Dear friends
I don’t imagine any of you who are reading this will doubt that the world as we’ve known it – certainly, as those of us who are now in our sixties have known it – is vanishing, and all too fast and, right now, all too brutally. To the extent we ever believed we had certainties, those certainties have all gone. In the meantime, though, we all live in and are part of this creaking and crumbling, corrupt and decadent Western civilisation, and the simple truth is that most of us can’t choose not to. But we can choose how we live in it. We can choose our behaviour, and the beliefs and values we’re going to try to live up to. We can choose how we respond to what’s happening in our bit of the world right now.
I’m not hugely interested in chronicling the details of, or agonising over, how and why some democracies can so easily be felled and the ‘world order’ can so easily be overturned. That one’s for the historians – at least, those who have the stomach for it. I’m a psychologist and a mythologist by professional and academic training as well as by inclination, and the questions I’m interested in are these:
In such times, what do we want to fall back on, to hold tight to? What do we want to preserve? What are our values; who do we think we are and what do we believe we’re for? What stories do we tell about who we are, and who we long now to become? What does a good life look like in these times?
These are the questions I’ve been exploring for a couple of decades now, in one way or another, in my books and more recently here at The Art of Enchantment. And as well as delving on occasion into the rather more abstract concept of the ‘archetypal feminine’, which is present in and relevant to all of us, I’m always exploring them in the context of women’s actual lived experience, and the hard work of reclaiming our voices and reimagining our stories today. This International Women’s Day seems like a good opportunity to raise those questions again. As you will all know by now, when our culture fails to offer us any meaningful stories to live by, I turn to the old stories for help. So today I’d like to offer you all some inspiration from our own British and Irish mythology and cosmology, and to highlight the many ways in which it was centred around women. A little of what follows will be familiar to those of you who’ve read If Women Rose Rooted and others of my books; some of it is new.
Over a decade ago now, when I first read Potawatomi author Robin Wall Kimmerer’s beautiful book Braiding Sweetgrass, I was sad to read her suggestion that the story of Eve is the story which belongs to, and so defines, non-Native American women in the West. In contrast to her own people’s stories about Skywoman, she writes this: ‘One woman [Skywoman] is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other [Eve] was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.’
Of course Robin would write that, because at the time she wrote her book, no one was raising awareness of the ways in which our own native mythology and cosmology centres women, and elevates them, in profoundly different ways from the old Biblical stories of Eve. But our own stories centre women precisely in the ‘good green world’, responsible for maintaining the balance and harmony between humans and the land – and, uniquely, carrying the moral and spiritual authority of the Otherworld that’s entangled with it. Nobody seemed to realise that. To the extent that the stories were known, they were offered up as entertainment, curiosities, rather than stories that once upon a time constituted an entire cosmology, a worldview. That was when I knew I needed to write If Women Rose Rooted, to raise awareness of a British and Irish mythology (which also extends into much of the rest of Europe, albeit often in less clear ways) that’s dominated by powerful women who are the creators and shapers of the land, its guardians and protectors, and who represent the moral and spiritual authority of the Otherworld.
Because – and this is important – the story of Eve that Robin is referring to isn’t native to Europe at all. This is not our native mythology. It doesn’t spring from our lands and our ancestry and our old, earth-centred ways of being in the world. Although we certainly adopted it wholesale, and there’s no question but that it’s had a profound impact on us, the story of Eve is a story from a tradition which arose in the Middle East. Our native ‘Insular Celtic’ – i.e. British and Irish – stories about women are very different, and they're much more aligned with the stories that Robin presents from her own tradition than they are with the Biblical stories that we much later embraced. So back in 2014, when I first set about writing If Women Rose Rooted, I felt it was more than time that women here knew that.1
These are the stories we women should have inherited, those of us with roots in these lands – but we lost them a long time ago. It’s important that we reclaim them. The stories we tell about the creation of the Earth and the origins of humankind show us how our culture views the world, our place in it, and our relationships with the other living things which inhabit it. If the stories we claim as foundation stories of our culture depict women as weak, untrustworthy and inferior, then however much we may rail against it, we will be treated as if we are weak, untrustworthy and inferior, and our voices will have no traction. But if the foundation stories of our culture include women who were wise, women who were powerful and strong, it would open up a space for women to live up to those stories: to become wise, and powerful and strong. To be taken seriously, and to have our voices heard.
