I sometimes awaken at night in the cave. It has ceased being startling. I fall asleep in my bed and soon I can hear the slow persistent drip of water in the pool, feel the dampness, and sense that now familiar awareness of being in the home of the Morrigan, a place that holds part of myself now.
The first time this happened was a moment of panic for me, a desperate climb out of the darkness towards a sliver of light. Now I sit and quietly breathe, centering myself in that holy place, feeling my Queen breathing close to me. I take time to appreciate the moment of closeness, of intimacy with my Goddess, before I slowly climb to the surface, feeling like I am being born anew each time.
When I reach the surface I sit at the mouth of the cave, resting under the hawthorn tree on a fallen pillar stone. This is a new part of my dream landscape, this cave. It has always been there, a whisper, a story, a tale told by people I met in hushed, conspiring tones, but it was not a place I was able to visit or enter in my dream realm until I did so in the physical world. Now that I have, the cave has become part of me. It has taken up residency in my internal and spiritual landscape, a fissure in the familiar ground of my dreams.
After a day in Dublin, we hopped on a bus and headed west into Connacht, to Cruachan, to the mound of Rathcroghan and to Úaimh na gCat, the Cave of Cats. This part of the trip was essential for us. We had personal work we needed to do before the rest of the tour arrived.
As we headed west the land changed, got wilder, rockier. Hedges gave way to rock walls, fields of crops gave way to cattle and sheep. There is a beautiful ferocity to the west of Ireland, a sense that it is and has always been, untamed and raw. To me, a longtime resident of rural California and someone who has lived in some of the harshest and wildest places in my country, Connacht seemed lush and enchanting. The hills and landscapes reminded me of rural Pennsylvania where I grew up, low rolling ridges and deciduous forests. But there was something else here, something ancient and pervasive. It was a connection that I felt as soon as I stepped foot in this land, a connection and pull that got deeper and more compelling as I headed west.
We got off the bus in a small town in County Roscommon and were met by our host and guide to the cave Lora O’Brien and her family. We first encountered Lora online, in and around the loose knit circles of Morrigan devotees that inhabit the backwaters of the Internet. Lora immediately stood out and was recognizable as the real thing, a well grounded Irish witch with a sharp sense of humor and healthy disdain for some of the more frivolous spiritual philosophies, a sometimes rare thing in the Pagan world. She is very clearly someone that walks a path of service, a priestess of the Great Queen and the guardian of the Her Cave. We had the pleasure of meeting her in person at Pantheacon last year and felt an immediate kinship. We were able to share some of the sacred and beautiful places of our land with her and she graciously offered to host us and be our guide to Rathcroghan during our visit.
We spent our first day in the west exploring and connecting with the land. Dublin had been all bricks and traffic, with St. Stephen’s Green showing us a richly beautiful but highly manicured taste of the natural landscape. Out here, we felt the spirit of the land more acutely, more viscerally. We walked the narrow roads and did some local exploration. We visited the Famine Museum (I’m going to have to write a separate post to unpack my feelings about that), got our first taste of Irish woodlands, and visited a graveyard with the ruins of a church in it that was so old that graves were placed within the footprint of the original church structure.
Graveyard at Kiltrustan Church
The next day we headed to Rathcroghan, the royal seat of Connacht. Rathcroghan is an area of approximately 4 square miles, west of the tiny town of Tulsk where the Rathcroghan Visitors Centre resides. It is a vast complex, mostly unexcavated but thoroughly mapped, of over 60 mounds and related sites. It is probably best known as the Royal seat of Connacht and the home of Queen Medb and her consort Ailill. It was this place where Medb and Ailill had their fated “pillow talk” that instigated the famed Táin Bó Cúailnge, the cattle raid of Cooley. Here is Crúachain of the old tales but also the burial mound of Rathbeg, Rathnadarve where the two bulls that were once swine herds had their final battle, the Mucklaghs massive earthworks raised when two giant demon pigs came out of the Cave and ravished the land, and the Cave itself, Úaimh na gCat, the Cave of Cats, the home of the Morrigan and the focus of much magical initiation and activity in early legend, referred to in some of the tales as Ireland’s Hellmouth.
Rathcroghan mound
The Cave was the magnet that pulled us west. It is possibly the force that pulled us to Ireland. We were called to this particular gateway for reasons still unclear to us but we were haunted by the Cave and its place in our hearts. But before we could enter the Cave it was made clear to us that we had to engage with Medb and with the mound of Rathcroghan.
