Round the Herne

As it is now National Storytelling Week, I have asked friends to suggest themes for stories so I can record a few tales for the week. Carol gave the idea of snakes, so this is a short story rather loosely based on a Mohawk account of how snakes came into the world. Unusually for me, this is quite a brief account. There are quite a lot of stories from around the world that see either humans as being sired by one or other animal species, or vice versa. It's a curious way of inter-relating different species and perhaps explaining such things as totemic emblems within tribal culture, and something I may reflect on at more length when my brain is working.  A nice morning was followed by a stressful afternoon, so I'm using this as "narrative therapy" to cheer myself up!

Today is the beginning of the Year of the Rooster on the Chinese calendar - so best wishes to all those Chinese people celebrating it. This is my sign in the zodiac, so an auspicious year for me. To mark this, I've recorded my take on a story about the creation of the Zodiac by the August Jade Emperor - with particular attention to the role of the chicken. The mythological tales of this ancient culture are fascinating, and I'll be learning some more in the coming months.

One of our dogs is having a health crisis, the severity of which we will not know till we hear more from the vet. As such dogs have been much on my mind, and the significant role they play in ancient and some more modern religions. Our relationship to dogs has been a tremendously significant one in human evolution, and their role as hunters and helpers may have given many communities the edge they needed to survive in time of hardship and scarcity. Some of the folklore around dogs is ghoulish, like the Japanese stories of the Inu-gami, whilst other tales are far more joyful. This Irish story is really little more than an anecdote about a magical dog, an aside in a larger story accounting for how the radiant god Lugh acquires his hound - in that version called Failinis. Another story, slightly different in context and taking place latter (by which time Lugh has either lost his dog or loaned it one), renames the dog Fermac. This is the version recorded here.

This waffle was initially recorded for the Pagan Federation virtual moot. The theme was self-care (not my forte) and the only thing I could think of for it was this reflection on the recreational and re-creative nature of storytelling.