Manannán mac Lir–a brief introduction

I'm working on a special project for the month of August.  Those of you that know me IRL know that *religiously speaking* I swing with the Polytheist crowd with a slight emphasis on Irish Reconstructionist Paganism.  This month, I'll be writing about the god Manannán mac Lir (and posting) every day.  I got the idea from this post by Galina Krasskova, and plan on answering most of the questions to the best of my ability, though I am by no means an expert.  Oh, and I'll still be doing Poetry Wednesdays, but the poetry will be devotional in nature—also the poems will replace four of the questions.  Probably.  Oh, and I'm cross-posting this on my personal blog.

Manannán mac Lir chariots over the waves.  Art by Loime Studios.  I love this piece.

Who is Manannán?

Simply speaking, Manannán mac Lir is the Irish god of the sea.  It's actually a bit more complicated than that, but, of course, everything is.  And it would be a bit more accurate to say that he's the Celtic god of the sea, and Manx.  And possibly Welsh, though I, for one, am more apt to believe that the Welsh deity, Manawyddan, and the Manx/Celtic deity Manannán are two separate but interrelated entities like the Greek Zeus and Roman Jove.

Manannán is a liminal deity, walking much in the in-between.  He is associated with both the Tuatha de Danann and their enemies the Fomorians, and could be counted among either group or both.  He is the accepted outsider.  He is also the guardian (and ruler?) of the Blessed Isles of the Otherworld—Tír na mBean, Tír fo Thonn, Tír na nOg, Emain Ablach, and Mag Mell.  He is also known to ferry the souls of the dead to the otherworld.

He is as vast and changeable as the sea itself.

He is a magician, a trickster, a wise man, a fool, a lover, a warrior, a protector, a gatekeeper, a father, and a teacher.

Oh, and he has a wicked sense of humor.

There is so much to this god, and I'm excited to be exploring more of him with you as the month goes on.

Uses promptos facit

Stonehenge by Simon Wakefield - it's funny because this picture was actually taken on the 27th of December 2008.

Practice makes perfect

On the eve of the summer solstice (yesterday), I started thinking about the importance of regular practice in magical workings.  Magic, like writing or music or any other skill, is learned.  You may have an aptitude for it, but if you don't nurture that talent you won't get very far with it.  The benefits of creating and sticking with a regular schedule of ritual and workings are subtle yet manifold.  The more you work at something the easier it becomes for you, you know?

I know that when I stick to regular practice I feel calmer, more grounded, and yet more open and in touch with the various gods and spirits with whom I work.  Unfortunately, I'm terrible at keeping with a regular schedule at anything in my life.  Life, it seems, likes to get in my way, and I can always find an excuse to not do something even if it's something that I really want to do.  I'm working on breaking that habit, but, like with anything, it takes time and practice.  And I frustrate so easily.

See, I have a tendency to work manically—in fits and starts.  I'll spend days fretting over one or another: researching a god, or learning the magical, medicinal, and culinary uses of an herb, or finding, copying, and/or writing poems and prayers.  Then, I'll lose focus, and spend weeks doing nothing but vegging out with Netflix until I feel so guilty for doing so that I jump back into a manic state of work.  And everything is done so randomly and in such a slipshod fashion that I get no benefit from it.  I learn nothing.  I lose focus because I never really had it to begin with.

I decided a while back—though those who know have been saying this for years (I just didn't listen)—to look at my magical and religious practices like I did school.  I was brilliant at school.  Ruthlessly organized, relentless in my studies, and (once I figured out my major) frighteningly focused.  Since I finished my Master's degree, I've been all at ends.  For a while it was like I lost my purpose.  The sad fact that people with my degree now have an average wait of 10 years before landing a full time job in our field just made it worse.  In fact, even now the thing I most regret about my life is that I got a Master's: I don't believe that I will ever work full time in my field, and will leave it (and my crappy part time/no benefits job) as soon as I am able.  That's not the point, though.  That's not the lesson.*

The point is: what I need, what I believe everyone needs–especially magic workers–is that focus I learned in my years at university.

Regular practice.  Regular studies.  Regular worship.  It helps.  Really and truly, it does.  When I work on a schedule and not at my own whim, I am much calmer and everything in my life benefits.  The slow and incremental learning of anything, helps not only to build a foundation for more advanced skills, but also in retention.  To continue with my college analogy, it's much easier and mor effective to study all semester than to desperately cram before the final.  My magical practice has, in past years, been that desperate cram session resulting in wonky spells that may or may not work.  To fix this I've slowly been adding routine into my practice, and cutting out the mania.

