Ali's Gone AWOL

Disappearances and mental health disorders in Irish myth and in real life

Céad míle fáilte, a hundred thousand welcomes to H A G! I’m Ali Isaac, and this email comes to you from the intersection of female senescence and Irish landscape, both mythical and natural. My book, Imperfect Bodies, will be published by Héloïse Press in the spring of 2026.

Autumn gifts from the wild hedgerow

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Female Fallowing

Something happened in July. I tried four times to write a piece for August’s newsletter, but I couldn’t do it. I still have the drafts sitting in my Substack’s back-office. I had plenty of ideas, but no inspiration. I lost the will to do anything, to exercise, walk the hedges, be with my beloved wild plant neighbours or indeed my human ones, struggled with basic chores, my energy and joy deserted me. Time stretched so that I felt like I was wading through treacle not air, achieving very little , and yet at the same time passed too quickly. I felt not quite part of this world. I felt flat.

It’s happened before: two whole months of the previous summer, and various other times going back into my 40s. I know what it is (now), and if you’re a woman of a certain age, no doubt you do, too. It’s ‘low mood’, and it’s a symptom of perimenopause and menopause. And it can be devastating.

I refuse to see it negatively. Instead, I call it ‘fallowing’. Like when ancient farmers used to let their fields go through cycles of crop production and lying fallow. This unproductive inactive period allows the soil to rest and recover its fertility. In actual fact, what this means is that it allows the land to revert to its natural state, the way it was before human interaction, the way it is supposed to be. In the same way, fallowing allows the body and mind to rest and recover. But female fallowing is not about fertility; that part of us has been and gone, I’m afraid, and personally, I don’t miss it. What fallowing allows us to do is to retreat within ourselves and rediscover our creativity, our inspiration, our Imbas.

This time, I recognised what was happening to me, and for the first time, I didn’t try to fight it. I allowed myself the grace and space to give myself up to it. I coccooned myself within my home. I crafted when I felt up to it. I read. I sat on the sofa at night beside my husband and watched Netflix with him. I cuddled Carys… a lot. I ate when and what I wanted. I scrolled Instagram. I didn’t write anything, apart from the freelance work I had contracted myself to do. And I thought. A lot.

I felt guilty often. I worried I’d lose my subscribers here. I actually gained some. Thanks for sticking with me, you guys! And welcome to all newcomers, I hope you will enjoy what you find here. The research I had planned for my next book, and the edits of my YA projects didn’t happen. And then we went to Corfu for a holiday, Conor, Carys and I. A change is as good as a rest, they say, and you know what? It was. I read 7 novels in 2 weeks, what a luxury! And I came back with a list of goals that I have already begun to tick off.

Fallow periods are essential to our wellbeing, I have realised, no matter how uncomfortable and horrible they are to experience. They lift eventually, when the time is right, but if they don’t, you must seek help. Being able to ask for help is a strength, not a weakness. Low mood is a type of depression sparked by our declining hormones; it is unlikely to be fixed by antidepressants, and you can’t just ‘snap out of it’ or ‘pull yourself together’. Depression is a common mental health disorder, and there are several types. Although women are diagnosed more often than men, the only female depression listed on the National Institute of Mental Health website is perinatal depression. The NHS UK website does, however, link menopause with depression. So we’re not imagining it, Ladies!

Depression and Story

I first came across the idea of depression as fallow in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. It immediately struck a chord with me, because I could see elements of myself in it.

Veena… was sitting on the worn plush-covered sofa as if rooted there, staring at the wall. She had on her usual shapeless dress; her knees were covered with an old yellow baby blanket; her pale hair hung limply on either side of her round, soft, whitish face; her hands lay curled slackly, as if her fingers were broken. On the floor in front of her was a scattering of dirty plates. Veena didn’t cook; she ate what Bernice’s father gave her; or else, she didn’t eat it. But she never tidied up. She hardly ever spoke, and she didn’t speak now. Her eyes flickered as we went past her though, so maybe she saw us.

