In this issue, we meet Saint Íta, The Mórrígan, the ambiguous and compelling Goddess that governs war, prophesy, motherhood, and perhaps water and cosmic illusion.

The Mórrígan's aspects have fewer direct representations among the Saints. Motherhood in Christianity is the domain of Mary, after all. I'd love to deal with the Mórrígna (her aspects) separately throughout the year, as I am hoping to do with Brighid, but so far Íta is the only clear Mórrígan-saint I've found. So I'm stuck kind of doing them all at once.

It's Issue #2, and already likely to be one of the longest of the year. Believe me when I say, I've re-drafted this email many times and edited it down. There is a lot that I've left unshared, a lot of cross-identification and evidence that I've omitted. At this early stage of the Newsletter, I still feel that I need to justify my identifications carefully, whereas over time I'm hoping I can lean on prior work more and more, and keep things more brief.

That said, I tried this email by a friend and she said it wasn't too much.. so I re-added a little detail then. I'll be going over many of Íta's connected saints later in the year and she'll get even more detail by proxy: Íta as the Mórrígan is easily one of the most important saints of all, in my opinion.

So! Today, we cover the Munster Saint whose life and folklore suggest an identity with Macha, Baḋḃ, and the proposed third Goddess of the Mórrígan Trinity, variously named simply "Mórrígan", "Mórrigu", or more distinctly, "Anand".

Water-Mother of the Gods

The Irish gods have a mother, and her name is "Danu". At any rate, that's the name reconstructed from the collective name of the main group of Protagonist gods: the Tuatha Dé Danann. Danu is not directly attested anywhere, but her name is very suggestive of the Welsh Dôn, similarly present in name only, and also a series of rivers and bodies of water across Europe due East. Indeed, a Vedic and Hindu mother goddess bears exactly the same name: Danu (1), and her name means something relating to water or liquid, too. We are, therefore, expecting a water-goddess.

There have been decades of speculation already on whether Danu has identity with one of Ireland's most-loved goddesses, the Mórrígan, for three main reasons:

• The Mórrígan is An Dagda's wife, and he's the Ollathair, or "Great Father", and he's canonically father or grandfather to loads of the Tuatha Dé.
• The Mórrígan is a Triple Goddess, and two of her constituent identities are already well-known: Macha and Baḋḃ. That leaves the third, variously called "Mórrígan", "Mórrigu", or "Anand" (rarely and perhaps innovatively, "Nemain").
• The name "Anand" is tantalisingly similar to an entry in Cormac's Glossary for "Ana - mother of the gods of Ireland.." and also to a goddess of Munster, "Anu", associated with breast-shaped mountains and a womb-shaped lake.

Problems include: None of the Mórríogna have any outward connections to water, none of them have names that suggest water or maternity, and while Macha does have kids that one time, we don't get a sense of her being maternal because she dies right away. Also, there are other Goddesses who are more obviously watery and maternal, such as Boann.

Even if we do accept Anand might be Danu, we're still lacking her legends. Which of Dagda's children are hers, and which are of other pairings? In what order do her children come? What are their associated birth-myths?

Fosterer of the Saints

Íta of Killeady (AKA Íte, Ída, Íde) is best remembered as foster-mother to an array of famous saints. She's also a marked prophet and seer, and has strong links to Macha and Baḋḃ in name and narrative.

That should be exciting enough to begin with - we have a Saint who looks like she could link to 2 of the Mórríogna - but it gets better, because Íta is the most famous "Mother" among the Irish Saints (2), and her Saintly relationships put her squarely where we expect the Mórrígan-as-mother to be (though, I won't go into them in this issue; gotta tease some goodies to come).

Do we have a single saint who can give us the whole Trinity of Mórrígan? Can this finally give us some detail on the relationships and birth-myths of Mórrígan and Dagda's children? Let's see.

Íta and the Mórríogna

To keep things to a controllable length, I'll treat the two main canonical Mórríogna vs. Íta separately:

Macha

Macha is a compelling and powerful Horse-goddess, and multiply-incarnated land-goddess, of Ard Macha in Ulster. She's described in the Dindshenchas with the curious epithet "The Sun of Womankind". This name has been conjectured to connect her to an obscure Munster goddess named "Grian" (in English, "Sun"), who in turn is sister to a better-known land-and-water goddess "Áine", both of whose key area of identification is very close to Íta's heartlands in Limerick.

