A.D. Brock Adams
A Note on Reconstruction
The primordial cosmogony of the Gaelic peoples — the myth of how all things began — has not survived in the form we might wish. What the Leabhar Gabála Érenn preserves is already a synthesis: a creative weaving of indigenous Gaelic mythological memory with biblical narrative, undertaken by monastic scholars who understood that the two were not incompatible but complementary. The original cosmogony that preceded that synthesis — the Gaelic account of the void, the first stirring, the emergence of being from non-being — exists now only in fragments, in parallels with kindred traditions, and in the resonances between what the Barddas preserved and what comparative mythology illuminates.
What follows is a sacred reconstruction — an act of mythological imagination in the spirit of the tradition itself, which has always understood that the truths carried in myth are not diminished by the creative act of their telling. The fili who first shaped these stories was also making choices, selecting images, weaving the inherited fragments into the form best suited to communicate what the tradition knew. We continue that work here, with honesty about what is reconstruction and gratitude for what has been preserved.
Before the Beginning: Neamhní
Before time kept its own counsel, before the first word was spoken into the dark, there was Neamhní — that which is neither here nor there, the void that is not empty but full of what has not yet become.
The traditions of the world have given this primordial state many names. The Norse called it Ginnungagap — the yawning void of potential, the great gap that preceded the first fire and the first ice. The Babylonian Enuma Elish names it Apsu and Tiamat — the sweet waters and the salt waters mingled in darkness before the gods were born. The Hebrew tradition opens with tohu wabohu — formlessness and emptiness — over which the Spirit of God moves like a breath. The Hindu tradition names it the state before the primordial sound AUM set creation in motion. The Druidic tradition names it Neamhní — Annwn in Welsh — the realm of unmanifest potential from which the Barddas says all souls begin their journey.
All of these are the same stillness, perceived through different sacred imaginations: the boundless, patient, inexhaustible capacity of the divine to contain within itself everything that has not yet been spoken into existence.
Within Neamhní, a pulse. Not yet a sound — something prior to sound. A warmth at the centre of the boundless cold. A movement in the stillness too subtle to be called motion. The first intimation that the void is not indifferent, that it contains within itself the seed of its own overcoming.
From that pulse — a tone. IAO. AUM. YHWH. The vibrational signature of the divine, the Name that calls existence into recognition of itself. And with the speaking of the Name, Neamhní becomes Adharta — the world of becoming, of growth, of the long journey from the first stirring toward the fullness of Saoirse.
The Holy Mother: She Who Was Before the Word
Before the Name was spoken, there was the one from whom the Name was spoken.
She is the Holy Mother — the primordial feminine presence whose womb is Neamhní itself, whose body is the waters of the deep. If the divine is the breath that moves across the face of the waters, she is the waters. If the divine is the seed that falls into the earth and becomes the oak, she is the earth. She is not created — she is the condition of creation, the receptive ground within which all becoming becomes possible.
In the Gaelic tradition, she is Anu — D’Anu, the great mother whose name the Tuatha Dé Danann carry within their own: the Tribes of the Goddess Danu. Her breasts are the twin hills of Kerry that mark her body upon the landscape of Ireland itself. Her body is the land, and the land is sacred because she inhabits it, and because every creature that lives upon it lives within her embrace.
She is also Boann — goddess of the River Boyne, whose name means White Cow, bó fionn, embodying purity, fertility, and the life-giving properties of water. She is a figure of transformation, wisdom, and the nurturing force of rivers and waterways, the one whose defiance of the forbidden well brought the sacred waters of knowledge flooding across the land and carved the Boyne itself from the body of the earth. Boann is both the creator and the consequence, her name forever tied to water, wisdom, and the price of seeking too much knowledge. In her, the divine feminine is not passive or merely nurturing — she is fierce, curious, willing to pay any price for wisdom, and in paying that price she gives the land its most sacred river.
Boann is one aspect of the great female divinity of the Celts, her other aspects being Brigid and Étain — the latter whose name means poetry, herself a member of the Tuatha Dé Danann. The death of Boann creates the cosmic waters which irrigate all known worlds.
She is also Isis, who gathered the scattered limbs of the divine and restored life from death. She is Parvati, the Shakti — the divine creative energy without whose consent the universe could not move. She is the cosmic womb from which all beings emerge and to which all beings return, the silence that holds the Word before it is spoken, and the silence that remains when all words have been spoken and the cosmos rests in the fullness of what it has become.
All existence is an ode sung in her honour. Every life lived with love and courage is a verse added to the endless hymn that the cosmos sings in gratitude for the womb that held it before it knew itself.
The Birth of the World
For ages without number, Neamhní held within itself the tension between the ice of absolute stillness — Elivagr, the primordial cold from which the Norse tradition drew the same image — and the warmth of the divine pulse moving at its centre. This tension is not conflict but potential: the same tension that exists between the seed and the soil, between the held breath and the word about to be spoken.
Then Llyr summoned forth the waters — both fresh and salt — and the first great differentiation began. Aedh, the divine craftsman, the Dagda in the role of creator rather than sustainer, established the bounds between them: the sweet waters of life rising upward toward the light, the deep salt waters of Donn — the lord of the dead, the keeper of the house of souls — sinking toward the deep.
