Arcana A 59
Arcana A 59
lnsula Feminarum.
Mediaeval echos of Celtic femininity
No not sink upon a bed of sloth,
do not let your bewilderment overwhelm you;
begin co voyage across the clear sea
to find if you may reach
Tir na mBan, the Land of Women
(lmmram Bran, 8th century, translated by K. Jackson)
Insula Feminarum, Tir na mBan, mis Ablach, the Castle of Maidens,
Avalon, the Isle Joyeuse... Just as many evanescent, magnetic, parallel
feminine universes within the magic precincts of which an archaic
— and, at the same time, a very modern — conception of
Woman and the role she exerts in the world found shelter and survived,
despite work and historical, philosophical and religious upheavals.
These blessed islands, a sort of metaphore, peripheral areas (or even
disguises?) of Paradise, that men of the sea or pen sighted fleetingly
or coveted in vain, throughout the Middle Ages.
The steps by which the fascinating archtype of the Island of Women was
perpetuated in Europe, from tradition to tradition, and down through
the centuries, are only a specular image of those intermediaries which
enabled forms and symbols of Celtic culture to propagate during the
Middle Ages, by means of a slow, constant and fertile metamorphosis,
going beyond geographical and ideological frontiers with a perfect
fluidity and without traumatism.
As with most seminal prototypes of epic cycles, it is possible to
define a real core, made up of historic facts, on which are then
grafted multicoloured, sometimes rebellious narrative buds. As of the
first century, the geographer Pomponius Mela mentioned the Sein Islands
off the Breton coast, the seat of a picturesque divinatory sanctuary
guarded by nine virgin priestesses who were endowed with the power to
control the elements, heal the sick and transform themselves into
animals (all faculties which reappear frequently in the material that
we will analyze further on).
The sacred prestige of this type of place doubtless contributed, if not
to creating then at least to making more intense and widespread the
eminently Celtic concept of alltar (‘Another
Place’). It is often — but not necessarily — a
question of an island which shares with its Indo-European Hellenic
homologue, the Hesperides Islands, the western latitude, the resolutely
feminine connotation and the predominance of apple trees. In any event,
this place co-exists alongside the human world and remains accessible
to human beings, even though uniquely through mysterious, deceptive
‘threshholds’, beyond which one reaches Another dimension
of being.
Through contact with Christianity, the alltar did not disappear
— on the contrary. The painless fusion of Tir na mBan
with Tir na mBec (literally, ‘Terra Viventium', a name
which, however, already existed in the pre-Christian era) might be
explained by J.L.Weston's analysis [From Ritual to Romance,
Cambridge, 1920] referring more generally to the innumerable
transmissions of symbolic structures from the Celtic to the Christian
traditions: ‘...there was something in these legends which not
merely made possible but actually invited a transition to high
Christian symbolism.’ This is why well-known Immrama (a
literary genre in ancient Irish which narrated the marvellous
initiatory travels of a hero in supernatural places) find a place of
honour in devotional literature: around the 9th century, the travels of
the heroes Bran and Maelduin gave birth — without major
modifications either in the itinerary or in the style — to the Navigatio
of a semi-historical figure, Saint Brandan, abbot of Clonfert.
Transposed into its Christian version, the myth becomes even more
directly intelligible, and the Saint sets off quite openly in search of
the archtypical Paradise, the source of being, whereas the destination
of Bran/Maelduin had been more ambiguous. And it is certainly not mere
coincidence that the oldest and most sublime mediaeval visions of a
Christian hereafter (precisely those which will find their definitive
and most perfect version in Dante's Divine Comedy) appear in
these works from the Celtic area, in which are drawn spiritual
landscapes whose phantasmagorical imagination has no equivalent in
other European traditions.
Yet not only the Church assimilated these ancient mythic structures,
investing them with new functions; secular culture was also fascinated
by them and did not cease to propose them in turn, often without even
trying to decipher them, by adapting them to new styles. In the 11th
century, almost suddenly, a sort of Celtic flood washed into the
cultural basin of continental Europe: this was but the first of a long
series of Celtic Renaissances which would occur regularly every hundred
years or so (we think especially of Spenser's extravaganzas during the
Tudor era, Stukeley and his neo-Classic druids, the Ossianic mannerisms
of Romanticism, Yeats, and certain so-called
‘rediscoveries’ of the New Age). Whereas the authors of
theological and adventure fiction, in the tradition of the first
Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes (c.1180), drew abundantly
from Celtic sources concerning the myth of the Holy Grail (numerous
studies have proved with certainty that the ontogenesis of the Grail
must be put in relation with the Irish — and perhaps pan-Celtic
— prototype of the Cauldron of Immortality), the specialists of
secular subjects war and love — did so to the same extent.
