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Morgan Sheppard (1036 KP) created a post

Jul 17, 2026  
It's #FolkloreFriday 🐱

This week's folklore Friday explores the cat in Celtic and Welsh mythology — a creature the tradition never quite trusted to be simply domestic.

The Cath Palug of Welsh legend began as an ordinary kitten and grew into a creature of monstrous destructive power, which reflects something the broader Celtic tradition understood instinctively about cats. They were threshold guardians, Otherworld creatures that chose to sit beside human fires without ever fully relinquishing where they'd come from. They watched things invisible to everyone else. They knew things by means that didn't bear close examination.

The Celtic animal month of the Cat is running alongside the tree month of Holly right now — both of them quietly liminal, both of them more formidable than they first appear.

#FolkloreFriday #WelshFolklore #CelticMythology #TalesFromWales
      
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Morgan Sheppard (1036 KP) created a post

Sep 2, 2026  
The Celtic tree month of Vine and the Celtic animal month of Swan both begin today — a pairing that feels exactly right for September.

The vine offers the last abundance of summer, the harvest at its richest point before the cold takes hold. The swan in Welsh and Celtic tradition is a creature of transformation and liminality — belonging to two worlds at once, moving between states with a grace that makes it look easier than it ever is.

Abundance and transformation, harvest and liminality. September in two images.

Which feels more like where you are right now — the vine or the swan?

#WelshFolklore #FolkloreFantasy #TalesFromWales #IndieAuthor #BookCommunity #ReadingCommunity #Bookish #Reading
      
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Morgan Sheppard (1036 KP) created a post

Aug 14, 2026  
It's #FolkloreFriday 🌿

This week's folklore focus — the hazel in Welsh and Celtic mythology, and why its symbolism is more coherent and more interesting than it might first appear.

Nine hazel trees overhang the sacred pool at the source of wisdom. Their nuts fall into the water and feed the salmon that carries knowledge upstream. The bubbles rising where the nuts fell are called the bubbles of mystic inspiration. The hazel is the origin point of the whole chain — without it, the pool is empty, and the salmon has nothing to carry.

The same tree was used for water-divining across the Celtic and Welsh traditions, its forked branches sensitive to water beneath the surface. The tree that feeds hidden wisdom also finds hidden water. The associations are consistent, pointing toward the same quality — a sensitivity to what lies beneath ordinary perception.

The Celtic tree month of Hazel runs now through August, and this week feels like exactly the right time to sit with what the tradition understood about it.

#FolkloreFriday #WelshFolklore #CelticMythology
      
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Morgan Sheppard (1036 KP) created a post

Jun 26, 2026  
#FolkloreFriday 🌩️

The Cŵn Annwn are among the most enduring presences in Welsh folklore, and are one of the most consistently misunderstood.

They are the hounds of Annwn, the Welsh Otherworld, white-bodied and red-eared in the oldest descriptions, running with Arawn their master across the night sky and through the storms that gather after midsummer. They are associated with the Wild Hunt in the broader Celtic tradition, though the Welsh understanding of them is its own distinct and carefully considered thing. They don't simply terrorise. They have purpose, direction, and a sovereignty entirely their own.

The piece of their folklore I find most compelling is the detail about sound. The Cŵn Annwn are loudest at a distance and grow quieter as they approach. To hear them clearly and close is not a warning. It is already too late for warnings. That inversion of the expected, of danger growing quieter rather than louder as it nears, says something very precise about the nature of the Otherworld in Welsh tradition. It operates by different rules and doesn't announce itself the way the mortal world does.

They were heard in storms, in the depths of winter, on the old roads between places. They ran where the boundaries were thinnest. And they were not cruel, in the tradition's own terms. They were simply doing what they had always done, moving through the world on business that was not the living's to question. 🌩️

#FolkloreFriday #WelshFolklore #TalesFromWales
      
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Morgan Sheppard (1036 KP) created a post

Jun 8, 2026  
I've been thinking about swans again, which probably means I'm deep enough into the Brodyr Alarch world that it's starting to think back at me.

Swans in Welsh and Celtic mythology are rarely what they appear. They carry enchantments, wear transformations like second skins, and move between worlds with a grace that makes the crossing look easy when it never is. The Mabinogion is full of creatures that belong to two states at once — neither fully one thing nor the other — and swans embody that ambiguity more completely than almost anything else in the tradition.

There's something about that liminality that feels endlessly useful for storytelling. A character who exists between worlds is a character with a particular kind of loneliness and a particular kind of power. 🦢

#WelshFolklore #FolkloreFantasy #TalesFromWales #BrodyrAlarch #FantasyRomance
      
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Merissa (14150 KP) rated Stalking the Goddess in Books

Dec 17, 2018  
ST
Stalking the Goddess
Mark Carter | 2012
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Stalking The Goddess by Mark Carter is not a book to be taken lightly or to be read as a fill-in. This book deserves your attention as Mark Carter has tried to do the near-impossible and unravel a book that has long been thought of as a Pagan Must-Have. The White Goddess by Robert Graves has long been considered as one of the ultimate books for a Pagan to own, with links to the Welsh Celtic path and showing how, through poetry, that paganism lived on through the ages.

Stalking The Goddess is written like a thesis or dissertation from a university so will appeal to any academically-minded out there. This did make it quite hard going at times and I would read some and then take a break to digest what I had read.

Mark Carter has “untangled the woods” of The White Goddess and made it more accessible to the Pagan who would like to know more about it and where Robert Graves got his sources. Mark Carter has made it possible to see who has influenced Robert Graves, both in a positive and also a negative way, by showing whose work was used and which was not.

One of the things that I found most interesting was that although The White Goddess boasts a Welsh Celtic basis, Robert Graves had actually pulled on stories from the whole of Europe, as well as from the Bible, the Jews and used stories from the Saracens to compile his book and it somehow all seemed to fit which is where Mark Carter has excelled. Star Wars even makes an appearance!

In no way is Mark Carter dismissing The White Goddess and even states in the Epilogue that without The White Goddess it is unlikely that paganism would have developed as it did.

Overall, I would recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the history of The White Goddess, or for someone who has an academic “twist”. Thought provoking and a very interesting read.