“for ’tis I that exacted a singular vow, such as no woman before me had ever required of a man of the men of Erin, namely, a husband without avarice, without jealousy, without fear. For should he be mean, the man with whom I should live, we were ill-matched together, in as much as I am great in largess and gift-giving, and it would be a disgrace for my husband if I should be better at spending than he, and for it to be said that I was superior in wealth and treasures to him, while no disgrace would it be were one as great as the other. Were my husband a coward,’twere as unfit for us to be mated, for I by myself and alone break battles and fights and combats, and ‘twould be a reproach for my husband should his wife be more full of life than himself, and no reproach our being equally bold. should he be jealous, the husband with whom I should live, that too would not suit me, for there never was a time that I had one man in the shadow of another.’
Medb speaks during the Pillow Talk, the opening chapter of the Táin Bó Cúailnge.
Queen Medb (Maeve in English), the legendary Queen of Connacht in Irelands great epic the Tain Bo Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) is one of Irelands best known goddesses. The archetype of the warrior Queen, she looms large in the mythology of Ireland, and especially Connacht. She was said to have cohabited with nine kings of Ireland. Medb demanded her husband satisfy her three criteria—that he be without fear, meanness, or jealousy, and we will see later what these demands really mean.
The Tain of course begins with the story known as the Pillow Talk between Medb and her husband Aillil, in which upon comparing their respective wealth she discovered her possessions were not entirely equal to her husband. Discovering that she had no bull to match that of her husbands white bull Finnbheannach (white horned), she set out to get the only one in Ireland that could match it, the Brown Bull of Cooley, for she could not be anything other than equal to her husband in wealth. When it was refused to her, she launched the invasion of Ulster to acquire it. And so the tale begins.
What is perhaps less known though are the deeper origins of her name and connection to rituals of kingship, wealth, sovereignty and the female energy in nature, not only in Ireland, but also in India, the easternmost part of Indo- European culture.
The Tain is set traditionally around the time of Christ in western calendars, but it is evident that in her guise as a goddess she is far, far older than that.
Medb as we Know Her
The spelling in Old Irish is Medb, a name derived from an ancient Indo-European word Medhu, meaning mead, the alcoholic drink made from honey. “She who intoxicates” would be a fair translation of the meaning of her name. And indeed in the tales she is not averse to using her sexuality to get what she wants, offering many heroes her “friendly thighs” on top of other rewards in exchange for fighting Cuchulainn, a deal that almost always resulted in their death.
A ritual drink was given to Irish kings when they were inaugurated. This ceremony was conceived as a marriage between the king and his territory. For example in the Annals of Loch Ce, it says that in 1310 Feidhlim son of Aedh “married the province of Connacht”. Similarly, it was part of every marriage ceremony for the bride to offer a drink to the husband to symbolise their consent to the union.
In this way Medb symbolised the land and a kings sovereignty over it. Many stories involve meeting a hag who is transformed into a beautiful woman through a kiss or sexual union. Niall of the Nine Hostages was said to have acquired the kingship this way as he was the only one to kiss (and indeed lay down with!) a hag guarding a well, upon which she turned into a beautiful woman and revealed herself as the Sovereignty of Tara, and that Niall and his descendants would have it forever. This hag is likely an incarnation of Medb, and is known as Flaith, a word meaning “power”.
Medb, the goddess of sovereignty at Tara was known as Medb Lethderg, meaning Maeve of the Red Side and it is liokely that she is the goddess in this story. Rath Medb is a large enclosure (750 feet across) to the south of the hill of Tara associated with her, however it is much neglected..
Once a king had accepted marriage to the goddess, he was bound to respect the land as his wife. Therefore to spoil or defile it meant that the Goddess would break that bond and remove her protection, a fearsome injunction indeed.
As the Tain unfolds many places acquire names from notable events involving Medb, such as where her pet stoat is killed by Cuchulain and the incident is commemorated by naming the p[lace after it. In this way many landforms are associated with her, which, as a goddess representing the land, makes sense.
