* The audio above is a voiceover for this post if you’d prefer to listen. The ‘future self’ practice itself is on the audio at the end of this post.
‘She was, and perhaps still is, worshipped on Midsummer Eve by the peasantry [community], who carried torches of hay and straw, tied on poles and lighted round her hill at night. Afterwards, they dispersed themselves among cultivated fields and pastures, waving their torches over the crops to bring luck and increase for the following year. One night… the ceremony was omitted owing to the death of one of the neighbours. Yet the peasantry at night saw the torches in greater number than ever circling the hill, and [Goddess] Áine herself in front, directing and ordering the procession.’
T.W. Rolleston, Celtic Myths and Legends, 1911
A Chairde, Friends,
We have crossed the threshold into the portal of Bealtaine in the northern hemisphere, a season of ripening whose energies climax at the summer solstice. The Irish Gaelic words for the summer solstice are, grianstad an tsamhraidh, literally ‘sun stop of summer’, as the sun appears to stand still at its highest point resulting in the longest day of the year. And so, as we bloom into this time, I share a creative practice to accompany us inspired by the Goddess and Fairy Queen, Áine (“Awn-ya”).
Áine’s name means brightness, lustre, glow, radiance, spendour, brilliance, wit, glory, most Irish folk will know an ‘Áine’ as unsurprisingly it’s a popular name given its beauty. Áine is likely an old Sun Goddess (the sun is a feminine noun in the Irish language but is fluid, also associated with the shining god, Lugh), a Sovereignty Goddess of Munster in the south of Ireland, and later a Fairy Queen. I will curate a Creative Ancestor Profile on Áine for you soon.
Meet Your Future Self
This is one of my favourite creative practices to do. In this guided journey, you will travel to Áine’s lake at Lough Gur in Co. Limerick, to meet the archetypal image of this Goddess along with the image of your ‘future self’. This practice is not about fortune-telling or fate, each image we are gifted from our psyche, from our soul—or as I would see as from the Unconscious, the place where the Celtic Otherworld emerges from—represents a potentiality for our lives. Images are holy because they express the potential that we already hold within ourselves. They provide clues to what our soul is trying to communicate with us on our life’s path. We have become used to devaluing imagination as pure fabrication, a dreadful travesty of our excessive logos/‘logical’ times. Deep imagination is about bringing an image that emerges from the soul into form, there’s nothing unreal about that.
‘… by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy—that mode which recognises all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.’
James Hillman, A Blue Fire
To engage in this practice is to engage with your soul.
