Imbas Forasnai is a very mysterious process of enlightenment. The Irish hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill would enter this visionary state of Imbas (Inspiration), when he needed to foretell the future, after partaking of the first three drops of the Salmon of Wisdom, which told jhim all things past, present and future.
J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture 1997 p60, notes that ancient *hzeng(w), to anoint the salve or besmear, lead to the word awcanem in Armenian, to anoint. In Old Irish, imb means butter and Old High German, ancho means butter, from the same root as salve or ointment. In India, ghee is sacred butter which is used as an anointment.
The Smertae Tribe in N Scotland, is likely to be named from this smearing anointment word.
It would appear that imbas as inspiration and imb as butter and the process of anointment and smearing, are somehow connected. Perhaps it was the oily nature of a salmon, cooking in a cauldron, which provides this connection with the opening of the third eye to the divine light where time and space are all one, but this is a profound mystery, which requires much future research. It may be that the cow is relevant here for its milk and butter, because Fhionn partook of the three drops of the cooked salmon by the River Boyne or ancient Buvindia, meaning white cow. White Cow was another name for the Milky Way, hence milk and butter on the third eye allowed a vision of the cosmos, from underworld up to heaven. The spiralling galaxy of the Milky Way around us, would be a vast anointment in space, some 52,000 light years across, powered by a Black Hole, at its very centre; so time and space will do some very strange things within this vast cosmic scheme. The fact that the heavenly canopy was called the Dagda's Cauldron, can only add to the salmon's brew in the cauldron, for in Mesopotamia, fish is used to also mean star, just as the underworld, under water, reflects the stars in heaven, and the scales of a salmon do shine like stars.
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