CHAPTER 5
The fourth figure to be considered in this book is also one from popular culture, being apparently unknown to members of the cultural elite until folklorists began to record the beliefs, stories and customs of ordinary people in modern times. For that reason, she is herself seemingly unrecorded until then, and so is in that sense the most recent of the sample to be considered yet; though, as will be seen, she has some medieval, and probably some ancient, components of identity. The discussion of her which follows is the most tentative and speculative of all those in the present book. She comes from the Gaelic world of the British Isles: native Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland. Her name is the Cailleach or Cailliach, signifying the Old Woman or Hag.1 She is a mighty, giant female figure of immense age, associated with mountains, hills and other wild places, and in some areas with the winter season.
The Folklore
The late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century records of the Cailleach show both a remarkable ubiquity across most of the Gaelic world and an impressive homogeneity of some characteristics. One is her considerable age. One tale from County Kerry, in the far south-west of Ireland, collected in the early twentieth century, portrays her as roaming for centuries across Ireland with her large herd of cows and goats. In County Mayo on the west coast, a man asks her about a piece of remote history, believing she may have lived through it, and it is stated that only certain animals are older than she. Another story from Kerry made her live on a mountain top through the ages, amassing great wealth and killing a thief who comes to her house. In another western Irish folktale, she had lived almost two hundred years before a young man outwitted her and got her killed in a storm; but in Connemara it was told that she survived for millennia until St Patrick made her disappear in a flash of light. On the Blasket Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, she was given an origin myth by the 1930s as being a once-beautiful woman who was doomed never to die until a certain friar blessed her, which took an immense time. Another Connemara tale asserted that her death would come, after many centuries, when her name was called three times.2 The same theme was found in Scottish Gaeldom. On the Hebridean island of Mull, it was told how she had existed since the time of Adam and Eve, living on a headland of the isle. At the opening of each century she renewed her youth by bathing at dawn in a lake, before a bird called or a dog barked, or the sun rose (according to the version of the story); but there came a century when one of those things occurred before she had bathed, and she died.3 At various places in Scotland it was said that she had obtained immortality from drinking the water of a particular well, which had held miraculous, life-giving water. A tale from Tiree had her sing of her immense age.4
In both nations, too, she was often portrayed as a giantess who shaped the landscape. In the Beara peninsula of Ireland’s western County Cork, a large cairn was said to consist of rocks which she had piled up as ammunition to pelt and overcome another of her kind. In County Mayo she tucked a male visitor under her arm to leap across a river. In the western province of Connacht it was said that the round towers which are a distinctive type of Irish medieval building were constructed by her in a bid to reach heaven.5 Various Irish landmarks are associated with her. The large cairns of the Neolithic passage tombs of Loughcrew, on the summit of Sliabh na Caillighe, the Hill of the Hag, were said to have been constructed by her using rocks dropped from her apron.6 Another enormous Irish megalithic tomb, this time in County Cork, bears the name Labbacallee, the Hag’s Grave or Bed, and a mountain in County Galway is called simply An Chailleach, the Hag. In Scotland she was represented as able to wade through deep lochs and stretches of sea. Most of the hills of the northern county of Ross were said to have been built by her with stones and earth from her pannier, and a prominent cairn in the West Highland region of Morvern was reputed to have been made in the same way. Lochs in Argyll and Mull (where she was reputed to have been the last of the native race of giants) were allegedly formed when she left the cover off her well and flooded a valley. She is associated with mountains in the south-west Highland region of Argyll and the western isles of Tiree and Skye, while a dangerous rounded rock on the coast near Inverness is called Bogha na Caillich, the Bow of the Old Woman.7
