By JILLIAN KRISTINA
Ireland, 1973. A wedding, a raucous dance floor. A mysterious procession arrives – men with straw hats concealing their faces. A goat draped with a garland of flowers.
“Who invited them?”
“No one. That’s the point.”
A troubled bride goes outside into the night air, bonfires burning behind her. She gets sick, then begins to put herself back together when she notices the goat. A concerned husband arrives on the scene, frantically calling her name.
All that remains is a Claddagh wedding ring, abandoned on the ground…
Present day.
A woman singing, limping through her apartment. A chair is placed in position. The woman, clad in a floor-length gown, climbs on the chair and fastens the rope. Rosary beads. Mother Mary, peering at a hanging figure with a smile, porcelain hands clasped in prayer.
The daughter comes to collect the detritus of what was left behind. Neon red crosses reflected in her eyes, ghosts of a life once lost, calling her – inviting her – to travel back with them. Back to her own personal hell, confronted with the weight of what she would not (could not) reconcile.
Many will be extended, but not every ghost’s invitation should be accepted as we near the end of this eclipse season. Or maybe, ever.
Because not all mothers are good. Some become twisted, hanged by the strangled roots of their own gnarled past. There’s always something of that rot that remains: religion, oppression, abuse, exploitation. These things that were pushed upon us, these institutions of decay that infect not just the present but generations to come. Lineages that have to reckon with the cruelty, the calculated callousness, and work every day to root it out of their own spirits. So they do what they must to stem the bleeding and eradicate the putrefaction.
And yet, with all of this effort, this awareness, the sickness of the psyche pours through in thick, suffocating streams of rage and denial. Sometimes, these streams protect us. Sometimes, they drown us.
Sometimes, they lead us home.
In Aislinn Clarke’s 2024 Irish-language, intergenerational folk horror, FRÉWAKA, we see the ways in which the lines of lore and reality can blur, one borrowing from the other. Feeding. Feasting on the traumas and turning them into ferocious tales – fantasies – that carry more truth than we would ever care to know.
Siobhán (Clare Monnelly), known to her friends as Shoo, has arrived on scene to deal with the contents of a cluttered apartment left behind by her mother, a troubled woman who ended her life there, surrounded by myriad religious relics, including a glow-in-the-dark Mother Mary. All of these symbols of faith, of history, of personal iconography, and yet, no sign of a daughter. No pictures. Nothing. Accompanied by her very pregnant Ukrainian fiancé, Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya), Shoo’s resignation is palpable, even more so at the insistence of her fiancé to salvage what they can because this was her mother. That means something, she says.
Sometimes screams are audible. Most times, they’re not. They erupt silently in our throats as we try to suppress the guttural fury that’s always waiting, always ready, just beneath the surface. As we swallow this hysteria, we continue a cycle of suffocating violence through which we fortify the origins of our own desecrated root systems, growing deeper and stronger with every passing day we refuse to tend to them. And the partial solar eclipse in Virgo on Sunday, September 21st, will make sure we do, because it’s dredging up the sludge. It’s resurrecting the specters whose wailing reverberates through our dreamscapes, ensuring there is no peace until we acknowledge them, answering their shrill calls with our own howls of defiance and tools of severance.
Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain) knows all about the nightmare of defiance that seems never to end. When Shoo, a primary care worker, receives a call to travel to a remote Irish village to look after an agoraphobic stroke-survivor who has requested an Irish-speaking home helper, she sees it as the perfect opportunity to remove herself from her deceased mother’s home. Leaving Mila with the duty and burden of packing the domicile, she boards a bus and heads towards a place that the locals warn her not to go. But go she does, and she’s greeted with screams and… piss.
“There are certain things they don’t like – pure metal, salt and piss.”
Peig is anything but welcoming. It’s rumored that she was in an asylum or a Magdalene laundry, and she was always odd. And maybe a bit delusional, which might explain the deluge of urine that streamed under the door Shoo was knocking on. Peig no longer knows whether the woman standing outside her door is who she says she is or if she’s one of them. One of Na Sidhe.
“Who are they?”
Na Sidhe are the fairy folk of Ireland, and Peig is terrified of them. Her house is adorned with protections, most noticeably, a red door to the basement, accented with a horseshoe and guarded by seven iron nails to keep the perpetrators out. The color red in Ireland is also associated with the presence of the Otherworld and protection against evil entities, and there is no shortage of the hue throughout this story of three tormented women.
“It’s a good number, the number three.”
