

     
                                     
                                     
     TABLE OF CONTENTS                                                
                                                  
     The Mare Goddess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
     
     The Irish Ritual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
     
     Macha and Cu Chulainn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
     
     Celtic Goddesses: Ritual and Myth in Britain . . . . . . . . . 6
     
     The Irish Goddess of Sovereignty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
     
     The Irish Celtic Goddess of Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
     
     The Irish Goddess and Celtic Sovereignty: Love and Power . . . 18
     
     On the Reciprocity of Divine Relationships . . . . . . . . . . 20
     
     The Celtic Goddess of Sovereignty as Warrior . . . . . . . . . 23
     
     The Power of Three and Two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
     
     The Celtic Goddess as Druidess  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
     
     Christianity and the Death of the Goddess in Ireland  . . . .  32
     
     The White Goddess as Sovereignty in Medieval Wales:
                           The First Branch of the Mabinogi. . . . .34
     
     The Second Branch of the Mabinogi:
                       The Goddess of Sovereignty is Weakened  . . .37 
     
     St. Brigit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40 
     
     The Death of the Goddess in Gaul: and the Origin of Witches. . 44
     
     Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
     
     
     
     THE MARE GODDESS
     
          Striking similarities have been pointed out for over seven
     decades between horse sacrifices in ancient India and Celtic
     Ireland.  These similarities quickly became one of the important
     pieces of evidence which indicated that both the Aryans, who
     invaded India and began the Vedic Period (c.1500-2,000 B.C.), and
     the Celts evolved from a common population which began to fission
     and expand during the Neolithic (Dillon 1963).  This stem culture
     we now know to be the early Indo-Europeans, who are sometimes
     called the Kurgan Culture; their apparent origin was the area now
     known as southwest Russia sometime prior to 4,000 B.C.  Common
     features in ritual and linguistics survived enormous differences
     of time, place and environment.
          As O'Flaherty (1980: ch.6) says, there are two basic
     questions about the horse sacrifices that demand consideration.
     "1) Why did the Irish ritual involve a mare and a king, while the
     Indian ritual involved a queen and a stallion?   2) Why was the
     horse killed in the ritual but rarely in the myth? ... The ritual
     began with symbolic copulation between the royal figure and the
     equine figure and ended with the slaughter of the animal and the
     eating of its flesh or fluid.
          "The skeleton of the myth may be read as follows.  A goddess
     in the form of a white mare or a water bird assumed human form
     and mated with an aging sun king.  Impregnated by him through her
     mouth, she gave birth to hippomorphic twins, male and female, who
     incestously begat the human race.  The goddess or evil black
     alter ego injured or threatened to devour her children or the
     king.  She then disappeared.  The myth ends there, but the ritual
     elaborates upon the simple disappearance of the mare and the
     simultaneous mutilation of the king or the stallion or the son:
     in the ritual, the king killed the mare and ate her to restore
     his waning powers" (O'Flaherty 1980: 149-150).
          O`Flaherty does not present this tale as the possible
     Indo-European prototype, that is the single myth that existed in
     parental Indo-European culture before it began to fission and
     spread.  Rather, this is a "thematic rather than a historic core"
     (O'Flaherty 1980: 151).  It contains those elements that may be
     identified within many variations from a variety of Indo-European
     cultures: Indian, Irish, Greek, Roman, Gallic, Welsh, and
     Russian.
           I also wish to further complicate the interpretive
     challenge by suggesting that this myth originated after Old
     Europe, with its religion of the Great Goddess, had been invaded
     and apparently culturally swamped by various Indo-European
     peoples.  I believe this myth to be syncretic, that is an attempt
     to reconcile potentially hostile and adversarial mytho-poetics
     who found themselves close neighbors after the Indo-European
     migrations.  To call this a pure or characteristic Indo-European
     myth misses the point.  After the Indo-European invasions, I
     believe several cultural regions saw the rise of mytho-poetics
     which attempted to integrate major themes from both the Thunder
     God mythic structure of the Indo-Europeans and the indigenous
     Neolithic religion of the Great Goddess.  These cultural regions
     are those where the myth of the Indo-European mare may be found,
     the earliest of which in written records is that of Vedic India
     c.1,500 B.C..  Furthermore, while Indo-European peoples
     apparently swamped much of Old Europe, some Indo-European tribes
     remained in contact for some time with `islands' of Great Goddess
     religion which survived their invasions as was the case in
     classical Crete and several localities on the European mainland.
     The mare is decidely not Indo-European in metaphor although the
     choice of this animal to use as a mythic symbol is
     characteristically Indo-European.  Old Europe did not domesticate
     the horse and it played no prominent role in their `pure' mythic
     structures, although wild horses may have been occasional food
     animals.  The Goddess is ever-present in the myth and ritual of
     horse sacrifice.  When her epiphany is that of a water bird and
     not of a horse, then this is `pure' Old European metaphor
     (Gimbutas, 1989).  The fact that she is no longer reproductively
     self-contained, and therefore no longer parthenogenetic, reveals
     the power of the Indo-European invaders; she mates with a sun
     king to become pregnant.  However, her power remains absolute in
     the ritual, for the king must eat her flesh or drink broth made
     from it in order to restore his powers.
          "The incident at the heart of it all involves two basic
     processes: a sacrifice and a marriage.  The sacrifice brings gods
     and humans together through food that is obtained by slaughter.
     The marriage brings men and women together through sex (here, as
     elsewhere, expressed through metaphors of food and eating).  The
     emotional components of lust and fear/agression, which we have
     seen underlie so much of the mythology of the Goddess, are
     present in this compound ceremony, ..." (O'Flaherty 1980: op.cit.).
     
