#68 / The Puck Fair and marriage to the land

A few weeks back I was talking about the Puck Fair in Killorglin,
Co Kerry, in the southwest of Ireland. For those of you not
familiar with the fair, essentially is a Lughnasadh adjacent
festival where a wild billy goat is caught on the mountainside
the goat is brought back to the town, and the Queen of Puck,
traditionally a schoolgirl from one of the local primary schools
crowns him King Puck. They are then paraded around the town
looking down on their subjects from a kind of mobile tower that
looks a lot like a medieval siege tower without the protective
cladding to the delight of a rapturous crowd. It reads a bit like
the start of a folk horror screenplay, doesn’t it? And to be
fair, it should because there is some pretty heavy pagan
fertility symbolism laced through this event. There are some
adult themes in the show as we also get into overlordship or
Kingship depended upon male claimant making love to the
territorial goddess and some of the wilder accounts of Kingship
rites as laid out by Giraldus of Wales, that involve the
consumption of the marriage to the land in its most literal
sense. .



Show Notes: 


Puck
https://puckfair.ie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlq9z1hnH7I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zCRh78StwY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqD8MZHC5Lw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhmLF0r2nEw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Murray

Anu
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/230841.Mythic_Ireland
https://exemplore.com/paganism/The-Magic-of-The-Morrigan-Alluring-Anu

https://thenewpagan.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/danu-great-mother/


Geraldus of Wales
https://twitter.com/erik_kaars/status/1243884746280747008?s=20

http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/topography_ireland.pdf


Support the show:
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/spiritbox
TWITTER - https://twitter.com/spiritbox3
SUPPORT - https://www.patreon.com/spiritbox
PODCAST - https://anchor.fm/spirit-box
Music by Obliqka