Balor and The Very Hot Solstice of 2017

I love the Irish myth of Lugh’s slingshot victory over Balor of the Evil Eye, at the (second) battle of the gods at Moytura. I once told their story with home-made puppets as part of an OBOD grove ceremony. It was as solemn and mythically accurate an occasion as you can imagine from the picture below.

This myth is, of course, more properly associated with Lúnasa, the August festival – but this year I’m claiming its relevance for this summer solstice (which has no myths associated with it, as it wasn’t celebrated by the Irish within folk memory).

Characters, left to right: Ethniu, imprisoned in a tower (interpretation apparently taken a bit from Rapunzel); Cian; Balor of the Evil Eye (interpretive influence obvious); Lugh Lámfada.

There are many theories about who Balor in the Irish myths might have represented*. One is that he was the blazing summer sun that destroyed the crops, who needed to be slain, perhaps with a sacrifice, so that the harvest could happen. This year, that mythic concept resonates rather well with me — and probably with a lot of the people in Britain, suffering a run of hot weather of the kind that we are never prepared for. (We live in houses designed to hold the heat, most of which were built in the Little Ice Age, and we have no air conditioning.)

And, looking at it less literally, that Eye of Evil that threatens our land could stand for a lot of things, in UK society, in this post-Brexit post-election summer of chaos…! But then, in my theology, Chaos is the pool that feeds the Xartus, the tree of Justice and the pattern of the universe.

Here’s to you, Lugh Samildánach, victor over the blazing Eye that threatens our land.  May chaos never destroy the order of the universe. May the order of society never become so hard and unyielding that chaos cannot rebuild it.

You can read Lugh’s story here.

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*As usual, I am more focused on mythic truth than ‘historical accuracy’ of myths (given that even the concepts of ‘historical’ and ‘accuracy’ are really socially constructed and unstable things). AKA, take my UPG at your own risk! (Especially when it comes to the Xartus, which is based on one person’s interpretation of one speculative idea and is almost pure mythic truth and UPG.) I haven’t had a chance to find sources for this interpretation of the myth of Balor this year – I’m so busy with my PhD that I hardly have time to blog at all at the moment – but I’ll edit with references when I get a chance. In the meantime, it’s still the interpretation that Wikipedia references. I’m told that this interpretation is quite dated. But again – mythic truth! :)