Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (41 page)

Nantosuelta
The goddess whose name meant “wandering river,” Nantosuelta was once thought to be a water goddess, but is now more often viewed as a fertility goddess—water being seen as a powerful symbol of birth. The patron of hearth and home, she is the consort of Sucellus, an agricultural god, and she is usually depicted carrying a basket of apples.

Sucellus
Sometimes described as the “king of the gods,” Sucellus is a male fertility deity whose name meant the “good striker.” Always depicted carrying a long-handled hammer, he uses this tool to wake up the plants and herald spring.

Taranis
The thunder god, Taranis rides across the sky in his chariot, which emits thunder from its wheels and lightning from the sparks of his horses’ hooves. A powerful Celtic war god, Taranis was equated by the Romans with Jupiter (like Zeus, the god of thunder) and sometimes with their war deity, Mars. (He is also connected to the Norse god Thor; see below.) The Roman writer Lucan singles Taranis out as the god to whom human sacrifices were made, although more recent scholarship shows sacrifices were made to several Celtic gods. Seven altars dedicated to Taranis are known to have existed in the Celtic world, all dating from Roman times.

Part II: The Celtic Gods of Ireland

Brigid
Known as the “exalted one,” Brigid is an Irish fertility and war goddess. Supposedly raised by a Druid, she is a divine “multitasker,” responsible for healing, fire, blacksmiths, poetry, wisdom, and protecting the flocks. As the saying goes, a woman’s work is never done.
Her holy day, called Imbolc, is one of the four major Celtic religious festivals of the year, an important springtime event celebrating ewes coming into milk—a powerful symbol of rebirth and fertility for Irish Celts. It was also traditionally a time during which a wife or husband could legitimately walk out of their marriage.
More intriguing than Brigid’s mythical stories are the parallels between this pagan goddess and her sixth-century namesake, St. Brigid (450 CE-523 CE), who blinded herself in order to avoid an arranged marriage and become a nun. The goddess Brigid is known for her generosity, and St. Brigid became one of Ireland’s patron saints, known for her miraculous ability to feed people and perform endless acts of kindness. St. Brigid also tended a fire that was said to burn continuously for hundreds of days, just as the goddess Brigid was associated with the ritual fires of purification. Finally, St. Brigid’s feast day is celebrated on February 1, the same day that Imbolc, the festival of the goddess Brigid, had been celebrated.

Daghda
Known as the “good god,” Daghda is viewed by the Irish people as the “father of the gods,” but could never be confused with a deity like Zeus. Think John Goodman: kindly, fat, and somewhat uncouth. Wearing an obscenely short tunic, Daghda drags around a gigantic weapon on wheels—a magic club with the power to kill at one end and restore life at the other. A god of magic, wisdom, and fertility, Daghda is also the “provider” god, who possesses an enormous and inexhaustible source of food that comes from the “cauldron of Daghda.” His never-empty cauldron was later connected to the Holy Grail supposedly used by Jesus at the Last Supper and brought to the British Isles by Joseph of Arimathea.
The son of the great goddess Dana, Daghda freely mated with many goddesses, but his coupling with the battle goddess Morrigan was most significant, because it was thought to provide security to the Irish people. Most likely a localized version of the Celtic agricultural god Sucellos, Daghda had other names as well—Aed (fire), Ollathir (all-father), and Ruad Rofessa (lord of the great knowledge).

Dana (Danu)
Mother of Daghda, Dana is the mother goddess of the entire divine race known as the Tuatha. In Irish myth, when the Tuatha are supplanted by the Celts, they retreat to underground hills and are transformed into the fairies, or “little people” of later Irish folktales. Dana finds underground residences for all of them, and these are the “fairy mounds” (
sídh
) that provide many legendary place-names around Ireland. Two famous mounds in County Kerry are known as the “paps [breasts] of Anu,” another form of the great goddess’s name.

Lugh
Associated with sunshine and light, Lugh (pronounced
loo
) is the “shining god” as well as a fierce warrior, magician, and craftsman, related by blood to both the Tuatha Dé Danaan and the rival Fomorians. Among the many marvelous weapons he forges are a sword that cuts through anything and a spear that guarantees victory. Once the Tuatha are supplanted in Ireland and transformed into the legendary “little people,” Lugh becomes the craftsman Lugh Chromain (“little stooping Lugh”), whose name was later Anglicized as the word “leprechaun.”
Another vestige of his name is found, somewhat ironically, in the capital city of Ireland’s colonial conqueror. The “fortress of Lugh” became Lugdunum, Latinized by the Romans into Londinium, which later became London.
Lugh’s festival, called Lughnasa, was celebrated on August 1 and was one of four pivotal Celtic Irish holidays, meant to mark the beginning of the harvest. It plays a central role in Irish playwright Brian Friel’s
Dancing at Lughnasa
.

Morrigan (Nemhain, Badbh, Macha)
Known as the “phantom queen,” Morrigan (pronounced
more-ree-an
) is a shape-shifting goddess of horses and war, who can change from human being into animal forms. Whenever Morrigan appears as a raven, death is nearby, and she is often seen to be waiting at a river ford for warriors to pass so that she can determine which will die in battle that day. Standing in the river and washing the corpses of the dead, she is also called “the washer at the ford.”
One of Morrigan’s most important roles comes in the great Irish story the
Táin
, when she unsuccessfully attempts to seduce the hero Cuchulainn. (Pronounced
koo-hool-n
; see below.) Intent upon making war, not love, this warrior hero rejects her advances, and in doing so, seals his fate.