She is associated in Connacht with Rathcroghan, a vast ritual complex near Tulsk in Co. Roscommon where the kingship of Connacht was based from ancient times until the 17th century. Here, her name appears in an Ogham inscription at the entrance to the cave Uaimhe na gCait, the Cave of the Cats, reputed to be an entrance to the underworld. In some stories she incarnates as a fawn.
Ireland or Erin was, and is, divided into five provinces, hence the name in Irish coiced, or fifths. Each province was ruled by a king or provincial king and the over-king was the ruler of the central province, Mide (Meath).
Due to the Christianisation of Irish mythology and the old religion, the divine aspects of Medb were downplayed, and she was pictured more as a queen in the human sense. However, enough survives in the stories for us to reconstruct what she must have originally represented, and when we compare them to her counterparts in Indian mythology we can see that there is much more to Medb than meets the eye.
Lakshmi, Madhavi and Medb
The Indian Mahabharat is one of the great epics of ancient Indian culture. Written in Sanskrit, the story in its present form goes back to the 4rth or 5th century BC, but contains material that is much older, dating back to the time of the Vedas the oldest layer of Indo-Eropean literature to survive in the world, dating back three or four thousand years ago.
Shri Lakshmi Goddess of Wealth and Sovereignty
Medbs counterpart in Indian mythology is found in the story of Madhavi, a name that also derives from Medhu meaning mead. She is an earth goddess in Indian mythology, and this name is also one of the names of the goddess Lakshmi the goddess of wealth, fortune and prosperity. In the ancient scriptures of India, all women are declared to be embodiments of Lakshmi. She is the consort of Vishnu and the marriage and relationship between Lakshmi and Vishnu as wife and husband is the paradigm for rituals and ceremonies for the bride and groom in Hindu weddings. In an early form Sri (later combined with Lakshmi), the wife of Indra, offers him a drink of soma, a fermented drink of the gods. So here we have an echo of the connection between Irish kingship rituals as a marriage to the goddess Medb, and Irish weddings and the importance of ritualised drinks.
Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth, fortune, power, luxury, beauty, fertility, and auspiciousness. When worshipped as Maha-Lakshmi, Lakshmi is visualised as a warrior-goddess riding a lion. Lakshmi is associated with horses and cattle, both symbols of wealth and it is in this guise as the bestower of wealth, power and sovereignty that we may recognise the very same elements in the character of Medb. The reason we know they are connected is in the survival of this remarkable ancient story in the Mahabharat about Madhavi, a lesser known version of Lakshmi in Indian culture.
For a relevant article on Lakshmi link here
Madhavi and Medb
In this very ancient story a sage called Galavi asks his guru repeatedly for his price for teaching him, the guru responds in irritation that he will take 800 white horses, each with one black ear. A seemingly impossible request! So Galavi goes to the greatest king at that time Yayati, who says he does not have the horses, but gives him his daughter Madhavi instead. Her beauty was so striking that any king would gladly give up his kingdom for her, and they are described as lusting after her. She has the ability to have a child and become a virgin again afterward and she tells Galavi that this is how she can solve his problem. So Galavi goes in turn to three kings who are childless and gets 200 horses from each one in exchange for them having a son with Madhavi. He then returns to his guru with the 600 horses and offs him Madhavi in exchange for the final 200 horses that he is short. She has a fourth son with the guru. the sons become the founders of dynasties, and the land is divided up amongst them.
The story is very old, its principle characters come from the distant Pre-Vedic or early Vedic times. The parallels to the Irish Medb are striking. In both cases there is a theme of procuring rare and precious animals, both are embodiments of female sexual power and use their sexuality to attain a goal, both marry kings repeatedly, and are evidently seen also as the embodiment of sovereignty. Madhavi is not sovereign herself; but sovereignty passes through her to her four sons who grow up to become great kings whose deeds are celebrated in the Puranas. In Medbs case, it is her demands of a husband that tell us the qualities that an Irish king must have. To be without fear, to be generous, and to be without jealousy are the qualities required to marry her, in other words to become a king. And hence men who compete for the kingship are seen to be vieing with each other to marry her, and their qualities or lack of them determine the outcome, with many of them dying in the process. The balance that is aimed for is the combination of the female energy of the land married to the male energy of the king. When these are in balance, then the rule will be harmonious.
