Cailleach, Ancient Goddess Forms
What follows are descriptions and tales from one old source:
n ocean form of the Cailleach is known as the Muileartach
or Muireartach. The Muileartach resembled the Sumerian Tiamat of Mesopotamia
and certain Old Egyptian Goddesses in having a demon or half reptile form.
In a well-known Gaelic folk-poem,
of which there are several variants, she is represented as one who knocks at a
door and calls upon Fionn to admit her. Although, as she approached in her
darkness, she pulled up a tree, swept off the branches and had it for a stick,
she cries in a plaintive voice:
‘Is mise Cailleach
truagh, truagh (I am a pitiful, pitiful Cailleach.)’ Demon and reptile, or
half-reptile form and in being a slayer and destroyer as well as a giver of
life. Like the mother of the giants in the Finlay Changeling folk story, the Muileartach
assumes the form of an old woman after leaving the sea and visits a house to
ask for a night’s lodging, pretending to be a traveller who is cold and
weary. She wants only to warm herself at the fire
and would be content to eat with the dogs (
B’fheàrr leam, a bhith am blàth ‘s do theine
mhóir, ‘s a bhith ancomith ri do chonaibh). The door is barred against her, and when she finds that her deceitful
pleading is in vain, she kicks it open. Then, entering quickly, she seizes with
her ‘
crooked claw’ Fionns Cup of Victory and runs away with it, having shown
herself in her true colours as a Cailleach of great fury (
a’ Chailleach bu mhór fearg) The Fians pursue and struggle with the
Cailleach:
‘Thinman (Caoilte),
son of Roin, caught his big sword and his two spears, and the active youthful
Oscar caught the embroidered skirt that was round her body. They took the apple
from the wretch.' This myth has not only been connected with the Fians, but
the much later Manus (Magnus Bareleg) and in the confused snowball of narrative
are fragments of ancient myths like the mystic apple and the Cup of Victory
from which Fionn derived his mysterious
powers, supplies of food &c.
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Like our Cailleach Bhear, the Muileartach has a blue-black
face and a single eye:
‘There was one flabby
eye in her head
That quicker moved
than lure-pursuing mackerel.
Her head bristled dark
and grey
Like scrubwood before
hoar frost.’
A variant is:
‘Her face was
blue-black of the lustre of coal,
And her bone-tufted
tooth was like red rust.
In her head was one
pool-like eye,
Swifter than a star in
a winter sky.’
She had come across the ocean to demand the heads of Fionn
and his chief warriors, but was herself slain. Our
Cailleach acquired various names in different localities. She is Cailleach uisge (Water Calleach) when
she comes from the sea or haunts a swollen river ford, waiting to drown
reckless and hurried travelers. A Cailleach
na h-Abhann ( the river Cailleach) is mentioned, who haunted a ford on the
river Orrin in Ross and Cromarty and drowned unwary people.
n the Cromarty Firth the south-westerly gales of spring are
referred to as those of
Gentle Annie.
Her stormy period is supposed to last for six weeks, and the fisher people of
Cromarty have sayings regarding it. The Firth, called before 1300
Sykkersund
(Safe Sound) is a natural, land-locked harbor, with abrupt headlands at its
entrance, and is fringed by undulating hills. It is well protected from the
east and north winds, but part of it is dangerous for small craft when the
south-westerly gales blow in spasmodic gusts through a gap in the mountains. A
particular point below the Cromarty coastguard station, which stands on
Maryness, is feared by the boatmen, because there the tide runs swiftly and gusts
of south-westerly wind sweep with great fury. The point of the promontory is
called Heel of Ness, and the writer has seen fishermen lowering their sails as
they rounded the point
even in moderate
weather, owing to the superstitious dread of this area of danger. Gentle Annie
is deceitful and no risks should be taken.
