The monastery of Clonmacnoise (Cluain Mhic Nóis in Irish, meaning “Meadow of the Sons of Nós”) was founded in 544. Celtic art was to become inextricably associated with Christian symbolism – but the early Celts followed a very different creed.
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THE CELTIC COSMOS
Classical commentators were struck by the centrality of “religious observance” in Celtic life; at the same time they struggled to understand a creed without written scriptures, graven images or constructed shrines.
A mantle of mist shut out the sky above; below, a buffeting wind picked up great squalls of rain and scourged the slopes, their green, scabby grass, their tawny bracken bending to the blast. To the frightened wayfarers watching from the ridge, the hillside seemed quite bleak enough but further down a dismal prospect gave way to one of grotesque revulsion and fear. Covering the valley bottom, curving over like the carapace of a vast and squirming beetle, glossy black shapes jostled and crowded in a hectic throng. A mob of ravens, they draped the ground in deathly black, but, as they frantically pushed and pecked, the viewer caught glimpses of grey, white, gold, bronze and red between their writhing forms. Only by gradual degrees did it become clear to the dismayed onlookers that this gruesome kaleidoscope of colour represented what had been a battlefield. That mass of mangled mail, of pallid flesh, of gaping wounds, of contorted limbs, was all that remained of the youth of Ulster, cruelly slain.
As for the flapping, croaking, clawing birds climbing over one another in their greed for the broken bodies beneath, there was never any doubt in the viewers’ minds of whatthey were. The raven was the emblem (for the want of a better word) of the Morrigan, the war goddess – although it represented her in a way that went well beyond religious symbolism or poetic metaphor. The relation encompassed both those things, though, for the Morrigan was at once a bird and a woman; an imaginative principle and a violent, destructive force. (And, at the same time, a creative one – for death had its place in the cycle of life; dead carrion became living, breeding flesh in the body of the raven, so the Morrigan was also a powerful goddess of fertility and enduring life.) Simultaneously unique and manifold, she could be a single raven tracking its solitary way across the sky above a raging battlefield, a bird of the ultimate ill omen, or – as here – a flock of flesh-eating, bone-stripping scavengers. Numbers don’t seem to have signified too much to a cheerfully