“What’s the matter with her?” Amanda whispered to me.

“She’s Fallow,” I whispered back. ¹

Atwood goes on to describe people in a Fallow state as resting, “retreating into themselves to gain Spiritual insight, gathering their energy for the moment they would burst out again like buds in spring”.

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I love that last metaphor! Atwood’s description is a bit extreme in relation to how I felt, but not that far off the mark; any physical movement felt exhausting, including showering and tidying up. I didn’t care how I looked. I didn’t care what I ate. I hardly moved. But I had Carys to care for, and there was no avoiding that. She needed me, and that gave me some impetus, stopped me sinking too far. And it was pretty much all I could manage.

Atwood’s book is set in a post-dystopian future, and if you read it you will see how all the destructive features of capitalism and modernity we are living through now feed into and fracture the human psyche. But poor mental health is not a modern thing. Through the earliest writings of Irish scribes, there is evidence that they were familiar with depression as far back as the early medieval period, because it surfaces in their retellings of Irish myth.

The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn

In the story of the Serglighe Con Culainn, the ‘Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn’, the warrior Cúchulainn becomes depressed and falls into a malaise in which he appears to sleep for a year, dreaming prophetic visions from which he cannot be roused.

This tale survives in two manuscripts, the twelfth-century Book of the Dun Cow and a seventeenth-century copy of it. The text has been heavily doctored through the centuries, but the earliest parts by their lingustic features are believed to date to the ninth century.

The plot of the story goes like this: Cúchulainn hunts and injures a magical pair of birds who are really the Sidhe women Fand, wife of sea God Manannán, and Lí Ban. He immediately falls into his ‘wasting sickness’. The reason we are given is that the two fairy woman transform out of their animal form and get their revenge by attacking him with sticks and beating him almost to death. No one around him in the mortal world witness this, because it take place in the fairy realm. To them, he is in a waking yet dreamlike state, in which he can still speak to them at times. This goes on for a year.

Eventually, Fand relents and says she will heal him on condition that he works for her and defeats her enemies in battle. He agrees, and also embarks on an affair with her. When Emer, his real wife in the mortal world discovers his infidelity, she challenges Fand with a dagger, and it is seemingly this passion that restores him from his stupor. Cúchulainn re-enters the mortal world. However, according to Lady Gregory’s version of the story, assimilated from local folklore and oral tradition, Cúchulainn is so destraught at the loss of his fairy lover that he

went with great leaps southward to Luachair, the place of rushes; and he stopped for a long while without drink, without food, among the mountains, and where he slept every night, was on the road of Midluachan. ²

Conchobar, King of Ulster, sent all the poets and the skilled men and the druids of Ulster to find him and bring Cúchulainn to his fort at Emain Macha. They put enchantments on him, and made him drink the daught of forgetting so that he would have no memory of Fand, and gave some to Emer, too. In the Book of the Dun Cow version, there is no mention of Cúchulainn escaping into the wild, and it is Manannán who makes the couple forget by waving his cloak between them.

In the Táin bo Cuailnge, the ‘Cattle Raid of Cooley’, Cúchulainn also has other periods where he will sleep for several days and nights at a time, and periods where he does not sleep at all. Alongside his remorseless killing sprees while under the influence of the riastradh, his battle frenzy, and his capacity for rage, it has been suggested that Cúchulainn may have been a user of narcotic substances, perhaps amanita muscaria (fly agaric). ³

Dr Deborah Hayden suggests this behaviour is a sign of mania lupina, and that the only way to control it was to wear special items of clothing that restricted his movement, allowing him to still fight, but slow him down so he could not kill indiscriminately. ⁴

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The mound at Emain Macha, where Cúchullain served as warrior to Conchobar, King of Ulster

