Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
An Old Scots Term for 'Cross-Quarter'
In 1633, accused Orkney witch Isobel Sinclair confessed that over seven years, “sex times at the reathes of the year, she hath bein controlled with the Phairie; and that be thame, she hath the second sight: quhairby she will know giff [if] thair be any fey bodie [i.e. anyone about to die] in the hous” (Henderson 83).
There is much of interest in this statement, but for our purposes today I would like to draw your particular attention to the phrase “at the reathes of the year.”
More commonly written raith (rhymes with bathe), this Scots word denotes “a quarter of the year; three months” (Robinson 540), deriving ultimately from the Scots Gaelic ràith (RAW-ee), “season, quarter (of the year).”
Sinclair uses the term, though, in a rather more restrictive sense: she is clearly referring, pars pro toto, to the year's Quarter Days, the first day of each respective quarter, i.e. the old Celtic Quarter Days of (to give them their Irish names) Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, and Lunasa.
Four hundred years later, witches still keep to the calendar that Isobel Sinclair knew in 1633. But modern witches are a mixed people: our Wheel of the Year is a felicitous marriage of Celtic and Germanic. It is now the Germanic solstices and equinoxes that we know by the name of Quarters; the Celtic high-days that fall between them, we have come to call the Cross-Quarters.
The term raithes, though, accords the Cross-Days their old Celtic primacy, and there's much to be said for this. Many-ness enriches us all.
Isobel Sinclair's ultimate fate remains unknown.
Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan (2001) Scottish Fairy Belief: A History. Tuckwell Press
Mairi Robinson, ed. (1985) The Concise Scots Dictionary. Aberdeen University Press
Above:
Stones of Stenness (Mainland, Orkney)
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