Danu Forest - Wild Magic

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

Wild Magic: Celtic Folk Traditions for the Solitary Practitioner 2020 by Danu Forest.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

As the purchaser of this e-book, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the authors copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

First e-book edition 2020

E-book ISBN: 9780738763590

Book design by Samantha Peterson

Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

Editing by Laura Kurtz

Interior illustrations by Dan Goodfellow

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Forest, Danu, author.

Title: Wild magic : Celtic folk traditions for the solitary practitioner /

Danu Forest.

Description: First edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota : Llewellyn Publications,

[2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary:

Celtic-based natural magical practices; incl. mythology, botanical

informationProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020030011 (print) | LCCN 2020030012 (ebook) | ISBN

9780738762678 (paperback) | ISBN 9780738763590 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Magic, Celtic. | Faery-Faith (Wiccan sect) | Nature

worship. | Mythology, Celtic. | NatureMythologyIreland.

Classification: LCC BF1622.C45 F67 2020 (print) | LCC BF1622.C45 (ebook)

| DDC 133.4/3089916dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030011

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030012

Llewellyn Publications does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publishers website for links to current author websites.

Llewellyn Publications

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.llewellyn.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my family

of both blood and spirit
and all the other wild things of the forest.

Contents

List of

: What Is Wild Magic?

: An Creideamh S : The Celtic Faery Faith

: Earth

: Sea

: Sky

: Fire

: Our Green Kin

: Honouring the Sacred Land

Practicals and Exercises

Disclaimer

The wild is wonderful, but it can also be dangerous, even with all the knowledge and experience in the world. In this book you may discover all sorts of techniques and resources to help you explore the wild and wild Celtic spirituality in its various forms, but it is essential that any knowledge found in any book goes hand in hand with your own common sense, careful preparation, and awareness of the practical risks inherent in any particular location or situation. It is important to always be fully responsible for our own welfare and those around us when in wild places. We need to be careful of wild weather and not to take risks when engaging spiritually with storms or high winds; equally, we need to know fire regulations in national parks, and take care for the fire safety of all life forms around us. We must be fully knowledgeable and responsible about any plants we may inhale or ingest and let people know our plans before disappearing into wild places for any length of time. Guides, food, water, safety, and communication equipmentespecially first aid kits and phonesare irreplaceable in many wild places. In every endeavour, we need to remember that safety is always first.

Acknowledgements

No book is ever written alone, and my deep gratitude goes to all those who have helped me along the way: to my teachers, students, and fellow travellers, and especially to Dan Goodfellow for his unwavering support and beautiful illustrations, and to the team at Llewellyn, most notably Elysia Gallo and Laura Kurtz for making this book the best it can be.

Introduction

What is Wild Magic?

F eel the air in your lungs and your feet upon the ground. Feel your heart beating. Underneath the everyday, our daily concerns, and cultural routines, each of us is wild inside. We are every one of us living on this earth with the land beneath us, and the sun moon and stars above. Every one of us needs clean air, clean water, and good food. Every one of us has a long line of ancestors who walked this earth before us; they faced similar challenges, highs and lows, and lived in a world as full of the potential for spiritual connection as any one of us today. My ancestors, the Celts of Britain and Ireland, are often said to have lived in closer communion with the earth and venerated nature in a way seldom seen in the modern era. However, the earth and spirits who dwell within and upon this earth are as accessible to us today as ever. What has changed is not nature or the spirit world but us clothed in our technology and plastic and concrete cities, it is we who live with the delusion that we are somehow distanced from nature, from the wild, and the effects of our behaviour towards it. The wild has never truly left; it is we who have merely closed our eyes and pretended to leave it far behind.

We are, each of us, wild, if we strip away the conditioning and conventions that force us to change our shape to live with the constraints of the modern world. We can see wild as a negative or even frightening term these days, as it comes with a host of associations we find hard to controlinstinctual, unconstrained, fierce, even, and driven by an inner voice or calling that pays no heed to the rules which govern our societies. Wild has also become something we quietly admire, or even treasure as something outside ourselves, as if it were something inaccessible, something which has no place in this world even while we mourn its loss. We see a nobility in wild things, a presence, a power, while at the same time we partake in a culture which strips the wild away without mercy, destroying habitats and all the life forms that rely on them with endless hunger. Our consumerist lifestyle strives to take more and more for itself to fill a void within each of usa void made by our movement away from the wild within ourselves for which there is no compensation. Without the wild, without nature in all its diversity, we lose ourselvesnot only our souls and our spiritual connection to our own presence here in the world, but ultimately our lives as a species. We cannot sever our connection to the whole of life.