The Divine Old Woman

The Divine Old Woman



The Cailleach sometimes assumes the shape of gulls, eagles, herons, and cormorants. She rambles the hills followed by troops of deer and wild pigs and leaps from hilltop to hilltop. She created mountains and lakes, she built the archaic cairns and megaliths.


The last spurt of harsh winter weather is called A’ Chailleach. Then comes Latha Na Caillich, which in the old calendar fell on March 25, the equinox, and this is when the hag was “overthrown”—til the next equinox. [That used to be new years day, but now is called Lady Day.] In early spring the Cailleach hurls her slachdan into the root of the holly and gorse, plants symbolic of winter and sacred to her. During the “big sun”—the light half of the year—she metamorphoses into a gray boulder that exudes moisture.



People observed and watched for definite meteorological changes that signaled the coming of the Cailleach, who brought snowfall over the heather-dyed hills and fields. Various accounts show Cailleach Beura and her helpers riding on wolves and wild pigs (like Norse and Russian witches), especially in February storms.

Ireland and Scotland are covered with natural shrines associated with the Cailleach. The stormiest headlands on the coast of Mull used to be called Cailleach point. The Old Goddess sat on its rocks, looking out to sea. A nearby cave was called the milking place of the Cailleach’s goats and sheep. Likewise, the rocks at Lora Falls were called stepping stones of the Cailleach and her goats.

The Muilearteach was an ocean Cailleach armed with “two slender spears of battle.” Upon her head, the Muilearteach had “gnarled brushwood, like the clawed old wood of aspen root.”

Her face was blue-black of the lustre of coalAnd her bone-tufted tooth was like red rust.In her head was one pool-like eye,Swifter than a star in a winter sky. 



The great Old Goddess of Ireland was the Cailleach Bhéara or Hag of Béare in Munster. She “existed from the long eternity of the world.”  A woman of Tiree once asked the Cailleach how old she was. She replied that she remembered when the Skerryvore rocks were fields where barley was farmed and when the lakes were little wells. Her great age was a sign of power, truly venerable, and proverbial: “as old as the Cailleach Bhéarra.”


The Corca Loighdhe sept claimed Boí as their ancestor, and the Corca Dhuibhne said that she had been their foster mother. The ancestor of this clan, the “people of Duibhne,” was Dovinia, a goddess whose name appears in several ogham inscriptions in west Munster. The Book of Lecan says “… it was bequeathed [to the Corco Dhuibhne] that they shall never be without some wonderful Cailleach among them.”


The Beare peninsula in west Cork belonged to this Old Woman, and the island Inis Boí at its end was named after her. A sea rock was pointed out as the Tarbh Conraidh, the cailleach’s great bull. His bellow impregnated the cows who heard it. But once he went swimming after a cow, and the Cailleach struck him with her slachdan, turning him to stone.

The Cailleach’s slachdan relates to staffs used by Celtic shamans. The Fé was made of aspen wood, sometimes with Ogham characters cut on it, and had power both in healing and cursing. It was used to strike what was detested. This striking could also banish ills. Cormac’s Glossary calls it a magic wand. Priests considered it pagan and forbade people to bury it with the dead in Christian cemeteries. A manuscript of 1509 recommended cutting the name of a man made impotent through magic on the wand in Ogham runes and striking him with it.


The Cailleach Bhéarra was credited with extremely sharp sight, being able to discern from a distance of twenty miles. It is said that she never carried mud on her feet from one place to another, and never threw out dirty water before bringing in clean. This last was a faery taboo widely observed across Ireland.


The Hag’s Chair faces north inside one of the great cairns atop the Loughcrew hills. This was a six-foot high stone seat engraved with a vulva-gate, concentric circles, and other signs, with a lot of quartz scattered around it. Legend says that the Cailleach Bhéarra came from the north to perform a magical act that would give her great power. She filled her apron with stones, dropping a cairn on Carnbane, then jumped a mile to Slieve-na-cally (Hag’s Mountain) to drop another, then on to the next hill, where she let another fall. On her fourth and final leap, she slipped and fell to her death.

Countless Irish myths tell how the Cailleach constructed huge mounds, megaliths, and towers in a single night. Some of them are known by names like “one night’s work.” [Wood-Martin, 134] Scottish myths often cast the Cailleach as a shaper of the landscape. She carried earth and stones on her back to make the hills of Ross-shire. Sometimes the basket or its strap broke, spilling the contents out to form mounts like Ben Vaichaird and rock piles like Carn Na Caillich. Faeries called glaistigean are credited with similar land-building feats.

The Cailleach created the Hag’s Furrow while ploughing. She turned up huge piles of stones while ploughing on mount Schiehallion, the Caledonian faery hill. (Its Gaelic name, Sídh Chaillean, means “Crone’s Mound.” Many other places are named Beinne na Cailleach (her mount) and Sgríob na Cailleach (her writing). Folklore says that the Crone turned into a boulder atop Beinn na Callich, where a prehistoric cairn also stands.

