Horrid she may have been, but she was sexual as well. (Metrical Dindshenchas “Odras” 55: in Mórrígan úathmar.) Because she could bring death, she was feared. When she was on the land, she was a battlefield goddess, similar to the crow-goddess Badb. Thus, the Morrígan lived deep within the earth, in a cave – that most chthonic of places.
(Metrical Dindshenchas “Odras” 56: a húaim chrúachan cubaid.) Out of the cave of Crunchu, suitable home. In one poem, the Underworld goddess, the Morrígan, came The Dindshenchas root the deepest connections of these mythological figures to the land. Proof of this connectedness to place is found in the Metrical Dindshenchas, literally the metrical ‘lore of the hills’ (Quin: D: degra-dodelbtha 124.70 ff S 177: 42 ff), early Irish poems which recount the (supposed and sometimes made-up) origins of place names and of traditions concerning events and often mythological characters associated with these places.
(Brenneman and Brenneman 1995: 42-43 70) On the other hand, on a continuum rather than a polarity or complementarity, place can have its own sacrality. The sacred and the loric are complementary, and the place-oriented particularizing tendencies of the Celtic earth-based religion are complementary with later Christianity in sacred places such as the Holy Wells of Ireland. To this power of the particular rather than the universalizing, of otherness rather than sameness, the authors give the term loric, and they believe that these characteristics are at opposite poles to what is called the sacred.
The sites themselves radiate this energy. Here, power arises from configurations of the landscape: the well, the tree, the stone. Instead of a global force, this was a power of a specific place, and it was a power of space, rather than one of time, according to Walter and Mary Brenneman. In Ireland, the earth was the divine feminine. Queen Medb – an ancient Irish goddess of sovereignty transposed into mortal queen – and the Morrígan, a goddess with Neolithic roots, were two Irish goddesses connected deeply to the land of Ireland. I dedicate this paper to Patricia Monaghan, whose love of place, and especially Irish place, was profound. Medb, the Morrigan, and Place in Ancient Ireland
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