November | Excursions into Darkness
November | Excursions into Darkness
Lessons from the Mórrígan
“It was then that Badb and Macha and Mórrígan went to the Knoll of the Taking of the Hostages, and to the Hill of Summoning of Hosts at Tara, and sent forth magic showers of sorcery and compact clouds of mist and a furious rain of fire, with a downpour of red blood from the air on the warriors’ heads; and they allowed the Fir Bolg neither rest nor stay for three days and nights.”
Excerpt from The First Battle of Moytura as translated into English by Fraser, J. from the manuscript Dublin, Trinity College, MS 1319 Unit: pp. 90-110.
Who was the Mórrígan?
THE MÓRRÍGAN IS THOUGH TO BE is thought to be an Irish goddess of battle. She makes appearances in the Mythological and the Ulster Cycles of mythology, most notably in the tales of the Cath Muige Tuired Cunga (First Battle of Moytura) and Cath Maige Tuired (Second Battle of Moytura), and the Táin Bó Cúailnge (the Cattle Raid of Cooley). She is believed to be the daughter of Ernmas, a ‘she-farmer’ of the Tuatha de Danann. Etymology translates her name as ‘the Great/ Phantom Queen’.
In the Mythological Cycle, she appears as part of Lugh’s war council before battle, where she describes her contribution to the conflict as pursuing, hunting and cutting out the enemy. As the Dagda’s lover, she promises to go secretly into the enemy’s camp in order to ‘deprive [Indech, the enemy’s King] of the blood of his heart and the kidneys of his valour’; how she does this is not made explicit in the text, but as Indech lives on to join battle, clearly her work is intended to weaken and subdue rather than murder. Disturbingly, she returns with two handfuls of Indech’s blood as proof of her task. In battle, she exhorts her warriors to battle-fever and sings battle-hymns to maintain morale. She also makes prophecies of the Danann’s victory.
In the earlier First Battle, her role is more of a magical one, as the above quote demonstrates, casting spells with her ‘sisters’ to cause terror in the enemy, to weaken, harass and confuse them.
It is in the Ulster Cycle, however, where the full range of her powers are revealed. Not only does she cast spells and prophesise, the warrior Cuchulainn’s doom, mostly, but she shape-shifts into various animal forms such as an eel, a red-eared heifer, a wolf, and a crow, but also between the various female incarnations of herself as a comely maiden, and old H A G.
In these tales, she is working on behalf of the mortal Connacht Queen Medb to subdue the unbeatable Ulster hero, Cuchulainn. Medb has her royal court at Cruachan in County Roscommon, and it is here that the cave of Oweynagat is located, the entrance to the Otherworld through which the Mórrígan travels between the mortal and fairy realms.
It is interesting that Medb was herself born in this cave, a place associated very much with the feminine, and labelled by medieval authors as ‘the hell-mouth of Ireland’; they believed at Samhain, the Mórrígan would emerge accompanied by herds of monstrous pigs and flocks of red-headed birds, all with the power to decay whatever their breath touched, and a triple-headed monster known as the Ellen Trechen, which at her bidding would lay waste to all of Ireland.
WISDOMS
1.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared dream before.
Edgar Allan Poe
I gaze at the black hole before me, a tiny opening in the earth’s crust leading into Ireland’s internal spaces; the downward facing triangle, symbol of female anatomy, fringed with a pubic growth of hawthorn. I watch my companions, women all, disappear one by one, sliding their bodies horizontally into a gap just wide enough to accept them. I am unsure if this act of penetration is welcome, or a violation, but there is no time to ponder; it is my turn, and I am instantly swallowed whole.
It is both sensory deprivation and overload. Black air, heavy as the drop of a velvet curtain, laden with damp, and dancing dirt particles that glitter in the drunken glare of torchlight somewhere too far ahead; it presses against my chest like something alive and purring, makes the unconscious act of breathing a chore. I wave a hand before my face to check my eyes are open, but the blackness is absolute; I only know my hand is there because my brain and the movement tell me it is. My faulty sense of sight (minus 10 in my right eye) is useless here. The smell of wet rock and rot is pungent, but not offensive. The slide and slosh of our progress, the occasional clip of boot on stone, the murmur of hushed female voices and singular burst of laughter accompany us deep into the void, ricocheting loud off cave walls, amplified by confinement; whispered words are not secrets, here. I give myself up to sensation, to the touch of hands on rocks, to the quest of feet for stability, to trust in the presence of companions, fore and aft, guiding me onwards, down and down. I have never been more conscious of my vulnerability, how out of sync I am with the natural world of which I am part; I have no choice but to confront it.
