This is posted in the waiting room of an Irish hospital. Interesting glimpse into their culture.
The full text of the poster
This symbol has been developed by the Hospice Friendly Hospitals Programme to respectfully identify the End of Life.
This symbol is inspired by ancient Irish history; it is not associated with any one religion or denomination.
The white spiral represents the interconnected cycle of life, birth, life and death.
The white outer circle represents continuity, infinity and completion.
Purple has been chosen as the background colour as it is associated with nobility, solemnity and spirituality.
In this hospital the symbol may be displayed on a ward to add respect and solemnity during end of life or following the death of one of our patients.
is that Trisquel GNU/Linux?
I learned that in children’s hospital’s, the symbol is a butterfly. I could never look at a butterfly quite the same way after that.
Isn’t this one of the items you get in Zelda, Skyword Sword? Or maybe OoT?
oh cool it’s a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskelion
I love that there’s a wiki page to what amounts to humanities random doodle.
not associated with any one religion
Celtic pagans beg to differ I imagine
Yeah I was a bit surprised at that line since I had always understood it to be a Celtic pagan symbol.
Can’t upset the Christians I guess -_-
Ireland has a sizeable Catholic population, and Catholicism has a habit of subsuming local pagan traditions and gods and reworking them as their own.
It’s possible they meant their symbol and its use isn’t tied to any single belief. The symbol’s original meaning might be why they went out of the way to say so.
This symbol has been in religious use for a long ass time.
They’re just rebranding it.
It has been in general use across loads of areas of Europe - not just Celtic ones, even accounting for how widespread Celtic cultures used to be - and also since thousands of years before Celtic cultures emerged as a distinguishable group. I don’t think it’d be reasonable for any one group to claim ownership of it at this point
No, no, you see, it was designed by the Trisquel Project as the logo for their Linux distribution based on a deblobbed kernel /s
As far as I remember, it represents the grandma, the mother and the daughter. Some type of cult to woman and generations. It was associated with Celtics and reprieved by Christian religions, specially because introduces importance to matriarchs.
Ah yes, “pagan”, that famously singular religion.
Celtic Paganism does in fact refer to a particular pagan religion and set of beliefs/roots of those beliefs.
What’s the religion called then? It’s like a Christian being asked what their religion is and answering “monotheism”.
You can’t be serious. Have you never heard of a “pantheon” before?
Also, horribly ironic, since Christianity is actually a family of individual religions. Have you seriously never heard of Roman Catholicism, Methodism, Southern Baptist, Greek Othrodox, etc. ?
Also, various pagan gods often have a central group of worshipers usually referred to as “cults”. Examples would be the Cult of Odin or Cult of Athena. Members of cults primarily worship their chosen deity most people in a given culture wouldn’t be as selective and worship gods when appropriate, like asking Thor for a good harvest.
Granted, this doesn’t exactly apply to Celtic Paganism, but I’d be surprised if a practice common to the Greeks/Romans, Norse, Egyptians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, etc. didn’t also apply
It depends on the coven/group. Celtic pagans call themselves that or sometimes Celtic Wiccans or just pagans.
It’s the pagan beliefs that are rooted in Irish and Welsh history specifically. Then you have different pagan beliefs that are rooted in Norse theology or Greek mythology.
My mom raised me as Wiccan. There’s about as many denominations as there are in the Christian religion.
Edit: Sometimes they’ll even call themselves Druids or follow Druidism.
Wiccans and Neo-Druids are not Celtic Pagans. They are new age spiritualist nonsense.
Celtic Reconstructionism is the only “authentic” Celtic Pagan religion, based on surviving historical information rather than making up bits and using Celtic flavouring.
Thank you for the informative response. It seems that in this context, “pagan” is less of a religion name and more of a category of otherwise unrelated religions characterized by a mystical connection to nature.
No problem! I think you’re missing that we are saying “Celtic Paganism” and not just pagan.
No I’m not missing that, I’m arguing that it’s the equivalent to saying “American Monotheism” when you mean “Christian”. It strikes me as strange that there’s no, like, actual Celtic word for their belief system/way of life that we could use instead of [Region][Category]
Ancient Irish and Welsh ‘pagans’ worshiped entirely different pantheons from each other. ‘Celtic’ paganism is a pretty meaningless term.
Also, everything we know about the druids was written down by Julius Caesar, and - given that he wrote it as a justification for annihilating them - there is absolutely no reason to believe he was even attempting to tell the truth.
I’m talking about neo-paganism and modern religions.
It’s more like a Christian being asked what their religion is, and answering “Southern Baptist/First United Methodist/Lutheran/etc”. Every religion has denominations, and Celtic Pagan is an ancient denomination of paganism.
Paganism is incredibly diverse, I will give you that. “Pagan” is more of an umbrella term for many different beliefs with some common elements.
But christianity for example is also an umbrella term - you have catholicism (whis then has the many different orders and stuff under it), evanjelical christianity (with its many denominations) and orthodox church (which may or may not have different groups under it, I don’t really know). And even two different people within one denomination of the larger group of christianity may hold a slightly different set of beliefs.
Paganism is just a larger umbrella. I also went with Celtic paganism as it narrows it down a little more, that’s why I went for that rather than simply saying “paganism”.
Now I get what the hospital tried to go for. But saying it is not tied to a religion is I think a little unfortunate.