That’s why, on this International Women’s Day, I want to share just a handful of the stories of the strong, powerful, wise – and sometimes dangerous – women which exist in our native traditions. There’ll be many more of those stories here over the coming year, but this time around, I’m focusing on those women who were associated with the wells and their waters, and who brought the life-giving gifts of the Otherworld to the land and its people. And here’s why those stories are important now: if the old order is being torn down, we need to remember that women have always been the ones who stitch the torn bits of life back together again, and with beautiful, bright threads. We are the ones who make it all new again.
I offer these stories especially to our sisters in America, who are going to need to find many creative ways to make their voices strong in the years ahead, in a country where only the men’s shouting seems to count right now. If you have ancestry in these lands, or in the wider countries of Europe where similar stories are abundant, these are your stories too. Embrace them. They’re from your lineage; they’re your birthright.
The Voices of the Wells
I’d like to begin today’s story-theme – women and wells – by reading you the story that opened If Women Rose Rooted: the story around which the book is centred. My telling of the story is true to the original, but I’ve added in a framing story at the beginning and end. This is a story which was included within Chrétien de Troyes’ twelfth-century manuscript Perceval, le Conte du Graal, but was written by a different author and contains themes of older (almost certainly Brittonic but ultimately Irish) provenance. It is entitled ‘The Elucidation’, it’s set in England, and it warns of the dire consequences which might befall us if we should fail to honour our contract with the land, and with the women who represent its life-force.
‘The Kingdom turned to loss, the land was dead and desert in suchwise as that it was scarce worth a couple of hazel-nuts. For they lost the voices of the wells and the damsels that were therein.’ So, in its common translation, says the unknown author of ‘The Elucidation’. They lost the Voices of the Wells, the source of the land’s life, and the women who tended them. As a consequence they also lost the land’s spiritual heart. And so we came to live in a Wasteland, barren in body and soul.
Stories about the Grail constitute a significant part of the foundational mythology of Great Britain. Along with other tales from the Arthurian tradition, and a good many other fragments and histories about this and that (some of which I’ve written about here), this story cycle contributes to the wide body of lore that we call ‘The Matter of Britain’. And this story of the well-maidens – which tells us precisely what happens when we disrespect the feminine – is one of the foundational stories in our foundational mythology, for sure. It should be widely told, so that it’s widely known. Please tell it wherever and whenever you can.
What are the Wells, and who are their Voices?
It’s clear from the details of this story, as well as from other texts and manuscripts of the time, and from archaeological evidence such as inscriptions, that our ancestors saw wells as conduits to the Otherworld, and they saw them as the province of women. It’s worth a footnote here to point out that in British and Irish traditions, the Otherworld is a realm that differs from our own, and it’s the dwelling place of gods and other supernatural beings. (More coming up here on this, too.) It’s not, as it is in some other European traditions, a land of the dead. That’s why one of its Irish names is Tír na mBeo: Land of the Living. Normal rules of existence don’t apply there: time passes differently, and the seasons are often inverted. Our native Otherworld is an elusive place of beauty, harmony and abundance, where death and old age don’t exist.
The Otherworld might differ in these ways and others from the material world, but it is profoundly connected to it. It’s portrayed as a source of spiritual wisdom and moral authority, and of life-giving bounty. Its gifts, as in the story of the maidens of the wells, are almost always mediated by women. Women are the ones who determine who should receive the gifts of the Otherworld, and what the well-maidens in this story are offering to weary travellers when they offer a drink from their golden grails is quite simply the lifegiving, inspirational power of the Otherworld. It’s a spiritual nourishment, not just a physical nourishment. This is important, because it’s exactly what was lost with the rape of the well-maidens in the story, with their withdrawal from the land, and with the coming of the Wasteland. The link between our world and the Otherworld was broken, and the land lost its heart, and we lost the female mediators who connected us to it. This is also the meaning of the Grail – but that’s definitely another story for another day.
To be a well-maiden is to be a living bridge to restore the link between the Otherworld and our own – to be a conduit for the wisdom of the Otherworld, and to mediate its life-giving force. I believe that the language of the well-maidens – the language which we might use to re-weave that connection – is the language of myth and story, of archetypal image, of dreams and of song. This is the language of the imagination, the language of the Otherworld. It’s the language that connects us back to the land. It’s a bridge back to the old ways of connection, when people and the land were one, when the wisdom of the Otherworld could more easily be accessed. When women spoke as the Voices of the Wells.
