The Cailleach
The Witch is Coming
🪄Your Mythic Ancestors eBook, which you can read online here and download in full on PDF below, is your ever-expanding compendium of Celtic deities and archetypes, exploring their stories, symbols, and creative inspiration. We’re now 63 pages in and I hope you are feeling supported by this rich lineage that you belong to.
A Chairde, Friends,
Tá an Chailleach ag teacht, the Cailleach is coming, can you feel her? The Queen of Samhain. I was up on one of her many landmarks, Sliabh na Callaigh, the ‘Witch’s Mountain’ during a storm last weekend with the wondrous
and our beautiful friend, Dee Kavanagh from Hidden Ancient Ireland. We were going for a triple goddess look in the photo below as we leaned into the ‘Hag’s Chair’ but the Cailleach was not one for our notions and we ended up channelling more of a Sanderson Sister look from Hocus Pocus—the wild hair symbolic of the whiplashing whirlwind of energy on the hill that day.
Veiled One
Cailleach translates as ‘Veiled One’ in Old Irish. Her name also means divine hag, crone, widow, nun, and most commonly, ‘witch’ in modern Irish.
She is as old as time. She is our creator deity, our ancestor deity, our weather deity. She is our Great Mother; our Seanmháthair Naofa, our ‘Sacred Grandmother’. She was once a Sovereignty Goddess, a fierce protectress of these lands and a mother to ‘peoples and races’, a mother to their descendants, a mother to us.
It is said that the Cailleach created the Gaelic lands of Ireland/Éire, the Isle of Man/Ellan Vannin and Scotland/Alba. She often comes to life with a veiled one-eye and ghostly blue skin, holding a bow-legged gait as she leaps across mountains, shaping the land by dropping rocks from her apron and hammering great valleys into form.