one of those figures who appears at the edges of Irish tradition – not as central as the better-known Tuatha De Danann, not as dramatic as the Morrigan, but persistent. He keeps showing up in the folklore, particularly in connection with the last Sunday of July, in ways that suggest something older and more significant than his relatively sparse written record might imply.

I first came across him through Duchas.ie – the Irish Folklore Collection – and what I found there sent me down a very interesting path.

What Duchas tells us

One entry in particular stopped me. It describes Domhnach Crom Dubh – literally, Crom Dubh’s Sunday, anglicised as Garland Sunday by the English-speaking people of the area – and mentions a place called Altóir na Gréine, which translates roughly as the Altar of the Sun. This was a gathering place associated with Crom Dubh, where feasting, games, racing, hurling, dancing, and singing were held on this specific Sunday.

The entry offers an interpretation of the name worth quoting directly: that Chrom was a god, and that Dubh or Dua meant a sacrifice – making Crom Dubh, in this reading, something like “Crom’s Sacrifice.” (Dubh also means black, but this was the explanation given in the Dúchas entry) Whether that etymology holds up to scrutiny is a separate question, but the association between this figure, this day, and the idea of offering or sacrifice is consistent across multiple sources.

What happened to the Buaile na Gréine gathering? The priests and wise men of the surrounding parishes grew tired of it, according to the entry, and counselled the people to abandon the custom. They set up a patron at St Muchan’s in Ennistymon instead – a church gathering to replace the older hilltop one. The people, broadly, went.

This pattern – older gathering place replaced by a church-controlled alternative, the original customs gradually absorbed or redirected – is one of the most consistent threads in Irish folk practice. It’s worth recognising it for what it is, without bitterness and without romanticising what came before.

The Irish language connection

Something significant about the Crom Dubh entries on Duchas: the majority of them were recorded in Irish rather than English. This tells us something. These traditions were held more closely in Irish-speaking areas – in the west and south-west particularly, in communities where the older language and the older ways persisted longer together.

This matters for how we understand Crom Dubh. He is not a figure who survived primarily in the anglicised, more accessible parts of Irish tradition. He survived in the places where Irish was still the living language – which means the communities who remembered him were, in many cases, the communities most connected to the older ways of understanding the land and the year.

Who Crom Dubh might have been

The honest answer is that we don’t know with certainty. He appears in folk tradition as a figure associated with the harvest, with the hilltops, with the last Sunday of July. Some sources connect him to Crom Cruach – the darker, older figure I’ll be writing about next week – and suggest he may be a related or evolved form of the same deity. Others treat them as distinct.

What we can say is that he represents something genuine in Irish folk memory – a presence acknowledged at a specific time of year, in a specific way, by people who thought the acknowledgement mattered. The Crom Dubh course at Brigid’s Forge School (€37) goes into the sources in detail and sits with the uncertainty honestly rather than papering over it.

The tradition that survived

Here is what I find remarkable. In Ireland today, the August bank holiday weekend is still, for many families, a day trip to the seaside. The roads to coastal towns fill up. People walk seafronts and eat chips and let children run on beaches. The weather, as often as not, obliges.

Almost none of them are thinking about Crom Dubh. Almost none of them know that the impulse to go to the coast on this specific weekend has a name, or a history, or a figure associated with it that predates Christianity by an unknowable amount of time.

But the tradition survived anyway. The people kept going to the water. They kept gathering on the last Sunday of July. They kept doing, without knowing why, something their ancestors did with full awareness of why.

That persistence is its own kind of evidence.

Had you heard of Crom Dubh before this? Or Domhnach Crom Dubh? Drop a comment – I’m curious how widely known this is outside of Irish-speaking areas.

Tailtiu: The Goddess Who Gave Everything So Ireland Could Eat

Tailtiu, an Irish goddess, is not the most famous figure in Irish mythology. She doesn’t have Brigid’s longevity or the Morrigan’s dramatic presence in the popular imagination. But she is one of the most important figures associated with Lúnasa – and her story is one that I keep returning to, because what it says about work, sacrifice, and the value of what often goes unacknowledged is quietly remarkable.

