Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) (11 page)
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Authors: James MacKillop
Kingship is male; sovereignty is female. Specifics of early Irish kingship can be documented in space and time. Our knowledge of sovereignty figures comes from traditional narratives, some of which we today call ‘myths’. Although the notion leaves scant legacy in the modern imagination, the early Irish were by no means the first people to envision a female embodiment of power and authority. Further, this creature, sometimes enticing, sometimes loathsome, must be won sexually by an aspiring king. The Greek word for the king’s intimate union with the embodiment of sovereignty is
hierogamy
, for sacred [
hieros
] marriage [
gamos
], although the concept is certainly much older than the heydays of Cnossos and Mycenae. In the Sumerian myths of the Tigris–Euphrates valley (second millennium
BC
), the aspiring king must mate with Inanna, queen of heaven and goddess of love and fertility, on New Year’s Day in her residence. The king is portrayed in a hymn as an incarnation of Dumuzi, a shepherd-king and husband of Inanna, who appears in a rite of hierogamy which culminates in their ecstatic sexual union. This may have been acted out in life with one of Inanna’s temple prostitutes. Early Indo-European tradition evidences correlatives and echoes of a kind of spiritual and/ or physical sexual union between the male king and divine female sovereignty figure, even as far away as the instances of Vishnu and Sri-Lakshmi in India.
Sovereignty figures – perhaps goddesses – in early Ireland may wear different faces. Not only are her identities fluid, but she may veer from being an alluring young beauty of promiscuous appetite to being a frightful, demanding crone. This pattern contrasts with the iconography of early Gaul and pre-Roman Britain where representations of
divine couples usually show the female half as a personification of plenty and the earth’s abundance. Rosmerta, to take but one example, was worshipped from what is today Germany, across France and the Low Countries to Britain; she was frequently seen as the cult partner of Gaulish Mercury. We not only know her name but we know how she was propitiated. In Ireland, there are no clearly identifiable icons, only shadowy, sometimes nameless figures from early narratives. Sovereignty may be a goddess of the land or a personification of Ireland itself, who blesses fertility, fortunes and prosperity. In the earliest narratives, the goddess of sovereignty has primacy that a mortal king must approach with timidity; in later tradition the king has a primacy that the sovereignty may threaten to disrupt.
One of several early sovereignty goddesses is Mór Muman, whose name means literally ‘Great of Munster’, the southernmost of Ireland’s five ancient provinces. Originally a goddess of the Érainn people who migrated to Ireland in late prehistoric times, Mór had associations with the powers of the sun and eventually came to be worshipped all across southern Ireland or Munster. She was thought so beautiful that every woman in Ireland was compared with her. In an attempt to historicize her, medieval scribes assigned extraordinary powers to her such as exaltation and frenzy and the ability to fly; nevertheless, she was thought to have wandered Ireland for two years in rags. She was also ascribed sexual intimacies with known historical figures, such as Fíngein mac Áeda (d. 613) of Cashel, Co. Tipperary. She conceived a son by him but, hearing voices, fled before the child, Sechnesach, was born. Fíngein died soon after. Her name survives in more than a dozen place names, notably Tígh Mhóire [the House of Mór] in the parish of Dunquin, Co. Kerry. Aspects of her persona drifted into other figures, such as Medb, the warrior queen of Connacht, Mórrígan, the goddess of war fury, and the Cailleach Bhéirre or Hag of Beare, the mythic frightful old woman of the Beare Peninsula between the Kenmare estuary and Bantry Bay (see
Chapter 4
).
