PaganSquare


PaganSquare is a community blog space where Pagans can discuss topics relevant to the life and spiritual practice of all Pagans.

  • Home
    Home This is where you can find all the blog posts throughout the site.
  • Tags
    Tags Displays a list of tags that have been used in the blog.
  • Bloggers
    Bloggers Search for your favorite blogger from this site.
  • Login
    Login Login form
Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Dobunni

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 Home - The Old Irish Goat

...Well, if I say it who made it myself: that was one kick-ass Man-Making ceremony. They'll still be talking about that one a hundred years from now.

So I figure you owe me, what, something in the neighborhood of...say...nine cows. Good milch cows, too, mind you, nothing old and milked-out.

A nine-cow coming-of-age ceremony: now there's something you'll be able to tell your grandchildren about.

(“My family paid nine fine milch cows for my man-making,” you'll tell them, and they'll say, “Oh, grandpa, you're such a bull-shitter....”)

Hey, our people's cattle have always been our pride. You know what they say about us, that every word in our language means three things: something good, something bad, and something to do with a cow.

What? What? You can't be serious. You've got to be kidding.

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

In the Forest of the Hwicce

 

Place-names have a long memory.

Six surviving place-names in modern Britain preserve the memory of the Hwicce, the original Anglo-Saxon Tribe of Witches, who for some 225 years inhabited a territory in the Cotswolds and Severn Basin of what is now southwestern England: Whichford (Warwickshire), Wichenford, Wychbury Hill, Wyche, and Droitwich (Worcestershire), and Wychwood (Oxfordshire). Unsurprisingly, with one exception, all of them lie within the boundaries of the original Kingdom (or occasionally—witches being witches—Queendom) of the Witches.

Wychwood, the “forest of the Hwicce,” is the anomalous outlier.

Not all witches, of course, are witches. With trees, in particular, you have to be careful. Both the witch elm and witch hazel originally had nothing to do with witches of our sort, but derive instead from yet another Anglo-Saxon root (wice) meaning “bendable, pliable.” (The same root survives in “wicker.”)

Flexible as we may be, though, historical data makes it clear that the witches of Wychwood were originally the H-and-Two-C, and not the No-H-and-One-C, kind.

So how did Hwicce end up in non-Hwicce territory?

Last modified on
Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Victoria
    Victoria says #
    I would say as neopagans we are constructing our futures rather than reconstructing THE future. I'm not sure if we are in the proc
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Thanks, Victoria: good eye. I praise your thoroughness. My friend and colleague Volkhvy always says, "We're not reconstructing th
  • Victoria
    Victoria says #
    You are conflating the OE wicce/wicca with the tribal name Hwicce,. The tribal name Hwicce is attested in Latin and OE sources as

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

See now those marks on the cheekbones of Artos the Bear, and of Morgana First Wife before him.

Those are the fèin-signs of our people, the Dobunni, them they call Tribe of Witches.

Well now, maybe we aren't, and maybe we are.

In Artos' day, at coming-of-age, or fostering-in, they'd score you. With a new knife they'd score you, twice over each cheekbone, and rub in the blue woad. And that was your knife for life, then, and the signs your people wore.

In our day, of course, we score no more, but do we not still paint the fèin-signs on for big Doings, still with woad; and are they not always there, now, whether you see 'em or no?

Fèin they call “coven” these days, but still it means your own. Your own, and these the signs.

Why two now, you ask, why over the cheekbones, and where's the story?

Oh, it's a brave, braw tale and sure, I'll tell you. Oh, I'll tell you.

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

Reconstituting an Ancient Celtic Tribe

We're not reconstructing the past; we're reconstucting the future.”

(Volkhvy)

 

The original Celtic Tribe of Witches, a people known as the Dobunni, spoke a language known to linguists as Common Brittonic: a language which, in time, morphed (inter alia) into Welsh.

(The Dobunni themselves eventually morphed into an Anglo-Saxon-speaking people named, eponymously, the Hwicce. Peoples morph, languages morph: history is the story of change.)

So how do you say Dobunni in Welsh?

Some of my own family once hailed from the old Dobunni hunting-runs, but though Welsh is one of my ancestral languages, I'm not a Welsh-speaker, and I do not know whether or not memory of the tribe survived long enough to have undergone the sound changes that would have made a Brittonic word into a Welsh one.

(My guess would be, probably not. Being a people of the Cotswolds and the Severn valley—i.e. Southern Britain—the Dobunni were Romanized early, though their tribal self-awareness survived at least to the time of Boudicca's 62 CE “rebellion”, during which they sided with the Romans because their hereditary enemies, the Catuvellauni [“War-Cats”] fought with Boudicca's coalition.)

Nonetheless, we know enough about the processes by which the old language changed into the new that we can make an educated guess.

(As an amateur linguist myself, I find the process of updating old, disused words to what their contemporary forms would have become if they'd actually survived, to be a fascinating exercise in reconstitutive culture. If you think that there's an analogy here with the Pagan Revival, I think you're probably right.)

Boudicca's name, for example (if this actually was her name, rather than just an epithet meaning “victorious”) became Buddug (that's BIH-thig, with the TH of with), as the northern Celtic tribe known as the Votadini (who would have pronounced that V as W) became the Gododdin (gaw-DOE-th'n, with the TH of that).

So, mutatis mutandis, what name would the People Formerly Known As the Dobunni go by now?

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

Flamenco Nut <hr id=

 “Second, Mother of Third”

...
Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

You're of the Dobunni, the original Celtic tribe of Witches. You live in a traditional Iron Age Celtic roundhouse. Like houses everywhere, it shows forth a likeness of the cosmos.

 

In the center, the round hearth, with its living, undying flame.

To the right, the Men's Side.

To the left, the Women's.

Interestingly, the seat of greatest honor is where the Sides meet: directly across the fire from the door.

Door, fire, seat.

 

Men's Side, Women's Side: the language of ritual preserves these ancient usages, meaning “men generally,” “women generally.” The metaphor was originally a spatial one: “side” here meaning not “team” or “party,” but “side of the fire.”

I've long known of this traditional usage and its associations, but have wondered for equally as long: right and left sides as seen from where?

Well, I now know.

 

Archaeologist V. Gordon Childe records that among the shorefolk of the Outer Hebrides, such traditional spatial attributions persisted into the early “20th” century.

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

Hermes Kriophoros (detail) | Hermes(?) carrying a ram. [Roma… | Flickr 

Tale in a Time of Plague

 

As Pausanias tells it, the god Hermes once saved the city of Tanagra, in Boeotia, from a pandemic.

At the time, the plague raged all around the city, and the Tanagrans feared it was only a matter of time until it came to their doorsteps as well. Then Hermes, that ever-young god, was seen walking the circuit of the city's walls, bearing a ram on his shoulders.

Not one Tanagran died of plague.

Ever after, Hermes Kriophóros (“the ram-bearer”) was accounted the city's patron, and on his festivals the handsomest youth in town would ceremonially walk the circuit of the city's walls, bearing a lamb on his shoulders.

(Although Pausanias does not say so, presumably the lamb would have been borne ultimately to the god's temple, and there given to him in sacrifice.)

In Classical art, Ram-Bearing Hermes became a common icon of philanthropy, humanitas, and divine protection. The motif continued into the Christian centuries and, indeed, to this very day.

Last modified on

Additional information