Our homes were round once – a sacred circle. 

Imagine. A home with no corners. 

A roundhouse. 

Folk say the Romans made houses rectangles and introduced the cross-cutting corners of bureaucracy. 

The ideal Roman city was a regular grid of streets dividing square building plots or insulae. From here, the Insulae became a public marketplace. The Basilica was located on one side, and on the other, the Council Chamber and Civic Offices.

You can’t provide hierarchical order without squares. There’s equality and the ‘chaos’ of equity in circles. 

The roundhouse, the meeting place of communities.

There were very few large communal halls in our round towns, though you could argue the likes of stone circles and the Bile tree in the centre of things provided this function. In circles of stones and circles of trees, we shared our lives.

In round homes, we cooked on a central fire. O’er this fire, we entertained, crafted, repaired, slept, sheltered livestock, and told stories in the dark.

There is no centre without an edge.  

A cauldron atop the fire. Nourishing kin with food, warmth, stories, and myths once told by our ancestors, from their grandparents, now spoken by us. A cauldron holds symbols of relationship and the nourishment of connection. 

The cauldron is another sacred circle. 

These circular spaces were never just buildings, as we understand it today. 

The doorway faced sunrise.

We cooked in the southeast. We worked in the southwest. And we slept along the northern side. 

When houses were circles were we living in a cosmic dance? From sunrise to sunset. From birth to death. A reel. A sunwise deiseal turn. The direction of blessing. Deiseal air gach ni – the sunward course with everything.

In our circular houses the south was reserved for living and the north for sleeping, the south for food preparation the north for storage, offerings left opposite sunrise in the west. 

Life and death spiral constantly in this sacred circle dance. 

Each year, each day, each Moon.

West. Oceanic. Lir. Unknown. Act of sun drowning.  Illuminating the house of Donn. Dark sun death of the otherworld.

There seems to be poetry in our homes of a mythic kind. 

Can you dance a round dance in a square home? 

Yes, but I think it begins with the spirit of place. 

We deserve a peaceful home. 

Peace comes from exchange. 

Once we became a settled people, we didn’t move house often, maybe when someone died or got married. Our homes were a long-time generational deal – well until we were forced to move in situations like clearances and war. Now, it seems our lives are characterised by movement – of the diaspora, of the refugees, of the always-trying-to-do-better, upwardly mobile they call it – what does that even mean and what is at the top?

To build homes, we sought otherworldy guidance, watched the flight of birds, entrusted the waves to wash ashore our tutelar statue, shot an arrow or threw an axe as far as we could. 

Yearning to be guided to peace? Follow your omens.

Sacred Circles and Otherworldly Borders

Then, of course, we need to let the good neighbours know what we plan to do. We ask permission. We let them know where we would like boundaries to be. We make sure we aren’t interfering with something we shouldn’t. 

There. Not there.

Where you dwell. Where I will dwell. 

When a border is created, a boundary occurs. A liminal space is born. 

Here, we find the boundary stones and markers. Here is the sunwise turn of our roundhouse days.  Folk would stack stones marking the property boundary, walking the bounds with lit torches – sunwise – deiseal – at dusk. Firebrands 7 feet high in the air, stones left in situ overnight. Asking and imploring, “Can we settle here?” – “Do you see our fiery circle?”

If the stones still stood at daybreak, it was a sign you could build your home. If a snake was found, even better. The serpentine is an old symbol of the spirit of the land, echoed in many stories by dragons, wyrms and white snakes in our oral history. 

By marking the boundaries like this we set up the bonds of the agreement to cohabit. 

Our homes are built on a promise to the land. Think about that. 

It’s beautiful and meaningfully poetic. Far removed from our experience today where the promise is to a bank and a money lender. 

This promise, a folk pact with spirits who cohabit with you, is a foundational part of Scottish tradition and belief. It’s about re-establishing your contract of cohabitation with the spirits of home, hearth and the community you live in. This is a two-way bargain. It doesn’t come with interest payments and APR 

It’s the bargain we struck with the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Aos-Síthe re-enacted again in our common ways. Between the people and the land, not mediated by an elite priesthood. 

We are in trust and good faith. We are hospitable. 

