Book Club: Week 2: The Goddess Maeve
A Circle Holder and a Sugar Addiction Specialist choose a book.....
Celtic Queen Maeve and Addiction, An Archetypal Perspective by Sylvia Brinton Perera
Chapter One - The Goddess Maeve: Reflections and Prompts by Kate Oliver
Wandering on the High Moors above my hometown, I can often find myself lost in another world. Here among the fronded bracken and soft purplish heather brush there is a sense of timelessness such that to close my eyes for an instant I might catch sight of a fire blazing before a stone hut and a family hunkered down around it watching the stars.
There are places out here where the veil seems so finely stretched as to allow for permeability and sight into the other world. And for our ancestors, the Celts, the holders of our lost stories, this familiarity with life and the cycle of life and birth and regeneration was a given part of their everyday reality. It kept them whole and in tune with all of life in a way we may recall as children but lose as we grow up within the confines of a sanctioned society and the collective vessel.
What I am talking about is that sense of wonder, of otherness, of more that so many of us feel deep down in our soul and long to explore. For the Celts this need was part of their intrinsic experience of life. Embracing the life-giving experience of imbibing Maeve (Meadbh, mead) as part of ritual, as part of community, as part of a sacred rite experienced in together – this experience of collective wholeness was a deep gift of healing power, transcendence and ultimate transformation. It was embodied life force. It was Maeve – the “passion that rides us” and yet, there is no place for that in the way we live our everyday lives – so distant have we become from our ancestors and their ancestral knowledge.
When this experience, this vital part of life is neither honoured nor brought up to the light it can become something entirely different. When our deepest longing, our most intense awakening experience is mocked by observers “when we were swept up and our guard was down” we learn to connect these deepest feelings of “expansive surrender” with shame and we learn to fear it.
Learning to re-integrate this part of our life into our wholeness becomes key and is so deeply relevant when coming to understand the challenge of addiction. It is our deepest wish that this Circle Project Book Club exploration and prompts will give some of the magic back to your life. The Project was born out of my work with sugar, carbs and processed food addiction and recovery and the time I have spent in circle with Mitle honouring and exploring that part of intrinsic otherness that is alive in us all. It is my deepest wish that you will join us over the coming weeks and share your answers and creative responses to the prompts and journal questions we share on our journey through time with Queen Maeve.
Quote 1:
Maeve is the passion that rides us.
Provocation:
If you’re reading along, how many different portraits of Maeve can you find in these opening pages?
Quote 2:
After withholding menstrual flow when she fought against her foes, Maeve released it again at the end of the battles magically creating the source of three rivers so large that a mill could find room in each.
Provocation:
Maeve as the earth and her body as earth-creating. Three turning mills within three interconnected great ditches recalls the ancient neolithic spiral signs representing the ever-turning cycles of time which flow from the Goddess to transform all living things though life, death and regeneration.
What does this image stir in you and where might you have seen this image on the land near you?
Quote 3:
For the Celts and most peoples until recently in earth’s history – the original fullness of body, energy, emotion and spirit had not yet been split apart. For while we too know this felt wholeness in early childhood and find it again in moments of passionate intensity and visionary expansion, we live a culture that has rarely supported individual ecstatic experiences.
Provocation:
How do you recall such “moments of passionate intensity and visionary expansion” in your life?
Were they supported through social affirmation or was it a solitary experience?
Was it the more expansive for being a collective experience?
Quote 4:
Too often we have been taught through shaming and instilled fear to hold back or press all our passions into the vessels sanctioned by the collective.
Provocation:
What does this mean to you?
List the ways the Celtic Goddesses enraptured their lovers in the Celtic stories exploring the primal levels of desirousness.
Quote 5:
….any three things, the three highest desires..if you can name them in one breath.
Provocation:
What are your three highest desires and why is it so important you can name them right now?
What happens when embodied passions (the type drawn into life through Maeve’s being) are denied as represented by the “toothed maw”?
How else is the starved hag known to us?
What is missing in our contemporary patterns of intoxication?
List the places where the veil between this world and the next is felt to be easily permeable?
In the story of Tain, Cuchullain stands alone against Maeve and all her forces. Describe his qualities and explain why he chooses not to slay Maeve at the end of the battle.
In the comments, please:
Let us know if you are reading the book or not
Share your responses, experiences, thoughts, feelings, ideas and anything else that you feel called to
Offer any additional resources that you feel are relevant and helpful.
And please do reach out and connect with Kate. You will find her on Substack at
And head to her website Sugars Addictive.
We look forward to continuing this conversation and exploration with you.
With you in Circle in (r)evolutionary times
Mitlé and Kate
