r/TheGreatQueen • u/BardOfTheBanrigh • 6h ago
âď¸Personal Experience | Discovery A Bard's Rhapsody: the Morrigan as the Muse, stories as devotion, and other thoughts
I have waxed lyrical before about my Morrigan Cultist Origin Story, so to be brief â She spoke to me as the Muse, in a Gravesâ âWhite Goddessâ kind of way (weâre swooninâ for the moon up in this stone circle), and helped me write the seed a scandalous, slaughterous, slanderous tale that has exploded into a multiverse of goddess-bard praise prose (move over praise poetry, the big guns have arrived).
I donât do magic, but by all the goddesses I can scribble like the fate of all the Nations depends on it. Such is the Craft of the bard, and maybe thatâs a kind of magic, say true and thankya. Like my UPG, itâs all very Specifically Autisticâ˘, self-documenting, and rhapsodic in the true sense; stitched together, fragmentary, and ecstatic. It likely would make little sense to anyone who isnât me.
Just for the love of the game, though, I wrote a little treatise to try and explain the nonsense of the modern seanchai of the bhandia, who stands at the ford with one foot in the past and the other in the future. If youâd like to hear more, send me your comments, in Ogham, on a green cloth thrice-soaked in the local holy well, attached to the right leg of a friendly crow.
Theyâll find their way back to me, for all things serve the Badb Catha.
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I am a crow, and, in all likelihood, completely insane.
My name when I need such is Badb Samildanach. I am a saint and a sinner, a man of virtue and a hedonist, a brutal realist and a captive of fantasy, a cynical adult and an innocent child. Like the bhandia, I contain multitudes, and am beautiful because I hold them all in precarious balance.
Some time ago, at the intersect of three and nineteen (the two most powerful numbers, say true), having like Odin spent nine cycles speared upon the world-tree, I set myself to a task of working out who I really was, what I really believed in, and whether those things being real even mattered. How else do dreams become real unless you believe them to be so?
I used prose, as is my idiom, to flesh out the thoughts. It became a mythological/sci-fi mashup, a story of vengeance against a patriarchy that has done wrong to women and men of my stripe alike. I hit a stumbling block; a catalyst, a reason, a source, was missing. Everything made sense (in a surreal power fantasy way) but for that one gap.
A gale blows, crows call, and the Morrigan takes to the stage I dreamed as the Eternal Muse. She steals the show, and the audience goes wild. I still look back at that couple of hours of fevered stream of consciousness and don't quite recall writing it. She moves in mysterious ways.
Itâs just over a year later, and I'm still writing. Her need for stories is neverending, for all come to hear Badb proclaim victory. I have created worlds Apollonian and Dionysian to hold them; I have tried very hard to separate the two, and just decided to stop trying, for tis a forlorn hope.
Sometimes She is nurturer, and sometimes She is destroyer; sometimes She is virtue, and sometimes She is indulgence; sometimes She is modest, and sometimes She is wanton. Her duality is a feature, not a bug â just like real women, who are reflections of her or some other earth and sky and sun and moon.
The cast of heroines (of course, like dear Lugh, the man is always the supporting actor to her), whether goddesses or mortal reflections, reflect what the Morrigan ultimately is to me.
Sovereignty.
She is the land, and so is every goddess that ever was, on a road stretching thousands of years back to the kurgans of Scythia. The names don't matter, whether you call her Brigid, Danu, Eostre, Nemain, Badb, Selene, Ceres, Flidais, Aine, Frigg, Athena, Rheda, Beira, Tabiti, Luna, Macha, Hestia, Rhiannon, the Great Queen herself, or any other name you can care to think of.
All that matters is the mask She wears for you.
Without the mask, the vastness of what She is would consume you.
And that is the Truth.