The Mórrígan's Cave, and Caves as Places of Power in Ireland
“ Humans have long gone underground to do our sacred spiritual and magical world in this world, and connect to Other Worlds. Here we’ll examine Irish Caves as places of power through history - with a focus on Uaimh na gCat (the Cave of the Cats, Rathcroghan), known as the Síd ar Cruachán... the Mórrígan's 'fit abode'.
Hey. I heard you like Caves...
Close Your Eyes I avoided her cave for more than a year. I meant to go down, hundreds of times I said to myself, "Tonight, I can go to the cave tonight." I visited my friends, as their home is near the entrance and they had offered to take care of my girls while I climbed down. I meant to go down, so many times. But something always happened, something always came up, something always got in the way. My own magical path had led me to the darkness. Before ever we thought of Roscommon, I was walking this road with fear in my heart and excitement in my soul. I was not on a quest into darkness for the sake of darkness itself, but I had worked in the light for so long. To restore the equilibrium, I had to descend the dark places, so I would be able to swing back onto an even keel. The balance was needed, but to find it I had first to go down. Life and death, I needed to experience both. I needed to feel hate as well as love, pain as well as pleasure, sorrow as well as joy. My life dealt me the hate. I felt great pain and great sorrow, when I lost my first two children to miscarriage. But I didn't understand. I got the hate, I got the pain, I got the overwhelming loss and sorrow, but the understanding eluded me.
Close Your Eyes When I carried my first daughter, her twin was miscarried. I feared I would lose both, but my eldest was born to great celebration. I felt the love, I felt the pleasure, I felt the joy. I forgot the rest. Again, I did not understand. When I carried my second daughter, the lesson was harder and clearer. As I bled, I was sure she was gone from me. I mourned her loss, but sheltered my hope, as we waited weeks to see if she had survived. She did - it was her twin who had left us. The advice to be ‘grateful I still had one baby’ was confusing to me; my inability to separate my love for the living child(ren) from my longing for the dead one(s) caused me much turmoil. Through all of this, I began to realise that they each had their place in my life, they each had their lessons to teach, and it was really alright to mourn one while celebrating another. Life and death exist together together: I carried both, I birthed both, I celebrated and I mourned both. Each has their place. Each has their lesson. Finally, I understand. Journeying to darkness is not as simple as it is sometimes made out to be.
Close Your Eyes Some folk would have you believe that meditating on a crow feather or a scrap of blood on some tissue is enough for you to 'meet the dark ones’, and then you can go on about your business in the usual fashion. This sort of thing can be a start, an introduction perhaps, but it certainly is not the end or all of the experience. Whatever we take on while on the Inner planes manifests itself on the Outer - in the real world, in other words. To start on this path can be the spiritual equivalent of taking a 6-foot staff and thudding on the massive oaken door of the Universe, with the mad cry of 'Hey you, here I am! Bring it on’, reverberating through the expanse of time and space. The Universe looks out its little spy hole at you standing there in all your glorious door-thudding insanity, and says, "Oh, its you is it. You want it? Fasten your seat-belt matey, coz here we go’. The ways in which the Universe chooses to manifest itself and its darkness in your life are many and varied. It can be about facing your own fears, through self-examination and soul-searching. It can be about finally learning the lessons that occur and reoccur in our lives, through our mistakes and our life choices.
Close Your Eyes It can be about dealing with death and pain, about picking yourself up after a fall or a knockdown, and getting on with it, assimilating the lesson in that. It can be about releasing your own demons, walking into the madness of your own soul and crawling out the other side. If you go the route of picking a fight with a specific ‘Dark’ deity, then the fun really starts. You get all the above, plus the fun and games of having a strong personality front on the Universe, a real live Dark One - with all its care and attention focused right on little old you. The Morrigan has always fully fascinated and truly terrified me. She is a goddess of great power and fear, great strength and potency, great honesty and hunger. She can be as nasty as a bed of snakes or as toweringly tremendous as a hurricane. She’s not a force to be trifled with, and I was quite happy to shy away from her intricacies and play quietly in the sunshine of my innocence. Unfortunately for me - or perhaps fortunately, in the grand scheme of things - she had other ideas.
