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CHAPTER 1

The Goddess in Celtic Culture Morgan Daimler

The Goddesses of Celtic culture have long fascinated and drawn people, surviving into modern times in folklore and poetry, in fairy tales and modern fiction. For neopagans, however, these Goddesses remain essential parts of spirituality, and many modern seekers find themselves on quests to better understand who these deities were and are. This text is meant as a guide along that quest, a first step towards meeting a variety of Goddesses from several different Celtic cultures. Each is rooted in shared mythic symbolism and language but each is also distinct and comes with her own stories and personality. In the following chapters you will get to meet six of them, from the perspectives of different authors, and hopefully these introductions will be solid first steps on a much longer journey.

People often mistakenly think there is a single cohesive Celtic pantheon, and indeed many pagan books will offer lists of deities in this pantheon, although it is something of a misnomer. It would be more accurate to say that there are multiple Celtic cultures, related by language and art, and that each of these has unique pantheons to be appreciated. The term 'Celtic' is something of an umbrella term used by academics and adopted by popular culture to describe these related cultures. We might say that these different Celtic cultures are like siblings in the same family, who have many things in common but are not identical to each other. We can appreciate that the place of one Goddess in the Welsh pantheon, like Rhiannon, may bear some resemblance to an Irish deity like the Morrigan while also appreciating the things that make each of them unique. There are also a handful of pan-Celtic deities to be found who we can see guises of in all or many of the different cultures; Brighid is one example of a pan-Celtic Goddess. It's important to understand these various cultures for what they are both because it allows us to appreciate the modern living cultures fully and also because it gives us a deeper understanding of the amount of material and context that we may have for each deity. Learning about the Celtic Goddesses then begins with an appreciation for the different roots they each have within these various cultures and how those roots have shaped them over time.

Goddesses have always played an important, one might even say intrinsic, role within Celtic cosmology and spirituality and that role has not diminished in the modern era. When we look at historic Celtic belief we can find this central role of Goddesses reflected in the pattern of kings having to marry or otherwise receive the blessing of the sovereignty Goddess in order to secure their right to rule. If that king later proved unfit or ruled badly the goddess would intervene to remove him and make way for a new, better, candidate to take over. We also see this importance reflected in the variety of local Goddesses, usually deities of sovereignty for their own specific areas, and in the way that Celtic Goddesses aren't pigeon holed into specific limited purviews but could be and were powerful deities of war, battle, kingship, and wisdom. Perhaps we can also argue that we see their deep value in the way that no matter how the world has changed, no matter how the cultures they are anchored in have changed, they have found ways to survive hidden in saints and fairy queens and fairy tales. Times change but the Goddesses find ways to remain with us, evolving as our needs evolve so that they are as relevant today as they ever have been yet still cloaked in ancient power and mystery. Celtic Goddesses shaped the world in many stories, they foretold victory and success, they guarded the harvest and gave fertility to crops and livestock ensuring their people thrived. These Goddesses have always been and remain active forces in the world.

Those who seek Elen, Brighid, the Cailleach, Rhiannon, the Morrigan, and Badb will find a good beginning here. The first step in connecting to any of these Celtic Goddess is often to find out as much as you can about her and while this may sound simple it often presents a far greater challenge than anticipated. These are ancient deities, without doubt, but often their pasts are shrouded in mystery, with as many things about them that we may never know with certainty as questions that can be easily answered. As we move towards understanding who they are sometimes a good beginning will come in a personal anecdote of modern connection from a fellow traveller on this same path; other times the road may start in older mythology; sometimes the best start will lie in a blend of both. None of these deities exists only in the cold pages of the past but all are living and vital today and to find and understand who they are we must find their roots in history as well as their living truth now. The more you look the more you will realize waits to be found.

Celtic Goddesses are complex and multi-layered as you will see as you read further. Their stories weave throughout the land and spirit of the various Celtic countries and their power shines still in the hearts of those who honour them. They are divine Queens and wisdom givers, healers and prophecy speakers, and all of them have much to teach us. For some people understanding them is in understanding their past and mythology; to others the key to knowing the enigmatic deities lies within each individual's heart. What you will find in this book is a blend of these approaches, head and heart, welcoming you to take your first steps in meeting these Goddesses or perhaps helping you as you look deeper into who they each are.

Discover more about Goddesses in Celtic Culture

Elen of the Ways Elen Sentier

Elen is the reindeer goddess of the Boreal Forest, the largest forest on Earth that extends all around the northern hemisphere from the Tundra down to the latitude of the southern tip of Cornwall. Britain was part of it. The Greeks called the north wind Boreas and named Britain Hyperborea, meaning the land behind the North Wind, so we British were the Hyperboreans. I love being of the people from behind the North Wind.

