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The Morrigan — Description

What the ancient pagan Celts believed happens to you when you die is, like all things in Celtic academia, nebulous, contentious, and inconsistent. Everything we have about Celtic culture was written by people who didn't like them, there simply are no unbiased sources on Celtic mythology. The Romans, who thought of Celts as barbaric savages who got off on executing people by piling them all into a giant guy and lighting it on fire, were the first to tell us what they thought their neighbors believed. Specifically, we have to first consult Julius Caesar, a man who led an eight-year campaign to irrevocably disrupt the political climate between these peoples and then steamroll over them for the glory of Rome. In Book VI of his account of how the war went, his Commentarii de Bello Gallico, Caesar says of the Celtic druids who supervise these peoples’ spiritual rites, “The cardinal doctrine which they seek to teach is that souls do not die, but after death pass from one to another; and this belief, as the fear of death is thereby cast aside, they hold to be the greatest incentive to valour”.
This is then reasserted twenty years later by the Sicilian Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in Book V of his Bibliotheca Historica. Insinuating the Gauls as the sort of people who'd ruin the family Christmas on purpose just to have an opportunity to kick someone's ass, Diodorus says that these peoples believe, “that the souls of men are immortal and that after a prescribed number of years they commence upon a new life, the soul entering into another body.⁠ Consequently, we are told, at the funerals of their dead some cast letters upon the pyre which they have written to their deceased kinsmen, as if the dead would be able to read these letters”. This then is followed in 7 BCE by Book IV of Strabo's Geographica which says the Druids preach, “that men's souls, and also the universe, are indestructible, although both fire and water will at some time or other prevail over them”. Whatever that means.
I've seen this worldview glossed in both scholarly and neopagan contexts as a belief in “reincarnation”, and while I don't think that's wrong, I think there's a nuance that's lost by reducing it to just one word. Admittedly, I'm a zoologist, I'm biased to think of things in ecological terms, but there's a certain… biohorror to the transference of the soul in this school of thought. Let's flash forward a few centuries to when we instead have medieval monks writing about the indigenous Irish religion which they completely displaced. Consider one of our subjects from my previous essay on the Book of Invasions (a 12th century compilation squeezing 11th century mythological poems into a Christian lens). The story of Tuan mac Cairill kinda got glossed over in that text, but there's a more fleshed out narrative titled the Scél Tuain meic Cairill found on a 12th century sheaf of vellum called the Lebor na hUidre (The Book of the Dun Cow). In this narrative, Tuan (then the son of Starn) explains to Saint Finnian of Movilla that he's been around since the plague wiped out the entirety of Partholón's colony. Having to survive on his own in the haunted wilds of Ireland for twenty-two years, Tuan's frail old body eventually gives out in the grass, and when next he opens his eyes, he awakes as a fawn, growing into a noble stag who wordlessly watches the attempts of his human uncle Nemed to conquer Ireland from the Fomorians. After a long life of dodging predators human or otherwise, the old deer surrenders to sleep, and Tuan's next life is amongst the snorting shuffle of wild boars. The sovereign of swine then starves in a cave for three days, and the next light he beholds is through the eyes of a hawk, followed by the form of a salmon after his next demise. It's as this fish that Tuan is at last caught and placed onto the dinner table of King Cairill. Specifically, it's Cairill's wife who was peckish for something out of the river, and nine months after her meal, Tuan is born from her womb, able to speak with a human throat for the first time in centuries.
It's that final transmogrification which I think really gets to the core of how this reincarnation actually works. It's not random and there's no karma system, it's a circle of consumption. Your soul isn't so much adrift as it is loose, no different than any other organ which will inevitably be recycled into the nutrition of whatever consumes it next. It's very “but dad don't we eat the antelope?” You see this same mechanism expressed in De chophur in dá muccida (“The Quarrel of the Two Swineherds”), preserved in the 12th century Book of Leinster, wherein two shapeshifting swineherds, in the course of their bickering, transform into worms who are incidentally swallowed by the two cows which then birth their reincarnations, the prize bulls Donn Cuailnge and Findbennach over whom so much blood is shed in the Táin Bó Cúailnge. A couple other tales from the Lebor na hUidre follow this same pattern, the Tochmarc Étaíne providing the example wherein the eponymous Étaín is cursed into the form of a butterfly by the witch whose home she's wrecked. That butterfly then is blown about the land by fairy winds until she plinks into the goblet being drunk by an Ulsterwoman, who then gives birth to the human version of the bug she just swallowed. This is the same mechanism by which the god Lugh impregnated Deichtine in the Compert Con Culainn, taking the form of a creepy crawly in Deichtine's drink in order to reconstitute himself into the embryonic Cú Chulainn. It's very Giger.
