OGMIOS

A Gaulish god, the equivalent of the Roman Hercules. Lucian says that the Celts saw Ogmios as extremely old and bald, with wrinkled skin, yet in spite of this he was portrayed as Hercules, complete with lionskin and club in one hand. He is sometimes called upon in lead curse tablets to bring misfortunes on certain named individuals.

He was a god of eloquence.

OTHERWORLD

The Otherworld of Irish folk-tale is a tme Celtic paradise. There are no diseases there, no worries, no ugliness, and no old age. Instead there are in abundance, music, magic, and birdsong, and everyone is young.

This pagan paradise naturally became a focus for poets, even for poets who were monks. From the seventh century onward the subject was repeatedly and sensitively reworked.

Before setting off on his voyage to find the Otherworld, Bran mac Feb hail first pictured it as an island, later as “three times fifty distant islands,” lying far to the west of Ireland:

There is a distant isle,

Around which sea-horses glisten,

A fair course on which the white wave surges,

Four pedestals uphold it.

A delight to the eye, a glorious range, is the plain on which the hosts hold games; coracle races against chariot in the plain south of Findargad.

Pillars of white bronze beneath it shining through aeons of beauty, lovely land through the ages of the world, on which the many blossoms fall

Unknown is wailing or treachery in the happy familiar land; no sound there rough or harsh, only sweet music striking on the ear.

Another poem from the period dwells in a similar way on the allure, even to medieval

Christians, of a pagan paradise:

There, there is neither ‘mine ’ nor ‘thine white are teeth there, dark the brows; a delight to the eye the array of our hosts; every cheek there is the hue of the foxglove.

Fine though you think the ale of Ireland, more exhilarating still is the ale of Tir Mar; a wondrous land is the land I tell of, youth does not give way to age there.

Sweet warm streams flow through the land, the choice of mead and of wine; splendid people without blemish, conception without sin, without lust.

Yet, strangely, in this perfect land there is still fighting. Perhaps fighting was seen as necessary for young men to prove their manhood. Perhaps it was seen as a positive pleasure. Late one Friday night on a Northampton street many years ago, I came upon a small crowd of people gathered around a huge Irishman who was lying in a drunken heap on the pavement. His face was covered with blood and he was the worse for drink and fighting. I managed to haul him up onto his feet, while the small crowd looked on impassively. Swaying and beaming with gratitude, the Celtic giant oflFered to give me a fight. He was oflFering me a treat.

The story of Mac Da Tho’s Pig relates how Mac Da Tho, who is really a god presiding over the Otherworld feast, acts as host to the men of Connaught and Ulster. These opposing warbands sit down to a meal of pork and the usual quarrel breaks out over who should have the champion’s portion. Pork was always a major feature of these banquets, and archeologists have often found the remains of pork joints in late Iron Age graves, where both wine and a hearth were provided for a dead chiel—and a guest, for company.

There is, however, a darker side to the Irish Otherworld. Sometimes it is described as a shadowy place presided over by the god Donn. At Samhain, when summer turns to winter, it is this more somber aspect that prevails; the spirits of the dead are allowed to move across the boundary into the world of the living and the

Barrier between nature and supemature temporarily dissolves.

The boundary between this world and the Otherworld is permeable at any time of the year. There are traditional tales of living mortals visiting the Otherworld, often enticed there by immortals, and later being allowed to return.

Yet Otherworldly time is different from everyday time. This is perhaps rooted in the experience we have all had, of dropping off to sleep for a few minutes and dreaming of events in apparent real time that seem to go on for hours or days. John Masefteld develops this idea in his 1935 children’s book The Box of Delights. The world of dreams is taken to be akin to the Otherworld.

Another example of this is a story told in Pembrokeshire in Wales. A young shepherd joins a fairy dance and finds himself in a glittering palace surrounded by wonderful gardens. He spends many years there, very happily, among the fairies. There is one thing he is not allowed to do: drink from the fountain in the garden. As time passes, he increasingly wishes to drink from the fountain. In the end he dips his hands into it. hnmediately the garden and the fairy palace vanish and he finds himself back on the cold hillside among his sheep. Only minutes have elapsed since he joined the fairy dance.

This type of experience is often described in mystical trances, in which an enormous amount happens, mentally and spiritually, within the space of a few moments. Some of the (possibly late) fairy tales emphasize the long spans of time it is possible to spend in the Otherworld; after these long visits the traveler returns, like the shepherd boy, to find that only a few minutes have passed. But many of the fairy tales turn this idea around. A fairy dance lasting a few minutes has taken a year or more in the everyday world, as in the tale of and Llewellyn, where a few days of feasting in the Otherworld take 200 years in the everyday world.

It is not always so. In some stories, characters move easily backward and forward between the worlds without any change in time zone. But the mortal traveler to the Otherworld runs the grave risk—among many others—that they may not be able to return to their own time. They could leave to spend a few minutes in the Otherworld and return years, decades, or centuries later to find no one living that they know and all their loved ones dead.