Celtic elements and some corespondences

Celtic Elements
and correspondences

Gathered, treated and revised by GardenStone
© Copyright GardenStone, 2000.

This is something I gathered and ordered a couple of years ago; while discussing the Elements and how they relate to the Celts, The Irish section is from Domi O'Brien, I do not recall who the Welsh section was from, and it isn't included in the portion of the file I captured, sorry.

Irish

In Irish the realms are Land, Sea, and Sky. The Elements have a correspondence to the body, as shown below:

Elements	Human Body
earth	Flesh
stone	Bone
plant life	hair
sea	blood
sun	skin
moon	soul
stars	senses
cloud	mind
wind	breath

Welsh

The Eight Parts of a Man

There should be eight parts in each man:
the first part of the earth,
and the second of the sea,
and the third of the sun,
the fourth of the wind,
the fifth of the cloud,
the sixth of stone,
the seventh of the Holy Spirit,
the eight of the Light of the World,
called Christ.

Man's flesh is of the earth,
his blood of the sea,
his eyes of the sun,
his breath of the wind,
his mind and his inconstancy of the cloud,
his bones of the stone,
his soul of the Holy Spirit,
his understanding of the Light of the World,
called Christ.

If the greatest part of him is of the earth,
he will be languid and heavy;
if of the sea, he will be wise;
if of the sun, he will be wild and warlike;
if of the wind, he will be volatile and adulterous;
if of the cloud, he will be volatile and wrathful;
if of the stone, he will be hard and niggardly as a thief;
if of the Holy Spirit, he will be amiable and perfect
and godly in his deeds.

The above is taken from a medieval Welsh medical treatise. In it we can see a peculiar blending of both Christianity and the theory of humours, which dominated medicine of the middle ages and Renaissance. There is also another element. The addition of wind, cloud, and stone are not typical of humoural psychology and we may be inclined to chalk these up to a non-Christian or pagan influence.

I have laid this out as poetry, whereas the original text is in prose. The full text can be found in the journal "Etudes Celtiques," volume 8, 1958. The full title of the article is "Hafod 16 (A Medieval Welsh Medical Treatise). It was translated from the Welsh by Ida B. Jones. "Etudes Celtiques" might not be an easy journal to find, but any large (6 million plus) university library might have it. The other alternative is inter-library loan.
The article will also be interesting to anyone looking for a collection of tradition remedies and cures. For example:

To kill worms which arise is a man's stomach or belly so that he cannot retain food or drink without vomiting: take white trefoil and cast it in tepid wine and give it to him. . .to drink.

Back