THE SACRED GOOSE
Recently we acquired a book called ‘Fauna Scotica’ by Pullas/Low, which
deals with animals and people in Scotland. Among those there was a most
interesting chapter on wild geese. These are ‘winter islanders ‘, mostly on
the Northern Isles, especially on the island of Islay, but some also visit bird
sanctuaries on the main land, like the one on the Solway coast near
Caerlavrock.
Some 30 000 Barnacle geese come to Islay every winter, together with
about 10 000 Greenland White-Fronted ones. Farmers on the island were
not happy about these visitors, since they fed on their crops, but recently
compensations in money for this and the number of tourists viewing the
geese made it up for them, so that it is said that farmers earn more from the
geese than by agriculture. It was once thought of Barnacle geese that they
had emerged from the goose barnacle – a long-stalked crustacean found in
the deep Atlantic that usually attaches to the keels of boats, and nobody
knew where the geese went once they disappeared in Spring. We are told,
that the Irish thought, the geese that flew over in an Easterly direction were
the souls of the departed flying towards the resurrection. But most winter
visitors on Islay are from the Greenland population.
During the 20 th century the wild goose became widely known as the Celtic
symbol for the Holy Spirit. The idea sounds traditional but is hard to trace
beyond the Rev George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community. Having
said that, geese did have special significance in earlier times, in parts of
Pictland and Gaeldom. A small number of goose images appear on Pictish
carved stones, and although their meaning has been lost, some fishermen in
the North-East would not eat goose for whatever reason. In the early 1880’s
the lady traveller Constance Gordon Cummings wrote that in the Hebrides
“as in many other countries the goose was deemed to be too sacred for
food”. Few, if any, of her contemporaries substantiate this, but with family
connections in South Moray and Islay, Cummings would have had access to
genuinely old traditions. Be it as may, the Celtic ‘sacred goose’ found its way
into George Henderson’s ’Survivals in Beliefs among the Celts’ (1911),
which is probably where George MacLeod found it. The two men were
contemporaries, both based in Glasgow .and both men of the cloth, although
Henderson became a lecturer in Celtic Studies. MacLeod, impatient with all
forms of ‘worn-out churchiness’, preferred the wild goose to the traditional
image of the dove. With forbears in Morvern and Skye, we shall probably
never know for sure whether he invented it or drew on the same lost oral
traditions as Constance Gordon Cummings.
Reviewed by
Brigitte Williams.
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