Her character was rarely portrayed as benevolent to humans. A northern Irish story had her slain by the famed band of medieval Irish heroes led by Finn mac Cumail and a worm creep from one of her bones that itself grew into a dangerous monster.8 A western Irish tradition held that children born crippled were cursed by an action of hers far in the past. A tradition collected near Athlone on the eastern edge of Connacht in the late nineteenth century credited her with sending cattle plagues until a hero killed her. Another western Irish story made her kill a succession of young men by making them compete with her in work until they perished of exhaustion. Yet another credited St Caitiarn with turning her into a pillar-stone after she had enjoyed a long career of pillage and destruction in one district.9 In her stories she is as often portrayed as a tragic or pathetic figure as she is as an ogress, but rarely if ever as a benefactress or protectress of people. Another quality which she has across both the Irish and Scottish Gaelic areas is her association with animals. To a great extent, this is hardly surprising, because the beasts with which she is usually concerned are livestock, cattle and goats, which she herds and lives off the produce. A pastoral economy was the mainstay of traditional Gaelic societies, and so in this respect she is merely adhering to a norm. Indeed, she covers a spectrum between savagery and domesticity in the Irish lore, from the wild and predatory being vanquished by St Caitiarn to one who lives with her daughter in a glen and runs a farm, or even one in Connemara who regularly attends mass at her parish church. The one from the Blasket Islands has a human name, Ana Ní Áine, and actually marries an Ulster gentleman; her only common trait with the others is that she lives to an inhumanly great age.10
In Scotland, the keeping of cows was still found in places as one of her activities.11 In Mull she was even said to make cheeses, and a rock formation on the western mainland at Ardnamurchan was reputed to be her cattle byre. On three small Hebridean islands she was said to be especially fond of fish. Generally, however, the Scottish Cailleach was a wilder entity than the Irish one and more closely associated with the natural world. Hence, in the counties of Ross and Sutherland, in the northern part of the Highlands, she was said to herd and milk deer, something not found in Ireland.12 In keeping with this partial persona as a nature-spirit, the Scottish Cailleach was often especially associated with the winter season. An epithet attached to her was ‘the daughter of the pale winter sun’. In summer she was sometimes said to rest in the shape of a grey boulder, and in places she was visualized as carrying a rod or hammer in her right hand to strike the earth and call forth frost. Elsewhere she was thought to smite the autumn vegetation with a wand and so wither it, and to usher in the cold by washing her plaid in the Corryvrechan whirlpool, which lies between two Hebridean islands. Conversely, she was also represented as attempting to strike down the new spring greenery with a wand in the first week of April, until the warming sun made her cast it away and vanish in a cloud of passion. The last phase of winter was sometimes called A’ Chailleach, the Old Woman, and 25 March Latha na Caillich, the Day of the Cailleach, marking her overthrow by spring. The spring gales were said to represent her last attempts to repel the returning warmth. In this seasonal guise she was sometimes visualized as having a blue or black face, one eye, red teeth and long tangled white hair, in a Highland garb of grey clothes and a dun-coloured plaid, with buskins on her feet, leaping from mountain to mountain and across arms of the sea.13
In the Isle of Man, also, she was known, or at least has been recorded, mainly as an indicator of changing seasons, although this was not quite in the same way as in Scotland. Thus, it was said that she went out on the first day of spring, 1 February, and if she could manage to gather sticks from a ditch the coming season would be one of bad weather, but if the ditch were flooded with water or snow it would be fine. This was a local version of a very widespread popular belief that good weather at the opening of spring was a bad omen for the rest of it. At times she was thought to take the form of a giant bird on 1 February, flying and carrying the sticks in its beak: the apparition of this creature was therefore a warning of a difficult season to come. In general, among the Manx, she had the uncomfortable reputation that she was given elsewhere, being known in the local language as Caillagh ny Groamach, the Sullen Old Woman, or Caillagh ny Gueshagh, the Old Woman of the Spells. She was said in the island to have been an Irish sorceress who was thrown into the sea to drown by her own people but made it to Man, where she took up residence on a particular mountain, Cronk yn Irree. As such, she was credited, uniquely in her range, with a gift for prophecy, and was said to have uttered a number of predictions which were cited as having come true in the isle.14
As part of her role in Scotland as a nature spirit, she shades into other characters which are similar to her in form and function. A marine being called the Muileartach or Muireartach has been classified as a version of her, being similarly powerful, aged and female. In her own element this being was devilishly dangerous, but at times went onto dry land in the shape of an old woman and sought hospitality at human homes. In one folk poem she calls on the hero Finn in this fashion, and when refused entry kicks down the door and seizes his ‘cup of victory’. Finn and his war band pursue her and kill her and retrieve the object after a hard fight. An equivalent entity, the Cailleach uisge, Old Woman of the Water, inhabits the sea and flooding rivers and attempts to drown travellers. A third of this kind, the Cailleach na h-Abhan, the Old Woman of the River, haunts a dangerous ford on the river Orrin in Ross and Cromarty, and one ironically known as Gentle Annie occupies the equally perilous Heel of Ness, a promontory on the Cromarty Firth, and unleashes bad weather on vessels trying to round it.15
