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Hive and Forge – Transformation and Sacred Craft in Irish Cosmology (Part 4)
Across Ireland’s mythic, archaeological, and folkloric record, two forms of enclosure appear repeatedly as sites of transformation – the hive and the forge. These spaces are rarely treated simply as functional structures. They are places where raw matter enters, is tended through process, and emerges altered in both form and meaning. In Irish cosmology, transformation is seldom accidental. It is guided through skill, stewardship, and rhythm. The hive and the forge stand as pa


Guardians of the Threshold: Síle na gCíoch and the Protective Language of Irish Sacred Architecture (Part 3)
There are certain carvings in Ireland that appear to speak in a language older than the buildings that now hold them. They emerge above doorways, beside windows, along castle walls and within monastic stone, their bodies exposed, their posture deliberate, their presence unmistakable. These figures are known as Síle na gCíoch - commonly anglicised as Sheela na Gig - and although they have been catalogued, debated and interpreted through archaeological and folkloric study for g


Land, Law and the Speaking Woman - Territorial Saints and Sovereignty in Irish Tradition (Part 3)
The Paps of Anu Certain figures do not arrive through deliberate study. They rise gradually through landscape, through repeated encounter with wells, stones, shrines, and place-memory that begins to gather weight over time. Only afterwards does research begin to articulate what presence had already suggested. Across Ireland, female territorial saints belong to this category of cultural intelligence. They are not simply devotional figures preserved in ecclesiastical history. T


Gobnait at the Threshold of Spring (Part 1)
Early February carries a particular quality of light that belongs neither fully to winter nor fully to spring. Snow may still rest along shaded field boundaries and in the lee of stone walls, yet something within the air begins to loosen its hold. It is a season that does not announce itself through spectacle but through attentiveness. It asks to be noticed rather than celebrated. During one such morning, while the terrace door lay open to a low but steady sun, a bee crossed