In Altagore, county Antrim, stood a stone called the Shanven, “old woman.” People considered it sacred, leaving oatcakes and butter offerings there. One story says that a mason ignorant of the stone’s power moved it for use as a gate-post. The next morning it had returned to its old place. The Shanven story resembles French tales of Black Virgins’ removal and miraculous return to their mountain sanctuaries. Irish folk memory also refers to the medieval practice of taking shiela-na-gigs away from wells and fields to incorporate them into doorways and walls of churches, monasteries, and castles.

In Armagh, the Cailleach Bhéarra was said to live in a deep chamber under a hilltop megalith near Slieve Gullion. People visited this spot on Blaeberry Sunday, a survival of Lughnasadh. [Anne Ross, “The Divine Hag of the Pagan Celts,” 156] [insert on megalithic trade of Loughcrew, Slieve-na-cailleach] Slieve gullion in Armagh is called Calliagh Birra’s House, and the megalithic site Carrownamaddoo 2 is also called Calliagh A Vera’s House. In many places, standing stones are said to be people and animals she transformed.

Near Antrim is a búllan (rock basin) known as the Witch’s Stone. When the Cailleach finished building the Round Tower, she leaped off the top and landed on this stone, leaving marks from her elbow and her knee. This stone used to lie near a stream. Much later, a wall was built, cutting the stone off from the water. [Wood-Martin, 247]




I am Buí, the Old Woman of BeareI used to wear a smock that was ever-renewedToday it has befallen me, by my low estate,That I could not have even a cast-off smock to wear.

This poem about the Cailleach Bhéarra was written around the 11th century and preserved in the Otia Merseiana collection. The manuscript betrays priestly influences, recasting the Cailleach as the mother of St Fintan or the wife of an 8th-century poet, in the familiar pattern of stripping down ancient myths and reinterpreting them according to patriarchal norms. Under these terms, female might of the magnitude expressed in folklore is unthinkable.

Lone is Femen: vacant, bareStands in Bregon Ronan’s chair.And the slow tooth of the skyFrets the stones where my dead lie. 

The poem is about death, winter, decay. In this, there is some congruence with strands of folk culture linking the Cailleach to winter and the season of little sun. But the poem is brimming over with female bitterness and intense loss. Age is no longer venerable and powerful, rather it is seen as contemptible and weak. Her beauty gone, the Cailleach sits at the fringes of society, disregarded, in want. At last, she sings her death song: “My life ebbs from me like the sea / Old age has made me yellow.”

Ebb, flood, and ebb: I know Well the ebb, and well the flow.And the second ebb, all three,Have they not come home to me? 

This Buí of Beare laments her poverty and low status, the loss of the company of chiefs and warriors. “Only women folk I hate”—because of their beauty and the pleasures offered them. The old woman remembers the men she loved, and how she raced with them on the fields. King Diarmaid no longer comes to her; he is rowing across the river of the dead. Buí drank mead with kings but now sits with “shriveled hags” swilling the whey-water of poverty. She is made to follow the routines of a nun, against her will: “And as upon God, I call/ Turn my blood to angry gall.”



In spite of all the efforts of the priests and learned men, the lowly and powerful current of folklore carried the outlawed mythosophy of the Cailleach into modern times. She survived in Ireland as well as Scotland, where the Irish Scots settled, pollinating tales of “great supernatural hags haunting mountain passes or driving their deer over the hills and conferring benefits and evils on humanity as they saw fit.”



The Scots often spoke of beur cailleachan in the plural, as powerful beings living in lochs and among rushes. A certain tall lakeside reed was called “the distaff of the Bera wives.” Another water plant like the flag was called their “staff.” A Gaelic song mentions the three cailleachan of the Scottish Hebrides.

The Scottish cailleach’s cow was said to give great amounts of milk. In Benderloch “circular green hollows are referred to as ‘Cailleach Bheur’s cheese-vats.’ ” A rock shelter in Ardnamurchan is called the Caillich’s Byre, and it was said that she kept her cattle there. Like all faery cattle, they were inviolate. An Irish legend says that once the cailleach’s neighbors stole her magical cow and began driving her toward their farm. The crone gave chase, caught them and struck all three with her slachdan, turning them to stone. The largest of these rocks is called Clochtogla, the lifted stone.



Cailleach Beinne Bric, horó!Bric horó! Bric horó!Cailleach Beinne Bric, horó!Hag of the fountain high!I ne’er would let my troop of deer,Troop of deer, troop of deer;I ne’er would let my troop of deer,A-gathering shellfish to the tide.Better liked they cooling cress,Cooling cress, cooling cress;Better liked they cooling cress,That grows beside the fountain high.
In another version of this croon, the Cailleach proclaims that she is an old woman who ranges the mountains and glens and adds, “I never set fetter on black or red cow in the herd…. I am the carlin [old woman] who is light/ Alone on the spur of the cairns.”





When a pack of dogs attacked the Gyre Carline, she turned into a pig and ran away. This crone goddess of lowland Scotland carried an iron club. One old poem says the Gyre Carline lived on men’s flesh, upholding the demonised witch-stereotype. But Sir Walter Scott called her the “mother witch of the Scottish peasantry.”


