Danu, Great Ancestress
Mythic Ancestor Profile
A Chairde, Friends,
Before we explore Danu, as we move into this season of Bealtaine, a reminder that there are mythic ancestors deeply embedded in the archetypal energy and landscape of Ireland who are potent energies to connect with at this seasonal threshold:
Ériu, Banba and Fódhla
A triple goddess representing the sacred sovereignty of Ireland. Éire from Ériu is the official name for ‘Ireland’, this island to this day, is named after the goddess.
Amergin
The file, the poet-seer who led our ancestors, the Milesians or Gaels, to these shores at Bealtaine time.
Danu, Great Mother Goddess
‘It seems more appropriate to view all of these Goddess images as aspects of the one Great Goddess with her core functions-life-giving, death-wielding, regeneration, and renewal. The obvious analogy would be to Nature itself; through the multiplicity of phenomena and continuing cycles of which it is made, one recognizes the fundamental and underlying unity of Nature. The Goddess is immanent rather than transcendent and therefore physically manifest.’
Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess
For this month’s mythic ancestor profile, I wanted to share a little about Danu, an old goddess whom we know very little about. She is so elusive that there are debates about whether Danu is a fabrication of the Christian scribes who transported our myths from voice to vellum.
Truth be told, I’ve been reluctant to share about Danu, because I don’t have the same surplus of material to texturise her into form. But herein lies an opportunity to feel, not think our way into Danu. She for me is about the felt sense, Danu is an experience of the body. As pioneering Lithuanian archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas, says in the quote above, Danu ‘is immanent rather than transcendent and therefore physically manifest.’
Magical Mother
Danu, in essence, is a mother goddess. Ireland’s main supernatural race, the Tuatha Dé Danann, bear their mother’s name, in the translation, ‘Tribe of the Goddess Danann’ or ‘Tribe of the Goddess Danu’. The Tuatha Dé are a race of magicians, how they express is through the arts and magic, deeply embedded in and co-created with the wisdom of the natural world around them.
‘The Tuatha Dé Danann were in the northern isles of the world, learning lore and magic and druidism and wizardry and cunning, until they surpassed the sages of the arts of heathendom.’
Cath Maige Tuired, The [Second] Battle of Moytura