The Dream of Óengus

Here, we have another story of the ‘wasting sickness’. In Aislinge Óenguso, the ‘Dream of Óengus’, the protagonist is visited by a mysterious young woman in his dreams, although he appears to be awake. When he reaches out to her, she disappears. All day he couldn’t stop thinking of her, couldn’t eat. That night she visited him again, playing sweetly on a timpán, a type of stringed instrument. This time, she slept with him. This continued for a year, whilst he languished in bed, living only for the night and the girl of his dreams, love-sick and unable to eat, becoming weaker and sicker. It took two years more to identify and locate the girl. She was a shape shifter who lived alternately for a year as a human, then a year as a swan. Óengus found her at Samhain, just after she had transformed into a son. He was set a challenge to identify her among 150 other swans, which he did. He then became a swan himself so that they could be together. ⁵

We can see here a very similar malingering illness to Cúchulainn’s in which a male person is weak and confined to bed, semi-conscious and able to converse in the real world, but existing also in the fairy world at the same time. Both involve dreams and visions that ultimately find their conclusions in the real world. Both men are healed by the love of a woman. Yet both men had entered into their wasting sickness by the visitations and actions of fairy women.

The Romance of Mis and Dubh Ruis

In this medieval poem, the onset of Mis’s distress is sparked by the news of her father’s death as he took part in the Battle of Ventry, an event that places this story in the third century. When she found his body, she was so distraught with grief that she lost her mind and started drinking his blood. She then went on a 300-year rampage around the area of the Sliabh Mis mountains, which are named after her.

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Unlike in the tales of Cúchulainn and Óengus, Mis’s response is not one of malaise, but of action, or reaction, more precisely, to the trauma of grief. Like them, her response is born out of love, although familial rather than romantic or sexual.

According to Muirreann Ní Bhrolcháin, “her hair grows to the ground, and the nails on both her hands and feet are so long that she can tear apart the flesh of any human or animal that comes too close. She can run like the wind and eats raw meat”. ⁶ Appearance is important here, because it is not just behaviour and demeanor that signify mental disorder; women who fall outside the norms of female beauty, like Mis, become physically ugly, and undesirable, like the hag. This is the inevitable letting go of hygiene standards and the maintenance of one’s appearance that comes with depression.

Mis caused so much havoc and death that eventually, when the warriors and hunters failed, the king sent his harper, Dubh Ruis, to trap her.

Dubh Ruis decided the best way to win Mis round was with gold and silver coins, music and sex. These were the familiar things, he reasoned, that would remind her of her past life at her father’s court, of her humanity and civility, and bring her back to her senses. He scattered the coins around his camp, laid himself down on the mountainside, undid his trousers to expose his privates, hoisted up his harp, and began to play.

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Mis was drawn to his harp playing at first, but quickly became more interested in him, and a humerous, bawdy little romp ensues:

“A glance she gave, and she saw his nakedness and his playthings, and she said: “What are these?” she asked of his bag and his little eggs, and he told her. “What is this?” she asked of the other thing that she saw. “That is a branch of the trick,”he said. “I don’t remember that,” she said. “My father did not have such a thing.” “Branch of the trick,”she said again. “What is the trick?” “Sit beside me,” he said, “and I will perform the trick of that branch for you.” “I will,” she said, “and stay beside me.” “I will,” he said. He lay and slept with her and she said: “Ho ho, a good trick. Do it again!” “I will,” he said. “But I will play the harp for you first.” “Never mind the harp,” she said. “Do the trick again.” ⁷

Dubh Rois then builds a fullachta fiadh in which he boils deer meat to feed her, and gives her bread he has brought with him. Then he melts deer fat in the warm water of the fullachta and bathes her in it.

For two months, they live together in the mountains, and the gentle harper gradually returns Mis to civility and restores her sanity. They go on to marry and have children together, although when Dubh Ruis is later killed, Mis resorts to wildness again in her grief.

In this story, then, madness rather than melancholia is a symptom of the trauma of grief, and it is interesting that her madness is tolerated; the King orders Mis to be captured, not killed, despite all she has done. But like the other stories, it is the love of a partner that heals and restores her to normalcy.

