“The bogs, rivers, mountains, and shorelines are more than preservers of old myths, bones, and memories. They are energy banks and time sponges, and what is held within them seeks release.”

-Manchán Magan (Atlantic Islands author)

Listen to the Land Speak: A Journey into the Wisdom of What Lies Beneath Us

 

An incense with an unfolding scents-scape inspired by the Cailleach, the great winter crone and land-former of the Atlantic Islands.  Its fragrance is an aromatic journey that begins overlooking the lochs with the sharp, purifying winds of the Cailleach’s juniper-filled highlands. As you descend, the briny smells of sea spray and seaweed weave in and out, whipped up by her ocean storms, until finally you reach the earthy, resinous, honey-wild aromas of the moors and lowland bogs shaped by the Cailleach’s magical hammer.  Like the great hag herself, this incense has grounding and protecting properties.  Designed for winter-tide inner work, it supports journeys through liminal spaces to meet ancestors and the unseen forces within and without.

 

Ingredients:  All ingredients mindfully wildcrafted. Bog Oak from the Atlantic Islands, Myrica gale nutlets, Scotch pine resin, Juniper wood, berries and leaves, Reindeer Lichen, wildcrafted Tree Lichens, Blackthorn flowers from the Atlantic Islands, Irish Peat, Seaweed, Weeping Cypress drift-wood.  All bound with Blackthorn berries and Mistletoe leaves from the Atlantic Islands soaked in cherry hydromel combined with organic honey. Packed with Reindeer Lichens and sea salt infused with the aromas of conifer.

 

This price is for .75 oz in a black metal tin, dusted with Conifer infused Sea Salt

 

 

 

 

  Entering my crone years, I became increasingly captivated by a figure from my Scottish lineage: the Cailleach.  The Cailleach is not a goddess but rather a genius loci.  She is a spirit of place embodied as a powerful, ancient woman.  Not only is this land spirit from the folklore of my lineage, but there is a vibration of Scotland and other Atlantic Islands that rings through to the North America Appalachian Mountain where I live now.  Because, around 350 million years ago, the Appalachian Mountains were once physically connected to the Cailleach’s birth place, the mountain ranges of the Atlantic Islands Highlands, before the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea.  Both areas were the home to important glaciers during the last Ice Age.  The environments the retreating glaciers left are still home to many of the same plants and landscape features.  A multitude of vibrations spoke to me in blood and bone through the land itself and the 1000’s of years that my ancestors were connected to the land. The Cailleach became a significant presence in my life as I took online courses, joined groups and read about her folklore.  I fell in love with the idea of such a powerful crone figure.  She has become part of my mytho-poetic life.

 

The Cailleach is not a “goddess” in the structured mythological sense.  She is the story of the land.  A mythic embodiment of landscape forces of winter, wind, stone, storm, and old mountains.  She is the result of my ancestors’ deep science and knowledge from generations of observational living within the Atlantic Island’s environment.  At her core, I believe the Cailleach originally personified the human experience of witnessing and living alongside the vast, land and soul shaping power of glaciers.  Born out of an era when our ancestor experienced the world as emanations of living, creative, feminine presences.

 

 

To have relationships with non-human forces is deeply meaningful but difficult to describe.  It is best described in metaphor and stories.  The glacial ice would have been perceived by our animist ancestors as a living, breathing, moving presence.  The Glacier would speak.  Creeping ice would have emitting deep, low rumbles as it groaned under its own weight. On warming days sharp cracks and pops would have echoed above the droning sound of rushing melt waters. Glacier valleys acting as wind tunnels would have emitted eery ghost flute sounds. As the glaciers retreated, they would have left unstable melting cliffs creating the sounds of clattering rocks sliding down their loose slopes. 

