Tag: Irish lore

Where My Ritual Structure Actually Comes From

I’ve mentioned before that I open and close rituals deliberately, and that I do it with a five-part structure moving through the provinces of Ireland. What I haven’t said yet is where that structure comes from. I mean, it’s not something I made up out of nowhere.

The Settling of the Manor of Tara

So, here’s an old text – the Settling of the Manor of Tara – where a figure called Trefuilngid Tre-eochair asks Fintan mac Bóchra how Ireland has been divided up. Fintan answers in five parts: “knowledge in the west, battle in the north, prosperity in the east, music in the south, kingship in the centre.” Each province then gets its own long list of exactly what belongs to it. Connacht gets learning, foundation, teaching, judgement, counsel, eloquence. Ulster gets battles, contentions, hardihood, strife, pride, wars. Leinster gets prosperity, supplies, feats of arms, splendour, wealth. Munster gets waterfalls, fairs, knowledge, musicianship, melody, poetical art. And Midhe, the centre, gets kingship, stewardship, primacy, the overlordship of all Ireland.

And honestly, the story is about a lot more than this. It’s mainly about Fintan himself – a man who survived the Flood, lived a thousand years alone in an empty Ireland, and was there for every wave of invasion the mythology tells us about: Cessair, Partholón, Nemed, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha Dé Danann, the sons of Míl, all of it. The whole text is really him proving he’s old enough and remembers enough to be trusted with settling how Tara itself should be chronicled. The five provinces bit is one passage near the end, not the point of the story. Worth knowing, cos it’s easy to lift the neat five-part structure out and forget the actual text is this enormous, strange piece of mythic history with a thousand-year-old man at the centre of it.

Cúige, and the One That’s Missing

Here’s a thing that confused me badly as a kid. The Irish word for province is cúige – and cúig is the Irish word for five. Five provinces, cúige, straight etymology, no mystery there once you know it. Except Ireland has four provinces now. Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connacht. Four. I was very confused in primary school to be honest. Nobody explained why the word for “province” was built on the word for “five” when I could count them on one hand and still have a finger left over.

The missing one is Midhe – Meath, more or less, though not identical to the modern county. It’s the centre, and out of all five, it might have been the most dangerous one to hold. Tara and Uisneach were both there, and between them they represented the core power of the country, political and spiritual both. Whoever controlled the centre wasn’t just holding one region among five – they were holding the seat that the other four answered to, in a way. That’s a different kind of exposed than holding Ulster’s edge or Munster’s coast.

I feel a particular way about this one, cos Meath is my own home county. We call it the Royal County (I know, I know – the ego on us!! But you should see our neighbours…)

Why I Use It to Open and Close

The five-part structure I use isn’t lifted wholesale from the text – Fintan’s answer to Trefuilngid is describing the character of the provinces, not handing down a ritual script. But it’s what I built my own opening and closing prayers from. When I open a ritual now, I move through the provinces in turn – Ulster for strife and war, Leinster for prosperity, Munster for the arts, Connacht for learning, Midhe for sovereignty at the centre. This old text genuinely roots those five qualities, even if the ritual use of them is mine.

It gives me a structure that’s bigger than just what I personally want out of the ritual that day. It’s not a wish list. It’s five real, long-attested associations, and I’m asking something of each one in turn – built on the lore, not copied from it.

Magic done as part of ritual works better with structure like this behind it, cos structure is what stops a ritual sprawling into whatever feels vaguely spiritual in the moment. One goal, not several. A beginning, a middle, an end. Something you’re actually asking for, not just a general vibe you’re hoping shows up.

This is exactly the kind of thing I go into properly in Kindling Brigid’s Flame. (the course I’ve been building to help people prepare for their own Imbolc ritual) Working through the physical, emotional, and spiritual groundwork, and then building a ritual structure of your own, the way I’ve built mine. More on that as we get closer to Imbolc.

Source: “The Settling of the Manor of Tara”, https://maryjones.us/ctexts/tara.html

Brigid in the Irish Lore: Why the Texts Matter – and What It Can’t Tell Us

Brigid Irish lore sits at the intersection of several things that are easy to get wrong – reconstructionism, hagiography, mythology, and the complicated question of what we can actually know about pre-Christian Irish practice.

I want to be honest about where I stand on this, because I think it matters for how you approach the material.

An image of the Book of Fermoy from Irish Scripts on Screen
The lore is more accessible now, with the help of places like Irish Scripts on Screen, than ever before!

What the lore is – and isn’t

I’m not a reconstructionist. I don’t believe we have enough information to accurately reconstruct practices from two thousand years ago, and I think attempting to do so with confidence tends to produce something that tells us more about modern wishes than ancient realities.

But I also don’t think the Brigid Irish lore is therefore useless. Quite the opposite.

The stories that survived – about Brig in Cath Maigh Tuireadh, about her appearances in Lebor Gabála Érenn, about what Sanas Cormac records about her – these are the stories our ancestors thought important enough to keep. In most cases, they were preserved by Christian monks who were making active choices about what deserved to survive. That context doesn’t invalidate the material. It makes it more interesting.

When a bishop or a monk in medieval Ireland sat down to record a story about a pre-Christian goddess, they were doing something deliberate. Understanding what they chose to record, and how they chose to frame it, tells us something about both the tradition and the people doing the recording.

Brigid stayed

There’s something else worth saying before we go any further. Brigid is unusual among Irish deities in that she never really went away.

She didn’t disappear with Christianisation. She became a saint – one of the most significant saints in the Irish tradition, with a feast day, a network of wells, a flame at Kildare, and a body of hagiography that borrows heavily from her earlier forms. The St Brigid of Ireland course covers this in detail, but the short version is: the saint and the goddess are so entwined that treating them as entirely separate figures does a disservice to both.

I think we do Brigid a disservice if we ignore her saint aspect in favour of a purely pre-Christian reconstruction. She stayed with the Irish people through Catholicism. Helped them adapt, and adapted herself. She evolved. That’s not a corruption of something purer – it’s part of who she is. Irish practice has never been held in stone. It has always adapted to the times, absorbed new influences, and continued to serve the people it belonged to. Brigid is a particularly clear example of that quality.

What the lore actually tells us

So what do we learn when we go to the old texts? More than you might expect – and in some cases, something quite different from what devotional experience alone would suggest.

The Brigid of the Irish lore is a figure who can fight but chooses not to be a warrior. She is a mother – of one son, or three, or four, depending on which source you’re reading – who experiences profound grief and loss. Always associated with poets and poetry without any surviving record of her writing verse herself. She appears at crucial moments in the mythology as a support figure rather than a central protagonist.

None of that is what people usually lead with when they talk about Brigid. But it’s what the ancestors thought worth recording. And sitting with those choices – why these stories, why these details, why preserved by these particular people at this particular time – is one of the most useful things you can do if you want to understand her.

The lore doesn’t replace experience. But in my own practice, it has repeatedly put experience into context – given me a framework for understanding what I was encountering before I had words for it.

The courses

The lore courses at Brigid’s Forge School are designed to take you into these texts directly. Each one focuses on a specific source:

For those who want to go deeper into the Ulster material specifically, The Three Brigs in Ulster is a five-week course (€275) covering the Ulster Cycle appearances in detail.

None of these require prior knowledge of Old or Middle Irish. They’re designed to be accessible to anyone who is curious about Brigid and willing to sit with material that doesn’t always give easy answers.

Have you spent time with any of the old texts? Or does the idea of going to the lore feel daunting? Drop a comment below – I’d love to know where you are with this.