Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Every heroic literature has its supreme figure, and Ireland's is a boy who never saw his eighteenth year old age. Cú Chulainn , the Hound of Ulster—centerpiece of the Ulster Cycle and of its great epic, the Táin Bó Cúailnge , the Cattle Raid of Cooley—is the perfected form of the Indo-European champion: superhumanly gifted, catastrophically radiant, and priced from birth. Son of the god Lugh the many-skilled by a mortal mother, nephew of King Conchobar, he was small, dark, and beautiful—the texts insist on the beauty with un-warlike tenderness—and he carried within him a thing the tradition regarded with equal parts reverence and horror: the ríastrad , the warp-spasm, the battle-frenzy that unmade his lovely form into a monster when combat took him. His legend is built of vows, single combats at fords, a divine father, an offended goddess, and a death met standing up, lashed to a pillar-stone so that he might die on his feet—and running through all of it, like the one string of a...

Cú Chulainn in Battle — J.C. Leyendecker, 1911. Over the great hero of the Ulster Cycle, the crow wheels: the Morrígan is present at every battle, in the air above it, watching, predicting, sometimes helping and sometimes hindering, always the sign that something of decisive consequence is happening below. Before the battle, there is a woman washing. She stands at the ford — the river crossing that in Irish mythology is always the threshold between one state and another — washing the clothes and armor of men who have not yet died. The clothes she washes are those of whoever approaches the ford. If she is washing your garments, she has already seen the outcome of what you are about to do. The washing is not a prediction; it is a confirmation. She already knows. This is the Morrígan — the "Great Queen" or "Phantom Queen" (Irish Mór-ríoghain , etymologically debated but consistently associated with greatness, sovereignty, and the supernatural) — one of the most ...