Airmid, also known as Airmed or Airmeith, is the Celtic Goddess of the Healing Arts. She was a member of the Tuatha De Danaan, the most ancient race of deities in Ireland and just as they did, she had great magickal powers…
Image by Couleur on Pixabay.
You wouldn’t expect a Norse myth to be a parable on economic exploitation, and how bad deeds rebound on the doer. Grottasöngr, a story of how king Frodi forced two giantesses to work a mill without cease, and thus wrought his own destruction, is an unusual myth.
Serinity Young’s Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and Other Airborne Females, is a cross-cultural, multi-period, feminist study of flying women in myth, literature, ritual, and history. Through examination of sky-going females evident within the religions and iconography of the Ancient Near East, Europe, and Asia, as well as in shamanic, Judeo-Christian, and Islamic cultures, the author creates a typology of flying women through history that culminates in an examination of 20th century fictional airborne women and real female aviators.
In this instructable I will show you how to make a simple curse tablet in the same manner as most tablets found from Roman Britain. The Latin word for these was “defixio”. I will also mention some other types of curse table and how to make them, but this will be in less detail than how to make a defixio. A defixio is a type of curse found throughout the Greco-Roman world, in which someone would ask the gods, spirits, or the dead to do something to a person or object, or in some other way make the curse happen.
Most of us have at least toyed with the idea of a voodoo doll, but we wouldn’t really curse someone… would we? The people of the ancient world weren’t so shy, and have left us a lot of their ill-wishing to study. The things that made them angry enough to curse someone aren’t so different from the things that annoy us now: lawsuits, theft, property damage, infidelity, stealing someone’s boyfriend/girlfriend, and so on.
Greg Hill’s poem ‘Gutuater’ led me to the section on the underground shrine of the Chartres ‘magician’, dated ‘to the second century AD’, in Miranda Aldhouse-Green’s Sacred Britannia (2018). In 2005, during excavations for a car park in the centre of Chartres the construction workers found a ‘basement shrine’ accessed by ‘a wooden ladder and ‘a cache of sacred material, including pottery vessels, oil-lamps and a broad-bladed knife, of the kind used in killing sacrificial animals.’
For more on how the Celtic underworld gods were worshipped, click here.
The image at the top comes from Thomas Stephan, on Unsplash.
Fulla is one of the lesser-known Norse goddesses, described in the Prose Edda as Frigga’s right-hand woman. (Closest comparison Ninshubur and Iris/Hebe?) Her name means “Bountiful”. She only appears in one myth, but we do know a few things about her, thanks mainly to Snorri Sturluson’s efforts to preserve pagan lore for poets.
Aeracura seems to have been a a goddess of the underworld and of prosperity, whose cult centered on southern Germany and the north-west of the Balkans. Her consort was Dis Pater, who accompanies her in inscriptions, a statue, and magic spells. She shares her fruitful attributes with the Mothers, and may be a patron of miners.
Serket (also known as Serqet, Selkis, and Selket) is an Egyptian goddess of protection associated with the scorpion. She was worshipped widely in Lower Egypt as a great Mother Goddess in the Predynastic Period (c. 6000- c. 3150 BCE) and so is among the older deities of Egypt. She is associated with healing, magic, and protection, and her name means “She Who Causes the Throat to Breathe”. Her symbols are the scorpion, the Ankh, and the Was Sceptre, all of which convey her benevolent aspects.
Read more at the Ancient History Encylopedia
(Image originally from Flickr, by Merce.)
Chthonic in ancient Greek means “of the earth”, as opposed to the heavenly deities who lived in Olympus. These deities could be deities of the fertile earth, like agricultural deities, or else of the underworld. Heroes and the spirits of the dead were also considered chthonic.1
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