Sometimes these agreements were signed off with a sacrifice. There are different ideas about this. 

The idea of foundation sacrifice is an old one. We often hear tales of foundation sacrifices (the young child built into Tower Bridge in London or dead cats found in walls). Some argue this is vital to allow the building to be founded. Others view sacrifice as the due spirit price for changing land from wild to tame. Other schools of thought suggest this sacrifice becomes the guardian of your home. 

Folk talk of the first living thing to cross the threshold of a new house dying, and the spirit of the house (or graveyard, for that matter) will take it as payment. From here on out, you’ll see the house spirit use its form. Death as the foundation of a house seems so ironic when a house is filled with so much life.

We gave birth in our homes. 

Not in some removed hospital (hospital births were uncommon until 70 years ago but in front of the hearth fire on temporary beds of straw. The “Women in the Straw” is a phrase given to a woman giving birth. 

Women in the straw and a baby in the manger.

Here steps Bríde Boillsge – Brighid of Brightness. Straw-woven objects abound in her festival like the Brídeóg (a small straw effigy) – the leaba Bríde (Brighid’s bed made of straw) or a sráideog (a shakedown) made of leftover straw where the Saint could sleep and the criose Bríde (Brighid’s Girdle) – a braided straw rope in a loop with plaited crosses at the four points folk would step through for blessing. Like being born, I guess.

 A straw vulva. A liminal space.

The “Woman in the Straw” found in this festival of Imbolc and Bríde is, for me, a nod toward a community celebration of the more intimate act of birth carried out in our homes. Bríde becomes the midwife. 

The person giving birth was moved from the bed to the straw-strewn floor positioned near the hearth. Their birthing partner would place their hands on their shoulders as they assumed the kneeling position, encouraging them whilst the midwife assisted in the birth. In northern Sweden, almost identical customs exist. The midwife – who was known as the “Light Mother”, a “Straw Mother”, or an “Earth Mother” – stood behind them to help deliver the world’s emerging child. 

The designation of “Earth Mother” is potentially derived from a local Saami tradition that survived until the eighteenth century. The name reflects a concern with a spirit associated with childbirth who lived beneath an earthen floor of the home in their roundhouse called Madder-akka.  The term “Light Mother” may have entered the lexicon due to a notional ritual where a lighted candle was taken to examine the health of the newborn babe. In Scotland, the fiery circle returns – deiseal turns made as soon as possible after parturition and around newly born babes with smouldering pine candles or juniper. These circles were deemed effective against the intrusion of the daoine sìth or sìthichean,

In Ireland, the new parents would stay sometimes up to 9 nights after the birth on the leaba thalúna – the ground bed- beside the domestic hearth. 

There is no edge without a centre.  

The hearth was the centre of the house. Connected to the earth, light, nutrition and the family. The substance of every start and end. The home is foundational. The circle dances – the reel of the roundhouse plays on. This time danced between birth and new life. Dancing our circle dance in our square homes. 

The way you build a house is a way to shape a town. And how you shape a town is how you form your world. 

Life changed when our houses became squares.

If you want to change a way of life, you change homes. In the name of efficiency, town planning and ease of administration, of course. 

Today, we look through square windows, at square screens, sit in square cars, and look out square windows of square offices in square block towns. Looking at our square devices and square books. 

We are far removed from “circle culture”. We are far removed from an animate home, a space where life and death play out much more regularly. A home teaching us the deiseal spiral dance of life and death and what comes next.

Yet some of us have never lost our love of the roundhouse. I say the sacred circle isn’t too far away. It’s the rhythm pulsing through everything.

If we can smooth out the corners, we will find it again. 

References:

Parker Pearson, M. 1996.  Food, fertility and front doors in the first millennium BC. In T.C. Champion and  J.R. Collis (eds).  The Iron Age in Britain and Ireland: recent trends, 117-132.  Sheffield: J.R. Collis Publications.

Oswald, A. 1997.  A doorway on the past: practical and mystical concerns in the orientation of roundhouse doorways.  In A. Gwilt and C. Haselgrove (eds). Reconstructing Iron Age societies, 87-95.  Oxford: Oxbow.