Scotland's Sacred Goddess

Introduction

MANY PEOPLE THINK that in the distant past, before the development of patriarchal religions, most if not all human societies believed in a Mother Goddess figure and many books have been written on the subject. Hilda Davidson summarised:

There is general agreement that the concept of a goddess goes back into the remote European past.1

Such ideas have been noted in the mythologies of societies in many parts of the world and F Guirand distilled the idea of the goddess thus:

She was the great Goddess, the universal mother in whom were united all the attributes and functions of divinity. Above all she symbolized fertility. 2

We can see in this emphasis on fertility what may have been the origin of such belief, or more properly beliefs, in that humans, like all animals, were given birth to by a mother. Probably as important is the reality that human children, again like many animals, are directly fed by their mothers who give them both life and nurture. Much of the analysis to date has centred on Middle Eastern and Mediterranean evidence but as the material presented here will show, it seems that such beliefs were in existence here in Scotland, quite possibly up to the arrival of Christianity in the middle of the first millennium. How far back such beliefs go is impossible to tell, but it is distinctly possible that such ideas were already part of the culture of the first people who arrived here after the Last Ice Age.

This work is a collection of a variety of evidence that suggests the concept of a Mother Goddess was part of the belief system of early peoples in Scotland. Recent evidence shows that people were living here as long ago as 12,000BCE.3 This is relatively recent in the history of humanity and it seems certain that such peoples would already have had some kind of mythology to explain how the world, and the universe, worked. Mythology is essentially a means of describing the functioning of reality in terms of beings, modelled on human behaviour, who come to be seen as goddesses and gods. I have noted elsewhere that for mythology to work in pre-literate societies the stories they tell are set within the known environment of the communities in which they flourish.4 It is accepted that the earliest settlers were what is known as hunter-gatherers and had a nomadic or semi-nomadic life, in that they travelled the landscape to take advantage of different food sources throughout the year. The scholarly differentiation between such lifestyles and those of settled agricultural and pastoral societies has blinded us to the reality that these hunter-gatherer groups travelled known and settled paths. They thus developed relationships with the landscape that would have allowed such a localisation process, and this may be the reason that so many human societies have, over time, developed tales of supernatural beings associated with prominent mountains which can be seen over considerable distances.

Most of the material considered herein concerns the 'Cailleach', a Gaelic word that has come to mean both an old woman and a nun, but which in earlier times appears to have signified a supernatural being whose attributes clearly mark her out as some kind of goddess figure. Throughout this work there will also be material that refers to the 'Carlin', or the 'Gyre Carlin', a Scots term for a creature very much akin to the Cailleach, although apparently through the influence of Christianity she became particularly associated with witchcraft.

These figures were gigantic, they had supernatural power over the weather and the landscape and, in some surviving material, over death itself. In other material the Cailleach turns, every Beltain, into the young, beautiful and fertile figure of Bride, a deep mythological construct that makes it clear we are dealing with a Mother Goddess figure. A Goddess who, while an integral part of the cultural traditions of every locale where her stories survived, appears to have been part of a wider system of belief, suggesting that the material presented herein is only a fragment of what once existed.

Much of the surviving material is presented here as not much more than lists. However, those lists are evidence in themselves that the stories of the mythological creature who ruled the weather and formed the landscape were common to all, reflecting that wider system of belief. That belief itself is likely to already have been part of the culture of the first settlers who came here after the Last Ice Age. Different types of material will be presented here, but central to understanding the nature of belief in the far distant past is the corpus of stories that have survived, initially through the oral tradition and subsequently through a wide range of literary collections of such material. It was precisely through coming across so many stories of (usually giant) supernatural females associated with specific locales that I began to realise how extensive these creatures were in traditional culture, and, as we shall see, she is still with us. Listing the material like this may provide a basis for the future identification of patterns of place names reflecting as yet unclear relationships with the landscape.

It is possible the Carlin originally derived from the Cailleach, but it is in the survival of material regarding both figures that we can discern their cultural relevance to the communities in which oral traditions regarding them survived. I have no intention of becoming bogged down in the particulars of linguistics, but some clarity at this stage is necessary. As far as we can tell, at the time the Romans arrived in this part of the world the majority of the tribes living in Scotland spoke CELTIC languages. These have been sub-divided into two main branches, P- and Q-CELTIC. The latter survives in the modern world as Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and the recently revived Manx; P-CELTIC survives in parts of Wales, Brittany and also in the recently revived Cornish. At the time of the Roman invasion, the majority of Scotland's indigenous tribal populations are believed to have spoken a form of P-CELTIC, akin to Old Welsh, while in Argyll and at least some of the Hebrides, the tribes spoke a Q-CELTIC tongue which was the ancestor of today's Gaelic. The other language we will be dealing with is Scots, a north Germanic language related to English but which has much in common with the languages of Scandinavia. While this tongue is generally supposed to have arrived in post-Roman times, cultural links showing ongoing connections with Europe from prehistoric times suggest that older forms of this language could have been heard here thousands of years ago, spoken by visitors from the Continent, if not by settled groups.

Given that much of the material, particularly in the case of place names which form a significant part of the evidence, is in Gaelic, a Glossary has been provided, and this includes some of the more archaic Scots terminology as well. In both Gaelic and Scots terms the original forms have been retained, with no attempt to comply with current usage.

Due to the variety of types of material, their physical distribution and the irregular nature of their survival, some specific examples appear in multiple sections of this work, generally with different emphases. I am unaware of any previous attempt at gathering such diverse material pertaining to what are essentially unclassifiable belief systems, and therefore beg the reader's indulgence if such repetition and variety is at times troublesome, but attempting to lasso smoke is not easy.

The material is organised round specific themes, each having its own chapter. In Chapter 1 we look at the process of story itself; how oral transmission was central to all human culture before the advent of literacy and how the spoken word can retain significant material over millennia. Chapter 2 is concerned with the naming of places, and shows that some place names have a significance well beyond that of simple landscape description. The creation of mythological interpretations of the physical world is common to societies across the globe and the setting of story within the known landscape of each community played a vital part in the development of localised culture.

In Chapter 3 we look specifically at the Cailleach within the mountains of Scotland. Throughout human history, and across the entire planet, mountains have played a considerable role in a wide range of cultural activity, encompassing mythology, religion and tradition, and Scotland is no different than elsewhere. Chapter 4 concentrates on a series of stories that refer to the direct creation of parts of the landscape by supernatural female agency. Such material is in no way unique to Scotland, but here there is a great diversity of protagonists from the Cailleach herself, through various witches and Amazons to the Christian Devil. I suggest the evidence clearly points to the origin of such material being the figure of the Cailleach herself, and many of the variants are later, Christianised - perhaps even sanitised - versions of truly ancient ideas. Chapter 5 focusses on the remarkable amount of suggestive material that is associated with those prominent hills, known as Paps, Ciochan in Gaelic, that are shaped like female breasts, and thus apparently were understood at some level as symbolic of fertility, and perhaps of the supernatural females themselves. A considerable number of these, like the Paps of Jura, The Paps of Fife, the Eildon Hills and the Pap of Glencoe, can be seen as the foci of a wide range of cultural material regarding story, belief and possible ritual practice. This includes stories,...