That, at any rate, summarizes the information provided by the folklorists who have collected it, in Scotland and Ireland, and this exercise has followed the practice of the more recent authors in using the definite article throughout: in other words, it has resolutely spoken of ‘the’ Cailleach, save in those cases, at the end, where apparently related entities with different names or specific and qualifying suffixes have been discussed. A closer look at the specific stories collected – where the secondary sources repeat them as individual pieces of work – does raise some doubts about this approach. Some of them refer to ‘a’ and not ‘the’ Cailleach, as though there could be more than one being of the same or similar type, and indeed the tale of the cairn in the Beara Peninsula depends on the simultaneous existence, and rivalry, of two of them. However, the attitude of those scholars who have most assiduously collected the information on her has been to assume that all or most of it refers to the same archetypal being, and those who have made the largest and most systematic of the compilations have stated that the being concerned was an ancient goddess – as will be discussed in more detail later. Even when the material itself is considered as an aggregation of different pieces of evidence, one specific character recurs in many of them, in both nations, who has a suffix to her name indicating her as a clearly marked individual: the Cailleach Bheara (or Bhéarrthach, Bhéarthach, Bhéarra, Bearra, Bhéarach or – in Scotland – Bheurr or Bheur).16 It is time now to consider the earlier records for the Gaelic world, and see how far back this character, and references to ‘the cailleach’ or ‘a cailleach’ of the kind portrayed in the modern stories, can be traced. A steady descent of them through the ages would clearly substantiate the claim that they indeed represent memories of an ancient goddess, or a type of one.
The Older Records
An immediate location of the Cailleach Bheara can be made in medieval Irish records, in the form of a famous poem, ‘Caillech Bérri Bui’, commonly translated as ‘The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare’. ‘Bui’ may in this context be her personal name, and it is probable that ‘Bérri’ signifies the Beara peninsula on the south-west coast of Ireland (especially as Bui is the name of an island off its end).17 It is a highly literate and expertly composed piece of work, the language of which suggests a ninth- or tenth-century origin, putting it relatively early in the composition of medieval Irish literature; but there is no agreement on the date and no knowledge of the author. The problem from the point of view of the present exercise is that the character portrayed in it, who speaks in her own voice, is nothing like the one in the folklore, save for their common longevity. She is an aged human woman who was once beautiful and the consort of kings, and who has come to realize the futility of worldly pleasures and ambitions and to find her only true hope in Jesus. It may thus be read as a classic medieval Christian meditation on the vanity of earthly things, in comparison with those of heaven; it is certainly one on the woes of old age. The preface to one manuscript version names her as somebody called Digde, from the royal kindred of the Corcu Duibne, who became a nun and lived to over a hundred years of age.18 This would make a good fit with the linguistic associations of the name Cailleach itself. It derives from the standard Old Irish term for a veil, caille, which was in turn borrowed from the Latin ecclesiastical one pallium, showing that it was introduced with Christianity. ‘Cailleach’ therefore originally meant not ‘old woman’ but ‘veiled woman’, and the term was used in early medieval Ireland of both faithful wives and adult women who had embraced celibacy, usually as nuns. Gradually the meaning shifted to signify older women, or older married women.19
The Cailleach whom we are tracking seemingly makes a further appearance in the medieval texts, and in the same persona as that of the poem. This is in a rollicking parody of conventional medieval Christian vision literature, Aislinge meic Con Glinne (The Vision of Mac Conglinne), which was written later than the poem, in the eleventh or twelfth century. Near its beginning, a list of notable individuals associated with the northern cathedral city of Armagh includes one usually translated as ‘Dun Raven, white nun of Beare’ (cailleach Bérre bán). No more information survives on why she has this name or what her connection was with Armagh, or indeed with the character who utters the lament in the poem. The audience was clearly expected to know these things, and we do not.20 Those seem to be the only apparent traces of the Cailleach Bheara in the medieval literature, which is significant because the poetry and the prose tales of medieval Ireland are extraordinarily rich in references to legendary and mythological characters. In particular, there is no appearance of the immensely aged giantess, associated with landscape features, who is so prominent in the modern folklore. This is especially significant because the corpus of medieval Irish texts includes a particular genre, the Dindshenchas, which consists of explanations of the names of landscape features, and the stories attached to them. The modern Cailleach is completely missing from them.21 The Corryvrechan whirlpool, to which a modern tradition of the Cailleach cited above is attached, is actually discussed in an Old Irish glossary, written around the year 900; but there is no mention of her in this account and a quite different legend is attached to the place.22
