WITHERLINS | Scottish Witchcraft & Folklore

The following is an extract from

STUDIES IN THE SPIRITUAL
HISTORY OF THE GAEL, Volume V

BY
"FIONA MACLEOD"
(WILLIAM SHARP)

"Then he saw the woman or the girl look round. He had not heard her singing before, but he heard it now. By that sorrowful lamentation, low and sweet forbye, and by the tears that glistered white on the grey face, he knew it was the Nigheag Cheag a Chroin.

"Micheil was a man who would not let fear eat his heart. He gave a low sob, and waited till the sickness of the cold sweat was gone: then he licked the dryness of his lips. 'Peace to you, good woman,' he said.

'And so you know me, mo cuat,' she answered to him, putting down on the grass the whiteness of the leinag cheag bhais, the little white shroud of death.

'I know you, Woman of Tears,' he said, 'though why is it calling me mo cuat you are, for I am no lover of yours? And that whiteness there on the grass, sure it is for a child or a maid, that?'

'Let me look at you,' he said.

He saw her tall now, and dark: bigger than the great alder on the bank not far from her.

'Do you remember?' she said.

"Micheil was still at that. 'No,' he whispered, when the high reed near him was no more shaken with the breath of his pulse.

'You will never be forgetting me, Micheil Macnamara. As for that whiteness there, it is the cloth of blindness.'

"Mo Bròn,' Micheil moaned; 'sorrow upon me!'

"Look at me,' he said.

"Micheil put his gaze at her. It was no woman now he saw, not even a bandia, but a power or dominion, he thought. She had her feet far down among roots of trees, and stars thickening in her hair as they gather in the vastness and blackness of the sky on a night of frost.

'Are you Death?' Micheil sobbed, his knees shaking with the awe that was on him.

'I am older than Death,' she said. Her voice was beyond and above and behind and below; but it was no more than the lowness of a low wind in the dusk.

"Then he heard a chanting, as of trees in a wind, and of waves rising and falling in caverns by the sea: but he did not know, and never knew, if it was in the tongue of the Gael he heard, or in what tongue. But it would be the Gaelic, for sure: for Micheil had little English, then or after. And the words that he heard were somewhat as are these words, but remembered dimly they are, as in a dream:--

'I am she who loveth Loneliness,
And Solitude is my breath.
I have my feet on graves,
And the resurrection of the dead is my food,
For the dead rise as a vapour
And I breathe it as mist,
As mist that is lickt up of the wind.
I am she who stands at the pools:
I stand at the meeting of roads,
The little roads of the world
And the dark roads of life and death,
And the roads of all the world's of the Universe.
I am Anama-Bhroin, the Soul of Sorrow:
I am she who loveth Loneliness,
And I have the Keys of Melancholy and of Joy.
My lover is Immortality
For I am a Queen,
Queen of all things on earth and in the sea,
And in the white palaces of the stars
Built on the dark walls of Time
Above the Abyss.'