OMEN DAYS (revisited)
augury, a Celtic 12 days of Christmas and other ways of seeing
Hello dear readers,
This is a revisit of a piece I wrote last year exploring the Omen Days. I’ve added some thoughts and personal insights that I didn’t feel quite confident enough to mention the last time I shared this.
Here it is in its longer version. Heads up for some chat about grief, funerals and a brief mention of suicide.
Every year around Midwinter, wherever I am, I still try and carve out a small crack of sacred time to slip into for myself. Most years, just simply paying attention to the Solstice’s sun stand still and aiming to move slower is all I manage.
I’ve also always had this fantasy that I will make an effort to engage in the Omen Days… but every year I fail to, utterly.
I first came across this temporal landscape, through the work of Mandy Pullen and Jane Embleton.1 Essentially, these are the Twelve Days of Christmas, but viewed through a Celtic, folkloric lens. The premise is that each of the twelve days corresponds with a month of the year: so the 26th is January, the 27th is February and so on. Folks who follow the Omen Days, go searching for an augury from nature each day that provides an omen about the month that day represents.
Sometimes referred to as Twelvetide or Twelftide, these are intercalary days that are ‘…the days left over from reckoning up the solar year and, in calendars throughout the world and at different times, they are special because they are considered to be ‘the days out of time.’2
Writer and practitioner of Celtic Shamanism, Caitlin Matthews, quoted above claims that the practice has its roots in Celtic traditions of Wales, Scotland and Brittany. Other than her ancient blog post I can find very little factual writing about the origins of this tradition, but I love the sense of possibility these days might offer us, with their invitation to engage in the in-betweenness of this time.
These threshold days that fold the end of the year into the beginning of the next have long been observed by many traditions across the World. Rauhnächte, is an old German and Austrian practice held over a similar time-frame. Roughly translating to ‘rough nights’ or ‘smoke nights’, I read how these liminal days were ripe for interference from evil spirits, the devil and other lost souls. Villagers would dress up in menacing costumes to scare away the trouble-makers, not unlike an extended Halloween. In other sources, each night of this liminal time is thought to offer a powerful time for wish making, with 13 wishes in total.
Augury is thought to have roots in Greco-Roman traditions, originally as a practice of observing birds for omens. If you were to look for one now you might go for a walk with the intention of seeing or sensing something. This might be an occurrence out of the ordinary: a chance encounter with a fox on the cycle path, an unusual pattern in the bark of a birch or the unexpected scent of cinnamon as you cross the path on your way home.
Caitlin Matthews recommends going out, finding a spot to stand in and then spinning around. When you stop spinning, the first thing your eyes land upon is the augury for that day. She also suggests taking out a small frame with you, with which to capture the scene. (I think you can trust your other senses too, the augury might not arrive as an image.) The key is consistency; enacting the same ritualised search each day and then using your own intuition and imagination to interpret that sign.
And I think anything can be an augury. For city dwellers, sometimes finding one in ‘nature’ might feel challenging so I urge you to consider that whilst a rock or bird might have a message for you, so too might a piece of gum cemented to the pavement! I really try not to be a purist about this or tie myself in false binaries of natural versus unnatural. The world is a wild entanglement of things and that gum once came from the earth too, as does everything else.
It’s my daughter’s birthday on New Year’s Eve, and so searching for an augury on that day often slips down the list of priorities. Each year, as the celebrations and demands of the season churn around me, I lose the thread of the practice and basically give up. But even in the absence of completing the full succession of the days, the premise of lingers in my mind, drawing me to reflect on other thresholds and liminal spaces.
One of the most interesting liminal times I’ve encountered are the days just before someone dies (or at the moment they die) and their funeral.
I’ve never felt brave enough to write about this before - us celebrants tend to keep our own beliefs or experiences to ourselves, but the more people I work with, the more I see this time as its own sacred space.
This threshold between life as we know it ending and a new life without our person in it beginning is a seriously tender transition. Practically speaking, in the UK, the average time for this temporal zone is between one and two weeks, but it’s hugely dependent on the circumstances and I’ve worked with families where it’s been 3 weeks or more before the ceremony. It also depends on the religious background or beliefs of the person who died, as Muslim and Jewish folk in particular are required to be buried as quickly as possible.3
People I work with sometimes tell me of their wild dreams or a chance encounter with a more-than-human friend that felt charged with something different to ordinary life during these in-between days. Folks will sometimes coyly say that it felt like it was a message from their person.
Earlier this year, I worked with someone whose mother had died after navigating many years of cancer. As we started dreaming up a plan for the ceremony, we began to talk about whether her mum had ever mentioned any beliefs about death or what happens after life. She explained to me that she’d been rigorously practical and was never interested in talking about that stuff, but then revealed a little later that as death had drawn closer her mum had started joking about how she’d like to come back as a robin.
The next day we met again to explore a potential venue for the ceremony and who was waiting for us at the entrance gate? You guessed it: a tiny robin, all plump and twitchy-feathered. It followed us up the path towards the barn where we were considering taking the ceremony.
