Feeling powerless? The Cailleach will set you free.
Cailleach, the "Veiled One". She is the Witch-Hag-Crone-Land-Ancestor-Goddess of the Celts.
She is a Winter Witch goddess ancestor.
In combination with Spring's Bríd, she shares the duties of caretaking the Land. They are sisters of light and dark, growth and stillness, all opposites held in one figure.
Bríd and Cailleach are not one or the other - they are both existing in wholeness where one aspect is dominant while the other rests, but both are always present. Birth suggests death and growth suggests harvest. Cailleach is the dark face of the golden beauty of youth and bloom. The return of winter and stillness reminds us of the inevitable decline.
Youth and beauty lack the wisdom earned through the awareness and experience of repeating cycles and patterns. We often forget the decline and the death in the height of increase. We forget that the wheel is always in turn and this too will pass. The Cailleach is a call to recognize our patterns and cycles and to know where we are, where we have been, and where we are going. The Cailleach holds the wisdom at the center of the spiral. The Cailleach is the opening of transformation.
The Harvest of all things.
Cailleach comes into dominance at Samhain. She opens the doors of the dark and cold and of death. She begins the journey within to prepare the ground to bring forth abundance in spring.
There must be fallow time to nourish new growth.
Winter is the time of sleep and rest and dreams and inner reflection. This is the time of stillness and listening and telling the stories of the patterns of Inspirited Land and Inspirited People and the wisdom needed to be brought to awareness again. After a busy season of growth and tending and nurturing and harvest, Cailleach's time is to be quiet and still and root ourselves in Spirit in Place.
Cailleach is the Land
Cailleach is part of the great cabal of the Tuatha de Danaan (People/Land of Danu. Danu means waters). To Celts the people are the Land and the Land is the People.
I can't stress this aspect enough in Celtic reconnecting. The Land is First Teacher in all things. Celts are taught by and communicate with and are in direct relationship with the Land. We care take and steward the land directly because we are in sacred spiritual relationship with the Land. We align in this way with Indigenous ways of knowing and being with the Land.
To rule and hold legitimate power, the ancient kings of Ireland were required to marry the land in the form of a sovereignty goddess. The goddess was personified as the Land. In the old stories the sovereignty goddess would often appear as a Cailleach; an old, ugly hag. The potential king would have to lay with the Crone to "win" her and align with the sovereignty of the land. The worthy king who succeeded most often awoke with a beautiful young maiden and the authority to rule.
Cailleach is the bringer of winter. Veiled or cowled in snow she drops a blanket of white from her apron to cover the land. The veil she wears is the curtain between life and death, from which we go and from which we return. Rebirth is a foundation in the triple spiral of the Celts.
Her veil is also the garment of wisdom that comes with white hair and age and repeated years of Being in Form. The veil is a symbol of tuar; the ability to see the future and hold vision for the cinneadh (clan - KEEN-yuhg). Holding vision is the mandatory first step in creating lasting and permanent change in the world of Form. Nothing be-comes without first holding vision.
This story is the big ask of life - can you love and accept the decline and death as equally as the youth and beauty? If you can, you are worthy of power and in alignment with the authority of Land.
The Cauldron
The cauldron is a symbol for be-coming.
It represents all the potentiality becoming real in the world of Form. It is a symbol of the source of all good things. It is the unending cauldron of Dagda that fed multitudes and never went empty. The empty cauldron is a symbol of the fertile void space of Creation before Form - the place of all things in their potentiality. The cauldron gives space to hold a new vision to come into Form. Nourishment and healing come from the cauldron. It is symbolic of Earth from which all sustenance and medicine arise.
Traditional "Halloween" Witch magic symbols belong to Cailleach. There are also associated figures prevalent in other cultures. Kali (who is likely the original PIE source for Cailleach, Valkyrie, Vila [which is the source of the phrase "gave me the "willies"], and Rusalki).
Cailleach is a psychopomp; she is a carrier of souls from Form to Spirit. This role is associated with the moon as psychopomps were believed to carry the souls of the dead to the moon. Psychopomps are associated with carrion eaters; crows, vultures, and flies all transform dead flesh.
Skulls and bones are Cailleach's domain. Celts believe that our soul resides in our head and would proudly display the heads of their enemies and their sacrifices as sources of great wisdom. Kali wears a necklace of human heads and a skirt of human arms. Cailleach is the partner to take you into the dark and down into the deep in order to return with something new and needed in your life. She is the diver into the deep of great gifts and hidden treasures.
Cailleach helps us make friends with death and accepts grief and loss and pain with the knowledge that the wheel will turn and souls return to us again. Cailleach's embracing death is a gift and a blessing. There is nothing new without taking away what is old and no longer serves. Cailleach reminds us that this is not stopping, this is not the end; this is but one aspect of an infinitely turning cycle.
Cailleach is Water.
Muireann is an Cailleach. These are symbols of active energies we choose to invite and be in relationship with. The gods/goddesses/ancestors are not separate from us. They represent energies and ongoing lineages of wisdom. They represent the inherited experience and connection to all that came before and all that will come again. This is the unbroken, shared experience of life; fite fuaite. Eadar-fhighte.