Furthermore, Madhavis father, Yayati, divided his kingdom (which was the earth) among his five sons: to Tuvasha he gave the south-east; to Druhyu the west; to Yadu the south and west; to Anu the north; and to Puru the centre . Purus ruled as the Supreme Kings of earth. This has obvious echoes of the five divisions of Ireland into north, south, east, west and centre, with the centre being the location of the supreme king.
The similarity in stories from the extreme east and west of the Indo-European world is fascinating and shows the age of the concepts underlying these tales goes back to the beginning of the cultures emergence. The Tain is therefore built around themes that go back at least to the Bronze Age, and perhaps further, certainly to the first arrival of Indo-European speaking people in Ireland. The provinces must be similarly ancient, based as they are on an idealised ritual version of how the universe and land should be organised which is shared in India. We cannot date it exactly, but the time of last contact between Indian and Irish populations may go back to the 4th or 5th millenium BC, and arrival in Ireland in the 3rd or 2nd millenium BC, which shows the depth of time we are talking about in these tales.
Does a Goddess Ever Die?
In so far as goddesses can die, Medb of the Tain was said to have been killed on an island called Inis Cloithreann (Clothru seems to be a synonym for Medb) in Lough Ree near Knockcroghery while bathing. She was killed by Furbaide in revenge of his mothers death by a piece of cheese fired from a sling. It is likely though that the story of her death is a later concept, when her divine nature was less popular and the stories had become secular in meaning. No longer worshipped as a goddess directly, she now became known only as the warrior queen of Connacht, which was more acceptable to the Christian world.
While she is associated with many sites in Connacht, she is generally believed to have been buried in the great cairn on Knocknarea in Co. Sligo. The cairn is called Miosgain Medb, meaning Maeves butter pat, from its resemblance to the shape of a traditional pat of butter. That she is reputed to be interred here is interesting as her association with kingship may mean that this is a burial place for kings, and there is reason to believe that the west is where the souls of the dead journeyed to the underworld. However, there is no mention of her association with the cairn in ancient Irish texts and therefore it may be a later folk belief or comes from the habit of naming landforms after her.
Nowadays, interest in her has been revived in Ireland with the rise of neo-pagan religions and particularly in relation to female sexuality. Irish and Irish-American poets have explored Medb as an image of woman’s power and sexuality, as in “Labhrann Medb” (“Medb Speaks”) by Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Appropriate in a time where women are only now achieving equality comparable to that which had been the norm in Ireland in times past. However, when we look at the full depth and range of associations that Medb has with ancient concepts of the land, fertility, wealth, authority and so on across the world, we can see that she is a very important key in recovering lost aspects of Irelands heritage, especially when it comes to womens story on this island. The old scholars may have Christianised much of Irelands ancient literature but, uniquely in western Europe, they preserved it in its essence also, which gives us something precious, a window into the sophistication, colour and drama of ancient Irish culture, comparable to anywhere in the world.
Postscript
Perhaps it would also be no harm if the principles of kingship and the contract between rulers and the land that Medb represented for so long were also revived, considering the poor state of modern Irish political leadership and its sad disconnection from both the land, and the high principles that were once expected of, and enforced, upon Irish leaders by the goddess herself, Medb.
Notes
M L West, Indo European Poetry and Myth.
A prayer fragment on Lakshmi showing the three aspects of female life that Medb also sometimes appeared in.
“Every woman is an embodiment of you.
You exist as little girls in their childhood,
As young women in their youth
And as elderly women in their old age.”
— Sri Kamala Stotram
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