The Triple Goddess in Celtic Tradition
© Copyright 2002 Montague Whitsel, All Rights Reserved.
Celtic mythology is replete with tripled or triadic deities. In this article I address this phenomenon by first exploring the Celtic fascination with threes and triads as a way of alluding to the mysterious dimensions of the cosmos in which we find ourselves living. I then apply this to the question of why there are triple deities. The major part of the article is then an exploration of the mythos of two triple Goddesses: (1) ANU—DANU—TAILTIU (Goddess of Sources, Springs and the Earth) and (2) the Celtic Lunar Goddess �?BOANN—BRIGHID—CERIDWEN, mentioning ways of encountering these Goddesses today, through chant, meditation and imaging.
“Did the Celts worship the Goddess?�?nbsp; This is a question that I often get asked by curious and sincere people looking into Celtic mysticism and spirituality. As it stands, the question implies a now popularized story concerning the distant past; i.e., when all of humankind �?in the Neolithic (c. 10,000 �?c. 6,000 BCE) �?supposedly worshipped a single, unified, “Great Goddess,�?long before there were any gods to speak of and when life was a kind of earthly paradise. Whether or not this scenario turns out to be verifiable (in historic and archeological terms), it has already made a deep impact on contemporary religious consciousness. It often affects the kinds of ideas Neo-Pagans have about the distant past.
While there is a growing body of evidence for a Goddess-centered religion in what is now called “Old Europe�?(see the work of Marija Gimbutas, et. al.), Celtic religion seems to have had its own unique mythic paradigm. The Celts worshipped a great many goddesses �?as well as gods �?and nowhere seem to have worshipped a single “Great Goddess.�?nbsp; There were very few paired gods & goddesses in Celtic mythology (the Daghda and the Boann in Irish mythology is an obvious exception). Nowhere do we find the gods killing off goddesses, as is supposed to have happened in other mythologies as the Great Goddess lost favor, being supplanted by warrior gods in the society’s pantheon of deities.
While they didn’t worship a Great Goddess, neither did the Celts worship a “Great God�?(at least not until the rise of Celtic Christianity in the 4th century CE). In fact, if by ‘they�?we mean something like “the Celts as a whole, in all times and places,�?‘they�?didn’t worship any deity in common! Celtic religion is deeply and persistently polytheistic; it is regionally rooted. Celtic deities are almost always tied to particular tuatha (“tribes�? or perhaps to regional sacred sites; e.g., springs, wells, ancient trees.
Each Celtic tuath had its own deities, both gods & goddesses. These deities were manifestations or perhaps personifications of all of the various aspects of daily life. There were deities of the stable, the hearth, the field, the well, the cradle, the springs and wells from which people drew their daily supply of water, and of virtually every other dimension of life. There were gods of hunting and of sport. There were goddesses of healing, war-craft and magic. There were gods of time and space, and goddesses of the numinous and mysterious aspects of daily life. Each of these deities could be called upon when they were needed, while at other times people paid little or no attention to them.
There were also deities with a regional status; i.e., that were worshipped in a general area by more than one tuath. Danu �?who had a Continental origin �?may have originally been connected with the Danube River. She was later mentioned in other Celtic areas and may be implicated in the name of the Irish Tuatha Dé Danann (the People of ‘Danu�?). As such, Danu may have been the patron source goddess of one of the early Celtic groups to enter into Ireland and settle there. There are other goddesses who were known by one name on the Continent and by another name in Britain, Scotland and Ireland, such as the Irish goddess Brighid. She was known as Brigantia in Britain and as Bride in Scotland.
The Celts did not generally treat their deities as ‘parental�?figures; beings to ‘depend on�?or in relation to which they saw themselves as subservient. Rather, the deities suggested ways of referring to energies in the cosmos through which a person could become empowered or resourced. They often treated their gods & goddesses more or less as equals, yet always with the tip of the hat to their supernatural and immortal nature.
I sometimes think that the Celts were approaching a much more mature kind of relationship with the universe than was being expressed in many of the Mediterranean-based religions, where people had for a long time felt themselves to be the pawns of their gods (you only have to read the Odyssey to get a sense of this) and where others were giving up their autonomy and willingly becoming slaves to their God. The Celts seemed to realize that gods & goddesses were an important manifestation of the universe while at the same time acknowledging their own autonomy from their deities. If so, it would have been interesting to see where a Celtic religion would have gone without the interference of Christianity.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Celtic mythology is the existence of the so-called “Triple�?or “Triadic�?Goddesses. For some reason the Celts didn’t just worship single, individual deities, but linked some of them together in threes; never four, never two, but three. The Celts were fascinated by threes, tripled images and triadic ideas. Triple designs and three-part motifs �?such as the triskelion; a three-fold spiral �?appear in the very earliest examples of Celtic Art. When Celtic people wanted to encode their wisdom for posterity, they created “triads;�?three-part sayings that could be memorized and passed down orally. The Celtic imagination was populated by a number of tripled or triadic deities �?gods as well as goddesses �?that were somehow more mysterious than the general deities and that functioned to express mystical rather than more mundane or practical truths. What is it about threes and triads and triple manifestations of things that so appealed to the Celtic Mind?
