Who Is the Celtic Goddess of Winter? The Cailleach Explained

Call her Beira, the Queen of Winter.

Call her the Hag or Spirit of Winter.

Call her the White Nun of Beara, or the Old Woman of Dingle, or the Witch of Ben Cruachan, or the Blue Hag of the Highlands.

Call her Cally Berry.

Call her Buí, Bua(ch), or Biróg.

Call her Digde, Digi, Dirri, or Duinech.

Call her Bronach, Mish, or Mal.

Call her Cailleach Bhéara—the Hag of Beara.

Or simply call her the Cailleach.

She is the divine hag.

The crone.

Quite literally, she is the “old woman” or “old wife.” 

Though originally, Cailleach meant “the veiled one” in Old Irish.

So, let’s pull back the Cailleach’s veil, shall we?

What do you think we’ll find?

A winter-welcoming, deer-herding, kilt-washing, staff-carrying, firewood-gathering divine grandma?

Or a blue-skinned, red-toothed, one-eyed, storm-conjuring, hammer-wielding, landscape-shaping giant?

Turns out she’s a little bit of both.

We’ll get into it.

Pssst. You can watch a video adaptation of this essay right here. Text below continues.

The Many Faces of the Divine Mother

While some folks refer to the Cailleach as an Irish deity, it would be more accurate to say that she is a Gaelic/Goidelic Celtic deity, as she also has a presence in the Isle of Man as Caillagh ny Gueshag a.k.a. Caillagh ny Groamagh (“the Old Woman of Gloominess”) and in Scotland as Cailleach Bheur.

In fact, the Cailleach’s associations with winter come almost exclusively from Scottish folklore.

What’s more, if we open the door to comparative mythology, Scottish folklorist Donald Alexander Mackenzie—in his book Myths of Crete & Pre-Hellenic Europe—argued that the Cailleach has cognates in…

• the blue-faced, iron-clawed, child-eating bogey-woman Black Annis from English folklore;

• the blue-skinned, red-eyed, multi-armed divine mother Kali—who wears babies as jewelry—from Hindu tradition;

• the lion-headed, donkey-toothed, long-fingernailed, blood-drinking, child-slaying demoness Lamashtu from Mesopotamian mythology;

• the matronly, veil-wearing, underworld-adjacent grain-mother Demeter from Greek mythology, who, it should be noted, was worshiped in Arcadia as the horse-headed, snake-haired Demeter Melaina, or “Black Demeter”; and…

• the Egyptian mother-goddess Neith, and Neith’s replacement the cow-horned sky-goddess Hathor, and Hathor’s replacement the veil-wearing, afterlife guide and divine mother figure Isis.

Now, this is the part of the essay when I’d usually chalk all of this up to a shared Proto-Indo-European linguistic origin.

But given that the inclusion of Mesopotamian and Egyptian figures throws a crook and flail in that idea, I think there’s an even simpler explanation.

Divine Mother Origins

Divine mother figures arose independently across the globe because our ancient ancestors observed that human life came from mothers. 

However, we have to remember that infant mortality rates were much, much higher thousands of years ago, and child-birth, while still prone to complications today, was even riskier back then. 

So it wasn’t just the miracle of life that was attributed to these divine mothers, but also the everpresent tragedy of death.

Hence, a divine mother can be associated with life-giving land and agriculture and pastoralism while also being associated with child-slaying and child-eating and, in the case of the Cailleach, destructive storms and the “death” of plants that comes with winter.

The Cailleach: One Half of a Celtic Mother Goddess?

To quote British folklorist Katharine Mary Briggs:

“The Cailleach…fights Spring with her staff, with which she freezes the ground. When at length Spring comes, she throws her staff under a holly tree, under which green grass never grows,” (source: The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature).

And with that mention of the holly tree I am so tempted to go on a long tangent about the Holly King and Oak King archetypes, but I’ll let you go down that rabbit hole on your own time. 

What I will say is that the wintry Cailleach may have a divine counterpart in the summery Brigid, the Irish goddess of poetry and fertility (amongst other things).

Interestingly, both of these goddesses—the Cailleach and Brigid—have been compared to Anu a.k.a. Ana, whom Cormac’s Glossary describes as the “mother of the gods of Ireland.”

Anu is also sometimes called Danu or Dana, making her the alleged namesake of the aforementioned gods of Ireland, the Tuatha Dé Danann, but as I explained in an earlier essay/video (see above link), the name Danu doesn’t appear anywhere in any medieval Irish text and was essentially cooked up by linguists who assumed “Danann” was in a possessive form and could thus be hypothetically rendered as Danu in a nominative form.