This becomes obvious as you enter Connacht. The Cave might be the home of the Morrigan, but Rathcroghan is the realm of Medb. She compellingly looms over the land, Queen of the West, Lady of Initiation and Intoxication. This is her home. She is the guardian of the land and the chaperone of the Cave. Her role is that of initiator of warbands, a guide to engagement with the Battle Goddess. It was in this role that we had to engage with her.
Queen Maev by Joseph Christian Leyendecker
I have had a shaky relationship with Medb mostly stemming from the fact that my former wife went by that name. During our lives together I did my share of using the name in anger, and it was easy for me to buy into the common portrayal of Medb that paints her as petty, jealous, and vain. The more I researched the stories and texts and the deeper that I delved into the volumes of modern research on the Táin and Medb’s role in it, the more I noticed that all too common pattern of trivializing and vilifying powerful women that our culture so quickly and effortlessly does. In the case of Medb, this pattern becomes entangled with the Norman conquest and subversion of the predominate Gaelic culture. These ancient stories of a Lady of Sovereignty bestowing the blessing of the Sovereignty of the Land to a ruling King did not mesh with the Christian/Norman idea of a King chosen by God. Here we once again have the patriarchy attempting to erase any remnants of feminine power in order to solidify their control over the population, and it is here where we see the perception of Medb being changed from a powerful Queen to a petty whore.
We stood on the mound of Rathcroghan, the place flashing between the royal center of Connacht and a mound in a verdant field surrounded by sheep. We got glimpses of the Crúachain of old, pieced together with legends, archaeological data, and our view of the mound on that day. We walked in that place of the dead, the bones of ancestors interred beneath of feet. We see from the archaeological research that it is highly likely that the mound is a passage tomb, another example of the Irish building sites of ritual and political importance directly on top of the bones of their honored dead. This is one of the most iconic and beautiful practices in ancient Irish history, this method of connecting the ancestors to royal power. It not only created a claim of legitimacy to whatever dynasty was ruling at the time, but it created a ritual space that was directly connected to the graves of the mighty and beloved dead, and also set their ritual and ceremonial center directly on a gateway to the Otherworld.
So that windy afternoon we sat on the mound and spoke to and left offerings for the dead of that place, to the beings of the Otherworld that we live alongside, and I apologized to Medb for misunderstanding who she is. We sat and listened and felt that gateway shift and open, a deep chthonic passage to other realms, until we received the conformation of acceptance that we were looking for. Once we heard it, we headed to the Cave.
Louis le Brocquy’s Illustration from the Táin
The Cave is not only the home of the Morrigan but has a number of tales connected to it about strange and horrible things emerging from it and laying waste to the land.
“…pigs of magic came out of the Cave of Crúachain, and that is Ireland’s gate of Hell. From out of it issued the monstrous triple headed Ellen that wasted Erin till Amairgene, the father of Conall the Victorious, killed it in single combat before all the men of Ulster. Out of it, also, came Red birds that withered up everything in Erin that their breaths would touch, till the Ulstermen slew them with their slings.”
We weren’t there to slay demon birds or magical swine. Nor were we there to fight otherworldly cats or werewolves. We went to the Cave for a moment of communion with the Goddess that we were dedicated to, a quiet space of contemplation and connection. We sat at the entrance, said our words, made our offerings, and followed Lora into the Cave.
I won’t speak of the details of my experience in the Cave here. People’s experiences with it are personal and unique. There is nothing that I can say about it that will do it justice in any way. Like any ordeal or spiritual journey, these types of experiences belong to the one having them and significance and meaning tend to hold importance to them. But that day we entered the Cave, had our moment, and learned the lessons that we needed to learn. One week later, we stood at the entrance to the Cave again in the pouring rain, this time with 17 members of our tour. This time, 17 people in the process of bonding during a 9 day pilgrimage crawled into that sacred muddy hole in the ground, blind, wet, and completely trusting in each other, and had their own experiences in the Cave. This is part of the magic of that place, it is a spot that enables a moment of personal connection to the Otherworld. These moments, profound and life changing as they are, are for the one experiencing them alone, with significance and meanings connecting the circuits that they need to for each person individually. The power of that moment in a muddy cow field in the rain was twofold, the trust and bravery of 17 near strangers taking a leap of faith together and helping each other descend into a pitch black hole in the earth, and the myriad of personal experiences and the lessons learned by each individual that day, each one different and each one intensely personal.
Holding the sacrificial sword after crawling out of the Cave.
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Strixian Woods 