Salmon Wisdom Healing Project

In the Western world we have largely lost our connection to the feminine as divine. This imbalance enables governments to turn a blind eye to the destruction of the planet. The same can be said regarding our bodies. The environmental crisis is not a crisis of the environment; it is a human self-esteem problem. We don’t truly value ourselves, our bodies, each other, all of life, and because our human bodies are extensions of the body of the earth, we take our low self-esteem, our self-hate, and create discord in the very thing that sustains us. To truly remember the preciousness of life, the warrior (the masculine qualities within both men and women) must surrender to the Goddess (the feminine energies within men, women, and the land).

Early Ireland was a matrifocal society.  Women had pwer over their own bodies, over birthing, the skills of medicine and midwifery, smithing, dyeing, and weaving.  Life was centered around the mother or the mother’s family.  The paternity of a child was often not known, nor did it matter, because every child belonged to his or her mother’s family.

To the indigenous Celts, the divine feminine is a wisdom bestowing goddess.  The great Irish war hero Cuchulain learns both fighting techniques and the inner wisdom of a warrior-in-balance from Scathach, a goddess on the Isle of Skye.  A number of poet-seers in the Irish and Scottish traditions experienced and related to the goddess Brighid as the patron of poetry and fire.  She acted as a muse for those poets who endured sensory deprivation, often seeking their quickening verses alone in the darkness of caves.

In Irish myth nine hazel trees of wisdom surround the sacred well of knowledge. The nine hazel trees are of wisdom, inspiration, and poetry. The salmon living in the well would eat the hazel nuts and it would make them wise, and it was said that any person who ate the Salmon of Wisdom would know all the wisdom and poetry, and gain the gift of prophecy. They would be able to remember their future.

In the Irish tale of Fionn macCumhaill (Finn MacCool) a boy named Finn went to learn poetry from the bard Finneces (White Wisdom) who had been seeking the Salmon of Wisdom for seven years. Finneces caught the salmon and gave it to Finn to cook, telling him to not eat any of it. Finn accidently burned his thumb while cooking the salmon, and immediately sucked his thumb, thus he was the one to gain the wisdom of the salmon and gained the gift of prophecy. From that day on, anytime Finn sucked his thumb he could see the future.

By remembering the dreams and stories of our ancestors, we too, like Finn MacCool, can remember our ancestor’s future, and reclaim a more balanced, holistic, and ecologically sustainable world.