The Dagda: The Irish Wind Harvester Part 2 of 2 

The Dagda: The Irish Wind Harvester Part 2 of 2 

Bhima and Dagda: Divine Cooks

Continuing where we left off, there are further curious parallels between Bhima and Dagda to be discussed. One of these comes with Bhima's association with cooking. In the Pandavas' period of exile, Bhima becomes a cook. So strongly is he marked by this vocation that he gains the epithet Ballava, “cook,” and is often depicted in iconography with a cooking bowl or pot of food and a ladle. Dagda, of course, is know for the great cauldron he carries around, from which no one ever comes away unsatisfied, and the ladle he scoops up food with. In iconography this makes the Dagda and Cook Bhima look uncannily alike. Less well-known is the fact that the Dagda is also recorded as a cook, owner of a stupendous “cooking oven”: when his son Bodb Derg inquires what will be his marriage portion, we read that “it is likely the Dagda put up his cooking oven there, that Druimne, son of Luchair made for him at Teamhair. 

And it is the way it was, the axle and the wheel were of wood, and the body was iron, and there were twice nine wheels in its axle, that it might turn the faster; and it was as quick as the quickness of a stream in turning, and there were three times nine spits from it, and three times nine pots. And it used to lie with the cinders and to rise to the height of the roof with the flame” (Lady Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men). Quite a lot of cooking could be done with such an oven. Of course, to pair with his cauldron, the Dagda also has a massive club, capable of killing with one end and reviving with the other. But Bhima has an almost identical iconic weapon of choice (though without the magical properties), a great mace, huge in size and said to be equivalent to a hundred thousand maces. He is often depicted with this weapon and one of his primary titles is Gadahara – “mace weilder.” Dagda's club, like Bhima's, is said to be made of iron. Bhima's mace is described as “a mace made entirely of Saikya iron and coated with gold” (Mahabharata), while in a desctiption of Dagda it is said that “In his hand was a terrible iron staff (lorg…iarnaidi)” (Mesca Ulad ‘The Intoxication of the Ulstermen’). 

As Bhima's mace is said to be equivalent to a hundred thousand maces, Dagda's club is said to be so large it has to be wheeled around on a cart and is “the work of eight men to move, and its track was enough for the boundary ditch of a province” (Cath Maige Tuired). Like Bhima, the Dagda is known for his incredible strength and is a kind of one man army in battle. Just as Bhima surpasses his brothers with the greatest raw battle prowess, the Dagda, when the various warriors of the Tuatha de Danaan announce one by one what means of war they will use, in his turn announces that he will use all of the powers of war mentioned. 

One description of Bhima describes him similarly as a warrior who weilds all weapons and powers of war – sword, bow, dart, steed, elephants, chariot, mace, and strength of arm: “The mighty-armed Bhima of immeasurable energy hath already turned back for the fight. The son of Kunti will certainly slay many of our foremost car-warriors. With sword and bow and dart, with steeds and elephants and men and cars, with his mace made of iron, he will slay crowds of our soldiers.” (Mahabharata, Drona Parva section 22). Finally, one of Dagda's more cryptic epithets is Cera, which is uncertain in translation but either relates to the word for “jet,” which could connect again to a jet of air or wind, or could alternately mean “creator” (Monaghan, 83). 

It is not entirely clear if the Dagda has a role in the cosmic creation proper, but he does do plenty of building and assigning of the dwellings of the gods, and in many places is seen to be a great shaper of the landscape. Bhima likewise carries the title “creator” – Hanyalaurya – though again his role in the creation is not entirely clear. However, about this sort of “creation” we can refer to Eliade, to a passage that seems to accurately describe the Dagda's role as well: “...this " creative " element is very marked in Zeus, not on the cosmogonic level (for the universe was not created by him), but on the bio-cosmic level : he governs the sources of fertility, he is master of the rain. He is " creator " because it is he who " makes fruitful " (he too sometimes becomes a bull ; cf. the myth of Europa). And his " creation " depends primarily on what the weather does, particularly the rain. His supremacy is at once fatherly and kingly; he guarantees the well-being of the family and of nature both by his creative powers, and by his authority as guardian of the order of things” (Patterns in Comparitive Religion).

If we continue the comparisons to the those between the god Vayu himself and the Dagda, we find that both have a central myth about a son who is killed for some great transgression and then restored to life after their father grieves powerfully for them. For Dagda this son is Cermait Milbel; for Vayu it is Hanuman. Hanuman is born to a married human woman when she catches some “sacred pudding” dropped by the wind god. Hanuman later on is killed by Indra for trying to take something that is not his – the sun – and his father Vayu then withdraws dejectedly from the world, causing great suffering to all beings by his absence. Vayu finally returns when Shiva decides to revive Hanuman. The Dagda's son, Cermait Milbel, is killed by Lugh after committing a sin perhaps comparable to stealing the sun: having an affair with Lugh's wife. The Dagda is said to have cried tears of blood for him and carried his body on his back as he withdrew to the East, where later on he revived him with the healing staff he acquired there. Though Cermait's birth is not described, Dagda's other son Aengus Og is indeed fathered on a married woman. The Dagda doesn't drop sacred pudding on her, but it amounts to the same thing.

Wind God as Harvest Father

The wind god in the Near East, such as the Sumerian Enlil, was the primary agricultural god as well, and may have influenced the idea of the Harvest Father in the mediterranean and other parts of Europe as there is evidence that Enlil's usurpation of the sky kingdom was borrowed by the Hurrians and then by the Greeks with their god Cronus. We may infer that the easy equation of wind god and harvest god was guided more than anything by the prominent role of the wind in scattering seeds and leading the way for the rains.