The three most frequently cited sovereignty deities, Banba, Fódla and Ériu, appear in the pages of the pseudo-history
Lebor Gabála
[Book of Invasions], which is discussed at greater length in
Chapter 7
. Their entrance comes shortly after the arrival of the last of the invaders, the Milesians, equivalent both of mortal human beings and the Gaels
of early Ireland themselves. At first all three oppose the invaders and only change their minds when they can demand favours. Banba meets the Milesians at a mountain called Slieve Mish on the Dingle Peninsula of Co. Kerry, where she asks that they take her name for all of Ireland. Although she is ascribed a father named Cian and a husband named Mac Cuill, her name appears to have once applied to south Leinster, Ireland’s easternmost province, or the plain in Co. Meath that contains Tara. Fódla appears before the Milesians at Slieve Felim in Co. Limerick, and she too asks that her name be given to the whole of Ireland. Personifying the power of the land, Fódla is also ascribed a family, and echoes of her name are found in both Irish and Scottish Gaelic place names. The Milesians allow the three names to be used for Ireland, but Amairgin rules that Ériu’s will be the chief name, while the others persist as poetic alternatives. Of more lasting effect is the meeting with Ériu at the hill of Uisnech in what is today Co. Westmeath, often cited as the centre or omphalos [navel], of Ireland. She is portrayed wearing circlets and rings, prompting some commentators to suggest that she has an identification with the powers of the sun. After Ériu tells the Milesians that Ireland is the fairest of all lands under the sun and that the Milesians are the most perfect race the world has ever seen, the poet Amairgin promises her that the country will bear her name. Indeed, the Modern Irish name for the Republic of Ireland, Éire, is derived from Ériu, as is the anglicization Erin. An annual fair at Uisnech that continued into early modern times was attributed to Ériu.
Ériu appears to be portrayed in stories with conscious political motivation, such as the pre-eleventh-century
Baile in Scáil
[Ir. The Phantom’s Frenzy]. In this the shadowy king of pre-history Conn Cétchathach [Ir. of the Hundred Battles] and his men set out from Tara and are enveloped in mist so that they lose their way. A horseman invites them to a house 30 feet (9 m) long with a ridgepole of white gold. In a room full of gold, they find a damsel seated on a chair of crystal and wearing a crown of gold. Upon a throne they see a Phantom, whose like had not been known at Tara. He reveals himself as the godly Lug Lámfhota, and the damsel as Sovereignty of Ireland, Lug’s wife, who then serves Conn with enormous portions of meat. Though she is not identified in the text, commentators identify the ‘wife’ with
Ériu. Next to her are a silver vat, a gold vessel and a gold cup. She asks to whom she should serve the red ale therein contained. The Irish for red ale,
derg-fhlaith
, contains a pun on
laith
[ale, liquor] and
flaith
[sovereignty]. Lug answers by naming every prince from the time of Conn onward, although none of these names appears in historical records. Lug and the house disappear, but the gold cup and other vessels remain with Conn. The offering of a reddish drink signifying sovereignty, with unmistakable sexual connotations, also appears in other early Irish stories.
In addition to being described as sovereignty figures, Banba, Fódla and Ériu are also described as tutelary goddesses, meaning they are patronesses or guardians of the land. Many Celtic deities have the power of shaping, taking different forms, a capacity shared by the Greek divinities as described by Homer in the
Iliad
. Among the shapes they could take was that of an ugly old woman, but one still seeking sexual favours. There are two views on why sovereignty should sometimes be seen as physically repulsive. One is that the sovereignty figure can also be a bringer of death or the deliverer of a curse. The second is allegorical, on the perceptions of a young prince reaching maturity: that the responsibilities of sovereignty are ugly and frightening until they are embraced.
A model of this motif is found in the eleventh-century
Echtra Mac nEchach Muigmedóin
[The Adventure of the Sons of Eochaid Mugmedón], a story that promotes the authority of the Uí Néill, that powerful dynasty of early Ireland. The key figure is Niall Noígiallach [of the Nine Hostages], the possibly historical fifth-century founder of the Uí Néill dynasty. Before he has reached his maturity, Niall and his four brothers go hunting, stopping in a forest to cook a meal. One, Fergus, while looking for water, finds a horrible hag, black as coal, with hair like the tail of a wild horse, smoky eyes, a crooked nose, green teeth that can cut oak and green nails; worse, she is covered with pustules. She wants a kiss; otherwise, no water. Three brothers refuse, and one, Fiachra, gives her a small kiss, allowing him to see Tara and later to found a royal line in another part of Ireland. Niall agrees to kiss the loathly lady, volunteers to lie with her, and then throws himself upon her, giving her a most passionate kiss. At this the hag is transformed into a wondrous beauty, clad all in royal purple, with
bronze slippers on her white feet. She reveals herself as Flaithius, the sovereignty of Ireland, and grants Niall the water, kingship and domination over the country for succeeding generations. She also advises Niall to refuse to give water to his brothers until they grant him seniority over them and agree that he might raise his weapon a hand’s breadth above theirs.
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.
Goddesses, Warrior Queens and Saints
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 marriage 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.