A Chairde, Friends,
Building on the interest from our last Mythic Ancestor Profile on ‘Celtic Shapeshifters’, below are more of your shapeshifting ancestors for you to deepen a relationship with, bringing our total so far to ten ancestors. I also plan to create a guided-audio shapeshifting journey for January’s creative ritual.
As part of my own Jungian studies, where we’ve been exploring the archetype of the apocalypse, an insight revealed itself to me: shapeshifting is a means to survive an apocalypse in Irish mythology. We see this in the likes of Fintan Mac Bóchra (from last month) who survives the deluge by shapechanging into a salmon, an eagle, a blue-eyed falcon, and a hawk. We have Tuan Mac Cairell below who survives a great plague by shapeshifting into a stag, a boar, an eagle, and a salmon.
What is it about letting go of our known identity, like the human form for Fintan and Tuan, and surrendering into the wild and natural forces of our more-than-human-kin that helps us survive?
Tuan Mac Cairell
Tuan Mac Cairell (‘Tuan Son of Cairell’) is the nephew of Partholón, who led the second group of peoples, Muintir Partholóin (‘The Kin of Partholón’), to Irish shores to make their home here. Lebor Gabála Érenn, ‘The Book of the Taking of Ireland’, tells us that six peoples inhabited Ireland over millennia. The Tuatha Dé Danann, the Irish deities we are most familiar with and the ancestors of who we might call ‘fairies’ today, were the fifth; we mortals, named the Milesians or Gaels, are the sixth.
The Partholóns grew from 48 settlers to a tuath, a ‘tribe’ of 5,000, but were disastrously wiped out by a great plague over the course of a week ‘between two Sundays’. Everyone died except Tuan. He survived as the only inhabitant of the island for 22 years, after which he witnessed the arrival of the third peoples to settle here, the Nemedians.
‘Then I was from hill to hill, and from cliff to cliff, guarding myself from wolves, for twenty-two years, during which Ireland was empty… I saw them [The Nemedians] from the cliffs and kept avoiding them, and I hairy, clawed, withered, grey, naked, wretched, miserable. Then, as I was asleep one night, I saw myself passing into the shape of a stag.’
One night Tuan has a dream where he shapeshifts into a stag. When he awakes, he has grown antlers on his head, and is now in the form of this dream-stag. He becomes the leader of the deer herds of Ireland. Following his lifetime as a stag, he retreats to his cave where again he transforms, this time into a boar, and the cycle renews itself. When he is an elderly boar, Tuan once more enters into his ‘dark caves’ and through his incubation, more magic unfolds: