In this episode of The Pagan Portal Podcast, host Rachel Patterson is joined by best-selling author Morgan Daimler to dive deep into the tangled roots of Irish mythology, fairies, and spiritual practice.
Morgan shares insights from their upcoming translation project, Tales of the Tuatha Dé Danann, highlighting how Victorian mistranslations, poetic wordplay, and modern fantasy games have all shaped and sometimes distorted our understanding of Ireland’s ancient stories. From Macha’s not-so-symbolic acorns to the unique nature of fairy magic, this episode unpacks the complexities behind some of Irish paganism’s most widely accepted beliefs.
They also discuss the nature of the Otherworld, the blurred lines between the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Aos sí and other spirits, and the critical importance of returning to original source texts for anyone working with Irish deities and traditions today.
If you’re drawn to Celtic mythology, fairy faith, or the deeper study of Irish pagan spirituality, this is an essential listen.
Topics covered include:
– What the ancient Irish believed about the Otherworld
– Why some fairies come from D&D, not folklore
– The misunderstood symbolism of Macha’s “acorns”
– Fairy magic as its own tradition
– Translation issues in Irish mythology
– The overlap between gods, fairies, and spirits
– Making myth more accessible through literal translation
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#celticmythology #irishmythology #folklore #paganism #fairyfaith
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Hello and welcome to the Pagan Portal podcast produced by Moonbooks Publishing and presented by me, Rachel Patterson. If you prefer prefer an audio only version, hop on over to Spotify. If you would like to sign up for early showings of all their goodies, then please do consider subscribing and please do hit the subscribe button on YouTube. So, we have a returning guest today and is always a pleasure and fascinating to chat with the wonderful, the legendary best-selling moon books author, expert in the fair folk, Celtic and Norse pathways, and any number of other things. Welcome, Morgan Daer. Thank you for having me back on. It’s always fun to chat with you. Now, most people will know you. If they don’t, they’ve been under a rock somewhere. But would you just like to give us a little bit about yourself? Sure. So, uh, my name is Morgan Daimler. I have been a witch since the early 1990s. I have been studying mythology and folklore for about that same amount of time, less officially and then more recently have gotten into it in a a more direct and academic sort of way. Um, I write books, as you mentioned, uh, mostly about fairies, um, Irish mythology and Irish folklore and kind of anything related to that. Um, and I’ve also sort of unintentionally in the last several years gotten into studying the intersection between modern fiction and belief. So, a little bit of everything. It’s what makes life interesting. That’s my motto. Now, you have two new books coming out with Moon Books this year. If we can start with Pantheon, the Irish. Now, this does sound a really silly question given the title, but what’s the idea behind this one? So, Pantheon: The Irish is either the third or fourth book in a Moonbook series called Pantheon. And the vision for it was to sort of offer a range of culturally specific books that would give readers a solid introduction to that pantheon and to sort of the pagan spiritual practices associated with it. So the first half of the book is talking about the culture I’m focused on in this case um Irish. I’ve also written a previous one on the Norse. Um so the first part is focusing on the history of the culture it’s from the spirituality and the religion of the culture it’s from and then the second half is looking at the pantheon itself sort of the the range of gods that we know about and also some adjacent uh spirits that are kind of not exactly gods necessarily but um similar. or come on to those. Now, I need to get the usual question out of the way first. Celtic or Irish, what’s the difference? What’s the clarification? So, um, Celtic, I usually will say Celtic language speaking cultures just because it’s a little more specific. But Celtic is kind of a broad blanket term for a group of related cultures that um share sort of the same root language and uh original root culture if you go way way back. Whereas Irish would be one of those specific cultures. Um when we’re talking about Celtic, we’re talking about uh generally speaking, you know, 20 2500 years ago and sort of what was happening at that point as populations were moving and you know, there’s a lot of things happening back then when it came to this culture and the original concept of Celtic cultures even was not um unified. So when we talk about it today, I think is a little misleading. We get this idea that there was this one big Celtic culture that was just one big thing that moved around. But it was actually always these these small groups that shared again similar languages and and similar art styles and mythology and things like that. And eventually that kind of divided. I am of course paraphrasing here and there are some disagreements among scholars about where it started, where it spread. Yeah, literally everything. Um, so I’m just sort of giving you the most commonly understood version, simplified. Um, and then of course you have the Irish culture which is very specific and it shares some features with other Celtic language cultures. Um, but it also has things that are unique to it, to that location that we don’t find in other places. So, it it’s kind of the difference between something that’s very general and very specific. Yeah, I know. It gets confused quite a lot, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, I think what happened is because um particularly in the 1990s, it was um sort of a thing. It just everything was Celtic. You just called everything Celtic and Yeah. and sort of mashed everything together. And a lot of times when people were saying Celtic, they were talking about Irish. And I think it created this confusion now, you know, 30, 40 years later where people just assume that they’re kind of direct equivalents. Um, and they’re not. So, so if we look at the Irish mythology, uh, I know with the Welsh, we have the Mabanogi. Does is Irish mythology recorded anywhere that a lot of it is. So I think this is another of those fun like uh misinformations or or urban myths, however you want to call it. Um because you will see a lot of people saying we don’t know anything about Irish mythology. We don’t have any sources. And where this comes from is the fact that all of our written sources were written down by Christians. And that is true. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have anything. And particularly the older material was recorded um at least in my opinion fairly directly. It’s not until later when we get to like the 16th 17th century that we start to see some kind of questionable questionable versions of things happening. Um, but a lot of the older material is is pretty straightforward and they would even say in it like, you know, they would give you the the original story and then add on in the end, but like, oh, but we know, you know, as good Christians that that isn’t possible. So, um, it’s yeah, just literally a disclaimer for the bishop. Um, and it wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t like there was, you know, you have to like really read into it to tease these things out. They were pretty clear. That disclaimer was pretty clear. Um, yeah. So, we have we have a decent amount of material. We don’t have everything. Um, which I, as far as I’m aware, is true for pretty much any pagan uh European pagan culture. Um, everything we have uh will have references to things that we don’t have, you know. Um, just stories that have been lost, things that were common knowledge. they weren’t written down at the time. Things along those lines. U but we do have quite a a good amount of it. Excellent. Yeah, we have really I guess the Romans, the monks, they were the ones that wrote things down, weren’t they? So, we have them to thank for it really. Albeit perhaps a little bit colored. Um, and I actually think with the Romans, uh, not that that’s my particular focus, cuz that wasn’t really an issue in Ireland, per se, but, um, the Roman return, I think, is trickier because they weren’t straightforward about it. Um, Oh, no. You know, they just sort of incorporated everything and wrote wrote about it through their own lens, you know. Absolutely. Yeah. All with a pinch of salt with them. or sometimes even hundreds and hundreds of years later. But we have to start somewhere, don’t we? Um I think, you know, again, circling back to the fact that people have this idea that if it was recorded by Christians, we have to completely throw it out. Um because I run this out a lot with with fairy beliefs as well. If we did that, we would have nothing, right? To be clear, there would be nothing. Yeah, exactly. Um, and I, like I said, I think this idea that if Christians wrote it, it’s completely untrustworthy. We just need to be careful not to, you know, as they say, throw the baby out with the bathwater. There there’s definitely a good amount of material that we can clearly see was originally pagan or is even still relayed as pagan. And then again, there’s the the bishop disclaimer in there. Got to keep the bishop happy. And I mean it when I say it’s not subtle. Like there’s a story of how all the the healing herbs on earth were found and it ends with you know there’s it involves uh several of the Irish gods of healing because Ireland tends to have sort of a redundancy um not in a bad way with deities where you have multiple that are associated with a particular thing. So m multiple gods of healing multiple goddesses of war you know things along those lines. um and the sort of primary god of healing was upset with a situation very paraphrasing the story and um his daughter was cataloging all of these healing herbs that had grown up out of her brother’s grave and he scatters them all you know and says this is not knowledge we’re meant to have basically and literally after that finishes there’s a little addendum to the text that is like you know but we know you know it was our Lord Jesus Christ who gave gave us all this knowledge of of healing herbs. So, like it’s not subtle. You don’t you don’t need a magnifying glass to find it. Do we know what the Irish ancient Irish thought about uh other realms, other worlds? Uh we do some degree. Um and again, like we don’t have no one sat down and wrote out, you know, a little treatise on this is what the the common people’s beliefs are about these things. That would have been useful. that that would have been. Um I’m glad that today we do have things like that and hopefully they’ll survive, you know, 2,000 years from now. Um help out those future anthropologists and folklorists. So, um, we have references actually the oldest Irish language story about the what we would call fairies in English, but the AI, the the people of the Fairy Mountains, um, talks about that world and it was basically understood as a very concrete physical realm, but one that could not necessarily be reached by humans intentionally. there’s some accidental things that happen, but um whereas the people who live there, the the people of the other world have this ability to cross back and forth, um you know, humans tend to either wander in there accidentally or be taken in there. Um and it was this idea that it was something adjacent to the human world, connected to the human world, but also separated from it. Oh, I it’s interesting. I we I did read somewhere that I think it might have been a fiction book that the actual fairy world used to be one and the same with ours, but because we upset them so much by destroying nature, they shifted it. Have you heard that one? I have. Um and you’re right, that is something that’s modern. Uh I haven’t run across it in fiction that I know of, although I’m sure it’s out there. Um I have run across it in the more sort of new age end of the scale kind of books. Um there’s this idea that uh the the fairies, the good folk are um sort of cousins to humanity, I guess we could say. Um that they came first and they’re connected to us, but they were more evolved, more powerful, more magical. And when humans, it’s a little unclear at what point this would have happened. And if you know anything about human history, you’ll understand why it’s unclear, but that humans at some point became too violent and too destructive, and so they