The Boreal Forest is the world of the reindeer, they thrive there, and reindeer lived in the Highlands of Scotland until around 8,000 years ago when, because of climate change, farming and hunting they became extinct. Reindeer are the only deer where the female, as well as the male, carries antlers. Elen is the antlered goddess, her symbol is the antlered female reindeer, and it's prevalent all over the northern hemisphere. The earliest picture so far found in Britain is a beautifully stylised drawing of a reindeer, found in 2011 in Cathole Cave in West Wales, which dates from 14,500 years ago, nearly 5000 years before the end of the last Ice Age.

Humans first arrived in Britain one million years ago and one of the reasons they came was following the reindeer as they migrated northwards each time the ice drew back. Reindeer gave them all they needed for life – food, clothing, housing, bone for tools and needles, sinew for thread, antler for more tools and for carving into beautiful and probably sacred objects. The Sami people in Finland, the Caribou folk of NW America and the Mongolian reindeer people still live in a similar way to our Palaeolithic ancestors here in Britain.

Elen is old, old, old, she has been with us all those millennia, stories of her abound and so do her place-names throughout the country. She is known as Elen of the Ways and this title comes from the old story, in the Mabinogion, of her wedding with Macsen Wledig. Macsen is the Brythonic form of the Latin name Maximus; he was a real person as well as a god- figure as happens a lot in all our stories, a Spanish-Roman general who came to Britain and is sometimes called emperor. His title, Wledig is Brythonic and means "of the land"; it's like the Latin-derived word pagan and the French derived peasant, from paysan, which also mean of the land. Macsen's title is about him becoming a king of the land, and this means he is guardian of the goddess, Elen. One of the ways of confirming a king in his job of kingship was that he was carried to the sacred place, often the top of a hill and his foot was set in the footprint on an ancient stone. Just two miles from where I live is a village called "Kingstone" – no prizes for guessing where the name comes from; there a quite a lot of variants of Kingstone all over Britain.

She gave Macsen the job after he'd proved he could be a worthy guardian. Like all our old powers, Elen is a trickster, she tests to see if a man is up to being her guardian, good enough for the job. Our old folksongs tell this story, like The Coal Black Smith which tells how the goddess makes her potential mate chase her, to see if he can catch her. Only if he succeeds will she accept him as her guardian.

To lure Macsen to her, Elen sends him a tricksy dream that teases and inspires him to find her. If he succeeds he'll demonstrate he has the nous and the gumption to be a good enough guardian. Macsen succeeds, taking the customary year-and-a-day to do it, so she weds with him. The morning after the consummation, Elen asks Macsen for the cowyll, the morning gift the bridegroom gives the bride after their wedding night. She asks him to build her three caers, strongholds, cauldron-places – the word caer is related to cauldron – so he does. She then builds the roads, the ways, that link between them, and so holds the title "of the Ways". On maps of Wales you can still see a few physical remains of the Sarn Elens, Elen's ways.

Our old lore is worse than the Zen riddles of the sound of one hand clapping, very riddling and quite deliberately confusing. We use riddles and confusion to make students work for the wisdom, so they prove to themselves, and the goddess, that they really know it. It's like Elen testing Macsen so he has to use all his skills, wits and imagination to succeed. When we work with the old stories rather than just read them, and make the connections for ourselves, we know their deep meanings in our bones. The goddess never spoon-feeds, never makes it easy, she wants us to prove our worth.

Deep within the lore of the three caers Macsen builds for Elen, and the roads she makes between them, is our lore of the chakras and my book, The Celtic Chakras, shows you how the stories teach us about them. The three caers relate to the three chakra pairs – heart/solar-plexus, throat- sacral and crown-base, while Elen's ways are the energy threads that connect between the pairs. Each pair holds the energy of the goddess and the god. These energies twine and spiral together between the three pairs and finally come to rest, and to life, through the wedding of the goddess with the god when all the threads meet at the brow chakra, this comes about as a result of our work with them through the stories.

I grew up with Elen and the deer women first on Dartmoor and then on Exmoor. Some years back, I spent time in the Highlands of Scotland following up on their old deer women stories as collected by historian JG McKay. In the Scottish tradition, very similar to where I grew up, the deer are the "fairy cattle" and the deer women are the spirits of place who guard, own, herd, and milk their deer. They're known as Bean Sidhes, bean is Gaelic for woman while sidhe means spirit or fairy. They often appear as colossal old women, shapeshifting out of (and back into) hills and mountains, or sometimes lochs or woods, or even waterfalls. While I was wandering about the Highlands with my witch- friend, spaewife and fellow bone singer Fiona Dove, I went to many of the old places to dream with the bean sidhes for myself. I found them both like and unlike to how they are for me down south. The Scottish Highlands, like all non-citified places in Britain, are peopled by the sidhe, the faer folk who en-spirit trees, bushes, rivers, rocks, caves, mounds and mountains and the land itself. McKay calls these old ones canny, meaning cunning, shrewd, wily and crafty like the cunning folk I come from; he also calls them uncanny meaning eerie, weird, mysterious and strange, again like the folk where I grew up.

