Concerning Cernunnos Part 2: Accessing the Fruits of the Wild

(Part 1 can be found here)

So Cernunnos, as a god of the in-between, a conduit, is able to deflect the destructive power of nature away from humankind and give nature’s gifts of food and wealth. Does he do this for us out of the kindness of his heart? No, Anne Ross explains:

“The Celts did not love their deities; they made contracts with them as they did in their own society. By making offerings into pits, wells, springs, peat-bogs and all watery places, no doubt with solemn attendant ritual, the druids were in fact ‘binding’ the gods into making reciprocal gifts to mankind – including no doubt, security against their own hostility.” (Anne Ross: Ritual and the Druids, in The Celtic World edited by Miranda J Green, Routledge, London,1995, p.441)

To understand the system of reciprocal gifts, if you haven’t already I urge you to read The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss.It’s a ground-breaking book, first published in 1950, and still a classic text on reciprocity. It doesn’t give examples from the Celtic past but does look at Indo-European forms and asserts that the family of Celtic people ‘has certainly known such institutions’. After reading it I had a much deeper understanding of the system underlying early Celtic society, some later folklore and even some fairly recent Welsh customs. For me it brought into greater depth of understanding such things as fosterage; the contract between the warriors and their lord in the Gododdin; why you must not eat anything when you visit the sidhe, what lies behind the deposition of valuable items, sometimes deliberately broken, into bogs and watery places; the almost obscenely sumptuous great cattle-feasts; and possibly put Medb’s distress that Ailill had one more bull than she did in a new light….

Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia:

'In his classic work The Gift, Mauss argued that gifts are never "free". Rather, human history is full of examples that gifts give rise to reciprocal exchange. The famous question that drove his inquiry into the anthropology of the gift was: "What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?" (1990:3). The answer is simple: the gift is a "total prestation", imbued with "spiritual mechanisms", engaging the honour of both giver and receiver (the term "total prestation" or “ total social fact” (fait social total) was coined by his student Maurice Leenhardt after Durkheim’s social fact.). Such transactions transcend the divisions between the spiritual and the material in a way that according to Mauss is almost "magical". The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: "the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them" (1990:31).


Because of this bond between giver and gift, the act of giving creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate on part of the recipient. To not reciprocate means to lose honour and status, but the spiritual implications can be even worse: in Polynesia, failure to reciprocate means to lose mana, one's spiritual source of authority and wealth.


Mauss distinguished between three obligations: giving - the necessary initial step for the creation and maintenance of social relationships; receiving, for to refuse to receive is to reject the social bond; and reciprocating in order to demonstrate one's own liberality, honour and wealth.'

 In order to enter into a fruitful relationship with Cernunnos then, he would be given offerings and in exchange he would be obliged to return his gifts: to deflect the negative forces of nature, give fertility, food, and, since wild nature is ultimately the source of all material, wealth, even in the form of money. God and humankind are bound in a system in which honour and the spiritual source of authority and wealth are at stake.

As Celtic society moved beyond the gift economy - seen by Mauss as an early system of exchange in probably all human societies, eventually superceded by the market and the money economy (and of course now, by the global economy) – Cernunnos’ domain began to extend beyond the forest and the wild - the primal location for the transfer of goods from Nature to humankind - to all venues of civilisation where trade took place.

Cernunnos, Lugus and Lúgh

At this point I started to think about the god Lugus. Wasn’t also he a god of trade and exchange, didn’t he win the fruits of the wild in the form of the harvest for the Tribe and wasn’t he a hybrid figure and associated with Mercury? I found all this addressed in Alexei Kondratiev’s article Lugus: The Many-Gifted Lord. Alexei  lists the attributes they share as the tendency to tricephaly (having three heads) and the association with money and with twin serpents. “Both are threshold figures, facilitating the passage from life to death and back again”. However, he points out that as they are often depicted together they are clearly not meant to be identical.

For me, another similarity between them is that Lúgh, the Irish reflex of Lugus, is a hybrid figure like Cernunnos. Not part animal/part man but, because his mother is of the Fomóirí and his father of the Tuatha Dé Danann, he is half Fomóirí, half Tuatha Dé Danann. The Fomóirí represent the powers of the Land and the Tuatha Dé Danann are the gods of the Tribe who represent human social functions and support and nurture humankind.The opposition and conflict between the two has its roots in Indo-European mythology and is clearly of pre-Christian origin.