     
     
     THE IRISH RITUAL
     
          "In the Irish ritual (recorded A.D. 1185 by Giraldus
     Cambrensis), a white mare was led before the king in the presence
     of his people.1  Then, `He, seeking to elevate himself not into a
     prince but a beast, not into a king but an outlaw, approaching
     like an animal, professes as shamelessly as irrationally that he
     too is a beast ... That is, he behaved like a beast (mounting
     her on all fours and from the rear) for copulation with the
     mare).  The mare was then killed, cut into pieces, and boiled,
     and the king bathed in the broth, drinking it by lapping it up
     directly with his mouth, not using a cup and he also ate the
     mare's flesh'" (O'Flaherty 1980: 152).  This is an eyewitness
     account by a well known scholar and historian of the times whose
     veracity is not questioned by scholars.  It contains three
     essential elements of the core myth: the mating of the king with
     a white mare, the slaughter of the mare, and the eating of its
     flesh and drinking of her essential fluids as broth.
     Furthermore, "we encounter the Indo-European tendency to deny the
     divinity of the mare, a theme that will haunt these myths and
     rituals ..." (ibid. See also Doan (1987: 82).  This is precisely
     what we would expect if Irish Celtic culture at this late time
     retained an ancient tension and internal conflict from the time
     when Indo-European mytho-poetics integrated with the much older
     tradition of the Great Goddess.  The Mare Goddess was still very
     much present but accepted uneasily and resented.  The
     mytho-psychological conflicts are deep, for Giraldus' report
     describes the behavior of the king as `a beast'.  The mare is, of
     course, at first glance merely a beast and this statement is an
     attempt by the Christian monk to reduce both the Goddess and the
     king, who is the sole conduit to the deity for his people, to
     `mere beasts'.  The fact is that in the ritual, the Mare Goddess
     is killed and then consumed.  This points to the final victory of
     the Indo-Europeans, although it is an incomplete victory because
     the power that flows into the king is that of the Goddess.
          Why is this report, which is of a surprisingly late
     date and compiled by a highly prejudiced observer, accorded such
     weight and believed to be accurate?  Scholars have long believed
     that Irish and Indian myths preserve the most archaic elements
     that can be documented from written sources about both the Great
     Goddess and early Indo-European myths.  Why?  These two cultural
     regions lie on the periphery of the Indo-European realm and
     therefore Indo-European migration, while not later than in other
     places, was less powerful in the sense of numbers of
     migratory incursions and possibly in the actual numbers of
     invaders as well.  Therefore the Goddess survived, was renewed
     and absorbed some attributes from the newly arrived Indo-European
     myths.  The most visible of her attributes is her new epiphany as
     a horse.  There is an analgous situation in that realm of
     anthropology which studies hunter-gather peoples.  Those cultures
     who preserved a `pure' hunter-gather-fisher lifestyle into the
     first half of the twentieth century resided in remote regions
     which were not contacted by Western Culture until well into the
     nineteenth century: the Arctic, remote Pacific islands, African
     and Amazonian rainforest, and the Australian and southwest
     African desert.  Furthermore, the medieval Irish ritual is
     supported by much other fragmentary material from the other
     regions where sacrifice of the mare or stallion for kingly
     renewal was practiced.  The one unique item in the Irish ritual,
     the eating of the mare's flesh, is not unusual.  The eating of
     the flesh of a sacrificial animal is a common theme world-wide
     and prehaps in earlier times and in these other localities, the
     mare or stallion was eaten.  Robert Graves (1955 1: 255) notes
     myths of the taming of winged horses in Danish and Irish sources
     as well as Greek.  He postulates an archaic rite in which the
     Triple Muse (or Triple Goddess) of the Mountain forced the
     candidate for kingship to capture a wild horse which was later
     ritually eaten by the king, after his symbolic rebirth from the
     Mare-headed Mountain Goddess (O'Flaherty 1980: ch.6).
          On the European continent the Mare Goddess is met with in
     several closely related epiphanies.  Demeter in Greece was horse
     headed.  Epona was worshipped in both Gaul and the British Isles.
     She was depicted as a woman riding on a mare, or
     anthropomorphized with a human female body and a mare's head, or
     as the mare itself.  She was associated with the male horse god,
     Rudiobus, and she is also associated with birds.  Her name is
     derived from the proto-Indo-European *ekwo-s which means horse
     and is the root from which the Latin equus and Sanskrit asva are
     derived.  She is particularly concerned with pregnant mares and
     foals, there is a representation of her seated on a throne with
     her hands on the heads of two foals.  Other images show her as a
     woman feeding apples or hay to pregnant mares.  She presided over
     the mating of horses and the birth of both foals and human
     babies.  "But like many another true mother goddess, her
     relationship with children was ambivalent; sometimes a child is
     depicted crouching under the raised leg of the mare ..."
     (O'Flaherty 1980: 154).  In a second century A.D. Greek text
     there is a myth of a misogynist who mates with a mare and the 
     resultant `child' is Epona.  The greatest quantity of verified 
     detail about the actual rites surrounding the Indo-European Mare 
     Goddess comes from Vedic India.
     
