Crom Cruach

The Irish prayed to him by lying face-down on the ground. They called the field where his idol stood Magh Slecht, the Plain of Prostrations. He was the chief idol of pre-Christian Ireland according to the archaeologist Michael J. O’Kelly, a gold figure surrounded by twelve subordinate stones in the southeast of the Parish of Templeport, in west County Cavan. The Irish gave him their firstborn children in exchange for milk and grain. They worshipped him on Samhain eve, the night the year died. The high king Tigernmas and three quarters of his army are said to have died at his feet on one such Samhain. In the fifth century a Romano-British missionary named Patricius arrived from Britain with the staff of Jesus in his hand and broke him.

This is the most documented destruction of a Celtic god in any source we have. The story is told three times, in three different texts, across three centuries. The idol he destroyed was real enough that a piece of it, broken and partly buried, was dug up in 1921 in the same townland and now sits in a museum in Ballyjamesduff.

Names and Etymology

His most common form is Cromm Cruaich, modern Irish Crom Cruach. Crom means bent, crooked, or stooped. The 19th-century lexicographer Edward O’Reilly suggested an alternative root, cruim, meaning thunder. Cruach is a noun for a pile, heap, mound, or stack: of grain, of hay, of slaughtered fighters, of hills that look like piles. So at minimum he is the Stooped One of the Mound. At maximum he is the Thundering One of the Slaughtered.

The 9th-century Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick calls him Cenn Cruach, the Head or Chief of the Mound. Jocelin of Furness, writing in the 12th century, calls him Cenncroithi and translates this as the head of all gods. The 14th-century Book of McGovern, written at Magh Slecht itself, simply says local women trembled in fear when they had to walk past his stone in Kilnavert. The folk continuation called him Crom Dubh, the Black Crooked One.

Appearance

According to the dinnseanchas poem in the 12th-century Book of Leinster, the central image was a figure of gold. The 9th-century Tripartite Life describes it as covered with gold and silver. The same texts call it a wizened god, hidden by mists, a weak image. Around it stood twelve subordinate figures, sometimes described as stone, sometimes as bronze. Some interpreters have read this configuration as the sun encircled by the twelve signs of the zodiac, which would make Crom a solar deity as well as a fertility god.

The shape of the central image has been argued for two centuries. Was it aniconic, a plain cone of stone, or anthropomorphic, with a human face? The Christian hagiographies all assume the latter. The Quarta Vita of Saint Patrick, written around 800 CE, says the demon in the idol turned the stone toward its right side as Patrick approached. The Tripartite Life says the idol leaned toward the sunset, “for it is southwards its face was, i.e. to Tara, and the mark of Patrick’s staff still remains in its left side.” A cone has no left or right, no face, no facing direction. A figure with a head does.

The Iron-Age stone now identified with him reinforces this reading. The top of the Killycluggin Stone bears a hair-motif found on other La Tene sculpted heads, including the famous Celtic hero from Mšecké Žehrovice in the Czech Republic. Whatever face it once bore was smashed to pieces.

The Cult at Magh Slecht

The Plain of Prostrations is a small one. Three square miles in the south of the Parish of Templeport, bounded south by Templeport Lough, north by Slieve Rushen mountain, east by the Shannon-Erne Waterway, west by the River Blackwater. It contained, before modern farming and quarrying broke much of it, more than eighty ancient monuments: nine megalithic tombs, three stone circles, nine standing stones, seven ring barrows, two stone-rows, six crannogs, thirty-three rath enclosures or souterrains. It is the densest concentration of prehistoric ritual building in County Cavan and possibly in Ireland.

In that landscape, the cult of Crom was the central rite. The sacrifice was the firstborn child. The exchange was milk and grain. The cycle was Samhain eve, the night of October the thirty-first, the same night that became Halloween and All Saints’ Day. The worshippers knelt on both knees and pressed their foreheads to the soil, the same prostration posture documented in many ancient and modern devotional traditions.

The cult was old enough that the dinnseanchas tradition traced it back to Erimon, the legendary first Milesian king of Ireland.

The Death of Tigernmas

The most famous Samhain at Magh Slecht ended in mass death. The high king Tigernmas, with about four thousand of his army, died at the idol while prostrating themselves. The Annals of the Four Masters date the event to 1413 BCE. The Irish chronicle tradition calls this the Seventh Plague of Ireland. Tigernmas’s grave at Magh Slecht is still marked by a standing stone.

The ancient texts treat the catastrophe as supernatural punishment, the god turning on his worshippers. Modern readings have suggested mass-poisoning from contaminated grain or some kind of epidemic carried by the autumn pilgrimage. The chronicle gives no medical detail. It says they bowed and they died.

The memory that survived in the same county was that Crom could turn lethal as readily as he could be fed.

The Destruction by Saint Patrick

Patrick reached Magh Slecht in the fifth century CE, the same century the Roman empire fell in the West. The encounter does not appear in his own writings, the surviving Confessio and Letter to Coroticus, and it does not appear in the two earliest 7th-century Patrick biographies by Muirchu and Tirechan. J.B. Bury argued there is a missing passage in Tirechan that originally contained it. Ludwig Bieler, who edited those biographies in the 20th century, would not commit either way.

The 9th-century Tripartite Life preserves the scene. Patrick raises the Bachall Isu, the Staff of Jesus, and the central idol falls forward, face-down toward the Hill of Tara. The gold and silver covering it crumble to dust. The imprint of the staff is left burned into the bare stone. The twelve surrounding idols are swallowed into the earth at the same instant. The demon who had inhabited the image appears, and Patrick curses him and casts him to hell.