Their union was so complete, so inextricable, that they became one flesh — the sacred marriage of the waters that is the first covenant of creation, the hieros gamos enacted before there were gods or humans to witness it. From this cosmic womb emerged the first incarnate form of the eternal — taking shape as a seed, a wandering acorn borne upon the face of the waters, the oak of the world not yet rooted in any soil.
Boann, with her lover the Dagda, became the mother of Aengus — the Young Son, the god of love and poetic inspiration, born of the sacred union between the river and the all-father. In the mythological register of this cosmogony, Boann is the great renovator — she who, like Auðumbla in the Norse tradition, licks the salt from the thawing ice of the primordial world and releases the first form of the divine into the light. She receives the seed of Bile — Belinos, the bright one, the god of life’s ecstatic return at the turning of winter toward spring — and bears within herself the first flowering of the world’s becoming.
The Emergence of the Sacred Three
From the first movement of the divine within Neamhní, three sacred principles emerge — not as separate beings but as three modes of the single divine life making itself known in the newly forming world:
Aedh — Being itself, the divine creative intelligence that shapes the formless into form, that sets the boundaries between the waters, that plants the first sacred oak in the newly emerged earth. Beyond gender in its own nature, Aedh takes on the masculine principle in its relationship with Anu — not as a fixed identity but as a counterpoint that makes generation possible. It is the craftsman and the fire, the shaping presence that ensures existence continues to tend toward its own fullness.
Bile / Belinos — the bright one, the principle of life returning from death, the solar force that rises at Midwinter and strengthens toward Midsummer, the divine child born from the cosmic womb at the darkest moment of the year and growing in power and beauty until the harvest is complete. He is the Thaisbeanadh — the Showing of the divine — that the tradition recognises in every sacred hero from Lugh to Aengus to, ultimately, the Christ: the one who dies for the world’s renewal and whose return the community celebrates with fire, feast, and the declaration that life has overcome death once again.
Donn — the deep one, lord of the House of Donn where the dead gather before their onward journey, keeper of the threshold between this world and the next, the gravity of the cosmic deep that holds all things in their proper relationship. He is not death in the sense of annihilation but death in the sense of transformation: the force that ensures that what has lived returns to the ground of being and is renewed from it.
Together these three constitute the Gaelic face of the divine trinity that every tradition perceives in some form — the creator, the life-giver, and the transformer; the maternal, the solar, and the deep; the world, the light, and the return.
The Fourfold: Neamhní, Adharta, Saoirse, Sìorachd
Beneath and through all three, the Barddas cosmology gives the soul’s journey its framework — the four states that constitute the complete sacred order of existence:
Neamhní / Annwn — that which is neither here nor there, the void of unmanifest potential, the womb of the Holy Mother before the first word is spoken.
Adharta / Abred — that which is here, the world of becoming and growth, the long and necessary school of experience through which the soul gathers the wisdom that only lived existence can yield.
Saoirse / Gwynfyd — that which we seek, the realm of freedom and illuminated blessedness, where the soul rests at last in conscious harmony with the divine will that has been calling it forward from the beginning.
Sìorachd / Ceugant — that which is there, where Dia alone may dwell, the infinite circumference of eternity that no creature can fully traverse but toward which all things perpetually tend, the horizon that recedes forever and in receding draws all creation forward into an ever-deepening encounter with the inexhaustible mystery of the One.
A Hymn to the Holy Mother
All existence resounds with a hymn of gratitude to the Holy Mother — to Anu, to Boann, to the one who holds the world in her womb and releases it into becoming.
The River Boyne, one of Ireland’s most famous and historically significant rivers, is said to have been created by Boann herself, cementing her connection to Ireland’s physical and spiritual landscape. Drinking from the Boyne in the month of June would grant the gifts of poetry and seership — the river that Boann created through her defiance of the forbidden, through her willingness to pay the price of wisdom, flows still through the land above the buried ancestors of Brú na Bóinne, past the spiral-carved stone of Newgrange where the Midwinter sun enters the innermost chamber and announces, in a language older than words, that the divine child has been born again in the darkness.
In every season and for every reason, may peace and goodwill flourish upon this earth, mirroring the primordial harmony from which all life unfurled. May the Holy Mother’s waters carry us toward the wisdom she purchased at such cost. May the sacred fire of Bile burn in the minds of the fillidh and warm the hearths of the people. May the deep waters of Donn receive the dead with the same gentleness with which the earth receives a seed.
And may the Name — IAO, AUM, YHWH, the vibrational signature of the One from whom all things proceed — continue to sound through the fabric of the created world, the primordial pulse that was there before the beginning and will be there when all words have finally returned to the silence from which they came.
References
- Leabhar Gabála Érenn, ed. R.A.S. MacAlister (1938–1956). Irish Texts Society.
- Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams), Barddas, ed. J. Williams Ab Ithel (1862, 1874).
- Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson, trans. Jesse Byock (2005). Penguin Classics.
- Mac Cana, Proinsias (1970). Celtic Mythology. Hamlyn.
- Ó hÓgáin, Dáithí (1991). Myth, Legend and Romance. Prentice Hall.
- Boann entries: Britannica, Wikipedia, Secret Ireland, Tales from the Wood.
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