Stone of Destiny

Hearing its Shriek. Imbas Dispatch #11

A Chairde, Friends,

Picture a crystal coracle, a small boat gently lapping upon the shore of the mainland, whatever this looks like to you. Give yourself permission to imagine, to bring fantasy into form. Go on, no one’s watching. No one can see what you can see (or sense) in your mind’s eye; how magical is that? Your imagination can take you anywhere. You step into the coracle, and it begins to move of its own volition, gliding across a sea that mirrors the sky, a shimmering glass of saxe blue.

In time, a veil of mist descends upon you, its moistness dancing on your skin, making you feel breathy and alive. You sail through the mist until you see an opening, a sliver of clarity. Like curtains, you pull back the mist to widen the sliver, revealing the shore of an island. The coracle docks on the sands as you disembark and begin to wander away from the shore. You are on Inis Fáil, the ‘Isle of Destiny’.

At the centre of the island, its sacred navel, is a single standing stone, the Lia Fáil, the ‘Stone of Destiny’. One of the four treasures of the gods, it is said to shriek with joy when touched by a true sovereign. You place your hands on the stone. Your hands as a symbol of your creative power and an extension of your heart, the compass of your soul. With your touch—hands, heart and soul—the Lia Fáil shrieks with joy, evoking a flash of brilliant white light across the horizon.

Journey Home (Psyche) by Susan Seddon Boulet

Destiny Shrieks

Destiny shrieks because sometimes it has to. I like to imagine that destiny begins in childhood like an invisible hand covering our ear and whispering, follow this, follow that. We listen. We follow this, we follow that. Until we are forced to grow out into the world with all of the inner-turmoil this can bring and our ears become blocked—a build up of waxed expectation, of waxed survival. But destiny knows persistence. It may leave us for a while and then return, no longer a whisper but a loud voice, warning us of the necessity of change, then a shout, then a roar, then a shriek. A question to ponder here is not simply ‘Do we listen?’—but do we allow it to become a shriek of woe or a shriek of joy?

The Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny, is the last in our Imbas Dispatch series on the four treasures that the Tuatha Dé Danann brought with them to Ireland (along with the Spear of Illumination, Sword of Light, and Cauldron of Plenty). The stone comes from the mystical fortress of Falias and was gifted to the Tuatha Dé by a druid called Morfesa, from mór meaning ‘great’ and fis meaning ‘knowledge’.¹ The Stone of Destiny still stands at Tara, or Temair in Irish, meaning ‘place of eminence’, the royal capital of ancient Ireland. Whether this is the original stone of the legends is debated today.

A phallic monument, it was said to shriek when touched by a true king or when he drove his chariot next to it. The stone declared the destiny of a prospective king, but whether this came to fruition was dependent on the king’s marriage to the goddess of sovereignty, who, in Tara, was Medb Lethderg (‘Maeve the Red-Sided’). In this way, for our ancestors, the integration of the divine masculine and feminine was necessary for the fulfilment of a sovereign’s destiny. 

There is a quote that I love from a 11th-century poem that says of Tara²:   

‘No keep like Temair could be found. She was the secret place on the road of life.’

This, for me, sums up destiny: she is the secret place on the road of life that we must find. But how do we find a secret place? I sense it’s by learning to listen. By attuning our inner ear to hear destiny speak, for destiny in many ways is another word for our soul. For me, I often describe it as following mystical breadcrumb-by-breadcrumb. I know I’ve found a breadcrumb when something shrieks inside of me that makes me feel fully alive in my life, like my heart is pushing me forward to follow even if my head hasn’t caught up.

Destiny informs the word ‘destination’, whose roots mean ‘to make firm’, ‘to establish’. This often marks the end of one road, life as we know it, and the beginning of another. The Lia Fáil is destiny made firm and established. In Jungian terms, it symbolises our sensation function: our ability to define what exists in the world through our senses. When I visit Tara, I can literally place my hands on the Stone of Destiny, feel the cold granite, it is an embodied, sensory experience for me. Like the earthy, material pentacles in tarot, the Stone of Destiny symbolises the reward of destiny made manifest, of a calling answered by a worthy sovereign. And yet it doesn’t end there, it’s merely another step closer to the ‘secret place on the road of life.’

Journal Prompt

Make a list of your destiny paths. Paths that have felt at sometime or another like they were your secret place on the road of life.

A good starting place is your dreams and fantasies as a child. When I was about eight or nine, my destined path was to build a wooden house in an enchanted woods and fill it with magical paraphernalia, inviting in dwellers like talking animals and otherworldly beings. I attempted this in the park across the road from where I lived in a working-class Dublin suburb—when destiny calls! But you know, it came back in recent years in the form of this Enchanted Dwelling practice I created to support my craft. Now, I can go to my magic home whenever I desire.

Then ask yourself:

Which of your destiny paths have shrieked with joy?

Are there any paths on your list (old or new) that feel alive for you this Samhain?

How might you follow one of these paths to find your secret place?

Voices of Celtic Wisdom

I am thrilled that I will be once again facilitating on Voices of Celtic Wisdom with magnificent creative souls and storytellers like Aoife Lowden, Tara Brading, Manchán Magan, Eileen Budd, Angharad Wynne, Cáitlín Matthews, Dolores Whelan, Eimear Burke, Manda Scott, and many others. This is its second year running and it really is a wonder not to be missed! A four-month immersion in Celtic magic. ✨

Croí isteach,

Jen x

1. Celtic Cosmology and the Otherworld: Mythic Origins, Sovereignty and Liminality by Sharon Paice McLeod

2. The Book of Tara by Michael Slavin. The poem is from the Metrical Dindshenchas (‘Lore of Place’)