     
      
     MACHA AND CU CHULAINN
     
          "The Celtic Irish myth of Macha and Cu Chulainn is a very
     close parallel to both the Irish ritual and the Indian ritual and
     accompanying myth.
          "A supernatural woman named Macha agreed to marry Crunniuc
     on one condition: `Our union will continue only if you do not
     speak of me in the assembly.' ... But one day King Conchobor
     heard that Macha's husband had boasted that she could run faster
     than the horse of Conchobor.  Though she protested that she was
     too pregnant to race, he forced her to race against his chariot.
     Just as the chariot reached the end of the field, she gave birth
     beside it, bearing twins, a son and daughter.  The name Emain
     Macha, the Twins of Macha, comes from this episode and remains
     the name of that plain ...  Years later, Conchobor mounted a
     chariot with his sister, the woman Deichtire, who drove the
     chariot for her brother; they chased a flock of birds from Emain
     Macha until they reached Brug and took shelter in a solitary
     house, where they ate and drank.  Later, the man of the house
     told them that his wife was in her birth pangs in the storeroom.
     Deichtire went in to her and helped her bear a son.  At the same
     time, a mare at the door to the house gave birth to two foals.
     The Ulstermen took charge of the baby boy and gave him the foals
     as a present, and Deichtire nursed him" (Kinsella, 1970: 6-7,
     21-23 in O'Flaherty 1980: 167).  Although O'Flaherty considers
     them unimportant, the Neolithic Great Goddess makes a brief
     appearance here as a flock of birds.
          However, in another variant of this myth, the Neolithic
     Goddess is more prominent.  "Conchobor and some of his men chased
     a flock of birds from Emain Macha.  Now these birds were avatars
     of Deichtire, the sister (or half sister or daughter) of
     Conchobor, and of fifty young girls with whom she had lived for
     three years.  When Conchobor and his men chased the birds to the
     house at Brug, Deichtire and her companions assumed human form
     again, and Deichtire appeared as the mistress of the house.
     Conchobor, not knowing that it was Deichtire, demanded to use on
     his hostess the droit du seigneur that was his well known
     perogative.  Deichtire begged for a postponement, for she was
     pregnant and that night she brought forth a boy who looked just
     like Conchobor, though Conchobor did not learn until the next day
     that the woman who had received him was his sister.  The child,
     the future C Chulainn, was named Setanta; he was brought to
     Emain Macha to be nursed by Finnchoem, the mother of Conall"
     (Gricourt 1954: 75-79).
          "The birds are the Deichtire and her companions, swan
     maidens whom we will meet in Indian variants of this myth (and
     who are adumbrated in the Indian ritual).  The importance of the
     birds is evident from the fact that in a later episode of the
     first variant, in which the birds are not identified with
     Deichtire and her maidens, the god Lug appears to Deichtire and
     tells her that it was he who had `kidnapped her with her fifty
     companions in the form of birds' - an episode that, since it has
     no logical place in this variant at all, must have been kept from
     an earlier variant in which it was truly essential" (O'Flaherty
     1980:168-169).  Of course, Lug is kidnapping the Goddess herself!
     The enormous mytho-poetic conflict between Indo-European peoples
     and the older Neolithic Goddess culture is here encapsulated.
     
     
     
     RITUAL AND MYTH IN BRITAIN 
     
          There are virtually no contemporary observations of Goddess
     worship or ritual activity by Roman observers of Celtic society.
     Strabo, who died c.26 A.D. is believed to have utilized an
     ethnography written by Posidonius.  He referred to `an island
     beside Britain' on which sacrifices were performed akin to those
     in Samothrace where the sacrifices were in honor of Demeter and
     Kore (Persephone).  The Roman geographer Pomponius, writing in
     the first century A.D., describes a group of nine virgin
     priestesses living on the island of Sena (Sein) off the Brittany
     coast who were believed to have magical and curative powers. They
     could call forth waves with their singing, change animals into
     whatever form they wished, cure incurable diseases and predict
     the future for mariners who came to them (Doan 1987: 19-28).
     These are certainly attributes of the Goddess, but the question
     remains of possible influence from the Greek legend of Circe.
     Should these women be called witches, rather than priestesses who
     might incarnate the Goddess?
     ............
                           
     
     
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