Saint Íta does seem to have some occulted connected to horses, insofar as she is strongly associated in folklore with a Donkey, an equine that may substitute for horses in Christianised myth. A cross-comparison through Ness, below, also suggests a birth-myth connection: as Macha gives birth after racing Conchobhar's horses, Ness the sister of Íta gives birth apparently in a speeding kingly chariot.

She has an unusual myth where a man asks her to make his foals have a specific patterning which is reminiscent of the otherworldly "White with Red Ears" cows that pop up in Irish mythology. She obliges, grudgingly.

Finally, and in the Martyrology of Oengus, Íta is given an uncanny epithet; "The White Sun of Munster's Women" (Oengus, Stokes, 1905; CBÉS 0494:102) - the only other occasion I know of where a woman is described as the "Sun of Women" besides Macha.

Baḋḃ (Nemain?)

Mórrígan is best known as a Goddess of War and Prophesy. And an ambivalent one, at that; even her own husband, An Dagda, has to come and appease her before their war with the Fomhoire to ensure her support and their victory. Her support was also essential to victory over the Fir Bolg. Her association with Prophesy appears in all her aspects to some extent, but her battle-associations align best with the Goddess Baḋḃ, whose name means "Scald Crow". Another attested Mórrígna is Nemain, and is often assumed to be an aspect of Baḋḃ - her name even possibly a cognate of Greek Nemesis. As Baḋḃ, Mórrígan is a frightening prophet of battlefield doom, an architect and inciter of war and battle, and it is said she feasts upon the severed heads of the slain.

Well, Íta doesn't feast upon heads. But she does have several associations with battle. One one occasion her people come to her ahead of a battle for her support, and their victory is attributed to her support. On two other occasions, she revives her chosen people who have died in battle - one of these is her "Sister" Ness' consort, the craftsman "Boanus", so that she can have a child by him. The scene in which she and Ness locate his body and head is similar to a Medieval English story about "Edith the Fair" (nb: vowel similarity to "Íde") who finds her maimed husband's body in a battlefield.

The Mórríogna also sometimes collectively intervene directly in battle and inflict mass-casualties with magic and terror, especially Baḋḃ / Nemain. Íta also assaults a whole group of people with a blood-curse, remembered in folk-tales of "Túr na Fola" (English: "The Field/Enclosure of Blood") and "Cill Cnuic na Mallachta" (English: "The Church of the Hill of the Curse"). This often features a curse themed around blood - accounts vary. In one version she relents and puts the curse instead on a Crow.

It must be said: the Mórrígan also prophesies peace and prosperity after warfare. She book-ends conflict, helping to end it as much as she incites and relishes in it. Íta doesn't prevent or end wars, I should add. But the Mórrígan isn't just a chaotic war god by any measure.

So much for Baḋḃ and Macha; I hope you'll agree that there are strong parallels to Íta already. Now to see if we can identify our Watery Mother, Anann.

Watery Comparisons

Ness, Mother of Conchobhar: Íta's sister Ness might be a substitute for Íta's own maternity of Mochoemóg - I say this because Ness' entire marriage and conception story is controlled by Íta, and then Íta immediately fosters her child. Íta's "sister" Ness has strong parallels with the sometimes-warrior, sometimes-motherly, sometimes-queenly water-associated Ness of the Ulster Cycle - put like that, the Ness of Ulster already sounds Mórrígan-ish. Most uncannily, both Nesses have an intimate connection between their pregnancy and a man named "Fachtna". Íta's Ness appears to give birth in a speeding Kingly Chariot - a motif which seems to echo how Macha gives birth after a race against King Conchubhar's horses.

Deirdre, Of The Sorrows: Another character from the Ulster Cycle (it's a pattern), Deirdre of the Sorrows parallels Íta in being a natural prophet, and in escaping her arranged royal marriage to flee to a distant land, with support from her mother-figure. Íta's birth name is Deirdre.

It would be a bit daft if I didn't mention the obvious Water-Mother Goddess who likes An Dagda, Boann, who also presents as a Prophesy-goddess under the name "Fedelm" in the Ulster cycle. Frankly speaking, yes: I think there are a lot, a lot, of reasons to see Boann and Anann as being esoterically identified. But that's not a Saint-comparison, and I'm not going to talk about it here! Suffice to say though, that I think they might have been generally viewed as different deities to the uninitiated. It's likely that the religious leaders of the Gaels understood them as being identified, but that they were distinct in common retellings. It just seems to be that the stories are not presenting Boann/Fedelm as being "The Mórrígan". There is a mytheme of Íta's though, of a special fish that can appear in her wells that bodes well for those who see it. The fish cannot be cooked and should be returned to the well if caught (CBÉS 0653:21) - this is a mytheme that seems to associate with Saints that have something to do with the Well of Segais, the otherworld source of the river Boann and of Water-Wisdom.