In Cromarty the fishers have the following saying regarding the Cailleach
of the south westerly gales: ‘
When Gentle Annie is screeching round the heel of Ness,
with a white feather in her hat, she’ll be harrying the crook’. (The crook
is the pot which hangs from the hook of the chimney chain.) There is no food in
the pot because the fishers cannot go to sea. "Gentle Annie" had the
reputation of playing tricks with the weather. A morning broke peaceful and
calm and men ventured to sea, lured by reason of her deceptive promise. Then
suddenly a fierce storm came on and there were wrecks and drownings. In Gaelic
lore the Cailleach period in spring is comparatively mild, but is only an interlude,
because fierce storms follow. A sunken rock known as
Bogha na Caillich is on
the Inverness-shire coast. It is dangerous and is dreaded by seafarers. Other
rocks, already referred to, at the mouth of Loch Etive, Connel Ferry, over
which pour the Falls of Lora, are similarly a peril, although the Cailleach's
"stepping stones" and the tides are very swift and treacherous.
dangerous sandy bar at the entrance to the Dornoch Firth
is called
the gizzen brigs (Norse,
gisnar bryggja, leaky bridge). In the local Gaelic lore the
bar is connected with a malicious female spirit. The writer has heard
references to her as a storm-bringer and drowner of seafarers. The longevity of the Cailleach is accounted for in a group
of stories which tell that she drinks the water of life. One of these, which
locates the "
Well of Youth"
near Loch Ba in Mull, tells that she visited it at the dead of night, and drank before bird tasted water or dog was heard to bark.
She thus kept herself always at sixteen years of age. A version of
this story, continues: At last, when making her way to the well on a calm
morning (and such mornings are very beautiful in the west Highlands) she heard
a dog bark. She exclaimed:
‘Little knows any living wight
When mischance may
befall him;
For me early has the dog called
In the calm morn above Loch Ba.
'I had enough of
spells
To serve the seed of Adam,
But when the mischance
was ripe
It could not be warded off.'
Having said this, she fell, crumbling into dust. She lived
so long that she had above five hundred children. A prior's daughter in
Tiree is said to have met the Cailleach Bheur and asked her how old she was.
She said her memory extended back to the time when the Skerryvore rocks, where
the lighthouse stands, were covered with arable fields.
"Little sharp old
wife, tell me your age."
"I saw the
seal-haunted Skerryvore
When it was a mighty
power;
When they ploughed it,
if I am right,
And sharp and juicy
was its barley.
I saw the loch at
Balefuill
When it was a little
round well,
Where my child was
drowned,
Sitting in its
circular chair;
And I saw Leinster
lake in Ireland
When children could
swim across."
Beira sang in terms of
affection regarding places in Tiree, and especially some on the farm of Valla:
"The little dune, the big dune,
Dunes of my love;
Odram and the Raven's
mound
Where I was a young
girl,
Though I am to-day an
old woman,
Bent, decrepit and
sallow."
his is the late,
poetical aspect of the Cailleach, reflecting the influence of Christian
culture. Her fierceness of character is obscured and she is regarded merely as
a woman of remarkable longevity and more a sentimentalist than a treacherous
enemy of man who claims sacrifices of human life. In numerous
fragmentary folk-stories she is, along with her helpers, a shaper of Scotland.
One tells how she carried on her back a pannier filled with earth and stones
and formed almost all the hills of Ross-shire. Occasionally an
accident happened. When standing on the site of the huge
Ben Vaichaird, the bottom of the pannier
is said to have given way, and the contents, falling through the opening,
produced the hill, which owes its great height and vast extent of base to the
accident.
The eminence known as
Little Wyvis was similarly formed while one of her assistants was leaping
across a valley. It is told that when the Cailleach was constructing a bridge
across the Sound of Mull, commencing at the Morvern side, the strap of her
creel, filled with stones, snapped suddenly and the contents of the creel formed
the cairn called in Gaelic
Càrn na
Caillich. "She intended to put chains across the Sound of Islay to
prevent the passage of ships that way, and the stones are pointed out on the
Jura side, to which the chains were to be secured." Other are:
Beinn na Caillich, a hill in Kildalton
parish, Islay, is called. after her, and a furrow down its side, called
Sgrhb na Caillich, was made by her as
she slid down in a sitting posture. In the parish of Strathlachlan and Strachur
in Cowal, Argyllshire, there is also a hill called after her,
Beinn Chailleach Bheur. In the
eighteenth century Statistical Account of this parish, the Cailleach is
referred to as
the Old Wife of Thunder. She is reputed to be a
leaper from hill to hill and one who could command terrific thunder and
desolating deluges at pleasure and hence the dreadful apprehensions of
incurring her ire that generally prevailed. Although some think that the
parish minister of Strathlachlan and Strachur was mistaken in connecting the
Cailleach with thunder, we find that the poet William Dunbar, who was familiar
with her cantrips as a hill-shaper, &c., in Lothian, also refers to her as
the source of thunder- storms. He makes her the wife of Fionn the giant, and
writes:
"Scho spittit Lochlomond with her lippis;
Thunner and fyreflaucht (lightning) flew fra hir
hippis."