Lately I've been needing more help with that.  Last October I quit one of my two part time jobs** and now I have way more time on my hands.  Which, for me, means more time to pursue my own interests/studies, and more time to dick around and forget about those interests/studies.  To remedy this, I recently bought a weekly planner–just like I had in uni–to help me plan out (and stick to) a more complicated schedule than I was expecting.  Oh, and this planner is a magical thing!  Room for notes and so much more.  And it's much harder to ignore a book than my phone.  It'll help me find and maintain a workable schedule for everything I want to do: magic, language, work, search for work, write, worship, and more!

As I am now, I've been able to maintain (for the most part) weekly offerings to my gods, ancestors, and spirits as per my arrangement with them.  I haven't kept up with my language studies, but expect that to change with focus.  As will my magical studies, since I plan to treat them like actual classes rather than the ad libitum episodes that they are now.  All this will help me to deepen my spiritual and magical practices, and help me gain a greater proficiency and knowledge of the things.  I encourage everyone looking to deepen and enrich their own practices to do so as well.

Happy solstice everyone!  And how cool is it that the full moon and the solstice fall on the same day this year?

*That's a minor rant about my utter disappointment and the waste of about $30K that I couldn't and still can't afford.

**In the hopes that I would soon find a full time position somewhere.  Besides that it was a SUPER crappy job.  Management treated the part time employees poorly, and the HR person constantly talked to me like I was a mentally handicapped child rather than a full grown woman in her 30s.  Sorry, another rant.

The Essentials

L'Envoûteuse (The Sorceress)
Georges Merle Georges Merle, France, 1851 - 1886
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

When you look up spells online, or read a book of introductory magic—or even beyond that, you're generally inundated with a need for things: this wand, that candle, that herb or stone or incense.  Trappings, that's all they are, and I've found that you don't really need them.  What you do need are: a safe space, a quiet head, and an open mind.  These are what I believe to be the three essentials to a successful magical practice.  Eventually, I'd like to write more in-depth essays on each of them, but, for now, I think a brief introduction will do.

A safe space

A safe space can be anywhere that you won't be disturbed and that you feel, well, safe.  It can be anyplace.  I currently use my bedroom and sometimes my kitchen, but I have used parks, woods, the shores of both lake and sea.  Magic can happen anywhere, but I find that I work best in a space where I'll not be interrupted.  I also think that it's best if whatever space you're using is clean, uncluttered, and relatively peaceful.  You need a place where you can concentrate, let yourself go, and just be.  If you're constantly worried about being stumbled over, interrupted, or, gods forbid, attacked, you just can't get into the correct mindset.

A quiet head

A quiet head is one that is at peace, where your mind's not jabbering at you constantly.  It's a mind that's cleared of all thoughts but that of the task before you.  This is difficult, but can be cultivated with meditation.  The trick is finding a meditation that works for you, and that in itself can be a struggle.  One of the reasons, I think, is that we have this idea of meditation as being the emptying out of all thought, so we sit and we struggle because our minds won't stop working.  Thoughts keep coming in, we get annoyed with ourselves, and eventually we just give up, usually with a disgusted feeling of "I just can't do this."  I don't believe that to be true.

First off, there are several different ways to meditate.  You can use a form of moving meditation: dancing, Tai Chi, running, yoga.  Moving meditation is just a form of moving where you have to concentrate on the movements your making rather than how you're going to pay your phone bill, or what's going on on your favorite TV show, or whatever.  Those thoughts may enter your head, but they don't stay because you have to be all in your body.  You have to check your timing, your breathing, where you're hands and feet are.  You have to concentrate on what you're doing, rather than what you're thinking.  It helps to center you, right?  Getting lost in movement.

There's also visualization.  You focus on a picture or scene in your mind.  You plant a seed and watch that seed grow behind your eyelids.  See the roots seeking water and deeper earth, the sprout pushing up towards the sun, see it quiver, see it breathe.  Or you can focus on a memory, preferably not an unpleasant one, but something agreeable.  The first time you flew a kite, or rode a roller coaster.  What did it feel like?  What did the wind feel like?  The tug on your arms?  What color was the sky?  Remember the way your heart beat on the way up, and down.  Remember the twists and turns, the feel of almost falling.  Picture it in the most minute details, the sounds, the smells, the flow of blood through your veins.

