The Old Callings

Ask what the Celts called their shamans and you will be disappointed: they called them nothing, because the job as Siberia knew it did not exist in one person. Ask instead who in a Gaelic or Welsh community went between the worlds on behalf of others, and the answer is crowded. There was the poet who saw in the dark, the woman of knowledge who bargained with the fairies, the dreamer, the second-sighted man who saw the dead walking beside the living, the keening woman who sang the soul across, the storyteller who carried three hundred tales in his head. Each held a piece of what the shaman holds whole. Learning their names is the beginning of practising honestly.

No Word for Shaman

The American teacher Jane Burns puts it plainly: the word shaman is obviously not Gaelic, and in this culture there was never one word to cover the whole spectrum of work. There was, in Burns’s phrase, “a whole cast of characters” whose skills the community called upon at different times and in different ways. Frank MacEowen, author of The Mist-Filled Path, makes the same point and adds a warning: just as the Lakota and the Navajo have their own names for their own medicine people, so do the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh, and it does the traditions no service to melt them down into one pan-Celtic figure.

What follows is a field guide to that company. It draws on the medieval literature, on the folklore collected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on the work of modern writers who have tried to recover the words. Where a term is modern, we say so.

Those Who Knew

Druí, draoi Irish and Scottish Gaelic, “druid”

The priestly and learned class of the Iron Age, judges, teachers and diviners. In the Irish tales druids raise mists, read the clouds, fix the lucky day and shift their shape. The word survived in Gaelic long after the order did, and in later use it could cover a range of people: MacEowen notes that a bandraoi, a woman druid, might be a midwife, a counsellor, an herbalist, a judge, a diviner or a bonesetter. Pronounced roughly “dree.”

File Irish, plural filidh, “poet, seer”

The professional seer-poet, trained for up to twelve years, keeper of genealogy and law, praiser and satirist, and practitioner of the incubated vision called imbas forosnai. If any single figure deserves to be called a Celtic shaman, most scholars who use the word at all would point here. See the essay A Fire in the Head.

Seanchaí Irish, “bearer of old lore”

The tradition-bearer and storyteller of later centuries, the heir of the filidh in the cabin rather than the court. A good seanchaí carried hundreds of tales word for word, and the telling of certain tales on certain nights was itself a protection.

Those Who Saw

The Scottish Highlands and Islands kept a vocabulary of seership that is richer than anything that survives in Irish, partly because the Second Sight was still common there when the antiquarians came looking for it. Martin Martin devoted pages of his 1703 Description of the Western Islands to it; Robert Kirk, the minister of Aberfoyle, wrote The Secret Commonwealth about it in 1691, describing the “co-walker” that accompanies every person and is visible only to the sighted. Kirk, local tradition says, was taken into the fairy hill above his manse the following year.

Taibhsear Scottish Gaelic, “one who sees apparitions”

The person with the Second Sight, an dà shealladh, the two sights: one who sees the dead, the fetch or double of the living, the shroud that rises up a body before death, the funeral that has not happened yet. The gift was rarely welcome, often inherited, and sometimes lifted only by a charm.

Fiosaiche Scottish Gaelic, “one who knows”

A soothsayer or diviner, one with fios, knowledge, who could tell what was hidden in the past or coming in the future. MacEowen describes the fiosaiche as a visionary with precognitive and retrocognitive sight.

Bruadaraiche Scottish Gaelic, “dreamer”

One who dreams true: who receives usable knowledge in sleep, and who, in MacEowen’s account, is so attuned to the dream that they can read it even in waking life. The native ancestor of every practitioner who keeps a dream book.

Awenydd Welsh, plural awenyddion, “inspired one”

The Welsh soothsayers described by Gerald of Wales in 1194, who went into a violent trance when consulted, spoke in riddling oracles, and had to be shaken awake afterwards. The most direct medieval description of a trance practitioner from any Celtic country. See Weighing the Evidence.

Those Who Healed

When the learned orders fell, the work went to the parish. Every district had someone who could cure, and the cures were often a mixture of herbs, charms, prayers and dealings with the Otherworld that nobody tried very hard to separate.