Entering Oweynagat, the cave at Cruachan in Co. Roscommon, is an incredibly sensual and female experience. It is a potent place, a deep dark cleft in the earth associated with powerful women and female magic. According to legend, it exists as a conduit between the Otherworld and our mortal realm through which the Goddess of war, known as the Mórrígan, frequently travelled. Medb, Queen of Connacht, was said to have been born here. I think of these mythical women as I pass through the cave’s uterine passage, fingers trailing across the cold moist of smooth, flesh–coloured stone until the walls fall away from me and I am poised on the threshold of a large chamber. In this deep, womb–like cavity, lined with a thick glutinous membrane of mud, we gather and pause.
It is Samhain, when the veil between worlds is thin, and the ghosts of the dead were once thought to return. We talk quietly and remember our lost loved ones. My feet sink into the ooze but there is bedrock beneath, and braced upon it, I feel strong, rooted in place, unafraid. Below us, above our heads, on either side, the solid earth is not in fact solid, but fractured with bubbles of air and pockets of water, ribbed with bones of stone, held together by decay, probing root structures and fibrous strands of multiple mycelium. Here, in this rich dark soup of nutrients, is where it all begins, where seed is nurtured into life.
Returning to the surface is like birth, the shadow–light of dusk almost too bright, the first fresh breath heady, the movement of air on skin startling. Trees sway, sun drops, long grass swishes as I walk back to my car. As night settles in, the benevolent face of the moon is a flat, golden disc unusually large and low on the horizon. She watches me all the way home. And I sense that something in me has changed.
2.
All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.
John Ruskin
I am in the dark - the darkness is in me.
I write in the silent darkness before dawn, the glare of a blank screen slapping my face, gouging into my eyes, attempt to spear the words lurking in half–formed thoughts behind them. Outside these walls, among leaf mould and shrubbery, the eyes of wild creatures shine like tiny torches as they scurry about their business of hunting or being hunted. Above us all, the stars hang out in their constellations, strung across the sky like ropes of Christmas lights. In the muddle of it all: me.
Sometimes, the words pour fast, and I wonder where the stream is coming from. Today, they are slow, each one considered, their positioning on the page punctuated by sips of muddy, dark coffee. I only like myself when I am writing, when I can’t see myself, when all I feel is this ethereal flow of thoughts from brain to page via fingertip contact with a keyboard. It is a wonder to me, this gift of technology, this separation of body from self, the grand reveal mapped in black on white, this mirror of truth.
Sometimes, though, these thoughts are too stark for daylight and I backspace, watching each letter vanish as the text is unmade, but it is too late; I have poured my darkness into the world, and it doesn’t need symbols to make its presence felt. It cannot be un–thought, but it can be fed or starved. It can be acknowledged, and examined, and made powerless.
3.
I am intrigued by the dark. Out of darkness comes creation.
Famke Jansen
I give birth in the dark, a spotlight highlighting the space between my legs from which new life will emerge: a son, my second, born with a frown. Childbirth is savage, a process so violent and bloody that religion could only make sense of it by declaring it a punishment on all women for the transgression of Eve. In the moment, it feels that way, but the midwife holds up a small mirror in which I see the black hair on the crown of his head, and I reach down to make first conscious contact between mother and child, to smooth back those black, sticky wisps, and my fingertips, which know so intimately the sterile hardness of plastic keys, encounter now the warm yielding flesh of a new human being.
I have written my genetic code into the text of his cells, but in the dark waters of my womb, he has already been adding his own. I have conceived both ideas and children in the dark, and they are equally beautiful, and powerful, taking on a life of their own beyond me.
4.
Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure, and blazing, and fierce.
Carl Sagan
There has been a reversal, and it happens like this, in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of world–wide lockdown. We are self–isolating, cocooning a rare child, safe, we think, on our hilltop with its crown of trees, infection filtered by rural living. We venture out, masked and gloved, only to buy food, worrying we are bringing home something more deadly in our shopping bags. We wash our hands to banish contamination, while the Earth conducts a cleansing of her own. Nature flourishes as humankind declines. Time slows and swells, marked not by hours and minutes but by swathes of blossom: hawthorn, elder, foxglove, meadowsweet, that wash over the land like waves, and wild encounters: hare, hawk, heron. We are guided by the rhythms of bodily need: nourishment, sleep, movement, excretion, and our thoughts are loud in the absence of voices. The sound of human industry fades, and in that silence nature’s voice is raised; how varied is the birdsong, how rasping the call of the wind, which, with no voice of its own, finds an instrument in the branches and leaves of trees. The drone and hum of bees and bugs is a soothing guided meditation, and the light–hearted chit–chat of water chuckling across its stony bed is as rejuvenating as laughter.