The longer I study Celtic mythology and practice Celtic spirituality the clearer it is to me that the Celts were deeply appreciative of the mysterious element in the reality we inhabit. Behind all that we as human beings ‘know�?and call ‘real�?is a deeper reality; a numinous realm just beyond our mind’s grasp. The everyday events that we so often take for granted reveal, if looked at from another angle, this other, more mysterious dimension. If you search long enough, study hard enough, worship gods & goddesses devoutly enough, Celtic mystics believed, what you would eventually come up against is ‘Mystery;�?everything opens out into the unknown. The cosmos is strange and mysterious. For the Celts, reality emerges from this Mysterious ‘beyond�?and returns to it again at time’s end. To say that something was ‘three�?or to present it with three names or three aspects was one way of alluding to this Mystery.
I tend to think that the number �?�?fascinated the Celts because, in one sense, it is the first number with enough complexity to symbolize the mystery inherent in the cosmos. ‘One�?may be seen as single, simple, unadorned. ‘Two�?is the number of opposition, contradiction, complementarity, and duality. ‘Three�?pushes beyond our usual habit of dividing the world up into ‘this�?and ‘that, ‘here�?and ‘there,�?‘us�?and ‘them,�?‘you�?and me.�?nbsp; It introduces the mysterious ‘third;�?the tantalizing ‘other�?�?into our neatly bifurcated worlds. ‘Four�?represents the cardinal points of the Earth and as such brings us back into the spatio-temporal realm. Three is the liberating number; the number of Mystery.
As such, the Celtic triple or triadic deities are just one more vehicle through which to express this mysterious otherness. Triadic gods & goddesses did not become such through a process of multiplication; i.e., different tuatha (i.e., “tribes�? didn’t just recognize the ‘same�?deities in each other’s ‘pantheons�?and then bring three of their names together for the sake of simplicity! Rather, I think there must have been triple gods & goddesses from the very emergence of Celtic consciousness; these deities are as archaic as the Celtic fascination with the number �?.�?/FONT>
Thinking in these terms, we might suppose that certain local deities were always thought of as in some way triadic. There was a need for a triple goddess or a triple god; it said something about the nature of reality that couldn’t be expressed through the myths of single deities. While there is a tendency among some students of Celtic mythology to see triads or triple-aspected deities as emerging only at the regional level and to imply that these triads were ‘more important�?than the ‘merely�?local deities, I think this draws too much on a Mediterranean bias with its tendency to value abstractions over the specific and hierarchy over egalitarian social arrangements. When you enter the Celtic Realm, you leave the world where these presuppositions work; you are in a different mythological cosmos.
According to a strictly Celtic logic, something may be given a triple-aspect in order to draw out its more mysterious element; not because it is ‘higher�?or ‘better�?than other things, but because it reveals the strangeness of Nature and human existence in an unusually powerful or poetic way. When something becomes triadic or is tripled, it has the power to awaken us to the Mystery inherent in the cosmos and our experience of it. Gods & goddesses that are presented as triadic or who have a triple-aspect are revelatory in a unique way.
I will here discuss two primary triple goddesses. The first of these is ANU—DANU—TAILTIU, a Goddess of Sources, Rivers and the Earth. The second triad �?BOANN—BRIGHID—CERIDWEN �?is one expression of the Celtic Lunar Goddess and Muse of Poets, Bards and Storytellers. Each of these triads represents practical experiences while alluding to a more noumenal dimension. In the pages that follow, we will explore their mythos and suggest ways of connecting with these mysterious triple deities.
A. ANU—DANU—TAILTIU (The Goddess of Origin and Destination)
All things have a beginning and an end. The Celts were well aware of this. They personified the temporal limits of existence and the mysteries these perimeters implied (Birth—Life—Death—Rebirth) in the character or function of various gods & goddesses. In Ireland, three goddesses seem to have played this role: ANU, the goddess of sustenance, nurture and abundance, DANU, the lady of movement, tides and process, and TAILTIU �?the goddess of vigor, strength, and endurance. While separately quite influential in the Irish Celtic World, together they had the effect of alluding to realities concerning the limits of our existence. While we will deal with each of them in turn, keep in mind that they form a triad; a vehicle for the mysterious transcendence of the ordinary.
