2022-05-09 23:15:19
As the Greeks developed an increasingly human sense of religion and mythology, myths about heroes were used to bring brute stones into the new environment, by associating the stones with heroes in some way. In the same way the language of saints is used to christianify pagan wells: the saint wept here, or struck the ground with his staff, or was healed here, or did penance here. Irish wells often figure in the Lives of Irish saints. Columba terminated pagan worship at a Scottish spring and blessed it (Adamnan claims, it had made people ill before Columba!): now its healing powers were authorised, a pattern widely repeated and with particular frequency in France. More alarmingly, given the well-known cult of skulls among the Celts and archaeological discoveries of real specimens, a number of Welsh Christian myths tell of the death of a saint at a well, particularly by beheading, and a standard type of story tells how a virgin is chased by a rapist, beheaded by him and a well appears where the head falls or blood drips. This Welsh theme is not unparalleled: in the Auvergne St Julian’s head too gives a spring its curative properties Jones delightfully suggests that ‘the red stain of iron found at chalybeate wells helped to give rise to these tales’, which you may believe if you do not have the stomach for the cult of skulls, amply evidenced in wells.
A strange counterpoint to this Celtic association of well-tree-skull is found in Norse tradition. Odin apparently gained his wisdom, losing his eye for it, at the spring of the giant Mimir. Here the three motifs are associated: the tree of Mimir (maybe Yggdrasil itself), the spring of Mimir (and its evidently oracular wisdom) and Mimir’s oracular head. It is perhaps no coincidence that his name recurs in some German and Swedish river-names. The head is perceived as a source of power, recalling how now and again one comes across special care to bury heads (leaving trunks to rot) because that is where the soul is.
Ken Dowden - European Paganism: The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
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