Although we don’t have any direct examples of pre-Christian prayer, written by pagan hands in a time untouched by Christianity, it could be argued that echoes of the pagan past have at least survived in the manuscripts and the traditional prayers we do have. These echoes can take a number of different forms: Certain types of prayers can be traced back to pre-Christian roots (mainly based on the comparative evidence); certain metres that may be used; certain phrases or formulae that might recur, over and over again (even referencing pagan gods, or ‘gods and un-gods,’ as we’ve already touched on), not to mention certain types of imagery or symbolism that might reference pre-Christian cosmological concepts.
There are certain types of prayers curses that can be found in Gaelic tradition, where the curse may be bound to the intended target limb by limb, or above, below, front and back, which can be compared with Gaulish defixio (‘curse tablets’). In both cases, they sometimes relied on the conceit of binding the curse itself so thoroughly that there is simply no escape, thus ensuring its effectiveness as an absolute. Examples of these curses have been discussed by Bernard Mees in his Celtic Curses (2009), one of which comes from the sixteenth century archbishop of Glasgow, Gavin Dunbar, who aimed it at the Border Reivers. The curse was bound to each outlaw from head to toe, inside and out:
I curse thare heid and all the haris [hairs] of their heid; I curse thare face, thare ene [brain], thare mouth, thare neyse [nose], thare tounge, thare teith, thare cragis [forehead], thare shulderis, thare breystis, thare hartis, thare stomokis, thare bakis, thare waymes [wombs], thare armys, thare leggis, thare handis, thare feyt, and verilk part of thare bodys, fra the top of ther heides to the sole of ther feyt, before and behynde, within and without.24
Alongside these curses (or ‘clamours,’ as they may be known), there is also a type of prayer called a lorica (Latin for ‘breastplate,’ where the Old Irish counterpart, luirech, is a loanword derived directly from the Latin). They rely on the exact same conceit, although instead of binding a curse or some sort of maledictive force to someone, they are performed as a way of binding a spiritual force about the body – as if donning armour – for explicitly protective purpose. The most famous example of one of these loricae is St. Patrick’s Breastplate, which may also be known as ‘The Deer’s Cry,’ and as the first name suggests it’s said to have been composed by St. Patrick himself. This isn’t actually likely to be true (it’s probably an eighth century composition, a few centuries later than Patrick’s lifetime). The prayer is quite long, and it invokes a number of different forces that are meant to ‘gird’ the person who’s reciting it. These include ‘girding myself’ with:
…the strength of heaven,
Light of the sun,
Brightness of the moon,
Brilliance of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Firmness of earth,
Stability of rock.25
Following on from this, the strength, might, mind, eye, ear, word, hand, path, shield, and help of God are then bound to the body as well, and later on Christ is invoked for protection against a number of dangers, being bound to the body in all directions – above, below, left, right, front, back, and so forth. The powers that are initially invoked, in the quote above, clearly reference the three realms and the Irish dúile (‘elements’), which is a neat throwback to some of the most fundamental cosmological concepts that crop up in our sources, over and over again.
More than that, however, one of the dangers the prayer appeals for protection against (besides ‘the black laws of paganism’) is ‘the spells of women and smiths or druids,’ which is given as fri brichtu ban ocus gobann ocus druad in the original Irish.26 The phrase brichtu ban (‘spells/enchantments of women’) that’s used here can be compared with a basically identical formulae that’s used in a Gaulish inscription, known as the Larzac tablet (c. 100 CE), which opens with the line in sinde se bnanom bricto[m], which can be translated, ‘In this, this enchantment of women.’27 It’s possible that the alliterative nature of the phrase simply led to its use on these two occasions, of course, but we do find further examples of this sort of phrasing – echoing the same sentiment, but not using the exact same alliterative formula – in sources elsewhere, ranging from early Irish myth to a lorica written down in an Austrian monastery at Klosterneuberg (in Old Irish, by an Irish monk). The repetition of this sentiment has been interpreted as evidence that these enchantments were an established an genuine concern that was shared by the Gauls and the Irish – a concern that lasted into the Christian period in Ireland, to boot.
