Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) (12 page)

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.

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.

Two spring goddesses attracted extensive cults in Roman Britain – Sulis and Coventina. With worship centred at Bath, Sulis was a native deity whose cult merged with that of the Roman Minerva, a process described in
Chapter 2
. Although some scholars have asserted that Sulis was originally male, she is referred to as
dea
[goddess] in Roman commentaries, and the much-photographed surviving bronze head of Sulis depicts an unmistakably female face. As with Coventina, Sulis patronized both eye ailments and female disorders. The model bronze and ivory breasts found at Bath may have been worn as amulets by mothers until their infants were weaned and then given in thanksgiving to Sulis for having encouraged lactation. But Sulis was also a scold. Found at her shrine are 130
defixiones
or curse tablets. These are sheets of pewter or lead inscribed with messages to the goddess filled with complaints against bullies and perceived enemies with requests for retribution. Such curse tablets also exist in the Mediterranean world, but here they beseech a healing goddess to invert her beneficent powers.

Like Sulis, Coventina’s worship was focused on one particular site, namely what is now Carrawburgh on Hadrian’s Wall, although evidence of her cult can be found as far afield as southern Gaul and northwestern Spain. A well-preserved stone relief portrays her flanked by two nymphs, which may be a triple image of the goddess herself, as she is also nymphlike. Precious tributes are found at her shrine, including 16,000 coins, finger rings, brooches and decorative pins, such as appear at sites of other healing deities, including Aesculapius or Asclepius. There is little direct evidence, however, to prove she was a healing goddess and she may have been what Lindsay Allason-Jones (1989) calls an ‘all-rounder’ goddess, a kind and generous protector against all the evils afflicting mankind.

A woman’s beauty can be counted on to catch the eye of the beholder. So will a woman’s ugliness. During most of modern literature, beginning at least with Provençal troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the reader has become used to the simple equation that beauty equals desirability and that ugliness invites disdain and rejection. Early Irish and Welsh narrative tradition presents more complex portraits. Men still prefer the company of beautiful women, but a woman’s role within a story is not complete with a mere assessment of her appearance. The ill-favoured hags of the sovereignty stories, cited in
Chapter 3
, reward most generously the prospective kings who make love to them. Similarly, the gorgeous Welsh Blodeuedd (whose name means ‘flower face’,
Chapter 13
) turns out to be a catastrophic mate, filled with deceit and treachery. We cannot know the implications of a pretty or an ugsome face, whether benign or malevolent, until we see how the persona behind it completes her role in the narrative.

A woman’s ugliness can contribute to her arresting dramatic entrance, such as that of the seer Cailb in the pre-eleventh-century story
Togail Bruidne Da Derga
[The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel]. Da Derga, Conaire and all the guests are seated when, after sunset, a lone woman asks to be let in. The narrator then pauses for a paragraph on
her surreal hideousness: shins as dark as a stag beetle and as long as a weaver’s beam; her ‘lower hair’ reaches to her knees and her lips are on one side of her head. Entering and proclaiming herself Cailb the seer, she rebuffs a challenge to the apparent meaninglessness of her name by standing on one foot, holding up one hand and chanting in one breath the thirty-two different names she can bear, including Badb. Her appearance, the assembly learns, foreshadows the fearsomeness of her prophecy that all present will be destroyed except for what the birds can carry off in their claws.

Ugly women in early Welsh narrative also appear formidable initially, but, like their Irish sisters, they are bested by male figures. The women often gain control of fantastic cauldrons. The myth of the cauldron runs very deep in Celtic culture, beginning with the great treasures from the ancient world. The extensively studied Gundestrup Cauldron, recovered in Denmark (see
pp. xix–xx
,
38
), is covered with artistic decoration that provides a kind of Rosetta Stone for the interpretation of early religion. Numerous cauldrons appear in both Welsh and Irish narrative, always with magical properties, such as bubbling inexhaustibly or offering unique powers; they are probably ancestors of the Arthurian Grail. The haggish Ceridwen, a shapeshifting witch, keeps a cauldron of knowledge at the bottom of Bala Lake in
north Wales, hoping to reserve its powers for her children, the fair-faced daughter Creirwy or the hideous son Morfran. Three savoury drops intended for Morfran fall instead to Gwion Bach, granting to him unique powers of insight and superhuman wisdom. Ceridwen then pursues Gwion Bach and the two shift shapes until she at last consumes him as a grain of wheat. The grain impregnates Ceridwen, and nine months later she gives birth to Taliesin, the divinely inspired poet (see
Chapter 13
).

In
Branwen
, the Second Branch of the
Mabinogi
, the ill-featured giantess Cymidei Cymeinfoll [W. bloated with war] becomes a personification of a cauldron of regeneration. Just as the cauldron could bring alive dead warriors, so she could create them by becoming pregnant and giving birth to fully armed soldiers every six weeks. The hero Matholwch incarcerates Cymidei and her husband Llassar Llaes Gyfnewid in an iron house, which he then burns. The couple escape and give the cauldron to Brân/Bendigeidfran, the deity later described as the ‘king of Britain’.

Of all the females with ill-favoured visages, the one who generates the most extensive lore is Cailleach Bhéirre, known in English as the Hag of Beare, cited as a sovereignty figure at the end of
Chapter 3
. Named for the Beare Peninsula between Bantry Bay and the Kenmare River in west Co. Cork, she is linked to several locations in the south and west of Ireland and has similarly named counterparts in Gaelic Scotland and the Isle of Man. Undoubtedly first a goddess, she is featured in a poem of
AD
900, where she is an old woman lamenting the loss of her youth, and she remained celebrated in both written and oral tradition up through the twentieth century. Somewhat sinister but wise, she came to be thought of as a nun in early Christian times; the word
cailleach
comes from the Latin for a veil,
pallium
. But she also speaks of having had many lovers, children, foster-children, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren; she never relates Christian wisdom.

Her physical unattractiveness, rooted in her early associations with sovereignty, never contributes to a sense of villainy for the Cailleach Bhéirre. In the earliest traditions, she is thought to have taken many lovers while young, including the ferocious Fenian warrior Fothad Conainne. Later she was linked to landforms and attributed with powers that transformed animals into the standing stones surviving
from Neolithic times. In Gaelic Scotland, where she was known as Cailleach Bheur, she had a blue face as the daughter of the pale winter sun and became a female spirit of the wilderness and the protectress of wild animals. In Scotland also she took a watery form known as Muileartach. In Ireland citations of her age became proverbial so that when people reached very advanced years they were said to be ‘as old as the Cailleach Bhéirre’. In her lamented lost loves, her crabbed promises of sovereignty to fearful but aspiring princes and her extreme longevity, she became an embodiment of human disappointment, like us in everything except mortality.