So Lúgh is, like Cernunnos, both of the Wild - the powers of Nature and the Land, sometimes referred to as the forces of 'Chaos’ - and of humankind - of Culture and civilisation. The ram-horned snake of Cernunnos is the equivalent to the Fomóirí, (and particularly to Bres, their chief), both representing the dual aspect of the Land, benign and malign, having the power of the harvest but also the power to withhold it. But whereas Cernunnos is simply holding the snake in check, Lúgh has a different solution: he is a warrior (among his many other skills) and he does battle with the Fomóirí.

According to the Cath Maige Tuired (a 16th century text using material which may go back as far as the 11th centry and obviously draws upon IE material), Lúgh defeats them partly by magic, partly by his skill with the slingstone, and is ready to kill Bres. Bres became king of the Tuatha Dé Danann because he has a Tuatha Dé Danann mother and a father of the Fomóirí. Thus he is the mirror-image of Lúgh, a dark twin. (His succession is flawed since the Tuatha Dé Danann are a patrilinear society; the 'rightness of things' is therefore compromised.) Bres proves to be his father’s son, exhibiting the malign powers of the Land and withholding the fruits of the Land from the Tribe which leads to the conflict. However, Lúgh spares Bres who bargains for his life by revealing the secrets of successful agriculture to the Tuatha Dé Danann:

‘If I be spared’, says Bres, ‘the kine of Erin will always be in milk’. ‘I will set this forth to our wise men’, says Lúgh.
Hence Lúgh went to Maeltne Mór-brethach, and said to him: ‘Shall Bres have quarter for giving constant milk to the kine of Erin?’
‘He shall not have quarter’, saith Maeltne; ‘he has no power over their age or their (offspring) though he can milk them so long as they are alive’.
Lúgh said to Bres: ‘That does not save thee: thou hast no power over their age and their (offspring) though thou canst milk them’.
Said Bres: ‘Forbotha’, etc. [...]
‘Is there aught else that will save thee, O Bres?’ says Lúgh.
‘There is in sooth. Tell your brehon that for sparing me the men of Ireland shall reap a harvest in every quarter of the year’.
Said Lúgh to Moeltne: ‘Shall Bres be spared for giving the men of Ireland a harvest of corn every quarter?’
‘This has suited us’; saith Maeltne: ‘the spring for ploughing and sowing, and the beginning of summer for the end of the strength of corn, and the beginning of autumn for the end of the ripeness of corn and for reaping it. Winter for consuming it.’
‘That does not rescue thee’, saith Lúgh to Bres. ‘Forbotha’ etc., [...] saith he.
‘Less than that rescues thee’, saith Lúgh. ‘What?’ says Bres.
‘How shall the men of Ireland plough? How shall they sow? How shall they reap? After making known these three things thou wilt be spared’. ‘Tell them’ says Bres ‘that their ploughing be on a Tuesday, their casting seed into the field be on a Tuesday, their reaping on a Tuesday.’
So through that stratagem Bres was let go free.

(The Second Battle of Moytura, translated by Whitley Stokes, pp 106-107)

Here it is Lúgh who wins the harvest for the Tribe, conquering the malign elements of the Land. Yet we should remember that Lúgh is half Fomorian and so, in a sense, is in conflict with himself and has subdued an essential part of himself. Something we may return to later.

The Irish festival of Lúghnasadh, the assembly of Lúgh, on August 1st was said, according to one account, to have been instigated by Lúgh to commemorate his foster-mother Tailtiu, whose name, according to Alexei, means Great One of the Earth from Old Celtic talantiu. Tailtiu is renowned for having cleared the plain in the centre of Ireland for agriculture. The festival was originally a time when the people of the tribes gathered, when contracts were made, trade undertaken, artists and craftsmen displayed their wares and there were sports and competitions.

More recently the agricultural aspect of the festival was all that survived and a prime part of the proceedings was an enactment of the myth of the triumph of Culture versus Nature, where humankind, the Tribe, win the harvest from the malign powers of the Land.

The classic work on this is, of course, The Festival of Lúghnasa by Máire Mac Néill, London, Oxford University Press, 1962.

Culture versus Nature: An Irish Folktale

A later development of the theme of Nature v Culture is found in several Irish folktales which feature the Cailleach Bhearra as a corn goddess figure who teaches the people the secrets of the harvest, often being tricked into doing so by a young hero. One set of tales concerns how the Cailleach cannot be matched in the reaping of the corn and kills various reapers by sweeping their legs from under them when they fail to beat her in reaping contests. One such tale was recorded by Douglas Hyde in 1901 (D.de hÍde, Ceithre sgeulta tarraingte as an "Sgeuluidhe Gaedhealach”, Baile Átha Cliath: Gill, 1901).

