Cuigeal na maighdin,
Cuigeal na maighdin,
An t-snighe ’ga froighneadh.
Cuigeal na maighdin,
Cuigeal na maighdin.
Caidil, a leanabain,
Caidil, a leanabain,
Cha n-eil mir’ agam-sa
Am pòca no ’m balgaibh.
Caidil, a leanabain,
Caidil, a leanabain.
Caidil, a leanabain,
Caidil, a leanabain,
Cha do shnìomh thu ’n clò bàn,
’S tu ’nad thàmh fad na h-oidhche;
Caidil, a leanabain,
Caidil, a leanabain.
This spinning song is from South Uibhist, a Hebridean Isle with a beloved and renowned song tradition. It sings of the maiden’s distaff, sometimes translated to the mermaid’s distaff, from which a young mother is spinning thread for stockings whilst singing to her baby. It was largely passed through the oral tradition, but seems to have been recorded in writing but once in the 1930s.
There are countless working songs that have been shared throughout time as a part of the Scottish Gaelic song lineage. There were songs for spinning, weaving, waulking the wool, rowing, and even milking the cows. Some of these songs were light hearted and shared of the people’s wishes, loves, and lives, while others shared of their frustrations, woes, and unshed grief. They were songs sung by mothers, foster-mothers, and aunties that kept alive the hearts of men slain in battle. They were also songs that passed coded war messages across the land in the times of the Jacobite Rebellions so as to help the Gaels to maintain sovereignty, dignity, and safety in a time where their native tongue and culture hung in the tendrils of threads brutally torn and wyldly unassured.
Most often, the songs were shared in community as a village of women come together to work and sing as one heart. For waulking, the season progressed by going from house to house to honor and support the completion of the woven cloth at each of the homes’ of the villages' celebrated weavers. There was a faery named The Loireag to whom they offered fresh milk and cream on waulking days as she was said to stand guard to support their efforts and help to unite their intention. The women often sang one song for each of the seven, nine, or twelve steps for the work day- all of these numbers were considered magical by the Gaels and thus their work flowed in magic. The length of each step often led to long, varied, improvised songs of heightening passion and speed. Sometimes they even asked the fates and wheel of fate what may come to be as well.
These songs and the art of spinning were so fundamental to the Gaelic culture that distaffs and whorls from spindles have been found in ancient burial mounds. On one of these whorls was engraved with Ogham writing; when spun, it reveals a blessing song for the soul of the beloved spinner who was laid to rest in the mound. Her song has lived beyond the threads of time as she knew it as a song that surely rings out to the great spinners who weave each of our fates: ‘a blessing on the soul of L,’ her thread cut but short.
You can listen to this spinning song as sung by Agnes Currie of Lochboisdale here.
Traditional Scottish Gaelic spinning song as recorded by Margaret Fay Shaw from Agnes Currie and recently learned from Frances Dunlop
In the following video, Liv Mokai Wheeler interviews Òran an Rìbhinn: The Venusian Song facilitator, Tatjana Karajanov.
They connect around musical medicine, sound healing, the golden threads of Tatjana’s connection to Venusian energies, and Tatjana's journey with these sacred transmissions in her healing work. We are delighted, and honored to be joined by Tatjana for a Voice Healing Ceremony in our Òran an Rìbhinn journey. We are deeply honored that Tatjana would consider sharing of her profound medicine in an interview that is not in her mother tongue as well.
The Great Weavers of Fate… Are they the three sisters who sit at the base of the Cosmic World Tree? Are they even more ancient grandmother weavers who animate the hands of the three sisters? Are they so close to the breath of life that their presence and beingness inexplicably spins and weaves and expresses in all life without need of name or form? Are they a creation of the Creator or did they create the Creator?