Water is a symbol of life and knowledge of the deep, dark interior discovery of the hidden treasures available to the Self. The dark forest and the dark waters are similar symbolism for the call to gather back to ourselves the hidden gifts and lost pieces of Self.
The waters literally fed the Celts for thousands of years. The seas give and the seas take away from the people without regard for person or status or role. The waters were a power of the manifest universe beyond the small worlds of men.
Salmon spawning would literally bring food to your feet. You could reach out with a net and catch as much as you needed for the whole winter. This was nothing short of abundance delivered directly from the sea by Danu.
The salmon agree to this gift given. A fundamental aspect of Animism at work is the sacred relationship between predator and prey. Required was the acknowledgement of the gift of life given willingly by the prey. The prey have agreed to be caught and consumed, as long as the predator honours and respects the gift given and uses it for the benefit of all.
This relationship is invoked when we dive into the dark interior waters of self to retrieve gifts, talents, strengths and wisdoms left behind. We honour and respect the gifts and use them for the benefit of the whole community.
I’ve been listening to The Salmon People podcast and now I’m interested in the life-cycle of salmon and their health and well-being in our oceans.
Lí Ban, Mermaids and Christian Colonization
Muireann is associated with the mermaid Lí Ban (lee-BAHN) which means beautiful woman or strictly speaking, colourful woman), the story of St. Comghall (KOHw-l) and Lí Ban’s conversion to Christianity. Muireann means "sea white, sea fair". They are both of the sea.
Lí Ban was the daughter of King Eochaidh (Oh-HEDGE), the King of Ulster. She and her dog were the only survivors of a massive flood that created Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland - right around where my ancestors come from. CARRICK FERGUS! lol.
Water gushed up from dry land and killed her father. Lí Ban and her dog were alone in the water for 300 years. She was lonely and prayed to Danu to be transformed into a salmon so she could become part of their community. Danu transformed her dog into an otter and Lí Ban into a mermaid - part human, part salmon.
The symbolism and the moral lesson of this Christianizing of a pagan story is interesting.
Nature made Lí Ban a creature of Nature. At home in the water she is subject to no male authority. She is a wild nature creature who swims in the deep dark waters of mystery and is associated through salmon with knowledge and wisdom. Wisdom can be lonely. Especially if you're the only one holding this wisdom.
There is also the implication that wisdom for a woman is aberrant and will result in “unnatural” things that are threatening to the social fabric and authority of the church. Wisdom is not a woman’s “natural” purview; neither is solitude. There is no such transformational pull back to community or punishment for Finegas or other male wisdom-seekers.
The Salmon of Knowledge is a Celtic story telling of Druid poet Finegas' quest to catch and consume the Salmon of Knowledge from the river Boyne and thus become the smartest man alive.
Alas, Fionn MacCumhail (Finn MacCool), charged with cooking the salmon for Finegas, burned his finger on the pan and put his finger in his mouth, thus taking all the knowledge for himself.
So, Lí Ban was half mysterious Nature water woman, half salmon of knowledge. She is symbolic of the wild Nature Woman of wisdom, outside the confines, authorities and strictures of men. She was "saved" by a Christian saint who baptised and renamed her Muirgen, (which means "of the sea"), which transformed her back into a woman and returned her to the authority of her new father, the church.
She also died. lol.
Yep. The story goes that she was so persuaded to be "saved" as a Christian soul that she was willing to give up her mortal form to get it. Ew. Christianity was so valuable that you should be willing to die to get it. Or... when a wild Inspirited Woman of Wisdom won't submit to your authority, kill her and tell a story of willing conversion and miraculous death.
Lí Ban was filled with colour and life and wildness, as she was. She gave up her Nature self and her wild access to the deep wisdom waters of the dark. She gave up (I question whether she gave up her power and freedom willingly) the spirit of Nature and the Inspiritedness of Land and Water to become colonized and domesticated by the so-called 'civilization' of the Church. She gave up her own Spiritual authority and connection with the Spirit of Land and Water to become a servant to the colonial authority of the Christian church.
This is a colonizer's tale.
This is a teaching tale to the colonized people. This tale encourages the colonized to devalue their connection with Inspirited Land and wild Nature . This is a colonizer morality tale to teach women what is expected and acceptable Christian behaviour in this new Christian society.
This is a colonizer morality tale to teach men how they should like their women. They are expected to tame and control (and maybe even kill if the women don't give in and don't behave and don't give up the Spirit of their Nature so easily), the wild Spirit of free Nature women who stand in their own Spiritual Authority.
Cailleach says fuck all that.
Cailleach is the energy of the wild Nature woman. She is old and wise and beyond the authority of institutions and male governance.
She governs. She teaches.
She lives in freedom and wisdom and sovereignty.
This is the energy of Cailleach.
She comes knocking when we stop being willing to distort ourselves to meet the value judgements of others.
She asks you to do the hard work of going into the deep dark waters to reclaim the lost jewels of your Inspirited self. Your lost Self is calling.