Whispers of the Seven Sisters: Unearthing a Divine Family in the Kerry Mountains
The wind that scours the mountains of Sliabh Luachra has a voice. It’s a sound I’ve come to know intimately, living here on the slopes of Dá Chích Anann, the Paps of Anu. It carries the scent of wet heather and ancient stone, and sometimes, if you’re quiet enough, it carries stories. Out here, on the borderlands of Cork and Kerry, the line between landscape and mythology is not just thin; it is altogether absent. You don’t learn the stories from a book; you walk through them every day.
The two mountains that dominate my horizon are not merely geological formations. They are the breasts of a goddess, Anu, the great mother of the Tuatha Dé Danann. They are a profound, unignorable statement of feminine power, of nurture and fertility, etched into the very body of Ireland. They are the centre of my world.
About ten kilometres from my home, nestled in a fold of this sacred land, lies a place of quieter, but no less potent, mystery: a megalithic stone circle. It’s a place where the energy shifts, where the wind’s voice seems to drop to a conspiratorial whisper. Locally, it’s known as the Seven Sisters.
For years, that name has been a beautiful puzzle. The most immediate, scholarly answer is an astronomical one. The name “Seven Sisters” is almost universally associated with the Pleiades star cluster, that glittering knot of stars that has guided farmers and mystics for millennia. Many, if not most, of our ancient stone circles are celestial clocks, their alignments marking the solstices or the rising of significant stars. It’s a valid, logical explanation. And yet, it has always felt incomplete to me. Standing within that circle, feeling the immense presence of the Paps nearby, the answer felt rooted more in the earth beneath my feet than in the distant, cold fire of the cosmos. The name felt personal to this place.
I began to wonder if the whispers on the wind were trying to tell a different story, one not of the sky, but of the soil. A story of a divine family whose presence defines this land. The answer, I’ve come to believe, doesn’t lie in a constellation, but in a genealogy. The key isn’t a star chart, but a goddess—a mother named Ernmas.
The Great Mother and Her Brood
To understand the Seven Sisters of this stone circle, you have to go back to the source. In the sprawling, tangled family tree of the Tuatha Dé Danann, Ernmas stands as a powerful, if somewhat obscure, matriarch. She is described simply in the old texts as a “she-farmer,” a title that belies her immense significance. She is a wellspring of divinity, and from her came a cascade of daughters who would shape the destiny and identity of Ireland.
It’s in charting her descendants that the local name for the stone circle snaps into focus, revealing itself not as a generic tag, but as a sophisticated and breathtakingly specific piece of preserved lore. Ernmas had, by my count, seven famous daughters, often appearing in powerful groups of three.
The First Trinity: The Land Itself
The first and perhaps most foundational of her daughters are the three great sovereignty goddesses of Ireland: Ériu, Banba, and Fódla. These are not minor spirits; they are the living essence of the island. Their story is one of possession and identity. When the final invaders, the Milesians, arrived, each of the three sisters met them and asked that her name be given to the country. The Milesians agreed, and while Ériu’s name—in the form of Éire—prevailed, Banba and Fódla are still used today as poetic names for Ireland.
They represent the very soil, the political and spiritual right to rule, and the soul of the nation. They are the land given form and voice. To think of them is to think of the ground I walk on, the peat and the rock and the running water. They are the daughters who are the kingdom. Ernmas, through them, gave birth to Ireland itself. This alone provides a powerful trio of sisters, their influence radiating from the core of the island’s being. But their mother was not done. The land needs more than just a name; it needs protection, passion, and the power to determine its own fate.
The Second Trinity: The Storm and the Soul
If the first trio represents the body of the land, the second represents its fierce and unpredictable spirit. Ernmas also gave birth to the three great war goddesses, a triad of power so immense and terrifying that their names were spoken with reverence and awe: Badb, Macha, and The Morrigan.
To label them simply as “war goddesses” is to do them a disservice. They were far more. They were shapeshifters, prophets, and forces of nature.
Badb, whose name means “crow,” was the one who would wash the armour of warriors doomed to die, her cries on the battlefield inducing terror and confusion. Macha, a complex figure with links to horses, sovereignty, and the plains of Armagh, could outrun any steed and curse men who wronged her with the pains of childbirth.
