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A Scottish Goddess: An Introduction to The Evidence
Stuart McHardy
Abstract: This paper provides a brief introduction to the considerable amount of evidence, gathered from literature, oral tradition, archaeology, place-names and landscape analysis that can be utilised to show that in pre-Christian Scotland there was widespread belief in a supernatural female who was of a Goddess type. Surviving in both literature and tradition as the Cailleach in Gaelic and the Carlin in Scots, this figure has associations with significant mountains, particular landscape sites and a range of archaeology over time, suggesting sufficient proof that this supernatural figure was at the core of localised mythology across Scotland. While related to stories and beliefs elsewhere, the suggestion is that the Cailleach in Scotland is indigenous.
Keywords: Cailleach, Carlin, Scotland, Scottish legends
In oral tradition from Scotland’s two oldest indigenous languages, Gaelic and Scots, there are references to powerful supernatural female figures who in pre-Christian times may well have been perceived of as goddesses. While we can never reconstruct the specificities of belief patterns of the pre-literate past, the attributes of this being, the Cailleach in Gaelic, and the Carlin in Scots, can be understood as deriving from an indigenous mythology centered on a supernatural female figure. This evidence exists within literary records, often deriving from oral traditions, recorded oral tradition, contemporary oral tradition, place-names and perhaps most interestingly, in the landscape itself. Such material comes from all over Scotland and exists in both of Scotland’s surviving indigenous languages Gaelic and Scots. In this brief overview of the evidence, we will look at material from both linguistic traditions, in which the supernatural figure of the Cailleach in Gaelic and the Carlin in Scots, feature as both landscape creator and weather-worker. In a forthcoming work, Scotland’s Sacred Landscape, due …
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S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies Volume 1 Number 1 (2022)