Morning Post: Non-experimental edition

The morning post is probably here for the next while even if, like this one, it actually lands in early afternoon.

( What's that, Skip? The Prime Minister of Australia is down a well? GOOD JOB! )

Offerings at a Holy Well

Being brought up non-Catholic in a Catholic country, and going to a convent school gave me a fascination with the details of the religion. Not the by-the-book form of how it should be per Rome, but as it's practised by people who believe in it, or act like they believe in it, or observe the rites without believing, or bring in entirely non-Roman-Catholic practices and don't see any issue with it while believing.

In particular, there's the veneration of saints and the practice of pilgrimage. These don't happen in the branches of Protestant Christianity I'm familiar with, and while they absolutely do in paganism, albeit in different forms, they're very conscious, deliberate things there.

Yesterday, I saw some stuff in this context I hadn't before. There's a site at Lemanaghan in Co. Offaly which has been a monastery since at least the 10th century, and had an ecclesiastical presence of some kind from at least the 7th century. avenueyew wrote up her previous visit here, and you can read that for the historical background. I really liked the causeway ("togher") and the cell/oratory, but it was the holy well, and even more specifically the things people had left there that really fascinated me.

We've a long, long history of devotional gifts or sacrifices on this island. We know of swords and tools that were rendered unusable before being thrown in bogs at the borders of territories going way back. We know of bog bodies, many of whom may have been sacrifices in some way. Even bog butter may have been a sacrifice. There are pious gifts of land to the Church, and the leaving out of milk for the Good Neighbours. There are the Faerie Trees at Tara, hawthorns with hundreds of ribbons and bells and bits of tinsel and all kinds of other stuff tied to them, and others at different sites across the country.

These offerings are in the crook of an elderly, slightly hollow ash tree beside the well. There's a plastic bottle on a chain by the well itself, so you can extract some of the water, should you want, and there are coins in the well.







There are rosary beads - some probably quite expensive - small bits of cloth, ribbon and string, two action figures, a Peppermint Aero, various devotional/mass cards, other bits of jewellery, coins, shoelaces, crucifixes, artificial and real candles, and a variety of medals dedicated to a wide variety of saints. I've never seen anything like it, and it feels more like voodoo than Christianity (not that voodoo doesn't have aspects of Christianity, of course).

And everything put there was put with a specific purpose in mind. The person placing it might have known of the "proper" approach, which involves walking three times around the well with the offering before placing it, or they might have just put it there, but it was for something in particular, and that offering made sense to them.

Reading & Watching Update

Watching: I am completely up-to-date on Agents of SHIELD, including the six-episode web-mini-series that sits between seasons 3 and 4. Except for the episode which aired last night in the US, which I'll see later today. The next thing I want to catch up on is The Magicians; I think I got to the end of Season 3, but I couldn't swear to it.

Reading: I finished out The Root, and found it good; the two separate plotlines don't quite connect, which feels strange, but I assume they'll do so in the second book, which I'll acquire soon. I suppose this is a thing now, in the wake of GRRM.

I ran through Jools Sinclair's Girl on the Ghost Train in about an hour, which was mildly entertaining, but mostly just a bit odd, in all of writing style, world-building and characters. I keep thinking that if things like that can get published, I should have no problem, but I'd also need to finish some of my fiction to make that argument.

Currently on Zen Cho's The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water (another confirmation of my prediction that long titles like those of Becky Chambers would be in in 2020), and finding it good. There's a very fine lingual detail there of using the words "brother" and "sister" as pronouns, which I'll need to look up and see if it's a real thing.