Day 1: A Basic Introduction of the Deity

It’s hard to answer this question without answering the other 29 questions as well. It’s hard for me to just give a “basic” introduction of Lugh. It’s like that book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

If you ask me to talk about Lugh, I’m also going to want to talk about how I met Lugh.

If I talk about how I met Lugh, I’m going to also want to talk about about His names and epithets.

If I talk about His names and epithets, I’m also going to want to talk about His myths . . .

It’s a vicious cycle, so I’m trying to halt it by looking at the list of other questions as I write this, hoping that nothing I say winds up being an answer to another question on a different day. I’m finding it impossible not to mention the other subjects – but I will try not to go into too much detail.

So, let’s talk briefly about Lugh.

 

Lugh is an Irish deity, and according to Caesar’s account – was one of the most widely honored deities of the Irish pantheon. Caesar equated him with Mercury, but while there are certainly similarities between the two gods, Lugh is very much a unique deity.

He was a member of the Tuatha dé Danann, usually translated as the Tribe of the Goddess Danu. He was a relative newcomer to the Tuatha dé, but proved Himself more than capable in battle. He is the divine father of the Irish hero Cú Chulainn, and served as a king of Tara. This project has some excellent timing because Lugh actually founded the festival of Lughnasa, which bears his name. The most popular belief is that He founded it in memory of his foster mother Tailtu.

It’s very hard to pigeonhole Irish deities by calling them “The god of ____,” which was a hard concept for some historians and anthropologists to grasp. We see in some other cultures that deities have very strict domains. The God of the Sea,” “the God of the Sun,” and so on and so forth. This is not how the gods of Ireland are arranged.

The Irish, and in many instances the Celtic, worldview saw deities as very much real and present in their lives. They weren’t distant figures in the sky – they walked among man. They fought with them, or beside them, they had children, they lived, and they died. How could a god only deal with the sun when He also has a war going on in his back yard? How might a goddess take care only of the hearth when there’s smithing to be done?

This difference in worldview is where many misconceptions about Lugh, and other Celtic deities, come from. Even though we know today “that’s not how that works,” misinformation continues to be spread. I’ll elaborate more on Day 9: “Common Mistakes About this Deity,” but I felt it necessary to bring up in this introductory post because it’s necessary to grasp this concept before we can continue.

Because you can’t introduce Lugh simply or briefly and consider it a complete description.

You can’t say, “This is Lugh, the Irish God of War” because He wasn’t. Neither was He The Irish God of  Smithing, nor The Irish God of Bread Making. That’s not how the worldview works.

You can say He is an Irish God. You can say He has some warrior characteristics. You can say He has some skill as a smith. As soon as you get rid of that definite article “the,” you start hitting a little closer to the truth.

Lugh is a god of many things, and I hope you will enjoy getting to know Him through this project, as I have enjoyed getting to know him through my months of devotion to Him.

Gaelic Polytheism and Me (or: a brief history of my religious progression and some other ramblings)

There are hundreds, no, thousands of different “pagan” religious paths that an individual can take. What drew me to Gaelic Polytheism, then? Well, this requires a bit of a story.

I was introduced to the idea of paganism around age 11 or 12. I used to ride my bike in to town (I lived 5 miles outside of it) – and then bus into the center of the city, where I would spend the day at the library.  In the teen section, I stumbled across a series of books called Circle of Three, by Isobel Bird. They’re about three girls who are brought together by a mutual interest in witchcraft and Wicca. Intrigued, I checked out the first one and proceeded to chew through all 15 in the series. After that, I began checking out a few of the “New Age” books. I fondly remember Where to Park your Broomstick by Lauren Manoy in particular. Eventually, one of the librarians confronted me.

“Are you serious about this, or just dabbling?” she asked as she eyed the books on the counter.

“Serious.” I told her nervously, caught off guard by her prying.

” . . . I don’t want to check this out to you,” she said, “you need to come back to Jesus.”

I took the book back from her and used one of the self check-outs instead, and did forever more after that, but her questioning had gotten to me and I started looking for another source for my studies. I wandered a bit downtown and, to my surprise and delight, found a metaphysical shop. The people there were, obviously, more friendly about the subject. They didn’t mind that I came in and sat on their floor to read and rarely bought anything. They were nice and the conversations were always good (I actually still go back and talk to them). This also led to me being able to attend a couple of Sabbat gatherings with the local eclectic pagan circle, which was exciting. Before this, I had self-identified as Wiccan, but I quickly found out that that wasn’t quite right – it didn’t fit what I believed, what I felt, what I did. I started calling myself an eclectic pagan then, and it made it easier to open up and learn about other things that weren’t Wicca. The community setting was great and I really enjoyed being in such a group.

It couldn’t last forever, though, and eventually I had to go off to college in another town.

I’ve been here for 3 years now and a lot has happened. I found the local large coven pretty quickly through Witchvox, and I often go to their events – but their practice is Eastern Hellenistic with some other eclecticism thrown in there, and our practices actually rarely coincided even before I discovered Gaelic polytheism. A smaller circle in the area has more similar practices to mine, but we don’t meet very often because of conflicting schedules (When two people can’t make it, but the circle only consists of 4 to begin with, we don’t have much of a circle anymore!). We actually haven’t met since I transferred my practice from “eclectic paganism” to Gaelic polytheism. I don’t expect much to change with them whenever we meet again – except maybe that now I feel more secure and confident in my own beliefs and might be interested in taking a more active role.

Speaking of which, I suppose we’d better start talking about what my practice has become! So you have some background, now. As a newbie first discovering paganism, I called myself a Wiccan. From there, probably around age 15/16, I began calling myself an eclectic pagan instead. The most recent change came about  just this year . . .