I'll add a last one I enjoy: Meḋḃ of Connaught. A fierce female-sovereignty, maternity and sex, war-inciting queen who's generally already accepted to be a euhemerised goddess, and who enthusiastically sleeps with An Dagda's apparent double Fergus, Meḋḃ shows every sign to me of being a narrow form of the Mórrígan... and she becomes, at one point, the origin of several bodies of water when she menstruates.

Does Íta directly have a watery side? Not much, there are two hints. One, is that she is associated folklorically with safety at sea despite never travelling by sea herself (particularly in Waterford). And the second, is that when her son Brendan fails to find the promised afterlife on his first voyage, it is Íta who sets him right. This unaccountable association not only with the sea, but with Cosmic Voyage upon the sea, is very compelling.

What does it mean that Mórrígan might be a water-goddess, with or without Boann? A lot, actually. But it's, again, not relevant to the comparison with Íta. I do think though that Mórrígan is probably continuous with the Cosmic Ocean, to be in some way identified not only with water but with the pregnant substance of the pre-cosmic state (3). It would be natural to identify this with the creative "waters" of the female body, and Íta's association with Pregnancy is consonant with that.

The Children of Íta

Oddly, Íta's own life only acknowledges Saint Mochoemóg (4) as a foster-son even though Brendan figures repeatedly. The other canonical sons Brendan & Cumméne have clear descriptions of her maternity in their Vitae. One might almost think the redactors of Íta's life were trying to downplay her maternal centrality, and the other authors didn't take the hint.

The Saints that she mothered are all male - probably part of the reason for this is that Christian rewritings often downplayed or erased women. But, it's also possible that any daughters she had could have been recast as Nuns - she does have plenty of those, and some of them even get names. Fewer, I think, than with Saint Brigit, some of whose nuns do seem to be minor goddesses in their own right.

As to the boys, they include Brendan (her first), Cumméne, and Mochoemóg (the only acknowledged in her Vita) at least. Contemporary folkloric accounts vary as to whether Finbar of Cork and others besides might be included, but I can't yet find a source for this prior to the mid-20th century. Íta isn't mentioned in their canon accounts, at any rate. Modern Íta folklore also maintains that she had another sister besides Ness, named either Fíona or Eannaigh, and I can't find a manuscript source for this, either. Eannaigh, at least, sounds enough like "Anu" or "Áine" (sister of Grian, the epithet of Macha and Íte..) to make me wonder whether it's an authentic memory.

International Parallels

Macha's Horse/Sovereignty roles make her a frequent pairing with Welsh Rhiannon. Her identity with horse-offspring and land and conflict with kings might also suggest Greek Demeter. As a mother/horse goddess bearing divine twins while in her horse-role, we could extend to include Vedic Sanjna. Only one of these has any link with Íta; her insistance on intensive small-scale agriculture might evoke Demeter's pattern of being a goddess balancing Agriculture and sacred wild.

As a war-goddess, you could align Baḋḃ with Greek Athena. While Athena is goddess of weaving, Íta is also (preposterously) credited with inventing Basket-Weaving in some folklore (Dunphy, 2006: 200). Back-comparison from Athena would then further suggest that Scáthach is another Ulster-Cycle guise, adopting a role as Supporter and Supplier of the hero on an "impossible bridal quest", as Athena does for Perseus and Odysseus, and Scáthach does for Cúchulainn.

Hindu Durga, another goddess with a huge domain including war, peace, power, and maternity, could also be a good match for Mórrígan and particularly Baḋḃ. Durga has an association with Maya, a central Hindu concept that sometimes just means "Propensity for Disguise" - this is a trait shared by the Mórrígan but is also visible in the life of Íta when she magically visits Clonmacnoise incognito.

Ossetian myth has two prominent maternal characters who superficially look like Mother-deities but the former of the two, Dzerassae, is the waterier and the mother of a Nart matching the profile of Coemgen. Her daughter, post-mortem, is the subsequent mother-goddess of note, Satanya.

