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Brown Bear, Oak & Mugwort Ritual Rattles (Available in 2 Sizes)
This listing is for one Brown Bear, Oak and Mugwort Ritual Rattle, from The heART of Ritual.
 
There are two different sizes to choose from, a full sized rattle and a travel sized rattle. Please be sure to select the size you wish to order from the drop down menu.
 
• keywords: strength, grounding, courage, insights, protection, resilience, inner stillness, letting go, grief composting, community, home and hearth.
 
The Rattle head is naturally dyed with Acorns and Oak bark. It is filled with offerings of the Bear's favourite foods, including Fly Agaric and Wild Berries, and a star Garnet for direction on the path. The space between the Rattlehead and handle is accented with Wild Rose and Mugwort plant fiber cordage, the cresent moon shaped sesamoid bone of a wild Brown Bear, and ethical Bear Fur. I made a small hand painted Cep for the side of this tool as fungi are one of Bear's most treasured foods. This is attached to the handle with Wild Rose and Mugwort cordage and accented with natural matt stone beads. The handle is the stem of an incredible Mugwort plant that grew in the garden in 2024, it's height exceeded three meters so I knew as soon as it returned to the ground and went to sleep for the winter that I would have to honour those stalks!
 
This offering came through during the winter 2024 earth element season, which wove themes of sticks and stones and skin and bones throughout, both literally and symbolically. Winter Solstice is the time that I personally feel the strength of Oak most, and on this date, a messenger arrived at the door, Brown Bear. It appeared in my dreams and manifested in reality too.
 
I wrote a rather long insight into this in our Spring newsletter, but what I didn't mention there was that I also received an enexpected piece of brown bear fur and feet bones on Winter Solstice too! Note that this time of year is when Ursa Major and Minor are most prominent in the night sky, so the framework for birthing of this ritual tool happened very softly, organically, and easily. 
 
In many ways, this one ritual rattle represents it all - the bones of Samhain, the light and hope of Winter Solstice, instinctual awareness of the need for rest, strength and trust in the process, and the natural pace of the Earth all wrapped into one.
 
ABOUT RATTLES AS RITUAL COLLEAGUES
Rattles are ceremonial tools that resonate primarily with the fire element, their sound resembling the hissing of a snake. As a tool, they are used to purify, cleanse and transform (an individual, group energy, or place) and are also wonderful to use to energize or invigorate if a person is feeling sluggish or a space is stagnant. This is their transformative work as traditional healing tools. What resonates with you, how you choose to uniquely work with these ritual tools, your experience, and the direction this takes is entirely up to you. It is your intimate expression of prayer and reflects your unique ceremonial intention.

Brown Bear, Oak & Mugwort Ritual Rattles (Available in 2 Sizes)

PriceFrom €100.00
Tax Included
Quantity

  • These are the only ceremonial rattles that Niamh has crafted this year and will make absolutely gorgeous gifts to Self and/or loved ones. Just eight of each are available and just like each of us, each rattle is wildly unique. The photographs in this listing give a good indicator of what you will receive, however please understand that due to their uniqueness, there will be very slight variations. They are one of a kind, sustainably made, petrochemical free, green ritual tools (she even makes her own bone glue). They are crafted exclusively with hand gathered and upcycled elements.

OUR SHOP IS CURRENTLY CLOSED, BUT WE LOOK FORWARD TO WELCOMING YOU AGAIN SHORTLY.

Our Autumn 2025 shop opening took place from 6pm on September 7th until 6pm on September 14th
 All times are listed in CEST. Orders begin shipping from 22 September, fulfilled on a first-come, first-served basis. Made-to-order pieces dispatch from 6 October onward, unless noted otherwise. All orders are shipped from Europe.

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WINTER 2025 COLLECTION: 

Full details of each season’s collection are shared exclusively through our seasonal newsletter. This missive carries the deeper ground of the season – its energies, themes, and archetypes. Shared only four times a year, it offers original long-form writings on the mythic, elemental, and archetypal ground of the season within Irish cosmology and the Celtic Wheel of the Year, along with the creative soil from which each collection emerges. Readers also receive early access and a members-only preview of these handcrafted, ephemeral offerings.

 

Click HERE to receive our newsletter each season.

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SEASONAL OVERVIEW

Season • Winter

Element • Earth

Direction • North

Archetype • Elder Archetype

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THE FRAMEWORK FOR THIS COLLECTION

Our Winter/Earth Element Collection arrives into the season of Samhain – that threshold between the last new moon of the dying Celtic year in October, astronomical Samhain, and the first new moon of the year to come in November. It is here that endings and beginnings lie folded together – a dreamtime of moons that leads us into the deepest dark – asking us to walk slowly, to walk in Earth time. 

 

This is not the hurried clock-time of the everyday. It is slow time – deep time – recorded in bedrock and fault-line, in layers pressed through clay and shale. As the earth keeps her history in stone and strata, so we carry memory in bone. The land is our larger body – marrow and mountain, clay and skin, each carrying memory. To enter this season is to enter those depths, to map again the contour lines of the inner ground, to feel where the body holds fractures, pressure, weight-bearing, release. The work is slow. The work is old. Stone remembers, and so do we. Our bodies are cairns of remembrance.

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Between Samhain and Solstice we are pilgrims moving through inner hollows and chambers of the soul. It is sanctuary time, a time of reverence and devotion, where prayer is not passive but visceral and embodied – where we kneel not before idols but within the tabernacle of our own being. The ember of light is entrusted to us here, and it must be guarded with care – fanned in trust, sheltered in hope, nourished with care, until it kindles to flame and warmth.

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Samhain is also the season of surrender. To grieve what has passed in the twelve months gone. To honour ancestors, yes, but also to lay down the burdens of the year, the losses and thresholds crossed, the shocks and griefs that linger. As leaves return to soil, so sorrow returns to earth, darkening into humus that feeds what will come. In the body, this work is felt in the earth element – in the musculoskeletal frame, in the gut’s deep work of breaking down and letting go. To release is to create space, and to hold is to become heavy. The earth teaches us this balance, for she both receives and yields in the same breath.

 

This is the annual pilgrimage to the soul’s inner shrine – beyond one life, beyond one line of ancestry. It is the thread that connects us with stone and to soil, with grandmother and grandfather, with all who came before and all who will come after. In this time-out-of-time we reweave ourselves into that thread, into the north, into the slow, enduring rhythm of earth itself. And from that ground – from a living tapestry of blood and bone and surrender – the Solstice light is born again. A flame at the heart of winter.

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REFERENCES THROUGHOUT THIS COLLECTION​

Focus for the Winter collection is the element of Earth, Embodied Ritual & Green Prayer, Illuminating the Dark & the Inner Hearth, Chakras of the Root, Knees/Elbows, Feet/Hands and Earth Star, Physical WellBEing, the Musculoskeletal System, the Digestive System & Intestinal Health, Death, Grief Processing & Trauma Composting, Vulnerability & Surrender, The Pilgrim & the Inner Journey, Protection, Connection & Roots, Hibernation & Radical Rest, Cultivating Sanctuary & Stillness, Conscious Nourishment & Nurturance, and of course, Earth Rituals for the Head, Heart and Hands.

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