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Celtic deities

Eriu

Someone was asking me the other day why Ireland has such an unpleasant name РIre Рland Рthe land of ire or anger. It was, of course, none other than our old friend the Brits. The Gaelic name Eire comes from the Goddess Eiri̼.

Eddie Stack, friend, writer and bard, tells me: “Eiriu, Banba & Fodhla  were three mother goddesses of the Tuatha de Dannan, the magical race who were early settlers of the Island. The T de D were vanquished by the Milisians — early Gaels — and the three queens were killed. Later they ‘appear’ again in Irish mythology as Bridgit, Anu and Danu… Anu is goddess of prosperity, Bridgit is goddess of fertility, and Danu is goddess par exelence and mother of all the gods…they are represented by the triple spiral like the one at Newgrange…

You’re taking me way back here…all this stuff is very rusty in my head…but I hold the feeling in my heart. In essence the Irish are a matriarchal race…the great mother…we tuned into the universal mother before it was popular…I often feel two things we have/had that frightened the Brits + the Church: Imagination (read magic) and devotion to the Goddess (the feminine).”

Eddie’s quite right of course, British men are often accused of having no connection to their feminine side, incapable of expressing their feelings and emotions, whereas their Irish counterparts will bore the backside off you while regaling you with their feelings and emotions. It was probably the running around beating everyone else up that made the Brits so disconnected from their feminine side, which they did for quite a few hundred years, amassing in the process, the greatest empire the world has ever seen, literally, the empire on which the sun never sets.

It’s not a black and white picture of course, there were enough Irishmen in the army and navy of the Brits and they apparently did their best in the departments of warfare, not to mention, rape, looting and pillaging. I’ve never understood pillage, it sound like it was along the lines of dispensing headache and other pills to the poor souls who’d been raped and looted, but not a bit of it, my dictionary says it’s robbery with violence especially during wartime and it comes from an old French verb piller meaning to plunder. Which begs the question, what’s the difference between looting and plundering, but we’ll leave that for another day.

There is, of course, only one God, assuming for a moment that you accept that there is one at all. So how come out of one, we create so many, as here. St. Patrick apparently used the shamrock, with three leaves on one stem to explain the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost to the heathen Irish, but I wish he’d have turned his explanatory powers to letting us know how you could have a Father and Son without a mother? Perhaps if he’d asked us, we could have let him borrow one of ours since we had so many of them. Maybe it’s a bit like the sky, there’s just the one, but it has many aspects, sunny and benevolent, dark, broody and threatening etc, so given our pool old limited brains we need a few competing and dissonant images to give us a better sense of our maker, and Father, Son and Mother sounds OK from this point of view – but where’s the Sister, if there’s a Son?

spirals at Newgrange

Have you ever seen the statues of Athena or Pallas from ancient Greece? She’s often seen wearing a helmet, with three snakes coming out the top of her head. Without going into detail, snakes are symbols of the divine Mother, look at the logo for physicians for example where the snakes are a symbol of nurturing, healing and regeneration, all motherly qualities.

These three Goddesses control the channels of subtle energy within us, and we find the same thing in many traditions, e.g. the Sanskrit culture, where the three Goddesses who control the three channels, essentially, past, present and future, are Mahakali (left), Mahasarawati (right) and Mahalakshmi (center).

The work Om, too, is actually AUM, three syllables with A – left channel, U – right channel and M – center channel. And, within us and without, the universe consists of past, present and future, and each of those three aspects is under the auspices of a particular aspect of the Goddess.

I’m sure that the people who lived in Eire, will have understood this.

The spirals in groups of three at Newgrange are acknowledgments of this, and the three and a half coil spiral, all over the world, is the symbol of the residual divine feminine power that’s in the Sacrum bone, and which awakens under the right circumstances. I’ve visited the Newgrange site a number of times. It’s in the Boyne valley about an hours  drive north of Dublin. It is said to be a burial site, there are what are known as passages graves there. It contains the oldest man made structure in Western Europe, some 1000 years older than the pyramids in Egypt. The fact is that it was built by people in the Stone Age, and these people clearly knew of this subtle feminne energy, hence the spirals. They also had great understanding of mathematics, astronomy, and architecture – imagine building a huge structure which had stood for 5,500 years, using a technique known as corbelling, a structure whose creation required precise knowledge of the midwinter solstice, and the engineering skills necessary to channel the first rays of sunlight on that particualar day through a gap a metre wide and a third of a metre hugh and to illuminate the inside of the structure? And, all without telescopes or sophisticated measuring instruments?

These people were not alone of course in appreciating the mysteries of the spiral. The Maoris of New Zealand saw the spiral in a new fern opening, and tatooed spirals on their bodies, and the Hopi Indians in Arizona clearly knew too about this residual feminine energy in the body.

It is not for nothing that in many countries over many millennial that those who would try to control other humans have tried to suppress the feminine, for the feminine aspect knows only love, not control, the nuruturing of creativity, she is the ultimate in liberation and freedom. Organized religions are a good example. They are founded either by incarnations or prophets, for the transformation and emanciaption of human beings, but within a few generations of their passing, they become external rather than internal – focussing on buidlings, rituals etc and they get hijacked by the masculine, hence a priestly class that excludes the feminine.

I have a feeling that worldwide, the devotion to the Goddess as Eddie puts it, will really come to the fore.

Isn’t it a remarkable thing how spirals esist at every level of the phsical universe, from within the atom, the double helix of DNA, in the opening of baby ferns to huge galazies in the farthest reaches of outer space?

spiral galaxy

spiral galaxy

admin Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Meditation, Understanding, human brain, ydig monotheism, polytheism, Three Goddesses