The way in which the Irish lorica and the Gaulish defixio both express the same sort of conceit – binding a certain force, good or bad, to the body – would also point to a common (and specifically pre-Christian) origin, though whether this origin is specifically Celtic or more broadly Indo-European is up for debate. There are examples of these curses and the lorica prayers to be found across Europe, from various periods (e.g. first century BCE Rome through to medieval Iceland), though the lorica, specifically, do appear to be a particularly Irish expression of this conceit, which then spread elsewhere (as Irish monks settled to work in monasteries across the whole of Europe in the medieval period, as the Klosterneuberg lorica shows, for example). The lorica is, in effect, the exact opposite of the curse or clamours we find, with the curse’s clear intention being to cause harm as the lorica aims to protect it. This in itself only serves to reinforce the possibility of their common – and ancient – origin, but it must be said that there not everyone agrees on this point, in academic circles at least.28
Poetry can offer us a rich vein of evidence to mine as we look for possible pre-Christian survivals because the professional poets (filid) embraced a rather conservative approach to their craft. Of course that doesn’t mean they didn’t also innovate or embrace new things, so we have to be careful not to overstate just how much of the pre-Christian traditions may have survived – in a ‘pure,’ untouched sense, at least – and we also have to remember that just because some things did survive, that doesn’t mean they were still understood as ‘pagan’ – even when explicitly pagan figures, like the gods themselves, are referenced.
With those caveats in mind, perhaps one of the biggest reasons that certain things survived from the pre-Christian era is that the compositions of these professional poets relied heavily on what might essentially be boiled down to a lot of ’stock imagery,’ symbolism, or motifs, that were articulated in certain metres. They often drew on an established store of various turns of phrases, metaphors, and themes, to the extent that their poetry has been described as ‘conventional’ rather than ‘creative’29 (though that’s not to say there isn’t a wealth of absolutely beautiful poems for us to look at). The professional poets who made a living in composing these verses may have had to come up with impromptu poems on the fly – flattering or impressing a potential patron, say – and they also had to remember a truly vast amount of oral tradition. Being able to fall back on these ‘conventional’ rather than ‘creative’ techniques would have still taken a lot of skill to do it effectively, but it certainly also made their jobs a lot easier.
The poems these poets composed were clearly meant to be recited to an audience, so even the rhythm and the sounds involved – the alliteration, assonance or other linguistic tricks – were all incredibly important. The poets knew what worked and what didn’t, and so most of them stuck with what would be most effective; taking risks doesn’t tend to lead to a huge amount of job security for most people, although the pay-off can be huge when it does work out. Either way, though, the approach these poets took – the tricks and stock images they used, even the very metres themselves, can sometimes be identified as having pre-Christian origins. They weren’t used because they were pre-Christian in origin, of course; it’s more a case of adhering to a proven tradition – why fix something that isn’t broken?
Instead of heaven and earth, then, we might find references to the three realms (even where ‘heaven and earth’ would be far more appropriate, like in explicitly religious – Christian – poetry). One example here (where the specific form of the phrasing has proved especially inspirational in Celtic Reconstructionist circles) can be found in an eighth century poem from Blathmac mac Con Brettan son of Cú Brettan, which goes:
Ba deithbir do dúilib Dé
muir mas, nem nglas, talam cé
co imro-imchloítis a ngné
oc coíniud a ngalgaite.It would have been fitting for God’s elements,
the beautiful sea, the blue heaven, the present earth,
that they should change their aspect
when keening their hero.” (Blathm. 257-60)30
The poem is obviously Christian – it’s about how the elements themselves responded to the death of Christ – but instead of Blathmac referring to the Biblical heaven and earth here (as would be more fitting, since he’s explicitly referring to God’s creation) he sticks with the native understanding of the world as being comprised of three realms.
We can also find blessings composed using a metre that can be traced back to a common Indo-European origin, and it’s a metre that may well have had some sort of religious significance to those pre-Christian Indo-European peoples, too. In this instance we’re specifically referring to the heptasyllabic metre, and we often only see it in the very earliest surviving examples of poems in our Irish sources. This may suggest that the poems themselves could have more ancient roots than the language itself (Old Irish) might suggest. In some cases, the metre itself may have fallen by the wayside – the use of a more modern form of Irish, and the inevitable linguistic differences that comes with it, means the original metre can no longer be sustained. This is exactly what the famous Celticist and linguist, Myles Dillon, suggested in his discussion of a blessing that can be found in a (possibly originally eighth century) tale known as ’The Story of the Finding of Cashel’ (Senchas fagbála Caisil). The blessing itself can be found in a number of other sources – with some differences in each iteration, but all of them share an obvious common core. In Dillon’s view, this common core points to a much older, and possibly pagan blessing that has survived within the literature, being reframed in a more suitably (though still rather superficially) Christian context.