Could this be because the medieval authors who wrote the literature found her a distasteful character, too earthy and pagan for inclusion in it? That seems unlikely, because they did include, copiously, other supernatural females who would seem equally unpalatable to devout medieval Christians, such as the trio of bloodthirsty and troublemaking spirits associated with the fury and panic of battle – almost certainly former goddesses – the Morrigan, the Nemain and the Badb. Nor did they shirk the recording and copying of episodes of rampant earthy vulgarity, such as one concerning the grossest and most rumbustious of the male superhumans in the medieval tales, the Dagda, which appears in ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’. It includes mockery for (temporary) impotence, a description of genitalia, overeating (of porridge) followed by copious defecation, and two episodes of outdoor copulation.23 Could, then, the absence of the modern Cailleach from the medieval sources be explained if she were a favourite deity of the common people, and those sources were composed by a literary elite which had no regard for her? Again, this seems hardly credible, because, although medieval Ireland was certainly a very hierarchical society, it was also one divided between hundreds of tiny kingdoms. Social and political units were therefore too small for a wide cultural gap to develop between different social orders. In striking contrast (for example) to the medieval French and English romances, the Irish stories do reflect situations – such as those just cited involving the Dagda – which could be appreciated by all social ranks.24
There are, however, figures in the medieval Irish literature that may well have contributed to the later figure of the Cailleach, and they consist of menacing and dangerous mature female beings who live outside of human society, or at least of settled and mainstream versions of it, and are designated by terms usually translated into English as ‘hags’ or ‘witches’. Some feature as beings that dwell in wild places and are attracted by the din and violence of human battles, and indeed incite them, so functioning at once as lesser versions of war goddesses like the Morrigan and as spiritual equivalents to the carrion-eating birds and beasts which sought out human conflicts to feast on the slain. The twelfth-century historical saga called The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill has ‘battlefield spirits and goat-like battlefield spirits, and maniacs of the valleys, and destructive witches and shape-shifting supernatural beings and the ancient birds and the destroying demons of the air and the heavens, and the misfortune-giving demonic supernatural host’ gather, eager for the great battle of Clontarf, which is the climax of the story.25 In Cath Finntrágha (The Battle of Ventry), a tale of the hero Finn and his band from later in the medieval period, ‘demonic females of the glen’ join ‘the hounds and the whelps and the crows’ and ‘the powers of the air, and the wolves of the forests’ in ‘howls from every quarter’ to inspire warriors to kill each other.26
It is not clear how far, if at all, these battle-spirits are related to the murderous females who attack heroes with physical weapons in the Irish literature. In another story about Finn, Bruidhean Chéise Corainn, three such ogresses trap and bind him and some of his warriors by magic in a cave, and intend to kill them with swords. They are described as hideous, with coarse and dishevelled hair, red and bleary eyes, sharp and crooked teeth, very long arms and fingernails like the tips of the horns of cattle. Their father is a non-human being from a parallel world who has been offended by Finn and sent them to take revenge; but they are thwarted when another of Finn’s followers breaks in and kills two of them with his own sword before forcing the third to break the spell and release his comrades. In Echtra Airt meic Cuinn (The Adventure of Art, Son of Conn), seven similar horrors attack the hero, Art mac Cuinn, in a forest at night; again, they have been sent by an otherworld ruler, this time a queen, who has taken offence at him. He defeats them in hand-to-hand combat.27 Fearsome women, or woman-like beings, using physical weapons with appalling strength, are also prominent in medieval Welsh literature. The Nine Hags of Gloucester, in the romance Peredur fab Efrawg, lay whole districts waste until they are killed by Arthur (the British national hero in some ways equivalent to Finn) and his band. Arthur and his men are pitted against one of the same kind of foe in another tale, Culhwch ac Olwen, a ‘Very Black Hag’ living in a cave, who fights and physically overcomes, wounds and throws them out one by one. Arthur himself eventually kills her by avoiding close combat and throwing a knife.28 Such figures lingered in Welsh folklore as the gwrach, a hideous old female who haunts wild and lonely places and is a menace to travellers.29
