Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

Yeats’s Crazy Jane draws on the tradition of the Hag in Celtic mythology. The Cailleach of Beara, or the Hag of Beara, embodies one dimension of the tripartite Celtic Goddess trinity. With the Maiden and the Mother, the Hag completes the incarnation of one of Irish mythology’s most powerful forces. Associated with winter, the Hag of Beara reigns from Samhain through Beltaine, or from the first of November to the first of May. She spends the summer months transformed into a clammy boulder perched on cliffs facing the ocean, where she waits for the return of her husband, the King of the Sea, Manaan mac Lir.

Such a powerful Celtic force needed taming within in Ireland’s Christianization narratives. Incoming Roman priests realized the significant role of Irish mythic figures, so they provided additional stories to explain to the native Irish the replacement of these figures with Catholic saints and martyrs. In one such story, the Cailleach, defender of the old ways, steals St. Caithighearn’s prayer book. Awakened by a local pious witness, the saint pursues the Cailleach, retrieves her prayer book, and turns the Cailleach to stone, setting her to face the sea. Stories fashioned by the church thus layered Catholic dominance over mythical figures. St. Catherine’s final defeat of the Cailleach came in the form of a cat: Catherine became the patron of cats, an animal previously attached to the Cailleach.

Roman colonization thus preserved some continuity for the Irish, ostensibly allowing them to maintain some of their cultural identity. But under British colonization, all preservation of Irish culture ceased. The Catholicism that once provided a link to Celtic traditions became a mark of inferiority as Anglo-Protestants controlled all aspects of Irish life. It took the advocacy of Anglo-Irish like Yeats and Lady Gregory to recover folk culture and the outlawed Gaelic language. By saving the language spoken only secretly by farmers, laborers, and household staff, the Irish literary revival of the 20th century preserved the myths, stories, and characters of Celtic Ireland.

In “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” Yeats uses the Hag goddess, the Cailleach, to confront the Bishop, the representative of the Church. The longer sequence of Crazy Jane poems shows Jane as both the maiden and the hag incarnation of the Celtic Goddess who controls the life force of this world.