Celtic Myth in the 21st Century

The Gods and their Stories in a Global Perspective

Emily Lyle

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786832054
• eBook ISBN: 9781786832078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

This wide-ranging book contains twelve chapters by scholars who explore aspects of the fascinating field of Celtic mythology – from myth and the medieval to comparative mythology, and the new cosmological approach. Examples of the innovative research represented here lead the reader into an exploration of the possible use of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Celtic Ireland, to mental mapping in the interpretation of the Irish legend Táin Bó Cuailgne, and to the integration of established perspectives with broader findings now emerging at the Indo-European level and its potential to open up the whole field of mythology in a new way.

SECTION 1

MYTH AND THE MEDIEVAL

1

GOD AND GODS IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY: TÍRECHÁN ON ST PATRICK AND KING LÓEGAIRE’S DAUGHTERS

Elizabeth Gray

Stories about the gods of pagan Ireland lie barely below the surface of Tírechán’s account of the meeting between Patrick and two daughters of King Lóegaire on the slopes of Cruachan.1 Composed in the second half of the seventh century, Tírechán’s description of St Patrick’s missionary travels establishing churches that will form his patrimony reflects contemporary claims by Armagh and by leading branches of the Uí Néill that placed much of Ireland under the actual or aspirational control of an intertwined spiritual and secular aristocracy. The passages under consideration here include an extended anecdote describing the conversion of the sisters, fair-haired Ethne and red-haired Fedelm, and an earlier reference to efforts by the girls’ druid foster fathers to keep Patrick away from their charges.2

To prevent Patrick from entering Mag Aí, lest he influence the girls to ‘make the ways of the holy man their own’, the girls’ druid foster fathers had generated darkness and fog that took Patrick and his bishops three days of fasting and prayer to disperse.3 Resuming his missionary journey, Patrick reaches the well of Clebach before sunrise, where he and his companions are met by the king’s daughters, arriving there to wash. Ethne and Fedelm do not know ‘whence they were or of what shape or from what people or from what region’.4 The sisters’ first thought, Tírechán tells us, is that Patrick and his companions are men of the síd (viros side), ‘men of the otherworld’, or alternatively, in Latin, ‘of the earthly gods’ (aut deorum terrenorum).5 The girls also consider a third possibility, that what they see is an ‘apparition’ (fantassiam).6

Aware that the strangers may be deities, the girls address Patrick, their first words seeking literally to place him: ‘Whence are you and whence have you come?’7 To know who and what the strangers are, the sisters ask a double question that offers Patrick the opportunity to identify his country and people of origin as well as the starting point for his journey to Cruachan. Ethne and Fedelm are not simply curious. They need information to know how they should respond to the strangers, whatever they might be. Personal identity and legal standing in the early Irish context depended upon an individual’s territorial origin and family affiliation.8 Status influenced the style and quality of clothing as well as hairdressing and personal ornaments – Patrick and his bishops would be wearing the unfamiliar Christian tonsure, and perhaps unfamiliar garments.9 To recognise a stranger’s shape is both to see the physical person clearly and to understand the significance of what one sees. Identity in these terms, once established, determines appropriate interpersonal behaviour.

Patrick’s failure to reply to the sisters’ questions is significant for the tale’s fundamental strategic contrast between pagan and Christian perspectives. As narrator, Tírechán indicates what his pagan characters – the two princesses and their druid foster fathers – are thinking, while Patrick is known solely through his words and deeds. While the girls wonder silently about Patrick’s possible supernatural status, Patrick, directing attention away from whatever the girls may suppose, proclaims his ‘true God’ as the appropriate object of their devotion. In the parallel version of this encounter in the later Vita Tripartita , the girls ask Patrick directly whether he and his company are from the síd, from the gods.10 He does not reply there either.

For these two princesses, fostered by druids, the realm of the gods is not unfamiliar territory. Ethne’s rapid-fire questions to Patrick about his God document her fifth-century beliefs about the deities she knows – as imagined by Tírechán in the seventh century.11

The first maiden said: ‘Who is God and where is God and whose God is he and where is his dwelling-place? Has your God sons and daughters, gold and silver? Is he ever-living, is he beautiful, have many fostered his son, are his daughters dear and beautiful in the eyes of the men of the earth? Is he in the sky or in the earth or in the water, in rivers, in mountains, in valleys? Give us an account of him; how shall he be seen, how is he loved, how is he found, is he found in youth, in old age?’12

Irish society was still in the process of integrating elements of its cultural inheritance into a new Christian order. Druids, for example, retained legal status and were entitled to sick maintenance equal to that of a bóaire, the free landholder whom Fergus Kelly compares to the twentieth-century Irish ‘strong farmer’, a person of wealth and standing in his community, although well below the rank imagined by Tírechán, whose fifth-century druids serve as advisers of kings and fosterers for royal children.13

What can we learn from Patrick’s dialogue with Lóegaire’s daughters about Tírechán’s imagined pre-Christian world of belief? First, it is polytheistic and preliterate. For the sisters, there are many gods, not one, and Ethne’s questions reflect characteristics of deities she knows from oral tradition. Before the arrival of Christian literacy, to know about the gods was necessarily to have heard stories about them: someone must have spoken about them, detailed their genealogies and family histories, identified them as supernatural patrons of particular peoples, and associated them with specific places in ways that mapped the world of the gods on to the Irish landscape.14

We know from the girls’ initial reaction to Patrick and his companions that gods may appear in human form and turn up unexpectedly at dawn. One by one, Ethne’s queries reveal further ‘default assumptions’ about the nature of the gods she knows.15 When she asks Patrick where God is and how he shall be seen, she reflects her understanding that gods can be located and perceived through deliberate but unspecified human actions. In asking the location of God’s dwelling-place, she indicates that specific sites can be identified as the abode of deities. That individuals or peoples claim certain gods as their own particular gods is implied by her question ‘whose God is he?’16

Among themselves the gods’ relationships are intimate and familial, and like mortal parents they are concerned about the upbringing of their sons and daughters. They foster their many children in other households, a practice that in early Irish society created networks of personal and familial ties and produced strong emotional and contractual bonds among the families in question.17 The gods have great wealth in precious metals, both silver and gold. Young or old in appearance, they may be both beautiful and immortal.

Ethne expects a god’s son to have many fosterers, although she does not indicate whether they might include human families.18 That possibility appears in later literature: one version of the birth tale of Cú Chulainn, identified as a son of the god Lug, features competition among leading Ulster nobles to serve as Cú Chulainn’s foster parents that results in a multitude of fosterers, a matter of boasting for him when he woos his wife Emer.19 As Edel Bhreathnach points out, ‘Royal dynasties depended on fosterage to build alliances, and in many cases multiple fosterages of royal families were effective in creating networks of alliances.’20 Such advantages were evidently not lost on Ethne’s gods, their practice of multiple fosterage underscoring their ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Celtic Myth in the 21st Century: Jonathan M. Wooding, Series Editor
• Section 1: Myth and the Medieval
• Section 2: Comparative Mythology
• Section 3: The new Cosmological Approach
• Bibliography