In the Arthurian matter there are quite a few suggestive matches, but let's just try to get one. It is likely that the Horse-Mother deity would be mother to one of the Horse-Twin characters, and there are a few candidates for this role. Gawain's one of them, and his mother might be the best: her name in early forms is Gwyar meaning "Gore" - suggestive name for one of the Mórríogna.

Closing Comments

You might be thinking that Mórrígan doesn't seem very motherly, and she seems pretty morally ambivalent. To the former, I will say that the manuscript tradition was written by Christians, and they left a lot out, much of which appears to be rendered in the Hagiographies of saint-ified gods. Via Íta and maybe Ness we can see a clear motherly side to the Mórrígan. But, as an ambivalent, sometimes fierce and antagonistic goddess.. well, Mother Goddesses are also just Like That. Look at Gaia and especially Tiamat 5, two goddesses who are allies and supporters to their children one minute, and antagonists the next. If Mórrígan is sometimes the antagonist, that's very much on-brand for the Great Mother.

You may be named for the Mórrígan if your name is a variant of Íta, or Ness, or Neasa, or Deirdre, or perhaps Ethne or Findchoem. Or, Mórrígan or Macha or Nemain or Anand or Danu, I guess! As to places, her holy sites are peppered accross Munster, particularly Waterford, North Cork, and Limerick. But also, Navan Fort in Armagh, and perhaps even Ráth Cruachain in Co. Roscommon if I'm correct about Meḋḃ. If the connection to Boann feels true to you, then the entire Boyne river is literally the goddess in her watery aspect. The river, lake, and estuary "Ness" in Scotland may well be named for her - go visit Inbherness, but try to use some Gàidhlig while you're there.

Footnotes

1. The etymology of Hindu Danu is very clearly linked back to bodies of water in Europe, which is pretty cool. Paradoxically, the etymology of Irish Danu is still ambiguous on this score; etymology considers the way languages have evolved, so the situation is not symmetrical. Still, I think the signs point to a partial identity of Irish and Hindu Danu, though the Hindu form is more specific and narrow.
2. Though, not by a wide margin the one with the most Saintly children - it's just that the others are more obscure generally and don't all get Vitae of their own.
3. You might wonder whether this indicates conflict in domain between Mórrígan and Ler, the Irish god of the sea (yep, Ler, not his son Manannán, but that's for another issue...) - and the answer is Yes, and also No. I have a lot to say on this also but it's also off topic!
4. Last issue, I "leaked" that "Coemgen" is another name of Cian, father of Lugh. "Mochoemóg" is a diminutive of the same name: you might assume that Mochoemog goes on to be a Cian-type, but that isn't necessarily obvious in his own Life. And I think we'd all love to know his deal, because Mochoemóg is the god who gives succour to the Children of Lir, one of Ireland's most famous stories. Ness' son in the Ulster cycle is also not a Cian-type, but instead a King, Conchobhar. It seems that, in the Irish material, there is some ambiguity about the role of this god, and there may be Welsh parallels, which will get more exploration in later appearances.
5. Remember how I said there are signs Mórrígan in some sense might be the pre-cosmic ocean? Look at Tiamat. And then recall the first lines of the Abrahamic creation myth, where God is above "The Waters" as he begins to create - the Abrahamic creation begins right after the defeat of Tiamat. If Mórrígan shares in this concept, then her parallel would be in the first line of the Bible. Or, look at the Ice (still waters) from which Búri and Ymir and Adhumbla emerge at the Norse creation scene.

Bibliography

• Hoover, Nora E. (2012) Translating a Saint: The Life of Saint Íta and Early Irish Christianity. Middletown, Conneticut: Wesleyan University. Accessed here
• Dunphy, James (2006) Saint Íta, The Forgotten Princess, ISBN 1-4120-7778-8 (See 'Caveat Emptor' above!)
• The Metrical Dindshenchas, poem/story 27, accessed at https://celt.ucc.ie/published/T106500D/text027.html
• Oengus; Stokes, Whitley (1905) The Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee, London: Harrison and Sons, accessed at Archive.org
• Title Image: a Crop of NateBergin's photo of the pane for Saint Íta at the Honan Chapel in Cork. CC-BY, 2025. Thank you Nate!

