In her groundbreaking book published in 2003, entitled God and the Goddesses,1 Barbara Newman considered a number of figures whom she termed ‘allegorical goddesses’ who personified virtues and institutions in medieval literature. Among these were Wisdom, Philosophy, Lady Reason, Lady Poverty, Holy Lady Church, Lady Right, Lady Love and Lady Justice. They proliferated from the twelfth century and were all distinctive creations of the Christian imagination. The authors who wrote of them explicitly awarded them divine status, calling them goddesses or daughters of God, and Newman was quite certain that they were neither ‘pagan survivals’ nor versions of a ‘Great Goddess’. Instead, she regarded them as a third order of superhuman being in medieval Christian thought, along with saints and classical pagan goddesses, with both of which they to some extent overlapped. In her opinion, they substantially transformed and deepened Latin Christianity’s concept of the divine and represented a second Christian pantheon, generated after the saints. Their function in texts was to assist the authors in a spiritual project, and they were treated as being as real as angels or devils, as deserving of love and reverence and as being on intimate terms with the Christian God. As allegories, they could mediate religious experience not easily accommodated within scholastic doctrine, and formed an important part of an ‘imaginative theology’: the pursuit of serious religious thought through the techniques of imaginative literature. As divine figures who were the subordinates of God and the personifications of some of his attributes, they posed no danger to orthodoxy and provided a safe space within which to explore the Christian faith. So, it seems that it is possible to have Christian goddesses, and that the term is not an oxymoron.
Nonetheless, the beings discussed here are not equivalent to those who were the subject of Barbara Newman’s study, with the partial exception of Nature; and she stands out from the rest of those considered by Newman. She did share with them the attributes of being put for a time under the umbrella of Christian cosmology and made into a lieutenant and agent of its God; and like them she could be treated as an allegory. On the other hand, she was not an abstraction as the others were, and represented something far more solid and dynamic, and on a much larger scale. She was simply more important, and more enduring as a literary character. She was also the only one of Newman’s goddess figures to have clear antecedents in ancient philosophy and poetry, the only one to be invoked in spells, and the only one with enough independence and stature to survive the Middle Ages and cut loose from Christian theology again to become a part of modern culture. The other figures considered in this book seem even more like pagan goddesses than she does, but none of them can definitely be identified as such, in the sense of known deities once venerated in antiquity. They do not fit readily either into any of Newman’s other categories of superhuman beings identified by medieval authors: they are not angels, devils or saints. In fact, they do not seem to fit anywhere at all.
Nonetheless, they all had considerable emotional traction, and inspired beliefs that covered large areas of space and time. To some extent, human relationships with them overlapped the categories of those usually associated with nature-spirits. The fairy queen (obviously), the lady of the night rides and the Cailleach all had some similarity to that class of beings variously called in English fairies or elves. In that sense, they have connections to the ‘small gods’ of peoples across the globe who have had their indigenous religions officially replaced by major religious systems such as Christianity or Islam, that whole panoply of spirits and human-like beings who live parallel lives to humans, often in wild places or underground, and interact with them, but have none of the grandeur of deities. Worldwide, they tend to linger as a belief system among ordinary people when the major goddesses and gods have disappeared from their mental universes.2 The difference in the figures considered here, however, is that none of them seem particularly ‘small’: on the contrary, they do seem at times to operate on the scale of deities. Two of them had definite connections with the natural world in a broader sense. Mother Earth or Mother Nature, whether envisaged by early medieval farmers seeking fertility for their land, early medieval herbalists seeking plant remedies, high medieval scholars, medieval or Victorian poets or modern intellectuals constructing ideas about primitive religion, generally represented its more wholesome, nurturing and providing aspects. By contrast, the Cailleach, to ordinary Gaelic folk, personified or wielded the more menacing ones: winter, wild and hostile environments, the threat of predators and the inescapability of ageing and dying. Both therefore embody mental consequences of the human experience of living in environments which seem to have their own independent, animating powers.
To some extent, the same could be said of the fairy queen and the lady of the night rides, but neither of those personifies natural forces and neither indeed seems to live much closer to nature than the humans of the time. The fairy queen has a court, with royal or noble trappings, and the night-roving lady holds revels and games for her retinue and enjoys visiting houses to feast. Their social importance is that of friends and patronesses, especially to socially disempowered or marginalized humans. In this respect, they resemble Christian saints, and both they and the saints draw on the genuine human experience, in a pre-modern society, of the need to obtain the favour of the wealthy and powerful in one’s social and political world. Neither, however, is in the least saintly. Both apparently exist outside of Christian structures of authority, human and divine, and of the bounds of civilized and ordered society: they come out of hollow hills, or the uncultivated countryside, or the night. They teach magic, a group of practices repeatedly condemned by orthodox Christianity, and the names first given to the lady of the rides reflect bogey-figures of New Testament tradition, Diana and Herodias. They are profoundly counter-cultural.
Every one of the figures considered in the body of this book is transgressive in another sense as well: all are female. They are females with power, agency and authority, in a medieval and early modern world in which both heaven and earth were theoretically placed firmly under masculine control. Even in the single case in which one was brought safely and respectably into Christian cosmology – that of Nature – the responsibility allotted to her was still considerable, with much day-to-day freedom of action. Even Nature, moreover, resides in the terrestrial world and is not part of the company of heaven, nor a messenger from it.3 In their gendering, the beings considered here have more in common with Barbara Newman’s ‘allegorical goddesses’, who are likewise female, as part of the medieval view of woman as a dichotomized Other to formal and normal structures of power. Their role, however, is, as has been said, very different and far more of a direct challenge to those structures.
They also offer a direct challenge to current structures of academic debate, as outlined in the first chapter of this book. They suggest that Christian Europe, both in the Middle Ages and after, was capable of developing new superhuman figures which operated outside of Christian cosmology. These did not do so in direct opposition to Christianity and were not associated with a particular sect or faction, although they were often thought to favour and teach service magicians. They were part of the thought-world of people who were otherwise orthodox Christians for their place and time. It seems wrong to refer to such figures as ‘pagan survivals’. Though they may have drawn on ancient ideas and motifs, they appear to have been products of the Christian period and to have gone on being produced – if the characterization of the Cailleach made here is correct – in the late medieval and early modern periods. On the other hand, to describe them as Christian, unproblematically and straightforwardly, is to miss the point of how completely they functioned outside of, and alongside, the Christian world picture. It may be that we need to find a new labelling system for such entities, to fit an increasingly post-Christian society in which more of their kind, such as the Green Man, are arising, and for which the old polarizing terminology of Christian and pagan is no longer suitable.