Haggis Supper
Fair fa’ yer honest, sonsie face,
Great Chieftain o’ the Puddin-race!
This article sketches an image of the Scottish Haggis. It begins with the rough notions found in modern Scottish culture. It thereafter considers Haggises in the ancient Book o’ Kāiros. Finally, it concludes with the question: Are Haggises Angels?
Modern Scottish Culture
In Scotland today, Haggises are a fantastical bardic joke to entertain our motherland’s many tourists. In the everyday imagination, they are roughly depicted as fat, furry and one-legged beasts raging through our hilly, heathery and misty glens.
Hunting haggises is permitted. Nevertheless, it’s commonly considered a fool’s game and oftentimes a death-sentence. Why? Well, supposing their wits and brawn are as high above our sapien gifts as we lord it over mice, it would be perilous to stalk a haggis’s backside.
Sapien hunters have aft gone missing after sighting an alluring phantom stag or bottle of whisky.
More viscerally, haggis is the well-known national Scottish dish formed of sheepy stuff mixed with oats and so on. Haggis is best known as the main fare in the annual Burns Supper, alongside it’s fellow victims Neep, Tatty & Fire-Water.
Haggis is also known locally in the Scottish ‘Chippy’ as battered (jumbo) haggis, as haggis pudding in a Scottish breakfast and as canape haggis bon-bons.
Scotland’s national Bard, Schir Robert Burns, made the haggis world-famous in the past few centuries with his ‘Address to the Haggis’. His poem inter alia is recited annually upon January 25th, the anniversary of his birthday in 1759 AD.
Burns anthropomorphised the Haggis in his Address. His playful tribute praised the Haggis’s robust, flabby warrior frame, a fitting meal for a hungry Scot; much better than the “skinking ware That jaups in luggies”, such as “French ragout”.
Beyond Burns’ wordy & comedic Address, there is a modern dearth of both metaphysical and other bardic culture (music; art etc) concerning the haggis.
Burns’s images latently offer deep metaphysical potential. offers a terrific and precious opportunity to build upon and bulk up the Burnsian potential.
The Book o’ Kāiros’s ancient mythology fulfils this purpose. It serves solid meat to satisfy this deeper metaphysical hunger. It transforms the national Supper into our tribe’s religious sacrificial ritual in the lore of the Haggis Cynd-Ribeye’s tale.
Beyond the wurd (written & oral), there may be lost historical music and art pertaining to the Haggis. Rather than seeking to discover dusty vestiges of these potentially hidden treasures, we must draw out the subliminal culture embedded within our national, imaginative subconscious.
I hope that talented musicians and artists shall draw upon the metaphysical & literary sub-structure of Kāiros for material to inspire beautiful creations devoted to the beloved haggis.
Kāiros
The ancient mythological tales in the Book o’ Kāiros possess rich metaphysical content vis a vis the Haggis. Haggises appear frequently in the faery tales of Cwir the Kwackie and Gellie, then scantly in the pseudo-historical tales, most notably the prehistoric chronicles. The Kāirosian tales suggest a predominant preference for the Caledonian forest in later Scottish pseudo-historical tales.
Haggises are an angelic species originating within the angelic world of Poynde, created by the thistly faery-spirit Kachit. In Cwir, they are described as stocky, brown-furred and four-legged spirits. Bear-like heads, wee tails, glinting eyes with giant fangs.
The mischievous and crabbit Cynd-Ribeye is most memorable in Kāiros. Haggises conceive bairns by headbutting each other, playing upon the Scottish Glasgow-Kiss. The one-leggedness of Cynd derives from a macabre encounter during his sojourn in the world of Mylk.
Cynd-Ribeye is best-known for heroically incarnating the Deo Gratias (‘Thanks be to God’) concept in Gellie. No spoilers on Cynd’s heroic deed.
Deo Gratias is the idea that the root of rationality/morality is gratitude to God. So, the mysterious ontological praise of God in prayer kindles ethical thinking and action.
For, if one is grateful to God for the gifts of creation and sustenance, one is motivated to abide by the His laws, the rational purpose of one’s powers. One will even accept the loss of happiness if the trewth demands it.
For the deepest motivation and meaning for existence is an ontological, relational respect, not necessarily tasting one’s own happiness.
If ungrateful, one is not motivated by relational respect, or at least not as much. To that degree, one seeks happiness away from relational adherence to God, in some creature.
This is the Genesisian sin. When one’s eyes are not firmly fixed on respect for God, the allure of certain pleysures can cause one to ‘play God’. This ‘playing God’ is reconceptualising the rational order in a manner which rationalises the irrational plucking of a pleysurable fruit. One’s eyes close to God – and open to God and self in one’s false images.
Much depends here upon a definition of Trewth/Reason, the subject of another article.
Are Haggises Angels?
The Kāirosian tales conceives of Haggises as angels in Thomistic-Christian terms.
However, the precise position of the Haggis species within the loose ideas of the Dionysian hierarchy is unknown.
However, since angels (the lowest order) typically minister on earth and since haggises have ostensibly settled upon earth continually in apparitional guise throughout human history, they are probably a sub-species of angels, operating beneath the Archangel and Principality species.
Can we pray to Haggises as friends? No.
Haggises are merely a human symbol which has been used by the author in Kāiros to express metaphysical ideas of angels, both in their own worlds and in human society.
Angelological musings over Christian revelatory sources analyses human ideas dressed within human words, to give us a rough human idea of an ineffable creature. Angels are ineffable because they are immaterial. Humans do not possess the angelic nature – whatever that is – to grasp angels as angels know themselves.
According to these principles, the Haggises are useful as rhetorical means to contemplating truth – and hopefully incarnating it properly in one’s prudential case.
