Late November, in Ireland. The ground is sodden, filled with rain and storms. Rain on top of rain, beating at the windows in the night. Days dull at noon. All a constant grey. It suits my mood. I have not stopped crying in over fifty days now. And the anger comes like a sudden squall, a mother’s rage ready to rip a hole in the weave of the world if I could just make it stop.
We’ve been out gathering greenery, my boy and I. A few crisp days spent foggy breathed in bogland and holly grove. Stripping ivy fonds from ancient castle walls and trimming their farmed fir for festive wreathmaking this weekend. I cannot find the cheer for it and yet it feels fitting, the ward of it, the protective charm, the binding spell. The land wells up in it, all but the fir is native, all of it ancient and symbolic. My fingers tinged green with old winters magic against the dark.
The dark falls early now. My boy is obsessed with twilight and gloam, watching for it daily, enamoured with the slippiness of it, neither one thing or another and full of possibility. The nights have been so cold and damp I can’t get the fire to take, my hands black with soot from trying. Winter has truly set in. Soon the twilight of Samhain will give way to the dark of midwinter, we are deep in Cailleach territory now, and in a few short weeks we will be at the longest night.
November’s full moon will peak on Monday morning here in Ireland, so tonight (Sunday 26th) it will be at its fullest in the nights sky. The Darkest Depths moon, the Mourning Moon. And its name befits the times. We are years deep in a collective, global season of Samhain, of grief and of mourning. Mass death a near daily occurrence, the media got us used to heartachingly high numbers during the lockdowns, a scoreboard on our screens, and now we keep count again, a genocide live streamed. We live in an age of mass extinction, numbers again used to qualify the destruction of our planet. The devastation. And it aches. Each number a life, a soul, a spark against the dark. When I truly try to grapple with it all the grief is unbearable.
But grief is love, love that no longer has a place to go. And so, to grieve, to mourn is an act of love. In that love, midweek I attended a burial, live streamed and horrendous. I watched as body after body, all wrapped in blue, were placed in a mass grave. Each of them murdered, most in their beds, and all unknown. Unnamed in death. I held space for it in the quiet morning of my kitchen. For them I bore witness, hand on my aching heart, in grief for each life, for the senselessness of it all. I will not reduce this to numbers. I will hold the humanity of it as best I can, safe in the outer circle of my privilege, thousands of miles away. To hold space for the dead and scream like hell to save the living, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop, is the least we can do.
We are in the darkest depths; those of us paying attention, we are in collective mourning. A mass vigil. A funeral procession. For the deaths and for the world as we believed it to be. We stand at the graveside and weep. We scream our grief into the holy dark and pray to whichever God is best placed to make it stop. Because these men in power will not. These boys, playing dress up in the clothes of war. Uninitiated, unproven, dishonourable men who have never faced their own shadow and wear their masks to the world.
And so, we grieve, because it is we who will have to stop them. We must traverse the underworld, draw up power from bloodied lands, call our ancestors to our backs and rise. It is a lifetimes work, of struggle and of grit and therein lies the grief of it, at least in part, no life ahead of quiet ease, no pulling the veil back over our eyes. We borrow this earth from our children and now we must wrestle it from greedy hands, or they will attend its funeral.
Ireland is a country much accustomed to death, and as such we have many folk beliefs and traditions regarding it. Such traditions are for the living, to ease the mourning and to transmute the love lost. Today I will share a brief overview of these beliefs and practices alongside a short piece of fiction based on them, and of the Yew I wrote of earlier in the month. Twining them together felt more organic than splitting the two, for they all traverse the same territory. It is of a wake house and a psychopomps journey in the realm of the dead, dream flight and death tending, a true banshee in the night. And whilst it is inspired by Irish wake and death beliefs alongside the Yew folklore it is also partially inspired by a poem written by Em Barry, entitled Martyr’s Prayer.
Bury me with the pit of an olive in my left breast pocket So that a tree of peace may grow from where I lay.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Of Asterisms and Allegory to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.