Regardless, there’s an argument to be made that the Cailleach and Brigid are actually the two faces or component deities of this Irish mother goddess, with the former taking power on the Cross-Quarter Day of Samhain, which the ancient Gaels celebrated as the end of summer and beginning of winter, and the latter taking power on the Cross-Quarter Day of Beltane, Samhain’s calendrical opposite, which the ancient Gaels celebrated as the beginning of summer and end of winter. 

(The ancient Gaels only recognized two seasons, FYI.)

Granted, winter sometimes ended sooner than Beltane if, on the February 1st Cross-Quarter Day of Imbolc, the Cailleach saw her shadow. 

Okay, fine, not true. But get this:

According to legend, it was on Imbolc that the Cailleach gathered firewood to sustain her hearth fire for the rest of winter.

If the weather was mild on February 1st, the Cailleach could gather lots of firewood, meaning winter would continue for several more weeks. 

But if the weather was foul on February 1st, the Cailleach would be unable to gather lots of firewood, meaning winter would be over soon.

And yes, the connections to the modern American Groundhog Day tradition are obvious.

If it’s sunny on February 2nd, the groundhog will see its shadow and winter will continue for six more weeks.

But if it’s cloudy on February 2nd, the groundhog won’t be able to see its shadow (because there’ll be no sunlight to cast said shadow) and winter will end early.

For more information on how Imbolc inspired Groundhog Day and how this Gaelic festival, long associated with the goddess Brigid, became Saint Brigid’s Day, go check out my Imbolc playlist on the Irish Myths YouTube channel.

But for now, let us return to the Cailleach and the many different forms she can take.

What Does the Cailleach Look Like?

In addition to appearing as an old woman with a magical ice staff, or an old woman collecting firewood, the Cailleach can also appear on Imbolc as a gigantic bird collecting sticks in her beak—at least on the Isle of Man, anyway.

This according to Briggs.

Meanwhile, Scottish folklorist Florence Marian McNeill notes in The Silver Bough (Vol. 2) that on Scotland’s west coast, the Cailleach appears essentially as a washerwoman who initiates the seasonal switch to winter by washing her féileadh mòr (“great plaid” or “great kilt”) in the Gulf of Corryvreckan for three days, thereby creating one of the world’s largest whirlpools while simultaneously stirring up a tempest. 

When the Cailleach is finished, her kilt is pure white in color, matching the white of the freshly fallen snow blanketing the landscape.

In other parts of Scotland, however, it takes more than one Cailleach to brew a storm. 

According to McNeill, the Storm Hags or Cailleachan—Cailleachan being the plural of Cailleach—represent the destructive power of nature and are associated with Scotland’s spring windstorms. 

Then there’s the iteration of the divine hag wherein she’s not a hag at all. Or at least, not all of the time.

Here, I’ll let Mackenzie explain. Just keep in mind that in the following tale, the Cailleach is referred to by her pseudonym, Beira. And I quote:

“Beira always visited the [Green Island] on…the last night of her reign as Queen of Winter. All alone in the darkness she sat beside the Well of Youth, waiting for the dawn. When the first faint beam of light appeared in the eastern sky, she drank the water as it bubbled fresh from a crevice in the rock…

“As soon as Beira tasted the magic water, in silence and alone, she began to grow young again. She left the island and, returning to Scotland, fell into a magic sleep. When, at length, she awoke, in bright sunshine, she rose up as a beautiful girl with long hair yellow as buds of broom, cheeks red as rowan berries, and blue eyes that sparkled like the summer sea in sunshine. Then she went to and fro through Scotland, clad in a robe of green and crowned with a chaplet of bright flowers of many hues. No fairer goddess was to be found in all the land, save Bride [a.k.a. Brigid], the peerless Queen of Summer,” (source: Scottish Folk-Lore and Folk Life).

Of course, the thing about youth is that it’s fleeting. And the thing about beauty is that it fades. And in Cailleach’s case, it’s really fleeting. And it really fades.

Here, I’ll toss it back to Mackenzie:

“As each month went past, however, Beira aged quickly. She reached full womanhood in midsummer, and when autumn came on her brows wrinkled and her beauty began to fade. When the season of winter returned once again, she became an old and withered hag, and began to reign as the fierce Queen Beira.

