I am republishing my review of Bernhardt-House's article in celebration of the fact that he has uploaded the paper to Academia.edu, making this hard-to-find piece easy to obtain. Thank you, Phillip! (Click here to view or download.)
“Imbolc: A New Interpretation”, Phillip A.
Bernhardt-House (pp 57-76) in Cosmos 18 (2002)
This intriguing article looks at
the meaning of Imbolc from a new perspective—that of a connection with wolf and
warrior cults originating with the Indo-Europeans and presenting in Roman and
Celtic civilizations. Bernhardt-House has a broad knowledge of the literature
and he brings together disparate pieces into a tantalizing whole. Where he
himself concludes that his new etymology may be proved unsound, it nevertheless
serves to “refocus our attentions on certain smaller aspects” of Imbolc,
particularly the wolf aspect, which is “now beyond doubt as having been
important to the holiday as it would have been observed in pre-Christian times”
(pg 65-66).[1]
In approaching the subject,
Bernhardt-House first looks at both Neo-Pagan and scholarly etymologies of the
Irish word for the festival, Imbolc. While accepting the consensus meanings of
milking and purification, he suggests an additional—and surprising—one.
If im has as its
basis “butter”, olc is generally derived as “evil, bad, wrong” in Irish,
both Old and Modern. But Kim McCone[2]
traces this word back to the Indo-European root meaning “wolf”. Joining these
two, Bernhardt-House offers “Imbolc as the 'butter-wolf'”, hoping to “shed some
light on further images in Irish sources, as well as connecting this to a
further complex within Indo-European ritual” (pg 60).
These images in Irish sources
range from calendrical evidence linking February to wolves, the association of
Candlemas in France and Belgium with the wolf (where a wolf sighting predicts
the ending of winter), of Brigit herself with the bear and wolf, and so on,
along with an examination of the period of time between Samhain and Imbolc and
its association with warring, as well as hospitality.
Perhaps most interesting is the
parallel drawn between the rites of the Lupercalia in Rome and Imbolc in
Ireland, and their potential links to Gaulish deities and to earlier rituals.
The link with purification in both festivals is already established; the writer
points to a possible further link in purification with the use of milk or, in
the Irish case, butter.
The young Roman priests, the
Luperci, sacrificed a dog and a goat at the cave where Romulus and Remus were
said to have been nursed by a wolf. The blood of these two animals was mixed
and the youngest priest's forehead anointed with the mixture; this was then
cleaned away using a piece of milk-soaked wool, which ritual was followed
eventually by striking the general populace with goat-skin thongs for luck and
fertility.
In a medieval story St Brigit
removes the signs worn by men which signify their engagement in activities of
war; Bernhardt-House suggests that if “some form of Brigid was one of the
presiding deities of Imbolc, Brigit who was bear-mother in origin but could
easily have been a wolf-mother in Ireland, might have been the deity who
removed these warrior-signs and reincorporated the youthful fian-warriors
into regular society, perhaps by the means of the purifying medium of milk, or,
given the etymology I have suggested with imb-, perhaps even butter” (pg
64).
The details examined by the
writer are greater in number and scope than suggested by this brief review, and
it is worth tracking down the article through your local or university library.[3]
This is just the sort of thing
that gets the creative mind churning along nicely. A very enjoyable article.
[1] For a complete review of the wolf and
werewolf in Celtic literature and an examination of that material, see
Bernhardt-House, Phillip A., Werewolves, magical hounds, and dog-headed men in
Celtic literature: a typological study of shape-shifting, Lewiston, NY: Edwin
Mellen Press, 2010.
[2] See my review above of his Brigit section,
“Fire and the Arts” (etc) in Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish
Literature, Kim McCone (1990)
[3] For a posting in the NeoPagan blogosphere
see http://www.patheos.com/community/paganportal/2011/02/01/the-hidden-imbolc/.
For a discussion in a Celtic
Reconstructionist forum of both the blog post and this peer-reviewed article,
see http://community.livejournal.com/cr_r/351977.html
In particular see the comment from 
wire_mother: “I've read the original article from which PSVL derives this thesis
(Bernhardt-House, Phillip A., "Imbolc: A New Interpretation", Cosmos
18 (2002), 57-76), and I buy the argument on the basis that OIr. olc very
plausibly derives from PIE *wlkwo- "wolf" (which gives us English
"wolf"!, and which through simple metathesis gives us *lukwo-, from
which we derive e.g. English "lupine" from Latin) and also very
plausibly shows semantic drift into its current meaning of "bad,
evil" given the Christian experience of the youthful warrior/lycanthropic
bands in Ireland; that it shows a definite relationship to Lupercalia, which
seems to be a Latin reflex of the same ritual impulse; and the relationship of
St. Brighid to the outlaw bands (all of which elements are discussed in that
article by PSVL). For disclosure, I know both Prof. Bernhardt-House, the author
of that article, and PSVL in person, and have discussed the issue with them
many times, but even so, the three points I list here are more solid than even
the assumption that we can derive pagan practices from e.g. folklore. That is,
we have solid linguistic grounds (any linguist can easily derive that using
tested rules of language change - one would have to dismiss nearly the entire
field of linguistics to dismiss that point), solid comparative grounds (in the
same region, even, and from a tradition which is linguistically closely related
- one would have to dismiss the concept that religious ideas refer to the past
in any way to dismiss that point, which would require one to dismiss the
concept of any continuity of pagan religion at all), and solid hostile
testimonial grounds (and the evidence for those youthful warrior-bands being
also self-consciously, as well as community-consciously, considered to be
"lycanthropic" is extensively documented across Europe, in the Celtic
countries, and specifically in Ireland).”
wire_mother: “I've read the original article from which PSVL derives this thesis
(Bernhardt-House, Phillip A., "Imbolc: A New Interpretation", Cosmos
18 (2002), 57-76), and I buy the argument on the basis that OIr. olc very
plausibly derives from PIE *wlkwo- "wolf" (which gives us English
"wolf"!, and which through simple metathesis gives us *lukwo-, from
which we derive e.g. English "lupine" from Latin) and also very
plausibly shows semantic drift into its current meaning of "bad,
evil" given the Christian experience of the youthful warrior/lycanthropic
bands in Ireland; that it shows a definite relationship to Lupercalia, which
seems to be a Latin reflex of the same ritual impulse; and the relationship of
St. Brighid to the outlaw bands (all of which elements are discussed in that
article by PSVL). For disclosure, I know both Prof. Bernhardt-House, the author
of that article, and PSVL in person, and have discussed the issue with them
many times, but even so, the three points I list here are more solid than even
the assumption that we can derive pagan practices from e.g. folklore. That is,
we have solid linguistic grounds (any linguist can easily derive that using
tested rules of language change - one would have to dismiss nearly the entire
field of linguistics to dismiss that point), solid comparative grounds (in the
same region, even, and from a tradition which is linguistically closely related
- one would have to dismiss the concept that religious ideas refer to the past
in any way to dismiss that point, which would require one to dismiss the
concept of any continuity of pagan religion at all), and solid hostile
testimonial grounds (and the evidence for those youthful warrior-bands being
also self-consciously, as well as community-consciously, considered to be
"lycanthropic" is extensively documented across Europe, in the Celtic
countries, and specifically in Ireland).”