Mór Muman agus Aided Cuanach meic Ailchine

Mór Muman agus Aided Cuanach meic Ailchine, ‘Mór Muman and the death of Cuanu mac Ailchine’, is a story that dates to the tenth century, or possibly earlier, and is found in the Book of Leinster, which was compiled during the mid twelfth century.

Mór Muman was the daughter of a seventh-century historical king of Munster, Aed Bennan. She never stepped outside of her house, and it was said that she heard voices speaking to her out of the air. When the Kings of Ireland came seeking her hand in marriage, she decided it was finally a good time to leave:

Great derangement [presumably this was caused by the voices] was put upon her, so that she bounded over the mound of the liss, so that it was not known to what place she went. ⁸

Such leaping is typically a sign of mourning, loss or madness in early Irish literature.

Mór wandered Ireland for two years, “blackened by sun and wind, in rags and marshes”. ⁹ In other words, she had gone back to nature. She had succesfully survived, alone, in the wild for two years. She had rewilded herself. She shows no sign of the aggression or violence associated with Mis.

In Cashel, she obtained employment herding King Fingen mac Aeda’s sheep. Fingen’s wife mocked the new shepherdess for her rough, wild ways, and dared her husband to sleep with her. He obliged, although somewhat unwillingly, and something strange happened; the king was kindly, and having sex with him seemed to restore her memory, and she remembered her name. Then he gave her her weight in silver. In the morning when she rose to tend to the sheep, he wrapped a purple cloak around her shoulders to which he pinned a queenly brooch. She married him and in due course gave birth to a male heir, Sechnasach.

So in the end, in her desperate attempt to evade marriage, Mór makes a good match after all. In fact, it seems to me that reading between the lines of this story, we find a girl repressed by patrarchal expectation, who was raised to be traded for her father’s most advantageous political alliance. She had no choice but to submit. That’s enough to send any woman into depression. The only way to avoid her father’s control was to escape. Being able to choose her own partner (after she has already tried him out and got to know him a little) restored her to normal mental health.

What does Irish Mythology tell us about Disappearance and Depression?

Well, today we have a much broader understanding of the different conditions that can affect our mental health, but back in the day, our Irish scribes did not neccessarily distinguish between depression and insanity. However, what these stories show us is that from earliest times, people suffered from the same sort of stresses and strains that we do today. They also show that people had then, as now, different responses to those stressors. To be overcome by melancholia was as common as grief, or violence, or madness. Return to nature was a common reaction, where peace and solitude brought some level of relief. Physical activity seemed to help, whether it was leaping, climbing trees, sex, fighting, or hunting. Music also features in two of these tales. But mostly, it is care, tenderness, gentle human interaction, and love that brings a cure.

That’s all for this week! Wishing you positive mental health in these troubled times. Thanks for reading,

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Rock of Cashel, where Mór Muman is said to have lived. Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

1. Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood (The Maddaddam Trilogy Book 2), Hachette Digital, 2009, Ch. 16, p. 96/518.

2. You can download your own free copy as a pdf of Lady Gregory’s CUCHULAIN OF MUIRTHEMNE, 2nd edition, 1903, with a preface by WB Yeats right here.

3. Riedlinger TJ. "Fly-Agaric Motifs in the Cú Chulaind Myth Cycle". Lecture given at the Mycomedia Millennium Conference as published on Erowid.org. Oct 29 1999, published by Erowid June 2005

4. Dr Hayden taught me Celtic Studies in my first year at uni. You can read her article on Cúchulain here.

5. You can download a free pdf copy of this tale in Old Irish, translated into modern Irish and English here.

6. Ní Bhrolcháin, Muirreann. “Kings, Goddesses and Sovereignty”, An Introduction to Early Irish Literature, pp.93-111.

7. Ibid.

8. O’Nolan, T.P. “Mor of Munster and the Tragic Fate of Cuanu Son of Cailchin”, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature, 1912/1913, Vol. 30 (1912/1913), pp. 261-282.

9. Ibid.