Bean feasa Irish, “woman of knowledge”

The wise woman, with her male counterpart the fear feasa. She found lost things, diagnosed the fairy stroke, brought back those who had been “taken,” and told the future. Biddy Early of Clare, who died in 1874, is the most famous. See the essay The Fairy Doctor.

Bean leighis Irish, “woman of healing”

A healer of the body by remedy and ritual, who in Burns’s account could also cast out what did not belong and break spells. Leigheas is still the ordinary Irish word for a cure.

The fairy doctor

The English name for the healer whose power came from, and was exercised in negotiation with, the sí. Followers of the creideamh sí, the fairy faith, they were said by Yeats to be often people whom the fairies had loved and carried away for seven years.

The one who has the cure

Across rural Ireland, families still hold a cure for a single ailment, the burn, the shingles, the sprain, the thrush, passed from one generation to the next, often across the sexes, and given freely or for a token. A seventh son was born to cure. This is the most widespread living survival of the old healing callings in these islands, and it is still sought quietly by people who also see their doctor.

Dyn hysbys, the pellar, the charmer

The Welsh “knowing man,” like John Harries of Cwrt-y-Cadno in Carmarthenshire, who died in 1839 and was consulted from across Wales; the Cornish pellar, who lifted ill-wishing; the charmers of the Isle of Man and the Scottish Highlands. Every Celtic country had its cunning folk, and most were consulted by the same people who sat in church on Sunday.

Those Who Sang the Dead Across

Bean chaointe Irish, plural mná caointe, “keening woman”

The woman who led the lament at the wake and the grave, improvising praise and grief in verse while the company took up the cry. Burns names her plainly as the one entrusted with the proper commissioning of souls to the spirit world: what core shamanism calls the psychopomp. See the essay Keening the Dead Across.

Bean sí Irish, “woman of the mound”

The banshee: the Otherworld keener who cries for the members of certain old families before they die. The folklorist Patricia Lysaght has shown how closely she mirrors the human keening woman. Where the bean chaointe sang the dead out of this world, the bean sí sang them from the other side.

Bean nighe Scottish Gaelic, “washer woman”

The washer at the ford, seen at a stream washing the clothes or armour of one who is about to die. In the Irish tales she is the Morrígan, and Cú Chulainn sees her on his way to his last battle.

Those Who Kept the Word

The Celtic peoples held language itself to be powerful. A blessing could prosper a house and a satire could raise blisters on a king’s face; Burns speaks of the reverence in this tradition for the value of one’s word. The bards, poets and storytellers, Burns insists, were never mere entertainers but healers in their own right. The Welsh bardd held a rank close to the Irish file. The seanchaithe of the twentieth century were still being visited by folklorists with notebooks and recording machines, and the stories they told, of the sí and the dead and the ones who went away, are the raw material of every Celtic journey.

Those Who Lived at the Edge

Finally there were the liminal ones, who lived outside the settled order and drew power from it. The fénnid, member of a fian or hunting war-band, lived in the wild beyond the boundaries of the túath; Fionn mac Cumhaill was both fénnid and file, outlaw and seer, and his tales are full of Otherworld ordeals. The geilt, the madman of the woods, of whom Suibhne is the great example, had been driven out of his mind and into the trees, and there found a poetry of the wild that no court poet could match. Neither was a healer, but both show what the tradition believed about where vision comes from: from the edge, from the wild, from having been broken open. See Cooked in the Otherworld Hostel.

The Callings and the Core Methods

Old Words for New Work

Some modern practitioners have wondered whether new Gaelic words might serve better than the borrowed Siberian one. MacEowen has floated turasaiche, “one who journeys,” and eolaí, a guide. These are honest coinages, so long as they are presented as coinages. What we would not do is take an old title for ourselves. A file was made by twelve years of schooling; a bean feasa was recognised by a parish that had watched her cures for decades; the one who has the cure was given it by a parent. None of these titles can be claimed by reading about them. “Shamanic practitioner” remains the plainest description of what most of us do.

The old callings matter for another reason. They remind us that the work was always shared out. Nobody was expected to be poet, seer, healer, dreamer and keener at once. A circle in which one member dreams true, another finds lost things, another sings well at a graveside and another knows the tales is closer to the old pattern than any lone practitioner with a certificate.