Land, Sea and Sky: Mapping the Three Realms onto the Shamanic Three Worlds
Core shamanism travels up and down a world tree. The Celts swore by land, sea and sky. The two maps overlap, but not perfectly, and the gaps are where the Celtic path becomes its own.
Every student of core shamanism learns the map on the first day. There is a Lower World, reached by going down through the earth; an Upper World, reached by going up; and the Middle World, our own, which has a hidden side. Joining them is the axis of the world, often a tree. This map is found from Siberia to the Amazon and it works: people who have never heard of it journey down a hole and find themselves in a landscape of animals and roots, or climb and find themselves among teachers in light. But when a practitioner turns to the Celtic sources, they find a different map laid over the first one, and the places where the two do not quite align are the most interesting places on the page.
The Oath of the Three Realms
In the Táin Bó Cúailnge, when the Ulstermen rouse at last to face Medb’s army, they swear that they will hold their ground “unless the sky with its showers of stars fall upon the face of the earth, or the ground burst open in an earthquake, or the sea come over the land.” The formula appears again and again. Strabo and Arrian record that when Alexander the Great asked the Celtic envoys on the Danube what they feared most, expecting them to say him, they answered that they feared nothing except that the sky might fall on them. Treaties were sworn by the three. In the medieval Irish and Welsh texts, land, sea and sky are the frame of the world and the guarantee of every promise.
Notice what this map is not. It is not vertical. Sea is not below land in the sense that the Lower World is below the Middle; sea is beside land, and they meet at the strand. Sky is above, but it is weather and stars as much as a realm of spirits. The three are the three faces of the one world, and the sacred point is where they touch: the shoreline at dawn, the hilltop in rain, the island in the mist. The Celtic cosmos is horizontal, tidal and meteorological. It is a cosmos you can stand in.
Where the Otherworld Is
This matters for the journeyer because of where it puts the Otherworld. In the three-worlds map the realms of spirit are above and below, and the Middle World is where we live. In the Celtic sources the Otherworld is overwhelmingly here: inside that hill, under that lake, across that stretch of sea, through that bank of mist that came down while you were walking. Pwyll meets Arawn in a forest clearing while hunting. Nera walks out of the hall at Samhain and into the mound. Bran hears music on the strand and a woman of the sí is standing behind him. Oisín meets Niamh riding across the water on an ordinary morning. The Otherworld is the Middle World with the veil pulled back.
In core shamanic terms, then, a great deal of Celtic work is Middle World work: journeying to the spirit side of the actual place where you stand, meeting the spirits of this hill and this water, negotiating with the people of this mound. Harner’s system treats the Middle World with some caution, as the home of unquiet and confused spirits as well as the spirits of nature, and the caution is well placed; the sí are not uniformly kind, and the folk tradition is full of rules for dealing with them. But a Celtic practitioner cannot avoid the Middle World. It is where the tradition lives.
Laying One Map on the Other
With that caution in place, the correspondences are useful.
Sea and the Lower World. The Land under the Wave, Tír fo Thuinn, and the realm inside the mounds share the Lower World’s qualities: depth, darkness, treasure, ancestors, the powerful dead. Tech Duinn, the house of the dead, is an island off the western sea. The Dagda’s cauldron and Annwn’s cauldron are down there. Practitioners who enter the Lower World by a Celtic door, a well, a cave, the mouth of a passage tomb, consistently report a wetter, saltier, more royal Lower World than the one the handbooks describe. Expect halls, feasts and kings, not only animals.
Sky and the Upper World. Here the sources are thin. The Celts had sky gods, Lugh the bright one and Taranis the thunderer, and the Land of Promise, Tír Tairngire, has a quality of light that recalls the Upper World. But the tradition does not climb. There is no Celtic ladder to heaven, no world tree whose crown is a realm of teachers. Practitioners making Upper World journeys in a Celtic frame should hold the imagery loosely and let the experience teach them. Many report that the Upper World, approached from the Celtic lands, is less a realm of teachers than a realm of weather and wide sight, the view from the top of Loughcrew in a west wind.
Land and the Middle World. This is the strongest fit and the centre of the practice. The spirits of the land, the people of the mounds, the saints who took over the wells, the ancestors in the ringfort: all are met in the Middle World, in the place where you are. The daily practice of standing on the land, greeting the water and the sky, and acknowledging the fire at the centre, which we describe on the Practices page, is a Middle World practice. It is also the whole Celtic cosmology performed in five minutes.
The Tree at the Centre
The two maps meet, finally, in the tree. Core shamanism has the axis mundi, the world tree that joins the realms. The Celts had the bile, the sacred tree of the tribe, under which kings were made, and Ireland remembered five of them: the Oak of Mugna, the Yew of Ross, the three Ashes of Tortu, Dathi and Uisneach. The hazels over the Well of Segais drop their nuts into the water and the salmon grow wise; the tree stands at the source of the river and the source of knowledge.
The difference is instructive. The axis mundi is a cosmic principle; the bile is a particular tree in a particular field, and if you cut it down, as the men of Munster cut down the sacred tree of the Uí Néill in 981, you have struck at the soul of the people. Celtic cosmology is always local. The practitioner who wants to journey in this frame does not need to find the world tree. They need to find their tree, the one near where they live, and sit against it until it knows them.
A Practice: Orienting in the Three Realms
Go to a shore if you can, or any place where water, land and open sky meet. Stand on the line between land and water. Face the land and name what you know of it: the hill, the stone, the tree, the people who were here before. Face the water and name it: where it comes from, where it goes, what lives in it. Look up and name the sky: the weather, the direction of the wind, the time of day. Then put your hand on your chest and feel the fourth element, the fire, where the three meet in you. Say: “By land, by sea, by sky, I stand here.” Hold it a minute. Then, if you wish, close your eyes and journey, not down or up, but through: through the mist, into the hill, under the wave, into the spirit side of exactly this place.
Do it at dawn or dusk, when the thresholds of time align with the thresholds of place. That is where the Celtic Otherworld is: not up or down, but beside you, at the edge of the tide, in the next hour.