A Woman’s Quest for Knowledge
Boan’s Tears by Ali Isaac
“On this show, every season is Cailleach season.”
Lately, I’ve been joking with guests and the wider podcast community that, even though we tend to associate her with winter, on KnotWork Myth & Storytelling, it’s always the right time for a story about the sacred hag of Celtic lore and landscape.
Perhaps the joke is on us because this week’s guest,
, who has a vibrant Substack newsletter called , brings us a story of another Irish goddess altogether: Boan.
That said, I think we can play with that old adage: when it comes to Ali and her work, though the storyteller can take the hag out of the story, the storyteller is always going to bring the story back to the hag.
This comes through so clearly in everything I know about Ali’s writing, particularly in her introduction to what she calls The Cailleach Project.
Though Ali and I have only just met, and have only had a chance to chat a couple of times on Zoom, it’s clear we’ve been sharing the same dream, and the same bookshelves, for a long time. In this post, she calls together Ní Ghríofa, Ó Crualaoich, Magan, Kristeva, and others. These are names that lovers of mythology and feminism will know in their bones, and they are writers who speak to so many universal aspects of the human (and more than human) experience.
As Ali says:
This is not a newsletter about Irish myth, or history, or motherhood, or feminism, or landscape, or seasons; it is all of the above and the myriad ways these topics intersect.
Yes, please, more of that intersection, now and always! Because, really, it is in the interweaving of these ideas that the sacred hag shows us, again and again, that she has us all wrapped in her cloak, always.
In this newest KnotWork Myth & Storytelling story we meet Ali’s Boan, a wife, a lover, a mother, and passionate seeker of knowledge who never has the chance to become the crone.
Unless, of course, that’s what’s happening when Boan is swept away by the River Boyne and finds a new home amongst the stars of the Bealach na Bó Finne, the Milky Way?
See, there it is.. all stories and all roadways do take us to the Cailleach after all.
