In The Belly, Here Comes The Light
The Cailleach, boundary layers, gestation, and the answer to St Patrick's question
Folklore says that once, after the Christian empire had colonized Ireland and inserted itself into the still lush and resilient local mythology, St Patrick had asked The Cailleach how she had lived so long. She simply answered, “I don’t ever carry the muddy dirt of one place beyond that of another place without washing my feet.”
This week I have walked through mud every day to my own coven of trees, a place where time thins, and I’ve thought about The Cailleach staring down her looming body, making eye contact with a man so mortal he likely seemed brittle. An exasperated sigh as she steps into the icy rush of a winter river. Her wide feet sink into the boundary layer as she bends to scrub away what was. One piercing gaze into his soul when she answers and he knows she sees how much clings to him, how unwashed his own story is. As if she’s really saying, ‘Let it all go, Patrick. Let the story of your god return to the earth, let it gestate again.’ And then with one smooth movement, The Cailleach is gone, leaping over hills, passing through gates of what will be.
Have you met her yet? The Cailleach?
Those who’ve seen her would say she is a giantess who tosses boulders, leaps hilltops, and roams wild with the animals - not too far removed from Ada Limoń’s Cannibal Woman. She is a crone, an indomitable and wild creature who sits high up on the Hag’s Chair. So tall is her seat that she can see half of Ireland from its height. And all around her chair are uterine-shaped sanctuaries once covered by the earth, all engraved with swirls, vulvas, solar patterns, and portals of life and rebirth.
Tara Brading calls her “Grandmother of the bones.
Grandmother of the stones.
Earth-shaper.
Wisdom weaver.
Veiled one.
Keeper of the old ways…the great mystery…the unraveling.
Ancient voice of the natural world.
Guardian of the deer and the cattle.
Grandmother of creation and destruction.”
The Cailleach and her sacred meaning are carved onto the bones of Earth itself. Hard as they tried, the church just could not remove her from the stories, or from the faithful hearts, or from the undeniable cycles of green living. The best the empire of men could do was claim that she, the Crone Giantess, was in fact a withered hag, a miserable, powerless nun.
Still, I am a great-granddaughter of Ireland and, when I am in that cove of trees, I look sideways out my left eye. I study one wide moss-covered Grandmother tree spreading thick in her soil-seat, all her eyes sprouting strange short arms. As if you could climb her like a ladder. As if something very old and important lives miles up in her canopy but you’d have to risk the thinnest of her rungs to reach it. When I look at her straight on, the bark warps and shimmers. She bends inward like she cradles a doorway in that thick creviced coat and it’s occurred to me that maybe I could step between her eye-arms, return a part of me to itself. Maybe I don’t have to climb, just step through.
I sit with her the way my ancestors must have sat in The Cailleach’s realm. I sink into a bench someone left facing the half circle of old mothers and I feel an inherited memory of a Hag’s Chair, of uterine-shaped tunnels, of a patriarchal man asking for the secret of Nature’s longevity, and of our giantess goddess answering with the one thing he could not do: release, decompose, gestate new again. Can you do that, Patrick? Can you let your resurrected god rest in the warmth of death? Can you travel deep into the womb again? Can you let your spirit sleep through the winter?
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