Who is to say to whom truly we pray…
These venerable beings have had many names across what we call time and space. In Greek folklore, they were the Sisters of Fate born of Themis and Zeus. They were noble daughters tasked with spinning destiny. Clotho combed and spun the fibers of life. Lachesis wove and measured the length of the cloth of life. Whilst Atropos, the oldest and smallest of the sisters who was thought to perhaps be a being of the wee folk, snipped the yarn of life and welcomed the soul home as the Goddess of Death. In Wales, they were but one Goddess by the name of Arianrhod, or Silver Wheel, who governed rebirth and the cosmic weavings of fate across time. In Scotland, they were traditionally called the Three Witches of Forres.
In Norse folklore, they are named Urdr, Verdandi, Skuld. They are the Norns. It is not known if they are of the Gods or of the elves or even of the dwarves. But they are honored as three maids who weave the destiny of all of life whilst they watch the breath of creation from the base of the Cosmic World Tree, Yggdrasil, at their well of Urth. It is believed that when Odin hung himself upside down for nine nights, that it was the Norns to whom he offered his eye as a demonstration that he was wyrthy of receiving the secret, sacred, knowledge of seeing with the technology of the Runes; it is said that his eye still sits inside their well. It is also believed that Freya received her knowledge of a magical shamanic art-form called Seiðr from the Norns as well. In this, not only are they the great spinners of each of our fated destinies, they are the original keepers of the magical and divinatory arts as well. By the Norse it was also believed that fate or destiny was not always finite but could also be woven anew with each choice we made and each step we took- if the sisters so agreed. In the end, they believed that ultimately the sisters were less preoccupied with the destinies themselves, but rather how passionately and vigorously we rose to live them each time we were called to the loom.
It is believed that from Urth or Uerth, a root word meaning turning and becoming, came their name the Norns and thus branched many words for Fate or Destiny. In Anglo-Saxon languages, they were called the Wyrds, or Weird Sisters. In Socttish, Weirdfu. From Norse weorð or weirding, grew weirdful, worthful, worthy- all meaning honor filled, reverential. From them also blooms wyld, wyrth, weirding women, and worship.
Weird and fate, so feared by modern folk, once ran with the moon untethered and celebrated with spirited ways. But weird is yet the medicine carried in our veins, these threads of life flowing in the body and beyond. Weird is yet the otherworldly creatures that sometimes take the form of the human who can see the luminous threads as the Wyrd Sisters spin and cascade them into the epics of our beings, of our hearts, of our very souls.
These noble sisters know the true tapestry of each of the songs inherent to our beings because they have spun, woven, and tended to them even, or most especially, when we have forgotten that the song of our soul even exists.
So how does one venerate and honor the Grandmothers Weavers, the Great Weavers of Fate with due honor? How does one bow their head in fullness to the Wyrd Sisters who spin and create the infinite, sparkling pictures of each of our soul’s destinies and the story of creation throughout all time?
Do we pick up a spindle and spin them a song? Do we dance wyldly and wassail at the base of a tree? Do we rise to meet our destinies with passion and wyrth? Or do we simply walk the path they have laid before us with as much valour as we can muster until the thread is cut and a new length of cloth is begun?
Who is to say? Who is to say? Who is to say?
In the, Völuspá, a beloved Icelandic creation story from The Poetic Edda that shares much of Norse spiritual cosmology through prose, Odin calls the spirit of a seeress from the afterlife to share about the trajectory of life and any destruction that may befall creation. The Volva woman arises from the mists to share her great memory of the birth of creation and all of life. She even echoes Odin’s secrets of the trials of his magical initiation back to him, thus revealing the depth of her mystical abilities to read the fates of even the Aesir father-god himself. She then proceeds to a prophecy that tells of a time that had yet to come, a time where the fates of all holy races were to be revealed whether human, giant, dwarf, elven, God, or Goddess. In essence, throughout the full arc of this expansive tale, she shares the beginning of time and the fated destruction of it in kind.
These poems and epics too were largely preserved through oral tradition until they were set to vellum manuscript in the thirteenth century. The following excerpt is the seeress's recount of the story of creation, of life lived amongst a great ash tree as fated, spun, woven, and cut by The Great Weavers of Fate at their sacred well.
