The Sky Father and Earth Mother: the Basis of All Indo-European Religions, Part Four, the Celtic Earth Mother

 The Proto-Celtic Earth Mother

She has been reconstructed as *Danu, from whom we derive the Irish Reflex Danu and the Welsh Dôn. *Danu ultimately derives from the PIE reconstructed goddess, *Dānu, whose reflex is found in the Vedic Dānu, the mother of a primordial race, the Danavas. She is an extremely ancient water deity, who is indirectly defeated by Indra when He slays Her son, Vṛtra, the serpent/dragon, in order to release the waters. There are no hymns addressed to Her in the Rig Veda, but She is, nonetheless a divine entity, a deva‑matr̥, a 'mother of divine beings'. Her name is also preserved in the Iranian word Dānu, meaning 'river, running water'. Likewise, on the continent, the Celtic reflex of the goddess is preserved in the names of great rivers, such as the Danube (Latin name, Danuvius), the Don, Dnieper, Dniester and the Donets in Russia. The Daugava which runs through Belarus and Latvia from its source in Russia, flowing into the Baltic Sea. A tributary of the Daugava, the Dysna, flows through Lithuania and Belarus. Indeed, the meaning of the root behind the PIE *Dānu, the noun, * dānu‑ means 'river, stream, flowing water.' The underlying verbal root of the noun is *dʰenh₂‑ /*dʰen‑, 'to flow, run, drip.' *dānu‑ is reconstructed from the following reflexes:-

. Sanskrit: dā́nu — 'fluid, drop,' also the primordial mother.

. Avestan: dānu — 'river'.

. Old Irish: Danu — ancestral mother of the gods.

. Welsh: Dôn — same reflex.

. Hittite: dānu‑ — “river”.

Just as the Vedic Dānu is the mother of the Danavas, so the Iranian Dānava are the children of a primordial water deity, whose name was suppressed and consequently not preserved in the Avesta, but the concept is clearly there, and Her name survives in Her offspring. Due to the religious reforms of Zoroaster and the elevation of Ahura Mazda, ancient Indo-European deities were either demonised or erased. We see this pattern time and time again with all monotheistic religions, which are basically intolerant. Fortunately, the same or similar deities survive in the Rig Veda, which gives us insight into the Iranian reflexes. 

It is clear from all these reflexes that the Proto-Celtic *Danu and the PIE *Dānu is strongly associated with water, in particular, rivers. As is evident from the Vedic, Irish and Celtic mythologies, She is also an ancestral deity. This is demonstrated in the Irish mythology where Danu is said to be the mother of the Irish gods, the Tuatha Dé Danann ('the people of the goddess Danu') and in the Welsh mythology as the mother of the Welsh gods, the Plant Dôn ('the Children of Dôn').

My readers may be wondering why the PIE *Dānu and the Proto-Celtic *Danu should be considered to be Earth Mothers when they are so clearly associated with water and rivers? The answer to that question is that the ancestors did not draw such a clear cut distinction between these two domains. The waters that *Dānu and *Danu preside over are the waters beneath the earth, as opposed to the waters which rain down from the heavens. The rivers themselves were important boundary markers for the tribes who occupied the land. It should also be remembered that across Indo-European mythologies, creation begins with the primordial waters, and water is the source of life and fertility. The rivers thus, are the visible representations of the goddess, and it should be noted that hydronyms are the most ancient form of nomenclature that we have, and rarely change with the migrations of peoples.

It is interesting that the PIE and Celtic Earth Mothers do not have a male consort. The absence of such a consort is quite meaningful; *Danu belongs to the oldest ad deepest layer of Indo-European myth, where origin mothers are mothers, but not wives. Examples of such deities include the Vedic Dānu, the Greek Tethys (mother of rivers), the Norse Nótt (the personification of night and mother of Jörð), Jörð, (the personification of the earth), the Greek Gaia (the earth itself), the Vedic Pṛthivī (personification of the earth), and the Baltic Žemyna (the personification of the living earth). Broadly speaking, the various Indo-European Earth Mothers all appear before the Sky Father in the earliest layers of the cosmology; they have roles independent of the Sky Father. Indeed, in the Greek mythology, Gaia produces Uranus, the sky by Herself. In the Celtic mythology, *Danu, no father of Her offspring is mentioned. It is clear that the Earth Mother is older than the Sky Father by at last one cosmological generation. The children of the PIE and Proto-Celtic *Danu appear before the manifestation of the Sky Father. It is only with the appearance of the PIE Sky Father that marriage appears as an institution. The sky is a much later ordering principle.

Riders of the Sidhe, 1911, John Duncan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Riders_of_th_Sidhe_(big).jpg