In classes this week we are studying identity and belief as applicable to the communities of the North East of Scotland, which makes you very aware of things that are believed to by extranatural (means basically the same thing as supernatural, minus any negative connotation). I also find it difficult to navigate the path between church based religious belief and folk (or non-church) religious belief, but that's probably due to my lack of religious instruction.
While walking home from lectures in the gloaming hours of the evening, through a small cobble stone alley between a stone fence and a wee house, a black cat came down the lane towards me. As we passed each other, she meowed, almost like a warning, and at the same time, from a tree above us, a raven cawed.
*see below for a definition of "gloaming".
If that's not a warning from the invisible world, I don't know what is. But the problem arises in interpretation. Obviously I've already taken it as a warning, but I've grown up in a tradition of reading black cats as bad luck, in some places they are good luck. Ravens have a cornicopiea of meaning associated with them. I only need to pick the right culture in order to understand a raven's caw in whichever way I want. I problem is deciding if the interpretation of the cat's meow and the raven's caw are from the same tradition of beliefs. Or I could take the neo-pagan approach and pick whichever one I like best and bugger-all if they ever existed together before. However, I think neo-pagans are full of tosh.
I am familiar with black cats and ravens being signs of bad luck, hence my interpretation of this moment in the alley as a warning of something bad to come. Although, I don't know what I'm being warned about. I suppose I could cast about in my head and discover something I should be warned about.
SCOTTISHISM #3
gloamin(g) (n.)
Spelled with or without a 'g'. This is a word you can't truely understand until you've lived in the far northern pieces of the world. There's nothing like it. The direct gloss into English is: "Evening twilight, dusk." But what it really means in Doric (or North Eastern Scots, its the same) can't be summed up in three words.
1813 Hogg Queen’s Wake (1874) 32:
"Late, late in a gloamin when all was still, When the fringe was red on the westlin hill."
"Late, late in a gloamin when all was still, When the fringe was red on the westlin hill."
Gloamin is the long slow sunsets, that last for hours as the sun slowly slides across the hills and behind the glens. But even after the sun has passed through the gates into the world beyond, the light lingers low across the trees and hangs off the lacy clouds. 
Loch Feochan, originally uploaded by dunard54 on flickr. For more images visit scotlandinthegloaming.blogspot.com
1 comment:
A friend of mine, who presents himself as a re-constitued verison of the Scotsman John Muir, often quotes the old man while hiking high in the Sierra and refers to such light as the "glomin" as the "alpine glow". This alpine glow shines off the granite cliffs and snowy crags of the high Sierra as a pale lavender that dips into deeper shades of melancholy as it rims the valleys and and darker forests of the lowlands below.
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