Really close, but off by one part: paganism is not an inclusive term. It’s an exclusive term. Rather than groups (originally) agreeing they are pagans, Christians decided anything not Christian is pagan. The modern meaning of pagan is euro-centric because that’s where Christianity took hold. The Norse and the Celtic and the Baltic and the Germanic “pagans” likely would not see themselves as on the same side of the argument against Christians. Grouping pagans together is like grouping barbarians together across the world. Literally, because barbarian is also a derogatory term. (bar-bar was the racist interpretation of foreign language by the Greeks and then Romans)
The meaning is shifted now because of 2000 years of Christian erasure. So sure, it might now be that Pagan is an equivalent type of term as Christian, covering many groups that identify themselves as their parent term, but that’s not the historical context. That makes a difference when talking about the actual history.
You are right about that. But I didn’t talk about history and how it effectively was deragotary term, as didn’t find it relevant in this context.
“Pagan” became to mean non-christian, but afaik originally it meant “person from the countryside” - lat. paganos I believe (also see: heathen - person from the heath) - so people living in vilages and such, who took longer to convert from the old faith.
Anyway, as other commenter said somewhere here, these religions usually didn’t have names historically that we know of. It was simply the religion to the people. Moreover, the religion was not centralized. The various tribes, even villages could have differences and their local gods that were worshipped. So yeah, christians came up with the umbrela term and yeah, it was developed as an insult basically. But it’s what we have as a name for these religions.
I didn’t find it relevant as modern day pagans mostly embraced the term and I don’t think it holds same negative conotations as it did in the past.
Why do they need a symbol for that? Can’t they just don’t put any symbol? What does a symbol add?
At the vet I’ve seen a candle that they light when someone brings in their pet to be put down. It lets other patients know the terrible suffering the family is going through and allows them to be respectful to that. I’m guessing this symbol serves a similar purpose.
How would you mark the room where someone just died. Maybe their family is there grieving.
“Please don’t disturb” is slightly silly to put on a door handle
Maybe our customs are different. Usually this situation is very short and by the time you hangbthe sign, the person would already be transferred to the morgue. I lived in a similar situation where we had a family member die by night and by the time we reached in the early morning we went directly to a specific cleansing area. So it is very obvious what is going there.
We are Muslims and time from death to burial usually takes less than 24 hours.
Have you heard of an Irish wake? Traditionally they would throw a big party celebrating the life of a lost loved one and everyone would hang out with the body for 1-2 days
Then why do they put those door handle holes in the signs?
I’ve never seen one. Basing my question on the laminated display. Ifvtheybhave a big deck of door handle signs, then of course it is very quick.
isn’t this Brigid’s symbol?
That woild be St Brigid’s cross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigid’s_cross
Ah, thank you. For some reason I had the goddess Brigid associated with the triskele and maiden/mother/crone but there’s so much overlap nowadays between goddess and saint that it’s hard to find reliable sources on what was who.
The Celtic Triskele! My mom had a bunch of these in her jewelry and house decorations. We always honored it as a symbol for the maiden, mother, and crone.
If you visit Boyne Valley, one of the cultural highlights in ‘Ireland’s Ancient East’, you’re likely to find the Celtic Triskele symbol at the entrance of the 5,000-year-old Newgrange Passage Tomb. It dates back to the Neolithic era, and boasts true beauty in a serene location. However, that’s not the only place it can be found.
Markings and artifacts have been located in various ancient sites, which also show us that the Celtic Triskele became popular with the Celtic culture from 500 B.C. onwards. These artifacts can be discovered in Ireland, as well as Europe, and across America.
The Celtic Triskele was a symbol that had various meanings for the early Pagans. One of them was linked to the sun, triadic Gods, and the three domains of land, sea, and sky. As we mentioned above, the Triple Spiral was also believed to represent the cycles of life, as well as the Triple Goddess -the maiden, mother, and wise woman.
I got to see that in person! Newgrange is fascinating.
I know folks here are arguing about Celtic pagan culture but the spirals actually come from neolithic peoples from 5,000 years ago that we know very little about. They predate the Celts and the Picts and even the pyramid builders of ancient Egypt. We don’t know their language, religion, or much of anything except that they were pretty good engineers, moved enormous stones tens or hundreds of kilometers, and had a thing for spiral motifs!
Ran by air benders?
I thought water benders were more likely to be healers.
A triskel… odd choice
End of life is such a shame. You see, they have a point with the infinity and cycle points they claim, why would the person’s mind not be recycled into something else?
You lose the person, all that they are permanently. They instead, get to exist as a new being, with no memory of their past.
All relationships, acomplishments, anything of actual meaning erased.
Yet the cruel irony is that they persist, recycled as yet another wretched being.
“why would the person’s mind not be recycled into something else”
Why would it be?
Because why tf do we have the idea that we are somehow so special, that we don’t fall under the same laws as everything else.
The mind just has to be some metaphysical bullshit. Nah, it’s just material science we don’t understand due to our own flaws.
I have zero terror management. I am actively panicking every day, because I believe I don’t get to stay dead, which is the problem.
Nonsense.
Could just use F
Kinky. Someone should probably have googled who else have adopted a triskelion as their symbol.
The hospitals I have been in recently in the US use a purple butterfly for the same purpose…it’s really sad to see when walking around.
Does anybody else get upset because it is not centered?
Maybe it is a great way to distract those that are dying.
“Why is that sign they put up all wonky” instead of
“Oh god I see the spectre of death and he has a ball gag!”Pretty sure it’s centered.
What makes you say it’s not?
The two lower swirls are closer to the circle than the top one
Ohhh. I was looking only at the big circle.
damn, now i can’t unsee it.
