Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference)

by James MacKillop

  Although she has many counterparts in Ireland as well as in Gaelic Scotland and the Isle of Man, the most widely known hag of sovereignty is the Cailleach Bhéirre or Hag of Beare. While her name identifies her with the Beare Peninsula in Counties Cork and Kerry, she is also linked to several other locations in Munster. The Cailleach speaks in her own voice in an early, perhaps ninth-century dramatic monologue, translated under different titles. She declares that she is not the king’s but the poet’s mistress, and that she has a special liking for the plain of Femen in Co. Tipperary. As with the hag who made love to Niall Noígiallach, she will appear to a hero or warrior as an old woman asking to be loved. When she receives love, she becomes a beautiful young maiden. The Cailleach Bhéirre passes through at least seven periods of youth so that each husband passes from her to death of old age. She has fifty foster-children in Beare, and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren are the people and races of Ireland.

  Just as aspects of the old territorial goddess Mór Muman migrated to the Cailleach Bhéirre, so too aspects of the Cailleach can be found in the eighteenth-century poetic personification of Ireland, the Sean-bhean Bhocht [the poor old woman]. An anglicization of this name, Shan Van Vocht, was used as the title of a song sung by the United Irishmen in their rebellion of 1798, sometimes dubbed ‘the Marseillaise of Ireland’.

  The story of the aspiring young male who semi-willingly has intimacies with a loathly lady, transforming her into a great beauty with his lovemaking, has striking parallels in the literatures of other countries in Europe. The most prominent is ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c.1390). At one time commentators argued that because the Irish stories were older, and perhaps also because they were less well known in scholarship, they must have been the models for the English ones. Our greater knowledge today suggests that the relationship between the Irish and English stories is not so simple. Instead, the transformed loathly lady episode is so widespread in world literature as to merit its own international folk motif number of D732. Like many things Celtic, it is a part of European and international culture.

  4

  Goddesses, Warrior Queens and Saints

  IN LIFE

  The boom in popular and academic interest in the early Celts that followed the publication of Anne Ross’s Pagan Celtic Britain (1967) and Proinsias MacCana’s Celtic Mythology (1970) coincided with the rise of modern feminism as a cultural, political and scholarly force. Formerly the domain only of linguists and mythographers, Celtic narratives now served up allusive references in popular culture; Rhiannon became a figure in a rock song as well as a character in the medieval Welsh text of the Mabinogi. The Celts themselves may have been an archaic people, removed from the centres of European innovation, but they seemed ‘new’ because they were perceived (wrongly) to be apart from the patriarchal culture that has dominated the West since the Renaissance. True, the world of early Irish and Welsh literature was characterized by aristocratic warriors in pursuit of martial honour, but there were also stories of female personae in roles beyond the familiar ones of spouse, mother, nurturer and focus of male desire. The enticing and dangerous sovereignty figures, as cited in the previous chapter, presented active, seemingly libidinous women. Deirdre, the Irish tragic lover whose reawakened literary prestige began in the generation of Lady Gregory (1852–1932) and J. M. Synge (1871-1909), became so well known that her name was revived under different spellings in the younger generation. Many feminists delighted in the abundance of assertive women in early narratives, such as Queen Medb (anglicized Maeve, Modern Irish Medhbh, etc.), who led armies into battle even as men swooned at her beauty. The historical warrior queen Boudicca, cast in bronze on the Thames embankment as an emblem of Victorian imperialism in 1902, was still on public display, now outlined with a corona of new resonance. By the early twenty-first century, there were more than a dozen volumes examining the roles of women in early Celtic religion, lore and epic, some of them polemical, drawing on different sources and arriving at contradictory conclusions.

