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Let's face it, the ancestors were head-hunters.

According to the Roman geographer Strabo, writing in the first century BCE

The Gauls practice a custom common to many northern tribes. In battle, they hang the heads of their slain enemies around the necks of their horses, then at home they hang them on pegs in their houses.

The practice persisted for a surprisingly long time. While in Scotland, I paid a visit to the Well of the Seven Heads, where in 1663 a McDonald war-party stopped to tidy up the severed heads of seven clan rivals before presenting them to their chieftain.

Of course, the McDonald Himself probably didn't hang them around the Great Hall afterward.

What, I ask myself, would it be like to live in a home with severed heads hanging from the walls? While, say, you were eating dinner?

Surely they must have cured them in some way? Surely the stink would have been prohibitive otherwise? ("Oh Luvernios, not another one!") Of course, the old Celtic roundhouses lacked louvers—smoke-holes—over their central fires; smoke just percolated out through the thatch. It would have made for a smokey house-place, but also have kept down insects, and made an ideal environment for preserving meats. I suppose, with time, the heads would have dried and smoked along with the sausage and hams.

I look up into the eyes of the Green Man hanging above the computer. Like many pagans, I have many in my home: maybe 30 or so. (Every time I try counting them, the total is always different.)

Green Men we call them, but let's face it: they're Green Heads, mostly. In my own way, I suppose, I'm as avid a collector of heads as the doughtiest Celtic warrior.

In Bronze Age Britain, writes archaeologist David Miles in his magisterial 2005 The Tribes of Britain,

You could have any kind of house you liked provided it was round, 8 metres across and had a south-east facing entrance (96).

From the Bronze Age well into the Celtic Iron Age, ancient Britons “seem to have had a particular fondness for circular houses” (Miles 96), an architectural fashion rarely seen on the Continent.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that the circle had a deep meaning for these ancestors. Remember that these are the people who built the stone circles.

In virtually every culture, the house is an icon of the universe: floor = earth, walls = world, roof = sky.

(Cellar = underworld, one might add.) One might mention here as well the round barrow, house of the dead.

Stone circle = house = universe. Remember this next time you cast a circle.

So: the ancestral roundhouse, also—as you will appreciate—known as a "wheelhouse". (We'll leave aside the 8 meter—26 foot—diameter for now. Clearly, houses have to be of a size to hold their inhabitants.) Why did the door of the roundhouse need to face the southeast?

(One thinks of the traditional Diné [“Navaho”] hogan, always built with its door facing the rising Sun.)

Roundhouses had no windows; often, they didn't even have smoke-holes. (Smoke filtered up through the thatch.) Roundhouses were dark. A southeastward-facing doorway ensures morning light.

Southeast is also the general direction in which the Sun rises during Winter, when its warmth is most needed, and—in particular—at the Solstice, the Sun's annual rebirth. Think of the many megalithic monuments oriented to the Sun's rising (or setting) at this time of year. It's difficult not to see some deep symbolism here.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why, I would suggest, it is a roundhouse, and not, as proposed, a longhouse, that we need to build here at Sweetwood Temenos.

Regular readers of my blog here will recall that at Summer Solstice was celebrated in a handmade Celtic Roundhouse. This month the Roundhouse that Johnny and Tina built hosted an Irish handfasting as a way for an American couple could renew their wedding vows.  This self-styled Celtic Blessing was celebrated by Irish and American relatives with two Dublin shamans as celebrants/facilitators of the ceremony. 

The Blessing day dawned breezy and showery.  The roundhouse, a circular timber post structure with a 'live' moss roof lying lightly on woodland, was the perfect foil for the invariably variable Irish weather.

Maybe it would have been more appropriate to invoke Maeve or Mebh for Midsummer. But this is a Celtic roundhouse built in a magical woodland garden by a Smyth.  Brighid, as we know, looks out for all smiths, even those with a y in their name. The man had the vision as well as the craft. Between them, Tina and Johnny have made some magic on their land that lies a country mile from the Shannon Pot, where the River Shannon rises in Ireland.