The only image of Tailtiu I can find - an image of a woman in long dress, picking crops from the ground, in black and white
The only image of Tailtiu I can find!

Who Tailtiu was

Tailtiu was a member of the Fir Bolg – the people who inhabited Ireland before the Tuatha De Danann arrived. After the First Battle of Moytura, when the Tuatha De Danann took control of Ireland, Tailtiu maintained good relations with the new order. She became the foster mother of Lugh – one of the most significant of the Tuatha De Danann, the god of skill and craft and the figure most directly associated with Lúnasa.

This matters. In Irish tradition, the foster relationship was often as significant as the blood relationship – sometimes more so. Tailtiu chose to raise Lugh, or was selected to do so, to shape him, to give him what he needed to become who he was.

And then she cleared the plains.

The work that killed her

The story of Tailtiu’s great labour is stark and doesn’t soften itself. She cleared the forests of what is now County Meath – the great plain of Brega – to make way for agriculture. She cleared it so that Ireland could be farmed. So that the people could eat.

The work killed her.

She died of exhaustion from the effort, and before she died she asked Lugh to hold funeral games in her honour every year at the time of the harvest. He did. Those games – held at the Hill of Tailteann in Co. Meath – became the Lúnasa festival we know, the great assembly of the Irish people at harvest time. They were called the Lughnasadh, named for Lugh, though it was Tailtiu’s death (among others) they commemorated.

She did the work. He got the naming rights. This is perhaps not as surprising as it should be.

The quiet necessary work

What strikes me most about Tailtiu, our little known Irish goddess, is not the scale of what she did but the nature of it. Clearing land is not glamorous work. It’s not the work of warriors or poets or kings. It’s backbreaking, repetitive, essential labour that produces no immediately visible result – you clear a section, you clear another section, you keep going, and gradually the land becomes something it wasn’t before.

Nobody writes heroic poetry about land clearance. Nobody remembers the names of the people who did it. But without it, there is no harvest. Without it, there is no Lúnasa. The entire festival rests on work that is rarely celebrated in the way the festival itself is.

Tailtiu, to me, represents that quiet necessary labour – the kind that doesn’t get lauded, that doesn’t make the headlines, but that everything else depends on. The support work. The maintenance. The showing up day after day to do something that needs doing even when nobody is watching.

I think most of us know what that feels like. I think most of us have done more of it than we’ve been credited for.

The Fir Bolg connection

There’s something else worth noting. Tailtiu was Fir Bolg, not Tuatha De Danann – and she maintained good relations with the new order after a battle that could easily have produced only bitterness. She chose to engage. Chose or was chosento foster. She chose to give her labour to a land that was now governed by people who had defeated her own.

That’s a complicated position to be in, and the mythology doesn’t flatten it. She isn’t simply absorbed into the Tuatha De Danann narrative. She remains herself – Fir Bolg, foster mother, woman of the land – while choosing to be part of something larger than her original tribe.

There’s something worth sitting with there about adaptation, about finding a way to continue when the world has changed around you, about the difference between capitulation and conscious choice. (Yes, Tailtiu might also be another Irish goddess I can relate to as an engineer, even if this one has no major engineering connections)

Going deeper

The Tailtiu course at Brigid’s Forge School (€37) goes into the lore in detail – the sources, the context, what the texts actually say and what we can reasonably infer. If she’s a figure you want to know better, it’s a good place to start.

Does Tailtiu’s story resonate with you? The quiet necessary work, the foster relationship, the choice to engage across a divide – I’d love to know what lands for you in the comments.

Lúnasa: The Irish Harvest Festival and Why It Still Matters

Lúnasa – the Irish harvest festival – falls on the 1st of August, or the Sunday nearest to it. In modern Ireland, most people know it primarily as a bank holiday. An extra day off, a long weekend, maybe a trip somewhere if the weather obliges.