By this logic, if we are to take the Romans at their word again, there was no higher honor than to be eaten by carrion birds on the battlefield. Silius Italicus back in the 1st century CE makes an offhand note about the Celtiberian warriors in Hannibal's army in his poem Punica. He claims that to cremate the body of a warrior fallen in battle was considered a crime among their folk, because getting eaten by vultures meant the gods themselves had come down to carry your honored flesh in their gullets. Similarly, the 3rd century author Aelian, in his De Natura Animalium, remarks that the Celtiberian Vaccaei tribe goes a step further, that dying in a sick bed was dishonorable, that only criminals are so low as to be sent to the pyre, and that the bodies of fallen warriors are honored when their flesh is picked out by buzzards. More direct evidence would hint that ravens were also sacred to the Gauls, though in what way has completely eroded from what's left preserved. CIL 12, 4542 is a dedicatory chunk of sandstone found near Sarrebourg in France, dating to the first or second century CE, and it's the only rock to preserve the name of a goddess named Nantosuelta (either “Sunny Valley” or “Winding River”), whose iconography includes ravens and a big stick with either a birdhouse or a beehive atop it. She looks very queenly but that is, admittedly, entirely subjective. All women are queens, we're hot <3 The only other place we get ravens directly associated with warfare meanwhile is on CIL XII, 2571 from the French town of… Mieussy? How forward, take me to dinner first you crass French bastards. Here we have a single attestation of a goddess being offered to under the name of “Cathobodua”. Well… okay, “-athobodua”, the C fell off at some point in the past two millennia, but the roots are the same: from Proto-Celtic “*katu” meaning “war” and “*bodwā” meaning “crow”. While we have literally no other information we can glean about whoever this Gaulish goddess was understood to be, there's an exact cognate which rears its head again in medieval Irish literature: the goddess Badb Catha, the Morrígan.
Ooorrrrrrr… more accurately, Badb Catha is one of the morrígna, plural. See there's a lot of “I'm Spartacus” in what exactly the Old Irish phrase “An Morrígan” (“The” Morrígan) is referring to. It's a title, or rank or… something of that ilk, held by multiple characters from across different genealogies and myth cycles who are all individuals with their own names but who will also answer to “The Morrígan”. The etymology here is a little funky. The easy part is that “rígan” bit, meaning “queen”, from the same root as Latin “regina”. The more ambiguous part is where that “Mor” comes from. It's a split between the two best options: either it's from the same root as the “mare” in English “nightmare”, so something best described as a phantom, or it's from Old Irish “mór” meaning “great”, ultimately cognate with our English “more” and “most”. These are less goddesses of death so much as they are of doom, appearing ominously on the battlefield as a portent that warriors will soon fall in enough spades to eat. Like crows.
The word first appears in a text composed somewhere between the 7th and 8th centuries CE called De Origine Scoticae Linguae (or O'Mulconry's Glossary for the linguistically lazy). It's a dictionary of 884 Irish words accompanied by an origin story the author believed them to derive from. Under the listing “Macha”, he cites her as one of the “three morrígna”, and glosses severed heads taken off the battlefield then stuck on a pike as “mesrad Macha”, literally “Macha's crops”. Gruesome, yet badass all the same. Nothing was more prized to a fianna than an enemy's head. The name Macha is a word for vast open spaces with flat terrain, good land for cattle, equally good land to kill each other over cattle. The Book of Invasions further confirms Macha, alongside her sister Badb, as one of the three “morrigu”. They are one set of triplets born of the goddess Ernmas, whose name is a word for being slain by weaponry, because of course the Irish have a specific word for that. Ernmas in turn is the granddaughter of Nuada, first High King of the gods. Their Powerpuff Girls team is completed by their third sister, named… Morrigu? Or… Anand? Danann? You may be thinking wait Danann, isn't that the mother goddess the tribe of the gods is named after? Ava isn't that the goddess you wanted to avoid talking about in the last essay because looking at the etymology page gives you a headache? Does that mean you have to bite that bullet already? Yes Billy, yes it does. I'm never going to get anything done for the rest of my days, am I?
