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This page is of thoughts about how it is to be a Celtic shaman ...
 How
can you be lonely with the whole of Earth around you? Perhaps you do not speak
with it, think it is not speaking to you? If so I can understand your need for
"human" ... because you live with the illusion that human is all you can talk
with, relate with. Maybe a time in the wilderness, without other human company,
would be helpful, if you can be brave enough ... to listen to the voice of the
wind, of animals, of plants, of the sky, of the night, of the sun, of the Earth
herself.
Elen Sentier © 2010
 If
you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other: if
you do not talk to them you will not know them, and what you do not know you
will fear. What one fears one destroys.
From Chief Dan George
This is how we think of Life, The Universe and Everything as Celtic Shamans.
World Tree
For Britain, the World Tree is an Oak, Duir, whereas for
the more Nordic traditions it’s Odin’s Ash. We reserve the Ash, Nuin, for
Gwydion, the Master Enchanter of all Britain. The oak carries the 3 worlds …
Lowerworld – ancestral knowing, Middleworld – active participation in growth and
change, Upperworld – potential, ideas, concepts.
We share
triplicity, the concept of the triskele comes from the 3 faces of the
goddess Frayde – better know as Brighid from her Gaelic connections. Frayde’s 3
faces are Smith, Healer and Poet, in her healer-role she is the foster-mother of
Arth (Arthur) the once-and-future spirit-king of Britain. The name Arth means
Bear and this is seen again in how we call the constellations of the Great and
Little Bears, (Plough, Big Dipper) – we call it Arthur’s Wain. It has 7 stars
and is spiritually related to the Pleiades, the 7 Sisters, and connected to Arth.
This takes me to another fundamental concept of British
Celtic shamanism – duality.
Celtic will have both a goddess and a god holding the
energy of a concept; eg Upperworld is a province of Arianrhod of the Spinning
Tower – her name means silver wheel, another way of saying “chakra” – but it is
also the place of Llew Llaw Gyffes, the eagle-sun god. We have both the
masculine and the feminine energies intertwined in all our concepts.
 The branches of
the world-tree reach up into the blue void of potentiality to touch the Sun and
the Moon, the Two Lights of our Earthly sky that bring us life and light. The
word twilight comes from the merging of the word “two lights”, meaning
the time when the sun and the moon are both in the sky together, the veils
between the worlds are thin and communication easy.
Moon and Sun, goddess and god, lady and lord, soul and
personality … this is how we see duality, as two sides of one coin. I explore
this concept in the Wye’s Woman Workshops. The river Wye is our Mother River
here and I live very close to her. The Celtic tradition is an and/and
one, rather than either/or, we integrate rather than separate. We include
and adapt rather than separate ourselves off. This can make us hard to find as
we will have blended … shapeshifted … with what is around us, indeed the
Well-Maidens story is about this very concept and how it changes the concepts of
what is evil. We say evil is inappropriate good, evil often results from someone
“having your best interests at heart” whilst not asking what your needs are.
 This stone
image is very ancient and depicts the same things in a different way. The word
at the top is “Darwent” referring to the river Derwent which flows through
Derby, an ancient site as well as a modern city. The word at the bottom is
duir, Brythonic for oak. The image shows an oak tree with seven roots and
seven branches, all intertwined. Around the edge is the triple spiral.
NB – it’s interesting that in the second half of the 20th
century scientists discovered the DNA … a double helix and a triple spiral.
Makes me think our ancestors knew things, even if they didn’t express them as we
do today, perhaps they knew them more deeply than us?
 Additionally,
the stone oak image is reminiscent of a fantastic
archaeological find in 1999, known as Seahenge. An incredible 3000-4000
upside-down oak tree was uncovered by especially low tides off the Norfolk coast. The huge
oak tree was surrounded by a henge of oak ... a sacred place if ever there was one.
In the image of Duir it would be difficult, apart from the writing, to know
which way up the tree should be. The concept of putting one’s branches into the
earth and one’s roots into the sky is quite common all over the Earth as one of
turning back to help, of turning things upside-down, of one’s wisdom being in
one’s roots, etc.
Asking ... Choice
Asking and choice are fundamental to us, see my
blog where I recently told the tale of
Ragnall’s Wedding. We ask our
elder brothers, the rest of creation as humans are new-boy-on-the-block in
Earth’s evolution. Grammarye shows this in lore-stories like Cyllhwych and
Olwen, or Dyfrig’s and Gwydion’s pigs (Ceridwen’s totem). We ask our Familiars
(Grammarye for power animals) them to help us … and we listen.
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