Beyond our hill, in this perfect stillness, a world of colour boils into binaries and bigotry. An over–reliance on capitalism and consumerism weighs the value of the economy against that of human life, and the planet which nurtures us. A surreptitious rise of far–right groups is emboldened to step into the light. Racist attacks stifle black lives in broad daylight in front of cameras; a Chinese woman is pushed in a canal; Mexican children are seized from their parents’ arms and caged; governments take control of women’s reproductive rights, and vote to evict poor people from their homes, to starve children in school holidays. Under cover of Covid–19, human rights are eroded, and the aged, the poor, and the disabled are given up for sacrifice. There are demonstrations and riots. There are conspiracy theories, and denials, and rampant corruption.
I watch all this from the Otherworld of our hill, and wonder if this is how all once–great civilisations end. The darkness of human nature which had simmered for decades beneath the veneer of decency and notions of the common good, has erupted, dragging us back into the ethics of Medieval times. We used to call them ‘the Dark Ages’, but they were never so dark as now. The terror is white, and it does not hide in the night anymore.
5.
Darkness is full of possibility.
Michael Leunig
I used to be afraid of the dark. Of the night, which brought horrific dreams that banished sleep and bled into my daylight hours. Of the solid blackness which stole what remained of my already defective sight and risked my safety with unseen obstacles. Of the chest pain which only ever came with the swing of midnight. Of the thieves and the murderers and the rapists which used its cloak as cover. Of the ignorance within myself that I perceived as a void.
Back then, I lived in a housing estate with a street light outside my bedroom window which bathed the night in a golden glow. I couldn’t shut it out; it sliced through the gap between the curtains, stealing deep into the room with creeping fingers, gilding everything it touched. It was a false friend; I could not sleep without it, because I found everywhere else, the dark was too dark. I had to keep a light on.
Rural living comes with few street lights. Night, when pure and unfiltered by light pollution, falls soft as feathers on my skin. It is not so impenetrable as I thought. On a clear autumn night, the luminescence of stars and moon provides an astonishing light show which rotates over our hill as the year progresses. The Hunter, Orion, soon feels like a friend to me, and I orient myself in the night by looking for him. The breeze still blows in the night, the trees still stand guard, and though the birds sleep, other creatures are waking. The night is not a vacuum, it teems with life. The dark woos me, and I succumb.
We are taught to equate darkness with evil, but it wasn’t always so. In ancient times, the day started with the fall of dusk, not the rise of the sun. The new year started with the onset of winter, the darkest half of the year. Life sprouted in the darkness of the earth, and the womb. Poets, so highly revered, were taught to compose in darkness. Druids conducted rituals which required the absence of light; they were wrapped in animal hides, or used hand positions covering their eyes, or were watched over in darkened rooms. In death, human remains were returned to the dark, deposited in specially–built burial mounds consisting of a chamber accessed via a passage, sometimes likened to the womb and birth canal.
I think of that ancient poet, labouring alone in the darkness to birth his or her poems, and find solace. Light cannot penetrate the human mind trapped within its skull, yet here ideas are born and nurtured, or allowed to die. Spinning in the dark within us are constellations of thoughts and words, each one searing with possibilities.
There are two types of Darkness that I know of.
What my excursions into darkness have shown me is that there are two types of dark: the external and the internal, and as a young person, I was afraid of the wrong one. I was afraid of what the night hid: the physical obstacles and obstructions I could not see, the wild animals which might attack, the men who walked behind me, the thieves, rapists, murderers who used its cover to their advantage. I was afraid of how it distorted my perceptions and rendered me powerless and weak.
Of course, it wasn’t the dark which stole my agency, it was my own thoughts and fears. The dark is just an absence of light. And even then, it is rarely absolute. The glimmering of stars, whilst dispassionate and remote, provide more than enough light to see by, and if you make the effort to learn how, are a presence by which you may orient yourself and follow your path. The moon is a beacon in the dark at all her stages of fulness, a gentle, benevolent companion in the night. The darkness cannot be blamed for your missteps, for the night creatures’ reactions to your unexpected appearance, for the misdeeds of violent men. The dark is guileless, innocent, a fact of nature, a wonder of the planet we live on. The dark of night should be embraced as part of our physical experience of being, for although it has no physical form itself, it still impacts on ours.
