Irish Shamanism: Walking the Old Ways of Ireland: The Land, the Spirits and the Practice

A word about the title. "Shamanism" is a borrowed word, and this book says so on its first page. Ireland had no shamans. It had the draoithe and the filid and the bean feasa, the wise women and the fairy doctors and a long line of people whose names we never learned. But the family resemblance is real, and the old ways they carried are real, and they have survived, quietly, for fifteen hundred years.

Irish Shamanism is an honest guide to those old ways, for anyone drawn to them and tired of being sold something fake.

It will not promise you instant ancient wisdom, because there is no such thing. It will not sell you a certificate or an expensive initiation, because the genuine tradition was never for sale. What it offers instead is a clear, grounded, respectful introduction to the real thing: the land and how it was seen, the three worlds and the thin places between them, the Good People and the old gods and the ancestors, the trees and the plants and the animals, the wheel of the year and its four fires, and the quiet daily practice that holds it all together.

And it is honest about what it is not. Not Wicca. Not the Romans' druids. Not a costume. Not free of Christianity, which is woven through all of it. And not finished, because a living tradition never is.

Whether you are Irish, or descended from the scattered millions who left, or simply someone a hill in the west once looked at and would not let go, this book begins where the old ways always began. Not on a mountain in Connemara. At the back door, in the dark of a winter morning, with whatever cup you drink from first.