The old woman of the wells
There are numerous other stories about beautiful Otherworldy women who are associated with wells (often called ‘fountains’ in stories which have a French connection) – such as the old northern English story of ‘The Lady of the Well’ which we delved into in last month’s Fairy Tale Salon. I’ll be sharing some more of them in the months to come. But there’s also a strong British and Irish tradition which associated old women with wells. Some of it is folkloric or mythic; some of it derives from the physical world we inhabit. I wrote about this in my last book, Wise Women, focusing on Cornwall:
In Cornwall, there used to be a tradition of elderly women serving as tenders of holy wells, offering the unique healing gifts of those wells to the community. The best-known of these is an old woman called An’ Katty (Aunt Katty), who lived during the nineteenth century and was the well-keeper at Madron Well. On the first three Wednesdays in May, women would bring their children to the well to be cured of skin diseases. According to William Bottrell, a local chronicler of folk traditions at the time, An’ Katty made a good income in May through her attendance at the well, when she would direct the ‘high country folks’ in the proper ways to take the waters. First, Bottrell tells us, she had the child who had come to seek healing stripped naked, plunged three times against the sun, and then passed quickly nine times around the spring, going from east to west, or with the sun. The child was finally dressed, rolled up in something warm and laid to sleep near the water. If the child slept and plenty of bubbles rose in the well, it was a good sign. But no word was to be spoken while they were near the water, or it would spoil the spell, and a fragment torn from the child’s clothes must be left near it for good luck, usually hung on a hawthorn that grew by the chapel wall.
An’ Katty used also to instruct young girls how to ‘try for sweethearts’. During summer evenings, girls would come to the well to drop into it pins, gravel or any small thing that would sink. Each girl had to do was to think of the person who the objects represented, and as the pins or pebbles remained together or separated, such would be the couple’s fate. An’ Katty was never paid for this work with money, but with balls of yarn and other things she might want at the time.
An Katty at Madron Well was one of a long tradition of well-priestesses in Cornwall; at Gulval, for example, the eighteenth-century chronicler William Hals wrote about the ‘credulous country people’ who visited the village well for healing and divination. The well, he said, was tended by an old woman who kept the site tidy and clean, and proclaimed the ‘virtues and divine qualities of those waters’, which she offered to visitors in return for a fee.
This tradition of elder-woman well-keepers can also be seen elsewhere throughout Britain. In Scotland, for example, a gamekeeper intent on curing a disease in his grouse once set out for the holy well of Melshach, but found that a group of women were already there, dancing around the well. ‘An aged crone sat in their midst, and dipping a small vessel in the water, kept sprinkling them. They were married women who had proved childless and had come to the well to experience its fertilising virtues.’ Note the old woman associated with fertility; this is another strong theme in our native worldviews and I’ll come back to that too, another day soon.
In the Gaelic traditions of Scotland and Ireland, the Cailleach2 is often associated with wells. Loch Awe in Scotland was said to have come into being as a consequence of her forgetfulness: here is one old version of that story.
The occasion of the making of Loch Awe (Gaelic, Loch Odha) was the dun-coloured cow possessed by the Cailleach Bheur. This cow was so much thought of by the Cailleach, that there was never a grassy meadow or flowery dell better than another but was reserved for the animal, even if the place were a hundred miles away. And as for drinking water, there was no well or mountain spring on the surface of the earth that was good enough for the dun cow, but the well of virtues on the top of Ben Cruachan. Even if the animal had been pasturing in the Mull of Kintyre, and it was not seldom that that happened, the Auld Wife would come every step of the way with her to the top of Cruachan to give her to drink.
It was on a hot day that, tired with following her cow, she had just managed to tether her beside this well and stretched herself out to rest beside it, when, falling asleep, the waters burst forth, and thundered down the rocks, never stopping till they had filled the hollow valley of Loch Awe. (Hull, Legends and Traditions of the Cailleach Bheara or Old Woman (Hag) of Beare, in Folklore, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep. 30, 1927), p252-253)
It’s also said of the Cailleach that she had another well in Inverness which had to be kept covered from sunset to sunrise. Her maid Nessa was in charge of it. But one evening Nessa went late to the well, and when she drew near, water was pouring out of it. She turned and fled, but the Cailleach, who was watching her from the top of Ben Nevis, cried aloud: ‘You will run for ever and ever, for you have neglected your duty, and will never leave the water.’ The girl changed into a river, which ended in a vast loch, and so it is that the Loch and River Ness are named after her.