But fine, whatever, let's thumbtack and string our way from the top and work outwards from there. First, if we're taking the stance that the Tuatha Dé Danann do in fact derive their name from an ancestral goddess, then her name should actually be rendered as “*Danu”, the hypothetical nominative form of the genitive “Danann”. This in turn ultimately derives from a Proto-Indo-European root “*dʰenh₂-”, meaning “to flow”, which you see in the names of major rivers forking off from the Black Sea: the Dnieper, the Dniester, the Don, and most relevant to the Celtic sphere, the Danube, where indeed the archaeological La Tène Culture, ancestral to the Gauls, would first emerge and diversify. I can't deny the temptation there is really strong to attempt a reconstruction of some Celtic ancestor goddess personifying the Danube from which they sprung, perhaps not dissimilar to Nantosuelta and her sunlit river valley. However, it should be noted that while the Danube was defied in Roman-era archaeology, it was as a masculine deity named Danuvius, who himself only appears as a name on shrines along the river, so even if there is a connection, our surviving evidence does not preserve it for us to confirm or deny. You can have any headcanon you want, just so long as you acknowledge what you're pulling out of a primary source vs out of your own ass.
Drop that initial “D” one way or another and you get another goddess name, Anu or Anand, which the Book of Invasions at least seems to consider synonymous with Danu, or “Danann” as they continue to render it right before discussing the three Morrígna. Though, that could just be because I'm reading it wrong. The original text (or at least the Macalister translation I'm referencing) has some funky wording sometimes. Anu's name by itself means “riches” or “prosperity”, evidently some kind of fertility goddess, and boy is she. We have little in the way of content for this “mother of the gods” as the Sanas Cormaic glosses her, but she's got phenomenal endowments sticking out and proud of the Irish landscape. There's two, plump, adjacent hills called the Paps of Anu rolling over the countryside in County Kerry, which are mythologized as her beautiful bahongabanongs. So yes, you do in fact live in the timeline where you can quite accessibly touch the Morrígan's boobs. You know, if you're willing to take the praying mantis gambit, whiiiiiichhh…? No… no that would be bad. Anu, Anand, Danu, whatever you want to call her, this is the goddess out of all of her sisters who gets the title of The Morrígan, the original from whom all successive morrígna copy their chic. There's no way you're emerging from the bedroom of the queen of all fae queens, not with your head uneaten of course. Then again, I'm writing this essay for DeviantArt, maybe some of you filthy degenerates are into that.
All the same, it's an act of copulation which makes the Morrígan crucial to the Tuatha Dé Danann's war plans to march upon their Fomorian enemies. This next tale comes us by way of the poem Cath Maige Tuired (“The Battle of Maige Tuired”), a narrower expansion on the final showdown between the gods, the monsters, and the humans of Ireland. It only survives in a single manuscript, Harley MS 5280, penned in the 16th century, but the language is clearly older, so the poem itself was probably composed in the 9th century. We enter on the gloomy darkening of Samhain night, the eve of the great clash of armies. The Dagda, father figure of the entire pantheon, awaits alone, outside his home, awaiting a woman he'd made arrangements to meet at this exact location exactly one year ago. In the crisp night, he's alerted to her presence when he spots her washing her feet in the Unshin River, nine loose tresses in her jet-black hair, the Morrígan. They perform what I'm sure is heinous bug sex and the Dagda emerges triumphant in praying mantis gambit. It seems whatever this deal was involved her slipping the Fomorian Death Star plans his way and pledging her allegiance to the Rebellion. The Dagda places her at the head of an army of bards with the task of Vicious Mockerying the Fomorian King Indech into oblivion. She knows what to do from there.