To Know the Dark
“ To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, And find the dark, too, blooms and sings, And is travelled by dark feet and dark wings. - Wendell Berry, ‘To Know the Dark’.
In the Past ● Very few experience true darkness at night ● Have you ever? ● Brings an increase in sensory experience - dark dining ● Our ancestors knew... ● Role of darkness hugely apparent in the archaeological record ● Artefacts, remains intentionally deposited where light is excluded ● Caves, Megalithic monuments ● Barrows, cists, pits, bogs, tree holes - or just buried in the earth ● We view them in light, bring torches and spotlights … not as intended!
What it Does ● Darkness not an accidental feature of a site ● Fundamental, integral ● Absolute darkness is visual silence ● Retreats, seeking peace - tranquility and self development ● But how does that come about? ● Solitary confinement, deprivation of natural light ● Severe punishment - literal torture, ordeal ● Time in darkness dissolves supports, props, identity structures ● Inner (other world) experience is heightened
Stone Age Paleolithic (95% of human history!) 3.3 million years ago Mesolithic (hunter gatherer) 8,000 to 4,000 BCE Neolithic (first farming) 4,000 to 2,500 BCE Bronze Age (Copper, then Bronze) 2,500 to 500 BCE Iron Age (Celtic/Gaelic Ireland) 500 BCE to 400 CE Medieval (Christianity in Ireland) 400 CE to 1536 CE Rough Guide to the Archaeological Ages
● Figurative and non-figurative Art ● Deep Caves of Western Europe - 40,000 yrs ago ● Landscape features mostly absent ● Horse, Red Deer, Bison or Aurochsen ● (Cave painting of deer at Lascaux, France) ● Maybe aesthetic appeal, hunting magic, information repository? ● Darkness forms the context for the paintings - lamps, flickering fires ● For survival - it was never necessary to go into deep caves ● Domestic activity - cave exteriors and large cave mouths. ● Where light stops, life stops.
Liminality ● Desensitising or removing seeker from the world above ● Places of separation, suited to transition - rites of passage, initiation ● Caves are seen as ‘osmotic membranes’ (Bjerck, 2012) ● “Barrier for organic and non-organic contaminants, solids dissolved in water, heavy metals, radioactive and carcenogenic elements.” (Science) ● Art … ‘reality’, blurs, changes form, disappears, constant flux ● Caves in Italy (Neolithic) - cult and ritual ● Grotta di Porta Badisco, Grotta Scaloria, Pozzi della Piana ● 3 main ritual themes: Secrecy, Hunting Cult, Cult of ‘Abnormal Water’
Rituals ● Rites of Passage, incl. Initiations (Ruth Whitehouse) ● Changes in social roles and standing of participants ● Eg. Life Crisis Rites, Birth, Puberty/Menarche, Marriage, Parenthood, Death, Initiation, Inauguration. ● Rites of Passage: ○ Segregation (detached from previous state, pre-liminal) ○ Marginal (ambiguous, in-between, unclear, liminal) ○ Aggregation (accepted into new state, post-liminal) ● Liminal state, correlated with invisibility - societally invisible. DARKNESS!
Rebirthing ● Darkness, confined spaces, visual similarity … ● Caves = Wombs ● Participant enters tomb, re-emerges from womb.
Experiences ● Ethnographic Parallels - other societies initiation rites ● Refs: M. Allen 1967 (Melanesia), F. Barth 1975 (New Guinea), L.L. Langness 1977 (New Guinea), G.H. Herdt 1982 (New Guinea). ● Taken by force; suddenly, a sharp disorienting change ● Ritual specialists leading participants through the rites ● Ensuring correct performance, imparting secret knowledge ● Making sure the social transformation was successfully accomplished ● Known and trusted to participants, but in complete control ● Manipulated the initiates & cave environment for disorientation, fear.
“ For the rite to be effective, it is necessary for the participant to feel a fundamentally changed person at the end of the ritual process and this can only happen if the emotions are engaged. Without this, the manipulation of symbols by ritual leaders, however creative and elaborate, would remain an arid intellectual exercise without the power to change people’s lives. - Ruth D. Whitehouse, ‘Between symbol and sense’.
Recommend
More recommend