The Celtic-insular origin of Arthurian romances and the legend of
Tristram and Isolde (the subject matter of Brittany), as well as the
complex and refined intellectual game which is generally called
‘Courtly Love’, is an established fact, even if there
remain logistical and chronological hesitations concerning the precise
ways and means of transmission (one of the most likely hypotheses
postulates an itinerary going from Ireland to the Continent by way of
Wales, to Breton authors, following the Norman conquest). J. Darrah
[Paganism in Arthurian Romance, Bury, 1994] clearly sums up this
concept in a few lines drawn from a monumental recent study of
pre-Christian motifs in the cycle of the Round Table: ‘Violence
and sex in the Arthurian legend... follows track deeply implanted in
the human psyche as to explain their long survival.., they originate in
a primitive religious system of great antiquity... Once the significant
features of this system (in which strong men fought to obtain the brief
possession of a goddess) have been identified, it will be recognized as
providing some of the most popular topics in the romance, those topoi
constantly recurring. The real life «retainers» of the
original deities, their human representatives such as sacred kings,
became transformed into medieval knights... and their consorts into
wives or mistresses; and the original driving force of the great heroes
of epic, which... will be shown not to be love, but the devotion of a
sacrificial victim to his goddess... was interpreted as romantic love,
an unfamiliar concept in the 12th century. Thus a force that
irrevocably altered men's conception of women, and which ensured the
survival of the Arthurian legend as romantic love's most powerful
medieval exponent, arrived on the literary scene almost as an
accident.’
The Lady of troubadours' poems and courtly romances was in fact rather
different from her sisters in real life: ladies who, in the effective
exercise of power, counted for nearly nothing (with a few notorious
exceptions which confirm the rule) found themselves thus invested, in
the theories of mystical love then fashionable in their salons, of an
absolute power of life and death over men. They were sung and
recognized by men as the source and instigators of all virtue, martial
or otherwise, Mistresses and Initiators, exactly like the
warrior-goddesses, -queens and -magicians from pre-Christian Celtic
myths. We may thus subscribe to the remarks of Jean Markale [L'Epopée
Celtique d'Irlande, Paris, 1971], doubtless the most knowledgeable
and most eloquent standard bearer of the modern Celtic Renaissance
— for once, scientifically and philologically irreprochable:
‘Courtly love is only the poetic form which, in the 12th and 13th
centuries, was adopted by the cult of the Magna Mater Omnipotens... If
the Queen takes lovers, it is not for alienating the Sovereignty but
for transmitting her strength and giving man the power to work towards
the exclusive good of the Sovereignty... Courtly love.., is fairly
disconcerting in the Christian society of the Middle Ages and, even if
its origins are supposedly Occitan, it corresponds closely to the
preoccupations of the Celts and refers to their socio-juridicial
system.’
Classical Celtic society was (as doubtless was also mediaeval European
society in its entirety) essentially patriarchal. All Indo-European
societies, in fact, were founded on this model; but within this vast
domain, the range of more or less openly patriarchal orientations was
undeniably quite broad. Also, alongside societies in which the role of
the woman was clearly subordinate and secondary (Latin and Hellenic),
we find others in which her function was, at least ideally, much more
elevated and prestigious (Vedic, Germanic and, to an even greater
degree, Celtic society). Obviously, we do not have precise information
at our disposal concerning the effective social impact of this
particularity of the Celtic world. Nonetheless, even though mythology,
epic and the customs of matrilinear succession undeniably show that
woman was considered as a being endowed with an extremely powerful
‘energy’ — overflowing with ‘mana’ as an
anthropologist would say — both spiritual and material, that she
alone could transmit efficiently to the male, through highly precise
channels.
