A Fire in the Head: Poetry as the Celtic Technology of Trance

In 1703 Martin Martin, a Gaelic-speaking gentleman of Skye, published his Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, and in it he recorded how the bards of the Hebrides composed. They shut themselves in their rooms for a day, he wrote, with the windows stopped and the doors closed, lying on their backs with a stone on the belly and their plaids wrapped about their heads, and in that darkness they made their poems. He thought it a curiosity. We can recognise it as a method.

The Poet Who Sees

The Irish word file is usually translated “poet,” but its root means “seer.” The filidh were the professional learned class of Gaelic Ireland and Scotland, trained for seven to twelve years in schools that outlasted the druids by a thousand years. They kept the genealogies and the law, they praised and they satirised, and they saw. Three techniques of seership are named in the sources and glossed in Cormac’s Glossary, written around the year 900 by a bishop-king of Cashel who was himself a scholar.

Imbas forosnai, the “great knowledge that illuminates,” is described in detail. The poet chews a piece of the raw flesh of a pig, a dog or a cat, places it on a flagstone behind the door, chants over it and offers it to the gods. Then he chants over his two palms, places them over his face, and sleeps, while watchers make sure he is not disturbed or turned over. In three days, or nine, or at the end of the sleep, the vision comes. Cormac adds, disapprovingly, that St Patrick abolished the practice because it involved an offering to demons, but allowed the gentler díchetal do chennaib, the extempore incantation, because it needed no offering.

Strip away the pork and what remains is a recognisable procedure: a ritual preparation, a rhythmic chant, sensory deprivation by darkness and covered eyes, a sustained period of incubation under guard, and a vision received on waking. It is what shamanic practitioners do with a drum and a blindfold. It is what the Hebridean bards were still doing eight hundred years later with a stone on the belly.

Why Poetry?

Here is the part that the modern revival, with its drums, tends to miss. For the Celtic tradition the vehicle of trance was not percussion but language. Rhythm, yes, but the rhythm of metre, of repeated formula, of the chanted line. The filidh entered the Otherworld on their own voices.

Consider what rhythmic chanting does. It occupies the verbal mind with a task that is almost automatic, so that the ordinary stream of commentary falls silent; it regulates the breath; it entrains the body to a steady pulse, like a drum, but from the inside. Add darkness and stillness, and you have the shamanic state of consciousness arrived at by a different door. The content of the chant, moreover, is not neutral. If what you repeat is a praise-song to the land, or a genealogy that reaches back to the gods, or a declaration like Amergin’s “I am a wind on the sea,” the chant does not only carry you; it tells you where to go.

Taliesin’s great boast in the Câd Goddeu, “I have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form,” followed by a list of swords, tears, stars, words, bridges, eagles, coracles and strings of a harp, is often read as mythology. Read it instead as a transcript. It is what a seer says when he returns from a journey in which he was those things. The Song of Amergin, chanted as the Gaels set foot in Ireland, is the same: a shapeshifting litany that is also a claim of kinship with every realm of the new land. Poetry here is not about the journey. It is the journey, remembered aloud.

The Fire Itself

Yeats took his line from the folklore he collected in Sligo. Aengus goes out to the hazel wood “because a fire was in his head,” and the phrase describes the state of the seer: a burning behind the eyes, a pressure of knowing that must be spoken. The Old Irish Cauldron of Poesy, a text from perhaps the eighth century, describes the Cauldron of Wisdom in the head, filled only in the few, from which poetry and prophecy flow. The Welsh called the same fire awen, the flowing inspiration, and said it came from Ceridwen’s cauldron in three drops. Tom Cowan took the phrase for his book because it names what the practice is for: not comfort, not even healing in the first instance, but the kindling of a knowing fire.

A Practice

You can do this tonight. It requires no drum.

1. Choose a line. Short, rhythmic, in the first person present if possible. The Gaelic Is mise, “I am,” followed by your name and your place. Or a line of Amergin. Or a blessing from the Carmina Gadelica.
2. Make the dark. Lie on your back in a dark room. Place a smooth stone or a folded cloth on your belly to feel your breath. Cover your eyes with your palms.
3. Chant. Aloud, then under the breath, then silently, keep the line going on the rhythm of your breath. Do not hurry. Let the words wear smooth.
4. Hold the question. When the line has become pure rhythm, let your question rise behind it once, then let it go.
5. Wait. Images will come. Do not chase them. Fifteen minutes is enough to begin; an hour is a serious incubation; a night is the real thing.
6. Return and speak. Before you move, say aloud what you saw, in the first person present. “I am standing at a well. There is a hazel.” Then write it. The speaking is the poem; the poem is the record; the record is the knowledge.

Over months, a journey book kept this way becomes something the filidh would recognise: a body of praise, prophecy and self-declaration that grows into a personal mythology rooted in your actual land. That is the fire in the head, tended. It is a Celtic technology of trance, and it is older than the drum.