Nuadu (Nudd)
Supreme king of the Irish Celtic pantheon, Nuadu is the legendary ruler of the Tuatha, but loses his arm in battle and must relinquish his kingship. Later given a magical arm of silver, he is able to reclaim the throne, but he loses his courage in later wars and has to retire, giving the throne over to Lugh.

What was
The Cattle Raid of Cooley?

This grim description of the transformation of a handsome young Irish hero into a dreadful killing machine is the picture of Cuchulainn, the greatest warrior of Irish myth and folklore, and a central character in the Ulster Cycle and one of its central stories,
The Cattle Raid of Cooley
(
Táin Bó Cúailnge
).

First written down in the Christian era, the Ulster Cycle has an overlay of Christian culture, but the stories are about an older, darker time in Ireland, hundreds of years before the arrival of St. Patrick and Christianity. Said to have taken place about the time of Jesus Christ, the Cycle has a slim basis in fact, since its stories may be a recounting of the actual struggles among early Irish groups. But the stories in the Cycle have been layered with myth, legend, and fantastic episodes of sex, drinking, and killing—in approximately equal measures.

Although there are conflicting versions of his birth, Cuchulainn’s tale begins when Lugh, the chief of the gods, impregnates Deichtine, the sister (or daughter) of Conchobor (pronounced
connor
), legendary king of Ulster, in a dream. The child she bears—Sétanta—possesses extraordinary power due to his divine parentage, and gains further strength when he is tutored by goddesses in the art of war. But the boy gets into hot water when he is attacked by the watchdog of the smith god, Culann, and kills the animal. Culann angrily demands restitution, and the boy agrees to stand in as watchdog until a new animal can be trained. As a result of this episode, Sétanta’s name is changed to Cuchulainn—” the hound of Culann.”

When little Cuchulainn grows up, he is a strikingly handsome man and a ferocious warrior who turns into an appalling vision of terror when a battle frenzy—usually translated as the “warp-spasm”—seizes him. Armed with a magic spear called the Gae Bulga, which can inflict only mortal wounds, and accompanied by a charioteer who makes his chariot invisible, Cuchulainn is a fierce headhunter who always takes the most heads. To help him regain his mortal shape after battle, naked maidens are paraded in front of him and he is lowered into three successive barrels of icy water until he has cooled off—clearly the ancient Celtic version of the proverbial “cold shower.”

In the
Táin
, the character of Cuchulainn is equaled only by Queen Medb (Maeve), the legendary warrior queen of Ulster’s rival province, Connacht. Although here a mortal queen, the mythical Medb was also a powerful goddess of fertility—headstrong, powerful, dominating, and sexually ravenous. Her name meant “she who intoxicates”—figuratively and literally—and is closely connected to the medieval drink mead. As Celtic authority Miranda Jane Green put it, “Her rampant promiscuity symbolizes Ireland’s fertility, and the association of her name with an alcoholic drink is linked with the concept of the union between goddess and mortal ruler….” Before a battle, she would calm the troubled warriors who knew they had to fight the next day. As Thomas Cahill writes—and this was no myth—“Insensate drunkenness was the warrior’s customary prelude to sleep.”

In the
Táin
, Medb only marries the older King Ailill because he has money. The
Táin
actually opens with a comic scene in which the king and queen are arguing in bed over who is the wealthier of the two. Ailill says, “It struck me today how much better off you are today than the day I married you.” Medb replies that she brought him such a great dowry when they married that he is essentially a “kept man.” Just as a petty argument in ancient Greece among Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena over which was most beautiful led to the Trojan War, this contentious “pillow talk” soon leads to wholesale bloodshed, destruction, and death.

When Medb’s husband proves that he indeed owns more than she does—he has one more bull than she does, a special white one—the queen, determined not to be outdone, orders her men to steal a famous bull called Donn Cúailnge, the Brown Bull of Cooley, which is held in rival Ulster. But her men are thwarted by Ulster’s hero, Cuchulainn, who single-handedly fights off the invaders. Frustrated by the hero of Ulster, Medb plots to kill him and employs army after army without success.

The story ends with grim irony. While all the blood is being shed by men, the Brown Bull of Cooley is off fighting with King Ailill’s White Bull of the Connacht, an epic contest that rages all over Ireland. Finally, the Brown Bull—the prize first sought by Maeve—defeats the White Bull. But as it returns to Ulster, the exhausted animal dies, collapsing in blood, vomit, and excrement—not a pretty picture. All of the fighting and death have essentially been for naught, and the hero Fergus, Medb’s lover and leader of the men of Connacht, offers a moral that could just as well have been applied to the
Iliad
: “We followed the rump of a misguiding woman. It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be strayed and destroyed.”
*

As the
Táin
ends, the story is not yet finished. Other tales in the Ulster Cycle complete the legend of Cuchulainn. Medb recruits sorcerers—children of a man that Cuchulainn has earlier killed—who will do away with the supernatural hero. Finally, either killed by his own magic spear or struck by a magic spear thrown by one of these sorcerers, Cuchulainn is mortally wounded. But he secures himself to a rock, so he can die in an upright position. For three days—the Celts did love the number three—he throws back the invaders, time and again. But even his courage and superhuman strength are not enough. Finally a raven, the symbol of the war goddess Morrigan, lands on Cuchulainn’s shoulder, and Ulster’s great hero expires. A legendary warrior, Cuchulainn grew in Irish folk stature until he came to be treated as a defender of all Ireland. At Dublin’s main post office, scene of the famous 1916 Easter Uprising, in which Irish republican fighters battled British forces, there is a statue of the mythical hero in death, almost a Christlike figure from a Pietà, with the raven of death alighting upon his shoulder.