  The strong women portrayed in early Celtic tradition should not imply that the everyday life of Gaulish, British or Irish women was a feminist Arcadia. Male dominance approximating polygamy was commonplace, with a powerful man impregnating plural wives, concubines and household servants, a behaviour persisting after the advent of Christianity. Nevertheless, physical and written evidence asserts that Celtic women were indeed seen as much more than servants and consorts. In early Celtic iconography, men and women are portrayed as of roughly the same size and stature. Celtic women in life assumed roles denied them in Mediterranean societies. In accounts other than those of Julius Caesar (first century BC), we read of female druids, who also appear in later Irish narratives. Flavius Vopiscus (fl. AD 300) lauds the prophetic power of druidesses, a capacity they also retain in Irish traditions. The ancients also perceived Celtic women to be sexually independent. The geographer Strabo (first century AD) reports on an island near the mouth of the Loire on the west coast of Gaul where the women of the Samnitae excluded men from their society, going ashore occasionally so that they might have intercourse with men of their choosing, thus perpetuating their kind (Geographia, IV). Celtic women might make war as well as love. Several classical commentators describe women appearing on the battlefield alongside their men. Diodorus Siculus, a contemporary of Caesar, observes that Gaulish women were as large, powerful and brave as male warriors. The last great Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus (fourth century AD) depicts fighting women more furious than the men, huge creatures with bulging necks who frightened the Romans with their white skin and piercing blue eyes. Some modern commentators have suggested that these and other portrayals of Gaulish amazons are but another slur against the barbaric Celts, but indigenous expression argues otherwise. Two of the oldest Celtic artefacts associate the female with battle. A pot found in a seventh-century BC grave in what is now Sopron-Varhély, Hungary, bears the incised form of a goddess with warriors on horseback. More impressive is the bronze model cult-wagon dating from the same period, found at Strettweg, Austria. The wagon consists of four wheels supporting a platform on which an artist has depicted a ceremonial scene. A female figure with prominent breasts, perhaps a divine huntress, appears with stags and armed men, hunters or warriors, both mounted and on foot. Such portrayals are complemented by the helmeted goddess on the much-studied Gundestrup Cauldron, the bronze figure of a female warrior found at Dinéault, Brittany, and others. Amazonian women also appear in the early literatures of Ireland and Wales, the best known being Scáthach of the Isle of Skye, the martial tutor of the Irish hero Cúchulainn.

  The early Irish and Welsh tell us much about the conduct of daily life in their laws, which derive from native tradition rather than Roman law as in the rest of Western Europe. Those in Ireland are known as the Brehon Laws, named for the breithem, the judge or arbiter before the Norman invasion; some precedents date from as early as the sixth century. Welsh native law was codified by king Hywel Dda or Hywel the Good (d. 950). Brehon law allowed for nine forms of marriage, of which the primary was one in which both partners entered with equal financial resources. A second form of marriage was one in which the wife contributed little or no property, and a third was one in which the wife was better off financially. A woman might marry by choosing to elope without the consent of her family. Property a woman brought into a marriage remained hers. She could initiate a divorce from her husband for violence, adultery or impotency, or for his being homosexual. Sexual harassment was punished. In other respects, women did not fare so well under Brehon law. A husband might take a concubine; during the first three nights the concubine was in the household, the first wife was free of liability for any violence she committed short of murder. The concubine, in turn, was allowed to inflict whatever damage on the first wife she could accomplish with her fingernails, such as scratching, hair-tearing and minor injuries in general.

  The laws of Hywel Dda allowed for fewer forms of ma
rriage but are in many ways comparable in male-female relations. A wife could be compensated for physical abuse from her husband, but only a husband in Welsh law could retain property after a divorce. Welsh law proposed a complex formula for custody rights in divorce: after seven years of marriage a husband would retain the oldest and youngest child while the wife would be assigned all the middle children.

  The end of the Celtic Church in Ireland, 1169/70, and the closer union with Rome, rescinded the rights women enjoyed under the Brehon Laws, just as Edward I’s conquest of Wales, 1276–84, replaced the laws of Hywel Dda with those of Rome. The extension of Roman law, with its explicit patriarchy, into the Celtic fringe of the British Isles meant the extinction of women’s rights to their own property, rights for compensation from abusive husbands and freedom to initiate divorce. This vivid and demonstrable contrast between the suppressed and nearly lost Celts as against the rigours of ‘civilizing’ English rule and religious orthodoxy prompts some modern commentators to wish aloud for a society that never existed.