Jocelin, in the 12th century, retells the same scene with little change. The Metrical Dindshenchas simply records that “Patrick of Armagh plied a sledge-hammer on Crom from his head to his foot: he removed with rough soldier-deed the weak image that was here.” The grammatical detail of “head to foot” is again telling. A god with a head and feet. An anthropomorphic figure.

Patrick founded a church at Magh Slecht under Saint Banban the Wise. The original town was called Fossa Slecht or Rath Slecht, from which the wider area took its name. A holy well, Tobar Padraig, marks the place. A Christian site grew up where the cult had stood.

The Killycluggin Stone

In 1921 a stone was dug out of the ground in the townland of Killycluggin, in the same Magh Slecht plain. It had been broken into several pieces and partly buried close to a Bronze Age stone circle, inside which it had probably once stood. Reconstructed, the stone is at least six feet high. At the base were four rectangular adjoining panels, each ninety centimeters wide, totaling a circumference of three meters and sixty centimeters. The decoration is La Tene in style, datable to the second half of the first millennium BCE, the late Iron Age. The top bears the same hair-motif found on other Celtic sculpted heads.

Local tradition in Magh Slecht had always held that the Killycluggin Stone was the Crom stone. The 14th-century Book of McGovern placed Crom at Kilnavert, beside the road, where local women trembled passing it. The original Killycluggin Stone is now preserved in the Cavan County Museum at Ballyjamesduff. An imperfect replica stands beside the road about three hundred meters from the original site, on its base, leaning slightly to one side. The lean may explain the name: Crom, the bent one, the stooped one.

The identification with Crom Cruach is widely held but archaeologically tentative. O’Kelly preferred to call the stone the image of Crom Dubh, the folk continuation of the same deity. Either way, what survives is broken and headless. The smash is consistent with the hagiographies. Something with a face was destroyed there.

Crom Dubh and the Folk Afterlife

After Patrick, Crom did not vanish. He went underground and changed his name. He reappears in folk tradition as Crom Dubh, the Black Crooked One.

The folklorist Maire MacNeill spent decades collecting the surviving Lughnasadh customs of Ireland for her 1962 study The Festival of Lughnasa. What she found, again and again, was a struggle for the harvest between two figures. One, Crom Dubh, guards the grain as his own treasure. The other, originally the god Lugh, must seize it for mankind. In some versions the contest is over a woman called Eithne, who represents the grain itself. In folk Christianized retellings, Lugh is replaced by Saint Patrick. Crom Dubh becomes a pagan chief who owns a granary or a bull, opposes Patrick, is overcome, and converts. The harvest is returned.

This is recognizably the older mythological structure of an underworld god who must be confronted to release the grain. The Greeks knew it as the cycle of Hades and Persephone, the Mesopotamians as Inanna’s descent, the Egyptians as Osiris dying and rising. MacNeill’s argument is that the Irish cycle preserved the same structural pattern, with Crom Dubh in the role of the grain-hoarding underworld lord and Lugh, then Patrick, in the role of the bringer-back.

The festival itself survived under multiple names: Crom Dubh Sunday, Garland Sunday, Bilberry Sunday, Mountain Sunday, Lammas Sunday. Held on the last Sunday in July or the first Sunday in August. The traditional gathering was called Comthineol Chruim Duibh, the Congregation of Crom Dubh. Families ate the first fruits of the harvest: new bacon, new cabbage, new potatoes. A man who could not provide such food for his family was called a “wind farmer.” Pilgrims climbed hills and mountains. The most famous of these climbs is still active: Reek Sunday, the pilgrimage up Croagh Patrick, in late July, by tens of thousands of pilgrims a year.

Modern Survival

The Killycluggin Stone is in the Cavan County Museum at Ballyjamesduff, missing its head, leaning slightly in the way the name crom describes. The replica beside the road is locally called the Crom stone. Tobar Padraig, Saint Patrick’s well, still marks the plain where the idol once stood. Reek Sunday continues every July. The local women of Magh Slecht no longer tremble passing Kilnavert on their way to market.

The name itself reached one further audience. In the early 1930s in Cross Plains, Texas, a pulp writer named Robert E. Howard, drawing on his Celtic-revival reading, borrowed the name for the indifferent mountain god of his fictional Cimmerians, whose chief warrior was Conan. In John Milius’s 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, Arnold Schwarzenegger kneels in the snow before the final battle and asks Crom for one thing only: revenge. He invokes a god whose name was carved into a real Iron-Age stone in County Cavan and whose worshippers Saint Patrick scattered fifteen hundred years before.

The film does not mention this. Most viewers do not know. A god broken in the fifth century became a pulp deity in the twentieth and a movie god in 1982. The stone is still in the museum.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Metrical Dindshenchas, ‘Mag Slecht’ poem, Book of Leinster (12th century, compiled from older oral material)
• Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick / Bethu Phatraic (9th century)
• Jocelin of Furness, Life and Acts of St. Patrick (12th century)
• Killycluggin Stone, Iron Age (second half of 1st millennium BCE), Cavan County Museum, Ballyjamesduff
• Maire MacNeill, The Festival of Lughnasa (Oxford UP, 1962)
• Michael J. O’Kelly, Early Ireland: An Introduction to Irish Prehistory (Cambridge UP, 1989)