Beginning in pre-Christian times, the dead in Ireland and Scotland were accompanied on their physical and spiritual journey from life to death by keening mourners, according to Irish singer, songwriter, and teacher Mary McLaughlin. She notes in her article Keening the Dead: Ancient History or a Ritual for Today? that keening was, and is, not simply impassioned cries of grief, but “a sacred improvised chant that evolved over many centuries. It was traditionally sung over a corpse and was intrinsic to the ritual of the wake and funeral obsequies. (p. 1)” The keening song included an introduction, dirge, and cry and “reflects the life and passage of the individual who has just died. (p. 2)” Often keening was done by women who were professional ritual keeners at wakes and in the procession from dwelling to grave.
The keening woman, or bean chaointe, was essential to the well being of her community. Scholar and musician Narelle McCoy says in her article Madwoman, Banshee, Shaman: Gender, Changing Performance Contexts and the Irish Wake Ritual “the community could resume its normal pattern of life once the funerary rites were concluded having expressed its grief through the intercession of the bean chaointe.” She notes that “The bean chaointe (keening woman) inhabited a liminal state between the living and the world of the dead for the duration of the mourning period, entering a kind of ‘divine madness’ which allowed the keener to express the collective outpouring of grief through her voice and body, leading the community in a public expression of sorrow and lament.”
What is less known is that the bean chaointe also ushered new souls into life. McLaughlin says the bean chaointe was also often a midwife who may have also chanted at births (p. 11). Thus, it seems to me, keening was not only an expression of grief, but a reverberation that enabled individual and community transformations through the eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.
Aiding life transitions at death and birth through cries, songs, and chants is, of course, not limited to the Celtic world. Keening still takes place all over the globe, but for millions of people in the west and elsewhere it is a lost tradition. McCoy notes that keening was largely discarded in Ireland and Scotland by the mid-twentieth century, having been discouraged by the Church for centuries. This expression that was practiced by women out of the control of male authorities was not to be tolerated.
As I witness the pandemic’s trauma of the past two years, the environmental desecration of the past centuries, humanity’s violence of the past millennia, and more, I wonder what our world would be like if every community had keeners or others of similar traditions to lead us as a global village through grief, to transform our despair into wiser sojourns so that we may birth a better future?
Some musicians and scholars, like Mary McLaughlin, Narelle McCoy, Maeve Gavin, and others, are raising awareness of and reviving the old songs and practices of Celtic keening, making them available for all. Perhaps you come from a different but similar ancestral tradition that you can bring to public and private ceremonies.
Maybe some of us will explore new ways to dive deep into the most profound depths of our human sorrow that has been unkeened and uncleansed for generations to create healing and wholeness. Then, we can be nurturing midwives to encourage us all to arise like the green shoots among the brown leaves in spring. Spread among all those with many talents, our regenerative artistry may come not only from singing and chanting but pour out of our fingers as we write or paint, our feet as we dance, our hands as we coax music from our instruments, and our minds as we remake myths and stories that will root and nourish us.
To she whose heart has broken and whose body bleeds,
Stumbling over ungathered shards, unhealed,
Silent but powerful as the stars, our unembraced grief burgeons.
Despair’s daily violence, greed’s insatiable gloom, every day’s misty sadness
Dims our inborn exuberant wildness to gray
Till our confining, protecting eggshell bursts and keening emerges unbidden, unconstrained, free.
Join with me and pound your feet on the holy soil, wail into the wind
Keening’s power is even now reaching towards us.
The sound waves will echo and come back to us with all we need.
The reverberations connect us to our deep-rooted Divinity.
Our dreamed of sighs of sorrow are labor pains of rebirth.
Our connection to lost beloveds is not severed but remade.
We stretch out our arms, sing lullabies to draw them close in spirit,
Hold our planet’s sputtering soul for She, too, is dying to us.
Come dive deep, even deeper, into our own wells of humanness
Here we will find the quake’s rumble, the lava’s hiss, the tsumani’s wave, the violet petal’s unfurling, the soft wind against the feathers of a baby chickadee
The purple, red, green, and blue of memories sweet and sad.
