Beannachtaí na Cónocht: Blessings from the In-Between
The Quiet Rebellion of Remembering the Old Ways in a World That Forgot
As the spring equinox arrives, this is a call to remember the sacred rhythms of the land, reclaim ancestral time, and honour the Lurikeen—not as caricatures, but as keepers of balance, wit, and resistance.
Introduction
Every March, the world turns green—not for the turning of the seasons, but for the spectacle of Lá Fhéile Pádraig (the feast of Saint Pádraig). Streets fill with parades, pubs overflow with drunken revellers, and shop windows are plastered with images of grinning leprechauns clutching pots of gold. Amidst the clamour and consumption, few stop to question what was displaced, what was lost beneath the shamrocks and slogans. Just days later, the earrach cónocht (spring equinox) arrives quietly, largely unnoticed. The balance of light and dark, once marked with reverence by our ancestors, now passes without ceremony in a world out of step with the land and its rhythms.
What if, instead of celebrating the colonial conquest of Ireland’s indigenous beliefs, we turned our attention to the talamh (land), to the scéalta (stories) that once guided our people through the cycles of life, death, and renewal? What if we remembered that Lá Fhéile Pádraig is not just a national holiday, but a symbol of spiritual erasure, where ancient cosmologies were replaced with colonising saints and sacred beings were reduced to caricatures for profit?
For me, this question has always lingered beneath the surface. Long before I came out, long before I had the language for my queerness or my divergence, I claimed the name Lurikeen as my own in the early days of online spaces. It was more than a screen name—it was a talisman, a connection to something older and wilder, a world I sensed but could not yet name. The Lurikeen, far from the commodified leprechaun of English lore, were keepers of wit, guardians of the sidhe (the fae realm), and dwellers in liminal spaces. They became a mirror for my own liminality, a quiet resistance to a world that sought to tame and define me. In remembering them, I began to remember myself—and the stories that colonisation tried, but failed, to extinguish.
The Sacred Calendar of the Ancestors
Long before saints were imposed upon the people of Éire, time was not marked by church bells or papal calendars, but by the rhythm of the earth itself. The Gaeil ársa (ancient Gaels) lived in deep relationship with the land and sky, attuned to the subtle shifts in light, season, and cycle. Their féilire naofa (sacred calendar) was shaped by the grianstad (solstices), cónocht (equinoxes), and ceathrú laethanta (cross-quarter days)—points in the year that signalled profound transitions, both in the natural world and within the human soul.
The great festivals of Imbolc, Beltaine, Lughnasadh, and Samhain wove the people into the fabric of the seasons, each one marking a threshold: the first stirring of life in the womb of the earth, the lighting of summer’s fires, the gathering of harvest, and the descent into the dreamtime of winter. These festivals were not simply occasions for revelry or ritual—they were acts of co-existence, acknowledgements that humankind is but one part of a greater whole, and that to live well was to live in harmony with the land and the cosmos.
The cónocht an earraigh (spring equinox) held its own sacred place in this turning wheel. One of the most profound expressions of this can still be witnessed at Slieve na Calliagh (Loughcrew Cairns) in Contae na Mí (County Meath), where the sun’s rays at dawn on the equinox travel the length of the passage into Carn T, striking the ancient clocha greanta (carved stones) with precision and purpose. Spirals, solar discs, and lozenge patterns catch the light—marking not only the balance of light and dark, but a communion between stone, sun, and soul. This is not coincidence, nor mere function—it is cosmology made manifest, a living testament to the intelligence and reverence of the ancestors who aligned stone with star to honour this moment of cothromaíocht (balance) and athbheochan (renewal).
For the ancient Gaels, time was not linear, nor was it something to be ruled over. It was cyclical, sacred, and bound to place. The land was a teaghlach naofa (sacred kin), and the turning of the seasons offered a rhythm of belonging, not domination. The spring equinox was a call to notice, to prepare, and to honour the beatha nua (new life) awakening in the soil, the rivers, and the hearts of the people. It was a time to walk with the land, not to conquer it.
Contrast this with the calendar of saints, imposed from outside, with dates divorced from place and season, carrying with them not reverence, but control. The replacing of sacred festivals with saintly feasts was not just a change of names; it was an attempt to sever the people from the land, to replace relationship with authority, and to overwrite ancestral knowing with dogma. The cónocht, once a moment of cosmic balance, faded from public memory—whilst the feast of Saint Pádraig, himself a symbol of religious conquest, rose in its place.