When she "wald
rift" the heaven "rerdit" (roared).
Dunbar pictures her
wading into the Spanish sea "with her sark lape (tucked up). J. G.
Campbell quotes a Gaelic poem with regard to a mountain loch in Mull, called
Crù-lochan (horse-shoe lakelet), reputed to be "the deepest loch in the
world". Cailleach Bheur says:
"The great sea reached my knee
And the horse-shoe tarn reached my haunch."
A well-known Highland
folk-tale is devoted to the Cailleach who came in a dark cloud from Lochlann
and threw down fire-balls or thunder-bolts which set on fire the forests of
Scotland.
here are likewise folk-stories of our Cailleach as an inhospitable
woman. She is visited by a man who wishes to reside for the night, and she
gives him the head of one of her sheep to singe and then endeavours to deprive
him of a share of it when it is cooked. But the man outwits her in a bardic
contest. Stories of this type were evidently of comparatively late literary
development in the ceilidhs. They emphasize the meanness of the food-denying
winter deity and the cleverness of men who make use of poetic charms. In one of
the stories a man named William declared he would compel her to give him
lodgings and food. On entering her house she asked him his name, and he said it
was "William Sit-Down". She repeated his name and he said: "Why
should I not sit down when the mistress of the house asks it?" He there upon sat down. After some lively passages he tricked her into giving him not
merely a meal, but the whole meal. This type of story is of considerable
antiquity. Odysseus in the Odyssey (Book IX) tricks the one-eyed Cyclops by
giving his name as "No-man". In various Gaelic folk-stories a fairy
is similarly deceived by a man who gives his name as "Me Myself" or,
as "Mysel'-and-Mysel".
n the development of the William Sit-Down
narrative, it is obvious that other popular tales were drawn upon in the
ceilidhs. Our Cailleach Bheur and her assistants are evidently prominent
figures in an imported mythology. In some respects, as has been shown, the
chief Cailleach resembles the primitive
Artemis of Greece. The view that she
was merely a "deer goddess" ignores her associations with swine,
goats, sheep, wolves, birds and fish as well as deer, her connexions with trees
and plants, with mountain wells, rivers, lochs, marshes and the ocean, with
tempests and thunder and with hills, rocks, cairns, boulders and standing
stones.
n outstanding
attribute is her druidic hammer or wand, which cannot be accounted for by any
deer connexion. We gather from the folk-tales that it may be taken from her and
that when she suffers loss of it she is powerless. There may have been a myth
explaining how she recovered her wand after she emerged from her boulder, but,
if so, it has been lost. The standing stones on Craigmaddy Moor between Glasgow
and Milngavie are
the Auld Wife's Lifts. As Finlay Changeling
wields the hammer or wand for a time, so may have the Cailleach's son who
"put out" her eye, apparently by making use of it. We seem to detect
a memory of some old ritual in a curious dance known in Gaelic as
Cailleach an Dùdain (Cailleach of the mill-dust),
which may throw light on this aspect of the problem. It is performed by a man
and a woman and the man grasps in his right hand a wand known as the
slachdan druidheachd (druidic
wand) or
slachdan geasachd
(magic wand).
The man
and the woman, gesticulate and attitudinize before one another, dancing round
and round, in and out, crossing and recrossing, changing and exchanging
places. When the man touches the woman's head with the wand she falls at
his feet as if dead. He laments over her, dancing and gesticulating. He
then lifts up her left hand and, looking into the palm, breathes upon it and
touches it with the wand. Immediately the limp hand becomes alive and moves
from side to side and up and down. The man rejoices and dances round the figure
on the floor. And, having done the same to the right hand, and to the left and
right foot in succession, they also became alive and move. But, although the
limbs are living, the body is still inert. The man kneels over the woman and
breathes into her mouth and touches her heart with the wand. The woman comes to
life and springs up, confronting the man. Then the two dance vigorously and
joyously as in the first part. The tune varies with the varying phases of the
dance.
