Who were the Morrígan and Morgan Le Fay and is there a connection? The Morrígan was an Irish Pagan War Goddess and Morgan Le Fay featured in the Arthurian cycle. The Morrígan has many names and various attributes. both good and bad. Also, she was a shape-shifter as was Morgan le Fay. An aspect of this was her ambiguous relationship with the hero Cú Chulainn. There are doubts about the claims that the two are the same Goddess or even connected.
Summary
‘War goddess feeding on death and nourishing mother. The Morrígan stands as a paradigm of the puzzling character of Celtic goddesses’, as they often encompass contradictory traits and divergent symbolism. Learn more about the Morrígan and her possible connection to Morgan le Fay, also known as Morgana, by staying with me until the end.
Hello everyone. I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium I’m a PhD and a university lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magick, Esotericism, Paganism, Shamanism, and all things occult.
Today’s video is brought to you by the kind supporter of the Symposium, Angry Abacus. Thank you so much for commissioning this video and I hope you’re going to find it helpful in aiding your own creative endeavour. As a quick premise, I’d like to highlight that I will be using the category Celtic in this episode because it’s the one reported in the sources that I use for this video. However, I’m aware that this categorization has been recently challenged by scholars and Pagans as it lumps together cultures that present these similarities that should not be obliterated.
Now let’s move on to the topic, shall we?
The Morrígan was the war goddess of the Pagan Irish. In Gulermovich Epstein’s words, she is a horrific goddess, personifying war the way the ancient Irish saw it. Loud, chaotic, glorious, bloody, and heroic. She is savage and deceitful, bloodthirsty, and revelling in the gore of the battle. She comes as a carrion crow or a hag, foreshadowing or causing violent death.’ However, she’s not a demoness, she’s a feisty warrior who fights for her race, the Túatha dé Danann, “the folk of the goddess Danu”.
Her contradictory traits are exemplified in her strange relationship with Ireland’s great warrior Cú Chulainn. She, in fact, fights him yet forces him to rise to his greatest glory. Under other names — Nemain, Macha, Fé, Badb, the Washer at the Ford — she manifests other aspects, such as motherhood, sorcery, prophecy and teaching (Gulermovich Epstein, 1988, p.2).
The three main theories on the etymology of her name suggest that Morrígan could mean ‘Great Queen’, ‘Phantom Queen’ and ‘Sea Queen’. The interpretation of ‘Mor’ as Sea comes from reading the term without the mark of length and hence as a form of an Old Irish word, that means seawater. Interestingly, the latter interpretation has been leveraged to link her to Morgan le Fay [Morgan possibly meaning “sea-born, sea-song or sea-circle”] of the Arthurian cycle, also known as Morgaine or Morgana. We’ll say more about the possible connections between the two later, but for now, I shall mention that this etymological link is rather tenuous (Clark, 1987, pp.223–224).
“Morrígan” is also an early Irish gloss for Lamia in the Vulgate of Isaiah 34.14 in the Hebrew Bible. The Lamia was known from antiquity as a child-devouring female monster, who may reside in graveyards among the corpses. The revised standard version of the Bible reads here “night hag” here while the King James Version “screech owl”. Early Irish scholars must’ve thought of a Lamia as a creature similar to the Morrígan, who often appears in bird shape. By combining the different associations that emerged from the different translations of this passage, we get the sense that they saw the “Morrígan” as an ominous creature, female and presenting herself in a frightening bird form, as well as being associated with desolation and death (Clark, 1987, pp.224–225).
An analysis of Irish medieval literature’ – conducted as part of a referenced doctoral research – ‘and including linguistic, onomastic and narrative evidence, shows that the many names associated with the Morrígan all refer to a single class of entities performing a coherent function (Gulermovich Epstein, 1988, p. 198).
Interestingly, the tendency of depicting Goddesses with contradictory traits and symbols does not appear to be merely an insular development as several studies showed that it goes back to the roots of Celtic religious thought’(Tymoczko, 1985, p.22).
However, it is significant to highlight that these dichotomous interpretations of characters and actions, as being either good or evil, may stem from a Christian understanding of ethical values as well as what even classifies as good or evil.
‘Celtic mythic figures were both positive and negative’, and it’s been suggested that the tendency to split up such opposites is one of the main mythological developments of the Christian period. It may indeed be an area where Christian scribes “interpreted” and, in a way, altered the pre-Christian material(Tymoczko, 1985, p.26).
The Morrígan, as we mentioned, appears under many different names (Anu / Danu, Macha, Badb, Badba, Morrígna, Nemain, Bé Neít, Daughter of Ernmas, Fea) and takes many forms to perform numerous roles, including; carrion crow, sorceress, warrior, prophetess, source of immortal glory in battle, shapeless terror, and confusion during war. You know, she’s a mother, but her children are poisonous, or deadly warriors or her fatal childbirth leads to a deadly curse. Her relationship with the greatest warrior of the Ulster Cycle, Cú Chulainn is quite erratic. She prompts him to battle, yet opposes him. ‘She offers him her body, then attacks him in many ways when he refuses. As Macha, she makes his death inevitable, yet as the Morrígan, tries to block him from going alone to his last battle. In the end, she mourns him, yet revels in his gore.’ Wow!