So much swirling and emerging from our mouths and our bodies,
We bind ourselves to each other and the Earth with our willingness
To be a vessel for all that needs to be released and reborn.
Keen and I will hear you, truly hear you.
Keen and we will witness for each other.
Keen and the Earth will recognize Her voice in us.
Keen and all we love will be set aflame with life anew.
To hear a BBC4 radio documentary about keening including old recordings, click here.
Sources:
McCoy, Narell., “Madwoman, Banshee, Shaman: Gender, Changing Performance Contexts and the Irish Wake Ritual.” Musical Islands: Exploring Connections Between Music, Place and Research, edited by Elizabeth MacKinley, Byrdie-Leigh Bartlett, and Katelyn Barney, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.
McLaughlin, Mary, Keening the Dead: Ancient History or a Ritual for Today? Religions, 2019, 10(4), 235; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10040235
Thank you, Josie! I’m so glad to read your kind words! Yes, I also believe that crones are important for helping us to grieve as well as rebirth, both as individuals and as a society. While I don’t find that I ever really stop grieving those I have loved, I do find that as I experience bereavement over and over it is no longer a strange country, I know what grief is and how better to navigate it and am always grateful when I can bring some of that to others. I also do agree that we hold within our younger selves aspects that are within but just not ready to be expressed, which is why I am finding being a crone to be such a rich experience.
I feel this in my soul. I feel this in my bones, in my uterus, in my breasts. I feel this tugging at me, pushing me forward, driving me forward, propelling me. I resonate with this on every level I am aware of. I am a crone, joyously, and a part of me thinks I always have been, even when I was a maid, and a mother. Just waiting for the years to pass, to become the crone that was inside me all along. I have also always strongly resonated with the tales of Celtic Bards and Brehon Law. This is all just falling into place for me, a part of myself that has always been there, but was hidden from myself because I maybe wasn’t ready for it just yet.
Thank you. I am grateful to be growing, always.
Thank you for the link to the article, Glenys. You can hardly get a more powerful example of mothers’ grief spurned than the exclusion of mothers from the dawn ceremony and from monetary compensation. How horrendous that must have been for the mothers who both lost their sons and recognition of their grief. It reminds me somewhat of the origins of Mother’s Day in the US. Originally Julia Ward Howe proposed a “Mothers’ Day,” as in a day BY mothers rather than for mothers, to bring women together to stop war and create worldwide peace after the shock and trauma of the US Civil War, including the bereavement of hundreds of thousands of mothers. But, after a 40 year campaign, it finally became “Mother’s Day,” the commercial holiday that has nothing to do with horror, loss, and grief, and is all about a very shallow image of motherhood. Again, I really appreciate your comments about this!
Carolyn here is a related article: Private loss, public mourning: motherhood, memory and grief in Australia during the inter-war years https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612029900200204?
Thank you, Glenys! What a powerful event your Iraq War “weep-in” must have been! That’s so telling that weeping women were banned from the early history of Anzac Day. Weeping and keening go right to the real effects of traumas and force us to really look at them, taking them out of the control of whoever is trying to create the context. A “weep-in” for all we are experiencing now is a marvelous idea!
Thank you, Annelinde! Indeed, envisioning is such an important task for us all to do together. I’m so glad the poem helped!
Such a beautiful poem. Thank you. The clearer we can see the new world on the horizon, the sooner She will be here, I believe. Your words give clarity to the vision.
Thank you so much for writing this Carolyn. As you say: “As I witness the pandemic’s trauma of the past two years, the environmental desecration of the past centuries, humanity’s violence of the past millennia, and more, I wonder what our world would be like if every community had keeners or others of similar traditions to lead us as a global village through grief, to transform our despair into wiser sojourns so that we may birth a better future?” This form of protest statement, keening and/or weeping would be a powerful changer I think. I read somewhere that weeping women were banned from the major Australian war memorial event (Anzac Day) early on its history. I feel it is a bit like menstruation: a powerful reminder of the truth that the patriarchal context wants to remain hidden/silent.
Let’s organise a weep-in! A group of us did do something like that in our local town square when the war with Iraq started: “in solidarity with the weeping women of Iraq” our placards stated, and a woman there did a keening.