That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a bank holiday. But there’s considerably more to this time of year than a Monday off work, and I think it’s worth knowing what our ancestors were doing here – and why some of it still makes sense.

An image of sheaves of corn just harvested and propped up to dry. A traditional image from Lúnasa season in Ireland
This would have been a common sight in Ireland around Lúnasa in generations past. We still see it, jut less often!

What Lúnasa actually is

Lúnasa is one of the four great Irish seasonal festivals, sitting opposite Imbolc on the wheel of the year. Where Imbolc marks the very beginning of spring – tentative, hopeful, the first green shoots – Lúnasa marks the beginning of harvest. The work of the year is starting to show its results. What you planted, literally or metaphorically, is coming in.

In agricultural Ireland, which wasn’t very long ago at all, August was a serious month. The harvest had to come in. The work was physical and communal and urgent. And before it began in earnest, there was a moment of pause – of gathering, of ceremony, of acknowledging what the year had produced and what it had cost.

That moment was Lúnasa.

The GAA, the harvest, and Hungry July

For much of the twentieth century, the August bank holiday in Ireland was associated with the GAA All-Ireland semi-finals. That calendar has shifted – the All-Irelands are played in July now – but the cultural association between August and communal gathering hasn’t entirely disappeared. It’s just harder to see.

What is still very present, for the significant percentage of Irish people connected to farming, is the reality of harvest month. August is busy. It’s also, historically, the end of what was known as Hungry July – the period between the old stores running out and the new harvest coming in, when food could be genuinely scarce. The first fruits of August were not taken for granted. They were celebrated.

Most of us don’t experience Hungry July any more. But the housing crisis, the rising cost of living, the general sense of precariousness that many people carry right now – these are a different version of the same question our ancestors were asking at Lúnasa. Have we enough? What have we harvested this year? Is it sufficient to see us through what’s coming?

These are worth sitting with, even if your harvest is metaphorical.

Garland Sunday and Reek Sunday

The folklore records at Duchas.ie are full of Lúnasa traditions, and two in particular stand out.

Garland Sunday – the strewing of flowers, documented across many counties – connects to the idea of honouring the abundance of the earth at its peak. Reek Sunday – the climbing of mountains, most famously Croagh Patrick in Mayo but also mountains in Kerry and elsewhere – connects to something older and harder to name precisely. A landscape devotion. A marking of the high places at the height of the year.

Both traditions appear to carry traces of something pre-Christian underneath them. Both are still observed in various forms today. And both point to the same underlying impulse – to acknowledge, at this specific moment in the year, that something significant is happening.

The Lúnasa post I wrote a couple of years ago goes into more detail on the festival itself. And if you’re wondering how to navigate a time of year that belongs to figures other than your primary deity, this post on working with multiple deities might be useful.

What Lúnasa is for

At its heart, Lúnasa is a festival of stocktaking. It asks you to look honestly at what the year has produced so far – what has grown, what has been harvested, what has failed to come in and why – and to do that assessment before the darker half of the year begins.

That’s genuinely useful. Not as a spiritual performance, but as a practical act. What have you actually achieved this year? Are you still carrying something that needs to be set down? What do you have enough of, and what are you running low on?

August is a good month for these questions. The light is still long. There’s still time to adjust before the turn.

What’s coming

Over the next three weeks I’ll be writing about the three figures most closely associated with Lúnasa in the Irish tradition – Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, and Crom Cruach. Each of them has a course at Brigid’s Forge School for those who want to go into the lore properly. And each of them has something interesting to say about what this time of year meant to the people who understood it from the inside.

How do you mark the August bank holiday – or Lúnasa, if you observe it more deliberately? I’d love to hear what this time of year looks like in your practice.

Six Months from Imbolc: What the Opposite Side of the Wheel Teaches Us

Imbolc and Lúnasa sit directly opposite each other on the wheel of the year. Six months apart, as far from each other as it is possible to be.