Thus, ‘Even when she opposes him and dooms him, she provides him with the opportunity to win his greatest glory, glory which he himself has chosen over a long life (Gulermovich Epstein, 1988, pp.196–197).’ Sounds sensible I guess.
Now let’s explore the alleged parallelisms between the Goddess Morrígan and the mythical character of Morgana – Morgan le Fay of the Arthurian cycle.
Herbert suggests that both the Morrígan and Morgan manifest the trait of being shapeshifters. In Thomas Malory’s famous “The Death of Arthur” – published in 1485 – Morgan physically transforms herself and her following into stone to evade Arthur’s rage. While in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “Vita Merlini,” she shapeshifts into a bird. These incidents led to an earlier association with the Morrígan, who can also turn herself into a blackbird as well as alter her appearance from ugly to beautiful.
In Herbert’s interpretation, ‘Morgan’s ability to change shape signifies her potential to evade and to resist the shapes that others—authors, critics, and characters—attempt to impose upon her. So to use the expectations of others against them, and to move among, outside, and around assumptions as necessary.’
Since Celtic thought features the ability to embrace seemingly contradictory aspects, rather than viewing them as oppositional, Celtic goddesses are multifaceted by nature. However, the Morrígan specifically has long been seen as having a strong influence on the subsequent characterisation of Morgan both for the speculations surrounding a linked etymology as well the traits of their characters. For instance, there are similarities between how the Morrígan interacts with Cú Chulainn and how Morgan treats Arthur and his knights.
That said, ‘Celtic sources are not the only precedent to consider; Roman goddesses such as Sulis, also exhibit these contradictory characteristics as she presides over healing springs while also being associated with disease (Hebert, 2013, pp.5–6).
So in this sense it’s difficult to see whether all of these goddesses, who present these very contradictory aspects in the pre-Christian world, may all foreshadow Morgan and the traits that have been associated to her in the Arthurian cycle. Is it really the case that Morrígan is the leading influence? Or is the Morrígan representative of traits of the wider Celtic culture and the pre-Christian conceptualisation of goddesses?
Yet, as Herbert explains, ‘In the early twentieth century Lucy Allen Paton and Roger Sherman Loomis wrote extensively on the possible connection between the Celtic Morrígan and Morgan le Fay’. Yet this gave rise to several critics maintaining that the link between these two figures is too weak and there is no firm etymological support for such claims. ‘Their evidence relies on similarities between the late medieval tales in which Morgan appears and Celtic sources that feature Morgan-like characters such as the Morrígan.’
The apparent resonances between Morgan and the Morrígan still remain a tantalizing possibility that awaits a strong support in scholarship. Some of the contradictions between the two figures may derive from creative revisions on the part of the authors while the association between Morgan and the Morrígan, based on the volatile contradictory nature of them both, may overlook that Morrígan was not the only Celtic Goddess to embody the features we find in Morgan la Fay and that it might also be the case that such influence stems from the wider Celtic mythological milieu.
Nonetheless, Morgan’s descent from a Celtic goddess may provide an interesting – albeit partial – explanation and reconciliation of her contradictory portrayals in later literature. Lastly, as Herbert highlights, a link to goddess figures may counter the impulse to dismiss this female shapeshifter as simply evil, an instinct seemingly aroused – at least in part – from her very changeability (Hebert, 2013, pp.17–18).
As a final note, I’d like to address the practitioners among my viewers. I’d just like to clarify that historical and etymological connections, or lack thereof, between entities, don’t necessarily invalidate your religious beliefs or spiritual practice. Unless being historically accurate in your religiosity is a valuable aspect of your belief system, I’d see no issue in acknowledging a difference between historical evidence and individual religious experience. In fact, you’re an active part of the contemporary development and reinterpretation of these entities! This means that anthropologists and historians will have to deal with how Pagans and other magic practitioners conceptualise and engage with the Morrígan and Morgan now, in just a few years’ time.
My take is that knowledge is always empowering, whatever you choose to do with it!
This is it for today’s video. Thank you again, Angry Abacus for reaching out and commissioning a video on this topic.
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REFERENCES
Clark, R. (1987) Aspects of the Morrígan in Early Irish Literature. Irish University Review, 17 (2), pp.223–236.
Gulermovich Epstein, A. (1988) War Goddess: The Morrigan and her Germano-Celtic counterparts (Ireland). Los Angeles, University of California. Available from: <https://www.elibrary.ru/item.asp?id=6677631>.
Hebert, J. (2013) Morgan le Fay, Shapeshifter. Palgrave Macmillan US. Available from: <https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137022646>.
Tymoczko, M. (1985) Unity and Duality: A Theoretical Perspective on the Ambivalence of Celtic Goddesses. Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 5, pp.22–37.