#WyrdWednesday #Celtic: `As the Men of Dea were passing through the district of Ui Fiachrach by the Muaidh, a rowanberry, which was part of their provisions, fell from them, and a tree grew up from it. And there was virtue in its berries, and no sickness or disease would ever come on any person that would eat them, and those that would eat them would feel the liveliness of wine and the satisfaction of mead in them, and any old person of a hundred years that would eat them would go back to be young again, and any young girl that would eat them would grow to be a flower of beauty.
And it happened one time after the tree was grown, there were messengers of the Tuatha de Danaan going through the wood of Dubhros. And they heard a great noise of birds and of bees, and they went where the noise was, and they saw the beautiful Druid tree. They went back then and told what they had seen, and all the chief men of the Tuatha de Danaan when they heard it knew the tree must have grown from a berry of the Land of the Ever-Living Living Ones. And they enquired among all their people, till they knew it was a young man of them, that was a musician, had dropped the berry.
And it is what they agreed, to send him in search of a man of Lochlann that would guard the tree by day and sleep in it by night. And the women of the Sidhe were very downhearted to see him going from them, for there was no harper could play half so sweetly on his harp as he could play on an ivy leaf.`
Source: Gods and Fighting Men by Lady Gregory - Project Gutenberg eBook
Here’s what happened next: https://hear-me.social/@NeuKelte/114223931521838879

After Dumuzid was sent to the Underworld for not mourning his wife Innana's death, his sister and mother, goddesses of plants and things that grow, came to her and begged her to retrieve him: for nothing could grow while Dumuzid was beneath the earth. #WyrdWednesday

After Dumuzid was sent to the Underworld for not mourning his wife Innana's death, his sister and mother, goddesses of plants and things that grow, came to her and begged her to retrieve him: for nothing could grow while Dumuzid was beneath the earth. #WyrdWednesday

While her reputation is a much disputed point, Lucrezia Borgia is thought to have been a prolific poisoner, helped by her education of herbs and plants. She used this to help end threats to the powerful Borgia family. #WyrdWednesday 🖼: D.G. Rossetti

Devil's Bit Scabious is called that because the Devil, envious of the perfection of the plant, stole part of the roots and gave it a stem that abruptly comes to an end. Spite drives much of the Devil's actions in folklore, it seems. #WyrdWednesday

Devil's Bit Scabious is called that because the Devil, envious of the perfection of the plant, stole part of the roots and gave it a stem that abruptly comes to an end. Spite drives much of the Devil's actions in folklore, it seems. #WyrdWednesday

#WyrdWednesday #LegendaryWednesday: `The circle „Holme I“, consisting of an upturned tree-stump surrounded by 55 closely fitted #oak posts, was originally built on the saltmarsh away from the sea and specialists estimate it to have been built of timbers dating from the spring of 2049 BC.
Dr David Nance explains: “Dating of the Seahenge timbers showed they were felled in the spring, and it was considered most probable that these timbers were aligned with sunrise on the summer solstice.
He suggests that its function was to mimic the ‘pen’ described in folklore for an unfledged cuckoo with the intention to keep the bird singing and thereby extend the summer.
“Summer solstice was the date when according to folklore the cuckoo, symbolising fertility, traditionally stopped singing, returned to the Otherworld and the summer went with it,’ Dr Nance added.
“The monument’s form appears to imitate two supposed winter dwellings of the cuckoo remembered in folklore: a hollow tree or ‘the bowers of the #Otherworld’ represented by the upturned oak-stump at its centre.
“This ritual is remembered in the ‘myth of the pent cuckoo’ where an unfledged cuckoo was placed into a thorn bush and the bird was ‘walled-in’ to extend the summer but it always flew away.”
Source: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/news/23205