A Living Mystery
My first inkling was a stone with three women carved on its face in the corner of an upper gallery at the museum in Cirencester. The Matronae, the plaque said, mysterious tutelary goddesses that seemed to have originated in the Germano-Celtic environs of the Rhine valley and made their way to Britannia via the Roman army in the first few hundred years A.D.
The next morning after visiting the museum I woke up early and walked down the street to the center of town where the ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey are now a park adjoining the parish church of St. John the Baptist. The wifi and the mobile reception in my tiny inn room were somewhat spotty, but in the footprint of the old abbey I could catch a good signal and log onto Zoom for my rosary meeting.
Yes, a rosary meeting, as in Hail Marys and Our Fathers and beads and all that. We say five decades in a 27 day novena format, praying for our heart’s desires and rotating through the joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries. Some people change the words around a bit, subbing out the Our Father for a Our Mother or using a maiden-mother-crone version of the Hail Mary, but most of us say ‘em straight, albeit sometimes in different languages. Some of us are lapsed or former Catholics, some Protestant, some have never been Christian. But we all pray to Our Lady the beating heart of the Earth, the Queen of Heaven, Queen of the Underworld, Queen of the Beasts, Star of the Sea, and any other name you want to give her, for she has had many over the centuries.
It was the summer of 2021, and after a long pandemic and lockdown, I had decided to spend three months touring England, Scotland, and Wales, feeling pulled by my ancestors, as so many Americans are, to see their land of origin. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for— not genealogical information, exactly, though I had some curiosity about that. More an understanding of the land that in some remote yet still present way, had shaped who I am.
It’s a curious thing, understanding the earth to be a living being, not just in a metaphorical or scientific sense, but in the sense of a real, embodied intelligence and personhood. You step out into a grassy meadow, soil warm from the sun, and feel yourself rooted, supported, able to stand tall because you have a solid and nourishing foundation. Or onto a slick wet river rock, shockingly cold water splashing over your toes, causing them to curl and pull inward in an attempt to keep from losing your footing, and you laugh in surprise and gratitude for the delicious relief from the summer heat. Either way, the Lady gets her hooks into you and begins pull you into mysterious currents that twist and turn, sometimes circling in one spot, sometimes carrying you far away.
When I say the ancestors called me, I don’t just mean my human forebears. I mean the rocks and the hills and the waters they came from.
I spent those months with no real plan other than to follow my curiosity and intuition. Time and time again, I found myself walking into very old churches named St. Mary’s, usually discovered serendipitously. In museums, I continued to encounter the Matronae, at Bath and a few other places, and I began to wonder if there was a connection.
Ancient Goddesses
The Matronae, most literally translated as “the Ladies,” seem to originate in the lower Rhine valley where Celtic and Germanic tribes mingled and overlapped. Or at least that’s where we find the most inscriptions on devotional altars. There they are also sometimes called the Matres, meaning “mothers;” Matronae can also be interpreted this way.
Their names almost always take some kind of particularized form. Often they are named after land features, particularly bodies of water like rivers (Matres Aumenahenae, mothers of the river Aumenau), but also prominent hills or rocky outcroppings . They are also named after specific tribes (Matres Treveri), cities (Matres Nemausicae, of what is now known as Nimes), trees (Matronae Dervounae, Ladies of Oak) and sometimes even particular qualities (Matronae Lubicae, Ladies of Love). Cisalpine Gaul (now northern Italy), was another hotspot for the Matronae, though the inscriptions there are mostly found without specific names attached.
This idea of multiple female spirits that inhabit the natural landscape seems to be a common feature in Indo-European cultures. These multiple spirits, occurring often but not always in threes, are not necessarily separate from the idea of a single, overarching earth deity. In Balto-Slavic mythologies, which are some of the oldest and longest-lived Indo-European pagan cultures, you have local female water spirits like the Rusalki, but also Mat Zemlya (and various cognates), which literally means “damp mother earth.” In Greek mythology you have water-nymphs and triplicity spirits like the Fates, but they are sometimes seen as extensions of larger goddesses, like Diana or Hekate, who themselves are often conflated. Iunones is another name for female inhabiting spirits that take their name from the goddess Juno and are sometimes conflated with the Matronae, there are also Cereres (from Ceres, goddess of the earth and harvest), and Dianae.
