Cover art by Annibale Carracci
There are those who choose medicine, and there are those medicine chooses. In the folk imagination of Ireland, England, parts of Europe, and across the Atlantic into the Americas, a particular kind of healer does not learn his craft from books or masters. He arrives into it the way a river arrives at the sea, by a combination of origin and inevitability. He is the seventh son of a seventh son, and the tradition that surrounds him is one of the oldest, most geographically distributed, and most persistently believed strands in the history of folk medicine. This is a story about birth order as destiny. About the number seven as a key that fits a lock in the fabric of the world and about real people, men who found themselves, by virtue of how they entered the world, pressed into service as healers by communities that needed them…
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Isla Skye / The Druid's Cauldron Historical Society
We are a registered non-profit, The Druid’s Cauldron Inc. 501(c)(3) The Druid’s Cauldron is an independent journal established in 2016, dedicated to the preservation and exploration of the druids, filid/poets, culture, native wisdom, and the living traditions of the isles. We exist to recover folklore, herbalism, spiritual philosophy, and ecological knowledge embedded in the roots of the early Irish Gaelic and broader Celtic world.
Through deep research into traditional folklore, herbalism and mythology as well as personal artistic endeavors, we seek to cultivate a deeper relationship with the land, the seasons, and to one another. We are committed to serious inquiry and evidence-based information, or it is alluded that it’s personal philosophy and labeled as such. The Druid’s Cauldron is a space for the curious, the contemplative, and those who feel called to remember older ways of being in right relationship with the land and each other.
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