The female represented the cosmos principle – eternal and cyclical, while the male construct represented linear human history time marked by the male hero’s historical achievements. This combination created a framework which rested on a male/female dynamic. In this hybrid cosmology the divine female became a foil to the semi-divine male hero figure. Celtic transformationĬeltic culture had its own female divinities and so easily integrated older indigenous cosmologies. ‘Turloch Silinde’, poem 66 from The Metrical Dindshenchas, oral literature dating from pre-Christian era, transcribed in the 11 th and 12 th centuries. Though their lakes clave to the heroic women, Silend had a fatal toil from her lake-bed. ‘Famous above women were these for grace, they plied no business, after the fashion of low-born women Jungian analyst, Sylvia Brinton Perera refers to this as ‘the sacred and natural order of the unus mundus – the primeval unity before the opposites are separated’. This cosmology included the weather and the fertility of the land, which later developed into the sovereignty principle. These include mountains, mounds, coastline, rivers, lakes and caves.
Placenames and physical elements of the landscape are frequently associated with the death and burial of divine females who can be considered derivations of a generative female divinity. In mythological terms, scholars such as Marin Ni Eoin, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, Julia Kristeva and Maire MacNeill, have developed female divinity theory by identifying a recurrent theme of the ‘entombed female’. This figure is found in traditional cosmology as ‘the personification, in divine female form, of the physical landscape within which human life is lived and also of the cosmic forces at work in that landscape’. The Cailleach: The Personification of Land and Nature These ancient tropes continued to be used in Gaelic literature into the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Many suggest this figure was then re-elaborated by the Celtic warrior culture as a war/battle goddess, an expression of which was Medb. The Cailleach, which translates as ‘old woman’, ‘hag’, and ‘veiled one’, exists in both Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and is an expression of the hag or crone archetype found throughout world cultures. Tracing these concepts back to their oldest Irish mythological forms leads to the figures of the Cailleach, and Medb, antagonist of the epic the Táin Bó Cúailnge. ‘Graveyards themselves are focal points in the landscape and function as inverse omphali, sacred places which link this world to the one above and below’. ‘Until quite recently most Irish people lived within a cosmos that contained a privileged vertical dimension rather than a landscape with a horizontal one’. He defined it philosophically as contemptus mundi. This funereal referent was closely bound to an Otherworld referent. Sheerin developed his argument by maintaining that, not only do burial places have significant material presences in and on the land, but they have also significant immaterial functions. The literary theorist Patrick Sheerin supported his thesis referring to the privileged position of coffins, graves and graveyards in both the Irish landscape and its literature, citing texts from all major periods of Irish literature. Thirty years ago in Irish literary studies a contentious article asserted that ‘a preoccupation with death is the most evident hallmark of the Irishness of Irish culture’.
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