Cosmology

I won’t go too deep down the rabbit hole here, but I’ve made it no secret that I have an interest in what I call “The Old Ways”. While no one knows for certain what practices existed in the neolithic, preagricultural period of history, I think there are some things that appear to be universal when observing or investigating nomadic peoples closer to the modern age and we can draw some conclusions based on that in conjunction with what we can tease out about a few thousand years back.

The records of what was written contemporaneously or kept alive through oral tradition, however biased those records might be, sometimes point to a past that existed before those events were recorded.

One group that has extensive records, largely thanks to the oral tradition of the fili (poet-seers) of the Irish that were later recorded by monks, can be used in such a way as to at least use their records for the purposes of intellectual exercise.

While there is obviously some misunderstanding and biases added by those monks, there are people who have compared multiple documents to find the commonalities within those records, allowing us to read a little between the lines and filter out the more obvious fabrications in the record. While Old Irish as a language hardly reaches back to the neolithic, there is strong evidence that tales and archetypes from an earlier period were preserved in varying degrees by the fili and/or the druids, potentially from that older epoch. And considering the importance placed on very exact memorization before one could be considered a true fili, you can imagine that these written versions of oral tradition might reflect quite accurately fragments of those ancient times to one degree or another.

A few years back, I started collecting information from and translations of some of the oldest stories available in Old Irish. Because I like to visualize data in order to understand it better, I started “mapping” out some of the cosmological ideas of the oldest stories. Certain ideas have their physical placement in such cosmologic thinking, at least for the folks who were looked to for guidance in those times (either mythologic or real). Below is one visual tool that I created for the fraction of the cosmology that is associated with “The World”.

In short, the ancient Irish world in the old stories was divided into the “Otherworld” (sky), the “Underworld” (under the sea/ground) and “The World” (surface). Each realm was divided into five lands, associated with cardinal directions and the center. These realms were connected variously, but I won’t go into that here (this post is already longer than I intended). Each of those five lands was connected to a conceptual idea and a color. While there is some dispute about how to interpret or places these idea, I used my own intuition to decide which felt like the most reasonable when that problem came up (which was more rare than you might think).

So here is the fragment visualization representative of the world in which people live while alive. It is the place you and I walk within on a daily basis. In terms of “time”, it is the present moment.

I used Old Irish terms when I could find them, and they are noted at the top of each group. The rest of the group are words that are representative of the concepts associated with each Old Irish concept.

On a final note, it is interesting to point out the names of the cardinal directions in Old Irish. They are based on facing what is assumed to be the primary direction, East:

• oithear is literally translated as “facing the horizon”
• thuaidh translates to “the left”
• séis translated to “the right”
• siar translates to “the rear” or “behind”, and
• mide translates to “the middle”

Colors are rough approximations of the likely colors intended for the cardinal directions, in which there is some dispute, but they make the most sense (to me) when arranged thusly.

I have similar visualizations for the Underworld and the Otherworld but, as I have said, this post is already longer than I intended it to be.

File under: “Okaaaaaay Michael. Have you taken your meds today?”