The blessing as it’s given in the tale doesn’t have a heptasyllabic metre, but there are remnants of it, which is one point in favour of arguing for its pre-Christian roots. Dillon proposed a ‘reconstruction’ of this heptasyllabic metre, and we can again quite clearly see an obvious reference to the three realms. The lines in question, as offered by Dillon, go:
Bendacht nime, nél-bendacht,
Bendacht tíre, torad-bendacht,
Bendacht mara, íasc-bendacht.Blessing of sky, cloud-blessing,
Blessing of land, fruit-blessing,
Blessing of sea, fish-blessing.31
This blessing may have originally formed a part of some sort of ceremony relating to the kings of Munster – possibly their inauguration – and the specific nature of the blessings that are offered here, in full, are all obviously related to the kinds of benefits a people would expect to see when their king is a rightful ruler. In Irish tradition, a people will prosper and enjoy peace, idyllic weather, and good health (besides many other things), but the opposite will be true when their king shows he is unfit to rule. Many of the myths are underpinned by this concept (especially in the Historical Cycle, or the Cycle of Kings, as it’s sometimes called), and it ties in with the idea that a king can only rule with the approval of the sovereignty goddess of the kingdom, to whom he is married at his inauguration: It is the goddess herself who inaugurates the king, through their marriage. And it is the goddess herself who dispatches any ‘husband’ who shows himself to be unworthy of the position. Quite often in these stories, the first signs of a ruler’s lack of fitness to continue his rule will be demonstrated in the state of the land around him – the land he reigns over. The crops might fail; heavy rains, prolonged drought, or a thick layer of snow might cause all kinds of natural disasters, also causing livestock to suffer and starve – all of these examples being the kind of things the blessing is aimed towards averting. The over all form and style of this blessing here is just one piece of evidence that would suggest that this idea isn’t just a literary conceit, then: what we’re seeing here is the survival of a genuine pre-Christian blessing, underpinned by genuine pre-Christian belief.32
Other survivals are more obvious and explicit in their pre-Christian origins. Aside from the prayers that invoke deities like Flidais (and her daughters), or Manannán, Goibniu, or Dían Cécht, for example (as we touched on in an earlier section, in our discussion of Historical Sources), we also find references to the dée ocus andée, or ‘gods and un-gods.’ In one instance, a blessing of these gods and un-gods is given to a historical king, as we find in an eighth century poem in praise of a Leinster king by the name of Aéd mac Diarmata meic Muiredaich (who died c. 750). The line in question goes:
Ind flaith issed a orbbae · cach maith do dé no [anddae]
The lordship, this is his heritage, every good to him of gods or ungods.33
The original line actually has arddae instead of anddae (as given above), but the editors note that it should be anddae here. This is based on comparisons with other sources that have expressed similar sentiments, like the blessing given to the Morrígan, by Cú Chulainn, in the Táin. Here he says bendacht dé 7 ande fort (‘blessing of gods and ungods on you’), and this formulaic blessing may, in itself, reflect some part of a genuinely pagan healing ceremony. As David Rankin points out, however, the use of bendacht here, as a loanword, shows that ‘the benediction does not come to us as an unaltered pre-Christian fossil.’34
As you might have noticed, however, the spelling of dé and ande/anddae that are quoted above are different to the way I’ve chosen to give the phrase, using dee ocus andée. This is partly because there wasn’t a whole lot of standardisation when it came to spellings in the early medieval period, so for the sake of ease I’ve chosen a specific form and I’m sticking with it. The specific choice of spelling for dée and andée, however, reflects something the early medieval scribes liked to do themselves. When talking about God (beardy fella up in the sky) they preferred to use the spelling dé. When talking about a pagan god, however, they often (though not always, because of the aforementioned lack of standardised spellings) preferred to use the spelling dée. This was a handy way of making a quick distinction between Christian and pagan,35 and seeing as we are talking about explicitly pagan things here, it seems apt to embrace the convention, too.