The same sort of figure is found in Lowland Scotland as a character in comic or satirical verse written in the sixteenth century. Her most notable appearance there is as the ‘gyre carling’: ‘gyre’ probably meaning greedy or monstrous, and ‘carling’ a middle-aged or elderly woman or wife (dictionaries of Scots trace the latter term from the Old Norse kerling, an old woman, and not from cailleach). She crops up in passing in a number of poems between 1528 and 1581, but also gets a whole one to herself, which presumably tells the story to which the other works refer. This makes her a giantess dwelling in the Lothian district of Scotland in ancient times and living on human flesh, one of whose turds becomes North Berwick Law, a prominent hill in the region east of Edinburgh. She is eventually driven out of Scotland by the royal fairy host, escaping disguised as a sow to marry Mohammed and become queen of the Jews (as befitted a monster in the eyes of most Christians of the age).30 Another creature of a similar kind is the wife of the legendary British giant Gog Magog, who is represented in another poem or ballad as creating Loch Lomond with a stream of her spittle and (in the scatological manner of these works) having bouts of wind that produce effects of thunder and lightning.31
It may thus be seen that component parts of the later composite figure of the Cailleach are clearly already present in the Middle Ages. The contest between Finn and his men and the hags in Bruidhean Chéise Corainn is very similar to that between the same heroes and the hags in the Hebridean poem and Ulster tale collected from the modern folklore. The Cailleach Bheara overcome by St Caitiarn and the one killed near Athlone are other medieval monsters of this kind surviving into modern popular tradition. In the gyre carling and Gog Magog’s wife we see clear ancestresses of the giant Cailleach who creates lochs, builds hills and piles up large cairns in that tradition, again in both parts of the Gaelic world. The unifying figure that is represented by the folklorists, however, is missing in the earlier texts, and the Cailleach Bheara of the medieval literature does not provide it. Instead, she contributes other components of that later figure: her great age, the name which is most often given to her in the modern lore, and that element of pathos which hangs around the modern Cailleach in several of the folk tales about her. Indeed, in the case of the Cailleach Bheara we may well be encountering a similar phenomenon to that already suggested in the case of the fairy queen, of a figure with an origin in literary texts who became transplanted into popular culture and naturalized there, while being combined with aspects of older beliefs. So, there is still a problem to be solved here: of how this medley, of a literary character with those originally distinct beliefs and mythical beings, became the great nature-goddess of the modern folklore.32
A Goddess Emerges
Systematic folklore collection in the Gaelic cultural province, as elsewhere in Europe, commenced in the early nineteenth century and gathered pace through the Victorian period to reach an apogee between 1880 and 1930. In the famous assemblages of native Irish and Highland Scottish and Hebridean lore made until 1900, the Cailleach is remarkable for her absence. This is the more striking in that the works concerned contain a great deal of information about fairy-like beings, nature spirits and other non-human entities which could take human form. Most make no apparent mention of her at all, and none do so as the great pan-Gaelic spirit of the later texts.33 Instead, a few refer to individual legends of the kind which were subsequently to become part of the corpus assembled around her figure. Thus, in 1860 one important collection contained a story from Sutherland about the Cailliach Mhór Chlibhrich, represented as a ‘great witch’ or ‘great hag’ who cared for the deer in one district there and protected them from hunters (as long as the animals paid her respect).34 By the 1830s the Neolithic cairns of Loughcrew were already ascribed to the efforts of the giant hag carrying stones in her apron, and this was a motif found on both sides of the Irish Sea, for a very similar large New Stone Age passage tomb, likewise covered by a huge cairn, on the coast of Anglesey bears the traditional name of Barclodiad y Gawres, the Apronful of the Giantess.35