If Brigid is your primary deity – as she is mine – that means that right now, in late June and into July, you are at the furthest possible point from her festival. Imbolc is behind you. It won’t come around again until February. And Lúnasa, which belongs to a different set of figures entirely, is approaching fast.

This is not a problem. But it is worth paying attention to.

A picture of daffodils in my driveway
Yes I know, daffodils aren’t July flowers – it’s the only pic of flowers I have! lol

What the opposite point on the wheel actually means

The wheel of the year (as much as I dislike the term, it is commonly used…) is not just a calendar. It’s a map of energies, of what the land is doing, of what our ancestors understood about the rhythm of the year. And every festival has its opposite – a point of tension and balance, six months away, that helps define it.

Imbolc is about beginnings. The first light after the dark. The earliest stirring of spring. Brigid’s flame lit against the cold. It’s tender, hopeful, and small – a green shoot, not a full harvest.

Lúnasa is its opposite in almost every way. It’s the height of summer, the beginning of harvest, the moment of abundance before the slow turn toward darkness begins. Where Imbolc is about potential, Lúnasa is about what has actually grown. Where Imbolc is Brigid’s, Lúnasa belongs to Tailtiu, to the old gods, to something that predates even the Tuatha Dé Danann in the layers of Irish tradition.

Understanding that opposite point doesn’t diminish your relationship with Brigid. It deepens it. Because you can’t fully understand a festival without understanding what sits across from it on the wheel.

What sent me looking at this time of year

I started exploring the Lúnasa figures – Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, Crom Cruach – because I wanted to know what my ancestors were actually doing at this point in the year. Not what the books said in general terms, but what people in Ireland were specifically doing, in specific places, in specific ways.

I found my way to Duchas.ie – the Irish Folklore Collection, which is one of the most extraordinary resources available to anyone interested in Irish folk tradition. And what I found there stopped me in my tracks.

Garland Sunday. Also known as Reek Sunday. The last Sunday of July, celebrated in two main ways across Ireland: the strewing of flowers, and the climbing of mountains. Both traditions appear in community after community across the folklore records, often with details that suggest something far older than Christianity underneath them. Far older, in some cases, than the Tuatha Dé Danann themselves.

The flower strewing connects to the idea of honouring the earth at its most abundant. The mountain climbing – most famously on Croagh Patrick in Mayo, but not exclusively – connects to a landscape-based devotion that predates any of the named deities we know. These are the traces of your ancestors’ practice. They’re worth following.

Brigid at this time of year

Brigid doesn’t have a specific role in Lúnasa – and I want to be honest about that rather than force a connection that isn’t there in the lore. She and Lúnasa belong to different layers of the tradition, and that’s fine. Not every deity needs to be present at every festival.

What she does offer at this time of year is continuity. The relationship you’ve built with her doesn’t go dormant because her festival has passed. She’s still there. The water aspect is still available to you. The forge still burns.

But Lúnasa invites you to expand your attention. To begin to know the other figures who belong to this season, to ask what your ancestors were doing in late July, and to let the wheel of the year be a genuine guide rather than something that only matters at Imbolc and Samhain.

What’s coming

Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing about the three figures most associated with Lúnasa in the Irish tradition – Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, and Crom Cruach. Each of them has a course at Brigid’s Forge School for those who want to go deeper into the lore. And each of them has something genuinely interesting to say about what this time of year meant to the people who lived here before us.

If you want to mark Garland Sunday this year, you don’t need to climb a mountain. Put flowers in the house. Go outside if you can. Remember that the last Sunday of July has been considered significant in Ireland for longer than anyone can fully trace – and that your ancestors were part of that.

That’s enough. It’s more than enough.

Have you ever marked Garland Sunday or Reek Sunday? Or discovered something in the folklore records that surprised you? Drop it in the comments – I’d love to know what you’ve found.