Writing by Sylvie Zacrep
Hearing I ask | from the holy races,
From Heimdall's sons, | both high and low;
Thou wilt, Valfather, | that well I relate
Old tales I remember | of men long ago.
I remember yet | the giants of yore,
Who gave me bread | in the days gone by;
Nine worlds I knew, | the nine in the tree
With mighty roots | beneath the mold.
Of old was the age | when Ymir lived;
Sea nor cool waves | nor sand there were;
Earth had not been, | nor heaven above,
But a yawning gap, | and grass nowhere.
Then Bur's sons lifted | the level land,
Mithgarth the mighty | there they made;
The sun from the south | warmed the stones of earth,
And green was the ground | with growing leeks.
The sun, the sister | of the moon, from the south
Her right hand cast | over heaven's rim;
No knowledge she had | where her home should be,
The moon knew not | what might was his,
The stars knew not | where their stations were.
Then sought the gods | their assembly-seats,
The holy ones, | and council held;
Names then gave they | to noon and twilight,
Morning they named, | and the waning moon,
Night and evening, | the years to number.
At Ithavoll met | the mighty gods,
Shrines and temples | they timbered high;
Forges they set, and | they smithied ore,
Tongs they wrought, | and tools they fashioned.
In their dwellings at peace | they played at tables,
Of gold no lack | did the gods then know,--
Till thither came | up giant-maids three,
Huge of might, | out of Jotunheim.
Then sought the gods | their assembly-seats,
The holy ones, | and council held,
To find who should raise | the race of dwarfs
Out of Brimir's blood | and the legs of Blain.
There was Motsognir | the mightiest made
Of all the dwarfs, | and Durin next;
Many a likeness | of men they made,
The dwarfs in the earth, | as Durin said...
...The race of the dwarfs | in Dvalin's throng
Down to Lofar | the list must I tell;
The rocks they left, | and through wet lands
They sought a home | in the fields of sand…
...Then from the throng | did three come forth,
From the home of the gods, | the mighty and gracious;
Two without fate | on the land they found,
Ask and Embla, | empty of might.
Soul they had not, | sense they had not,
Heat nor motion, | nor goodly hue;
Soul gave Othin, | sense gave Hönir,
Heat gave Lothur | and goodly hue.
An ash I know, | Yggdrasil its name,
With water white | is the great tree wet;
Thence come the dews | that fall in the dales,
Green by Urth's well | does it ever grow.
Thence come the maidens | mighty in wisdom,
Three from the dwelling | down 'neath the tree;
Urth is one named, | Verthandi the next,--
On the wood they scored,-- | and Skuld the third.
Laws they made there, and life allotted
To the sons of men, and set their fates.
The war I remember, | the first in the world,
When the gods with spears | had smitten Gollveig,
And in the hall | of Hor had burned her,
Three times burned, | and three times born,
Oft and again, | yet ever she lives.
Heith they named her | who sought their home,
The wide-seeing witch, | in magic wise;
Minds she bewitched | that were moved by her magic,
To evil women | a joy she was.
On the host his spear | did Othin hurl,
Then in the world | did war first come;
The wall that girdled | the gods was broken,
And the field by the warlike | Wanes was trodden.
Then sought the gods | their assembly-seats,
The holy ones, | and council held,
Whether the gods | should tribute give,
Or to all alike | should worship belong.
Then sought the gods | their assembly-seats,
The holy ones, | and council held,
To find who with venom | the air had filled,
Or had given Oth's bride | to the giants' brood.
In swelling rage | then rose up Thor,--
Seldom he sits | when he such things hears,--
And the oaths were broken, | the words and bonds,
The mighty pledges | between them made…
Völuspá as scribed by Snorri Sturluson in the Codex Regius manuscript of The Poetic Edda in 1270 and translated by Henry Adams Bellows in 1936
The prophecy can be found in full here