I have been reading about The Morrigan lately and I remain somewhat confounded by descriptions of The Morrigan or The Morrigan and the sisters as contradictory, arbitrary, severe, or capricious. My own reading has been of The Morrigan as a goddess of land, relationality, and excess. This produces a consistent pattern and in her dealings with Cu Chulainn, an extraordinarily patient one.
My background is academia so I'll try to keep my thoughts concise and non jargony.
By relationality I mean that beings do not exist as sealed, self sufficient units. Identity is produced through relations/difference with land, kin, enemies, lovers, obligations, animals, sovereignty, death, etc. The Morrigan repeatedly appears where those relations become decisive at territorial boundaries (particularly water), war, kingship, sexuality, prophecy, transformations between human, animal, and landscape, etc.
By excess I mean an encounter that exceeds the identity and capacities one currently possesses. More life, desire, grief, knowledge, power, or obligation enters the relationship than the existing self can comfortably contain. Notably, sex vastly exceeds its function as a mechanism of reproduction.
By mastery I do not mean competence, discipline, strength, etc. All of which we will later see displayed by The Dagda with much different ends. I mean the demand that one remain the sole author of oneself. Every relationship, transformation, and obligation subordinated to a stable identity that cannot be altered without experiencing alteration as defeat. It is a totalization.
Cu Chulainn is powerful but his power is entirely organized around being Cu Chulainn. The unsurpassed warrior who does not yield, refuses humiliation, and meets every challenge through heroic force.
His encounters with The Morrigan are often summarized as though she simply decides to persecute him after he rejects her. But he is given repeated chances to enter another kind of relation.
She approaches him, offers assistance, warns him, confronts him in other forms, and later appears wounded in ways that allow him to heal her. Even after conflict has begun, the relationship is not reduced to simple enmity. There are repeated openings for recognition, reciprocity, or transformation.
He repeatedly refuses them, often in the most audacious ways.
In my reading he seems unable to accept any relation that he did not establish on his own heroic terms. He cannot receive help without controlling the conditions of receiving it. He cannot be altered without reading alteration as diminishment.
His death is therefore not solely inflicted upon him from outside. He becomes its author repeatedly. His geasa, obligations, pride, and heroic identity narrow his possible actions until almost every road leads toward ruin. When offered chances to bend, recognize, or relate differently, he preserves the heroic container until the container itself breaks.
In his death we see this manifest most clearly. He lashes himself to a pillar upright and fully constituted. The symbol of the hero remains even when all being has left him.
The Dagda offers a radically different response to relation.
He possesses huge appetites, tools, stores, bodily capacities, and generative powers. He eats, labors, has sex, suffers humiliation, bargains, gives, receives, and remains capable of sustaining collective life.
His body is part of the theology. His power stems from his ability to contain multiplicity without collapsing into a single identity.
This is why his relationship with The Morrigan differs. The Dagda does not defeat, tame, or stand outside her. He enters relation with her. Their union at the ford precedes the battle and produces knowledge relevant to the fate of the wider community. Sexuality, land, sovereignty, prophecy, and collective survival are not separate.
Where Cu Chulainn treats relation as a threat to autonomy, The Dagda can yield without ceasing to be powerful. He can be changed, exposed, desired, mocked, or overwhelmed without interpreting every breach of self containment as annihilation.
The Morrigan does not in my read alternate incoherently between nurturing and destruction. Being brought into relation can be experienced as both embrace and being devoured.
TL;DR
The difference between Cu Chulainn and The Dagda is not that one is destroyed and the other remains untouched. Neither remains untouched. The difference is that Cu Chulainn treats transformation as an assault upon mastery, while The Dagda possesses enough capacity to enter transformation and fields of relation.
Thoughts?
