The Morrigan

The Morrigan is a collective and a singular — she appears as one goddess and as three, in various combinations with Badb and Macha and Nemain. Her name has been interpreted as Great Queen or Phantom Queen, and she is both: a sovereign goddess of the land, a prophetess of battle-death, and a figure whose presence on the margins of a fight means the fight has already been decided.

In the Ulster Cycle she appears to Cú Chulainn in multiple guises — as a beautiful woman who offers herself and is refused, as a heifer, as an eel, as a wolf — each time testing him and being wounded by him, each time returning in a new form. At his final stand on the ford, she appears as a crow on the post he tied himself to when dying, and the warriors around him knew he was dead when she landed. The crow — particularly the hooded crow — is her bird across all traditions.

She is also associated with sovereignty itself: the goddess who confers legitimacy on kingship, who must be won or appeased by the king, who is the land in its most uncanny aspect. She appears at the Second Battle of Mag Tuired as a power who can determine the outcome. She is perhaps the most complex supernatural figure in the Irish tradition — impossible to ally with fully, impossible to ignore, and never, in any version of the stories, quite on any human's side.