Diana Beresford-Kroeger: Integrating Celtic Wisdom and Science, part 1 by Theresa Dintino

Moderator’s Note: This post is brought to you by a collaboration by FAR and Nasty Women Writers written and hosted by Maria and Theresa Dintino. This post originally appeared on their website on Sep 12, 2023

In her book To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest, Diana Beresford-Kroeger  shares her origin story, the humble beginnings of the famous scientist, the activist and crusader for the planet she became. We learn on what forge that will, strength, brain and consciousness were smelted. And it is one of beauty, strength and love, one that takes the breath away.

I loved this book. I loved going deeper and deeper into Beresford-Kroeger’s life story, into the rich depths of her Celtic heritage and medicine lineage. To learn the secrets and the wisdom. Beresford-Kroeger offers sacred transmission in this book, revealing another part of herself. It is a vulnerable telling and an irreplaceable gift.

Diana Beresford-Kroeger (b. 1944) has written many books including: The Global Forest, Arboretum America: A Philosophy of the Forest, and Arboretum Borealis: A Lifeline of the Planet in which she shares her intelligence on behalf of life systems, always advocating for more trees. She is a botanist and medical biochemist.She was instrumental in saving and protecting several species of plants and trees as well as sacred indigenous wild lands including Pimachiowin Aki in Winnipeg, Canada. She fights hard for the planet and believes strongly that we can combat climate change and win by learning more about the forest and how it operates as one system and the innate intelligence of the trees.

In this book she gets personal, sharing the story of her youth, exposing that she is of the Ancient Celtic lineage of the Lisheens. She writes of the elders who passed this knowledge to her deliberately, both orally and experientially, over consecutive summers of her youth after both her parents died.

“The name Lisheens means much to people who speak Gaelic. It opens a doorway into a different world. First off, the name itself is ancient, though the British soldiers who came with their survey charts for colonization changed it. In old Gaelic, Lios means fairy mound or fairy ring or, from even earlier, the enclosed ground of an ancient dwelling place. The ending, “sheens,” comes from sí in old Gaelic, meaning aossi or inhabitants of the fairy mounds. The valley is rife with stone artifacts from the time of the Druids, who were the elite educated class of the Celtic culture—the doctors and surgeons, astronomers and mathematicians, philosophers, poets, and historians. The hillsides were dotted with altars, ring circles, cairns, sacred stones, Ogham stones and holy wells. The turf bogs turn up treasures like baskets of butter, gold ornaments, or vessels of honey that have been preserved throughout the ages. When I was a child the valley might well have been the most concentrated, untouched site of Celtic culture in all of Ireland”(38).

Beresford-Kroeger had a strange and challenging beginning. It was shrouded in mystery and the unspoken. She was both Irish and English which created tension within and without. Her English father was “royal” while her Mother was from a medicine lineage in the Lisheens with a bloodline back to the kings of Munster. Being born a girl in her father’s lineage gave her no benefits or inheritance while being born a girl in her Irish lineage was viewed as an advantage. She would have the teachings passed to her.

The extended family in the Lisheens decided together to pass the traditions to her. She was entitled to it by her grandfather who was a learned and respected Celtic scholar. According to the ancient Brehan laws, once a child is orphaned they become everyone’s child. Her Great-Aunt Nellie enlisted all of the elders of the ancient Lisheens lineage to pass their special form of wisdom to the young Diana one at a time. Beresford-Kroeger believes that they were the last generation to hold the wisdom in its fullness and that is why they wanted to pass it to her so thoroughly as well.

Beresford-Kroeger is also something of a genius. When her mother was alive this was discouraged as she told her daughter it was not attractive and would not get her far. Once her mother passed, she was able to step into that aspect of herself unashamed. Her uncle Pat helped her develop her intellectual capacities. They read together and had complex conversations about mythology and the classics. He supported her receiving a good education.

Her Great-Aunt Nellie was widowed and lived on the farm that had been in the family for centuries with her son. Together they produced everything they needed to live. On the farm in the summers, Beresford-Kroeger was taught agriculture, raising pigs, cows, chickens and goats. She learned how to grow food and store it, and was mentored in the medicinal properties of herbs as well as the mythology, beliefs and customs of the Lisheens.

“Nellie’s huge inventory of plants and their uses was no more important in their eyes than my being taught to preserve a single egg in butter—I needed to learn it all. That esteem, which was heaped in equal measure on even the smallest tidbits, stories, songs and poems, is a crucial component of Celtic culture. And there was a constant reminder of it in every farmhouse from Ballylickey to Lackavane and beyond: the bed kept for the seanchaí.

The seanchaí was a wandering storyteller, a man with a prodigious memory and compelling delivery. His was an inherited position, passed down a family line of storytellers hundreds of years long. In the colder months, roughly from harvest to planting, he would travel from place to place sharing this stories with the people”(64).

Continued tomorrow.