by Terry McCombs

The Morrigan is not a simple goddess. At her core she is a deity of battle — not a warrior who fights, but one who stirs strife, flies over the carnage in the form of a crow, and decides who will fall. And yet she is also a goddess of fertility and sovereignty, without whom the king would be powerless. She is a triple goddess, shifting across her three aspects (Badb, Macha, Nemain or Fea depending on the telling). She appears in the oldest Irish manuscripts and resurfaces, barely changed in essence, as Morgain la Fey in the Arthurian cycle, as the wife of the Green Man in the Sir Gawain tradition, as the Wyrd Sisters in Macbeth. Terry McCombs, posting to soc.religion.paganism on February 28, 2009, traces the Morrigan through this chain of transformations using Ralph Abraham's Chaos/Gaia/Eros theory of historical consciousness — arguing that her persistence is not coincidence but necessity: she is the face the three great forces of human consciousness take when they refuse to be suppressed.

NAME: The Morrigan (Great Queen, Phantom Queen), Mor Rioghain, Morgain, Mórrígu, mór rígain, Morgan La Fay, The Bean-Nighe or The Washer at the Ford, The Wife of the Green Man, the Wyrd Sisters.

SYMBOLS: Raven or crow. Spear.

AREA OF INFLUENCE: Goddess of battle, prophecy, fertility, and sovereignty.

USUAL IMAGE: A shape-shifter, she appears in many forms — beautiful maiden, mature woman, ancient hag, crow, bear, and others.

RELATIVES: Ernmas (mother). Cailitin, a Druid, or Delbaeth or Dagda (father). Anu, Badb, and Macha; or Badb the Crow, Nemain the Venomous, Fea the Hateful (sisters or other aspects of her, or goddesses she presided over). Eriu, Fotla, and Banba (other sisters and goddesses of the land, not other aspects of her). Mechi (son, father unknown), who had three hearts in which were three serpents. The serpents, it was foretold, would destroy Ireland, so MacCecht killed him and burned the hearts, throwing the ash into the river Berba — even then the ash of his hearts boiled the waters of the river away and killed all the fish in the river.

HOLY BOOKS: Book of Leinster. Book of Fermoy.

SYNODEITIES: Kali (Hinduism). Cathbodva (Gaul).

Details

Once you look into the myths about the Irish goddess Morrigan, you begin to understand why it was that the Celts who developed the Celtic knot!

At her most basic, Morrigan was a goddess of battle who did not take part in battle itself, but instead stirred up strife, then flying over the battle in the form of a crow picked who would die by casting confusion on them, afterwards feasting on their remains.

Not your warm and affectionate sort of goddess — and yet she was also a goddess of fertility and sovereignty, without whom the king would be powerless.

Going deeper into Morrigan (or The Morrigan, as this may have at some time been a title) we find that she is also a triple goddess who, along with either her sisters Badb and Macha, or in some accounts Nemain the Venomous and Fea the Hateful, plays a shifting role in scores of myths and legends.

What is it that brings this goddess back in so many forms and guises and returns her, age after age, in another form even if this means mixing aspects that are both grand and horrific?

The Three Forces

I think the answer might be found in a theory put forth by Ralph Abraham, mathematician, historian, and Chaos theorist, in the book Chaos, Gaia, and Eros (1994, Harper Collins).

His theory — to oversimplify it — is that there are three main forces that have driven human consciousness through the ages:

Gaia: The physical existence and living spirit of the created world.

Eros: The spiritual medium connecting Chaos and Gaia; the creative impulse.

Chaos: The creative void, source of all form.

From the Paleolithic to the present, these three forces moved us forward — with at times one or more of them being suppressed, only to resurface again and again.

Whoever the original goddess was who returned as the Morrigan, she was most likely first worshipped in a very different form sometime between 10,000 and 4,000 B.C.E., during what Abraham called the Gaia span (agriculture and partnership).

With the coming of the Eros span — 4,000 B.C.E. to roughly 1962 C.E. (the wheel, patriarchy, and science) — she was re-imagined by a new way of thinking that often feared Chaos and almost always had, as part of its dominant mythos, the conquest of Chaos by a hero or god representing order.

In this way the Morrigan changed form from life-giver to carrion eater — and yet the three forces that she is part of continued to bring her back in multi-triad forms.

So that as the Eros span grew, she was not undone or put away, but continued to shape-shift.

Changing from setting as a raven on the shoulder of the dead Cú Chulainn, to reappearing as Morgain La Fey in the tales of King Arthur; or as the wife of the Green Man, tempting Sir Gawain; to stirring the cauldron for Macbeth as the Wyrd Sisters; and later, as part of the Celtic Fairy faith, becoming the Bean-Nighe — the Washer at the Ford — seen washing the bloody clothing of those who are about to die.

The thing is, in this theory the Eros span has now begun to be overtaken by the now-developing Chaos span — Neo-Pagan, Post-Modern, Chaos Theory — which offers the hope of the end of the suppression of these three forces, so they can be understood with positive effect.

No doubt the form that the Morrigan takes in this era, if his theory is correct, will be most interesting indeed.

Colophon

Written by Terry McCombs and posted to soc.religion.paganism on February 28, 2009, as part of his long-running God of the Month Club series. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

McCombs ran the God of the Month Club in soc.religion.paganism from 2003 through at least 2009. The Morrigan appeared in February 2009 — late winter, the threshold between the dark half and the light, when the Washer at the Ford still lingers at the edge of vision. McCombs's use of Ralph Abraham's Chaos/Gaia/Eros framework as an interpretive lens for Celtic mythology is unusual and characteristically self-taught: the kind of synthesis that flourished in the cross-disciplinary, boundary-crossing culture of early Usenet paganism.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

🌲