If, as has been asserted, specific linguistic constructions are the
profound expression of the mental structures of the society which
produces them, it will be useful here to recall that, in Celtic and
Germanic idioms, the genders of the Sun and Moon are the opposite of
those in the Romanic languages. Beyond language appears the mythic
ideology: the active, imperishable principle, giver of light and
strength, is feminine, whereas that which is passive, cyclical, cold
and vulnerable is masculine (see, for example, at the height of the
Stil Novo period, the archaistic image of the knight on his charger,
its hooves ‘shod with ice’ (‘ferrato a
ghiazza’), and his defeat by the powerful Donna di chalora
(Lady of Heat) in a madrigal by Jacopo da Bologna). This sort
of game of inverting the roles of the Sun and Moon is related in
significant fashion to the mythological and social motivations which
progressively brought about the violation (imposed not in a
‘premeditated’ but a ‘functional’ way) of a
theogonic system already widespread throughout the whole territory of
European civilisation. The original sun goddess, now supplanted, had to
content herself with domination over the Moon, whereas the
‘modern’ figure of the Cultural Hero, a new Apollo
vanquishing the Serpent Python (the latter being a characteristic
emblem of the subterranean mother goddess), seized abilities, prestige
and attributes (prophecy, domination over the animal kingdom, patronage
of the hunt, arrows bearing epidemics as well as health, particular
links with harts, wolves and large migrating birds...) which heretofore
had belonged to his own sister-mother-rival.
This latter may be brought back to the Indo-European prototype of
Danu/Anu/Anna/Anann: so many sovereign female deities who, in the most
varied cultural environments (from Vedic India to Ireland, from Iran to
the ancestral lines of the Urals) always appear with their cortege of
sacred birds, associated with waters (see the etymology of innumerable
European rivers: the Don, Dniester, Danube, RoDano [Rhône] and so
forth), to the domination over wild beasts, fountains and springs,
maternal fecundity... These goddesses (or rather these different
cultural avatars of the same divine figure) present a marked tendency
to appear in a ‘trinitarian’ form: doubtless the same
having survived — up through the 16th century, notably in regions
where ancient Celtic settlements had existed — in a Christianized
version through the particular iconography of Anna Selbdritt (the
feminine Trinity made up of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus in the arms
of Saint Anne, which Masaccio himself certainly did not ignore). This
‘goddess of origins’ continued to reappear regularly during
Classical periods, in the multiform semblances of various
proto-Dianas/Artemis (like the very fecund Mother Goddess worshipped at
the sanctuary of Ephesus, or the Mother Goddess Anu/Danann who gave her
name to places and mythic episodes famous in Ireland); she made it
nearly unscathed through the passage to the Middle Ages, becoming in
turn Anne, sister of King Arthus, or Saint Anne, whom certain royal
Welsh families placed at the head of their dynastic pedigree, or yet
again, the different Ladies of the Lake of Diana, the Hunting Maidens (Chacereces)
who, in the romances of Breton subject matter, perform typical,
stereotyped functions as initiators, inspirers and persecutors
regarding the heroes.
It is in the constant interaction of these immemorial archetypes with
the evolving European imagination that one must seek the origin of this
sense of breathless atmosphere, like a never-ending initiatory journey
in quest of the Eternal Feminine which is scattered throughout beliefs,
cultures and arts and which — eternally unquenched —
continues to cyclically produce our ‘daily Celtic
Renaissances’. Once again, we can thus subscribe to Jean
Markale's remarks, which are both poetic and provocative:
‘The image of the Celtic woman, even if it is dreamt more than
actually lived, is unquestionably more beautiful and richer in meaning
than the servile hetaera (courtisan) with whom the Mediterraneans too
often replaced the Goddess of Beginnings, she who was honoured at
Ephesus, well before the Virgin Mary's dwelling place was put there...
To rediscover the Goddess of Beginnings in her fullness, it is
necessary to destroy the chaotic and shadowy monsters which interpose
themselves between the hero and the Lady of Light. Thus can appear the
mysterious Dana, whom the Irish made the mother of the gods, and whom
the Bretons recognized, even unconsciously, in the features of Saint
Anne, she who can take on all names and faces, the Sun-Woman.’
It is in an eminently Celtic context that we have chosen the titles of
the four sections presented here, conforming to certain primscéla
(literary genres of the first category) which are to be found in the
traditional repertoire of the filidhs, one of the innumerable
categories of Irish bards from the early Middle Ages, subject to rules
and artistic and deontological customs as precise as they were strict.