It is popular now for some academics and practitioners to insist that we must not conflate deities, that we cannot assume that because one group of people worshiped a goddess of the earth in one place that we can draw any parallels to a goddess of the earth worshipped in another place. I know one pagan author who rails against the chant that goes “Isis Astarte Diana Hecate,” etc, because “They’re all different goddesses, dammit.” It is true that 19th century historians tended to systematize ancient paganisms in ways that are rooted in Christian ideas and conflate deities in ways that are probably not accurate; for example, some scholars doubt that there was any true Norse pantheon, rather that they were local gods associated with specific people in specific places, even if there were similarities that could be traced to a common root.
But someone who prays and offers devotion is not interacting with crumbling mementos behind glass. They are speaking to a real and live beating heart. And it’s not so crazy to think that the ancient practitioner, like the modern neopagan or spiritual seeker, would detect a deeper commonality, a web of relational unity, beneath the different faces. Goddesses morph as people travel to new landscapes, take on new identities and develop new languages, but there are always common threads that can be followed back to the root.
And so I began to take a closer look at the Matronae and their relationship to Mary because they, like the land itself, were seeking my attention.
As Germans and Celts were conscripted into the Roman army, they took the Matronae with them, further west in France and north into Britain. The Matronae found natural homes in the triplicate deities of the local Celts, and they took on names like the Matronae Suleviae.
The Suleviae may be a triple form of the goddess Sulis who presided over the hot springs of Bath, or they may simply come from the same Brythonic root word, suli, meaning good or clear sight. Inscriptions to the Suleviae are not necessarily found at springs or bodies of water, they are not associated with any particular locality, and some scholars have proposed that they were goddesses that helped to steer or guide rightly. Goddesses of clear seeing. Perhaps they developed from Sulis at the springs and took on a life of their own.
The idea of spirits or goddesses who grant visions at sacred springs exists is common in Greek and other mythologies. In the 15th century, Joan of Arc was accused of consorting with spirits at a tree with a spring nearby known for such activity; she claimed to be laying garlands for Our Lady and speaking to Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catharine. The words used by the peasants of Joan’s village to describe this site are usually translated into English the fairies’ tree and the fairies’ spring. But the French term used in the trial transcripts is not les fees. It’s les dames. The Ladies.
To this day, the holy wells of Britain are often said to be particularly healing of eye ailments. Could this be a remnant of these deities found at sacred springs who granted visions that allowed one to see clearly enough to chart a course into the future? The idea that you could wash yourself in the water and obtain clear inner knowing corrupted into the cleansing of a suppurated eye?
The cult of the Matres/Matronae persisted through the decline of the Roman empire and into the the early Middle Ages as the Anglo-Saxons migrated, settled, and mingled with the Romanized Celts. The Venerable Bede, writing in the 9th century, spoke of Modranecht, or “the night of the mothers,” a winter festival celebrated by those Anglo-Saxons who remained un-Christianized. It celebrated the Modra, which most scholars accept as the continuation of the Matronae cult. Interestingly, it was commemorated on Dec. 24, the night Mary labors to become the Mother of God.
A Sacred Valley
One day, at the tail end of a long weekend in Bath, I found myself ascending a hill. I had visited the famous Roman Baths and Bath Abbey, which stands on the site of one of the original Roman temples, a stones’ throw from the springs where Sulis, Minerva, and other deities were honored. I had wandered around the old Georgian buildings, tramped along the wildflower-edged towpath of the Kennet and Avon canal, and up into the hills surrounding the city.
At this point I was looking to kill time and, wandering the steep streets, I felt myself drawn further and further upward. “There’s something for you at the top of this hill,” said the voice that is always whispering in my ear. At the top was a church, St. Stephen’s. It was beginning to rain, and I thought there might be something inside for me. Unfortunately the door was locked, but there was a man sitting in the doorway, and we began to chat.
