Finding Sacred Waters

If you have the opportunity, visit a sacred well in one of the old Celtic places as this makes it especially easy to link into the Druidesses who guarded the sacred waters and used them for healing and initiation. One of the most intriguing wells is that named after the shadowy male saint, St Madron/Modron, whose name is the same as the Celtic word for Mother. Is this an indication that the former guardians of this well were devotees of the Mother Goddess and was it a druidic water shrine? I visited it when it was almost dark following a path through a tribute-laden woodland to a pool from which heat rose like a mist that warmed my body. Only the next day did I discover the actual well was further on and that my healing waters were a flooded pool in a grove made sacred by offerings and prayers. Any place can become a place of healing given enough power, faith and accumulated spirituality.

Many Christian churches and chapels, like the now ruined chapel near the well of St Madron were erected near pagan sacred wells, and the early Celtic church used these for baptism, before Roman Christianity decreed that a baptismal font should be placed inside the building The ruined chapel became a focus for divinatory rites, especially love divination over the following centuries.

The tradition of a female well guardian who performed magical rituals and made prophecies continued into the seventeenth century in remote areas such as Cornwall and into the nineteenth century in Scotland, suggesting again at least some vestiges of the Druidess tradition. The role of well guardian was handed down from mother to female relation in an unbroken tradition.

Another Celtic link was the use of a skull from a severed head, as a drinking cup at certain wells, for example the pilgrims at the well of Llandeilo in Dyfed. Here until the beginning of the twentieth century water was drunk from what was said to be the head of Celtic Saint Teilo whose ruined church surrounded the well. In another severed head legend, Winefride, a niece of St Beuno, was attacked by a local chief Caradoc who tried to rape her. When she resisted, myth records he cut off her head which rolled down the hill where it fell into a deep hollow. Instantly a stream burst from the rock. The ground opened and swallowed her assassin. Beuno set Winifrede’s head back on her shoulders and she became an Abbess. Her well is still a place of pilgrimage and healing.

How to find Holy Wells and sacred springs - a focus for personal healing powers

Whether or not you live in a Celtic land, wells and sacred water holes are almost always sacred to the Mother. Where people settled in the New World from Celtic and Northern lands, the wells they found close to the first settlements may have become a focus for Celtic-based rituals. Even in hot places however, especially in towns with sophisticated irrigation systems, wells and watercourses are not always revered. Although many sacred wells have fallen in disuse, been capped or covered over, it is still possible to find them, using a little detective work. The sites still possess the powers built up over thousands of years that are not eradicated by a century or so of disuse.

• In the UK the Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 Pathfinder series, includes many of the old wells and springs.

• In any area, search out old guides to the history and folklore that are now often reproduced very cheaply since the original material, often collected by historians of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is now out of copyright.

• Local people in shops and bars can often point you to an old site and fill in its more colourful legends.

• Look at place names even in the centre of towns; a remarkable number of wells were Christianised in the name of St Anne, St Mary and St Bridget/Bride so areas with these names, especially with an addition Bridewell clue, will usually yield a hidden sacred pool.Ladywell is another reference to wells dedicated to the Celtic White Goddess, that later became our Lady’ Wells. Look out for legends of a local ghostly white lady and you may find your well close by. The White Lady may be a displaced well spirit or priestess or she may be a folk memory of a local Druidess who acted as a solitary local herbalist and healer and came to the well for water and private ritual. .

• Nunswell or Nunwell may be a Christianised well with a former Celtic female guardians, Many such wells were enclosed within the Abbey walls.

• Crypts of churches and cathedrals built on ancient temple sites may, as I have said, also conceal an old well or spring. If not look around the grounds and you are almost certain to find your well.

• Look close to any ancient site, especially if there are surrounding woods and hills, for a well. For example, in the ruined abbey grounds at the foot of the mighty chalk Cerne Abbas giant is a beautiful pool type well dedicated to St Catherine; connected to it are ancient rites for getting a husband(so it is clearly one of the old Celtic fertility wells that in pre Christian and maybe more covertly in Christian times barren women visited before making love on the Giant’s phallus).

• No one expects stone circles or standing stones to be in their original state. Yet with wells I myself experienced illogical instant disappointment when finding that my first sacred well was not decked with flowers or a fairy maiden wishing well .

• A grid across the top, which is almost inevitable or a weed-choked hole, a muddy pool on the ground are harder to instantly make connections.

• But look around at you may be amply rewarded; at Sancreed Mother Goddess well near Penzance, a muddy walk along a brambly and hawthorn-covered path (not so magical if they are scratching and it is raining down), my trail ended at what appeared just to be a circle of rocks above ground. I was about to give up when I saw steep narrow steps right down into the Earth and there in half darkness the tiny pool where people had come to bathe and make offerings actually within the womb of the Mother.

• If you can’t find your well, look around the area where the map indicates your well should be for any withered rag ribbons or even perhaps new ones on trees and bushes., these can often assure you that you are on track. Local signposts – if they exist at all ‑ may disappear, leaving you stranded in woodland.

• When you finally arrive, look down if you can into the shaft and into the depths of the earth, the opening of the womb of the earth mother. Unlike a standing stone, this void can be quite frightening, because all the concepts of terra firma are suddenly less valid, as you stare directly into the entrance to the Celtic Otherworld.

• Then close your eyes and hold the palms of your hand down over the hole. You may experience warmth, light and see back through time the people circling the well at sunrise, perhaps drawing up the water in a bucket if the well was deep.

• Seek also, in the environs of the well, a choked stream or even a dried-up watercourse that may once have been the sacred stream or spring.

• If you feel any stirrings, make the well a special place to you. If enough people visit a place and perform simple healing and blessing rituals on the well, it is possible to re-awaken its powers.

• If you adopt a well, you need to find the well’s special times. If it is named after a saint, visit the well on the saint’s day. You may also manage to find the day of an earlier guardian that usually shares the same holy day as the saint.

• Research the ancient connections: what illnesses was the well especially famed for curing? Did earlier peoples have any particular rituals? Just before dawn was the most popular time and people would circle wells three times sun or clockwise. Easter. (the Spring Equinox) May morning and the old Whitsun, six weeks after Easter Sunday, were considered the most potent for water rituals.

• Go to the well, if possible, at times that are significant to you ‑ a birthday, an anniversary, a bereavement. Bring a friend, a lover, a child to share your place and endow it with positive thoughts. You will feel the energies growing and you own positive healing powers increasing.

• However tempting, do not drop anything down the well and if you leave ribbons on the trees, make sure that they are biodegradable.

• A single flower can be powerful, but why not bring seeds or tiny flowering shrubs and clear away a little of the undergrowth, so that over the weeks the site becomes more lovely.