And then there is The Morrigan. The “Great Queen” or “Phantom Queen.” A being of incredible power, she was a strategist, a guardian of the territory, and a manipulator of fate. She could appear as a beautiful woman, a fearsome hag, an eel, a wolf, or the ubiquitous raven, flying over battles to guide the outcome. It was her relationship with the hero Cú Chulainn that cemented her place as a primary force in the mythological cycles, a goddess who offered both patronage and destruction.
Crucially for this investigation, the ancient Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland) explicitly names these three as daughters of Ernmas. It clarifies that The Morrigan is a distinct individual, but also part of this sisterhood. This gives us our next three sisters, bringing the total to six. Six powerful, divine daughters of a single mother, each embodying a fundamental aspect of the land and its power. Six stones in a circle. But the local name insists on seven.
Finding the Seventh Sister: The Mother in the Mountain
So where do we find our seventh? The answer, I believe, has been looking down on me all along. The seventh sister is Anu herself.
This is the theory that makes the landscape sing. It connects the stones to the mountains, the daughters to their most famous sibling, and the entire mythological framework to this specific place.
Here’s why it feels so right:
First, there is the sheer geographical significance. The stone circle sits in the shadow of the Paps of Anu. It would be an almost wilful ignorance to believe that a sacred site so close to the physical embodiment of a goddess would not be dedicated to her and her kin. The circle is within her sacred territory; it belongs to her story.
Second, there is the interchangeability of names in the old texts. The name Anann—a clear variant of Anu—is used in the Lebor Gabála Érenn as another name for The Morrigan. This creates a beautiful, cyclical connection. It suggests that Anu is not separate from her more warlike sisters, but that her essence—the essence of the land’s power—is also present within the Great Queen. This blurring of identities is common in Irish myth and points to a deeper, unified source of power.
Third, and most poetically, Anu is the primordial mother goddess of the group. While Ernmas is the great matriarch, Anu is the one whose body is the fertile land of Munster. She represents abundance, wealth, and the nurturing power from which all things grow. By placing her as the seventh sister in the circle, she becomes both a sibling and the archetypal mother figure who binds the others. She is the source and the culmination.
So, the Seven Sisters of the stone circle are not the distant Pleiades. They are the daughters of Ernmas, a divine council set in stone:
- Ériu (Sovereignty)
- Banba (Sovereignty)
- Fódla (Sovereignty)
- Badb (War & Fate)
- Macha (War & Power)
- The Morrigan (War & Sovereignty)
- Anu (The Earth Mother)
This is a complete, self-contained, and profoundly local explanation. The name isn’t a coincidence; it’s a testament, a piece of high mythological knowledge preserved in the simple, everyday language of place.
The Fathers: A Tangled Thread
To add another layer of richness to the story, the myths also give us clues about the fathers of these divine women. It seems Ernmas had powerful consorts. The Dagda, the great “Good God” and chieftain of the Tuatha Dé, is most often named as the father of the sovereignty goddesses, Ériu, Banba, and Fódla. This links the land itself to the highest kingly authority.
Meanwhile, a more mysterious figure, Elcmar of the Brugh (Newgrange), is named as the father of the war goddesses, The Morrigan and her sisters. This suggests that Ernmas partnered with different aspects of divine masculine power to create daughters with vastly different domains—one to create the kingdom, another to forge its protectors.
This doesn’t contradict the story; it deepens it. It shows Ernmas as an autonomous, powerful goddess in her own right, choosing her partners and weaving a complex web of alliances that would birth the very soul of a nation.
Walking in the Story
To live here is to feel this story in your bones. The wind I hear is no longer just moving air; it carries the battle cries of Badb and the whispers of The Morrigan. The mountains are no longer just hills; they are the nurturing body of the mother, Anu. And the old stone circle down the road is no longer just a megalithic puzzle; it is a family portrait, a gathering of the seven powerful goddesses who shaped this land.
The stories we tell about a place are what give it meaning. They are a form of mapping just as vital as any survey. The local name “Seven Sisters” is a map of myth, one that has preserved an intricate piece of our heritage. It reminds me that the old gods are not gone. They are simply quiet, waiting in the stones and in the hills for those who are willing to listen to the whispers on the wind.