sort of withdrew from this reality. Um, we actually don’t have enough of the older Irish material to know for sure what they believed about that. Um, what we do have is is basically just coming from the perspective that there’s always been this divide. Um, you know, so there’s no Well, to be fair, we don’t have an Irish creation myth anyway for anything. We don’t we don’t have an Irish creation story for how the human world was made. Um any of that sort of stuff that has been lost. We have some hints about what it might have been um that you do need a micro um uh microscope to kind of find in the stories, but we have we have some hints of stuff. We just don’t have um the actual full creation story like we find in some other cultures. and everything we do have sort of presupposes that there is this other world that exists adjacent to the human world and has these powerful what we would call magical beings in it. Um so we don’t really know how that that started and I believe the Welsh is the same as far as I’m aware. Um there’s just an understanding that this is trees exist, rocks exist and the other world exists. is basically how it is. I I can go with I can I can roll with that. That’s fine by me. Now, you give a ritual structure in your book. Is that a modern idea or do we know that there were ancient uh Irish pagan rituals at some point? Sure. It’s it’s a blend of two things. um what’s in what’s in the Pantheon the Irish book. It’s um some of it is based on what we do know historically, which is not a lot. Um and some of that comes from archaeology, some of that comes from texts that we do have that reference different types of rituals. Um, and then some of it is based on modern Irish pagan practice and those are kind of blended in the book to give some suggestions for how you could approach uh doing a ritual in that context. Um, most of what we do have doesn’t get into the specific details of exactly how it’s not like a step-by-step guide to this is how you do an Irish pagan ritual. Um but it gives us sort of the general outline. So we would know that like um people would gather there would be some sort of ritual or ceremony either led by a druid who would have been the the priest or priestess of the time or sometimes nobility like the king would have um led certain types of rights and then there would have been feasting. Feasting is always a really important part of the whole process. As it should be. Yes. As it should be. That is definitely something we need to to carry forward and continue to Absolutely. Yes. I think we kind of in modern terms we tend to look at things as being very separate. So you have like monarchy would be one thing and then you know religion and spirituality would be another. um particularly here in the US because we don’t have monarchy here. Um and actually the closer way to look at it would be to use England for an example the way the king is the head of um the Anglican church I believe it is um Church of England. Yes. Um obviously you know these days that’s more of a an honorary title ceremonial sort of thing but um if you kind of look at it through that lens of this is someone who is considered to be um the the monarch leader of the country but they’re they have that role in part because they’re seen as um being approved by the gods I guess we could say. So there’s this older Irish belief that if you are the king or the queen, um but primarily the king, um you’re the king because the goddess of sovereignty has given you that ability, has chosen you. So that you can kind of see as I say that how that would tie into the idea of this being someone who could lead spiritual rituals. Yeah. They’re they’re literally blessed and chosen by the goddess. So are there any I mean we are familiar with the wheel of the year that is the modern idea today. Do some of those come directly from Ireland originally? To a degree. Um yes. So I’m just trying to think of like the the best way to approach this answer. So the modern wheel of the year as we have it many people probably already know this was sort of put together in the midentth century. Um, and it it sort of blends like a more Norse holiday schedule with um a more generally Celtic, but we’ll say Irish in this case, holiday schedule. Um, and that works for a lot of people. So, I am not in any way criticizing the modern wheel of the year, but four of those holidays, what would have been called the fire festivals, um, seem to have been primarily drawn from Irish culture, maybe also a little bit Scottish at the time. Um, so we have Illock, which is uh, February 2nd. Um, February 1st. See, I knew I was going to mess that up as soon as I started to say it. Candle Mass is February 2nd. That is the Catholic Saints Day. Um the 1st of February. There we go. Um all of the the Irish Fire Festivals are on the first of the calendar month that they’re associated with. So the it makes them easy to remember unless you’re me and then I managed to mess it up anyway. So the first of February is Imble and then we have the 1st of May is Bialchina. that kind of gets anglicized to Beltain for those that don’t recognize the Irish that I’m about to really confuse. Yeah. Um and then the 1 of August is Luna and then the 1st of November is sin, although we tend to celebrate it on the 31st. Um you know, in modern culture. Uh and that comes from the idea that all of these holidays would have begun the night before. Um and sort of ties into Yeah. this idea we get um from some of the older uh speaking of Romans, the older Roman material um claiming that the Kelts started their day at sunset basically and measured days from sunset to sunset instead of you know from midnight to midnight or dawned on. Um so there’s this idea if we’re saying the first of the calendar month you would start that the night before and that’s true for all of them. Um, when we look at like the folk practices, remembering the dates was one of the first things that I stumbled on when I was learning many, many years ago. Yeah. Remembering all those dates on the wheel. Um, I was going to say, and of course the solsticees and equinoxes are tricky because they’re not on the same day every year. They wander a little bit. Sent to trias. Definitely. Yes. Keeps it interesting. Definitely. I can remember having charts and things printed out all over the place just to