Who was Crom?

 

Here used to stand a lofty idol, that caused many a fight.

Its name was the Crom Cruach; Its caused every tribe to live without peace.

He was their God, old wizened Crom, hidden by many mists.

And for the folk who believed in him, the eternal Kingdom of Heaven shall never be theirs.

For Him they ingloriously slew their firstborn babies, with much wailing and peril, and poured their blood round Crom Cruach.

- Mag Slecht

A new, rewritten version of The Spear of Crom will be published by Ares/Head of Zeus on November 10. The date is a coincidence, but quite appropriate. Up until Saint Patrick arrived in Ireland in the 5th Century, at this time of year we would have been preparing to sacrifice our first born children to the old God, Crom.

Old Crom has largely been forgotten in recent years. Crom? Isn’t he Conan the Barbarian’s God? - accompanied by a scoff -  was the reaction many of the serious historical fictionados to mention of him; The implication being that sword and sandal fantasy has no place in “real” historical fiction.

The more discerning may remember Crom as the Maggot God who opposed Slaine MacRoth in the epic 200AD comic series back in the 1980s and 90s.  However Crom was an actual Irish deity borrowed by Robert E. Howard for his own mythos. 

It may surprise some that unlike a lot of the Celtic deities who modern day pagans will rhyme off from the many internet pages about them (the Dagda, Lugh the Long Armed, Bridget etc.), the surviving evidence we have for Crom comes from much older sources than an of the others, so could well be seen to be more authentic.  

Irish Pagan Gods - Ulster Museum

So who was Crom?

Two characters appear in early medieval Gaelic writings who go by the name: Cromm Crúaich and Crom Dubh. The current consensus appears to be that they were the same entity.  Crom might mean bent or stooped, thunder or even head or chief. Cruaich is a mound, stack or heap, usually of grain or hay - a harvest - but also a mound of corpses after a battle, the sort of the way “mowing down” and “aftermath” in English have become associated with war. So the “Chief of the Harvests” could be one way to look at his name. 

Dubh means black, which sort of shows how his reputation changed as he slipped into Christian memory. Though, if some of the legends are true about how we used to worship him, then he could well be seen as a very dark deity.

The Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick from the 9th Century mentions Crom in the form of a statue covered with gold and silver and surrounded by twelve other bronze figures. Patrick approaches it and raises his crozier, at which the statue of Crom falls down face-forward and the surrounding figures all sink into the earth. A demon, the pagan spirit who inhabited the stone, appears and Patrick curses him off to Hell. The imprint of Patrick’s crozier remains in the stone.

The same story, with the stone imprinted by the crozier, is repeated in another life of Saint Patrick, this time from the 12th Century.

The Dindsenchas (“Lore of places”) go into more detail and it’s from there that the poem at the start of this piece comes from. The Annals of the Four Masters tell the same tale, which was that there was a festival at that this time of year which honoured Crom at a gathering in Magh Slécht, which is in modern county Cavan.  

Our modern-day Halloween is the descendant of an important pagan festival called Samhain that preceded it and which shares many of the associated elements of darkness, fear and the supernatural. Samhain was one of the quarter-days of the year celebrated by the ancient people of Ireland. A word very close to Samhain appears on the 2nd Century AD Coligny Calendar, suggesting that Celtic cousins in Europe celebrated the festival too. It was the celtic new year when the old year died and (hopefully) the new year was born. There are lots of references in Early Irish Literature to great clan gatherings and festivals being held at this time of year, and the adventures of heroes and kings that take place at them seem to revolve around a lot of drinking and either the dead or evil fairies coming back from the otherworld to wreck some form of havoc.

According to the lore, ever since the time of King Érimón (sometime around 1700–1684 BC), folk gathered at Magh Slécht in Cavan at Samhain to worship Crom. Crom was represented by gold statue surrounded by twelve other stone figures and was propitiated with the sacrifice of first-born children. In return, Crom would guarantee a good harvest the next year.

At the mention of human sacrifice, people often start to get a bit uneasy and it can be common to blame biased Christian sources for trying to blacken the previous religion’s name. However when we look around the other cultures that existed at the time, it would be more unusual if the ancient Irish didn’t engage in the practice than if they did. We have, after all, quite literally found the bodies. 

Bog bodies (of which there are many Irish examples) exhibit such a degree of overkill that it points to some form of ritual, the only alternative being that for centuries psychopathic killers across northern Europe dispatched their victims using remarkably similar methods. Classical writers like Julius Caesar (again admittedly biased against the non-Roman Celts) all attest that the Druids sacrificed people to their Gods. As someone who grew up in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, the idea that the idea that Irish people would kill other Irish people for religious reasons isn’t exactly beyond the pale.

Gallagh Man bog body

In the Annals of the four Masters, Saint Patrick uses a more practical sledgehammer to break the idol and this is where myth and legend starts to merge with archaeology. 

The Killycluggin Stone was found near the town of Killycluggin, County Cavan, in the area that once was Magh Slécht. It is cone-shaped and covered in Iron Age La Tène carvings. When it was discovered it was broken into two pieces and had been buried near to a stone circle where it may have originally stood inside. 

The Killycluggin Stone, Cavan County Museum

So in summary what do we know about Crom? Well it looks like he was worshipped in ancient Ireland, particularly in the north west. He was associated with standing stones - an ancient name for a ring of standing stones was a “cromlech”- and his worship included human sacrifice carried out at Samhain. It’s easy to see how the terror and horror instilled by what went on that night could still echo in the modern Halloween. 

The new version of Spear of Crom is published on November 10.