by Morgan Daimler

These Pagan Portals are all current works in progress, serialised here on the Pagan Collective blog with each chapter being open for comment. In due course the entire script will be published as a Pagan Portal book.

Chapter 1 – Macha Daughter of Paratholon

“The names of the ten noble daughters
whom Partholon had….
Aife, Aine, lofty Adnad,
Macha, Mucha, Melepard,
Glas and Grenach,
Auach and Achanach.”

Lebor Gabala Erenn (Macalister, 1944)

The first Macha we will be looking at is also one who we know almost nothing about. She is barely a note within a wider story, yet she still represents the first time the name Macha appears in Irish myth. According to the Lebor Gabala Erenn Ireland was invaded or settled five consecutive times by different groups: first by Cessair, then Partholón, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha De Danann, and finally by the Gaels. It is during the second settlement that we first hear of Macha who arrives with her father Partholón and his people.

The Story

The first settlers of Ireland were a woman named Cessair and her people which included forty-nine women and three men; all but one would eventually drown when Ireland was flooded by the Biblical deluge. This interweaving of Irish mythology with Christian myth is common and reflects the scribes attempts to reconcile the Irish myths with their own Christian cosmology. The only survivor was a man named Fintan who transformed into a salmon and lived in the water; later he would take the form of an eagle and a hawk before returning much later to a human form.

Ireland remained empty after that for 300 years until the arrival of Partholón and his people, including 10 daughters and 3 or 4 sons, as well as around 9,000 others. The people of Partholón settled Ireland and introduced civilization to the island, including farming, and fought the first battle ever on those shores, against the Fomorians[1]. However after several years a plague came, arriving on Bealtaine/1 May, and wiped out all of Partholón’s people within a week, leaving Ireland empty once again.

In this myth we find Macha listed as one of the 10 daughters of Partholón along with two other names found among the Tuatha De Danann later: Áine and Aoife. It is perhaps interesting to note the meanings of the names of these women, beyond Macha which was discussed in the introduction: Áine – brightness, Aoife – beauty, Adnad – kindling, illuminating, Mucha – early morning, Glas – green/blue/grey, Grenach – boisterous. Meleprad, Auach, and Achanach are uncertain.

This Macha is a mystery, a name within a list of names, and so we can say little about her with certainty. But we can take a wider look at the people she came with and their accomplishments to make some tentative assumptions about her. The Partholónians arrived in an Ireland that was nearly untouched by humanoid beings[2], a wild and untamed place. Macha and her people began changing that, reshaping the land and according to the Lebor Gabala Erenn while Ireland had only consisted of one plain, three lakes and nine rivers previously during the time that Partholón’s people were there seven new lakes appeared and four plains were cleared; this is likely symbolic of the arrival of civilization to the island. This may be supported by a later passage of the text which claims that it was these people who first built a house, ‘put a cauldron over fire’, brewed beer, and prayed in Ireland. This Macha then is associated with the first people to not only begin changing Ireland from wilderness to settlement but also to introduce comforts beyond survival. It is also possible that the terraforming in the story may reflect much older ideas of a creation tale that has now been lost, as creating plains and rivers can have cosmogenic significance – literally creating and shaping the world or place being described.

This leaves us with Macha of the Partholónians as a figure associated via her kin with creation, land shaping, and bringing civilization and the skills associated with it.

Sources for Irish mythology

As we move further into the stories of Macha I think its helpful to offer a basic overview of the sources we have for Irish mythology and what exactly we are working with. It has long been my own approach to start by looking at primary sources and so, especially in these first few chapters, we will be relying mainly on these texts. In later chapters we will cover more recent folklore as well and that is a different well to draw from. I’ve also found that there is a lot of confusion about what sources we do have so hopefully this can help clarify for people and make it easier for readers to go out and find more material on their own.

So, what are we actually working with? While you may sometimes see people claiming that we have little to no older Irish material, its more complicated than that. We do in fact have a wide range of manuscript sources, with the older sources dating to the 5^th century. Where it gets tricky however is that we don’t have anything that was written by the pre-Christian Irish – everything we have was recorded and preserved by Christian monks or scribes. This has created one of the most pervasive divides in the study of this material: Nativism which sees all preserved material as containing some degree of genuinely Irish material, and Anti-Nativism which sees all existing material as influenced by and reflecting foreign texts. It is perhaps also important to keep in mind that conversion in Ireland didn’t happen quickly but was a process that spanned centuries. The early Irish law texts, which date to the 7^th and 8^th centuries, include references to Druids and their honor price, that is how much would be owed to them for various injuries, as well as what legal maintenance they were owed, which indicates that even 200 and 300 years after Christianity established itself in Ireland some vestiges of paganism remained. This overlaps with the earliest manuscripts, meaning that stories started to be recorded when there was still some degree of pagan presence. If we trace various figures through the texts we can see the slow change in the material into the 17^th century when it is overtly Christian and pagan material has been reduced to spectres and demons or literary characters.

If we were seeking purely and entirely pre-Christian Irish beliefs then we have none, but if we are willing to accept that there is material from the early Christian through medieval period that still holds a lot of pagan beliefs then we have a great deal to work with. I choose to hold the later view.

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[1] The Fomorians are a mysterious group with no known origins in myths who often act as antagonists in stories. The name is of uncertain meaning but may be related to the sea or ocean, and the Fomorians represent a primordial power.
[2] Although there have been attempts to approach the various invasions of Ireland as historic events tied to known cultures, I will be taking the mythology here at face value as mythology and approaching these various groups as spirit peoples rather than humans.