  Instead of presenting us with inviting milieus for post-Enlightenment views of gender and sexuality, medieval Celtic Europe gives us representations of women’s bodies we are not sure we can understand. Among the most studied and contentious of these are the provocative, possibly obscene statues known as Sheela-na-gigs. The Irish phrase is Sile na gCioch, or Sheila (Cecilia) of the breasts, but usage has favoured the anglicized sheela- (or sheila-) na-gig. These stone carvings from medieval Ireland, Wales and Scotland depict a naked woman smiling grotesquely, her legs apart, with her hands spreading her genitalia. Faces and bodies are unerotically crude and cartoonlike, but the Sheela pose may be found in modern pornography. A recent guidebook numbered more than 144 examples, most of them found originally in churches, where they were once displayed prominently. An agreed origin and date for the statues has not been determined, although speculation has not been wanting. They may be borrowed from French Romanesque depictions of the sin of lust, meant as a warning to the faithful. Such a portrayal would be congruent with a dictum of the early Christian theologian Tertullian (second-third century) that the entrance to hell lies between the legs of a woman. Or the Sheelas may have been fertility figures, used as cures for barrenness. Recent feminist commentators have asserted that the Sheela-na-gigs are reminders of the primal earth mother whose role over life and death predated Christianity. Whatever their meaning, their survival testifies that the scribes and storytellers who kept medieval Irish and Welsh narratives alive, as well as the audiences for them, were exposed to images of the feminine that were not of mothers, consorts, virgins, saints or martyrs.

  MOTHERS, PARTNERS AND HEALERS

  Marija Gimbutas in Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974, 1982) posits the existence of a Neolithic mother goddess, whose persona reappears in later tradition. Readers of classical mythology encounter names for the great mothers early in their study. Hesiod’s story of the origin of the cosmos (c.700 BC) begins with a female deity, Ge (or Gaia, Gaea), whose cult all but merges with that of another earthly mother Themis. Ge or Ge-Themis is then succeeded by Rhea the Titaness, and Rhea by Hera the Olympian. Each of these remains maternal while initiating momentous action. Ge, for example, creates her own consort, Uranus, the sky deity, and later conspires with her son Cronus to overthrow Uranus, allowing Cronus to become ruler of the Titans.

  The surviving evidence does not suggest there was ever a Celtic deity of such magnitude. Instead of one mother, there were many. In Britain alone at least fifty dedicatory inscriptions and images relating to a mother-goddess cult have been uncovered, with even more examples from what is today Burgundy in eastern France and the Rhineland of Germany. Mother deities are depicted in statues both singly and in triads, usually seated, accompanied by a child, often a male child nursing. They may also be associated with symbols of abundance such as animals, fruit, bread or cornucopias. Such early divinities rarely have names. The Matroniae Aufuniae (second century AD), seen with baskets of fruit, are found at what is now Bonn, Germany. The goddess of the Marne, Matrona (see Chapter 1), has maternal associations as her name suggests. She was also worshipped in Britain where Marnian immigrants settled. Matrona is the apparent source for the Welsh Modron, mother of the abducted child Mabon in the eleventh-century Welsh story of Culhwch and Olwen (see Chapter 13). Modron may have been transformed into the early Christian Saint Modrun, patroness of churches in Wales, Cornwall and Brittany, conventionally represented as a fleeing woman with a small child in her arms.

  Neither is there a Ge, Rhea or Hera from early Irish and Welsh narrative. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the goddess Danu, known only from the genitive form of her name in Tuatha Dé Danann [people of the goddess Danu], has no dramatic character of her own. She is tantalizingly close to Ana/Anu, a leading goddess of pre-Christian Ireland whose name appears to be commemorated in Kerry’s breast-shaped hills, Dá Chich Anann [the Paps of Ana], an identification that cannot be proved. The Welsh counterpart of Ana and Danu is Dôn, whose name is alluded to frequently in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi (see Chapter 13). She is married to the ancestor deity Beli Mawr, whose name is less often cited than hers. Her five children, Arianrhod, Gwydion, Gilfaethwy, Gofannon and Amaethon, embody the forces of light and good in their conflict with the more malevolent Children of Llŷr. But Dôn only influences rather than dominates action.

