Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately

Every year, I light the solstice fire with coals from the year before. 

That’s not quite true. I don’t always. Some years I forget to save them. But I always light a fire.

I inherited this tradition from my ancestor, the poet Elsa Gidlow.

That's not quite true either. She’s not a blood ancestor. Elsa taught me this ritual with her poem "Chains of Fires. " I posted it yesterday.

After reading I Come With My Songs, Elsa's autobiography, she became my lifelong model for the life of a lesbian, poet, and friend. I consider her my aunt. That's no lie.

(Her life story is the first autobiography published by a lesbian using her real name. That happened in 1986.)

Maybe Elsa recorded who taught her the tradition of lighting winter solstice fires on last year's coals. I don't know because my copy is in Santa Cruz. But I wonder if the tradition has something to do with her friendship with an Irish immigrant named Ella Young.

I met Ella Young in Elsa's autobiography, but I never bothered get to know her better because the only book of hers I could find was Celtic Wonder Tales and it was too flowery and male-centered for my taste. Celtic Wonder Tales is in the Sacred Text Archive, complete with illustrations by Maud Gonne. Here's an excerpt.

When Lugh was full grown, Mananaun said to him: "It is three times seven years, as mortals count time, since I brought you to Tir-nan-Oge, and in all that time I have never given you a gift. To-day I will give you a gift."

He brought out the Sword of Light and gave it to Lugh, and when Lugh took it in his hand he remembered how he had cried to the hills and rivers of Ireland -" Some day I will come back to you!" And he said to Mananaun:

"I want to go back to Ireland."

"You will not find joyousness there, O Lugh, or the music of harp strings, or feasting. The De Danaans are shorn of their strength. Ogma, their Champion, carries logs to warm Fomorian hearths; Angus wanders like an outcast; and Nuada, the King, has but one dun, where those who had once the lordship of the world meet in secret like hunted folk."

"I have a good sword," said Lugh. "I will go to my kinsfolk."

See what I mean?

Besides her connection to Elsa, I knew Ella was a friend to W. B. Yeats. I assumed she was a lesbian, because Elsa implied she was.

Now I am obsessed with Ella Young. She is my Irish grandmother. No lie.

She wrote an autobiography in 1945, Flowering Dusk: Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately. A perfect title for anyone's life story.

Flowering Dusk is out of print and very expensive, but last week I read a 2005 biography by Rose Murphy who quoted it extensively. I wanted to contact Rose, but she died in November, 2017, the same week I moved to Donegal.

I now know that Ella arrived in America in 1925 to tour the East Coast, recounting Irish folk tales to eager audiences of immigrants, hungry for their culture. She never returned to Ireland, and died in 1956 in her home in Oceano, California, near Pismo.

Pismo! From Protestant Antrim to Bohemian California in one lifetime. What a trip. 

When UC Berkeley hired her to teach Irish Studies, she delivered improvised lectures in flowing robes. She told Irish stories anywhere she was invited. She sent a Carmel PTA meeting to Point Lobos and they scoured it for fairies. I found a brief item in the Santa Cruz Sentinel promoting her appearance at "Sunnyside Bookshop" on Pacific Avenue in 1931.

Ella Young was famous among the artists and weirdos of mid-century Northern California. In the network that nurtured the the LSD-fueled counter-culture decades later, the "mystic" Ella Young thrived in a nurturing community she never would have found in the theocratic Irish Republic. 

Ella Young was born into a middle-class Presbyterian family in Co. Antrim in 1867. Like many protestants of her generation, Ella Young fought to free Ireland from British control. After the revolution was won, she fought on the anti-treaty side of the civil war. Her side lost, her own comrades were executed and imprisoned by the winners. When she was in her late 50s, she found a homeland, not Western Ireland, but the American West.

As I scoured the net for Ella stories, I found an article by Aidan Kelly in Pathos, and read something that astonished me. Beside her stories, Ella Young brought an Irish occult tradition to California.

The Fellowship of the Four Jewels was founded on May 1, 1916, by Ella Young, William Butler Yeats and his beloved Maeve (Maude Gonne), A.E., and others of the spiritual leaders of the movement for Irish freedom, in memory of those who had died in the Easter Sunday uprising only a few weeks before. The leaders had been summarily executed by the British; one of them was Major John McBride, Maude’s husband. ...