Yet the stones remain. The sun still rises. And the old ways, though buried, are not gone. To remember the sacred calendar of our ancestors is to step back into rhythm, to reclaim time as something rooted and relational, and to honour that we are part of a living, breathing world that speaks—not through sermons, but through light, soil, and the turning wheel of the year.
The Saint and the Snake: Colonial Rewriting of Sacred Time
Saint Pádraig is often hailed as the bringer of light to a so-called “pagan” land, his feast day celebrated with fervour as a symbol of Irish pride. Yet beneath the green-clad parades and pints lies a deeper, darker truth: Pádraig’s legacy is not one of liberation, but of conquest. The well-worn tale of him banishing the snakes from Ireland is widely understood by scholars and keepers of lore alike as a metaphor for the suppression of indigenous beliefs and deities—the druí (druids), the déithe na hÉireann (gods of Ireland), and the sacred cosmology of the Gaels. There were no literal snakes, but there was a rich spiritual tradition, deeply rooted in the land, that was cast out and demonised in favour of a foreign doctrine.
With the arrival of Christian missionaries, the rhythm of life that had been governed by sun, season, and soil was deliberately overwritten. Sacred festivals timed to agricultural cycles and cosmic alignments were rebranded as saints’ days, often placed at similar times of year to ease the transition—and ultimately, to obliterate memory. The beings of the otherworld—the aes sídhe (people of the mounds), the fae, the spirits of place and season—were recast as devils, demons, or silly superstitions, their names warped, their stories twisted. What was once a rich tapestry of belief and balance became a flattened tale of sin and salvation, obedience and hierarchy. Where once there was reverence, there was now ridicule.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the caricature of the leprechaun, a figure born of linguistic distortion and colonial mockery. The Lurikeen, small but mighty fae, known for their cleverness, swiftness, and deep ties to the sidhe, were guardians of hidden knowledge, tricksters in service of balance and justice, and figures of liminality and resistance. But in the hands of English storytellers and colonial chroniclers, Lurikeen became leprechaun—the name mangled through a confusion with the Irish word “leath bhrógan” (shoemaker or cobbler). This misunderstanding, whether deliberate or careless, reduced the Lurikeen to mere cobblers, stripped of their depth and dignity, and transformed into greedy hoarders of gold, peddled as figures of ridicule and consumption.
This was no accident. It was part of a larger effort to strip the fae of their reverence, to divorce the people from their ancestral stories, and to replace living beings of lore with mascots for markets and merriment. Through this act of linguistic violence, the Lurikeen were colonised in name and meaning—their role as keepers of balance erased, their existence commodified, and their memory twisted to serve a colonial imagination that saw profit in parody.
But the truth remains, for those who remember. The Saint did not banish the snakes—he banished the gods, the fae, the lorekeepers, and in their place, imposed silence. Yet silence does not mean death. Beneath the noise of parades and plastic, the old songs still hum, and the Lurikeen still watch, still walk, still whisper—for those willing to listen beyond the saints’ bells, and back into the heart of the land.
The Lurikeen: Memory, Resistance, and Liminal Power
To speak of the Lurikeen is to step into the in-between—between worlds, times, and ways of being. These are not creatures of whimsy or mischief alone; they are beings of balance, deeply aligned with the sidhe (fae realm), the turning of the seasons, and the sacred pulse of the land. Small in stature but vast in cunning, the Lurikeen exist on the edges of perception, resisting containment or categorisation, moving with ease between the seen and unseen, the material and the magical. In many ways, they are guardians of thresholds, and threshold beings themselves—never quite here, never quite there, and all the more powerful for it.
Their presence is not bound by modern borders or the artificial lines of colonisers. The Gaeil (Gaels) of Ireland and the Gàidheil of the West Highlands are of one people, separated only by water and the passage of time, not by spirit or kinship. Long before the kingdoms rose and fell, long before the crowns of foreign powers sought to carve up the land, there were the Gaels and the many kinships, bound by language, lore, and lifeways. The Lurikeen walked among all of them, under different names perhaps, but always present, always whispering from the shadowed hollows and sunlit glens, carrying the wisdom of the old ways to those willing to hear.
As a child, I heard their echoes in the stories told by my grandmother, who shared tales of clever folk, small but mighty, who outwitted giants and kings alike, not through strength, but through wit, knowing, and a refusal to yield. There was something in them that called to me, long before I had words for difference or queerness, long before I dared name myself outside the narrow boxes of the world around me. When the digital realm first opened to me in the 1990s, I claimed Lurikeen as my name—not consciously, not as a declaration, but as a felt sense of belonging, a thread back to something older and wilder, something that held space for who I was becoming.