So, I recently decided to test myself. A couple of weeks ago, I went for a walk alone in the dark. I admit I was nervous. To mitigate my fears, I set off at about 530pm, straight after work; here in Ireland, in mid November, it is already dark by then. I took a route I know well, my local 5km, a journey I took every day during our recent pandemic lockdown experience. I took my phone, for an added layer of security. I live out in the country, so there are no street lights. The stars and moon were obscured by a thick blanket of cloud, but the air was still and there was no rain. I told myself I would only go a short distance, maybe a couple of kms and then return, but the evening was so fresh and lovely, I decided to walk the full 5km. I texted my husband so he knew where I was. The path was deserted. I met no humans, no animals, the birds were silent and sleeping. I crossed the bridge, the stream gurgling below me as it always did. I was immersed in a kind of sensory deprivation; I could take no pleasure in the pastoral views as I usually did, or the plants and flowers I encountered along my route, because the darkness had pulled its curtain over them. The loudest sound was my feet on the path. And even though I had no familiar constellations to guide me, no moon to light a silver path for me to follow, the darkness was not absolute; once my eyes had become accustomed, I could sense a faint shimmering of light in the air, not enough to aid my sight, but enough to to comfort me. The street lights and human abundance of the town and city, I realised, gave me more cause for alarm than my lonely sojourn through the rural night.
One of my neighbours, who owns much of the landscape I walked through, once told me she doesn’t sleep well; most nights, she wakes between 1 and 3 am, and often, she gets up and goes out into the dark early morning and walks her land. I remember how horrified I was. I asked her if she was afraid, and she replied with a question: what is there to be afraid of? I didn’t know, because I had never had the experience. I have since faced my fear, but the challenge of leaving my warm bed to explore the 3am dark has not yet called to me. I will know when that time has come.
But what of the internal darkness? That is something I have experienced more frequently the older I have become. Depression, low mood, mood swings, insidious voices and nasty thoughts which just don’t seem to come from me; you can call it what you like, but it’s just as real as the night, and fluctuates just as erratically as natural light levels. Internal darkness is also an absence of light, of hope, of inspiration. Like external dark, it has no physical form, but it impacts on the body in physiological ways, just as it impacts on the mind.
This is the greater challenge, and one I am still working on. There are no simple answers here, like going for a walk in the night, or descending into a deep hole in the earth’s crust. Not that they were simple, but they were obvious; you face that fear by willingly entering into it. Room 101. The rats. But our internal darkness often stems from no obvious cause, yet it can lead us into extreme coping mechanisms.
I had - still have, really - developed over the years three self-medication strategies for when the internal darkness overwhelms: I drink wine/ gin, I comfort-eat [everything], and I write. They are not solutions, and I don’t recommend them. They help in the moment, they ameliorate, they disguise the truth, but ultimately in the long term they make me feel worse. Internal darkness is often something which cannot be vanquished alone. It took me until now, my 55th year on this earth to realise that. I’ve never been someone to ask for help with anything. But two things happened this year:
I almost threw away a year of intense study for my Masters in English just as I was about to embark on its key element, the thesis.
I took a very thorough medical offered by my employer which involved a questionnaire on my mental health, and to my absolute horror, it flagged the state of my mental health as ‘abnormal’. In big red letters.
I have never been a quitter. I am stubborn as a mule. Fiercely independent. Foolishly so, I now realise.
When I told my lecturer that I was giving up my Masters, she reached out to me with so much kindness that I was immediately humbled and grateful. I was not expecting such a response. It had not occurred to me that someone might care. Might want to help. That there might be other options. And although I felt like a failure, and weak for needing help, I decided in the end to complete my thesis. It was hard work but worth it; I was awarded a First Class Honours, and I graduate next spring.
The second issue is still in process. I fell apart for a few days, but then I made a plan, which started with seeing my doctor. I have little more to say about that at this stage, except that it seems I am having trouble with menopause. And this may resonate with many women, because the M-word is one, even today in 2022, that society doesn’t like to mention. Rest assured that it is one which will make an abundant appearance in the future here on H A G.
What the Mórrígan taught me about Darkness.
But going back to the Mórrígan; what have I learned from her? Well, for starters, she’s a shape-shifter; she takes many forms. This fits the obvious form of maid - mother - crone that most women go through. But she shows me that we can be who we want, that we are all complex manifestations of ourselves as we move through our existence, and that each aspect of our identity is valid and valuable.
