The Book of the Cailleach by Gearóid Ó Crualaoich

The Bull goes to a male magician to get the secret to the hag’s death. Who is the bull? As a half tamed beast, he is a threshold figure, a symbol of an agricultural world in direct contrast to the wilderness world of the hag.

Yes, the bull struggles to overcome the hag. The story of the Bull Bhalbhae has so many elements of female power. That is the most radical notion the space in which the oral tradition found itself. A world that was submerged by a dominant literate culture survived through the oral tradition. I love painting the story of The Bull Bhalbhae because of this primordial struggle that goes beyond the surface of events. As she is on geological time, she can afford to wait us out. The hag in the oral tradition is always an ancient figure that exists beyond human years. Here on the edges of Europe the hag goddess survives in all her archetypal fury. Her presence pulsates with life thanks to the peasants, not the ruling class. Interestingly, it is just women, but also male story tellers that ensured her survival. But she survived in the stories of men like Sean.

The Roman Catholic orthodoxy was fearful and tried to smother the power of the creative mother goddess. I found myself painting this giant cosmic female she rose out of my canvas and took me by surprise. The Hag is an otherworldly, non-cultural, nature being. “This personage is regarded in traditional cosmology as the personification, in divine female form, of the physical landscape within which human life is lived and also of the cosmic forces at work in the landscape.” Gearoid O Crualaoich – The Book of the Cailleach. She is the otherworld female that features so prominently in the oral Irish tradition. The hag is the cosmic force that rules the underworld.

The Book of the Cailleach by Gearóid Ó Crualaoich