In it the Cailleach Bhéarra and her daughter started farming in an area called Gleann na Madadh. None of the male reapers who worked for them were able to match the Cailleach in her reaping contests and she killed them all by cutting their legs off with her scythe. A warrior called Donnchadh Mór boasted that he could beat her and came to work for her. Although he was strong and fast he was exhausted after his first day’s work digging. However, the Cailleach’s daughter took a fancy to him and told him that if he dipped his bread in the milk of her mother’s hound he’d gain superhuman strength. He did so and won the digging contest. Before the haymaking contest, the daughter gave Donnchadh steel spikes to put in the field which made the Cailleach blunt her scythe so that he won again. Before the reaping contest the daughter told Donnchadh that her mother had a magic beetle in the handle of her sickle which gave her her powers. Donnchadh destroyed the beetle, was able to win the reaping contest and as a result the Cailleach revealed secrets to him. Her power was eclipsed and later she and her daughter and dog were killed in a storm.

Now Donnchadh is not Lúgh but obviously they share some characteristics since he is strong and skilled but also gains victory and wins the secrets of the harvest for the people by trickery. In this story the fertility of the land is female, the Cailleach being the malign but powerful aspect and her daughter being the benign but less powerful aspect (and she is killed in spite of her assistance to the young hero – a poor recompense!)

Coming next: Part 3: Cernunnos and Lúgh - Nature and Culture 

Shadows and Shimmers: Conversing with the Otherworld

I said in my last post that I’d write something about my relationship with Brigit as goddess and saint. My plan to visit Brigit’s church at Llanon more often had made me start to think about this, mainly because I was a little uneasy about using the church in this way; it seemed rather like accepting hospitality from people some of whose views I profoundly disagreed with. And since my main connection with Brigit is as a goddess of poetry, healing and smithcraft, just where does St Brigit fit in?

The trouble was that once I started to muse about all this I found I had pulled at a thread which led to a very long tangle! What did I believe about gods and goddesses and God. What was my relationship with Christianity and with neo-paganism? I decided to try and put into words my thoughts and intuitions - not easy to do, to formulate something coherent and communuicable. I found it interesting as an exercise though and was curious to see what would emerge.

So I’m going to start at the beginning, and I don’t expect to finish it in one post but will divide it up into perhaps three parts.

How I understand the spirit world and deity.

I find it difficult to believe that an all-powerful God made the universe and I don't tend to believe it has a purpose. It seems to me to simply exist in a dynamic state with its own natural laws. The way Lao Tsu describes the Dao - "That which can be expressed is not the eternal Dao" etc - gives an idea of its mysterious unknowability. I think in this instance I have what the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’ which he defined as when a person “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Maybe scientists will be able to penetrate its mysteries at some point in the future – or maybe not. The quantum physicist Niels Bohr said that the world is not only stranger than we thought, it is stranger than we could think - almost echoing Hamlet's words to Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy".

I wonder if we have evolved on this planet with intelligence and senses that might not have the capacity to see, or perceive or understand the spiritual world – much as we cannot hear sounds that dogs can hear but which undoubtedly exist. Certain drugs which alter people’s chemistry and physiology cause them to be able to see things another way – different colours, shapes, movement. So our physical make-up determines how we see/perceive/understand the world and what we think of as reality.

I always remember watching the scientist Carl Sagan describing how a three-dimensional object would appear to a two-dimensional being who would be unable to conceive of it. (The aim of this was actually to help us to understand the fourth dimension, since we are trapped in three dimensions). Amazingly, I found the very clip on YouTube so here it is:



While this doesn't give an exact analogy, it is suggestive of the way that some people experience supernatural or mystical phonemona. It seems to me entirely possible that there are dimensions we cannot conceive of but which we occasionally glimpse in shadows and shimmers and whispers.
I have only my limited powers of reason, my intuition and my own experiences to draw upon to make this unseen realm, this Other world, intelligible to my own satisfaction. What follows is simply a working hypothesis - I don't know what the truth actually is.

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It seems to me that because the spiritual world or the Otherworld is invisible to us - because we are only dimly aware of it through shimmers and whispers - we can only describe it and relate to it by drawing on the imagination. We make up stories about it - creation myths, the activities of the gods and goddesses and so on - we people it with beings somewhat like ourselves but with supernatural abilities or with bizarre creatures and mysterious beings. Imagination, then, becomes the tool through which we try to understand, describe and relate to this other unseen dimension; imagination becomes the tool through which we try to understand and relate to a greater reality.