There’s a similar story from the Isle of Mull:
Now there was only one place where Cailleach Bheurr watered her cattle-herd when she was away from Mull itself. This was a well halfway along the road she took to the headland of Kintyre. I don’t remember what its name was but, indeed, there was such a well there. And there was a great stone lid on the well and as soon as she arrived there in the morning, she would lift off the great stone so that the herd could get a drink at a time when they were thirsty. But if she didn’t place the great stone lid back on the well before the sun went down, the water would flow out of it and flood the whole world. It would pour out of this well and cover the whole world with a flood …’ (School of Scottish Studies Archives, University of Edinburgh Royal Celtic Society, MSS:SA 1953/49/B5)
In an image I adore, an old Scottish song about the Cailleach suggests that wells spring up from the places where her feet tread, in order to provide water for her deer:
Weird, weird, wife! with the long grey locks,She follows her fleet-foot stags,Noisily moving through splintered rocks,And crashing the grisly crags.
Tall wife! with the long grey hose,In haste the rough stony beach she walks;But dulse or seaweed she will not taste,Nor yet the green kail stalks.
And I will not let my herds of deer,My bonny red deer go down;I will not let them down to the shore,To feed on the sea-shells brown.
O better they live in the corrie’s recess,Or on mountain top to dwell,And feed by my side on the green, green cress,That grows by the lofty well.
Broad Bein-y-Vreich is grisly and drear,But wherever my feet have been,The well-springs start for my darling deer,And the grass grows tender and green.
And there high up on the calm nights clear,Beside the lofty spring,They come to my call, and I milk them there,And a weird wild song I sing.
(Excerpt from translation of the old highland song ‘Cailleach Bein a Vreich’ by John Campbell Shairp, from Kilmahoe: a Highland pastoral with other poems, Macmillan & Co, London 1864; pp.138-139)
Coventina: the northern English goddess of the wells
Coventina seems to have been a Romano-British goddess of wells and springs; we know about her from several inscriptions at a single site in Northumberland: an area surrounding a wellspring near Carrawburgh on Hadrian's Wall. Two stone slabs dedicated to Coventina, two incense burners and a range of votive offerings were found in a walled area which had been built to contain the outflow from a spring which is now called Coventina's Well. Excavation of the site also uncovered several inscribed altars, some with depictions of Coventina reclining, partially clothed and associated with water. On one of them, Coventina is either depicted in triple form (in my view, based on other common depictions of triple goddesses in the Celtic traditions, most likely) or is depicted with two attendants (unlikely; they all look the same and there isn’t one of them who appears to have higher status). At least ten inscriptions to Coventina, carved into stone, were found at Carrawburgh.
An example of such an inscription reads:
‘To the Goddess Coventina, Titus D[unclear] Cosconianus, Prefectus of the First Cohort of Batavians, freely and deservedly (dedicated this stone).’
And do note, in the image below depicting Coventina and found at a well dedicated to her, that she is holding (like the well-maidens of old) a cup. More about that cup in story-threads and articles to come.
I could go on and on with these stories from our tradition about strong, fascinating women, and over time here, I’m sure I will. They form part of a vast native mythology about women who set limits when men have broken all the rules and torn up all the sacred contracts. Women who understand how much is enough, and how much is too much. Women who are kin with the natural world and the other-than-humans who inhabit it with us. Women who, above all, create things that need to be created.
So what are we going to create now, in this broken world?
It seems to me that there’s a distinction in many of these old stories, and an important one: the distinction between creating and building. The old tales are essentialist by nature, I’m afraid, and we need to be able to accept that and move on – but what they show us is that men might build, but women create. When humans build, we build things. Concrete towers, tar sands, industrial wastelands. We don’t know how to stop; we don’t know how to set limits and stick to them. But in our old mythology, women were always the ones who knew where the limits lay, and women were the ones who created life, who wove the world into being. Isn’t that our challenge now? What’s the new world that we want to weave into being, each in our own way, each in our own circle of influence?
Whatever else we do and whatever else we think of creating, let’s all create stories. Let’s be storytellers, storymakers, storycarriers. Let’s take these old stories into our hearts and our lives, and use them. A return to the old native stories that show us women making the world will give us permission to remake ourselves and the world in the image of those stories. Maybe we’ll learn to respect and revere ourselves again, and so bring about a world in which women are respected and revered, recognised once again as holding the life-giving power of the Earth itself. Maybe we’ll work to restore the fertile feminine principle to the world, and so take responsibility for the healing of this Wasteland.
And maybe we’ll once again become the Voices of the Wells.