try and remind myself. Is there a specific form of magic that was specific to Irish paganism? Did they believe in? Did they work with magic? Um, there definitely was the concept of magic, the idea that certain people or types of people um could have an ability to influence the world around them in different ways. Um, a lot of it is going to be very similar, I think, to other cultures. Um, just that’s the nature in my opinion before people start, you know, yelling at me in the comments. In my opinion, um, just the nature of magic that it tends to be pragmatic in whatever culture we’re looking at. So there’s things focused on love, there’s things focused on health, there’s things focused on, you know, success, protection, um, everything that would matter to a person, you know, in their daily life. Yeah. um in Ireland, of course, we’re going to have more specific approaches to things and maybe specific ways to do things, but um the the ultimate point of everything and a lot of times even the way they’re approached is very similar. Um uh so it’s it’s interesting to look at the way that we have things that are very general that you can look at any culture and find and then also things that are very specific to Ireland. Like Irish magic tends to be very verbal. There’s this idea of yeah of um speaking things into being. um you know they have a whole concept of what’s called satire and it’s not satire in like the modern sense at all. Um and I try to stress that because I think people see the word and they immediately think of like how we would understand it today. Um, and yeah, and actually it was used as sort of it’s this spoken almost like a curse kind of a thing where you would um insult the person and the idea was that as long as you were speaking truthfully, they deserved to be uh satarized. Basically, it would have negative effects on them. Um, and there’s, you know, this idea in particular that it would cause like blemishes or disfigurements on the person as a sign that, you know, they actually did deserve this satire. Um, obviously doesn’t always work that way in stories because it’s the nature of stories, but that was theoretically the intent behind it. Um, and satists were actually really feared in the the sort of later conversion era culture. Um, we have laws in the early Irish law trackcts specifically about satire and satists and the idea that if you were if you were making a satire unjustly, there were consequences for that. Um, so yeah, just to kind of show you like where it was in the culture, it was pretty significant thing. Um he also had something called a rosque which is like a spoken poem but it’s magical in nature. So the idea was that you would speak this and then it would cause what you were speaking to happen sort of manifesting your will um through this particular style of poetry. So things like that I think are more uniquely Irish. Um yeah, and then of course they had the idea of the evil eye, which every culture I think has some concept of that. Um you know that you can look at someone with ill intent and cause problems. There would be a use for that these days. There’d be way too much of it going on though. Well, yeah, that’s true. It just be everywhere because obviously fairies are very very rooted in Ireland. Is there fairy magic? Does is that a separate thing to general magic or was there crossovers? So, I’m going to answer this two ways. Uh, yes, there’s an idea that the the good folk themselves have a particular type of magic. Um, and it’s a kind of magic that generally humans don’t have. Like, it’s specific to them. It still influences things that like human magic would be aimed at like health and luck and stuff like that. But good folk have a particular kind of energy, a particular magic to them. So because of that, there also were people who would specialize um not so much in the the pre-Christian era that we know of, although I’m sure there were back then too, but um particularly in the more modern era, uh there were people who would specialize just in knowing how to deal with fairies and and fairy enchantments. Um, so it kind of became like a a magical subsp specialty, you know, like if you were a wise woman or a cunning man or uh, you know, what have you, um, you would know how to deal with like all sorts of different kinds of magic and potentially magic things, but you would particularly know how to counteract uh, certain activities by the good folk. um if they were targeting someone, yeah, if they were causing someone problems or enchanting them or anything along those lines, um you would know how to deal with that because it was sort of a specialty field. Now, I’m going to jump back to where you mentioned the deities list and the other spirits. Why a separation? What’s the difference? So, in a lot of ways, it is an artificial separation is a very fair question. Um, you know, when we when we look at Ireland, there is sort of an understanding that there are humans and then there are nonhuman spirits. Um, and I’m really simplifying this. There’s a lot of nuance here that I’m just ignoring at the moment. Um, otherwise this is going to be two hours of me just trying to answer this one question. When we look at the nonhuman spirits, we have different groupings with a lot of crossover between them. So, it makes it very confusing. And when we talk about the Irish gods, we’re generally talking about the Teddan um the uh one of the groups of powerful beings who settled Ireland before humans came there. Um, and they are the ones who are the most often understood to be gods and they’re the ones in these older manuscripts and texts that are called gods. Um, explicitly, you know, this is Manan, the god of the sea or, you know, the Morgan is called a goddess, you know, things like that. So we kind of approach it like we have the Dan, the old Irish gods and then we have this sort of miscellaneous category. Um the Aishi the the fairies would be included in that. Um which is such a messy concept because some of them are toaded down in some of them are not. Um like I said there’s there’s really not a lot of firm lines here. I mostly broke it down just to make it easier for readers to kind of see the way things would get categorized uh particularly in the pre-Christian period. So you have the Denon, you have the the is the people of the fairy hills who