This pairing of gods and ‘un-gods’ (or ‘non-gods,’ ‘not-gods’) is a bit mysterious. It’s never properly (or usefully, anyway) explained just who or what these un-gods are, and various suggestions have been made by various academics and antiquarians over the years, since the nineteenth century. At the very least, the general sense we get from the way these un-gods are talked about – where the gods are equated with the áes dána (the professional classes of early Irish society) and the un-gods are equated with the áes trebtha (or the farming classes) – would suggest that the un-gods aren’t meant to have been antithetical to gods (not in an evil way, anyway). John Carey has suggested that the gods and un-gods may have essentially been a way of referring to the gods and basically everyone else who may have been venerated, or been seen as powerful enough to be able to intervene in, or influence human affairs. This could suggest a vague equivalent to ‘the gods and spirits’ (where the spirits might be ‘spirits of the land,’ genius loci, etc.), or the un-gods could encompass spirits and ancestors, too (if ancestors aren’t implied by the gods themselves, perhaps – divine ancestors, rather than any old ancestor, that is).36
Whatever the case may be, the pre-Christian origins of this very concept is suggested by the way in which the phrasing is used – in blessings, and in contexts that are otherwise overtly Christian (as the praise poem of Áed shows), which would point to its use as a ‘traditional’ expression, perhaps; one that hadn’t yet been eschewed because of its uncomfortable connotations. Why else would they be invoked in an otherwise Christian setting? On top of that , though, we do also find a Gaulish cognate to the andée, in the form of a reference to the andedion, which can be found on a defixio known as the Chamalieres tablet.37 This obviously suggests a broader Celtic context in which the andée themselves exist.
The literature as a whole preserves a detailed record of all kinds of local associations between the gods and certain places that can tell us something about the nature of the gods and their relationship with the land, and the people who claimed that land as their own – often relying on ancestral ties to a place as a way of bolstering their position and authority. This is one of just the functions those ogam inscriptions may have served; the stones themselves are often found at territorial boundaries, and so the names that were commemorated in the inscriptions may have been intended to claim that territory for themselves – and their descendants, who shared the same name or origins as they did.
The references to the names of specific population groups or ancestral deities may have therefore helped reinforce the claim they had, then. It also implicitly shows us that certain deities were attached to certain peoples and places, and the myths and surviving local legends also reflect this point. In the myths we see Midir living at his home of Brí Léith (possibly modern-day Ardagh Hill, Co. Longford), while the Dagda had an array of residences, including Brug na Bóinne (until his son Óengus tricked him out of it) and Uisnech. Bóand and Nechtán are said to have their home at Síd Nechtain (identified with modern day Carbury Hill, Co. Kildare), to give just a few examples here.38
These local associations aren’t a thing of the past, however; while the ninth century story of Cath Maige Mucrama (‘The Battle of Mag Mucrama’) clearly links the hill of Cnoc Áine with its namesake, Áine, who appears in the story as an otherworldly figure (with more than a hint of a sovereignty goddess about her, too), her ties to this place are still well-known today. Even in the nineteenth century we have descriptions of Áine being honoured by the locals once a year at Midsummer, where the men from the surrounding area would gather together at the foot of the hill, on Midsummer’s Eve, with flaming torches in hand. They would then carry these torches up to the top of the hill in a great procession, and once they got to the top of the hill they would parade the torches around the summit before coming back down, at which point everyone would take their torch and run it through the fields ‘for luck.’ The hill would then be left alone for the rest of the night, because Áine herself was said to come out and have her own celebrations., and it would be rude to disturb her.39
Similar sorts of traditions are known in other places, across Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. The festivals are an especially busy time for the otherworldly inhabitants of the local fairy hills, since it’s said that these are the dates when they ‘flit’ from one otherworldly home to another. Heavy storms and bad weather may be attributed to a local ‘lord’ or ‘king’ of the síde (these figures are often clearly divine in origin, even if they’re no longer seen that way by the people who live there), or to clashes between rival síde, while on a more ‘universal’ scale the figure of the Cailleach has a strong connection with the weather and the turning of the seasons. Her link with the seasons is especially prominent in Scotland, where she and Brigit (or Brìde) have a rather oppositional, antagonistic relationship with one another. As Brìde brings the spring at Imbolc, the Cailleach battles to keep the landscape in her wintry grip, but inevitably it’s all to no avail; the Cailleach gives up her attempts with a sad lament on March 25, known as Là na Cailleach (’Cailleach’s Day’), and Brìde’s reign is secured: Summer is now on the way.40
In Ireland, meanwhile, a similar tradition is centred around a figure known as Sheelah, who may be explained as the wife, mother, sister, or housekeeper of St Patrick. The day after St. Patrick’s Day, March 18, is meant to mark the official end of the winter storms (which are attributed to Sheelah, just as they are to the Cailleach in Scotland), and so it also heralds the beginning of spring.