To me, this model makes sense of the different religions there are in the world, the different gods and goddesses and supernatural beings - and why people with different beliefs have visions, hear voices, experience presences consistent with their own particular religion, in near-death experiences for example. These deities and other spiritual visitors may seem to be mutually incompatible unless you conceive of them as diverse tools that various people and groups have developed to enable them to access the Otherworld, through prayer, meditation, visualisation and art. In this view, the gods and goddesses become sacred instruments enabling us to access a larger reality.

Do these deities actually exist? Yes and no. "No" in that I don't think that such beings exist in the forms we imagine in that dimension, "yes" in that they exist as mediums or proxies, as an interface between this world and the Other. An imperfect interface that works erratically and/or selectively and sometimes not at all - rather like the remote control on my new mini digibox which sometimes responds immediately to my wishes and sometimes refuses to allow me to switch channels or access the menu or makes strange messages appear which are incomprehensible. (Most annoying, I have to say!) Or to put it another way, I am not my name "Hilaire" - but if I am in range or not unable or unwilling to respond, then when my name is called or I am addressed, I will answer to it.

I am assuming here that an 'other' dimension exists 'out there' as it were. But it is also possible that this Otherworld is not outside but inside us. The psychologist Carl Jung thought of the gods and goddesses as archetypal forces within our collective psyche. Modern science has begun to investigate the workings of the brain by neuro-imaging and seems to be coming to the conclusion that supernatural experiences are merely the result of physiological processes. For instance, apparently 80% of people experience being aware of an unseen presence when areas of their brain are stimulated by artificial means. Job done, the conclusion seems to be, it's all just the brain causing illusory sensations. But this seems to me just to lead to more questions. What is stimulating those areas of the brain when there is no human intervention? What effect does increasing blood supply to that area of the brain have? Might it enhance certain functions and abilities, the perception of unseen presences for instance?

Neuro-imaging has discovered that people in meditation are able to diminish the flow of blood to the parietal lobes - the area of the brain that is associated with orientating ourselves and awareness of stimuli among other things. Again, this seems to lead scientists to the same conclusion - that the feeling of loss of ego and merging with the timeless is only a sensation caused by physiology. But what might we be able to tune into when some of the parts of the brain that help us to be aware of our surroundings are switched off? Relieved of the distraction, perhaps the area of our brain that allows us to experience another way of being is enhanced, rather like when you are trying to hear someone speaking against loud music from a radio; when it is switched off, what the other person is saying can be heard more easily.

It does seem possible that when we are relating to something that seems to be outside of ourselves we are actually simply relating to an area of ourselves that is out of our conscious access. In my consideration of the mysterious way that poetry sometimes appears I am aware of the huge role that the unconscious part of the mind plays. Yet consciousness itself is still a mystery and it's possible that the unconscious mind is in some way connected to another dimension.

I tend to think that the brain and the conscious and unconscious mind are not a closed system. My reasons for this are rather "fluffy" and purely the result of intuition. For one thing, the awareness of other beings or presences or energies are often activated by certain places or natural phemonena in the natural world, and for another, I expect some people reading this will have had the experience, as I have, when in a certain heightened state or simply a state of well-being and good functioning, of coincidences, opportunities and luck coming into one's life and moving us forward in tune with our path in life. At those times the outside world seems to be participating in our reality to give us a helping hand. Well, as I said, this is "fluffy" but that is the experience!


All this may seem "wondrous strange", as Horatio said of the ghost of Hamlet's father. It is strange. So is quantum physics - so strange in fact that even quantum theorists don't really understand what is going on, they can only explain the phenomena. Quantum reality defies common-sense, is at odds with Newtonian science and even logic - one of the mainstays of science - has to be modified: quantum logic is known as 3-valued logic because as well as 'true' and 'false' it has to also posit 'maybe'.

The "many worlds" interpretation of reality states that at every act of measurement of quantum phenomena by a human being, the physical universe divides into separate universes. Apparently a majority of quantum physicists believe this is true...

I'm not saying that I think quantum reality is the unseen realm - I'm just saying it's very strange, only recently discovered and beyond the ability of the best scientific minds to totally understand. So I don't really have a problem with imagining and relating to another reality which isn't yet, or ever will be perhaps, compatible with scientific thinking.

William James, 1842-1910, the American psychologist and philosopher, had some interesting things to say in his lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience. For instance: "Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal." His approach was ultimately pragmatic, as is mine, and I agree entirely with the personal statement he makes at the end of the lectures:

"The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have meaning for our life also, and that, in the main although their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to keep myself more sane and true..."

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Next time I'll write about the particular story I embrace as my sacred instrument for relating to the Otherworld - the story of Brigit.