"The GOAT: Celebration of the Puck Fair" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "The Confessions of Fiona: Mythology and Folklore of the Faeries"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 11
Celebration of the Puck Fair
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Each
year on August 10th, in the small County Kerry town of Killorglin, a wild male
goat is captured in the surrounding mountains, hauled down into the town
square, and crowned. A local schoolgirl, chosen for the honor and titled the
Queen of Puck, sets a garlanded crown on his head. He's hoisted onto a high
platform above the crowd, where he'll survey his temporary kingdom for three
straight days of markets, music, and pubs staying open until three in the
morning, before being released back into the hills he came from, no worse for
the experience and considerably more famous. Ireland's Puck Fair is genuinely
one of the country's oldest surviving festivals, documented in legal records
back to the 1600s. What it is not, despite how often the claim gets repeated,
is a festival honoring Robin Goodfellow.
The
goat at the center of Puck Fair is not a folkloric stand-in for Shakespeare's
mischievous sprite. He's simply a goat, and the actual etymology, history, and
layered legend behind that goat is a far better story than the one usually
told…
All Hail the GOAT!
Start
with the word itself. “Puck” in Puck Fair descends from the Irish poc, meaning
a male goat, plain and simple; there's an old traditional song, “An Poc ar Buile,” “The Mad Goat,” still
associated with the festival to this day. The English literary Puck, the impish
spirit of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
also known as “Robin Goodfellow,” has a genuinely separate history rooted in
Old English pūca, a word for a household goblin or trickster spirit
found across English, Welsh, and Scandinavian folklore. Whether these two words
share a deeper common ancestor is a question scholars still debate rather than
a settled fact; W. B. Yeats himself
noted the theory that the Irish púca, a shapeshifting trickster spirit
distinct from the ordinary word for goat, might be linguistically related to
poc and, through it, to Shakespeare's “Puck,” calling the idea speculative even
in his own time. Folklorist Peter Berresford Ellis
went considerably further, dismissing the whole chain of reasoning outright.
Either way, the actual crowned animal standing on that platform in Killorglin
every August has never had anything to do with fairy mischief. He's a poc,
a goat, doing exactly what his name says on the tin.
Ask why Killorglin crowns a goat at all, and you'll collect at least three different, mutually exclusive answers, none of which can be fully verified. The most popular version credits Oliver Cromwell's forces during their brutal seventeenth-century campaign through Ireland: a herd of mountain goats, spooked by approaching English raiders, sent one panicked billy fleeing into town, where his frantic arrival warned the locals in time to prepare their defenses. A second, less commonly told version swaps out the villain and moves the timeline forward roughly forty years, crediting the warning to goats scattered by Patrick Sarsfield's Jacobite cavalry during the Williamite War in 1690 instead. A third theory dispenses with any specific historical incident altogether, tracing the fair to pre-Christian celebrations tied to Lughnasadh, the Celtic harvest festival marking the beginning of autumn, with the male goat serving as an old pagan fertility symbol.
What
actually survives in the documentary record is more mundane than any of the
three, and arguably more interesting for exactly that reason. A written grant
survives giving local landlord Jenkins Conway the right to collect tolls on
animals brought to the August fair, evidence the gathering was already well
established by that point, and in 1613 King James I issued a charter formally
granting Killorglin's fair legal status. None of these documents mention a
goat-god, a folkloric homage, or even Cromwell, who in fact wouldn't invade
Ireland for another three decades after that charter was signed. The
goat-crowning ceremony itself is popularly traced to 1808, connected to a legal
dispute over tolls that a young barrister named Daniel O'Connell, decades
before he'd become one of Ireland's most consequential political figures, is
said to have argued on behalf of a local landlord by successfully claiming that
goats fell outside a toll restriction covering cattle, sheep, and horses. To
prove the fair really was a goat fair and collect his fee, the story goes, a
puck was hoisted onto a stage for all to see.
Whichever version is true, or whether the real answer is some combination none of them fully capture, the actual, boring, document-backed history, tolls, charters, and a legal technicality about livestock categories, gets you closer to the truth than any of the three colorful legends competing to explain it.
None
of this myth-checking diminishes what Puck Fair genuinely is: one of Ireland's
oldest continuously running public celebrations, a documented piece of local
civic and agricultural history stretching back over four centuries, wrapped in
exactly the kind of competing folk explanations that tend to accumulate around
anything that old. Perhaps, the goat deserves his crown on his own considerable
merits.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the genuine Irish fairy tradition that Puck Fair gets mistakenly folded into, we're recommending a deep dive into the actual Sidhe.
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The Confessions of Fiona:
Mythology and Folklore of the Faeries
By
Steve Blamires | Crossed Crow Books
The
book's premise starts strange and stays there deliberately: in 1893, the
Scottish writer and mystic William Sharp began publishing under the name “Fiona
McLeod,” and for the next twelve years, “Fiona” produced an entire, internally
consistent mythology, deities, cosmology, and ritual structure attributed to
the Faery realm itself, material found nowhere in prior human folklore. Steve
Blamires, who has spent three decades studying this specific esoteric
tradition, uses The Confessions of Fiona to reconstruct and present that
body of work in full for the first time, including an appendix pointing readers
toward McLeod's original writings and a sustained examination of the faery god Dalua.
What
makes Blamires's approach genuinely useful rather than merely curious is his
refusal to flatten the Faery folk into the diminutive, harmless creatures
popular culture has reduced them to. He's explicit that the beings described in
this tradition are large, powerful, and at times genuinely dangerous, closer to
the older, more unsettling conception of the Sidhe found in older Irish and
Scottish folklore than to anything resembling a modern greeting-card fairy. The
book also lays out a genuine working ritual structure, built around the four
festivals and four magical tools of the Western esoteric tradition, that
practitioners can actually engage with rather than simply read about.
Readers should go in aware that this is presenting one specific, channeled twentieth-century tradition rather than a survey of Irish folklore broadly, and some reviewers have found the material's internal contradictions genuinely disorienting rather than illuminating; Blamires's own framing is that Faery logic simply doesn't map cleanly onto human expectations of consistency. But for readers of this magazine curious what a serious, sustained engagement with the actual Good Neighbors looks like, well past goat-crowning and general púca trivia, this is a genuinely rare source to work from.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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