A special gift for prophetic knowledge or clairvoyance thought to be possessed by poets, especially the ollam as the highest rank of fili, in early Ireland. Scáthach makes prophecies through imbas forosnai, and in the Táin Bó Cuailnge Medb asks Fedelm whether she has acquired it. Of all Irish figures, Fionn mac Cumhaill demonstrates imbas forosnai most consistently. A person of dubious authenticity, St Patrick, was thought to have abolished imbas forosnai as a denial of baptism, but a counterpart in Christian contexts was known as córus cerda [the gift of poetry]. This power appears to be a combination of fios [occult power] and teinm laída.
A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, James MacKillop
TEACHING
Through Ly de Angeles’ Patreon page you have the opportunity to challenge both your language and writing, to rewild yourselves and company. To erase religious and human-monetary terminology. As a student or apprentice you are invited to participate in conversation, and challenges to your current life outlook.
Prejudice, bigotry and exclusivity are off the table. All, of every culture, ancestry and clan are, therefore, invited. We understand that incalculable people’s predecessors were raped, erased as unique, had culture and language stolen, shamed or belittled and, usually for commercial reasons, always at the hidden hand of the arrogant mammals’ delusion that some were/are of lesser importance.
We know you have a right to explore this. If you find difficulty with the Irish, Celtic, Gallic or Scandinavian terminology please ask. Questions, to the bard, to the drui, to the poet and the dreamer, are nourishment.
We understand. language defines a culture. When we who are scattered and have been driven from ancestral soil, and who, therefore, speak the dialect and verbage of the conquerors; termed english (the ligua franca of the twentieth/twenty first centuries considered the current era by those of the ‘occidental west’ (a silly term, I know, I know) realise what we CAN do, we strip it of its inauthenticity. We remove the delusions of classism and elitism. We collectively embrace discovery of ancestral ecosystems and merge. We rise up.
Others will consider you pedantic. Do not fight them. Stay safe. Word it true.
THE RAGGEDY KING
The Fisher King sits at the bar tonight. His cap is dirty, tip pointing back, as though to a conversation he can’t let go of. His hair is tucked behind his ears, pierced with blackthorn and briar. He seems drunk but isn’t. Drugged, but is he? He introduces himself as Otto. He has badgers nesting in the caves of his eyelids. Mackerel and seals, basking sharks, from the far North Sea, thrashing silver and deep wild water muscle, black within each iris. Albatross, and two Vs of returning snow geese are forging through storm-crazy dark and ominous cloud, thick with ice — sky wracked licorice custard — effortless, from his mind to his mouth. He speaks of magic and druid lore and slaughter, and of all the unborn baby birds that, he whispers finally, might not live beyond the shell.
He has the smoke of peat hearths on his breath like squalid, dangerous perfume. And kelp. And loam. Eagles pipe his name, and hares descend to the valleys of his hands, to rest between the lines that tell of elder days and fathomless drownings.
I want to disbelieve him. That he should even be. I want to think him mad. Mortal. No guardian of any legendary grail should look so derelict and distant. So busted, but who am I to place him?
Dusk, seeping through the sigh escaping from his memories, is some place none of us should ever go. Somewhere between. I know that superstition. Like Oisín, returning on a moonlight horse, with hope that had rules he could not follow. Dust, that was. The loneliness of the forgotten. Its violatory emptiness.
He, a lake, has run dry.
Soil, like dried blood, or old loam, is under his fingernails, more lightless than the rooms where he hides the indignity of thrashings. Wild violets crack their arctic sod. Spring snow is still thick. It seeks sunlight that can’t come yet. He holds out his arms, soundless with forgiving.
Do you see me? he asks, disbelieving. Longing.
I hear you, I say. I see you.
Then you belong, he whispers, and coaxes twinned swans from his deep pocket. Willing them their freedom. Some unrecognisable ensorcelment. They don’t go. Some willpowers belong to no one but ourselves, I suppose. They shelter around his neck and touch each other, beak to brow. Lovers from the long ago. Not leaving. Not agreeing to the wasteland. All he knows.
The Fisher King sips his beer. His lips attempt to open with a storytelling of queens and glittering mirrored halls, but they are glued, like swallows to an alley wall, and nothing but a kestrel, from the top of the mountain, sighs its wingspan along the swamp that is the bar, hunting nourishment that used to be in copse, in thicket, in covey. The woman behind it pours a shot of oblivion in amber, watching him, afraid because she doesn’t understand how she knows not who he is, but what. She turns her back. She doesn’t dare any other way. He leaves forgetting on the counter. A tip, sort of.
When he steps out into the terrifying night I follow, wanted or not. Ignored. Old roses and bloated lilies, flaccid, hectic, catastrophic with lost beauty and entertainment, are dashed to decay along gutters of earlier rain before dropping through the destiny of an iron grate. They remind him, and he does not want that. Fur rushes past, grey with old snow, mother wolf searching for cubs amongst the detritus of the city, him knowing she won’t find them.
I am broken, he says, rolling a cigarette but forgetting what it’s for. Acknowledging that I am his company for a while.
I have seen your palace, I say.
He stops.
It’s a tent, he explains. You didn’t see anything. Besides, it blew away.
Like hate, I say.
Like belief, he answers, unsmiling.
And the rooftops are lined with indigo shadows. Pigeons. Noticers of crime and couriers of war, because he is what he says he is, but he is drowning in air. They are here to witness. Crows, the druids of another violated island, rattle down to balance, ballerinas in mourning, on the power lines. I’m fleetingly reminded of a childhood that was someone else’s. Wishing it was what really happened and not what did.
I know, he says.
And paired Orcas ride the roiling surf that foam-flecks through his compassion. He has stars for footsteps, each soft with a long-ago burning.
I am dead I think, he whispers.
But I hear you. I see you.
As he shrugs, ivy twines a thousand unchainsawed forest giants. It has a right to be here because it always has been. It garments his shoulders with a mantle, a remembered warmth upon which the swans settle, a birdly dark green nest, unmade by effort. Dreams, like icicles in the heart of a midwinter’s eve, weep down his cheeks and holly, oak and graveyard yew, form a procession along the desolation of street tarmac, drinking from him, growing infant mountains from decay. He does this.
I know you, I say.
He touches the muscles of his chest, beneath the thickness of the coat that frays at the slightest frightening, with a hand corded with the gnarled roots of a Brú na Bóinne rowan tree that crowns this king, like early spring, with vivid verdigris, with the courting songs of foxes across the valley, with the sorcery of those thin slivered tattoos, like a lifeline of ten thousand years.
If I hold him will I kill him? Like a coward, I look down, instead. If I know him will they lock me away too? If I tell him that I will remember, and I forget?
Gotta go, he says.
It takes discipline for me to say nothing else. What if I forget?
There is one — he says, over his shoulder, as he begins his disappearance. I know he means a grail. He knows I know.
I am the Fisher King.
Did he just say that and I thought it was the mist soughing through iron bars? Me? Forget him? I beg the night, don’t let it be the other way around.
IMBAS PRESS & WRITING COLLECTIVE (MYTHIC REALISM, GUTSY, GRITTY MEMOIR WRITING), PUBLISHING
Story writing, based on trauma (ongoing private group, limit 10 people)
RIVERS IN THE SKIN (EXPERIENTIAL)
IN BRIEF
RIVERS IN THE SKIN: a shamanic, initiatory, trance experience as harrowing as it is beautiful. Guided by indigenous Catuvellaun/Brigant and Celtic/Albanach elder, and attending traditional musicians.
Held twice annually in differing locations globally.
Image: Yannick Germain