Each goddess in this triad has her role to play in our existence; with her we come to be and are sustained in the midst of life. With her we also pass out of existence. Anu is the goddess of sustenance, nurture and abundance. She is sometimes thought of as the mother of the gods, and as such she is an ancient manifestation of the divine feminine in Celtic mysticism, perhaps even pre-dating her first appearance in Ireland. She is the source of our existence; thought of in terms of our coming out of the darkness into the light at a spring, a cave, a lake, or from out of the sea itself.
Go to the sea in your imagination. Imagine standing on a beach, seeing all of the evidence of organic life being washed up out of the surf; dead jellyfish, seashells, strands of seaweed, and so forth. Go to a spring in your imagination and feel the holy power of her presence. Here the gods are born and go downstream. We path back up the stream to its source too late for an encounter, yet echoes of this event survive in the loric patterns of the place. Go to a cave in your imagination. Enter it. Feel the darkness encompass you and know that it is out of the dark that you have come and that, regardless of what one might believe about the Otherworld and an afterlife, to the darkness we will return. The cave is like the womb and the tomb. Such dark places can be both nurturing and frightening. It is the mystery behind and within all things that sustains us; Anu symbolizes this primal experience.
Once we emerge from the darkness, we must be sustained, and here Anu also comes into play, for she is associated with the cattle that have long been valued among Celtic people. She nurtures us with her milk; a symbol of sublime sustenance in life. Her role as nurturer may be deduced from the fact that in County Kerry, Ireland, there are two hills known widely as The Paps of Anu. We go to her when we need ‘fed;�?when we need to tap into the primal energies behind and within everything. Once we re-connect with her, we experience again the abundance of life and its inner vitality.
Danu is a goddess of movement, tides and process. Everything connected with water and everything that water symbolizes for human beings; their survival, refreshment and pleasure �?is the domain of Danu. Not the sourcing nature of springs and the sea, but the flux and flow of existence, the movement of the blood within our veins and the movement of energy through synapses in our brains. She is goddess of rivers and streams. Her name is plausibly connected with the Danube River, along whose banks Celtic tuatha originally dwelt in central Europe. The Tuatha Dé Danann (“People of Danu�? may have been a court of gods & goddesses connected with Danu in earlier times.
Go to a moving body of water in your imagination. Feel its power; sense the rhythms of its current, manifold and intermingled like a Celtic rope design, moving downstream from some source in the hills or mountains. This movement is our life; it is our process �?change, growth, transformation �?from birth until death. We are constantly in flux; nothing stands still in life for very long. ‘Stillness�?is only an ultimate ideal in patriarchal, earth-hating religions that try to get us out of our bodies and flee the flux. For the Celts, however, the flux and flow is what life is all about. While we need places to rest and be still for a while, there is no virtue in ultimately stopping the movement that we are.
Walk down to the river or stream. Feel the vibrations in the stone and dirt beneath your feet, caused by the hum or clamor of the water flowing. This is your life; we are all a response to the movement of the cosmos �?we are watery and fluid. Once we realize this we become better able to work and play, create, change and anticipate trouble. The flux and flow of the current of the river is the song of Danu. The fish in the water represent her gift to us, not just in terms of bodily sustenance but also in terms of spiritual insight. When we go catching the Fish of Wisdom, it is Danu who is runing us new perspectives and intuitions in the course of our flow; the pattern of our own inner currents. It is Danu who helps us to discern where we are going and how best to get there.
Tailtiu is the goddess of vigor, strength and endurance. She is a primary Earth Goddess in ancient Irish traditions. She is the mother of the god Lugh, after whom the festival of high summer �?Lughnassadh �?is named. Her story connects her with the land, revealing her to be benevolent and self-sacrificing, willing to be oned with her people; their interests, aspirations, trials and cares are hers as well.
The story of Tailtiu that we have from mediaeval Irish sources concerns the creation of County Meath; the ‘central�?county in Ireland where the High Kings presided at Tara. It is said that Tailtiu was eager for Tara to be built and that, in her enthusiasm, she joined her people in clearing trees and plowing the land. She tore out a great lot of trees herself. She then harnessed herself to the plow and pulled it across one field after another. At the end of nine days Meath had been cleared and plowed, but Tailtiu was weakened by her efforts and died from exhaustion on the third day after the work was finished.
Everyone mourned her, and in her honor her son declared that he would establish a festival. This festival, to be held on the 2nd of August would be convened each year at Telltown, where his mother had died. It would be a time of sporting events, vigorous games and the presentation of works of art in Tailtiu’s honor. All of the people who had worked by her side and seen her enthusiasm and endurance, vowed to establish this festival and celebrate it ‘until the sky falls into the sea and the mountains themselves collapse.�?nbsp; The festival established by Lugh would become Lughnassadh in later Celtic spirituality. After this, Lugh set up the funeral pyre and cremated his mother’s body upon it. Thus the goddess was returned to the body of the Earth, of which she is the manifestation and protector.
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