There is a moment in the oldest Irish texts where the word imbas appears, and the scholars translating it consistently pause.
It means, roughly, "great knowledge." But that translation fails immediately. The ancient Irish understood imbas to be fundamentally different from knowledge as we use the word today.
Knowledge can be accumulated. Imbas cannot. Knowledge can be taught. Imbas either arrived – or it didn't.
To prepare for it, the Filí spent twelve years in the dark. They composed lying face-down in lightless rooms, hands pressed over their eyes. They fasted. They invoked. And then, they waited.
What the ritual actually looked like
Cormac’s Glossary, compiled in the ninth century, describes the specific practice: imbas forosnai – "the imbas that illuminates."
The ritual was sensory deprivation mixed with deep trance:
The poet would chew on the raw flesh of a ritually sacrificed animal.
They would press their palms against their face and enter a lightless room.
They would call on the old gods to reveal what could not otherwise be seen.
The sleep that followed was not ordinary sleep, and the dreams were not ordinary dreams. The knowledge that emerged could take any form – future events, hidden truths, or the precise words a specific moment required. It was a channel briefly opened between the visible world and something much older.
This practice was so explicitly pagan, so irreducibly outside Christian theology, that St. Patrick named it directly.
Patrick declared that anyone who performed imbas forosnai could no longer be considered a Christian. This wasn't a casual condemnation. Patrick understood what imbas represented: a form of knowing that bypassed the Church entirely, drawing from a source he could neither sanctify nor supervise.
The Filí practiced it anyway. For centuries.
The distinction that mattered: Craft vs. Fire
The Irish tradition was incredibly careful about something modern culture tends to collapse: the difference between craft and fire.
Craft could be learned. The Filí’s twelve years of training – the memorisation of hundreds of poems, the mastery of complex meters, the legal knowledge, the genealogies – all of that was craft. It was teachable, transferable, and assessable. A student either knew the twenty-four meters of classical Irish poetry or they did not.
Imbas was not craft. It could not be taught because it did not originate in the teacher. The grueling training wasn't designed to produce imbas – it was designed to make the poet capable of receiving it.
The distinction matters enormously. You were not building a skill; you were becoming a vessel.
A technically accomplished poet who lacked imbas was merely competent. A poet in whom imbas ran deep could change the fate of a kingdom.
Why it became the currency
When I started to rebuild the game from the ground up, I needed a core resource – the thing bards compete over, bid, accumulate, spend, and sometimes lose at the worst possible moment.
Imbas came up naturally, and it couldn’t be a better fit.
It is simultaneously precious and unpredictable. It flows toward some and not others. It can be cultivated but never manufactured. It carries immense legal, political, and spiritual weight in the mythology. Best of all, it carries a name that sounds exactly like what it is – something between inspiration and fire.
In Filí, the game’s economy is imbas. Every bid, every rank, and every challenge is denominated in it. That design choice was made the moment I understood what the word actually meant.
In our next update, we’ll dive into the world the Filí walked in, and the delicate balance they were sworn to protect.
Ull Sande / Dániel Lukács • Budapest, May 2026