Lugh had gone to the Morrígan first, securing armaments and volunteers for his mounting army. As the Tuatha Dé Danann stood face to face against a Fomorian army just waiting for someone to make the first move, Lugh inspected his troops, and he counted the Morrígan among them. When pressed what she brings to the team, as all the other gods were also drilled, the Morrígan responded in step, “Not hard to say. I have stood fast; I shall pursue what was watched; I will be able to kill; I will be able to destroy those who might be subdued”. Lugh liked her answer, and the gods revelled in the brutal carnage of the Morrígan personally ripping out Indech's kidneys with her own bare tarsal claws and collecting two handfuls of his blood from the leaking faucet she'd turned him into. Macha met her end in the incendiary beam of the Fomorian champion Balor, but Badb avenged her honor by surviving to the end, standing over the slain, the last Fomorian converted into crowfeed beneath her victorious talons. She was sent out to spread the news of the great victory over their overlords, and the immortal legend of the divine restoration of the true kings of Ireland. Badb's day job since then has been to commit to memory as many epic tales as she can come across, so that when you spot a crow, and you ask it “Have you any news?”, she may tell you of all you wish to know, and all you wish you hadn't. The prophecy she gives to the folk who put that question to her on that very first day was about the end of the world. Unfortunately, it's in the middle of this prophecy that the text degenerates, so we only get parts of it with big gaps in between. For the curious, this is what we have left, with ellipses where the text breaks. From what I gather it's not that the words are missing they're just so illegibly batshit that it makes translation uncertain. The Morrígan does this quite a bit throughout the literature, just to scare or otherwise confuse mortals with her magical word vomit.
“Peace up to heaven.
Heaven down to earth.
Earth beneath heaven,
Strength in each,
A cup very full,
Full of honey;
Mead in abundance.
Summer in winter…”
Well okay so far that sounds pretty awesome, we've cured the Pride Lands of whatever Scar did and Simba's gonna make sure it's smooth sailing from here! Then the crow keeps talking, goes deeper into the future when that sunlight too will one day finally rot with the rest of us, foretells a world filled with every disease and every unenacted vow of vengeance.
“I will not see a world
Which is dear to me:
Summer without blossoms,
Cattle will be without milk,
Women without modesty,
Men without valour.
Conquests without a king.
…
Woods without mast.
Sea without produce.
…
False judgements of old men.
False precedents of lawyers,
Every manager betrayer.
Every son a reaver.
The son will go to the bed of his father,
The father will go to the bed of his son.
Each his brother's brother-in-law.
He will not seek any woman outside his house.
…
An evil time,
Son will deceive his father,
Daughter will deceive her mother…”
It's got a Ragnarök ring to it, but of course we should be cautious that I, a Heathen, and the authors of these texts, apocalyptic Christian monks, are inherently biased to lean this narrative in that direction. There's just not enough data available to make a meaningful call on if this was an original pagan myth cycle leaking through or if it's just a flavorful fanfiction of the Book of Revelation. There doesn't seem to be any other references, at least not any clear ones, to what story the pagan Celts may have assigned to the end of the world. Clearly it's bad, sure, but the why and how are lost to circumstantial evidence. The closest thing I can offer you is from the Collecanea, a Latin treatise by the 7th century Irish Bishop Tírechán, who was writing an account of Saint Patrick's conversion of the island to Christianity. Oh boy there's layers to this, but it does put what the text purports to be an otherwise unattested name for this end of the world in the mouth of High King Lóegaire mac Néill. Tírechán says that Lóegaire says that his druids prophesy it as the Day of Erdarthe, the Fumigation.
“Fumigation” here is my personal stretch at an attempt to cobble multiple disagreeing translations together into one cohesive English word. I'm personally a fan of the argument put forth by Professor John Carey of the University College Cork that the word “Erdathe” stems from a Proto-Indo-European root “*dʰewh₂-” meaning “smoke”, “mist”, “haze”, and can refer to either fire smoke or any form of steam. Later on in the Collecanea, Saint Patrick comes across a rectangular fountain being worshipped by the druids, believed to be the tomb of a man who had his bones placed under a stone at the bottom of this natural spring because he “feared the burning by fire”, insinuating that there's some big catastrophe on its way to engulf the land which being underwater will protect him from. I like Carey's take on it because he loops it back around to whatever Strabo was on about 3128 words ago. We get the sense that the Celts just kinda expected society to spontaneously collapse some day, a valid assumption given the state of things. Tírechán's Lóegaire himself says that he and his brothers swore to their father that they would be buried facing each other in the royal tombs of their ancestors, armed to the teeth, snarling territorially at the others. They absolutely fucking hate each other even in death, and will continue to fight over the stuff they couldn't take with them until the relentlessly unsustainable cycle of family feuds and cattle raids degenerates mankind to something below animal. Then the stars fall from the sky and all the earth is scorched, the only salvation being underwater, which everything then becomes as a great flood puts out the flames. Does this leave the earth a deserted waste, or is the implication that the flood is here to stay, submerging us all into the timeless wonderland of the fae world beneath the waves? Is this a cyclical thing? Do the fires then return in force, evaporating the great sea into steam and freeing dry land back up to settle? Maybe that's even what the original context for the beef between the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomorians was? One side pushes, the other retreats, and we humans stuck in the middle just kinda suffer either way? I've got no fuckin clue man, I don't have enough to justify or disprove my wild speculations, but it's a fun platform to kick off some worldbuilding, if nothing else.
