January is a ride, isn’t it? Right now the Met Office maps are telling us that the whole of Britain is covered in frost. If you’re up in the Lakes, or the Highlands, or even Eryri, numbers with two digits and an ominous minus sign are hovering over the landscape, stunning us all into a kind of hibernation: don’t go out, wrap up warm, for the love of God reconsider that roadtrip to the Cat and Fiddle. I don’t even live near the Cat and Fiddle any more — that infamous old pub in the middle of the Peak District where every year, to the delight of ITV news, people get snowed in for days. I got stuck there once, about 3 years ago, and still some part of me imagines that driving anywhere in wintertime might have me holed up in its dark wooden interior. I think January comes with all of these well-honed associations, most of which we don’t like much. January = cold. Cold = pub. Pub = stop what you’re doing. Stop what you’re doing = well…an ending.
I should probably pause here to apologise for jumping to the idea of endings. It’s a big thing. A scary thing, sometimes. Frankly it might seem a bit of a leap — from pubs, to stopping, to endings. A bit dramatic, much? Particularly when culturally, we don’t really know what to do with them. Beginnings are so much more fun. Beginnings are all possibility and growth. Endings? Who knows. Maybe just get another pint in.
But then, if we’re honest, there is something about this time of year that leans towards endings. In nature, in daylight and darkness, in trees, forests and fields. We don’t like to acknowledge it too much, but that doesn’t make it go away. Instead the process lingers in the undergrowth, on the periphery. We try not to look at it. We try to smooth out its edges with softer, more romantic ideas of winter. Some of those ideas land. January = cold. Cold = pub. Pub = log fires. Log fires = cosy nights huddled with someone you love in that sexy amber light like you’re in a living incarnation of The Holiday.
To be fair, that does feel preferable to an ending. Given the choice, I choose sexy fires, please.
As it is, this winter, it’s an ending that’s turned up in my life. A big one. Which while being hard in itself, also means that the sexy fire version of winter seems pretty far away right now. And it’s also probably why, in the canon of Celtic Goddesses that I’ve been running with these last few years, it’s the Cailleach that’s knocking on the door at the moment. I’d rather Rhiannon or Cerridwen, to be honest, with their magical horses and shapeshifting ways . But you have to dance with the one that brought you, and right now, it’s the Cailleach. She’s blown in with her raging ice winds and her immovable intention to push all life back into its roots. Who am I to turn her away?
Cailleach 101
In the tapestry of our islands’ folklore, it doesn’t get bigger than the Cailleach. She is, in short, the old goddess of winter. With wire grey hair and piercing blue eyes, she wakes on Samhain (around Halloween) and calls in the storms, the snow, the ice. She strides across the Irish and Scottish landscape with a giant staff in her hands, pulling the veil of coldness with her, frightening animals into the hibernation holes, stunning tree leaves to abandon their branches and fall to the ground, signalling the ending of the harvest, of growth, of new life. Back to the ground you go, she says. It’s my time now.
And she embraces endings, not so much as a definitive stop sign, but more as a natural and essential stage in the cycle of a living earth. That makes her easier to bear — sure. Endings are beginnings, and all that. There’s no new growth without them. But I’m not sure that makes her any less alarming, at least at first. After the bounty of summer, she’s a bit of a killjoy. It’s natural to wish she wouldn’t turn up at all.
But she’s been with us a good while, nonetheless. The oldest written record of her comes in an 8th century Irish poem called ‘Lament of the Old Woman’, in which she speaks to the process of endings and aging with a kind of inevitability and defiance. In the 14th century she’s found in a The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare:
It is well for an island of the great sea:
flood comes to it after its ebb;
as for me, I expect
no flood after ebb to come to me.
But as her story travelled into Scotland, she became less a mortal woman and more a mythical ice queen made legendary in wild folklore. ‘The storm hag’ who controls the weather, who dips her long plait into a whirlpool and then shakes it so that ice drops cover the land, bringing in a tempest that could be heard rumbling in for miles around. She is relentless, formidable. And very, very old. In Wonder Tales from Scottish Myth and Legend (1917), Donald Alexander McKenzie calls her the mother of all Scottish gods and goddesses. Some stories even pitch her as the creator of Scotland itself — her storms whipping up tectonic plates and causing the mountains to smash into one another.
She is, without question, a giant of our island’s mythical world. She is coming whether we want her or not. So how should we act when she arrives?
Surrender
The Cailleach found me in the dark on a windy bay beach on the Mumbles headland a week ago. There was a quiet storm inside me that night. My chest literally felt stretched, so heartsore from a loss, from the quietness of winter, from the feeling of absence that seemed to permeate all things. I parked up in the car park by the lighthouse and tried to navigate down the rocks by thin moonlight, until the sound of the sea crashing on rocks drowned out the noise in my head.
“I’m coming,” she said
“I know,” I whispered, imagining first that I might be able to fight her off.
Madness of course. You can’t fight her. She’s the weather. She’s the wind and ice. She’s coming whether we want her or not. You can only meet her in a kind of humility. In a kind of surrender. You can only open your arms let her storm in.
“What do I need to do?” I ask, hoping I can bargain my way out of her grasp.
“Just be with me,” she says. Be with this. The grief. The non-knowing. The injustice. Be with her as she uproots and destroys and calls the ocean into a frenzy. It’s wild to imagine I could do anything else. For she is big. And I am human.
“When will you go?” I plead.
“When I’m done,” she says. It feels like more of a relief than it sounds. Because she will be done one day. One day she’ll blow over, and Spring will come.
And then, “…but for now, I’m here with you.”
Suddenly my grief has a name, and I’m not alone, and she’s with me, visiting for a while, doing her work. Without her, the world would stop turning. Without her, grief makes no sense at all.
The Cailleach’s lesson
The Cailleach is a goddess who gets a lot of PR at this time of year, particularly in more pagan or astrological circles. People talk about her as a metaphor for the seasons, as a reminder that even winter has its role in the cycle of life, as a story that helps us understand that there are some things, indeed, many things, over which we mere mortals have no control.
But I think, maybe, her lesson is more personal than that, and more simple. It’s the comfort that gods and goddesses have offered for eons: that profound understanding that even in grief, you are not alone. In the midst of the storm, in that void where life is sleeping, in those quiet moments where it seems like nothing at all is happening. That even then, there are forces and emergences occuring in the cosmos around you, and whether you make goddesses of them or not, whether you even like them or not, they are there, and you aren’t the whole story. That life is doing what life has always done, it is whipping up and dying down, shapeshifting and evolving. And so are you.
Be patient, child. For even endings aren’t the end.
Even storms subside.
And until they do, maybe find somewhere safe to wait it out.
I hear the Cat and Fiddle is nice, this time of year.
My name’s Kim and I usually write memoir-ish pieces somewhere on the edge of ancient mythology and new world imagining. My first book on the Lost Goddesses of Britain comes out with Penguin Random House next year. If you like that kind of thing, or just random musings in general, please like this post, or subscribe. Thanks for reading.