Only later did I come to understand that this choice was an act of survival and remembrance, a way to cloak myself in fae glamour, to move between worlds unnoticed, yet rooted in truth. As I began to understand my queerness and neurodivergence, I saw myself more clearly in the Lurikeen’s refusal to be pinned down or made palatable. They do not conform; they revel in liminality, in being both and neither, in occupying spaces where power tries to erase complexity. They thrive in the in-between, just as I have learned to do.
In this way, the Lurikeen are more than folklore—they are a living link to ancestral ways, to the cosmologies that valued balance, wit, and relational power over dominance or control. They hold space for those of us who walk between worlds, who carry identities that defy the binaries of the modern world, and who seek not to be tamed, but to belong on our own terms. In remembering them, we remember ourselves—not as the world demands us to be, but as we are, in all our wild, liminal beauty.
The Lurikeen live on in every act of resistance, in every reclaiming of identity, and in every quiet step back toward the land, the seasons, and the stories that were nearly lost, but not forgotten.
Rediscovering the Equinox: A Call to Remember
As the cónocht an earraigh (spring equinox) approaches, the land begins to stir with new life. It is a time of balance—when light and dark are equal, and the wheel of the year turns once more towards growth and renewal. For our ancestors, this was not simply a moment on a calendar; it was a sacred pause, an invitation to notice the harmony of the world, and to step in rhythm with it. The equinox was a time of alignment—within the land, within the self, and between the seen and unseen realms.
Yet today, this quiet turning is all but drowned beneath the clamour of modern Saint Pádraig’s Day, a spectacle that has been twisted beyond recognition. To me, it resembles a minstrel show—a degrading parody, crafted not to honour the people of the land, but to mock them, commodify them, and sell them back their own distorted reflection. It is a capitalist excuse for binge and excess, hollowed out of meaning, with leering mascots and cheap green trinkets, all under the banner of “celebration.” But what is being celebrated? Not the land, not the seasons, not the resilience of the Gaels, but rather their conquest, their silencing, and their lore twisted for profit.
The equinox, by contrast, asks nothing of us but presence. It does not demand spectacle or consumption. It asks only that we notice the balance, that we feel the quickening of the earth beneath our feet, and that we remember our place in the great turning. It is a chance to step away from the noise and into the stillness, to listen to the land and the wind, to honour the ancestors who once stood beneath the same sky and watched the same sun rise through sacred stones.
There is power in rediscovering the equinox, in reclaiming sacred time from the grip of commodification. One need not do much—perhaps rise with the sun and feel its light on your face, or walk in silence and greet the land as kin. Perhaps share a story, one of your own or one passed down, or offer a quiet word to the fae, who still walk beside us, unseen but not absent. Perhaps sit in stillness and simply remember what was lost—but not gone.
In these small acts, we step out of the colonial dream and back into relationship—with time, with place, with self. The cónocht offers us a doorway—a return to balance, a reminder of belonging, and an invitation to honour the sacred in the everyday. The land remembers, even if we have forgotten. And the fae remember too. All we need to do is listen.
Final thoughts …
To remember is no small thing. In a world bent on forgetting—on overwriting, commodifying, and distorting—to remember the old ways is a quiet rebellion, an act of defiance and belonging. To turn from the noise of commodified holidays and stand instead with the land, the seasons, and the stories of our ancestors, is to reclaim time itself—to take back identity, spirit, and rhythm from the systems that sought to erase them. We are not meant to live as strangers on our own land, disconnected from its pulse, its memory, its sacred turning.
The Lurikeen live on—not in cereal boxes, plastic trinkets, or tourist shop windows, but in those of us who refuse to forget, who carry their wit, their resistance, and their deep ties to the in-between. They walk with the dreamers, the misfits, the queer, the neurodivergent, the ones who cannot be tamed or defined, the ones who belong to the land and the sea, to the wind and the stone, to kinship older than kingdoms.
As the cónocht an earraigh (spring equinox) arrives, let this be a time not of spectacle, but of reconnection. Let us stand in balance, as light and dark do, and feel the stirring of life within and around us. Let us remember the stories not yet lost, the songs carried on the wind, the footsteps of the fae in the shadowed glens and sunlit hollows. Let us walk again with the Lurikeen, not as relics, but as companions, as guides, as kin.
Beannachtaí na cónocht ort—blessings of the equinox upon you.
May you find balance in this turning,
Belonging in the in-between,
And wisdom in the remembering.
May the Lurikeen walk beside you, swift and clever,
And may the land welcome you home.