Happened across this impressive rendition earlier this evening, by the inimitable Angus McBride (known for both Osprey and certain tabletop RPG offerings). It depicts the Cailleach Bheur – effectively synonymous with the Cailleach Bhéarra (see Hull 1927, inter alia), also known as Buí , the Wife of Lugh.

She is a figure of far broader saliency than the immediate attestations amidst those Gaelic branches of the Celts.

As applies ‘Cailleach’ – as Hull puts it, this “means one who wears a hood or veil (caille)”, and may equally well apply to an old woman with a hood, an “Auld Wife” or “Hag,” […]”.

Why is this significant? In essence, it is the identifying fixture for a particular Indo-European Goddess – or, we might say, a ‘Form’ or ‘Aspect’ of Her.

Effectively, the Wife of the Sky Father – when Her Deathly Visage is to the fore (think Pārvatī => Kālī; or Demeter => Demeter Erinys / Demeter Melaina), this is visually expressed via a (Blue-)Black ‘Covering’; this being lifted via ritual immersion when the more positive and (frankly) less terrifying Facing is restored (through Her proper honouring, the transition of season, and/or some dire demonic threat having been vanquished).

As applies the etymology, I have tended to derive ‘Cailleach’ from PIE *ḱel- – ‘Veil’, ‘Covering’; with Sanskrit Kālī (काली) being of shared origination (there, the ‘veil’ or ‘covering’ is not a garment – it is rather, a dark exterior skin or patina that separates from the Goddess when She resumes Her (Mahā)Gaurī Form).

(Matasovic, I was pleased to find, had arrived at similar apprehension for ‘Cailleach’ – positing Old Irish ‘Caile’ to be from PIE *keh₂l (‘dark’), which appears to be a variant reconstruction for *ḱel-. I was similarly enthused to hear of citation from elsewhere within academia viz. Kālī from *kē̌l (a rather exotic typography as utilized in Gebser, but confirmed to be very much the same *kel [sic] that refers to “conceal[ment]” etc.; ref. Menge-Güthling, 1910; Walde, 1938).)

We can observe this *ḱel- root underpinning elements such as the κάλυμμα / ‘kalumma’ of the κυάνεον δὲ κάλυμμα (‘kuaneon de kalumma’ – ‘dark-veiled’) with which Demeter (in Her Erinys / Melaina – Furious / Black(ened) – Facing) is described within Her Homeric Hymn (and c.f. κυανόπεπλος – ‘kuanopeplos’, or ‘black cloaked’; the colouration in both cases – κυάνεον / ‘kuaneon’, related to modern English ‘Cyan’, being a potentially rather ‘blue-black’).

This being the exterior veil that is likewise ‘concealing’ Her more positive and golden ‘beneficent’ Face – not coincidentally, a more ‘youthful’ one, as contrasted to the ‘old woman’ appearance linked to the Veil (and which can also be attested for various to the correlate Hindu Visage(s), likewise).

As I had put it elsewhere for Demeter – “this Cloak / Visage being ‘cast aside’ ( ἀπωσαμένη / ‘aposameni’ – ‘thrusting away’) as She ‘changes form’ (εἶδος ἄμειψε – ‘eidos ameipse’), Her ‘old age’ (γῆρας / ‘giras’) becoming replaced with the rather literally radiant beauty (κάλλος / ‘kallos’ – cognate with Sanskrit कल्य ‘kalya’ (‘auspicious’, ‘healthy’, etc. – and figuratively can mean ‘Daybreak’, a seemingly apt summation of the situation of Demeter’s ‘unveiling’) and कल्याण ‘kalyana’ (‘beautiful’, ‘agreeable’, ‘lovely’, ‘charming’, etc.)). “

In both of the Hindu & Hellenic major exemplars aforementioned, a ritual bathing [as at Shiva Purana VII 1 25, Pausanias VIII 25 / 42, inter many alia, etc.]; is the key transition from this (Blue-)Black (and Veiled) Deathly Visage through to such an inverse – and so it is, also, for the Cailleach. Although due to the nature of the folklore in question (it having been recorded quite some time post-Christianization) … we are unsurprised to find that some details have become bowdlerized or otherwise distorted as they have moved into ‘sanitized’ light.

To quote from an earlier work of mine (which had also been looking at some pertinent Continental European post-Christianization folk-ways):

“And as applies Her Immersion … per a prominent recounting from the surviving folklore (attested through the work of folklorist G.J. McKay), She had been supposed to undertake a ritual bathing once every hundred years at Loch Bà in order to restore Her youthful and beautiful form, with this having to occur at dawn and before any other being had stirred with sound due to the day. Unfortunately, in the version that has come down to us, a dog’s bark disrupts the rite and therefore leads to the Cailleach allegedly collapsing as a corpse. Presumably, the telling went from an original looks like a ‘Corpse’, ‘Deathly’, etc. through to ‘actually being dead’.

Now, the reason why I declare much of the above to be a ‘distortion’ of what could not be fully suppressed, ought prove rather readily apparent. A Goddess is … unlikely to be vulnerable to ‘death’ at the hands of a few village-men and standing water (whether, as Frazer attests in various cases, they are flinging curses in Her direction nor otherwise) – and similarly, the ‘twist’ to the Cailleach tale wherein the immersion is not only i) a once-in-a-hundred-years operation but also ii) disrupted by such a thing as a dog’s barking … these are quite clearly departures from the core underlying typology. Even in Scotland, a Winter does not last a century – and the affinity for the Goddess with Hounds should appear most readily in evidence elsewhere, with the cyclical passing of the seasons also not (thus far, at any rate) proving meaningfully dysjunct.

In both these suites of Eastern European and Celtic exemplars, that which has come down to us has now become the story of a religion and its true adherency sadly twisted into the active rejection of Her – and either continual & cyclic or once-off-and-narrativized-to-confine-to-the-past congealments for this as the Goddess (Who Is ‘Death’) being declared cast down, powerless, effectively ‘irrelevant’ … and, er, ‘Dead’.

The antidote?

Engagement with more authentic understandings to the situation. Such as those handily preserved for us (even if in somewhat fragmentary fashion, upon occasion) amidst those non- or pre- Christianized Indo-European spheres.”

There is more which we could say, of course – and in other works, as you can see, we have done so – but for now, I think, it is enough.

Jai Mata Di.