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Magic hammers were wielded by Greek satyrs apparently in
connexion with the raising from the earth of Pandora as Ge, the earth goddess. An Armenian myth tells that
Christ descended from the sky with a golden hammer. He smote the earth and
evoked the virgin church. Our Cailleach cannot now be connected with any
particular people who entered Scotland, and there is certainly no justification
for confining her to the Caledonians. It is extremely hazardous to assume that
she reflects an ancient state of society in Scotland in which woman was
supreme. Although the Picts, for instance, recognized descent by the
female line, no woman's name appears in the lists of Pictish rulers. There is
really nothing in the Cailleach stories to justify the view that they reflect a struggle between matriarchy and patriarchy. Some regards the
Cailleach stories as fragments of nature myths imported from
Norway. There can be no doubt that the deity had a calendar significance in her
association with the storms of winter and spring and that she was connected
with the sea and the mountains. But this theory fails to account for all the
attributes of the complex Cailleach. The theory of Norse borrowing is far from
convincing. Even the Norse material cannot be regarded as merely a collection
of nature myths. Weather controlling was only one of the activities of the
Cailleach.
ome would have it that the Cailleach was imported from
Ireland. However: The Scottish stories about the Cailleach are far more alive
and more widely spread than those of Ireland. They do not seem to have any traditions about
her in Aran.
In Ireland she has a wizard's wand with which, when herding her cows, she strikes a bull,
turning it into a stone, and she is connected with cairns and dolmens. There is
a
hag's chair in County Meath. In Northern Ireland she formed a
cairn on Carnbane by spilling stones from her apron, and she broke her neck
when leaping from an eminence. She lives in a cave on the hills above Tiernach
Bran. Her black dog gives milk which imparts great strength to a man who drinks
it. She is credited with some of the feats of
Aine an Cnuic (Aine of the hill, Knockainy),
the Queen of the Limerick fairies,
and she is the
banshee of some Leinster and Meath families, as
Cleena, Grian of Cnoc Greine, Aine, Una
and
Eevil are of other families,
there having evidently been culture mixing and the mixing of
myths. Most of the Irish stories emphasize the Cailleach's great strength and
longevity. She had seven periods of youth and was a great lover:
"It is riches
Ye love, it is not men:
In the time when we lived
It was men we loved.
My arms when they are
seen
Are bony and thin:
Once they would
fondle,
They would be round
glorious kings."
t may well be, judging from the late character of the Irish
material, that the drift of lore regarding her was from Scotland to Ireland
rather than from Ireland to Scotland. She plays no part in Danann myth and, she
is not mentioned in Cormac's glossary or in
Cóir
Anmantt, which contains the most ancient Irish existing traditions of the
gods, nor yet in the
Dindsenchus or
Agallamh na Senorach.
n Leicestershire she has been remembered as Black Annis, who is associated
with the Easter hare hunt and has a cat Anna form. An
eighteenth century title deed refers to land known as Black Anny's Bower
Close. Her cave was in the Dane Hills, but was filled in. According to a
local poet:
"An oak, the
pride of all the mossy dell,
Spreads its broad arms
above the stony cell;
And many a bush, with hostile thorns arrayed,
Forbids the secret
cavern to invade.
'Tis said the soul of mortal man recoiled
To view Black Annis'
eye, so fierce and wild.
Vast talons, foul with
human flesh, there grew
In place of hands, and features livid blue
Glared in her visage;
whilst the obscene waist
Warm skins of human
victims close embraced.”
She is credited in the local folk-lore with devouring lambs
and young children. Like Cailleach Bheur, she has a blue face and only one eye.
n Arthurian romance
Morgan le Fay, it is told, was chased by Arthur, whose scabbard she stole.
Then she rode into a valley where many great stones were, and when she
saw that she must be overtaken, she shaped herself, horse and man, by
enchantment into a great marble stone. Lady Charlotte in her notes to the
Mabinogion refers to two large rocks, reputed to be Arthur's
quoits, which he flung from the summit of Pen Arthur. A rock was thrown from
the same eminence
by a lady of those days, being a pebble in her shoe which
gave her some annoyance.
fragment of the
Scottish Cailleach story of the imprisoned maiden is found in the Norse ballad
of "
Hermod the Young", which tells of the hero liberating a beautiful
maiden who had been taken captive by a giantess. Hermod visits the mountain
dwelling of this hag and is permitted to remain for the night: Resorting
to cunning, he persuades the giantess the following morning to visit her
neighbours, liberates the fair maiden during her absence, and flees on his skis
with her over the high mountains and down the low ones. The giantess
pursues the couple. When Hermod with his young maiden had come to the
salt fjord (Elivagar) the giantess is quite near them, but in the decisive
moment she is changed to a stone, according to the Norse version, by the
influence of the sun, which just at that time rose; according to the Swedish
version, by the influence of a cross which stood near the fjord and its '
long
bridge'.
