The Book of the Cailleach Stories of the Wise Woman Healer [Paperback]

This powerful analysis of the wise women healer from the oral traditions of Ireland???s rural communities is unique in its depth and perspective. Stories, told and retold, embedded in the texture of culture and community, collected and studied for many decades, are here translated and made available to the general reader for the first time. The figure of the wise woman, the hag, the Cailleach, or the Red Woman are part of an oral tradition which has its roots in pre-Christian Ireland. In the hands of Gear??id ?? Crualaich, these figures are subtly explored to reveal how they offered a complex understanding of the world, of human psychology and its predicaments: the thematic structure of the book brings to the fore universal themes such as death, marriage, childbirth, and healing, and invites the reader to see the contemporary relevance of the stories for themselves. This is a breathtaking book. It returns to Irish folk material the emotional depth and imaginative meaning which it always contained in its natural context but of which it has often been stripped by the more utilitarian and commonplace interpretations long in fashion. It reminds me once again why I am charmed and enchanted by this material, and more than that, why I regularly find in it answers to the deep-seated obsessions of my own. A real gem of a book, containing an exemplary methodology showing how the Irish folk tradition can be interrogated to find answers which are vitally important to our age and times. ???The unearthing of a priceless spirit from forgotten, buried, misunderstood storytelling is like discovering Knowth or Newgrange and opening the doors to those otherworlds. Gear??id ?? Crualaoich???s work on the wise-woman healer, the cailleach, is of immense importance, for we need access to the secrets of healing and orientation in life known well in the past but now neglected. Without that secret knowledge we are left with mere rationalism and secularism, which are inadequate for dealing witl“