The Morrígan's personal hidey-hole is the cave of Oweynagat (“Cave of Cats”), situated among the royal burial mounds at Rathcroghan, mythologized as an entrance to the Otherworld. To cite a brief example, there's an incomplete poem of uncertain providence compiled in the Metrical Dindesenchas, a collection of location-specific folklore preserved in manuscripts as far back as the 12th century Book of Leinster. This tale follows an ornery old battleaxe of a woman named Odras, who upon waking from a nap in her cow fields, finds that her prize bull Slemon has been stolen from under her nose. The culprit is the Morrígan, whom the text describes as the Dagda's ferocious and envious wife, quick with her fingers when she wants something you have, not unlike crows and their curiosities. Odras however is ornery and knows her way around a sword. She marches straight up to Oweynagat, intending to get her bull back with as few words and as much violence as possible. Her big mistake is making camp for the night before diving in to get her bull back, however. The Morrígan emerges from her cave, standing tall and gothic over her sleeping prey, and chants a croaking spell which liquefies the warrior woman into a passive, harmless river which flows away from this haunted place, never to return to bother the goddess again.
There is but one thing the Morrígan despises more than being bothered, however, and that's if she's in the mood to be bothered but she's still not being given what she wants. Once upon a time there was one poor schmuck whose doom was to be everything that Badb ever wanted, and that lad was Cú Chulainn, hero of the Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge. In English that's The Cattle Raid of Cooley, and while the oldest language in the story survives from the 7th century, the full compilation only appears in manuscripts as late as the 12th. The great crowfeeding for which the Táin is lauded as the “Irish Iliad” starts as all things in Ireland do: with a pissing match. King Ailill of Connacht has made the bold choice to point out that he's wealthier than his dommy wife Medb, and Medb is not pleased when she makes them gather everything they own only to discover their wallets are equally heavy, save for one thing: the prize bull Finnbhennach. Sired by her cows, mind you, but since the spoiled bastard will only graze on Ailill's land, it's his by default. To amend this iniquity, Medb sends a party out to do business with Dáire mac Fiachna, a cattle lord with distant relations to her ex-husband, King Conchobar of Ulster. Medb sends her messengers with a transaction Dáire can't refuse: fifty heifers and royal lands in exchange for the greatest bull in all his realm, the Donn Cuailnge. Dáire is at first over the moon, but when the messengers get drunk and start insinuating that Medb's just gonna take the bull by force anyway, Dáire spitefully calls the deal off. Medb then arranges to take the bull by force anyway.
The Ulstermen, however, are in no position to withstand an invasion right now, laid out on the ground in crippling agony because they put the goddess Macha through tremendous abuse. Macha is alive again btw, this time around she's the daughter of Sainrith mac Imbaith and the loving wife of a landowner named Cruinniuc. Cruinniuc had largely put love to rest after the death of the mother of his children, but one day Macha glided wordlessly into his household, started performing chores and commanding servants, and though Cruinniuc questioned this oddity, he did not stop her. She was a wonderful conversationalist when you actually talked to her, and she in turn was smitten for him. The happy couple fell in love and married in secret, for Macha warned that word getting out about her presence would inevitably lead to something bad happening to everyone involved.