n Danish lore the
captured maiden is
Sigrid, daughter of Siward. She is carried away by a giant
who is slain by Ottar. The maiden is loved by the hero, but she declines to
respond and takes refuge in the hut of "
a certain huge woman" and
undertakes the task of pasturing goats and sheep. In the end she consents to
become the wife of Ottar, who carries her away. Mrs. K.W.Grant has collected
in Rumania from a Saxon-Hungarian woman, named Malvinia, a folk-tale of a very great witch, who was head over eight witches. She was harsh to
her son's wife, to whom she set the task of washing a brown fleece white. The
young woman washes it at a brook, but old Winter took pity on her and, taking
the fleece from her, made it white. When she returned home with the fleece and
some mountain flowers, the old witch was enraged and she and the other witches
mounted goats and began a contest against all growth, like the Scottish
Cailleach and her helpers. Snow and hail, wind and rain were summoned to
do battle, but the warm sun shone out, the south wind breathed, and Spring
triumphed. The nine witches were turned into stone, and 'there they sit', said
Malvinia, 'on their goats, on the top of the mountain of Silash in Temesvar;
and on the anniversary of their defeat the fountains in their heads overflow
and their faces become blurred with weeping'.
he memory of an ancient savage goddess survives in the
folklore of Greece. She is known as
Lamia, Queen of Libya, whose children were
robbed by
Hera. She took up her abode in a grim and lonely cavern, and
there changed into a malicious and greedy monster, who in envy and despair
stole and killed the children of more fortunate mothers. Another Lamia,
the
Gello, assumes the form of a fish, a serpent, a kite or a skylark and
likewise devours babies. When one of these hags is slain, no grass grows where
her blood falls.
primitive form of
Demeter concealed herself in the cave of
Phigalia, had a mare's head and was associated with snakes and other monsters.
When the Phigalians neglected to sacrifice to her a famine afflicted the land.
She was known as the
Black Demeter. Demeter cast a blight on the land when her
daughter
Persephone was carried away by
Pluto. The Scottish Cailleach, as we
have seen, beats the ground with her hammer, thus freezing it, to prevent the
grass growing. In Babylonia the demoniac forms of deities are referred to
in metrical charms and incantations.
Labartu (Sumerian "
Dimme")
haunted mountain and marsh and devoured stray children, like the English
Black
Annis. The Egyptian goddess
Sekhet was a slayer armed with a
dagger. The mother goddess of Crete was associated with trees and
mountains, snakes and wild beasts, and brandished a spear, or a staff which may
have been a magic wand.
t would appear that our Cailleach Bheur of Scotland is a
localized ancient deity of Cyclopean type and the Great Mother of giants. She
shaped the mountains, gave origin to rivers, lochs and marshes, and had a sea
connexion; she was the protector of fish and wild animals, whose forms she
could assume; and she was connected with uncultivated trees, and was possessed
of a magic wand, with which she controlled the weather during the winter and
spring; she was an enemy of man, but yet a mother of many children; and she had
a boulder or standing-stone form. The outwitting of her by means of clever
repartee appears to be a memory of incantations and charms which protected
human beings and compelled her to render service. The Cailleach has to be
considered in her relation to human beings as well as to the calendar, and the
various stories regarding her emphasize that she cannot be characterized as
either a deer goddess or a central figure in a nature myth. The Scottish
Cailleach had many specialized and local forms, like Artemis of Greece, whose
primitive characteristics survived longer in one area than another. Like
Artemis, the Cailleach had, as the lover of many kings and the mother of many
children, a connexion with birth. Farnell refers to an "Artemis-Aphrodite
". Although reputed to be a "virgin goddess", Artemis gave
birth to children. Perhaps, like the Cailleach, she renewed her youth by
drinking from a "well of life " and was supposed at the same time to
renew her virginity.
Scottish Folk-Lore and Folk Life - Studies in Race, Culture and Tradition, by Donald A. MacKenzie, 1935.
Picture source:
1.https://funnyjunk.com/Water+witch+folklore/qLgDMdY/
2. Initials were taken from the book Carmina Gadelica vol.I and II, by A.Carmichael, 1900
3. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/58/1e/b2/581eb2c63df489e6a140b7b0ffde4d91.jpg
Nico