I. SERCA—All the pieces belonging to the ‘Loves’
section, disseminated over a period of approximately two centuries, are
so many manifestations of the most typical commonplaces of Courtly
Love. However, a typically Celtic atmosphere inhabits every one of
them: from Tir na mBan, an eponymous piece from the collection,
judiciously written for three voices (the Three, a mystical number for
the Celts, was a symbol of totality, fullness, transcendence and
abundance itself— see the significance with which the
term ‘très’ is used in French) to Wyth
right al my hert (whose heroine is evocatively named Annis —
a Black Annis, both fairy and witch, still exists in English folklore),
by way of Tre fontane from the Italian estampie, evoking places
both aquatic and trinitarian quite often willingly frequented by
various Dianas and Maidens of Arthurian romances. As for our version of
the well-known Lamento di Tristano, in the background, we seem
to hear two moving verses from l'Intelligenza, a brief poem
written by an anonymous Italian author in the early 15th century: ‘Audi’
sonar d'un arpa, e smisurava / (‘non si curava
delle costrizioni della mensuralità musicale’?
‘si lasciava andare emozionalmente, con celtico abbandono’?)
/ ‘cantand'un lai, onde Tristan moria’ (I heard the
sound of a harp which poured forth / [not worrying about the
construction of the musical mensurability’? he let himself go
emotionally, with the Celtic abandon’?] singing a lai where
Tristan was dying).
II. BANFLAITH—In ancient Irish, this term can mean both an
abstract concept (Royalty, Sovereignty) as well as a mythic character:
the marvellous Lady from the Other World whose kiss, carnal friendship
or attentions in the broad sense of the word result in a mortal being
automatically raised to the rank of kings, of beings in relation with
the Beyond. This fundamental Celtic concept (the same according to
which, in myths and the epic, Queens—tangible personifications of
Banflaith — are situated on a different level as regards their
husbands, whereas the Kings are there only due to their being the
husbands, effective or mystical, of a Goddess who, incarnated or not as
a mortal queen, is the true mistress of the kingdom), destined to
exercise a determining influence over the mediaeval theories concerning
Royalty. The phenomenon is verified thanks to a process of transmission
which one might roughly schematize as follows: from ancient monastic
Ireland, depository and, in a certain sense, guardian of native
pre-Christian traditions, to the particularly dynamic Anglo-Saxon
cultural milieu of the 8th century; from this milieu (thanks to
personalities such as Alcuin and Scoto Eriugena, for
example) to the Carolingian Palatine Academy; and from there to the
mediaeval world in its entirety. Furthermore, almost parallel, an
interesting phenomenon was occurring in certain Northern European and
insular areas: that of the Virgin Kings. These were doubtless mystic
spouses faithful to the ancient Goddess by tradition, or rather, beings
jealously possessed by the abstract, philosophical personification of
Banflaith. Theywere canonized by a clergy who, just like the
Anglo-Saxons and Irish, always considered the sovereign as physically
and viscerally responsible for the well-being of his kingdom (cf.
the eloquent definition placed at the head of the list of pieces
belonging to this section, drawn from a treatise of political theology
from the period) and continued to enjoy a flourishing veneration up
until the very end of the 15th century. Here we present two
particularly striking cases: that of Saint Magnus Erlendsson,
jarl (governor) of the Orcades during his lifetime and patron saint
following his premature death at the hand of his cousin, Hakon Palsson (Nobilis
humilis Magne), and that of Saint Edmund, last king of East
Anglia and patron saint of England (Deus tuorum militum/De flore
martyrum and Ave miles celesis curie/Ave Rex) whose
hagiography overflows with fascinating mythic motifs of clearly Celtic
origin (for example, the ‘multiple death’ during the
sacrificial period of Samuin — the month of November — and
the miracle of the talking severed head which is associated with
innumerable kings of Irish epic cycles).