are referred to as a separate group in the mythology. They just aren’t clearly separated. It’s a lot of crossover. Um, you know, I’ll use I’ll use Madan as another example. So, he is a god of the sea. Um, he is eventually included among those who has Dan, but he was not originally and he was originally the god of the other world. Um, or at least, you know, the majority of the other world. So, that’s kind of how messy it gets. So he starts out connected to the good folk and to the other world and he’s he’s the king and um he’s sort of this this third factor in mythology with humans and the tadan but then eventually he’s sort of included among the tuadan and is considered one of the Irish gods uh along with them but that’s not how it always was and that actually really describes the majority of Irish mythology right there. Okay. It’s It’s confusing and messy and Yeah. Um and then like like most family trees. Yes. Oh, don’t get me started on the family trees. Yeah. The the genealogy of the Dan is um slightly unhinged. Yeah. Um and then we also have beings like the Kayak. Um the Kayak may emphasis on may be one of the Touadan possibly. We don’t know for certain. Um you have uh Dawn who was uh supposedly according to the mythology was the first human who died in Ireland but he became kind of this ancestral god. All of the dead go to the house of dawn. Um it’s it’s complicated. Um you have Crom Krook who or um Crom Dev uh who may or may not have been a literary invention originally. A lot of scholars think he probably was because he doesn’t appear in any stories of the Tidan. He doesn’t appear in any of like the original um mythology stories. he kind of shows up later. And he is, this is when we have to get that um magnifying glass out in the later material, but he is pretty clearly coded as sort of a um antichrist mollik kind of biblical figure. Um hence why most scholars feel that he probably was sort of a later addition to things, but he has still been considered a god for over a thousand years. So he’s definitely in there. earned it. He’s earned it by the sounds of it. Yeah, he’s been treated that way for a long time. And there are certain holidays or times of year that are associated with him. You know, it’s this is where I said it gets messy. It’s all very messy. Um, so yeah, and this is why I decided I would do this in in one section and then sort of these other messier things in a separate section instead of putting everything all together because that makes it even more confusing. Now on to the and I’m dreading pronouncing this, the tales of the Tuatha Dan, which is not how you pronounce it at all, which is your other book that’s coming out later this year, volume one. What’s this book all about? And and what’s the reason behind writing it? Sure. I think this is a fun story. I’m not sure if everyone will agree with me, but we’ll find out. So, I started translating old and middle Irish uh a little over 10 years ago now when I realized as I was doing some research around the Morgan uh looking at a particular manuscript story that the two translations we have of that particular story which were done about a hundred years apart there are certain points that are very different and I started to wonder why that was. So I was looking into it and found out that um a that particular story of the kwura a lot of it had not even been translated. It was poetic material. None of the translators including the modern ones really wanted to try to mess with it because it it can sound very nonsensical in English and a lot of it in the original language. You get a lot of word play happening that you just can’t translate into English. Um, and also the older translators, the stuff that’s in the public domain that’s easy to access, this would be the Victorian era, um, they would just ignore things that they felt were inappropriate for their audience or they would add things in if they felt something needed to be clarified. You got to love the Victorians. Bless them. Yes. So I kind of realized that you know we’re we’re approaching these English translations of these myths as if they are um you know basically holy writ uh you know there and I’ve seen people do this where they’ll take a passage and just interpret like every single word for these deep spiritual meanings. And again, I’m not criticizing if that works for you, but I started to realize that is all based on one person’s opinion when they translated it. And sometimes in ways that are very misleading. Um, you know, so I’ll give you a quick example. Um, you’ll hear a lot of people talking about in in Irish paganism talking about Maka’s acorn crop um being the the heads of, you know, warriors defeated in battle. And I have seen people who get very philosophical about the connection with acorns and oak trees and warriors and you know that uh one of Maka’s symbols is the the acorn or the oak and I mean it gets very elaborate and in depth and the original text does not say acorn. Um it’s just it’s a general term for for any nut crop. It could have been any kind of nut and right and to me that really changes the meaning. Um, you know, it’s it could have been hazelnuts, it could have been anything. Um, and if you’re getting so indepth about, you know, the symbolism of this particular thing and then it turns out that’s not even what was in the original story. you know, the translator just used ACORN because that was the easiest option with, you know, is really what it comes down to. And once I realized that, I was like, well, I clearly need to be able to read this myself or it’s going to it’s going to really annoy me. Yeah. Um, so I had started learning Old and Middle Irish. Uh, and I started working on my own translations and I had amassed sort of a a body of this work and Trevor Greenfield who is the fabulous and amazing editor through Moon Boat. Oh, hell Trevor. Indeed. I I owe him like a hundred muffin baskets at this point. Um, he is you and me both probably. He is an amazing editor and I adore him and I am dyslexic and he edits my manuscripts and has to deal with my very interesting approach to spelling sometimes. Um because spellch check does not catch everything. No, no, no. Um so yes, bless Trevor for all eternity for for putting up with me. Absolutely. Um absolutely. He’s amazing. But he had come to me and actually said that he thought it would be um something that Moon Books might be interested in to publish these translations that I have done. And I initially was a little skeptical because I’m like, well, I’m not sure um how well that’s going to work. You know, they are popular. I I do them on my Patreon. I have shared some publicly in the past. And um I take a very literal approach to translation and then leave it up to the to the reader to make it prettier or whatever you want to do with it. Um but so you can see and I’ll I footnote everything. Um so you can see like these are the other ways you can interpret that word, you know, in this instance. And that style apparently appeals to people. Some people like that. I learned how to footnote my books from you. You are wholly responsible for any footnotes in my books. I didn’t do them before I read your book. Awesome. That I love that. I’m a big fan of footnotes in general in books. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Um so yes, footnotes everywhere. That’s cool. Um and yeah, talking with Trevor, uh you know, he he thought it would be a good idea, so I said that, you know, why not? Let’s let’s try it. And um tales of the hooded volume 1 is mostly shorter pieces that I’ve done that focus on either the Irish gods specifically or the a fairies more generally. Um because I think particularly for a pagan audience, there is this kind of desire to read these stories, to have access to them, but they can be a little hard to find. And often they’re kind of mixed in or in amongst a range of other stories that might be less of a pagan interest. Um try to say this as nicely as possible. Um, you know, there’s there’s just certain stories that people are more focused on if they’re into Irish paganism. And so I try to mostly do those. And like I said, initially it started because I wanted to know what do these actually say? What is actually happening here? Um, I do have volume two uh coming out next year. Uh, and that one is fewer stories. It’s actually a longer book, but longer stories. So, the first one has quite a lot going on in it. Um, some of the Irish myths are fairly short. They might be a page or two worth of story. Um, others are longer. So, the second book has longer material in it, including the Kafura, which I mentioned before. Um, I have translated the entire thing start to finish. I do all the poetic bits. I 100% understand why other people do not um because they are they are a challenge um and I say right in the text that you know there are places where in English this does not necessarily make a lot of sense but these are the words you know and you just have to sort of flow with them and get the wider concept that’s being being said Um, but uh the first one comes out the end of October. I’m really excited for it. I hope it’s going to do well. Um, I I love that Moon Books took it on because it is more on I guess you would say like the academic end of things. Well, I say yes, but I think it’s important if you’re going to follow the Irish pathway, if you’re going to study and look at these deities. For me, it’s about going back to that source material. So, I think it’s really important. Yeah. Oh, I totally agree. And, you know, part of why I did this, besides just spite against one particular uh Victorian era translator, Whitley Stokes and I have have beef. Yes. So um but besides that as a motivator um I wanted to make this material more accessible um you know because beyond even the language barrier which is obviously going to be a problem um for for English speakers even for Irish speakers I should say because old and middle Irish is not mutually intelligible with modern Irish it’s it’s like old and middle English like if you get late enough you can start to understand a lot of it if you have modern modern Irish, but the earlier material, it’s it’s very different. Um, the same way old English is very different from modern English. Um, yeah. Um, so not only is there that aspect to it, but also a lot of these things if you don’t know exactly where to look to find them, you can’t, you know, and there’s um there’s some material even uh and I don’t I don’t remember if I included anything in the first book. I know there’s at least one piece in the second book that has not been translated into English at all. Occasionally, you’ll find things that have been translated into German. Uh because there’s a lot of Okay. Yeah. Um there’s a lot of uh interest that that seems random. It does. Um but yeah, there’s there’s a lot of uh interest by German language speakers, academics in the Irish mythology. So there are certain things that were translated into German but not English. So if you speak German, that’s useful. If you don’t, then it’s not. Um, and you still have to know where to even go to find these things. Yeah. So, um, part of my goal with all this was to to collect things in one place, one book that, um, people could go to. They’re not retellings. Um, because you can find those, but, you know, I think a lot of people don’t realize how creative retellings are. Um, you know, you hear retelling and you think, okay, this is someone telling the story. Um, but a lot of times it’s it’s that person really adding their own ideas and flourishes and filling out areas, you know, all that kind of stuff. And not again, not that any of that is bad, but they people get this impression that that was the original story. and very much not. So, um I’m hoping with this that people can go and see this is the original story. This is what it actually says in the material we have written down and then you can take it from there. You know, do whatever you want with it. Sorry, I have a lot of passion about this. No, no, but I think that’s good and I think it is really important. I think if you are going to work with any deity, you need to go back to the oldest source you can find. and the most reliable source. The internet has so much misinformation on it and so like you were saying earlier, someone translates something but it might be their own opinion and then it just gets copied from place to place. The amount of time I’ve seen the same information, exactly the same information with no base. Yep. Yep. I run into that a lot. This is brilliant. Yeah. When it comes to fairy material. Um, and I need to do a YouTube video about this and I I haven’t had time