Cruinniuc swore it to his cherished wife, but he's only human, and he lets the existence of his wife slip while he's boasting with the boys during King Conchobar's grand tournament. While Cruinniuc's hommies are gawking at the king's horsepower, Cruinniuc laughs that his wife can run faster than those steeds. Conchobar takes this as an insubordinate challenge, ordering his guards to seize Cruinniuc as a bargaining chip while his messengers fetch this bride of his. Macha is terrified by the intrusion of course, and her heart sinks when they tell her what unwisely came out of her husband's mouth. She begs them not to drag her out to the racetrack, please, she's nine months pregnant. These are not men with hearts, however, they tell her that if she doesn't run track against the king's horses, her husband will be put to the sword. The testosterone-whooping audience she's brought before is deaf to her pleas of mercy. The king's only response to her begging for enough time to give birth before they make her run is to order Cruinniuc's execution on the spot. Cornered into no other option but to comply, Macha runs the race, outpacing the horses by a mile despite her agony, and the second she's over the finish line, she drops. And screams. Her twin children Fír (“True”) and Fial (“Modest”) are born in that mud which henceforth bears the name Emain Macha (“Macha's Twins”), their mother's magical wails of anguish placing a curse upon nine generations of the men of Ulster. These wretched dogs will now experience the full, debilitating pangs of childbirth whenever they're confronted with times of crises where where immediate action is needed the most. Lmao see how you like it you misogynistic pigs~
Only the children are spared this curse, and so the defense of Ulster rests squarely upon the shoulders of seventeen-year-old Cú Chulainn, son and incarnation of Lugh, the high god of many talents. He's not entirely alone, for while his countrymen have irrevocably pissed off one Morrígan, Cú Chulainn has caught the favor of another sister. The Táin identifies her as Badb, but treats that more as a title, instead citing “Nemain” as her more casual address. This name is most often derived either from Proto-Celtic “*nemi” meaning “venomous”, which I'm most partial to just for the rule of cool, or even further back from Proto-Indo-European “*nem-” meaning “to allocate” or, perhaps more poetically, to dish out. Perhaps the middle ground then is something like “Envenomator”, which is equal parts existentially horrifying and pretty fuckin badass. The Book of Invasions also has a character named Nemain, one of two wives of the war god Neit who died beside their husband in the Battle of Magh Tuireadh.
In the Táin however she has eyes only for Cú Chulainn. In the form of a crow, Badb harries and badgers the army of Queen Medb. She even squawks in the ear of the Donn Cuailnge himself to convince him that the men of Connacht intend to slaughter him like a dickless ox once they have their hands on him, and that the only way to save his life and honor is to trample the bastards. She's buying Cú Chulainn all this breathing room because she likes watching him kill people, it turns her on, which is gross and inappropriate. He's seventeen, and he's really, really not in the mood for her advances. She proposes her love for him while the blood of his enemies is fresh on his hands, dressed to the nines in a gown of all the colors that ripple beneath a corvid's iridescence. He in turn tells her bluntly that his people are starving, the land is ravaged by war, and this is so not the time. He didn't come to this battlefield to have filthy bug sex.
Very well then, Badb smiles :) I guess you don't want my help then, and if you don't want my help, that means you want me to fucking annihilate you. She threatens to shapeshift into an eel and bind his legs to the ground while enemies descend all around him. Cú Chulainn in turn snips back that he'll break her fishy ribs between his fuckin toes if she tries him. Then she'll morph into a ravenous she-wolf, she harumphs, snapping at the ankles of the cows until the terrified herd tramples him beneath their stampede. Very well, he accepts the challenge, he'll take his sling here and he'll beam directly into her eye, a wound immune to all healing magic but his own, assistance he vows she will never receive from him. A hornless heifer then will be her form instead, hidden from his line of sight as she spooks the herd from inside. Cú Chulainn, frustrated and done with this game, then threatens to just break her fuckin' kneecaps if she doesn't leave him alone, and so she flies away, searching deep within herself to consolidate all the malicious intent she could ever summon from her deepest darkness. She knows that he knows that she is the goddess who controls when he dies. The game, now, is on.
She enacts all these obstacles in the course of his battle against the champion Loch mac Mo Femis, and each time it goes as Cú Chulainn told her it would. He bashes in the brains of the eel, hurls a javelin straight through the wolf's eye and out the back end, and disables the red heifer. Then of course he wins the fight against Loch anyway, and goes on to slaughter a hundred more of Medb's men right in front of her, because this kid is an unstoppable force of nature. Being an unstoppable force of nature is exhausting, however, he's burnt through a lot of calories and could use a drink by the day's end. By the most Irish of luck, he stumbles upon a blind old hag, disfigured in the head and legs, who offers him three swigs of her cow's milk in exchange for a blessing of healing. Cú Chulainn thirstily obliges, uncrooks her leg, unpops her eye, uncaves her skull and- goddammit she's the Morrígan under all those injuries. And she's catty about it too, coos awwww I thought you said you'd never heal me~ Cú Chulainn of course is not receptive to being played with, callously assuring her that if he had known it was her, he wouldn't have healed her. He's having the worst time in his life, and she's having the best. Yet still her playtime must come to its allotted end eventually. Cú Chulainn of course emerges the victorious protagonist by the end of the Táin, but that just means that Medb's target isn't the Donn Cuailnge anymore. The Aided Con Culainn is the story of how the Queen of Connacht sent her entire army just to kill a singular motherfucker in her ire. The Morrígan knows her favorite toy won't be walking away from this one, it's going to be glorious, but she sure is sad it's over. Oh well, least she has this one last chance to really fuck with his head!
