This will be more scattered and less considered than my usual post (the kind with shit in it, not the random ones) because I woke up about an hour ago from a dream in which I said to three women "I learned I am the sense of love that pours from the center of the world." They told me that I had to present my case to God, and I realized they were the fates in the maiden-mother-crone aspect. If I provided good reasoning, that was the end of the universe. If I was just being boastful, we would have a party. Since then I have been unable to go back to sleep because I have so many things on my mind, many of which relate to this project.
I am in a class this semester about Celtic and Norse mythology. We just hit mid-term and finished what we are going to discuss about the Celts. I have learned quite a bit, especially about triune goddesses, including that word, which is delightfully concise. I just have a sort of basic and new knowledge of all these things, rattling around in my head in terms of my Katherines.
For one, triune goddesses were a big deal at one point, but they often fell into the form of single goddesses that took care of one of the aspects, for example Morrigan. She was originally threefold, but her warlike crone aspect was the most popular for some reason. Thus she sort of shuffled off the other two, but hints of her original triunity remain in a lot of things. The same for Brigid (who I know much less about), who is one of those virgin goddesses... the Celts really had no use for virgins so her other aspects are much more visible.
There is also this whole concept in pagan societies of sorta... sharing, like the way the Greek and Roman pantheons are very similar with different names. If you have a lot of gods, it's not a big deal to add more. . The way my teacher put it is that if Christianity is presented to a Viking and he converts, he is basically thinking "Now I worship Odin, Thor, and Christ." Then of course similar ones are grouped together and can blend Everything gets mixed around. This is how I currently fit the poor lost child Hecate into the picture, though I still curse my Oxford wall.
When I say the Celts had "no use" for virgins I mean that it is considered a state of stasis, which is unnatural. Apparently one of the biggest stories in the culture is called the winter-summer myth. A virgin is kept locked away by an old crone, and a noble man has to come save her and bring her back into the cycle of things by making her a mother. These stories lingered of course... Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Rapunzel. In several the concept of stasis is emphasized by a forced real stasis... the death-like sleeping, which incapacitates the whole kingdom in Sleeping Beauty!
What does this have to do with Katherine? Jeepers creepers, it could be a lot.
That tendency for triune goddesses to lose aspects is very interesting to me, because Katherine is often an old maid. She is a maiden AND a crone, somehow skipping the motherhood and straight into the ornery old lady. And the crone is not really stasis, she just changes the world through destruction rather than creation (which is part of why all three parts even exist in triune goddesses... two sides of a coin as Neil Gaiman would say, I guess the mother is when it lands on its edge.) I had no idea I'd come across such an interesting thematic connection! (Again, think of "Taming of the Shrew" on these terms. O Katherine, my Katherine!)
Then, think Christian era. The new God is unchanging. Virginity is suddenly
the goal and a lot of virgin goddesses are suddenly virgin saints. Things get twisted around a lot, but remember Saint Katherine? She has a lot of destruction around her... it is an "everyone dies" story.
The thing that I find exciting is that there are hundreds and hundreds of
documented Celtic gods and goddesses, and the Celts... they didn't write shit down. All of this documentation is after Christianity took over. Documented by monks who worship Christian God and no gods before him (though possibly some gods after him). It is probably a tiny fraction of what really exists. The stories of the virgin and crone with the mother left out are everywhere.
I am pretty convinced now, that Katherines somehow fall from this tradition. It is fascinating. We may be clinging to connotations of a name that are practically forgotten and nigh incomprehensible in the world as we currently see it. I mean, even if you remove the influence of Christianity and its obsession with virginity, we have the confused world of feminism. Women should be allowed to do what they want, and basically they are.
Think about Mary in "It's a Wonderful Life," when George doesn't exist. She's an old maid, about to close up the library!! Oh no!! It strikes us as ridiculous today, and probably did so for certain people when it was written. But it isn't really that unusual to consider the fact that she has shut herself out of the gene pool sort of horrible. We don't really subscribe to the concept of "old maids" anymore? But for some reason there is still something about these grumpity ladies who don't want to have babies, even those who want to make different kinds of contributions, that sets them aside, at least puts them in "best friend" status in stories, because there is something off about them.
...And there is of course Cethlenn. That is for another time.