yet, but I have written multiple little articles and blogs and stuff where I’ll run into something and someone will be like, “Well, there’s this Irish fairy and it’s called this.” And I’ll be like, “I have never heard of that before and I’m pretty well-versed.” You know, I don’t know everything, but I I’m pretty familiar with like the range of of stuff. and I’ll dig into it and oh no, this this is coming from, you know, one particular less than accurate author in the 1990s or this is actually coming to us from Dungeons and Dragons and Oh, yes. Yeah, I run into that quite a bit. I’ve heard that from students. Yeah, I’ve had that from students. You Google a fairy and the first thing that comes up happens to be Dungeons and Dragon, which is brilliant. Yeah, but not factually correct. Um, you know, I I love D and D. I have played it since I was a teenager. I love Changing the Lost. I love the White Wolf games. I love Vampire the Masquerade. All of that stuff. Super fun. Not accurate to mythology or folklore. Um, and yeah, the number of people that I’ve seen try to argue that cold iron is cold forged iron because that’s what Dn D says it is. Um, and that is not not even close to what it is in folklore or you know older belief. Um, so yeah, it’s the dangers of googling and especially especially now with AI. Um, this is something I rant about a lot on social media, so brace yourself. Um, a lot of people if you Google and it’s the first thing that comes up, don’t believe it. Yeah, just skipping right past that AI summary. Um, and for two aspects of this, the AI takes, as you were just kind of saying, everything it can find. It does not differentiate between fiction, mythology, fanfiction, which is a whole other kettle of worms. um it just takes everything, anything it finds and it puts it all together and then it it repackages it for you. So you’re getting material that a lot of it is not accurate at all to the question you’re asking because of that. Um, and also I’ve run into more and more people recently that use things like chat GPT, large language models as search engines, which is not what they are and not what they were designed for. And I think people don’t do it. Yeah. I think people are just not aware that if you ask something like chat GPT to tell you about why the Morgan wears pink fuzzy leg warmers, the answer is not going to be it that she doesn’t. It’s going to tell you what it thinks you want to hear. So, it’ll give you this very creative, you know, something. Um, I’ve now got the most horrendous vision. I really can. You Yeah, she would not be happy with pink leg warmers. I can’t believe that. It might be an effective battle strategy though. It would definitely throw your opponent off. Distraction. Yes. Um but yeah, I would just try to, you know, throw out a very random example. Yeah. Um so yeah, I actually all of my books now, um I’ve requested this through Moon have a little disclaimer that nothing in the book was written by AI. Um generative AI of course I do use spellch check as we’ve established. I have to use spellch check. So yes, yeah, there are some things that are useful. I’m not I’m not 100% against every possible type of AI. Um, obviously spellch check is great. I actually am not a fan of grammar checking programs, but uh that’s me personally. Um, because I I find that they cause as many problems as they fix again because they don’t understand the dynamics of human language the way human speakers do. Um, but I’m not criticizing that sort of, you know, AI text to speech. If we would consider that AI, that’s all fine. Um, it’s generative AI where it is it is telling you what to write or it’s writing it for you and then you’re, you know, adjusting it or whatever. I’m I’m not a fan of any of that. So, and that’s become a real problem in pagan publishing. um not with pagan publishers, but with self-published material on sites like Amazon, there’s an increasing number of books that are AI written that are horrifically inaccurate. Um like I I have read some things that I will never be able to get out of my brain again coming from AI, but because it’s in a book, people think it is fact. Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah. Unfortunately, people assume and there’s I don’t want to say it’s a scam, but it kind of is a scam. But there’s there’s ways that this is done where it’s not just like a person has AI write a book about the Morgan and then they publish it. It’s done in such a way so they will intentionally make the sales look very high. They will pay for fivestar reviews. So, you go on Amazon and you find this book and it’s like, oh, you know, this has, you know, 100 five-star reviews raving about how amazing this book is and how great it is and it’s like in the top 10 Amazon sellers for that category. And actually, it’s an AI book and it’s it’s terrible information, but you don’t know that until you get it. Um, and if you don’t know the subject at all, then you’re going to think this is all accurate. Um, so that’s a a big problem. I think if you’re buying a book, check the author is a real person. And that’s easy to do these days, isn’t it? It is so easy to do, especially with pagan authors. Google the author. Yes, we’re out there. You can’t miss us. Yeah. And there’s there’s other red flags because there are people who write under pseudonyms and you might not be able to find a lot of information about them. But if you have an author who is putting out a book every two or three days, which is something the AI people do and the the content farm um people do. If you have an author who has written a hundred books on every conceivable pagan subjects, you know, everything, definite red flag. Definitely. You and I write books quite quickly. Even we don’t write two a week. Yes, that is the the joke that I’ll usually tell people. Um because I’m sort of known for being prolific and a fairly fast writer, but I cannot write, you know, two or three books a week. I cannot write one book a week every single week. It just, you know, you can’t. Um Yeah. And there’s ways to find out. Y um and what I’ll do now, especially on Amazon, is do the preview and you can kind of tell most of the time, um looking at that whether a human wrote it or whether something weird is going on. Yeah. Yeah. Um and don’t listen to people that are like, “Look for M dashes and