Or you can just focus on something something so much that it fills your head.  Use a flame, watch it dance, breath with it, stare into the heart of it.  Pay attention.  Watch that stream stream flow and bubble.  See the most minute detail of that tree, try to capture it in you mind.  Calm down and just look, choose one thing, and look.

You can do the same with almost anything.  The more you practice it, the easier it will be, and the clearer you're brain will feel.  You can start slow, five minutes a day, working up to fifteen, twenty, an hour, whatever.  Meditation helps to clarify your mind, clean your head out, and can help to minimize the damage negative or obsessive thoughts cause.  I'll not claim that it's a cure for depression, because I'm proof that it's not, but, for me, it helps to put things in perspective and kind of break that cycle of "my gods, you're a worthless human being" that I tend to get stuck in.  I really can't do anything when I'm in one of those cycles, let alone magic.  A quiet head is one that doesn't have those thoughts screaming on repeat constantly, or one that can disregard those thoughts as unimportant and shush whatever unhappy voices that want to take up all the space.

An open mind

What do I mean by an open mind?  Imagination, intelligence, the willingness to believe in magic.  You need the ability to change the way you look at the world, and the wits to recognize the change.  You also need to be able to experiment, to find out what works and what doesn't.  You need to learn and continue learning.  I find it's helpful to be good with words—some of my most successful spells have been little more than rhyming quatrains.  Life is a constant evolution of the mind, and it's my firm belief that if you aren't learning, you aren't living, and living is important.  You need to read, write, dance, play, pray.  Learn how to raise energy, and to ground it.  Find out what's works for you, tweak it, revise it, try again.  Find a new way that also works, or doesn't, and tweak that until it feels right.  Do it again.  Do it again.  Find another and do that.  Rinse and repeat.  Keep learning.  Be willing to keep learning.  Keep changing.  Believe.  Know.  Know down to your bones.  That in itself is a magic.

Be willing to put in the work.  Be willing to see the results.  That's how you do magic.

Update: News, Plans, and Other Likely Stories

Miranda–The Tempest, John William Waterhouse via Wikimedia Commons

I can't believe that it's been six months since either of us has posted anything!  Seriously, I started this blog with the express purpose of posting at least something once a month.  Leanne expressed to me the same desire.  Life, it seems, had other ideas.  Leanne spent those months preparing for and then welcoming her son to the world.¹  While I, like the ship in the picture, spent my time crashing against the rocks with a major case of burnout that ultimately cost me a job; granted, it was only a part time job, but since my other job is also part time I'm feeling the damage.  We've had no time for magic, is what I'm saying.  Or recording our magical practices, anyway.  More's the pity.

That, however, is changing.  I don't know about Leanne, because babies take a lot of time and effort, but I am planning on posting more.  I've promised my gods that I will observe all the Celtic Fire Festivals (Lá Fhéile Bride [Imbolc], Lá Bealtaine [Bealtaine], Lá Lúnasa [Lughnasa], and Oíche Shamhna [Samhain]) and I'm thinking I'll probably celebrate the solstices and equinoxes as well.  Everybody like a party.  I will record my ritual doings here.  As well as any major or minor magical happenings in between.

My religious leanings–polytheistic–have been pushing me more towards a more devotional practice, and towards Irish reconstruction and the Celtic pantheon.  I've been dreaming of Manannán mac Lir for months now, and, more recently, Brigid.  This change of perception requires a boatload of research, practice, and patience.  I will likely post articles about my path and what stumbles befall me.  It should be interesting.  Also, if you're interested, I've constructed an eShrine for Manannán (and Hecate and Bendis) over on Tumblr.  Check it out.

In addition to spells and rituals, and witchery of all types, I'm hoping to add poetry, prayers, stories, and songs.  I'd also like to add more reference pages/posts, which, I think, will come in handy on my journey, and will hopefully be helpful to our readers as well.  So keep an eye out for posts on: gods, gems/stones, the fair folk, plants/herbs, tools, shrines/altars, divination, and whatever else we think of.  Though, likely, those posts won't come any time soon.  There are a lot of changes happening in our lives, Leanne's and mine, in a lot of ways we're both having to rebuild from major upheavals, so please be patient!  We'll get this blog rolling again soon.

¹Cutest baby boy in the world, her son!  Not cutest baby in the world, as that title currently belongs to my brother's new daughter. ;)  I'm an aunt twice over (kith-aunt & kin-aunt)!  So exciting.