I knew some about Ella Young; I had listened to her commentaries on the radical radio station KPFA when I was in high school. Now I learned that when she came to America, she brought the Fellowship of the Four Jewels with her, and here transmuted it into the Fellowship of Shasta, with the same four feasts to represent the Four Jewels of Irish myth: the Spear of Lugh, which ensured victory (Feb. 1); the Stone of Fal, which shrieked under the lawful king (May 1); the Sword of Nuada, from which none could escape (Aug. 1); and the Cauldron of the Dagda, from which none would come away unsatisfied.

Among these papers was a testament written by Gavin Arthur on the Feast of Brighid 1970. It said:

In a night-long conversation I had with Ella Young in her cottage in Oceano where she died a few weeks later, she asked me to carry on this Fellowship. . . She and I and others celebrated all four feasts in the dunes of Oceano, 1931 through 1935, and off and on thereafter until she died, July 23, 1956, in Oceano. Her ashes were scattered in the Lyman Canyon behind the Old Bail Mill between St. Helena and Calistoga, and there I started celebrations of the four Feasts from 1960 on.

 

Jonathan Nightshade comments on Aidan's post:

The modern philosopher and writer on Eastern religions Alan Watts, in his autobiography, "In My Own Way" (1972, Pantheon), in describing his poet friend Elsa Gidlow writes, "She had inherited a charisma from a Celtic white witch and nature mystic named Ella Young, who had lived for many years beside the sand dunes south of Pismo Beach ....." (p282). He thereafter briefly mentions his own meeting with Ella Young. Interesting that he refers to her as a "Celtic white witch."

(link to article)

Then I found:

America produced its own, home-grown, modern Pagan revivals during the early twentieth century. What distinguishes them from those based on Wicca is that, like earlier British and Continental revivals, they failed to create lasting movements. Thus, the quarter days, which have always been celebrated as important feasts in Gaelic areas of Britain and Ireland, were brought to California as the key festivals of an Irish mystical society founded in the early twentieth century. This was the Fellowship of Shasta, imported into America by one member whose followers remained active—although hardly noticed—until the 1960s.

Footnote: Information from Ella Young, relayed to me by Aidan Kelly, June 1993. (Modern Pagan Festivals: A Study in the Nature of Tradition by Ronald Hutton)

Ella Young is the link between Ireland's Celtic Revival and the homegrown nature-based spiritual practices of California's Bay Area. 

Whatever spirituality I seem to practice, Ella Young is responsible for it. 

This Fenian Graves page on Ella is the best summary of her life that I found.

I like this piece by Mara Freeman:

Ella felt most at home in the wild and rugged beauty of the West Coast, where she revived the old Celtic Mystery School at Mount Shasta, the sacred mountain in Northern California. It was called the “Fellowship of Shasta,” and dedicated to the Goddess in her aspect of Brigit, mother of poetry, smithcraft and healing, to whom Ella felt particularly close. In doing so, she became one of the first people in the United States to revive the religion of the Great Goddess. The Fellowship held their gatherings in places of power, which, along with Mount Shasta, included Mount Tamalpais in Marin County and Point Lobos on the Central Coast. In these then pristine and wild places they celebrated the four Fire Festivals of the Celtic year.

Her relationship with the Earth, which she saw as a "great living Being," was practical as well as mystical. When out on a picnic with her friends, she would never touch food until she had poured a libation of wine, giving thanks to "Earth, Air, Fire, Water" and the Great Goddess herself, whom she addressed in Gaelic. The Fellowship of Shasta became involved in environmental activism, working to prevent developers from building on Point Lobos (now a State Park) and also with the Save the Redwoods League which works to preserve the remaining old-growth forests of California. (Ella Young, Mara Freeman)

Irish people like Ella inspired a people with myths and half remembered stories. These stories are necessary to create anything worthwhile out of repression and colonization. But Ireland did not become the nation she dreamed of. And California may be the Visionary State, but it is not what it could have been. 

Stories are not lies. They are what binds us, season after season, family to family.