England has a reputation for being somewhat cold, socially speaking. People are said to generally keep to themselves in public, dislike chatter and small talk, and look oddly at Americans who expect to strike up a conversation wherever they go. I can relate to this, being an introvert and despiser of inane chitchat myself. But when you are in a foreign country on your own for such a long time, you have to strike up conversations or go insane.
Perhaps it was that I was visiting right as the freeze of the long Covid lockdown was beginning to thaw, but I found Britons to be generally pleasant and sometimes extraordinarily open and helpful. When people find you have traveled all the way from America to wander off the beaten tourist path, that you’re curious about the nooks and crannies of the places they love, the places they’ve grown up in, been married in, or retired to, they tend to warm up.
David, the man in the doorway, was no different. After sharing a few of his favorite local spots with me, he told me that if I continued over the crest of the hill I would pass through a valley and come to a small village with a church once visited by Jane Austen, that it would be a lovely walk once the weather cleared up.
It soon did. I passed the village at first because it was less village and more a handful of houses strung along the road; the church was set back a bit and not readily apparent. But when I realized I had gone too far and turned back I found, set in a stone wall, a plaque commemorating Austen’s visit, and the church set into the hillside. It didn’t look like much at first, just another of the stone country churches that you find all over England.
But when I stepped inside, I immediately knew that it was very old. I suppose the bare stone walls and the massive carved stone baptismal font, details worn smooth from centuries of use, should have been the tipoff. But it was the atmosphere more than anything that arrested me. I could feel the prayers of generations of people coating the stone walls like the resinated traces of incense. It’s a thick and viscous sort of sensation, with a low vibratory frequency that pricks the backs of your arms and neck and buzzes in your ears. It’s the spirit of a place, nourished by years upon years of love and devotion. The 900 year old Norman church that was built on the site of Anglo-Saxon church dating to the 7th century, but what I felt there was older still.
In the garden outside St. Mary’s church (because of course that’s what it was named) was a healing well that pre-dated the church. And yes, the well is said to be especially good for healing the eyes.
There’s not always a clear line from the Matronaes and other goddesses to Mary. The old sites didn’t suddenly become churches dedicated to the Virgin. They first became dedicated to local saints in the days of Celtic Christianity, a pattern we still see in Cornwall and Wales, which retained their Celtic culture during the Anglo-Saxon, Viking, and Norman invasions. A man or a woman would take up residence in a picturesque spot and begin teaching, become known for their good works, establish a church, very often with a well attached, and become larger than life, absorbing qualities of the old spirits in legend.
The Marian revolution in Britain wouldn’t come until later, beginning in the late 7th century, and peak in the high Middle Ages, before the Reformation toppled, but that’s a story I’ll tell in the next installment.
I think this matters because the way we understand God or Spirit says something about the way we relate to our world, and one another. A god that only exists in a transcendent, remote heaven makes for a de-sacralized world. A world that becomes something to be manipulated and extracted. An earth that is full of spirit is an earth that we can’t help but be in relationship with.
When I talk about the veneration of Mary and the saints, and the ways in which our ancestors meditated their relationship to the earth through those beings, I don’t mean that they were part of some crypto-pagan survival within Christianity, meaning people who understood themselves as pagan but pretending to be Christian. There may have been some of that, but by and large a woman praying to Mary at a holy well would have understood herself as a thoroughly orthodox Christian. What I am saying is that some of these old pagan ways survived in Christianized form, and more importantly, that the spirits of the land have always been there, and are willing to take whatever form they need to in order to be heard.
I don’t know how many people still pray in Charlecombe Church. Many of the old parishes, like those in the US, have been in a long decline and some are being closed. But there are many ways to worship.
Charlecombe valley is a major spawning site for amphibians. Every spring, toads, frogs, and newts come down from the hills and across the fields to the lake where their breeding grounds lie. They have to cross the road that rans through the valley to do so. Every year, for six weeks, the road is shut down to all non-local traffic. When the sun goes down, a brigade of volunteers works all through the night to ensure the animals cross safely.
The Mother will always find a way to care for her own.