One of the most beautiful, mysterious things you can come across in your travels in Ireland or Scotland is a holy well. These ancient wells and springs were thought to originate in the Otherworld, from whence waters flows into our world, gushing forth as springs and rivers like the Boyne and Shannon. These rivers and springs all have their own goddesses, part of the water’s flow.
According to Mara Freeman, “In Celtic mythology the Well of Wisdom stands at the center of the Celtic Otherworld, the spiritual source of all, of which the holy wells of… Ireland are mere tributaries."
Early Irish literature tells us how this well gushes up as a fountain in the courtyard of the palace of Manannan Mac Lir, the king of the faeries. Over the well hang nine magic hazel trees dropping their purple nuts into the water. Salmon - the Celtic fish of knowledge and mystic inspiration - eat the nuts and send the husks floating down the five streams flowing from the well. It was said that “the sound of the falling of those streams was more melodious than any music that men sing.”
In the tale, Cormac's Adventures in the Land of Promise, Manannan Mac Lir explains that the streams are the five senses through which knowledge is obtained, “and no one will have knowledge who drinks not… of the fountain itself and out of the streams. The folk of many arts are those who drink of them both,” he says.
And so, drinking from these holy waters or bathing in them was, and still is, is thought to bestow poetic inspiration, wisdom, and healing.
Now, if you come across a holy well in Scotland or Ireland today, you’ll find the well or the spring itself, often protected by a beautiful man-made shrine. Alongside it, a sacred tree, large and ancient, as well as a hill or a standing stone. Before Christianity arrived, these wells were visited at special times of the year like Lughnasa or Samhain, times when the veil between the living and the dead was at its thinnest.
When pilgrims visited the wells, the ritual often involved a prayer walk called a pattern around the well, the tree, and the stones, in the direction of the sun. Water would be drunk from the well, and prayers offered. Most common was tying a strip of cloth – called a clootie in Scotland – to the holy tree after washing or drinking from the well. This was thought to drive any illness into the cloth, and as the cloth rotted away, so too would the illness disappear. Call it a clootie tree, a rag tree or a prayer tree, but if you find one, a holy well is not far away.
As Christianity took hold, these holy portals of the earth goddess became attached to saints, thus St. Patrick’s Well, or St. Brigit’s Well. Christian churches were built near the pagan wells, and the early Celtic church used these wells for baptism until Rome replaced them with the baptismal font inside the building. Many of these old churches still have a crypt or a grotto that opens into a subterranean spring, the old holy well. This place – close to earth and water – is the heart of the sacred enclosure.
For Celtic Cultural Alliance, this is Kate Scuffle. Slainte.