parenthesis because I love both of those things and you will find those in my books and I am definitely a real person and I don’t use AI.” So, um, you know, M dashes alone are not a sign that it’s AI written. Now, AI translating what you’ve just translated for your new book would be an interesting read. Yes. Um, it it would be entertaining because even um the Google translate for modern Irish is it’s an adventure. Um, and there is nothing, as far as I’m aware, that could translate um old and middle Irish at all. Uh, so yeah, you would end up with with some interesting things happening. Nonsense. Complete nonsense. Yeah, for sure. Now, like we went totally off a tangent there, but an important tangent. Yeah. Um, it’s an important subject. Do you think that’s it? Is Do you think that some of the stories, some of the myths are more important than others? Do I personally think that? Yes. Um, and I know people will disagree with me, but I think for an Irish pagan, it’s important to look particularly at the mythological cycle. It’s important to look at the stories where the Irish gods appear. Um, and where I’m coming from with this, I realize this is actually a lot of reading material, but most people in my experience, um, especially when they’re first getting into Irish paganism or learning about it, tend to focus on just one or two main stories or myths. And not that that won’t give you some understanding of of who these beings are, but a lot of times when you look at the wider picture, you look at sort of all of the stories they’re showing up in, um, you find that things are a lot more complicated than they might appear in just that one story. Um so I certainly think everyone should read the Kafura. Um the Kafura. So the the second battle of Mura is just called the Kafura. Um the Kafura is the first battle of Mura. And those are sort of two really important stories about the twoitan and how they arrived in Ireland and you know sort of who they are. But then there’s there’s a lot of other material out there that’s also really important that gives us some insight into who they are. If you want to understand who the the good folk were are are and were um especially in the older material, there’s particular stories you want to look at. Um that’ll give you an idea cuz for example I see a lot of people talking about the fairies today talking about how you know fairies are only good and helpful and nice and when we have bad experiences or we hear stories of bad experiences that that’s Christian propaganda you know trying to yeah trying to sort of make them look bad and if you actually read the really old material they’re not portrayed as either good or bad. They are simply a a group of human-like beings who are more powerful and more magical than humans and come from this separate reality. And sometimes they need our help and sometimes they cause us a lot of problems. But you can kind of see that they they were never just seen as like very nice, helpful beings. Even in the more positive stories, it’s like these are your neighbors. They’re called good neighbors in Scotland actually, but these are your neighbors, but they’re not your human neighbors. And you know, you just kind of need to be careful that you are on good terms with them and you know, as much as possible and things like that. And I think it it helps dispel the idea that um which is also coming from the more new age end of things that they are just here to like help humans. They just want humans to be better humans. Um, and no, you know, some of them like us, some of them don’t like us, and some of us, some of them wish that we were not here. So, you know, it’s a variety. Now, it’s huge subject and we’ve literally just ted the tip of the iceberg there and it has been fascinating. So, read the books if you want to know more. Are you working, this is a silly question again, are you working on any new projects? Always. I I always try to keep busy. Um I do have two three three books already scheduled for next year. Um it shows you how much I work that I can’t even remember how many books I already have coming out. Um in 2026 I have a book on the Scottish fairy courts um and how they evolved into the modern concepts of the fairy courts which I think people will really like. I think it’s a great subject and certainly one there’s Yeah, there’s a lot of misinformation. Um I have a Pagan portals about the Wild Hunt coming out next year. Yes, looking forward to that one. Yeah, that’s a funny one. A friend of mine actually. I was I was talking to her about how I don’t know what else I could even write about at this point. I’ve covered like which I always say when I’m getting, you know, I go through phases. Um and she was the one that was like, “You should write about the Wild Hunt.” And I was like, “Huh, okay. I wonder if people be interested.” and every time I mention it, everyone is like definitely very interested. So, thank you, Allison, if you’re listening. Good suggestion. Yeah. And then I have my second translation book uh coming out next year as well. Um the first one comes out in September. The second one is out, I believe, next July. And hopefully in a in a perfect world those will both sell really well because I am currently finishing up a translation of the Tando Culie which is sort of the big Irish epic with Kucullen and there’s a lot of Morgan going on in there and some Lou and lots of really interesting things. Um but obviously if the first two translation books do not uh find an audience um then the third one that the tonukuli won’t go through with moon which I’m hoping it will so so buy the books people buy the books just keep in mind if you want more you do have to buy them absolutely that’s brilliant it’s all absolutely fascinating as always thank you so much for joining us thank you for having Yes, people get out there, buy the books if you want literal translations of Irish myths. Yes, you know, then you know where to go. Thank you so much. Thanks to everyone that’s listening and watching and we’ll join you all again next time on the Pagan Portal podcast. You have been listening to the Pagan Portal podcast, a Moonbooks Publishing production. For more information, please visit our website.
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Beautiful share for this High Holy Lughnasadh! x ✨🌾 Thank you both.