Hi friends, and happy New Year!
2024 is nearly a week old, and I’m slowly, tentatively, coming out of the festive pause and of the flu-induced lethargy that tripped me up mid December. Today is the last of the Celtic Omen Days, an ancient practice of paying attention to the natural world through the twelve days of Christmas – for signs and clues to the year ahead, for “how exactly we are supposed to make it through this time” (Kerri ní Dochartaigh). I first discovered the Omen Days last Christmas through Irish poet-seer Laura Murphy. This year, I chose to use the Celtic Moon oracle card deck I got for Christmas to guide my omens. And the cards insisted that I lean into my nascent spirituality. So this was my first reason to share again the post below – because I believe in magic.
My second reason is that today is also Nollaig na mBan, or Women’s Christmas – a day when, after all the hard work of tirelessly waiting on family and friends over the festive period, Ireland’s women traditionally got to down aprons and utensils and meet up with their female friends, while the men took on household duties. What better day to re-publish this post on the power of women’s circles? I do after all believe in women.
This post, originally published in February 2023, remains one of my most popular on Substack, and one I’m the proudest of.
It was the eve of Ireland’s first ever public holiday dedicated to Brigid, woman, saint and goddess, and the Moon Fire Circle gathered on the beach in Greystones to mark the beginning of spring, or Imbolc, in the Celtic calendar.
Before the circle, I went for a quick dip in the sea. It was a bracing solo swim in slow rolling waves, with the sun shining behind my closed eyes. Before the sore walk back across the beach with bare feet on frosty sand, I thanked Brigid for the swim.
Around the fire, one of us guided the circle into a wonderful Brigid-inspired meditation. We then shared our intentions as “fiery arrows” for the season ahead, and released them into the fire. And of course we wove Brigid's crosses.
I struggle to connect with Brigid the saint. But the ancient goddess of fire and water, harbinger of spring, source of creativity and fertility, of nourishment, protection and love – this is Brigid for me. I am not from these Celtic lands, but her energy resonates within me.
So much so that, at the end of the Moon Fire Circle, she turned up on the oracle card I drew:
Earth Mother Triple Goddess Brigid
One year ago, I attended my first Moon Fire Circle. When my friend Anita had invited me to this gathering of women by the fire and by the sea, I tentatively said yes. Twelve months on, I am grateful beyond words for the magic and nourishment this women’s circle has brought me.
The Moon Fire Circle fulfills a need in me I didn’t know I had – for ritual, for meaning and for community.
As it turns out, they are inseparable.
Truth is, I am embarrassed by my increasing open-heartedness to magic, to the sacred, to anything deemed spiritual, and by my desire for ritual, which clashes with my fierce anti-clericalism. When sharing about my experiences of magic and wonder in nature and everyday life, the fear of being ridiculed holds me back. In our culture, material and intellectual satisfaction is supposed to meet our need for meaning and connection. Yet when my beloved atheist uncle passed away on Christmas Day last year, and there was no funeral as he had chosen to donate his body to science, I felt robbed of a crucial rite of transition, connection and yes, celebration.
I am still torn between the rationalism I grew up with, the cold, detached, scientific approach, and the enchanted, the spiritual, the sacred I’m drawn to.
I believe in magic
I once was chatting with Brian about “that kind of stuff”. He asked whether I didn’t know what to call it, or if I was embarrassed. A bit of both, was my answer. I don’t know what to call all this “stuff” I’m into and that, until not so long ago, would have had me run a mile in the opposite direction. Spirituality, magical thinking, hippy, woo-woo – all have been systematically demeaned and derided by patriarchal capitalism, the rational mind and of course, organised religion.
The Church, with its dogmatic monopoly on what is holy and what is not, sucked all joy and meaning out of ritual. There is a sense of dispossession from the sacred, that the sacred is outside of us and cannot be experienced without the intercession of an authority figure – always a man!
The witch-hunts killed those people who lived and taught a life of oneness with nature. Over two centuries 9 million were killed in Europe. It was a killing of the ecological mind.