We are also not dealing with a static or fixed body of material. We have some very old stories that have survived in manuscripts as well as more recent material with clear evolutions in belief evident. We have regional variations which place one figure as the main actor in a place where that figure was primarily acknowledged and then another version elsewhere that gives the same role to a different figure. We have the stories written in manuscripts and we have later folk tales and folk beliefs. Irish mythology is a beautiful and complex tapestry formed from all of these things, interwoven with newer ideas and personal theories.

Here are also some key points that should be kept in mind:

1. All translations are not made equal and translations often lose a lot in the translating. Many people approach translations of older material as if they represent exactly what the older sources said and its best to try to work to let go of that idea. Translations are always less nuanced than the original and may have implications in English that don’t exist in the original language. There are also issues with Victorian era translators adding or removing material based on their own feelings and beliefs, so that for example Whitley Stokes omitted an important section of the Cath Maige Tuired based on his feeling that it was too obscene for his audience. It is always best to treat a translation as a close estimate of the original and not to read too much into any particular text or piece of information based on what a translation says
2. Older mythology isn’t the same as modern retellings of stories or of modern folklore. The oldest myths exist in a fixed written form and we can point to the texts we have as sources for certain ideas or stories. Modern retellings often offer these same stories but with various differences, including streamlining the tale, combining different older textual versions into a single source, or adding the author’s personal ideas and opinions. In the same way newer folk beliefs reflect a variety of sources that may have influenced the story from euhemerization to local details. None of these sources are necessarily better or worse than others but it is important to understand the differences between them. Many things that are repeated now as ‘ancient Irish belief’ actually originate in the 1980s or 1990s outside Irish culture and many things that are found in older Irish material have become obscure.
3. We don’t have any single cohesive version of any Irish myths or stories in the manuscripts[1] with the possible exception of the Cath Maige Tuired which only exists today in one text. What we do have are a range of manuscripts from the 9^th century onwards which can vary greatly in details based on where and when they were written, who wrote them, and what wider cultural factors were going on at that time. This gives us in many cases a variety of stories which exist in different versions which may have significantly different details – for example in one version of the Táin Bó Cúailgne it is Badb who warns the Donn Cúailgne, contests with Cu Chulainn and so on while in others it is the Morrigan who does these things. For another example the famous encounter between the Morrigan and Cu Chulainn where she appears in disguise as a princess is found in only a single version of the Táin Bó Cúailgne; in all others that episode isn’t present.
4. Older stories must be understood in the context of the cultures they come from. For example its difficult to really understand the meaning of Macha’s name without having the context of the value of cows within Irish society, because that value is intrinsic to understanding the importance of a milking field. In the same way some older Irish myths like the Oidheadh Chlainn Tuireann reflect the political landscape of Ireland at the time the story was written down, giving us two very different stories of how the Tuatha De Danann overthrew the Fomorians – in the Cath Maige Tuired the battle began when the Tuatha De, en masse, rose up against the Fomorians who were oppressing them, while in the later Oidheadh Chlainn Tuireann, written when Ireland was under Norse oppression itself, describes a beaten down people who have to be forced to rise up by an outside agitator in the form of Lugh. Nuada in the Cath Maige Tuired is a noble king who lost his throne when he lost his arm but is willing to fight for his people, while the Nuada of the later story is a weak willed king unwilling to fight.  
5. A final point – Irish mythology is still evolving. We tend to think of mythology as historic material, and the bulk of what we have is older. But these are still living beliefs and they continue to evolve across the older myths and into modern living folk belief. We see this in the way the Lugh of mythology became the Lugh of folk belief, or the way Áine went from one of the Tuatha De Danann to a fairy queen to a human woman but all while retaining a place in folk belief. Irish culture is alive, Irish story telling is alive, and so the stories themselves are fluid and adaptable. We can (and should in my opinion) be clear about what is or isn’t older belief or recorded myth but we also have to be aware of modern concepts and ideas within the living culture that include mythic concepts and beings.

Ultimately we can say with some certainty if an idea is older or newer, if it is an Irish folk belief or coming from popculture, but we need to understand the range of sources and how they work together. And in looking at who Macha is we should look across as many of these sources as possible, using them like puzzle pieces to slowly create a cohesive image of her.

Macha in My Life – meeting the goddess

The first time I remember learning of Macha is when I was in my early teens. I am sure I knew of her before that, if only in a vague way, but when I was around 13 or 14 I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City with my friend Éilís and her mother. In the gift shop there was a small section of books on ‘Celtic’ mythology and I was excited to get a copy of one which included retellings of popular myths. In it I found the tale of Macha racing the king’s horses^[2] and I was immediately intrigued. There was something about the idea of a goddess who interacted so closely with humans, who understood human pain, and who enacted justice that seemed designed to create empathy that appealed to me. Unfortunately this was the early to mid-1990’s so the information I had access to was often distorted or outright wrong; I had to alter my understanding of who and what Macha was several times across the next decade, until I started to find better sources to look at, and eventually was able to access stories in original translations instead of retellings. My understanding of Her has changed a lot over the years but that core first impression remains.

No matter how my wider understanding of who and what Macha is may have evolved over time, that core love for her which began when I first read the story of Macha racing the king’s horses has always remained.

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[1] we do not necessarily have manuscripts which have survived from the earlier dating periods but we have later copies of those manuscripts which can be dated to those periods based on the language and style used.
[2] I will offer a retelling if this story in chapter 4

For more information: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/moon-books/authors/morgan-daimler