The old Scottish deer goddesses are authoritative, commanding, imposing, reliable and trustworthy, dependable; and they are respected as they are where I grew up, and where I now live. They are part of the Earth, and linked to their place with deep spirit bonds. The people of Iceland still recognise this and much more openly than we can, as yet, do here in Britain, but it will come, our old ways are returning as Elen is calling us. The people who live in these places where we visited knew themselves to be "of that land", wledig or pagan to that spirit of place, just as we did at home when I was growing up.

The goddess' representative on earth, in the everyday world, is the queen. Queens and kings in the old British tradition are different to the modern interpretation of those words. The root of the word queen is the Sanskrit word jani, it means woman having sovereign rule. The queen is sovereignty, she the goddess of the land here in the everyday. The queen is the representative of goddess on Earth. The goddess, Elen, gives life to all of her creation, she is the womb of Life, the receptive. The king is her guardian, it is his the semen that fertilises and impregnates her with the newness of the creative.

Elen is always a queen, and she didn't have to wed with a king to become one. She is sovereignty, she has sovereign rule, and so is able to confer sovereignty onto her spouse, making him a king as she does with Macsen.

In the Scottish myths, the goddess is also the hag and hags are also the healers and midwives of both birth and death, they are known as creators/destroyers, both gentle and fierce at the same time, holding within themselves the pairs of opposites. There were three women in the village where I grew up who held this role, one of them was my aunt who also was guardian (owner) of the village's sacred well. All of them were healers and midwives, they taught me the ways of death as well as those of birth.

The fairy cattle, the deer, are always in the care of the goddess, never the god. It is the fairy women who own, herd and milk the deer, they can shapeshift themselves into deer as well. The tales of the women who wear antlers on their heads, and so are representatives of Elen the antlered goddess, are still told down on Dartmoor where I was born. It is always the feminine who works directly with the deer. But they have their guardians, they're partnered by the masculine usually in the shape of antlered gods like Gwyn ap Nudd, and even Merlin who wears antlers and shifts into stag- form in some of his tales. But the masculine is never the keeper of the deer, only their guardian. It is the feminine who keep, preserve, maintain and sustain the deer; they mind them, protect and shelter them, watch over them.

The fairy women, the bean sidhe, are the mistresses of the deer; they are lovers, teachers, managers, keepers and riders of the deer; they sing to their deer, call them "darling deer" and "beast of my love", and dote on them. The bean sidhe are also called Cailleach or sometimes Cailleach Mhor meaning Huge Old Woman, and are the spirits of place of the local ben (mountain), strath (big river valley), river, or wood or grove. They're always gigantic, awesome, magnificent creatures, giantesses. McKay says of them, "they none of them wield a distaff, pitchfork or broom", they're all creatures of the wild, in no way domesticated. Their old tales read more like chapters in a natural history book than the modern, human-oriented stories we may be used to, especially from the Victorian romantic times. The stories are not about people but about the land, about the Earth herself, and the goddess as she shows herself to us. McKay suggests this shows great antiquity to the stories and I agree with him, for me it harks all the way back to Palaeolithic times.

They also hide and conceal the deer, protect them from those who would harm them in the sense of being greedy, and so will withhold the deer and curb those who would take too much. As hunter-gatherers we hunted but oh so differently from modern "sports" hunters. We knew hunting and killing a beast is a sacred task, the beast is a gift of the goddess so we knew to ask her permission, and knew how we were answered by the beast making it quite obvious that he or she is the one we should kill. We honoured the life that gave us life. The exquisite cave paintings around Europe show us this sacred task.

The old tales tell how the goddess came to dislike hunters when they became selfish and greedy, making depredations on the herds, taking far more than they needed, allowing the idea of "profit" to take hold, and not asking the goddess for permission to hunt. This harks to Neolithic times when humans began to clear the forests for agriculture and so to steal habitat from wildlife, and from the goddess herself. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't do this. They only ever took what they needed, never greedy but working with the goddess, the seasons and the land, not attempting to control it as we do now. We need to get back to this sort of thinking.

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Excerpted from "The Celtic Goddess"
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Copyright © 2018 Trevor Greenfield.
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