I intentionally didn’t point out this little creature’s appearance - I didn’t want to impose my interpretation of this event - but waited to see if my companion would say anything. When we walked back to the entrance she joked with me, ‘Did you spot it too? Maybe that robin was mum?!’
And perhaps that was just a lovely coincidence, but at the actual ceremony a week later a robin flew into the barn and sat on the table we’d shaped into a makeshift altar just as I was speaking the final words of the ceremony.
When my brother died, and again eighteen months later when my grandfather died, the days between learning of their death and the finality of the funeral were days where the Otherworlds seem to nudge closer. Those days were filled with synchronicity and high weirdness. Nothing as definite as my dead ones making contact, but more a sense of an opening being temporarily forged that enabled me to see past the mundane and into the sacred. Lights were brighter, colours enhanced, dreams vivid and prophetic, the more-than-human world made poignant appearances at perfect moments.
Skeptics will write these occurrences off as the by-products of shock and grief, but the animists and weirdos4 amongst us will likely interpret them with a different lens. For some these moments simply bring comfort; a tiny nod of possibility that their person is still with them. For others, they’re less certain about what these encounters mean, but no less enchanted by the strangeness and mystery of it all.
I also think I received an augury that warned of my brother’s death.
I was travelling around Devon and Cornwall with my partner and my daughter, who was 18 months old at the time. Needing a break from the hubbub of looking after a rowdy toddler, I’d slipped away to get some much needed quiet. I idled around some woods that were close to where we’d parked for the night. During this short excursion I sat down under an oak and leant against its trunk. I closed my eyes and let myself be held by the tree for a few moments and when I opened them a minute or two later, my gaze immediately fixed on this fist sized lump of granite about a metre in front of me. I felt like it was winking at me. I had to go pick it up and more carefully examine it.
When I let the rock rest in my palm, I was fascinated by how skull-like it seemed. Something about its cratered surface suggested socket holes; its shape from a certain angle gave the impression of a bony jawline.
I slung it in my bag and took it back to our camp.
‘I’ve found a skull stone!’ I proclaimed. My partner gave it a quick glance and agreed that it was certainly skull-like in shape. I wasn’t looking for an augury, it just seemed like a cool stone. With no further reverence bestowed upon it, it was chucked in the back of our truck to rattle around in the back whilst we drove to our next destination.
Two days later, I learnt that my brother had died by suicide.
Now maybe it was just a big ol’ coincidence. I’ll never know. And maybe some will think me mad to believe that this chunk of stone roughly shaped like a skull was an omen of an impending death. But ultimately, whatever anyone thinks, that piece of granite became a huge source of comfort to me. At a time when it felt like the tectonic plates of my life had immeasurably shifted, imagining that something - nature, some ineffable otherworldliness, who knows? - was communicating with me was the dose of magic I needed to navigate that time. To be woven into that small mystery allowed me to feel much less alone.
I took that rock everywhere I went for the first year of his death. And it sits by my bedside to this day.
I notice how I’m sometimes embarrassed in certain company to admit that I might believe in something otherworldly. As adults we’re meant to stop entertaining such things. But whether sought intentionally through practices like the Omen Days or stumbled upon unexpectedly in grief, I decided long ago to not try to understand these events with a logical mind, but to accept them as the strange, inexplicable, beautiful things that they are. To let them coax me out of myself and into a relationship with the world as a vibrant, lively and mysterious companion and to remind myself of the magic of simply paying attention.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether we believe they’re signs or omens, whether we attribute them to chance, spirits, a message from a beloved or something else entirely. Maybe what matters is the act of noticing, for making room for mystery, of seeing the world as alive and filled with possibility and meaning.
Although I seriously doubt I will manage the Omen Days this year, when the churn of this season pulls so many of us into the whirl of consumerism and endless capitalist demands, the quiet practice of listening for the earth’s signs feels especially radical to me. While we’re encouraged to rush and consume, to fill every silence with noise and tinsel5, these old ways of seeing also invite us to slow down and to resist the frenzy.
To embrace these experiences is a quiet act of reverence and resistance. They invite us to shift from a mindset of extraction and consumption to one of reciprocity and kinship. And in doing so, we rekindle a sense of awe and wonder—skills we so desperately need in these times.
When many of our hearts are raw with grief and sorrow at the state of the world, I can’t help but feel that we need these old ways of seeing more than ever. Modernity has trained us to see the earth as inert, a collection of resources for our use. To take, take, take. But when we expand our lenses and engage with the world as vibrant and responsive, we rediscover our interdependence with it. In noticing, we remember: no matter what ails us, we belong here too.
Omen Days or none, here’s hoping these liminal days are filled with connection, wonder and joy for you all.
With love, Lottie X
P.S. My comments are always open for any tales of the strange or the mysterious; the ominous or the prophetic that you’ve encountered too.
Two most excellent stewards of the sacred. Jane doesn’t have a website, but Mandy’s can be found here.
https://caitlin-matthews.blogspot.com/search?q=omen+days
My understanding is that 24 hours to three days is considered good practice, but families are also advised these days to anticipate possible delays.
Of course, I count myself in both of these camps.
Older readers here will know that I’ve really got it in for tinsel ;) I bloody hate the stuff.