Relentless. The Realm of the Cailleach
Oct 29, 2024
It’s 4:45 a.m.
For months, I have woken up in the middle of the night. It could be menopause, but that’s only a part of it. Tonight, there is a massive weight across my shoulders, a feeling of dread as heavy as a boulder in my belly. The wind is howling, and the rain belts against the window.
It feels unbearably relentless.
Being alive at Samhain 2024 feels unceasingly intense, hellish.
Images of rubble, of tiny bodies covered in blood, of distraught mothers in the genocide of Gaza.
Reports of men being forced into war in Ukraine.
The silence from Sudan.
Relentless.
Images of houses washed away in ferocious hurricane winds and waters.
The face of a beautiful, smiling six-year-old boy, in this country, who was missing for two years—who no one missed.
Four thousand children in homeless accommodation on this island.
The toxicity and tension of the U.S. election.
Relentless.
I have to get up.
I want it to stop.
I can’t bear this for a minute longer.
What can I do to stop it?
I don’t know what to do.
How do I respond wisely?
Grief, hopelessness, despair, guilt, bewilderment, anger, and more recently, fear.
That’s where I go, and in that order.
Others go immediately to anger, rage, overwhelm, panic, fear, collapse.
Others turn away and avoid, loose themselves in whatever ways they can.
Our collective trauma is up.
And we are all reacting and responding differently,
which creates even more chaos, complexity, and confusion.
Relentless.
Relentless is the realm of the Cailleach, the dark feminine force of winter, the destructive aspect of the sovereignty Goddess in the mythology of these lands.
In The Book of the Cailleach, Gearóid O’Crualaoich describes the Cailleach as the “supernatural female elder” and tells us that “thunderstorms, tides, wind, and wave power all attest to the energy of her abiding presence in the physical realm.”
She brings the wild and often harsh winds of change.
She arrives at Samhain, ushering in death, decay, and darkness in the natural world. Her fierceness increases in the bleakness of the Winter Solstice until, until at Imbolc when she transforms into Brigid the maiden, bringing renewal and new life.
This dark, hostile, aged, and deadly force has been denied and demonised by a patriarchal system that idealises the “comely maiden,” the bright, the living, the perfect.
In modernity, the Cailleach is depicted as the witch, the crone, and the hag.
We are taught to fear her,
to avoid her,
to run in the opposite direction.
Up until the last century she had been repressed, suppressed, in exile for 5,000 years.
What we were not taught is something that our ancestors knew—that she is the great force of transformation and creation. Because when she comes, she not only brings death; she brings the seeds of new life, initiating us into a new beginning.
In this time of the “great turning” (Joanna Macy), she is rising from the dark, damp roots to dismantle and deconstruct oppressive patriarchal structures, the toxic masculine and colonialism that is out of control on the planet and that exists within each one of us.
She is the archetypal mysterious force that creates the conditions that expose our deepest fears, our shadow, our excesses, addictions, our pain body, and anything out of balance with the natural order
Her return is the dawn of a new age, something the indigenous and ancients have been predicting for a long time.
Yes, I know it feels like things are getting worse every day, but actually, we have been this dysfunctional for centuries. It was just hidden under the shiny story of progress.
When the Cailleach comes with the relentless level of fierceness I see and feel these days, she is merely exposing what has been in the shadows all along—all the trauma, all the separation and fragmentation, the oppression, the domination, the over-consumption, the othering and the disconnection.
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
―
My carving of the Cailleach called "Where is the wisdom found" by the Sligo legend Michael Quirk
The Cailleach is rising, roaming, and roaring across the planet exposing the collective shadow of humanity. Rising, roaming and roaring around our beds at night exposing our personal shadows.
Everything is up.
All of our shit is up.
All unprocessed trauma of our childhood and our lineage.
We are in the hell realms together.
But contrary to what the patriarchal mind and every modern fairy tale would tell us, the hell realms are not the final dark end, a warranted punishment for being “bad.”
It is exactly here, in the wildest realms of hell in the company of the Cailleach, that we reconnect to our lost primal power, our agency, our sovereignty, and innate wisdom—everything we need to birth a new world.
As she rises, returns, and reveals our collective shadows on the world stage and personal shadows around our beds in the witching hour, we are being initiated into radically new ways of responding.
"Your deepest point of pain is your greatest point of power"
- Saida Desilets
The Cailleach's ferocious demand now is to lead with the feminine as an antidote to the violent ego centred hyper-masculine she is relentlessly exposing.
Here are three ways I hear her call to me.
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Honour your pain: A willingness to feel the immensity of our pain and to choose to self-regulate as the first response. When we attend to our pain and regulate our frayed and fried nervous systems she transmute it, alchemise it. Clear, wise and sovereign actions arise and we find we have much more energy to keep showing up to do whatever needs to be done.
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Honour your differences: Stay open to the possibility that we each have different histories and traumas, and therefore will respond differently. Practice staying connected and in relationship even in the excruciating discomfort of different perspectives. We are rewiring and evolving our nervous system.
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Honour this time of deep wintering: Can we allow ourselves times to retreat, to withdraw to renew so we don't burn out in the intensity? In the dark we see with new eyes, in the emptiness of winter we will find the courage to shed and let go anything that perpetuates the old order. And we have much we need to shed and let die these days.
I have learned that every time I feel hopeless, despair, fear, anger, agitation—every time I encounter a loss, a disruption, or hear myself think things like “I can’t bear this for a minute longer”—the Cailleach is knocking on my door, demanding that I go and face her in the dark wood.
I know, because she first paid me a visit 30 years ago. Back then, I chose to stay in the bright, busy, extroverted, shiny world I thought was safe. For 10 years, I ignored her persistent nudges until, exactly 20 years ago this month, she returned to relentlessly disassemble and dismantle my world, wreaking havoc and chaos in the process.
“You can no longer live like this, so far from natural rhythms, your wildness, your soul,” she wailed as she tore down the empty structures of gilded sophistication and modernity I had built within and around me.
The Cailleach showed me where I was out of balance. She taught me that feeling powerless is the portal back into connection with myself and all beings; that when I soften into the edges of pain, it dissolves; that my fears are my friends and signposts into old beliefs that keep me enslaved by the patriarchal system.
She is not to be feared… but to be welcomed, over and over, as we shed and let die the old order within and around us.
“Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