But furthermore, and perhaps less well-known, the Indo-Iranics themselves also believed in the connection between the wind god and the agricultural function. As one commentator on the Rig Veda puts it, “Vayu is propitiated because the wind conveys the coming rains and the onset of monsoons, which are considered good omens by farmers for cultivation of their lands and those looking for water,” and that soma is offered to him “so that he makes the winds pleasant and less destructive” (Jayaram V). We learn further that Vayu “also brings medicines to cure people. For his sake cows yield milk, and to him the coward prays for luck” (Jayaram V). 

Vayu himself is depicted holding a goad (though alternately a club), which has generally been used as a farming tool to spur oxen or other cattle as they draw a plough or cart. We find also that one of Vayu's names is Anil, which like the name Enlil translates to the word for the wind itself. The spelling of the name Anil is not an exact match to his counterpart in nearby Sumer, Enlil, but it comes strangely close nonetheless.

Wind or Sky God?

As the Sumerian and other examples demonstrate, when an atmospheric god took over for or usurped the kingship of the Primordial Sky, he often inherited many of the traits and abililities, even myths, from the Sky god. So it is for Enlil, and so it also is for Vedic Varuna, who inherits the role and omniscience of Father Sky or Dyaus Pitr, and is then referred to as though he is the sky itself. Zeus absorbs traits and roles of his predecessors as well, becoming an all-in-all deity, copious and omnipotent, referred to with the celestial name Zeus despite the fact that he was an inheritor of the sky throne seemingly multiple generations from the primordial sky. Likewise, it seems, with the Dagda. At various points Dagda appears to be the most fatherly, the most absolute of the gods, the most primordial, or the Divine Masculine incarnate. 

This is all well and good, and yet as demonstrated, due to his abundance of additional Vayu-like characteristics, this must be due to inheritance of roles and abilities from Father Sky, in the same general fashion as we see with Enlil. The Dagda is not actually the most primordial father god and progenitor of all the gods in the Irish divine genealogy and is also clearly more than simply the great and withdrawn sky. He has the whole set of traits and myths connected with the Indo-European god of the wind on top of whatever he embodies of the primordial “Dyaus.” Somewhat like Thor, yet even more explicitly and fully, he matches the archetype of the wind god and cannot be summed up merely as the god of sky. 

To a remarkable degree the Dagda preserves the archetype of the brutish and powerful lord of life and wind, maintaining a broad set of shared elements found in the oldest texts in both India and the Germanic world. The idea that the Dagda is simply the primordial sky god in fact has the preponderance of cases against it and thus a more daunting burden of proof: that is, if the Dagda was this original sky god, “Dyaus,” it would mean that among almost all of the Indo-European branches, indeed among almost all pantheons of the western and near-eastern world, the Irish alone preserved the god Dyaus as an active and central sovereign (and warrior) god rather than as a resigned presence whose kingship has been taken by one of his sons (whether Varuna, Odin, Zeus or Enlil). 

One would be forced to argue that the people residing at the farthest western reaches of the expansion from the Indo-European homeland had been the unique and miraculous preservers of the first celestial sovereign, who even in the Rig Veda has already become abstract and distant. The Celtic Irish are after all a fairly typical Indo-European people. It should be expected for the primary active gods of the Indo-Europeans to be somewhere present in the Irish pantheon until proven otherwise. And as for the god of wind, so important to the Indo-European divine world picture, he has been woefully unaccounted for in Irish mythological study.

Eliade again has a helpful distinction. There are two perennial lines of development for gods who inherit the sky from Dyaus, found across many mythologies, he says – these are roughly the Varuna/Mitra line and the Vayu/Indra/Rudra/Parjanya line; that is, the “absolute sovereign (despot), guardian of the law” sky god and the “creator, supremely male, spouse of the great Earth Goddess, giver of rain... fecundator...ritual and mythical connection with bulls” sky god (Patterns in Comparative Religion). Thus we can perhaps begin to understand the relationship of Dagda and Lugh as contrasting sovereigns within the Irish pantheon. Dagda represents the Vayu(-Indra-Rudra-Prajanya) path of inheritance, probably influenced or even given greater authority by syncretism with a preexisting Neolithic Harvest Father, and Lugh represents the complementary or rival Mitra-Varuna path. Each in their way reflect a part of the total sky sovereignty which has passed to them.

What we are left with in the Good God Dagda then is a god of druidry, of giving and taking life, of overpowering and creative vital force, of the cosmic masculine that unites with and masters the destructive feminine, of strength, speed, battle, resolution, of agriculture and of harvesting with great appetite, and, like his Vedic counterpart, a god of wind, breath, and prana – in the end, the Dagda is the god that cannot be done without, he is the Germ and Regeneration of the World. 

Bibliography:

Destiny of a Warrior - Georges Dumezil

Mitra-Varuna - Georges Dumezil

Patterns in Comparative Religion – Mircea Eliade

The Dagda, Thor and ATU 1148B: Analogues, Parallels, or Correspondences? - John Shaw

Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma - Robert Charles Zaehner

Gods and Fighting Men - Lady Augusta Gregory

Mesca Ulad 'The Intoxication of the Ulstermen'

The Metrical Dindshenchas Corpus of Electronic Texts.

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Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

Chandogya Upanishad

The Mahabharata

Rig Veda

The Indian Theogony – Sukumari Bhattacharji

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Myths of Babylonia and Assyria – Donald A. Mackenzie

Monaghan, Patricia. The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore

Lebor Gabála Érenn.

Cath Maige Tuireadh. Trans. Elizabeth A. Gray.

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storyarchaeology.com Isolde Carmody

hinduwebsite.com Jarayam V