One volume of a famous series on Argyllshire lore, which appeared in 1891, explained the name of Cailleach Point on the coast of Mull, which it translated as ‘the Old Wife’s Headland’. It claimed that an old woman had been trapped by the tide beneath it when gathering shellfish and had climbed the cliff to safety. Having reached the top, she exclaimed that she was now safe ‘in spite of God’, who promptly turned her to stone for impiety.36 In 1900 Alexander Carmichael’s celebrated collection of Hebridean songs, chants and stories, Carmina Gadelica, included two allegedly sung by the ‘Carlin of Beinn Bhreac’, who ranged the area around that double peak in the Cairngorm Mountains herding deer; they were included in a section on fairy women.37 An Irish story described how a man had used trickery to frighten away a menacing hag, called a ‘cailleach’.38 What is striking about all these references is the apparent complete absence of any sense of a unifying or incorporating figure behind them: they are packaged in different contexts, with the female being at the centre of them variously represented as a witch, giantess, hag, human or fairy, and never as a mighty nature spirit, or goddess, whose domain spanned the whole of Gaelic Scotland or Ireland, let alone both.
That entity seems only to have been perceived in the twentieth century. In 1908 an author called E.C. Watson published an article about Highland mythology which on one page linked up the various references to wild hags and giantesses in Scottish Gaeldom and suggested that they all represented the same form (though not necessarily the same being) of malign supernatural female associated with wild places and winter which could be labelled ‘Cailleach’.39 It is possible that by then improved communications within the Highlands and Islands, and increased publication of their folklore, actually was causing the ‘folk’ themselves there to make such linkages as they told tales and portrayed local superhumans. At any rate, in 1915 a veteran folklore collector, John Gregorson Campbell, devoted a short article to the Scottish stories of the Cailleach Bheara, a name which he translated as ‘Shrill or Cutting Old Wife’ and suggested had referred to her sharp wits. He identified them as occurring along the whole western coast of Argyll and on the nearby islands of Mull and Iona, and as describing an immensely old giantess who herded cattle and goats. He shrewdly suggested that she might have been imported there from nearby Ireland.40
These two brief notices prepared the way for the dramatic developments between the world wars, commencing in 1927 when a respected scholar of Irish literature, Eleanor Hull, brought out a thirty-page essay in the main British folklore journal which dubbed the Cailleach Bheara an ancient goddess, belief in whom spanned the Gaelic world. Her knowledge of the medieval sources was good enough for her to puzzle over the apparent absence of such a character in them and wonder if the sense of her as a nature divinity had developed in relatively recent times.41 As has been suggested, there is much to recommend this view, but her investment of the figure with a divine and pan-Gaelic status was to prove more influential than her concerns about the chronology. Five years later a veteran Highland folklorist, J.G. Mackay, put an equally substantial article into the same journal which proposed that the association between the local cailleach figures and deer in the region proved the existence of a cult of a deer goddess among the ancient Caledonians. He knew the material too well to fail to notice that there was no sense in it of a single being, as each district that had a mythology of a deer-protecting female linked her specifically to itself. However, he argued that they derived from the same cult, and he elevated the Cailleach Bheara into a universal great goddess, of the earth and the dead. If the influence of current scholarly fashion on this last interpretation is obvious (as outlined in the second chapter of this book) it is equally evident in his additional suggestion that the people regarded in former times as witches had actually been priestesses of the deer goddess(es).42
These pieces of work prepared the way for the breakthrough in 1935 when a Scottish journalist called Donald Alexander Mackenzie published a popular book on the folklore of his nation.43 He was a keen amateur historian of religion whose ideas included some held by others in his time, such as that Neolithic society had been led by women and centred on goddess-worship, and had been overthrown by attacking patriarchal Bronze Age Indo-Europeans; and that all cultural change in prehistory had been due to successive invasions by different races. He also, however, propounded some which were truly his own, and wonderfully eccentric, such as the belief that the whole world, including Britain, had been colonized in prehistory by Buddhists. He now grouped together all the Scottish, and some Irish, traditions of hags and giantesses described above as memories of a single great ancient goddess, the Cailleach, who had been the Gaelic equivalent to the Greek Artemis as a deity of primeval nature. His view of her was the one that went into popular culture for the rest of the twentieth century and has been the most generally accepted one ever since; the characterization of her made at the beginning of this chapter is essentially his.44 In making it, as in his views on Neolithic society and religion and on race and invasion as the motor of prehistoric change, he was very much of his age: this was after all the period in which interest in the survival of pagan ideas and figures into the Christian centuries, and in the concept of a great prehistoric goddess associated with the natural world (which had made an equally obvious impression on Mackay), was steadily strengthening.