Although both of these traditions are rather ‘pagan’ in feel, however, neither of them are all that old. They don’t fall on a date that’s ever had any significance to the Gaels themselves (until the English got involved in their affairs), and they are ultimately most likely to reflect an attempt at reconciling the traditional dates of the seasons as they’re reckoned the Gaelic calendar (which start at the festivals – Imbolc, Beltaine, Lugnasad, and Samain) with the seasonal calendar as it’s understood in England (where the seasons are linked to the solstices and equinoxes – six weeks after the Gaelic calendar), which came to be imposed upon the Gaels after conquest.41 In this respect, the festivals may not represent survivals in the most literal or direct sense (as the continued observance of Imbolc, Beltaine, Lugnasad, and Samain do, for example) but they do point to the continued and evolving significance of pagan figures like the Cailleach herself.
References
24 Bernard Mees, Celtic Curses (2009), 133.
25 Jacqueline Borsje, ‘Druids, Deer, and “Words of Power”,’ in Katja Ritari and Alexandra Bergholm (Eds.), Approaches to Religion and Mythology in Celtic Studies (2008), 136.
26 Jacqueline Borsje, ‘Druids, Deer, and “Words of Power”,’ in Katja Ritari and Alexandra Bergholm (Eds.), Approaches to Religion and Mythology in Celtic Studies (2008), 135-136.
27 Bernard Mees, Celtic Curses (2009), 55.
28 Jacqueline Borsje’s article, ‘Druids, Deer, and “Words of Power”,’ gives a good rundown of the for and against side. See also: Bernard Mees, Celtic Curses (2009), 120-124, and John Carey, King of Mysteries: Early Irish Religious Writings (2000), 127-129
29 For a quick overview of the subject see John T. Koch (Ed.), Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (2006), 1004. A more in-depth discussion can be found in Elva Johnston’s Literacy and Identity in Early Medieval Ireland (2013).
30 Liam Mac Mathúna, ‘Irish perceptions of the cosmos,’ in Celtica 23 (1999); Liam Mac Mathúna, ‘The Christianization of the Early Irish Cosmos?: muir mas, nem nglas, talam cé (Blathm. 258),’ in Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 49-50: Issue 1 (1997). For the poem itself, see: Siobhán Barrett, A Study of the Lexicon of the Poems of Blathmac Son of Cú Brettan Volume 1 (PhD thesis, 2017), 204.
31 Myles Dillon, ‘The Story of the Finding of Cashel,’ in Ériu 16 (1952), 63-65; 69; compare with another version of the blessing as it appears in Myles Dillon, Lebor na Cert (Dublin, 1962), 120-121.
32 Myles Dillon, ‘The Story of the Finding of Cashel,’ in Ériu 16 (1952), 63-64.
33 W. Stokes and J. Strachan, Thesaurus Paleohibernicus Volume II (1901), 295.
34 D. Rankin, ‘Bendacht dee & andee fort, a ingen (Táin Bó Cúalgne 2111, O’Rahilly),’ in Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie 51 (1999), 118.
35 See John Carey, ‘Dee, Pagan Deity,’ in Ériu 62 (2012), 33-42.
36 John Carey, ‘A Tuath Dé Miscellany,’ in Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 39 (1992), 24-45.
37 Bernard Mees, Celtic Curses (2009), 14; 120-123; P. L. Henry, ‘Interpreting the Gaulish inscription of Chamalières,’ in Études celtiques 21 (1984), 141-143.
38 Tochmarc Étaíne; Dindshenchas of Bóand I; Patrick Logan, The Old Gods: Facts about Irish Fairies (1981); Catherine Swift, ‘The gods of Newgrange in Irish literature and Romano-Celtic tradition,’ in Göran Burenhult (Ed.), Stones and Bones (2003).
39 Cath Maige Mucrama; David Fitzgerald, ‘Popular Tales of Ireland,’ in Revue Celtique IV (1880), 186-190.
40 On flitting, see: Patrick Logan, The Old Gods: Facts about Irish Fairies (1981) and Ronald Black, The Gaelic Otherworld (2005).; on Là na Caillich, see: K. W. Grant, Myth, Tradition and Story from Western Argyll (1925), 5-6.
41 See the Tairis blog for a range of references.
Eòlas 