As Peig exhibits more concerning idiosyncrasies, Shoo begins to settle into the house. She displays a patience with Peig that never comes through with her fiancé, almost as if she recognizes something of herself in Peig. Something of her own pain and yet, something she can’t quite name. Not just yet. But she sees the scars – like slashes – covering almost every inch of Peig’s back.
“I’ll tell you exactly what happened. You’ll think I’m mad or whatever you want. Then, I’ll leave it with you. I got married because I had to. Know what I mean? I was taken away on my wedding night. Not by a priest, or a doctor, or a nun, but by them. Daithi made a deal with them to get me back, but they’re a tricky lot. Very tricky. They hate us, you know. You’ve seen the scars I have. Punishment.”
A bride vanished. A ring, left behind. Rumors, speculation. A woman who’s always been a bit odd. And Shoo has questions.
“What is it like, down there?”
“A madhouse. A famine village. A laundry house. A coffin ship. A field, poisoned with blight.
A street full of blood and bullets. Hundreds of bodies piled into a septic tank. Punishment.”
“I know about punishment,” Shoo says, as she shows Peig the marks where her mother used to burn her whenever she got her prayers wrong. The glow of the neon red cross from the cupboard her mother used to shut her in, the burns from that weren’t physical; those are the burns that matched Peig’s – not the visible scars, but the ones that lie beneath, simmering and burning us from the inside out.
“Terrible how they used to treat people.”
In this recognition of each other’s personal traumas, Shoo begins to have her own experiences. She dreams of entering a house, the house of a man who recently passed – the Wake House – and sees the men with straw hats concealing their faces. She sees a washerwoman at the ford, an intense and often feared figure in Irish lore. She washes the clothes of the dead, and even the entrails of warriors fated to fall in battle, but no matter which, she always asks us what we’re ready to release. To let die. Shoo then finds herself facing her mother in her coffin and extends a hand towards her Mammy. Her mother’s eyes pop open, and a sickly smile spreads across her ashen face as she clutches Shoo’s hand, as if she’s not done with her – just yet. A wailing is heard, and Mila appears behind her, screaming and sobbing. Shoo then awakens to the piercing sounds of her own sobbing. Her own keening.
“They’re always listening. There’s a house under the house.”
Indeed, they are. Shoo continues to receive phone calls from the primary care services that gave her the assignment, and finally meets a representative who has come for a home visit, a representative who seems to require an invitation before entering. A representative who sniffs at Peig’s door after the elder barricades herself in her bedroom, screaming at the woman that she’s not welcome. And just like that, the representative vanishes. Soon after, Mila receives a concerning phone call from her employers. They claim that although Shoo put in for a compassionate leave for the bereavement of her mother, they’ve been receiving time sheets from her, even though they haven’t sent her on an assignment.
Peig then makes a discovery that rocks her very core: Packed away in a box of Shoo’s mother’s belongings that Mila sent to the house, lies proof of who Shoo’s mother was. And who Peig is to Shoo, and why they’ve connected the way they have. As Peig tells the story, her husband, Daithi, made a deal with Na Sidhe, promising them the baby for Peig’s return. Except that Daithi and Peig sent the baby away, tricking the fae, and the fae don’t like to be tricked. And they always get theirs.
“Births, marriages, deaths. Those are thin places. Thresholds. That’s what they like.”
A death. A wedding dress. A Claddagh ring left on the ground. A pregnant loved one wailing at a red door, begging, offering anything, whatever they want, for her fiancé’s return. One story ends; an endless cycle continues.
Take care, over the next few weeks, in deciphering which ghosts are here to help you, and which are here to devour you. The eclipse portal that has all but consumed this month has not been kind, but we can be kind to ourselves and each other. We can gather with those we love, whether blood or chosen family. We can tend to our roots, or rather, the cords that still tether us to a past that is ready to be reckoned with and released. We can see them, touch them, even, and then do the work of liberating ourselves from them. “Fréwaka” is a phonetic spelling of the Irish word “freamhacha,” referring to deeply entangled roots, the hardest to not only remove but even approach. But that’s the work of this eclipse season – clearing and cleansing. Letting our darlings die so that we can find space to breathe. To live without the weight of oppression and punishment that was never our – or our ancestors’ – twisted legacy to bear.
This column is dedicated to the late, larger-than-life (and the afterlife of) Brent Hinds of Mastodon. “The end is not the end you see. It’s just the recognition of a memory.” Roots Remain, EMPEROR OF SAND.
