Something of an irony to be posting an entry with this title near sunset, but...

Through a variety of causes that had no relation at all to each other, I've spent the past couple of hours reading about Stonehenge and Newgrange and other such things and decided that the subject is intensely interesting and will require much further investigation of it. It also strengthened my desire to learn some variety of Gaelic, because its phonetics are even worse than French and thereby highly fascinating.

Anyway, about those causes. One, it being Easter – named after the germanic deity Eostre/Ostara, goddess of the dawn (compare to Eos), and probably on the date of some feast or other in her honor. I've also been listening to a lot of Celtic Woman around now, so Easter and Ireland are for the moment linked in my mind. Two, I discovered their song Newgrange this morning, while listening to the CD A New Journey (though it was first performed by Clannad), which is this beautifully etherial and mysterious song (and Orla has the perfect voice for it). So naturally that got me thinking and pondering and musing – and researching the subject of Newgrange itself. Thirdly, I finished reading Mairelon the Magician, and in it there's this cult called the Sons of the New Dawn that mainly goes around annoying people and complicating things; they're these odd sort of inept neo-druids, so you can see how that relates to other ancient Celtic ritualistic things.

So all that got me into ideas about mythological interweavings and rituals and obscure places as I usually do, which naturally had to draw in various characters of mine and spawned several plot ideas, one of which involved the underworld and entrances thereto thanks to a single reference to such in one article I read. I'll have to write something about it at some point now – people sneaking into Stonehenge at night to perform rituals, or perhaps magically causing transportation failures so they could have the sunrise on the summer solstice to themselves...

And semi-relatedly, there's also the fact that the full moon, vernal equinox, and Easter happened so close together this year, and my birthday was right in the middle of all of it. There has to be some magical potential to ponder in that. (Reading through the Witches' Datebook is quite inspiring in this respect.)

And that was long and rambling and probably didn't make much sense to you, but that was how I spent my Easter. I also built the Storm Lasher, which is an excellent set (yellow Mantax claws!), and at brunch I learned how to play tunes on crystal glasses, which was fun...

Oh, and I also posted Hahli, if you'd be so kind as to look at her...

~ ToM