The Hag of Winter: Portrait of the Abject

So I live amongst these people, not quite accepted by them, for I do not go to mass as they donor hail the priest as father.

I keep to my own ways, spirit unbounded by men with rules and robes.

Jane Brideson, “The Lament of the Old Woman at Sahmain”

In the folkloric traditions of Scotland, Ireland, and England, a figure resides over the winter landscape. She is the Calleach or Crone, the old woman or the veiled one who is both marginal and ubiquitous in her presence. Traces of her are found in the caves of Ireland, where she built passages into the earth and where local folklorists will point to the horizon in the shape of her body. At the same time, she is a marginal figure who has seemingly outgrown her usefulness in the human cycle. She prefers to position herself as what French feminist philosopher Julia Kristva calls the abject-one who is cast off from rules and norms. But she claims this marginal position and in doing so she represents a reactionary feminine impulse that elects to cast off the rules and norms that inhibit human thriving. Because of her preference for her own company and being past child-bearing years, she is often portrayed as an object lesson for anyone who fucks with the obligations of feminine respectability.

Initially I was repulsed by the Calleach because she pointed to parts of myself I sought to transform into something more acceptable, more lovable. She beckons us toward a lonely way where personal authenticity can meansa  not being understood or welcomed. She represents to me a seasonal and psychic darkness that I fear becoming overwhelmed by.

Her entrance into our seasonal cycle means a decrease in light and a verdant landscape. In the northern hemisphere, the turn toward winter is a time of increased instability for those of us with depression. There was a time when I associated the decay of late fall with death. As many mental health professionals know, November is a month known for high suicide rates. While I never attempted suicide, I spent many, many hours wishing I could just stop existing. The increasing darkness and cold made existence feeI unfathomable and that something, perhaps everything, was coming to an end. Depression, anxiety, and hopelessness swept in to distort my perception.

From Jane Brideson’s Oracle Deck: Wisdom of the Calleach

So when I was asked to spend some time with the Hag of Winter, I hesitated. Narratives of my youth around female respectability and compliance long submerged, re-appeared. They taunted me with my failures and with my loneliness. “You will be unloved and neglected if you reject your feminine obligations.”

An Irish tour guide once explained to me that Snow White was a story about the Calleach who kidnaps Bride or Brigid during the winter months. When longer periods of daylight begin to return, this was because Brigid had freed herself from captivity. Both stories: Snow White and the Evil Witch, the Calleach and Brigid, depict two female arch-types locked into conflict, the younger innocent and naïve to the evil intentions of the elder.

You see, over the generations the Calleach became a witch who captures and poisons a princess. She is the old and ugly woman who defies obligations and lives in resentment of younger and more beautiful women. It is an effective way to teach the younger generations what not to become. So when Snow White fell asleep after eating the poisoned apple, I learned to fear getting old and unattractive. Her antagonist had been soured by age and neglect which made her resentful and mean. If she was ever, she was certainly no longer, a good woman, as the heroine of the tale languished under her power. That she had/needed power at all indicated a fatal flaw—she wanted too much.

The gentle patriarchy of Disney amplified my childhood desire to be wanted, which meant idolizing youth, beauty, and obedience. I dismissed the old woman’s power as dangerous, beyond the pale of acceptability and likability. I wanted approval and praise and the rules to help me achieve such things. I wanted to sleep deeply with the assurance that I deserved a prince to carry me to the safety of ever-after.

But time has a way of revealing how mythologies of romance are a ruse to get young girls to accept unfinished versions of ourselves. Quiet and well-behaved, we learn from portraits of audacity how not to be.

White men’s Christian theology refers to the divine as “our ground of being” which makes little sense in a tradition that rejects the feminine divine. As a result, Christian theology is rife with good women and bad women who only exist to reinforce the necessity of men’s control over us. In this sense Snow White is a Christianized version of a story in which women can only ever be subject to comparison and competition with one another.

But in the Celtic pagan tradition, the Calleach is an expression of the Triple Goddess—three faces of feminine power: the maiden, the mother, and the crone. As the old woman or Hag of Winter, she prepares the earth for a cold slumber, turning the ground solid and green foliage brown and dry. It is her work and her way to move with the creative flow of a tilting planet, stewarding the earth through the dark and cold until the light returns.

The Calleach has given me permission to do more than occasionally visit my shadow self. The abject within us is not so because it is where shame resides. It is where the righteous rage that we have been forced to swallow has taken up residence. She asks us to “keep to our own ways” when all else pushes us toward compliance and obedience. It is a lonely way that risks our expulsion from respectability.

Hags, I’ve learned, are women who wear wisdom on their face. She was not a withered cartoon antagonist, but a deity in triplicate who welcomes winter and beckons me into deeper contemplation and rest. Our psychic and physical landscapes are dependent upon her embodied presence. She is marginal, yet also ubiquitous in the way that she gives form to our horizons and our pathways, as she reveals to us that we, ourselves, are our own ground of being.

I’ll be posting new writing at least once a month for the foreseeable future. Please consider signing up for a paid subscription. When you do, you will have your choice of a free Irreverent Church Fan. (If you are already a paid subscriber, thank you! Please send me your snail mail for your free Irreverent Church Fan.)