Tara Imbolc Celebration for all.
Assemble in the Tara Car Park 4.30pm Sunday 1st Feb

Photo by Sean Gilmartin

Invitation To Tara.

Imbolc, at the beginning of February was one of the festivals of our old Pagan calendar later adapted to become St Brigid's Day. This ancient festival was celebrated as a festival of hope, when the sheep and goat herds started to produce milk for their coming young. It was thus a festival of life, lactation and hope and it was celebrated at Tara as far back as history goes, as it was all across our once green land.

This year you are invited to Tara to walk around the hill, dieseil- sunwards, with flames or candles at dusk. This will be done in a celebration of this old festival and it may help keep the destruction of the Tara complex in national view, something now sadly being forgotten.

Also with such darkness and pain approaching us in the form of a deep, man made and in many cases fatal recession perhaps the walk might convince any watchers to finally throw off their indifference and join us, because when our politicians stabbed into the heart of the ancient fields of Tara we lost not just our luck but now it seems our way.

Such a walk around the hill might also bring attention and clarity to what that cabal of politicians, speculators and bankers have done to us, our land and our future. While we pleaded for restraint and sustainability, they rejected it as nonsense. The results are now there to see, everywhere.

So come to Tara on Sunday 1st of February, assemble at four thirty in the car park. Bring lanterns or torches. Thank you.

Tara Campaigners.

Copy this leaflet, post it on, spread it around if you can.

The Fairy Folk of Tara

On the ancient Hill of Tara, from whose heights the High Kings once ruled all Ireland, from where the sacred fires in pagan days announced the annual resurrection of the sun, the Easter Tide, where the magic of Patrick prevailed over the magic of the Druids, and where the hosts of the Tuatha De Danann were wont to appear at the great Feast of Samain, to-day the fairy-folk of modern times hold undisputed sovereignty. And from no point better than Tara, which thus was once the magical and political centre of the Sacred Island, could we begin our study of the Irish Fairy-Faith. Though the Hill has lain unploughed and deserted since the curses of Christian priests fell upon it, on the calm air of summer evenings, at the twilight hour, wondrous music still sounds over its slopes, and at night long, weird processions of silent spirits march round its grass-grown raths and forts. It is only men who fear the curse of the Christians; the fairy-folk regard it not.

The Rev. Father Peter Kenney, of Kilmessan, had directed me to John Graham, an old man over seventy years of age, who has lived near Tara most of his life; and after I had found John, and he had led me from rath to rath and then right through the length of the site where once stood the banquet hail of kings and heroes and Druids, as he earnestly described the past glories of Tara to which these ancient monuments bear silent testimony, we sat down in the thick sweet grass on the Sacred Hill and began talking of the olden times in Ireland, and then of the ‘good people’:–

The ‘Good People’s’ Music.–‘As sure as you are sitting down I beard the pipes there in that wood (pointing to a wood on the north-west slope of the Hill, and west of the banquet hall). I heard the music another time on a hot summer evening at the Rath of Ringlestown, in a field where all the grass had been burned off; and I often heard it in the wood of Tara. Whenever the good people play, you hear their music all through the field as plain as can be; and it is the grandest kind of music. It may last half the night, but once day comes, it ends.’

Who the ‘Good People’ are.–I now asked John what sort of a race the ‘good people’ are, and where they came from, and this is his reply:–’People killed and murdered in war stay on earth till their time is up, and they are among the good people. The souls on this earth are as thick as the grass (running his walking-stick through a thick clump), and you can’t see them; and evil spirits are just as thick, too, and people don’t know it. Because there are so many spirits knocking (going) about they must appear to some people. The old folk saw the good people here on the Hill a hundred times, and they’d always be talking about them. The good people can see everything, and you dare not meddle with them. They live in raths, and their houses are in them. The opinion always was that they are a race of spirits, for they can go into different forms, and can appear big as well as little.’

Source: The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, W.Y.Evans-Wentz, London and New York; H. Froude, 1911

http://www.redfairy.co.uk/   

www.meathmasterplan.com

Earth's Analemma

An analemma for planet Earth.

Owing to the Earth's tilt on its axis (23.439°) and its elliptical orbit around the sun, the relative location of the sun above the horizon is not constant from day to day when observed at the same time on each day. Depending on one's geographical latitude, this loop will be inclined at different angles.

The figure on the left is an example of an Earth analemma as seen from the northern hemisphere. It is a plot of the position of the sun at 12:00 noon at Royal Observatory, Greenwich, England (latitude 51.4791 deg north, longitude 0) during the year 2006. The horizontal axis is the azimuth angle in degrees (180 degrees is facing south). The vertical axis is the altitude in degrees above the horizon. The first day of each month is shown in black, and the solstices and equinoxes are shown in green. It can be seen that the equinoxes occur at altitude φ=90 - 51.4791 = 38.5209 degrees, and the solstices occur at altitudes φ±ε where ε is the axial tilt of the earth, 23.439 degrees. The analemma is plotted with width highly exaggerated, which permits noticing that it is very slightly asymmetrical (because of the two-week misalignment of the apsides of the Earth's orbit and its solstices).

From the northern hemisphere, the analemma is oriented with the smaller loop appearing higher in the sky and the larger loop lower in the sky. This orientation is reversed in the southern hemisphere. From the equator, the analemma lies horizontally, with the smaller loop to the north and the larger loop towards the south.

See equation of time for an in-depth description of the east-west characteristics of the analemma.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma

A blog and a book from the road protests over in England  -  nine miles ---

http://www.ninemiles.co.uk/#