  There is no Celtic patroness of marriage, ancient or medieval, and there is no indication of there ever having been a cosmic marriage between earth and sky as one finds in Greece and Egypt. Something approaching a figurative divine marriage arises with the numerous ancient goddesses who are always seen with male cult-partners of comparable stature. Their portrayal does not pretend the semblance of a domestic life, and the divine couples often lack attributed offspring. Miranda Green has observed (1995) that many of these divine pairings follow a cultural pattern: an intrusive Roman god marries an indigenous deity with Celtic attributes. The Gaulish goddess known by the Latin name Rosmerta [good purveyor, great provider], whose cult stretched from what is today Germany to Britain, is usually linked with Gaulish Mercury. Images of fertility and prosperity, possibly including a bucket for dairy products, adorn her statues. She may also be a patroness of fertility and motherhood. Even though her iconography often resembles that of the Roman goddess Fortuna, and she sometimes assumes aspects of Mercury himself, Rosmerta’s worship indicates she is an indigenous deity whose name alone is Roman. Her cult partner, Gaulish Mercury, another native god given a conqueror’s name (see Chapter 2), adopts the caduceus and purse of Roman Mercury and looks like his Roman namesake; Roman Mercury, however, never had a cult partner.

  Nantosuelta and Sucellus are two more Gaulish deities with Romanized names; hers means ‘meandering stream’ and his ‘good striker’. They are often seen together, the best known example being a stone relief found at Sarrebourg, near Metz, France. As tall as her mate, with long flowing hair adorned with a diadem, Nantosuelta is fair of face and noticeably younger than Sucellus. In her right hand she holds a dish over an altar, while with her upraised left she grasps a long pole on which is perched what looks like a small house. What all these might signify is not clear, just as there is little agreement about what is implied in the long-handled hammer in Sucellus’s left upraised arm. Although they are commonly associated, sometimes accompanied by motifs of ravens and beehives, both Nantosuelta and Sucellus might also appear singly in shrines in both Gaul and Britain.

  Other surviving votive figures of divine couples do not always carry names or distinguishing iconographic motifs. Among those we can name is the Gaulish healing goddess Sirona [divine star(?)], often paired with Apollo in his guise as the spring deity Apollo Grannus. Sirona usually bears reminders of fertility, such as eggs, fruit and edible grain; she may have a serpent circling her arm and a diadem upon her head. Another Gaulish healing goddess Damona [‘great’ or ‘divine cow’], also portrayed with edible grain and a serpent circling her hand, is usually seen with a
male healer, Borvo. Worshipped very widely, Borvo is also known as Bormo and Bormanus; when he is known as Bormanus (indicative of bubbling water), his cult partner bears a doublet of his own name, Bormana. The polyandrous Damona, meanwhile, may also be seen with Apollo Moritasgus, or Apollo seen as a healer at Alésia in what is now Burgundy, eastern France.

  Burgundy was also the realm of Sequana, the healing goddess, the personification of the River Seine, who was worshipped at the river’s source, Fontes Sequanae [Springs of Sequana], in a valley near the modern city of Dijon. Of the many curative spring deities in Gaul and Britain, Sequana is one of the few with an iconographic presence. While not a creature of narrative, Sequana’s many representations and artefacts associated with her worship suggest a developed if static persona. She was a benign goddess. Pilgrims seeking cures left behind images of themselves with depictions of eye ailments, problems of the head, limbs and internal organs. Votive models of breasts and genitalia imply the power to deal with women’s disorders, although men appear to have sought aid here as well. Nevertheless, Sequana’s attention to procreation and the nursing mother establish a link with fertility and motherhood, pertinent to the question of why healing should have been attributed to a female deity.

  In Mediterranean culture, the power to heal was thought to be male, attributed first to Apollo, and later to his reputed son, Asclepius of Epidaurus (Aesculapius to the Romans). But early Celtic divine healers, both unnamed and named, are female. They possess generative as well as curative powers. Mother-goddesses, further, are often venerated at spring shrines. The feminization of the power of healing may have been an extension of the worship of the nurturing mother, or it may have been a reflection of everyday practice. A funerary stone (first century AD) erected in what is now Metz in eastern Gaul depicts a female figure with a doctor’s accoutrements. How many women actually served in this role is not known.