The Ancient Celtic Calendar–Imbolc

I expect most people can guess that the four major holidays back in our ancient ancestors’ time were the solstices and equinoxes. That is almost a no-brainer. They lived outdoors a lot and their agriculture and hunter-gatherer lives made the seasons and weather very important. But the Celts loved to divide things into halves and quarters and on and on, so they set up a second set of special festival days, exactly halfway between each of those big solar events.

The spring one is called Imbolc or sometimes another term I cannot spell offhand that means ‘ewe’s milk’ since lambs tend to be born early. This was a special festival since by then a few signs of spring were appearing. While at midwinter we took it on faith that the sun would return and growing season come again, now proof was showing up with a few springs of green and baby animals starting to be born.

For the Celts the date became dedicated to the goddess Brigid who presides over the forge and metal smithery, the home’s hearth, healing and midwifery and the creative arts. Yep, she was a busy gal! Water and fire were her emblems and the mystery of fire on water–thus a habit of floating candles on a bowl of water on her altar.

Well, as Christianity came to Ireland, somehow the deity Brigid became a saint and Candlemas evolved out of the earlier observations. There was the aspect of spring starting to appear too and from that has come our modern Groundhog Day. Only here in the southwest we do it a bit differently and say that if Ricardo the Rattlesnake comes out of his den and sees his shadow that winter is just about gone. The sun is out and all is right in the world!

I love ancient history and traditions and having mostly Celtic ancestors, all that stuff really resonates with me. My late hubby was also into that and we had bunches of books and did a lot of research. Someday one of my author personas will write some books in that setting… Actually Gwynn had been working on one sporadically for years  with the working title Gwynedd’s Tale. It started out a short story but has kept growing and covers events in Wales, Ireland and Scotland before they were really national entities.