Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon
5. It’s not the Other World; it’s the real world.
Continuing my mini-series on the real world, today we deal with number 5. Some of you know I have a fascination with Celtic antiquity (my heritage–at least half of it, the other half is German), especially the ancient Celtic religion.
(holy well, a bridge to the other world. Ireland)
The sidhe, or faery, the realm of the fairies was one expression of the Celtic notion of the Other World. In Celtic mythology the veil between this world, the realm of the living, and the Other, the Other World, is tenuous. At certain points in the year this veil thins and beings from both realms can move back and forth. The Celtic feast of Samain, Summer’s End, the last of the three harvest festivals which marks the finish of the growing season and the beginning of the fallow time, was a holiday well known for this very characteristic.
In its contemporary, very watered down version, Halloween, the costumed wee folk going from door to door reflect this traffic. Folks from this world, the living world and hence a real world, not necessarily the real world, could go through and could be captured by those in faery. Likewise, folk of the Other World could cross into this one and, if they chose, carry captives back to their own real world.
Another riff on this question of the real world comes from the ancient faith of the Mexica, the Aztecs notable as part of this long tradition. In this instance, our world, the living world, is not the real world, rather the real world is both before birth and after death, this realm being merely a dream between a sleep and a sleep. I suppose you might put the Christian afterlife in this same vein, since the life eternal has a more real aspect to it than this very temporary proving ground.
