The everyday life of the Celts included the supernatural equally with the natural, the divine with the mundane; for them the Otherworld was as real as the tangible physical world and as everpresent.

In this quote from her book, Walking The Maze: The Enduring Presence of the Celtic Spirit, Loren Cruden beautifully articulates the lens through which our Irish ancestors viewed their world. Every day and all day they were connected to the energies of the Earth, ancestors and Otherworld spirits. As John O’Donohue wrote, The Celts had an intuitive spirituality informed by mindful and reverent attention to landscape. It was an outdoor spirituality impassioned by the erotic charge of the earth.

Although the Catholic Church made what could be argued as equally impassioned attempts to dislodge this sacred connection, they were only partially successful in their efforts to demonize and trivialize these energies and spirits through the evolution of faery folklore. The charge of the Earth is just too strong.

In O’Donohue’s words, The Celtic mind did not separate what belongs together. The dualism that separates the visible from the invisible, time from eternity, the human from the divine, was totally alien to them. The charge continued, indeed continues, to live in the Irish people through many shamanic and healer traditions.