She appears in the illusion of three crones, blind in their left eyes, come to put her John Hancock on his allotted doom just as he closes the door on what he knows will be his last goodbye to all the people who raised him. They offer him a cut of the hound they're spitroasting over an envenomating fairy fire. Cú Chulainn tries at first to just powerwalk past this obvious trap, for though eating dogs was hardly unheard of in medieval Ireland, Cú Chulainn was geas-bound. A geas is… idk it's kind of a binding oath? The 5e spell that takes its name from this peculiar aspect of Irish cosmology actually isn't all that far off. It's a magical commandment you place on either yourself or someone else which either commits the person to a vow for life or prohibits them from partaking in some arbitrary taboo. To live according to your geasa was expected to bring you spiritual power and material plenty, while breaking your geas turns the Universe itself against you, and you should start expecting to be Final Destinationed any day now.
Cú Chulainn was not the name his mother gave him. He was Sétanta before he, not even seven yet, had to decide between his life and that of a guard dog with intent to kill. His apology to the dog's owner Culann was to replace the hound's post himself, vowing to guard the property until his master could find a new canine companion. Sétanta didn't like the name “Cú Chulainn” at first, it was a device for a druid to tease Culann's new cur, but he took it as seriously as any other title. If he was a hound, then hounds were his people, and to eat his people would tantamount to cannibalism. So by geas he forbids himself of the flesh of his kin, and now here he is being handed his death warrant in the form of his last meal. The three crones insist~ Afterall, society itself is placed under the greater geas of hospitality, and it's not very hospitable to refuse food being offered to you. So Cú Chulainn consumes his kin, and the hand that put it in his mouth withers into an irrecoverable numbness. The spare rations he stashes by his left thigh saps the strength from that as well. Cú Chulainn thanks the raven for her generosity, and then limps to his death.
Cú Chulainn watches his best friend die, his only horse abandons him, and the enemy's spear unfolds his intestines in front of him. He asks his opponents only for one last drink from the loch, and that they claim his head for their honor, as is the way of the warrior. They give him leave to carry his guts to the shore of the lake, where he quenches his thirst for the last time, and then ties himself to a rock with his own spillings. They may have his head, but he will die standing up. Though the dog goes limp, the ones who delivered the blow are afraid to approach the body and claim their trophy. His soul is still in the meatbag, afterall, this may be a trick. Then a scaldcrow lands hooded upon his shoulder, and eats his eyeball. He's dead. The Morrígan grinds his soul in her gizzard. What happens after Cú Chulainn dies… is up to her now.
Design notes, I was really determined to commit to the whole “fairies as insects” aesthetic I've been playing with. This was a really fun spec-zoo adjacent experiment… even if the colors were a bitch on my scanner and a lot of the detail got lost. Eventually I convinced myself that a darker silhouette was appropriate for the Morrígan anyway, so I'm not too bugged that it may be hard to make out every little segment in the exoskeleton. Rhinoceros beetles were my primary inspiration, both because beetles already have extremely malleable body plans, and because their facial structure was perfect for mimicking the beak of a crow. I didn't intend for these to be three different designs for three different Morrígna, but more that these are the three forms which any one Morrígan can assume to suit her aura farming needs. The final Pokémon evolution I gave her there in the back is probably the biggest loss of concept out of the three just for the sake of space. I want her to be something between a xenomorph queen and a spinosaurus dragon thing. I imagine the egg sac is what fills out the same shape as the big tadpole tail on a spino, and she does have big dramatic wings too which I just had no way to draw expanded in this framing. Maybe one day I'll give the bug queen her own once over.