09/12/2025
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“In Irish folklore, the Cailleach is consistently portrayed as an immensely old and powerful goddess; many of the stories emphasize her great age, and such stories are deeply embedded in the landscape.
Their usual setting is wild and rocky places, like the place names which are associated with her and which are usually attached to mountains or locations in which ancient dolmens and cairns are to be found.
More often than not, the stories say that the Cailleach is the creator of these places…
Stories of the Cailleach and mythic old women like her arise out of a time when the Earth was commonly represented as the body of a woman.
Caves were thought of as wombs, rivers as veins or the flow of life-giving milk, and hills were seen as breasts … but then, with time, the Divine became disembodied, transcendent, and the physical became something to overcome or supersede…
In many parts of Europe, these powerful and life-giving elder women were transmogrified in the folklore into stereotypical witches.
But what is interesting to me is that, although so many old gods vanished from memory after the adoption of Christianity, the Cailleach did not; her stories, and the stories of gigantic old women like her, are abundant in the landscape, and still very much alive.
It’s the old women who remain here then; it’s the grandmothers who endure.”
~ Sharon Blackie, “Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life”
Art by Elena Albanese
