I’m Just a Storyteller, Tugging at the Cloak of a Deity

On Telling the Story of a Warrior Queen Rather than a Goddess of War

When I started KnotWork Storytelling and began this new adventure as what I call “being a MythWorker,” I had no idea I would spend so much time wondering how to get a goddess’s attention. 

And, as it turned out, I’d spend only slightly less time wondering if I wanted a particular goddess’s attention.

This is a curious thing, because it’s not as if I “believe in” these goddesses. At least not in the sense that many folks might apply the phrase to capital “G” God.

With the notable exception of Brigid, who I have researched, written about, yearned for, and prayed to since I was a Catholic kid picking a confirmation name, the goddesses of myth have “merely” been guides, companions, and the focus of my fascination.

Of course, there’s no “merely” in having such a crew to act as my friends, my source, and my solace. I looked to them for sacred inspiration and blessed consolation. It’s just that I never expected them to intervene on my behalf and I never needed them to be “real” to work their magic in my life.

Is it strange, then, to say that, though I don’t expect my mythological friends to intercede in my life, I’m afraid to vie for the attention of certain goddesses in case they might lock me in their dark gaze?

You might say I am mingling divine beings and the muses. You might accuse me of superstition or magical thinking. You might accuse me of finding spiritual sustenance from some personalized combo platter of an attraction to the divine feminine, a devotion to a Great Mother who is bigger than all our human stories, and a creative appetite that pulls me towards the wisest, strongest, female figures in mythology. 

You might be correct. But such is a day in the life of a MythWorker.

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I tried to place a call to the goddess of war, but a warrior queen answered

When my friend and colleague Lee Chaix McDonough and I were chatting about what sort of story she might want to explore when she visited me on KnotWork Storytelling, she mentioned that she had been having some really interesting experiences with the Morrigan lately.

The Morrigan, if you haven’t met her in a dark alley or read about her in a book of Irish mythology, is one of the island’s resident triple goddesses. She flies in on dark raven’s wings to oversee war, death, and other things best practiced in the dark, like prophecy and magic. 

I would say I know of the Morrigan, but I wouldn’t pretend to know her. 

Because Lee is who she is, she instantly seemed to know what I meant. I said would try to see if I could get the attention of the goddess who many simply call “Herself,” but I couldn’t make any promises. Really, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go there, into that realm of the Phantom Queen which was so full of ambiguity and, well, gloom.

Though I rail against our culture’s addiction to the light, I still tread lightly, carefully, respectfully when I know I’m about to walk into Shadow.

As promised, I looked back to a few of of the Morrigan’s stories. I tiptoed up and tugged at her red-black cloak with a timid finger and then I ran back out of the cave into the sunshine.

Silence.

And that is how I came to tell the story of Queen Medb and King Aillil’s “Pillow Talk scene from the start of the great Irish epic, the Táin Bó Cúailgne, instead.

Medb was the logical next best choice. The Morrigan and Medb are certainly distinct beings, but they appear in the same tales and both have deep roots at Rathcroghan in County Roscommon.

If Morrigan is a fierce, rather untouchable goddess. Medb, who has her own associations with the concept of the Sovereignty Goddess, has a humanity that’s simply easer to track.

Medb, I was comfortable with. I had told her story in The Sovereignty Knot, and I felt ready to bring it to KnotWork. I’ll tell you more about what you’ll hear in this episode below, but first, here’s what I have learned about how to know when it’s time (and when it’s not) to try to write a story about a powerful mythical being.  

Dear {insert name of awe-inspiring deity}, I’d like to write a story about you (I think)

At its most simple, you know you have the green light to write a goddess’s story when the roadblocks simply dissolve and the story comes together. 

When it’s not time, it seems nothing and everything stand between you and the tale you’re aching to uncover and make your own.

Your attention wanders. Other projects feel more immediate. The laundry is piling up.

The cat steps on the keyboard and closes your browser and you can never find your way back to that one elusive website that seemed to combine scholarship, and spiritual sensibility. If it’s Mercury retrograde, the whole damn computer crashes.

You doubt the whole project and feel you totally imagined the otherworldly inspiration, the imbas forosnai, that told you that you had to tell this character’s story in the first place. You feel like a fraud trying to make new sense from an age-old tale that countless people have explored before you.

What you do find about the goddess seems flat and uninspiring, like dusty old legend or mere spiritual pablum.

From experience, I can tell you that this sort of nonsense can go on for months. And then, what you do next is actually irrelevant. If you’re meant to forget this desire to court this goddess for months or even years, you will.

And, when—if— you’re meant to remember her, you will. 

The resources simply present themselves. The book falls off the shelf. The random Google search for something else entirely takes you to the goddess’s threshold. A friend of a friend mentions the elusive name at a backyard party.

The synchronicities just become too big and bold to ignore. The invitation will be irresistible. 

You sit down to write into her story, and the words just appear. 

Sometimes, that ability to access a deity’s story is all about the time of the year.

We’re used to Christmas in July sales and we can jump a flight to the warm ocean in midwinter. As we have mastered place, we feel have mastered time, too. 

But, our ancestors would have told stories that were utterly rooted in their seasons. Just as you would not tell a story of the harvest when the ground was too frozen to plant the first seeds, you would not speak of a deity feats and adventures until their feast day approached. 

For example, I could not tell goddess Hecate’s story in May, but I could in November. 

I had tried to read Sorita d’Este’s Circle for Hekate for months, but I couldn’t get through more than a paragraph at a time. One gloomy late autumn evening when I returned to it once more (I was offering my Heroine at the Crossroads workshop again and wanted to brush up), I found myself devouring the not-so-riveting academic/esoteric prose.

In the night of flurried research, I learned about Hecate’s Night. I checked the calendar. It was, of course, the evening of November 16.

And such are the lessons of telling time according to mythology and centuries rather than personal preference and the insistence of “right now.”

Myths Take Time, Myths Take the Shape of the Times

In my conversation with Lee, we touched on all the ways that Medb is a model of empowerment for modern women

Medb (Anglicized to Maeve) is the ultimate sovereign. She fully possessed her own power and property, inheriting it from her father as was the way with royals of the time. She's also has her own profound sense of ownership of her own body and sexuality. She puts pleasure at a premium and really has no shame. 

The stories we have of Medb have passed through many hands. Originally, Medb, her husband, and her many lovers would have featured in the epic tales, preserved voice-to-voice over the centuries until the bardic tradition finally dwindled away. What we can read now, in translations by Kinsella and Carson, was crystalized in time by the Christian Monks in County Down’s Bangor Abbey in the seventh century.

We can never truly know what the “original” source was like. Since every retelling would evolve over time according to the dictates of its time, it’s not helpful to imagine there ever was a pure, full first telling. Instead, we might wonder who changed the story and why.

Is it possible that Medb’s story was edited by prudish priests and she was even more powerful and voracious than the text describes? Or, is it possible that the monks overemphasized her sense of sovereign strength and sexuality because they expected that the reader would understand her as some Irish Whore of Babylon, clearly a figure to be reviled (even as she titillated the chaste Christian audience)?  

We can’t know, of course. We do know that Medb was famous for “offering the friendship of her thighs” to so many that she “never had one man without another standing in his shadow.”

In my attempts to hold all the possibilities and contradictions, I’ve learned to love the fertile field of the unknown. I return to what my thesis advisor at Boston College once told our graduate seminar, “ Irish myths out-moderns the modern, and out weird the weird.”

And so, we weird moderns keep coming back to these stories to discover that we didn’t invent sex or power or marriage or infidelity or any of the other ecstasies and agonies of the day.

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Telling the Story of Goddess Who Agrees to the Interview

Let’s return to this idea of the goddesses who either reject or welcome the MythWorker.

As you’ll hear from my conversation with Lee–in which we’re very candid about our own marriages and our own understanding of power privilege, especially when it comes to money, visibility, and vulnerability–Medb showed up for us because we could show up for her.

Ultimately, that seems to be what gets you in the door when it comes to courting a mythic being. Can you find the timing and the courage to co-create with her? Can you give her just as much as she gives you? Can you tell her story as well as your own and manage to say something that is both timeless and new?

This week, I think we did.

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One Last Note: The Gift of the Shapeshifter Workshop is coming up March 6

My conversation with Lee also covers the magic of shapeshifting, which is more than timely as I have one more Gift of the Shapeshifter workshop coming up next week.

Such a vibrant group showed up when I taught the class yesterday. The stories and guided journey into the realm of the shapeshifter that I shared inspired poetry, deep inquiry into nature of the hero, and remarkable sensations of embodiment.

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