Read the oldest stories in the Western imagination — and find yourself in them

Perhaps you have been drawn to these stories for a long time — a name half-remembered, a symbol that keeps returning, a feeling that the myths of the Celtic world hold something you have not yet been able to fully reach. Or perhaps you are newer to this territory, and you have simply sensed that beneath the popular surface — the triquetra on the gift shop card, the vague talk of druids — there is something far older, stranger, and more demanding of your attention.

I understand that pull completely. It is what has driven my own long relationship with these traditions. And I also know the frustration that can follow it: the books that are all romantic atmosphere and no substance, the courses that promise ancient wisdom without teaching you to actually read the sources, the gap between genuine curiosity and the rigorous grounding that would let you trust your own engagement with the material. That gap is exactly what this course is built to close.

What we do here is work from the actual evidence — the medieval Irish manuscripts, the Welsh Mabinogion, the Red Book of Hergest, the threads of oral tradition that survived into living memory — and we learn to read it with care. We ask the scholar's questions: what do we actually know, how do we know it, and where does interpretation begin? That is not a way of diminishing the myths. It is, I would argue, the only way to take them seriously. A Morrígan who emerges from the genuine complexity of the Ulster Cycle is far more powerful, and far more useful, than one assembled from secondhand summaries.

But rigorous does not mean cold, and scholarly does not mean distant. These stories were never meant to be studied from behind glass. The Celtic mythological tradition is profoundly concerned with transformation, with sovereignty and its loss, with the Otherworld pressing against this one, with what it costs to be a poet, a king, a warrior, a woman of power. These are not antiquarian curiosities. They are mirrors. The practical work in this course — applying mythology to your writing, your symbolic life, your inner landscape — is as integral to the curriculum as the historical and textual foundations, because that is how these traditions have always worked. You learn the story. Then you let the story learn you.

I built this course for the writers who want to write from the myth rather than about it, the artists who want to understand what a raven or a cauldron actually means in its original symbolic grammar, the tarot practitioners and spiritual seekers who want to deepen their symbolic vocabulary without losing their footing in reality, and the lifelong learners who simply want to know — genuinely know — what these extraordinary traditions contain. You are welcome here, wherever you are starting from. Pull up a chair. The fire is lit.