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Many have described the ‘Cailleach’ as being the most potent image working subliminally on the collective psyche of this island. Why it should be the Negative Mother Archetype rather than any other form of the Goddess which describes the underlying psychic reality of this island I would barely hazard a guess. Some say it is the result of the curse of Macha, a miasma or mother-curse. Others blame the climate. I have even heard it suggested that the Tooth-Mother is always overridingly prominent on the Western seaboards of continents, due to the cultic use of the magic mushroom psylosybe which grows naturally in this biozone. The toothed monsters on the totem-poles of the Amerindians of the North West Pacific coast have been cited as an instance of this. Elsewhere I have seen it mooted that it is due to a very strong male bias in the consciousness of the Celts, which denies the deep Feminine, and is rewarded by a negative image from the repressed psychic contents. This makes a lot of sense to me because if, as Anne Ross suggests, the head was the central icon of the Celts, being to their religious ethos what the Cross is to Christianity, then already long before the arrival of St Patrick and his cohorts, our ancestors were severely cut off from what the French feminist literary theorists call the ‘language of the body’. This is not to suggest that women did not have a relatively powerful role in Celtic society, - there is enough evidence which suggests they had, - but, merely that the traits valued in women were basically the masculine ones of warlikeness, rather than the more nurturant virtues. We are in much the same dilemma today, what with women in this generation rushing pell mell to ‘beat men at their own game’, often at great psychological cost to themselves, without our asking ourselves is the so called ‘real world’ of male authority really worth entering at all in the first place. Without wishing to exonerate established Christianity from an unmistakeable patriarchal bias it may be that the death-dealing propensities of our head-hunting Celtic forebears had a role to play in perverting the basically moderately life-enhancing qualities of the message of Christ into the particularly virulent life-denying force that has come to be Irish Catholicism. The Celts were already in their time too deeply patriarchal for them to be of much use to us in any attempt to affect the inner conversion which must be made in face of the imminent destruction of this planet.
But there is a deeper stratum of consciousness still alive on this island. Unlike most of the countries of Northern Europe, the door between this world and the Otherworld was never slammed shut. Somebody always kept a foot in it, whether the poet in his chieftain’s hall, or the seanchai by his fireside.
The fact that a highly elaborate conceptual framework exists in Irish to describe and deal with the Otherworld, or ‘An saol eile’, is proof of that fact, a framework that, incidently, is virtually untranslateable, due to an inbuilt bias in the English language against the validity and tangibility of this experience. Put into English this perfectly serious interest in unconscious mentation and alternative states of consciousness becomes reduced to superstition or ‘Pisroguery’ and fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden.
Happily we live on an island in which large masses of people regularly see statues leaping about the place. Leaving the sometimes rather dubious orchestration of such phemomena out of it, the event is still significant enough in itself. In spite of the mass-media and an educational system which has vowed to destroy the imagination this is proof that we have not yet entirely capitulated to purely rationalist empiricism. (If it moves, measure it!) Also, and what is even more to my point, the moving statues are all female statues. Interestingly enough there has been no significant incidence of Jesus getting down from his Cross, à la Marcelino (a film which terrified many of us when hawked around the country in the fifties, for the benefit of what worthy cause nobody now can rightly remember). Neither has St Joseph taken to tampering with anyone with his lily, or more surprisingly, given the propensity of his vicars for the exercise, never has the ubiquitous St Patrick delivered anyone a belt of his crozier. If an image is on the move within us, it is a female image, and we project outwards what is the reality within.
I take our story, like the central truths of many different religions, to be a gift from the subconscious that cannot be rationally explained. But it can be pondered, worried over, wondered at, told over and over again, and because of its deeply symbolic significance it never loses anything in the telling. Besides the fine psychological insight that it was the vulnerable man, in all his nakedness, who overcame the hag, not any of the conquering heroes, there is another level of the story which has deep significance for the times we live in. Given that such a story had a socio-political significance for its inventors, and that it was probably enacted publically in the great pulsating amoeba which was the collective psyche of the ‘tuath’ or tribe, it has still a very valid lesson to give to modern, almost post-psychological man. Just {200} briefly, once more, a rerun of the main mythic elements. A king/father dies. His daughter goes mad, becoming a hag and reverting to a wild life in the woods. She is tamed and returned to her former condition as ‘speirbhean’ by a vulnerable male, who is also a musician. He marries her and becomes king, through being her consort. She gives him four children, and was considered one of the most beautiful and accomplished women of her time.
What can all of this mean for us?
As the work of most feminist theologians and literary theorists would suggest, the only way forward is somehow to break out of the dominant patriarchal ethos of the age. For all of us, inwardly, the king must die. Then as the work of Mary Daly would suggest, the ‘Hag’ energy erupts. The too-long repressed deep Feminine comes into its own, and as we learn to come to terms with what is dark and frightening in ourselves we can release others from the burden of carrying our resentment, in the woods, in one way or another. Then a new form of male energy asserts itself in the unconscious, and challenging the hag, and uniting with her, brings forth the conscious reality of the Goddess, as speirbhean. Rosemary Radford Ruether ends her powerful critique Sexism and Godtalk with an epiphany, a powerful evocation of the Goddess as speirbhean. This is more than I can personally do with any honesty at present. having long been acquainted with the ‘Cailleach’ as an inner reality I have to admit that I have not yet personally met the speirbhean. I’m still working on that inner Harper in all his powerful dream manifestations as Enemy, Sea-Horse or Minotaur, Bull of the Mothers. But there does seem to be a way forward, and I live in hope. If it is only with the arrival of softer Spring weather that inner transformation sometimes seems to take place, as happened I think when I wrote the poem “Primavera”. [Poem follows — ‘D’athraigh gach aon ní nuair a ghaibh sí féin thar braid [...] / Everything changed as soon as her nibs passed this way [...]’
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