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.
Thanks so much, Marisa, for having me on your very lovely podcast! It was so lovely to be able to share Boan's story, and I really enjoyed our conversation we had afterwards. Grá to you!
Oh, this story. Thank you. I was listening while driving to the nearest town for a supply run, and chattering aloud to myself afterward while tears streamed down my face. What IF! What if we think about death differently, not as a sacrifice, but an entry into another world of knowing? What if the waters overflow the well and sweep her away in ecstatic union? What if death - becoming a god, or becoming an ancestor, however we want to phrase it - is a portal to knowing/becoming the mystery? What if, when we die, we become a river, always carrying the land back to the ocean? What if she gave an eye, because she was receiving the insight/sight of the Other World? There are bits of Odin, Lucia, maybe even Brigid in there, losing eyes and gaining sight. I don't know - I can't claim enough knowledge of the lore to sense how our ancestors or how Boan herself may have felt about her shift from embodied goddess to metaphysical. But. In receiving this story, connection to Boan upwelled within my heart, and for this, and all the questions it brought to light - I am grateful.