Vandana Shiva
So-called pagan beliefs and practices were brutally repressed as heresy and witchcraft. More recently, they have been ridiculed as superstition or delusion. So much so that wanting ritual, needing it, feels awkward and embarrassing – something that we have to explain, justify and defend. And so it is another need that we suppress and sacrifice on the altar of conformity and rationality.
woo-woo (adj): based on false beliefs or imaginary things, rather than reason or scientific knowledge
In If Women Rose Rooted, author Sharon Blackie writes about how she suppressed everything in herself that wasn’t rational in order to avoid antagonising her husband. Not without cringing, I have started opening up to Brian about a more enchanted view of the world.
“Long ago we seemed to know instinctively that life wasn’t as it seemed. Our reality was a world of happenings, not things,” Manchán Magan writes in 32 Words for Field. With our rational outlook on everything, we have lost our childlike sense of wonder and with it, our sense of the sacred and of belonging to something larger than ourselves.
In the rational worldview, all you see is what there is. If something can’t be measured or counted or scientifically proven through peer-reviewed research, it is not real.
In this mindset, my connection to Brigid doesn’t exist. The Earth Mother oracle card I drew was random, not a sign or synchronicity.
Yet “we’re constantly being given opportunities to have a multidimensional life. Life is mostly whispering at you, tapping on your shoulder, sometimes shouting at you. There are different sensory levels of experience and we have forced ourselves into a narrow bandwidth,” says storyteller Bobette Buster. All you see is not all that there is.
And so ritual might not make logical sense. But I feel better for it – nourished, connected, attuned to the great web of life on Earth. And so I’ll keep seeking it, unapologetically. Free of the patriarchal shame around it, I will lean into the mystery, the wonder and the magic, beneath the shallow surface of what meets the eye.
Women’s circles – a new and ancient ritual
So what happens during the Moon Fire Circle that I find so compelling? On the surface of it, not very much at all. Hosts Erin and Laura (who writes at
) open the circle by smudging with mugwort or rosemary. One of the participants will then lead us into a gentle yoga session, or breathwork, or meditation, or even a sound bath. Next, we are invited to write down our intentions on a piece of paper, to be let go of in the fire at the centre of the circle.Then a “talking stick” gets passed around the circle for everyone to express what they feel called to share, be it a song, poetry, or their reasons for attending the circle. Or nothing at all.
This is always the most poignant part of the ritual – one when women voice whatever is on their mind or heart, to be safely held and witnessed by all of us.
There is no meaning pre-imposed on any part of the circle, and no expectation to feel one way or another. For the Moon Fire Circle is a dance of co-creation. It wouldn’t exist without us participants, whether there is a handful or a score of us. By gathering in circle, we create a safe and sacred space that welcomes us all as we are, in all that we are. We bring our presence and energy to the circle, and this creates this intangible container for our intentions and emotions to be voiced and witnessed. Speaking our intentions, whether out loud or in writing, releases them to manifest. By simply sharing whatever is on our heart, the walls of loneliness around our pain and struggles start crumbling down.
Done like this, ritual is “an act of healing, and to let participants know that whatever you’re carrying around with you, you’re not alone. It’s about feeling seen or heard. We don’t have a lot of space for that in our culture,” says Hugh Farrell of Listen & Breathe.
The word ritual comes from rtu, sanskrit for ‘menses’. The earliest rituals were connected to the woman’s monthly bleeding. Women’s periodic bleeding was a cosmic event, like the cycles of the moon and the waxing and waning of the tides.
Elinor Gadon
All around the world and since prehistoric times, women’s circles have provided a safe place to rest and reconnect and recharge away from the grinding stone of patriarchy.
Nowadays, as our sense of the sacred has been lost and traditional religious rituals have become stale, in a culture where there are no holy days, revived circles of women are disrupting capitalism’s violent assault on the living world.
On the eve of Ireland’s newly created “holy day”, spurred by a devotion to Brigid that I hardly understand, I took active part in a women’s circle – a ritual rooted in “a new and ancient sense of what is sacred” (Charles Eisenstein).
While our hyper-individualistic modern society continues to fail us all at a terrifying cost to all life on Earth, women’s circles give us a glimpse of the future our hearts are aching for. They rekindle the “ecological mind” by fostering meaning and community – intertwined needs that are at the core of what it means to be human.
A wonderful read. Thank you Annette. I also was brought to the 12 omens by Laura Murphy, love a good ritual and totally believe in magic :)