Medb, She Who Intoxicates
Warrior Queen & Sovereignty Goddess
A Chairde, Friends,
Today, we find ourselves transported to the royal court of Medb, the formidable Warrior Queen of Connacht in the west of Ireland. Medb, a powerful figure in Irish mythology, holds dual roles: she reigns over her mortal kingdom while also embodying the Sovereignty Goddess of Tara, the high seat of gods and kings, who could not rule without her. Let’s meet our Creative Ancestor for this month...
‘... A goddess who can bring the earth to life or make it barren, who can delude some men into destruction and make kings of others, who can intoxicate her followers with superhuman exhilaration on one occasion and emasculating terror on another—Medb is a powerful mixture.’
Charles Bowen
She Who Intoxicates
Medb (“May-v” or “Medh-uhv” in Old Irish) means ‘she who intoxicates’, from her name’s association with honey mead, the world’s oldest alcoholic drink. In Celtic lore, mead wasn't just a beverage, but a magical elixir imbued with supernatural properties that symbolised the plentifulness of the Otherworld.
‘A vat of intoxicating mead was being distributed to the household. It is there yet, its state unchanging—it is always full.’
A description of mead in the Otherworld
In this way, Medb's name is thought to be an expression of the banais ríghe, the ‘wedding feast of kingship’, the highest form of ritual in ancient Ireland. This sacred union transcended mortal marriage, symbolising the holy joining of the king of the tuath, the ‘tribe’, with the Sovereignty Goddess who was the living embodiment of the land, of nature herself. Here, the divine masculine devoted himself to the divine feminine, a metaphysical marriage that extended far beyond the couple to a betrothal of people, nature and the cosmos. Through this ceremony, the tuath were symbolically wedded to the land, forging an unbreakable bond with nature and the cosmic order.
During the banais ríghe, the goddess would offer the king a wedding libation—an intoxicating mead poured from her grail, her otherworldly cup. This indicated her approval of the union and the king’s legitimacy to rule. The goddess had the power to grant kingship to worthy rulers and withdraw it from unworthy ones. She was seen as a protector of the land and its people, but also as a fierce judge of a king’s fitness to rule. If a king was to rule without the goddess’s support:
Menacing lightning storms would strike,
Deathly plagues would spread,
Wildlife would perish,
Milk would dry up,
The harvest would fail,
Life itself would be impossible.
From the early medieval wisdom tract, the Audacht Morainn, the Testament of Morann
The cup of sovereignty here is symbolic of the later grail in Arthurian Legend. It is a symbol of being in reciprocity with the Otherworld, a core tenet of the Irish mythic imagination.
One of the most important goddesses of sovereignty (who we know little about) is Medb Lethderg who presided over Tara, the royal capital of the high kings of Ireland and before mortals, the Tuatha Dé Danann, the gods themselves. She is likely the older archetypal image from whom Queen Medb of Connacht descends. Old Medb holds the mysterious epithet, lethderg meaning, ‘red-sided’. Perhaps a symbol of the passion, the sexual power, the life-giving blood force, we see in Queen Medb.
According to legend, she had nine successive husbands, each a mortal king of Leinster. As an immortal deity, Medb outlived her consorts, taking a new king as husband upon the death of the previous one. The number nine is noteworthy here as thrice the sacred triple, emphasising Medb's mystical nature. The 12th-century manuscript, Lebor Laignech, the ‘Book of Leinster’, tells us that:
‘Great indeed was the strength and power of that Medb over the men of Ireland, for it was she would not allow a king in Tara without his having herself for a wife.’