Triple Goddess Ériu, Banba & Fódhla
Mythical Ancestors eBook for You
Hello Creative Souls,
To bring more magic into this space, I have decided to compile a live eBook for you to collect your Creative Ancestor profiles in. This means that each month as your collection of profiles grows so will this eBook, which you can download (and print if you desire) at the end of this post and every month as it expands. So far, in your book, you’ll find Brigid, Manannán Mac Lir, and today, the triple goddess, Ériu, Banba and Fódhla. It feels more tangible, more enlivened this way and I feel the ancestors deserve to be brought into form in a beautifully curated eBook, and perhaps one day in a physical book. It’s currently 21 pages so get ready for a tomme by the time we’re done lol but how magical is that? Pages full of mythical ancestors being brought back into our consciousness to enrich and guide our lives and these times.
As we are in Bealtaine bloom, for this month’s Creative Ancestor profile, it is the triple goddess Ériu (“Air-roo”), Banba (“Ban-va”) and Fódhla (“Foe-lah”) who we will bring into bloom in our hearts. In the founding member's Bealtaine retreat, we journeyed with Ériu, Banba and Fódhla and the potentiality for our lives that they express at this threshold time, so let’s have more from these three queens of Ireland…
(You can read as usual below and, or, in your downloadable eBook at the end of this post).
Goddesses of Sovereignty
Ériu, Banba and Fódhla are goddesses of sovereignty. Core to Irish mythology is the deep association of the feminine principle with the land. She is the personification of the land itself. In early Irish society, the basic territorial unit or where you lived with your community, was called a tuath, meaning ‘tribe’, or mini-kingdom. In order for a tuath to bloom, their king would symbolically marry the Sovereignty Goddess—the land—in a ritual called the banais ríghe. This enacted a sacred contract between people and nature, masculine and feminine expressions.
Today, we sometimes see the association of the feminine with nature as problematic because it has become gender-specific, excluding women and marginalised groups from the decision-making sphere of culture coded as masculine and, specifically, ‘male’. Early Ireland was no utopia for women but it was goddess-centric. The Sovereignty Goddess like Ériu, Banba and Fódhla, as this embodiment of the feminine was powerful and could influence the culture. She was respected, feared, life-giving, life-taking. She also shows us how the feminine could navigate three worlds—the mortal plain, the natural world, and the Otherworld—because all of these ‘places’ are connected. They are infused with the anima mundi, the feminine soul of the world.
‘The light of the World Soul is waiting to be used to connect us with the inner powers that belong to matter and to life itself. The real world is an enchanted place, full of magical powers waiting to be used. And, as the alchemists understood, the anima mundi is a creative force: “it is the artist, the craftsperson, the ‘inner Vision’, which shapes and differentiates the prime matter giving it form.”’
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul
To draw on the quote above, the Sovereignty Goddess connects us back to our feminine powers (that can exist in us all no matter our gender identity). She is the creative force, the artist, the craftsperson, the inner Vision that shapes the land outside my window and the landscape within me.
Triple Goddess
Ériu, Banba and Fódhla are in essence a triple goddess. Not in the sense of maiden, mother, or crone; the triple goddess does not appear in this sequence in Irish mythology. It’s more common that the triple goddess reveals herself to us as ‘sisters’. We can see these sisters as individual goddesses or an embodied triplicity of the same self. It feels empowering to me to view them as a triplicity of the same self because it speaks to the many archetypes whose images live within us. To the dynamism of our lives. We may be one soul, but we are never just one person, we can be as varied, creative and wild as nature itself.