Wintry Woman

Question: What do you think about the Irish winter goddess Cailleach? She is mentioned as having associations with Frost and Earth, and to usher in the winter in Ireland. The same source also talks about her counterpart, Brigid, who rules the summer months. Could Cailleach be a Legend 9 or 10 god of the Tuatha?

The Cailleach is an amazingly cool figure, and her origins and stories are scattered all across Ireland, Scotland and the outlying islands. She's an ancient giant hag-witch who does a million things; various accounts have her carving out cliff faces, causing deformities in children, running through Ireland with supernatural stamina, speaking so loudly that everyone on the island hears her at once, creating entire islands and landmarks, bathing in the waters of immortality, hiding or dispensing arcane knowledge, arbitrarily choosing to save some mortals and leave others to perish on a whim, and generally being older than dirt and dirt's mother combined. There are as many differing stories of the Cailleach as there are communities in the areas of her influence, though they can be difficult to track down thanks to the fact that she's a figure largely preserved through oral retellings and local folklore.

The Cailleach is not, however, one of the Tuatha de Danann. This is pretty obvious; she goes completely unmentioned in all the literature surrounding the rowdy progeny of Danu, and is said in some accounts to have been in Ireland at least since the time of the Fir Bolg, which means she was already present before the Tuatha ever set foot on Irish soil. Her myths have little in common with the Tuatha as well; she's not a heroic figure in any sense of the word, being more prone to doing things like causing rampant diseases to kill off all cattle in Ireland, and she has no part in the battles of the other Irish gods or the struggles with the Fir Bolg and Fomorians, being concerned with ancient elemental things like crags and blizzards.

But there are certainly options for using the Cailleach in Scion; she's pretty goddamn interesting, after all, so it would be a crime to ignore her. If you don't want to go the whole hog and make her a deity, she's an excellent cronelike antagonist in the same vein as other famous Celtic witches like Black Annis; there is still spirited debate in the scholarly community as to whether there is one Cailleach or a whole bunch of them (since the name is more properly a title), and if you chose the former there could be an entire race of hag-witches infesting the isles. If you do want to view her as a goddess - which, despite the continual Christian-inspired campaign against indigenous deities in Ireland, she probably was - she is likely of an older and more feral order than the Tuatha, more similar to the likes of Cernunnos or Crom Cruach than the bright and shining pantheon that conquered the isles, and probably most strongly associated with Fertility and Magic. The final option, and the one we're currently using, is to set the Cailleach up as a Titan Avatar; she is certainly ancient and generally antagonistic, and her powers are of the cosmic, feared variety. We're currently running her as an Avatar of the Titanrealm of Frost, based on her Scottish incarnation as the bringer of winter, but she could also be a good candidate for Ourea or the realms of Fate or Earth.

So seriously, go forth and hang out with the Cailleach. She's awesome.

As far as her possible connections to Brigid go, alas, much of that is mere speculation, or at worst New Age conflation nonsense based on the idea of Brigid as the preeminent goddess of the Celts (which is itself mostly nonsense, considering her incredibly tiny role in actual Irish myth) and the Cailleach therefore being merely an aspect of her. Scottish myth has the Cailleach, as winter, give way each year to spring in the form of Bride, who is a folkloric figure sometimes conflated with Brigid; but you could also just as easily associate the Cailleach with other Irish goddesses, including the Morrigan, who shares her predilection for cattle, or Danu, as both ladies literally embody the landscape. Regardless, any connection to Brigid is pretty tenuous, so I'd avoid trying to invent a dualistic theory where we aren't sure there ever was one and stick to the Cailleach as her own, indubitably singular self. She's a badass lady. She doesn't need Brigid to confirm that.

Celtic mythology is one of the hardest to do really good independent research on, simply because it's so popular in modern religions like Wicca and is such a favorite subject for New Age writers, which means that a good percentage of the websites and books on it out there are largely made up. If you're interested in the Cailleach specifically, I'd recommend the excellent The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer by Gearoid o'Crualaoich, and suggest that you avoid anything that spells the word "magic" with a K at the end like the plague.