“Often on stormy nights in early winter she wandered about, singing [a] sorrowful song…

“The aged Beira was fearsome to look upon. She had only one eye, but the sight of it was keen and sharp as ice and as swift as the mackerel of the ocean. Her complexion was a dull, dark blue…

“Her teeth were red as rust, and her locks, which lay heavily on her shoulders, were white as an aspen covered with hoar frost.”

The Cailleach: Legend & Folklore

Mackenzie goes on to explain that the Cailleach keeps great herds of deer, horned cattle, and other animals and that she effectively invented the pastoral practice of transhumance, which is the forced, seasonal migration of grazing livestock from highlands in the summer to valleys in the winter. 

Mackenzie also notes that the Cailleach created said highlands and valleys—and other features of Scotland’s notoriously craggy landscape—by dropping rocks and dirt from her creel, by pounding the earth with her magic hammer, and by letting her quarrelsome giant sons throw boulders at each other. 

And here we’ve reached an aspect of the Cailleach that is more in line with what we find in Irish folklore, as the majority of Irish Cailleach lore concerns itself not with winter, but with rocks, and cliffs, and mountains.

Case in point: the very name Beara, a name we’ve heard a lot in this video, ties the Cailleach to the mountainous Beara Peninsula in County Cork.

And on that peninsula one can find the Hag of Beara a.k.a. Hag Rock, a large, curiously shaped stone overlooking Coulagh Bay which, according to legend, marks the spot where the Cailleach waited for her one-time lover, the Irish sea-god Manannán mac Lir.

And by “marks the spot,” I mean it’s believed that the stone is the Cailleach in petrified form.

A similar tale is told about Hag’s Head, a rock formation at the southernmost tip of County Clare’s famed Cliffs of Moher that looks suspiciously like the head of a woman staring out to sea. Only in this case, the Cailleach waits not for Manannán mac Lir, but for the Ulster Cycle hero—and arguably Ireland’s greatest champion—Cú Chulainn.

There’s also a passage tomb in County Sligo’s Ballygawley Mountains called the Cailleach’s House, and another passage tomb in Sligo’s Dartry Mountains called the Cailleach’s House, and another passage tomb on the summit of County Armagh’s Slieve Gullion called, you guessed it, the Cailleach’s House. 

Oh, and at the base of Slieve Gullion there’s a tripod portal tomb, officially named the Ballykeel Dolmen, but all of the locals know it as the Hag’s Chair.

Then there’s a range of hills in County Meath known as Slieve na Calliagh (“the Cailleach’s mountain”), home of the Loughcrew National Monument, in which one can find Cairn T, a.k.a. the Hag’s Cairn, at the base of which one can find a kerbstone that is also called the Hag’s Chair.

And I’d be remiss not to mention that legend has it that the megalithic structures at Loughcrew and the Dartry Mountains and the nearby Carrowmore Megalithic Complex on Sligo’s Coolera Peninsula were all created by the Cailleach when she traipsed across the Irish landscape and stones fell out of her apron.

A Song of Snow & Stone: Why the Cailleach is Associated With Winter and Rocky Landscapes

All this being said, one of the oldest pieces of Cailleach literature, the 10th-century Irish poem, The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare, which (I have on good authority) will be the subject of the next episode of the Irish Myths StoryTime podcast, does draw connections between youth and summer and between old age and winter.

So, in an attempt to tie the Cailleach’s wintry and rocky aspects together, I will now share the following quotation from Mackenzie, in which he provides an alternative explanation for why the Cailleach becomes less powerful during the warmer months of the year.

And I quote: 

The Cailleach…is called “the daughter of Grianan” or “Grianaig”— that is, of the “little sun”. In the old Celtic calendar the ‘‘big sun” shines during the period from Beltane (1st May) till Hallowe’en, and the “little sun” is the sun of the winter period. “Daughter of the little sun” does not mean, however, that the sun was either her father or mother, but simply that she was born during the cold season. The Cailleach was supposed to have been transformed into a grey boulder at the end of the period of the “little sun” and to have remained in that form during the period of the “big sun”. I have heard references to this boulder being “always moist”, an indication that it was reputed to contain “life substance.”

So, the next time you find yourself on the Beara Peninsula in County Cork, do me a favor and run your hand across the surface of that big ole Hag Rock, and let us know here in the comments if the Cailleach has any life substance left.

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Want to learn about the darker side of Irish and Celtic mythology? Check out…

Samhain in Your Pocket

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Irish Monsters in Your Pocket

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Neon Druid: An Anthology of Urban Celtic Fantasy

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