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A Go at Your Own Pace Online Course

Keening is a centuries old ritual of lamenting the dead, stretching back to pre-christian times. Keening was the role of the Bean Chaointe, the Keening Woman, who led the community through their grief as well as singing the soul back home to the Otherworld.

My first experience of keening was for the death of a friend who had asked me specifically to keen over her body with her community when she dies. This then evolved in adapting keening to address the feelings of overwhelm caused by the climate emergency.

Grieving takes practice. Art, story and ritual can play empowering roles in honoring our grief and exploring our relationship to it so it doesn’t overwhelm us and leave us apathetic to the calls of injustices.

Reclaiming keening is an act of Cultural Activism, using traditional rituals to meet modern needs. Within this rediscovery of keening widens the image of the Bean Chaointe highlighting the forces that played a role in silencing the keeners.

This is a course for those:

  • Interested in what keening was and can be

  • The role of the Bean Chaointe and what that involved

  • Hearing some keening songs and exploring laments for powerful activism

  • A guide to creating your own personal keening ritual

5 Course Lessons + BONUS Lesson

1 What is Keening?

  • Definition and history of keening

  • The role of the Bean Chaointe (Keening Woman)

2. Keening Songs

  • The parts of the keening ritual

  • Laments

3. The Erasure of Keening

  • Reasons why keening as a practice was purposely stamped out. From social conditioning to superstitions, Colonial powers to the Church and then the law.

4. Modern Interpretation

  1. Examples of modern forms of keening

  2. Cultural Activism

  3. Art, story, ritual

5. Links & Resources

6. BONUS Lesson

A personal keening. Creating a keening ritual around your own intention.

Course Feedback:

How Does the Course Work?

This is an online course which you take at your own pace. Once you click on the enroll button below you’ll be prompted to provide an email address and create a password. Then you’ll access the course itself and be prompted to work through the lessons.

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The cost for this course is £49.00 (USD $62). You will be charged in your local currency. Payment is made through PayPal.



 
 

Your Guide

Jude Lally is an artist and writer with a background in Human Ecology who explores her connection to the land through art, story and ritual.

As an artist she is a Radical doll maker who views her art as part of a practice that stretches back to the first dolls fashioned from bones and stones – such as the Woman of Willendorf. She uses dolls as a way of connecting to ancestral figures and exploring the wisdom they represent. As a painter her work is born between the worlds and she creates ancestral figures whose images incorporate local soils.

Through Cultural Activist she draws upon the rich tapestry of her heritage offering ancestral practices such as Keening which when used in a modern setting can help to honor the grief we feel for all that is happening in the world. In using keening in this cathartic way she uses gestures of ritual which help inspire to work in creative ways in acts of resistance, working towards a restorative culture.

Her tradition is the Ancestral Mothers of Scotland which is born out of her deep rooted connection to the land. She explores the relationship through art, story and ritual around the wheel of the year. She lives in the West Coast of Scotland on the banks of the River Clyde, near Loch Lomond.