A Cracked and Bloody Chalice:
The Distortion of the Celtic Divine Feminine in Lady Macbeth
"I have a secret that you shall learn.[...]
The goddesses three low like kine.
The raven Morrigan herself is wild for blood." 1
Macbeth is set in 11th-century Scotland -- a time when Christianity and paganism were being woven into an uneasy marriage of worldviews. The conflict between the old and new order, and the roles people (especially women) would play in each, is heightened by the enormous amount of Celtic imagery used in the text by Shakespeare, and in particular by the presentation of the character of Lady Macbeth.
Lady Macbeth is a bitch. Most readers agree on this. She lies, she connives, and she is a co-conspirator to regicide. Although she is overtaken at the end of the play by an appropriate sense of remorse and guilt, followed by a suitably gruesome and offstage death, she isn't really the sort of person you'd want to let into your house on a dark and stormy night (or even a bright and sunny afternoon!). But Lady Macbeth -- although assuredly dreadful and certainly culpable for her deeds -- is more than simply a shadowbox villain or some horrible walking vagina dentata. She is a warped survival of the Celtic divine feminine, an image so powerful that even distorted, it cannot be destroyed. However, the garbled nature of the role she assumes, and her further misappropriation thereof, will create an even more deeply flawed incarnation that will eventually destroy her.
The Goidelic Celts -- the people now known as the Irish, Scots and Manx -- had an entire pantheon of goddesses that were dedicated to some aspect of war, slaughter and death. There were no war gods, and indeed no gods of death at all. This was not the province of men; women as midwives brought babies slithering into the living world and women as mourners saw them back out again. Perhaps because women knew the fierceness of life, they were the logical spiritual overseers of death.
The most powerful and pervasive image of the war goddess is the Morrigan, whose name means "great and terrible queen." She is the raven that croaks at death; she is the scald-crow that plucks out the eyes of the dead on the battlefield; she is the abyss of blood into which all must fall to be reborn. She has many aspects, many with different names and none less frightening than another. She herself is not evil, although later Christians painted her thus. She is an integral part of Gaelic culture, and must not be slighted or looked over, for of course without death there is no life. Some may have an easier death than the Morrigan promises, but for the male warrior class in this world she could, at any time, shroud a man in her black wings and bear him away to his next incarnation.
She is a chilling figure, female certainly, but not feminine, and it is that fearful essence that Lady Macbeth invokes when steeling herself for the eventual murder of Duncan:
"Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse, [...] Come to my woman's breasts
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers[...] Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell." [I, 5 38-49]
With that speech, Lady Macbeth has made herself a vessel for something that will eventually poison her spirit and her mind. It is important, however, that even though Lady Macbeth calls this spirit of heartlessness and cruelty down upon herself, and even though some would argue that she instigates the murder (based on the reading of Act I, Scene 5, 54-59), she does not commit the murder itself. She incites, goads or even inspires Macbeth and thus again reinforces the image of the bloody goddess as the spur of the warrior and champion.
In pre-Christian and even early Celtic Christian Gaelic cultures, it was the line (and therefore the blood) of the woman that conferred rights, inheritance and sovereignty. A man did not rule because of who he was; he ruled because of who his wife or mother was. He was given this right by the Goddess Herself -- seen as the very earth beneath his feet -- and, if She found him wanting, She could oust him from the place he no longer deserved and enthrone his successor. Lady Macbeth is setting into motion a practice much older than patrilineal descent.
Duncan, who is beset by civil war at the beginning of the play and thus personifies the weakened king against whom the earth uprises, is judged and found wanting (especially because he will not advance her husband to the position Lady Macbeth believes he deserves). So he is brought within her battlements -- a vital distinction made by Lady Macbeth -- and eliminated by her chosen champion: In this case Macbeth, earning his epithet "Bellona's bridegroom" [ I, 1, 55]. Bellona herself, in the earthly incarnation of Lady Macbeth, must plan and even see to the proper finishing of the job, smearing the blood on the faces of Duncan's chamberlains to call blame for the crime upon them in an unconscious mirroring of the ritual bloodbath of the Morrigan.
There are two crucial flaws in this course of action. One is that it is a travesty of the battle for the sacred kingship. Rather than face the king on the field for all to see, Macbeth steals into his room while he is totally defenseless and slaughters him in his bed. Even the violence of the pre-Christian Celtic world contained rigid codes of honor, and this murder flies in the face of all those restrictions. The balance for this offense is only set right when Macbeth faces Macduff -- the chosen champion of Malcolm, the true king -- and is killed and beheaded. Secondly, this murder violates another equally vital piece of the Celtic worldview: the sacredness of hospitality, a belief often symbolized by a cauldron or a chalice, and one that is inextricably tied to the belief in the woman's divine role as representative of the Goddess on earth. No thing was to be denied the guest of the household; his comfort, pleasure and safety were vouchsafed when he stepped across the threshold. Pagan or Christian, no Celt would think of murdering a guest under his own roof as anything but barbarous and utterly treacherous.
For Lady Macbeth to invite Duncan into Dunsinane and engineer his murder is a violation of the gravest kind -- made even more so by its triple nature, for he is guest, kinsman and king besides. Justice turns on this offender as well: Lady Macbeth dies by her own hand (the method of suicide being left to the director's imagination) and within the walls of her own home. She has violated the sanctity of the hearth, a precept just as sacred as that of sovereignty, and her fate must (and does) bring matters full circle.
Next... A tainted well and a warped reflection
1,2
Copyright © 2005 Sukipot.com