As explained previously, both those ideas reached a climax and apogee in the mid-twentieth century, and they had reverberations that have lasted until the present. They aided the acceptance of the figure portrayed by Mackay among some Irish scholars from the 1960s onward who interpreted the poem ‘Caillech Bérri Bui’ as a Christianization of a pagan mother goddess or goddess representing the sovereignty of the land, a major figure in medieval Irish literature.45 This acceptance culminated in the second notable book to propagate the concept of the Cailleach as a universal Gaelic great goddess, which appeared as recently as 2013. It was the work of a distinguished Irish folklorist, Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, who held a professorial chair at (the then) University College Cork, and was a study of the Cailleach mainly from the Irish folk material, with some from Scotland, so providing a counterpart to Mackenzie’s now venerable book.46 It was a joy and a gift for scholars to have the Irish stories concerning cailleach-like figures, mostly collected during the past hundred years, printed in such a convenient assemblage. He followed Mackenzie’s model and treated them all as referring to the same ancient goddess, embodying the sovereignty of the land, who had been displaced by Christianity and patriarchy (we see here the influence of contemporary American radical feminist ideas) to the social and cultural margins. In his formulation she had descended in turn from the universal Neolithic Great Mother Goddess, whose paramountcy had been destroyed by Indo-European invaders. He gained these beliefs from the religious histories of the mid-twentieth century which had embodied the belief in the universal goddess as orthodoxy, refreshed in Ó Crualaoich’s case by the writings of Marija Gimbutas. He was slightly aware of the criticisms made of them since the 1990s, but he absorbed these only to the extent of accepting that there may have been no single monolithic New Stone Age cult. He then disposed of this objection as a practical problem by recycling Erich Neumann’s model of Jungian archetypes from the 1960s, in which the Great Mother Goddess had been the most important archetype for the primeval development of religion – so that the existence of an apparent plurality of ancient goddesses counted for nothing, as they were all really aspects of the same one. He then invested the Cailleach with an additional feminist significance by claiming that the stories of her underwrote and legitimized the power of women as healers and wisdom-keepers in human society. With his work, the modern development of her persona may have reached its climax.
It may therefore be suggested in conclusion that the Cailleach, as a great goddess of the ancient Gaels, is a creation of modern folklorists. This need not strip her of her current spiritual and symbolic significance, or indeed – depending on one’s own concept of the origins of deities – of her possible objective existence. Moreover, the folklorists concerned were working with some very old materials, which probably do descend from pagan antiquity: local traditions of hags and giantesses, and spirits who protected the deer, which conform to types found more widely in societies that spoke Celtic languages, and beyond them. The bridge between these and the mighty deity of modern folklore was provided by the figure of the Cailleach Bheara, who seems on present evidence to have been a medieval Christian and literary creation. Like the British fairy queen, however, she made her way out of literature to spread very widely through popular culture, in her case through most of the Gaelic world by the end of the early modern period, if not before. Originally bonded by the theme of a female being of great age, provided by the Old Irish poem, the localized stories of her blended with and absorbed many of those older traditions to which reference has just been made. As in the case of Herodias, a character originally taken from Christian literature seems to have been relocated to a completely different social and cultural context. For those reasons, it may be proposed that she can take her place among the other figures that are the subject of this book.