Caveat Emptor

There are several well-meaning books and sites about Íta, including the one by Dunphy I cite a few times here, which repeat names and events that I, at least, can't find a pre-20th century source for, or even substantiate anywhere outside the book. In particular, Dunphy's book contains lots of sections that alternate freely between wholesale copies of a semi-fictional book from the mid-20th Century, and sections on Folklore that he collected but doesn't cite very well - it's often very unclear where the Folklore came from.

When he has a page that is clearly presented as collected folklore, I am happy to accept it as such, but I wish he'd documented its origins better. When there are tantalising details that I'd love to use but can't substantiate... I drop them. False leads lead to false conclusions.

There are several websites out there that similarly present as fact some details that I cannot substantiate, such as a version where Fionn Barra of Cork is fostered by Íta after the death of his parents. I would love to know where this is from, but I can't find it yet. I'm assuming it's recently creative, for now.

Coming Up!

OK, that's one of this month's biggies delivered. 2 more for January and then I have to deliver something for Brigit - I'm not doing another email like this though! I'll likely cover her parallels with either Hestia, or Artemis. Her Dawn/Spring/Solar aspect is becoming more generally recognised anyway. I'm open to thoughts, though.

I need to get better at communicating the newsletter dates, by the way: I am currently aiming to publish the newsletter the day before the Saint's feast day.

• 20th Jan: Féichín of Fore, Saturnine god of the mind and divine wrath
• 31st Jan: Máedóc/Aedan of Ferns, one of our two male deities of Fire
• 1st Feb: Imbolg, festival of Spring and the Dawn of the Year, and of Brighid
• 7th Feb: Mél of Ardagh, bearing a fragment of Midir's legend

If you enjoyed this issue of The Gods and their Croziers, do me a favour in kind: pass it on! A share, a link, a forward, they will all help immensely. Míle buíochas daoibh.

Patterns in Comparative Celtic Mythology, #2

The Mórrígan might be goddess of Maya, which at its greatest extent is the illusion of division between ultimate divinity and the sensible world - so let's talk about Monism. In the Comparative Mythology sense, that is.

If you look very closely at the gods, and graph them by their relationships, you'll start to notice that they can blur significantly at the edges. If you use international comparisons, you'll find that the lines are often drawn quite differently along these boundaries - epithets, domains, precise familial relationships, godly domains or attributes.. all can slip across boundaries.

It is possible that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were all Monists, believing (as with the largest sects of Hinduism, the longest continually-practiced religion of the group) that the Gods were all of a common essence, and that the universe was too. The Gods are all part of a Cosmic Masquerade, as indeed we all are, and even some of the Gods aren't "in" on the act.

To a lot of modern polytheists, this is considered "Soft Polytheism", and viewed as a failure to commit or a sign of Christian influence. But, there's evidence that besides Hinduism, this idea was widespread in Europe, too. We have attestations from Greek writers talking about the fluidity between Dionysus and Hades for example, sometimes including Zeus. Lots of Greek stories feature the Gods 'tag-teaming' in ways that seem a little discordant or hand-wavey without a Monist understanding; sinners fleeing one god such as Aphrodite only to immediately run into a more dangerous god such as Persephone for their comeuppance.

This "slippage" or "fluidity" can be most pronounced among the female deities, which might be down to a lot of factors, and it's, again, even stronger when you view a god comparatively across different religions. From that comparative point of view, all the female gods can quickly collapse into one if you try to make logical sense of their connections. The male deities also collapse, but because there are fewer points of contact between them, the collapse will go through multiple stages. You have to develop an attitude of consciously deciding when a boundary is meant to remain within a given tradition, and so letting the gods keep their masks on in order to tell the story.

For example: Is it a good idea to consider Fintan (flees sex) and Balor (forbids grandchildren) esoterically as two expressions of a common Saturnine, procreation-denying deity? Maybe: It can potentially give you a better understanding of that Deity. Would it be a good idea to do the same with Nuada / Nechtan and Fionn as fierce lunar poet-kings? Probably not; the stories present them as having a relationship of descent and inheritance, but without continuous identity. They are certainly related in spirit and some traits slip in various incarnations, but trying to see them as essentially the same would confuse rather than clarify.

Hopefully that helps explain my conundrum with Watery Mothers Anand and Boann, a little. Indeed, from this point of view, even though we have attestations that Boann (AKA Fidelm) is Eithliú (Eithne), I take the view that even they should be viewed as distinct deities and characters, the better to understand their appearances and characteristics. But, if Mórríogan, or Durga, or Danu, the masters of Maya, were to hear me say that, perhaps they'd laugh.