The Great Queens: The Morrigan to Cathleen ni Houlihan

by Rosalind Clark

Though men dominated early Irish society, women dominated the supernatural. Goddesses of war, fertility, and sovereignty ordered human destiny. Christian monks, in recording the old stories, turned these pagan deities into saints, like St Brigit, or into mortal queens like Medb of Connacht. The Morrigan, the Great Queen, war goddess, remains a figure of awe, but her pagan functions are glossed over. She perches, crow of battle, on the dying warrior CuChulainn’s pillar stone, but her role as his tutelary deity, and as planner and fomentor of the whole tremendous Tain, the war between Ulster and Connacht, is obscured.

Unlike the Anglo-Irish authors who in modern times treated the same material in English, the good Irish monks were not shocked by her sexual aggressiveness. They show her coupling with the Dagda, the ‘good god’ of the Tuatha De Danann before the second battle of Mag Tuired, but they conceal that this act – by a goddess of war, fertility and sovereignty – gives the Dagda’s people victory and the possession of Ireland. Or they reduce the sovereignty to allegory – when Niall of the Nine Hostages sleeps with the Hag she is allegorical of the trials of kingship! With the English invasion and colonization, the power of the goddesses diminishes further.

The book shows the fall in status of the pagan goddesses, first under medieval Christianity and then under Anglo-Irish culture. That this fall shows a loss in the recognition of the roles of women seems evident from the texts. This human loss only begins to be restored when, presiding over the severed heads in Yeats’s The Death of Cuchulain, the Morrigu declares, ‘I arranged the Dance.’

Genres: Nonfiction, Mythology, Paganism, Irish Literature, Ireland

277 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Mesoscope · Rating 5 out of 5]

The history and mythology of Ireland is the story of layers. By the time the first myths and legends were written down in the sixth century, at least three major cultures had already ruled the island - the Neo- and Mesolithic peoples who had initially settled the island, and who built Newgrange; the Indo-European Celts who invaded in the first millennium BCE; and the Christian missionaries from the mainland led by Saint Patrick.

From the old Celtic tales we can try to extrapolate knowledge of all three. For example, we suspect (but do not know) that many of the prominent women and female Sidhe in Irish literature, such as Medb, Badb, or Morrigan, may be remnants of neolithic goddesses.

Religious symbols tend to be extremely resistant to modification or deletion in certain structural respects, so the goddess offers a wonderful window into the prehistoric past. By tracing her evolution throughout historical time, we see how she continues to evolve and unfold, reflecting the new values and priorities of new social orders.

The primary subject of Clark's book study is the Morrigan, a complex lady of the Tuatha de Danann who appears in key episodes of early Irish literature such as "The Cattle Raid of Cooley" and "The Second Battle of Magh Tuireadh." The Morrigan links several important motifs within her person, including the sovereignty of the land, fertility, battle, and death. In her trifold aspect she may appear as a young maid, a sexually powerful woman, and an old crone.

Because the Morrigan is a complex, morally-ambiguous figure who incorporates both positive and negative qualities, Christian authors were unable to easily assimilate her into sainthood (as with the goddess Bridget) or euhemerize her into a human queen or noble (as with Medb). She is therefore a unique candidate for examining the goddess in Irish history, as she appears in the earliest literature in less-adulterated form than her sisters.

Clark traces her evolution forward in time, as her sexual aspect is unceremoniously extirpated from various accounts, not only by pious Christian scribes, but by the authors of the Irish Renaissance as well, including Lady Gregory and Yeats, who were apparently equally inhibited about such matters. This prudery on the part of latter-day authors is a shame bordering on a disgrace, as it altogether distorts the character and meaning of many of the tales to omit her function as fertility goddess. Lady Gregory, for example, simply leaves some of her key sexual acts out of her accounts.

The goddess-figure, who often represents the fertility of the land as the consort of the king, became absorbed in recent centuries as a patriotic embodiment of Ireland as the character of Sovereignty. For example, the aisling is a form of poem in which Ireland is addressed in the form of a woman.

It was under the influence of such sublimated forms of the goddess that Yeats composed his fatuous, simple-minded play "Cathleen Ni Hoolihan," which tells the eerie story of young men who becomes galvanized by the concept of Country in this guise. The play is made disturbing by Yeats's unwillingness to fully understand or control the symbols that he dealt with - he simply accepts them as delivered from beyond, and presents them uncritically.

In any event, Clark traces these manifold guises of the Irish goddess with alacrity, erudition, and an extremely illuminating expository gift.

I was drawn to this book by my intuition that goddesses and queens are usually the most interesting figures in Irish mythology, and this book has been enormously helpful in understanding why. It was an excellent, informative book.

[Maya · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like 3.5 please see my review at Celtic Scholar’s Reviews and Opinions.