Youth does not define me; I am not chasing it by altering my appearance to try and hold onto it as long as possible, like so many women feel they must. Motherhood does not define me; I am and always will be a mother to my children, but that is not all I am, and I have to dig deep and work hard to try and unearth this part of my individuality that I have buried for so long. At this stage in our lives, we are our own archaeologists; interpretation is key here, and we must pay attention to our intuition. It is not about reinvention, a concept often bandied about with regard to women of a certain age. It is simply re-engaging with who we always were, with that woman we never learned to express and have so long repressed in order to fulfil patriarchal expectations.
The Mórrígan’s shape-shifting took zoomorphic form in the guise of the crow/ rook/ raven, the eel, the wolf, the heifer. This is not something we mere mortals can do, but our imagination, meditation, our empathy can lead us to gain some understanding of animal existence and perhaps learn from that. After all, we all experience this world through our soft animal bodies; we share blood and flesh and bone. We have the same need for sustenance, shelter, warmth, love and companionship. I live in cattle country, I am surrounded by cows. What can they teach me? Why do we insult a woman we don’t like by calling her a cow? Across the road from me live a colony of rooks; they are loud and raucous. On my 5km there is a nesting pair of ravens. What can I learn from these feathered friends?
But the Mórrígan’s shapeshifting also took another form. Legend has it that she famously took another triple aspect: that of three ‘sisters’ named Badb, Nemain, and Anand, although in some stories, Macha replaces Nemain. Whilst it is understood that these three sisters were known collectively as the Morrigna, or Mórrígan, the mythology tends to describe her as an individual being. It seems more logical to me that each ‘sister’ represents a different part of her identity as made up of her skills, such as battle prowess, foretelling the future, and poet. We see this more clearly in the goddess Brigid, who is also made up of three ‘sisters’, in her case all of them called Brigid, who represent her skills in the forge as a blacksmith, her healing skills, and her poetic skills.
In entering her cave, I not only confronted my fears of the dark and caving, but I also willingly went to meet her. In the blackness, as I waited, I was forced to confront my limitations; what were my skills, if any? Was I flat and one dimensional, or multi-dimensioned? Was I fearless, would I go into battle for my beliefs? Could I see my own future, could I make my own future, or languish in the dark, feeble and powerless? Would I pass muster, or would she banish me from her cave?
I guess she accepted me, as I have returned to visit the Mórrígan every year since that first occasion, except for 2020, when lockdown forbade movement outside that 5km radius. I have learned a lot about myself, and I’m still working on it. It is unpleasant work at times, and it’s a long slow process, but it brings great rewards.
Sometimes, it is necessary to step outside our comfort zone and face our fears. If you are embarking on such a journey, please make sure you do so in a safe and measured way. Watch out for the people who can guide you, they will sway in and out of your life unexpectedly, and you don’t want to miss them. Realise your worth as a human being, and never be afraid to seek help when you need it.
We are entering our wisdom years. Let’s make the most of them.
SOURCES:
Fraser, J. “The First Battle of Moytura.” Ériu, v.8, 1915, pp. 1-63.
Poe, Edgar, Allen. “The Raven”, The Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48860/the-raven.
Ruskin, John. “The Lance of Pallas”, Modern Painters, vol. 5, p 209.
Sagan, Carl. “The Seth MacFarlane collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive”, Library of Congress, https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchCode=LCCN&searchArg=mm2011085590&searchType=1&permalink=y
What an intense journey that was! Anyone who was brought up in an urban environment and experiencing a rural one, will be able to relate to this, our ambivalent attitude towards darkness, how we say we love the peace and the tranquility of the night, but are actually terrified of falling prey to the monsters our upbringing has peopled it with. Caves, especially graves are full of a quivering sort of life, not the absence of life. I seem to remember that the Oweynagat cave was reputed to be an entrance to an underworld, full of devils especially cat devils. As far as I know, there isn't an underworld in Irish mythology, but how could the Christians understand a religion that didn't have a Hell? Christianity is all about darkness, death, fear and shame. Before that did the darkness have all that stigma? I doubt it, but I'm not a scholar.
I’m very interested in nature & the urban environment. I have an Instagram account but haven’t accessed it since the beginning of COVID. I was uploading images of my urban landscape which I was photographing while walking the dog. I have a Visual Arts background and it was a way to make the walking time more creative and thought provoking. This is more than likely why I’m interested in your Substack. 😌