Powerful old women’s opposition to military heroes appears throughout the tales and sagas of barbarian Europe and survives in modern peasant folklore. The hags in these stories have the power of shapeshifting, transforming themselves into wild animals or stunningly beautiful maidens. Their power reaches to the sun, moves rocks and earth and wind.





The fateful Morrigan confronted CuChullain in the form of a red-eyebrowed woman wearing a long crimson mantle. She then changed herself into a crow. “A dangerous enchanted woman you are,” said Cuchulainn. His ultimate doom was set in motion when three old women on the road shamed him into breaking his geis against eating dog meat. Their words to him could be said, to sum up, the conflict between hags and warriors, peasants and aristocrats: “Unseemly are great who endure not the little and poor.” [Anne Ross, “The Divine Hag of the Pagan Celts,” 157]

As in so many of these stories, CuChullain is made out the hero, and the elders’ reproach is presented as an unjust manipulation of him, completely isolated from the cultural context of the grandmothers. But it represents a survival of the politically submerged concerns of women elders: the true nature of war, and the arrogance of aristocratic heroes in the eyes of the common people.





The old woman declares that whoever is able to forge the magical Sampo will be allowed to marry her daughter. One of the suitors hires a smith who performs the feat. When this suitor presents Louhi with the Sampo he has purchased, she passes him over and, true to her word, marries the maiden to the smith who forged the Sampo. The warrior Ilmarinen, failing to get Louhi’s consent to marry another daughter, abducts her. The rejected suitors gang up on Louhi and capture the Sampo, but as they flee in a boat, the old woman calls up a terrible storm, wrecking Vainamoinen’s magical zither and scattering the Sampo. When the warriors regather its parts, Louhi shuts the sun and moon up in a cave, but in the end, she is killed.



Scandinavians, like the Celts, had legends about women who flung great boulders across the land and were responsible for the placement of rocks and other geographic features. These beings were variously calledtröllkonur (troll women) and giantesses, names often interchangeable with “witch” in folklore. [Grimm, 1041] Often the trollkonur can be recognized as immanent divinities of the land. Givinarhol, the giantess’ cave, belonged to an old woman who left her footprints on the rock near the lake. She ground gold in a quern. [Craigie] In feudal times, these beings are described as falling into bondage.




The two antagonists dueled with poetry (flyting was a ritual of insults). Atli bragged that he was hateful “to hags,” having often done night-riders to death, and wished Hrimgerth nine leagues under the ground. Then he accused her of holding up Helgi’s ships by witchcraft. Hrimgerth retorted that it was her mother who did that; she herself was working on drowning part of the fleet.

Hrimgerth taunted Atli, calling him a gelding with the whinny of an uncastrated stallion but with his heart in the hind end. She dared her opponent to step on land “in reach of my claws,” but he demurred on the excuse of his duty to Helgi. Then the jötun witch called out Helgi, her father’s killer. Only with the help of Helgi’s valkyrie lover was Hrimgerth prevented from slaying all his men. As the sun rose, the giant woman turned to stone in the legendary manner of trolls and dwarves. [Hollander, 173, Helgakvitha. Cf Alvismal, in which Thor questions the “all wise” dwarf, detaining him until dawn, when he turns to stone.]



Conflicts between divine hags and warriors model the antagonism of old wise women to warlords in real life. Not surprisingly, warlords’ contempt for witches was accompanied by a strong dose of fear. Anglo-Saxon men believed that witches and elves could make them sick or weak, even kill them. They were afraid of hags or hedge-riders (hagtessen) traveling by night, and of spirit, warrior-women called walcygean, the Saxon equivalent of valkyries. In 1022 Wulfstan, archbishop of York, wrote, “Here in England there are witches andwalcygean.”
Witches represented an impressive obstacle to conquest in the minds of early medieval warriors. It is written that before the Norman invasion of England, Gyrth had a dream that a great witch stood on the island, opposing the king’s fleet with a fork and a trough. Tord dreamed that “before the army of the people of the country was a riding a huge witch-wife upon a wolf,” and she tossed the invading soldiers into its mouth.


Loud were the mighty women when they rode over the hill
Loud were the mighty women when they rode over the land…
I stood under a shield while the mighty women
Prepared their strength and sent screaming spears…


Though the oppression of women and peasants was on the rise, old beliefs in the witch’s power endured. A heavily armed man might hesitate to harm or offend an old woman reputed for her Cræft. The hagtessen avenged wrongs committed against themselves and their kindred. An impressive body of traditions validated the powers of women elders. The witch’s cultural influence was strong enough to form a significant breakwater to the incoming tide of patriarchy that automatically assigned all authority and all privilege to the male, the warlord, the priest.







_______. “The Divine Hag of the Pagan Celts”, in Venetia Newell, ed., The Witch Figure: Essays in Honor of Katharine M. Briggs, Routledge Kegan Paul, 1973

Source: The Divine Old Woman


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