III. ECHTRAI—In the Celtic tradition, the constants relative to
Adventure could be schematically reduced to three: the Quest (for a
person, animal or object of capital material and spiritual value); the
Visit in the Alltar — or else, from the Alltar
— (in the course of which a supernatural Lady or King bursts into
the world below in order to kidnap or call back to them a mortal of
whom they are particularly fond); and the Seasonal Combat (the theme of
which always remains essentially that of the young champion of the
Rebirth — sometimes represented by a young girl — who
victoriously stands up to the waning powers of Winter). By all
appearances, Di novo è giunto un chavalier may be
related to this last category; the second, on the other hand, is
represented by Seguendo 'l canto, in which the extremely
Arthurian Diana shares with the great Celtic goddesses mentioned above
the mythological apple tree, the zoomorphic and warlike appearance as
well as one of those messenger birds whose flight sometimes determined
— at least according to the late Latin historiographer Justin
— the migration of entire populations (as in the case, for
example, of the Illyrians). With Nel bosco sanza foglie, we
finally witness a spectacular hybrid quest in which the Hunting Maiden
is in turn hunted, with the features of a ‘white hare’ (a
disguise favoured by fairies and witches in Irish folklore). In
passing, we may point out that this remarkable ‘Arthurian
connection’ of texts underlying the Ars Nova is nothing other
than the prolongation of an outdated frequentation of the matter of
Brittany in the artistic milieu of northern and central Italy.
Beginning in the mid-12th century, on the north portal of the cathedral
of Modena, one finds a bas-relief illustrating a rare episode drawn
from the cycle of the Round Table; the particular shapes taken by the
names of Guinevere and the knights, in the explanatory inscriptions,
refer directly to the earliest sources in middle Breton — of
which the knowledge in the Emilian region is an ulterior and stupefying
proof of the ubiquity and persistence of Celtic literary motifs.
IV. FISI—For this predominantly ‘Marial’ section,
which attests to the encounter of the rising courtly ideology and a
prodigious expansion of the cult of the Virgin Mary, we once again
leave the word to Jean Markale's remarkable talent for
synthesis [La femme celte]: ‘All the great sanctuaries
devoted to the cult of the Virgin Mary are, for the most part, places
devoted to a feminine Celtic divinity, be it the Cathedral of Le
Puy-en-Velay or Notre-Dame in Chartres...’ ‘The Galls
always accorded the cult of the Mother Goddess a place of honour... a
statue of her... stood in a subterranean sanctuary on the site of the
cathedral of Chartres, and this Virgo Paritura became
Notre-Dame-de-Sous-terre ('Our Lady of-the Underground’), an
object of veneration for Christian pilgrims. It was thought to have
definitively depicted the triumph of Jahweh and Christ, but from behind
reappeared the troubling, desirable figure of the Virgin.., who took on
rather surprising dedications: Our Lady of the Waters, of the Nettles,
of the Bramble Bush, of the Hillocks, of the Pines...’
As for Godric, a British hermit with a stormy past as a
pirate-merchant, he maintained equally confidential relations with
music, animals and the supernatural world (it was the Virgin Mary in
person who made him memorize, in a dream, the song Sainte Marie
viergene; as for Crist & Sainte Marie, he learnt that
from the lips of his beloved sister Burgwen, recently deceased,
who appeared to him in a vision accompanied by two angels). Here is
what the researcher Margarete Riemschneider says in her book Die
Religion der Kelten: ‘If one looks closely, one will notice
that his whole legend is a Christian interpretation of ancient Celtic
sagas... Godric is linked, even more closely than others, with animals
which, previously symbols of Hell, become gentle companions to
Saints... Amongst the latter, those who have something typically
Celtic, even after their conversion, remain close to craftsmen and
peasants, especially when they become hermits.’
We will bring to a close this voyage to the Island of Women with a
particularly lucid analysis which was written by a woman, Hilda
Ellis-Davidson [Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe,
Manchester, 1988], whose argument was to strike a fair balance between
philological erudition and emotional weight, by studying some of the
most profound European roots which she associated with others,
attributing a renewed significance to them — yet, it is precisely
the meticulous and complex ramifications of the same roots that LA
REVERDIE has attempted to cover again here: ‘While there are
great problems, there are also great riches in the tradition left by
the... peoples of north-western Europe [...] which deserve something
more than pedantic analysis. We should not be content to wrangle over
minute fragments isolated from the whole, but need to search for what
can be discovered of a world-picture which endured over a long period
of time for many men and women, to perceive where its strengths lay. In
this way, we may come to understand more dearly the strengths and
weaknesses in our own picture of the world.’
Ella de Mircovich
Translated by John Tyler Tuttle