It was the third week of February, and a medical emergency put me in bed for a week at home. I had a wealth of neopagan books that I had acquired over the years and, to pass the time, I started picking through one of the newer ones – Edain McCoy’s “Celtic Myth and Magick.”  I had been feeling disconnected from Paganism for a while, and was hoping for some sort of spark to remind me why I chose this path in the first place.

I didn’t find a spark so much as I found a metaphysical bag of bricks, dropping on my head as my eyes glanced over the name “Lugh.”

In the 8 or 9 years prior to this, I had never once felt the presence, voice, or will of a deity. What I was used to feeling in ritual was energy, but not like this. This here was an unmistakable force, and it stopped me in my tracks.

I took the hint and began reading all I could about Lugh from the books I had, but most of my collection was (and still is, unfortunately) made up of neopagan pseudowicca stuff, and finding good, credible information was hard. I began poking around the internet, and it didn’t take me too long to come across Celtic Polytheism, which felt like a piece of a puzzle sliding into place. I had set out looking for information on Lugh, and how to honor him, and nothing made more sense to me than honoring him in the context of his original culture: Irish, which is one of the cultures included in the umbrella term “Celtic”. Further research into that brought me to Gaelic Polytheism, where I rest. I firmly believe that Lugh brought me here, and it feels more right to me than anything has in nearly a decade of pagan practice.

Why is that? Why does it click so much with me?

Well, it feels right. The deities, the practices, the ideals – they speak to me. I feel better than I have in years, more fulfilled. Which sounds a little silly, I guess – but it’s true. That in itself, the fact that I enjoy it, is really enough for me to continue it – but there’s more.

And, as I have already mentioned, I believe that honoring deities in the context of their origin culture is important. Removing them from that context, I feel, is disrespectful both to the deity and to the culture. Since it is Lugh in particular that I’m pursuing a relationship, it only makes sense to practice Gaelic Polytheism.

I have a bit of a reconstructionist bent going on, though I no longer consider myself a reconstructionist. I really like the idea of basing my practice in historical traditions, I like having sources to turn to, studying to do. Having a historical basis also makes me feel validated, and wanting that validation isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Irish Celtic cosmology sits really well with me also. The Three Realms is a system that feels more tangible to me than the four elements, and incorporating them into my practice and thought processes has been surprisingly smooth.

I mean really, in short: I feel at home, here in Gaelic Polytheism. It fits me and I fit it.

Now that we have all of the preliminary “Who I am and what I do” stuff out of the way, I really hope to use this blog to tackle some writing projects, maybe some craft how-to’s . .  who knows where it will take us!

It’s an adventure!

What is Gaelic Polytheism? Reconstructionism?

The first question people have when my religion is brought up (as infrequently as that is), is “what is that?” Or, “what does that mean?”

In this post, I will seek to answer those questions, and discuss the subject of Gaelic Polytheism. How it relates to me on a personal level will be discussed in another post.

First, let’s back up. Gaelic polytheism is a branch, maybe more of a leaf than a branch, of the larger Celtic Polytheism – which is in itself a branch of Modern Polytheism. Polytheism, of course, is a belief in many gods. There are many kinds of polytheism in practice today. These include, but are certainly not limited to, Kemeticism (Egyptian), Hellenic Polytheism (Greek), Religio Romana (Roman), Heathenry (Norse), and more. And many of these also include some form of reconstructionism within them. Though I am not a reconstructionist, I do find value in reconstructionist methods and so the term bears a bit of elaboration.

Reconstructionism is a little different than the standard “NeoPagan” take on religion. Reconstructionists look to historical sources, archaeology, surviving lore and poetry, academic studies, and other credible sources in order to attempt recreate what a religion was like “back in the day.” NeoPagans more frequently put on a pair of rose colored glasses and pick out only the shiny bits from a span of cultures and mash them together. This is not to say that every NeoPagan does this – but it is a significant enough problem in the community that it serves as the contrast to reconstructionism.

I am sliding off on a tangent, now, about the problems in the pagan community. I will save that for another post. Instead, let’s get back on track, shall we?

So – there are different kinds of polytheistic religions, and Celtic Polytheism, then, is just one of hundreds of branches. Specifically, Celtic Polytheism deals with the belief of the gods of Celtic religions. This may seem obvious, but it brings up a much-overlooked question. What is Celtic?

This questions was answered beautifully in this Pagan 101 post on tumblr, but basically what’s important to remember is that the term Celtic in itself doesn’t really describe anything. It is an umbrella term, which usually refers to a language group. The cultures that fall under the “Celtic Umbrella” are not interchangeable – but they are often related. There is no “Celtic pantheon,” though, and so to get to the real center of what we’re talking about, we must move from the branch to the leaves.

There are many variations of Celtic Polytheism, including Welsh, Brythonic, Gaulish, but what I’m going to talk about is Gaelic, because that’s what I follow.

I’m going to borrow the definition of Gaelic from good ol’ Dictionary.com

a Celtic language that includes the speech of ancient Ireland and the dialects that have developed from it, especially those usually known as Irish, Manx, and Scots Gaelic. gaelic constitutes the Goidelic subbranch of Celtic. Abbreviation:  Gael

Myself, I focus on the gods, myths and practices of Ireland. And so, henceforth in this blog when I refer to Gaelic Polytheism, I most likely mean Irish specifically (unless stated otherwise).

Among the gods of the Irish are Lugh, Manannán mac Lir, Brighid, Ogma and many, many more. I strive to honor them in my day to day life through prayer, ritual, and dedication.

This post is already becoming quite lengthy, so I shall wrap it up and discuss Gaelic Polytheism as it relates to me in another post.