 

Legends speak of the Cailleach dropping rocks and boulders from her pockets.  The land where I live is littered with large rocks deposited by the retreating glaciers.  Local traditions describe Whirlpool of Corryvrecken in Scotland, one of the largest tidal whirlpools in the world, as a manifestation of the Cailleach’s presence and her great cauldron. The retreating glaciers carved loch valleys above ground and deep channels below the sea.  The uneven seabed funnels and accelerates tidal water, a key factor in the whirlpool’s formation.  The whirlpool spiral, created by the spinning waters, would have been recognized as a symbol of the divine feminine.  According to legend, every year as the air cools, the Cailleach wakes from her slumber and makes her journey to the Whirlpool of Corryvrecken to wash her enormous, plaid shawl (the patterns of plaids are another symbol of the land). She takes the shawl out of the roiling waters of her cauldron and shakes it dry.  Water droplets freeze instantly and cover the tops of the hills in the first dusting of snow heralding Winter.  Winter, the memory of the glacial-times.

 

  Like any artist or form maker, the Cailleach left her spirit in her work which was the land that she created as the glacier retreated and the people, plants and animals that inhabited those lands.  The Cailleach is depicted as a liminal figure, most often as an old woman with blue skin and only one eye who can shape shift into non-human forms.  While especially in Scotland, she still represents winter and death, the Cailleach also became deeply tied to the tradition of the wise woman healer. Her figure is not simply about winter’s destructiveness; she also represents the power and wiseblood of older woman, healing, knowledge, and the survival of ancestral wisdom.

 

A few intriguing details on some ingredients I chose for ‘The Cailleach’ incense.

 

Bog Oak is ancient oak wood preserved in peat bogs for thousands of years.  Over time, the tannins and minerals of the bog turn it dark, almost black.  It’s literally the memory of a drowned forest.  Trees fallen and buried under peat in the deep past. In Irish folklore, bogs are often seen as liminal, sacred places that are entrances to the Otherworld, burial places of offerings, and homes of powerful spirits.

 

Myrica gale is a plant that grows prolifically in both Scotland and the wetlands of the Northern Appalachians.  It is part of the group of plants that are used in the North Atlantic Islands for traditional fumigations known as “saining” in order to purify homes during the winter.  Myrica is one of my favorite late harvests. Its scent is unmistakable: resinous, balsamic, honey-wild, and a little feral. I wait until the leaves have fallen from the plants to better see the orange, resin coated nutlets.   Wearing boots, I stand in the cool, liminal waters of the marsh easily sliding into reverie.

 

 

Juniper is another of the important “saining” plants.  It grows high in the mountains in well drained ground.  I find that Juniper’s sharp, very fresh, lively aroma is an excellent aromatic metaphor for some aspects of the Cailleach’s personality

 

Reindeer Lichen is a key food for reindeer during the winter.  In winter, reindeer hunt for the lichens. Lichens buried under the snow to eat.  Many folkloric accounts mention reindeer as the Cailleach’s “cattle”.  At the time her folklore was developed, across the world, many of our ancestors were following reindeer herds.  These sacred animals supplied much of the food and materials goods for life in the Ice Age and the early Holocene.   Our ancestors learned to forage and save the lichens in order to attract the reindeer eventually taming large herds.

 

Blackthorn is deeply rooted in folklore, witchcraft, and spiritual practices, symbolizing protection, transformation, and the confrontation of inner darkness. It was believed the Cailleach carried a blackthorn walking stick symbolizing authority over storms and frost.  When she throws down her walking stick beneath a holly or blackthorn bush, spring begins.   Blackthorn flowers very early, often before the leaves, when the air is still icy.  In the Atlantic Islands this is the time of late winter bring gales called “the blackthorn winter.”  The blackthorn’s flowering marks the Cailleach’s waning power, when winter shows its last breath before surrendering to spring.

 

Peat forms extremely slowly, often 1 mm per year, so a 1-meter-thick peat layer may represent 1,000 years of accumulation.  It was traditionally an extremely important source of winter heat and fuel in the Atlantic Islands. Legends describe the Cailleach stamping her feet creating depressions and peat bogs.  In rural regions peats still fills winter hearths.  Peat literally and symbolically represents her energy stored in the land, used by humans to survive the winter she rules.