DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

Geas, geasa, geis : (Gaeilge - Irish) pron. “gesh”; plural geasa, Scottish Gaelic geis
1. A kind of magical obligation, prohibition, or taboo that a person may possess. It is usually imposed on magical people. As it is a sacred duty to maintain the peace and prosperity of the tribe, and as the chieftain is married to the local land goddess (goddess of sovereignty), his life is surrounded and infused with magic. The geas upon him are there to help him avoid unbalancing that magic. Great heroes could also be bound by geasa, and so long as the hero observes his geasa he will be successful and victorious.

There are several ways to receive a geas. A parent can grant one to her children at birth, a chieftain or druid can impose one upon a criminal as a punishment, or a druid can determine by oracular means what geasa a person already has. In heroic mythology there is a trend in which male heroes receive their geas from women, as in the cases of Cu Chullain and Diarmaid ua Duibhne. A hero may lose a gamble of cards or a chess game to a hag, and she imposes a geas upon him as her reward for winning; typically a geas of that kind is a requirement to perform some impossible task.

The risk of breaking geas is great. To break a geas is to act contrary to the forces of nature, and the result is the death of the person, or some other great social catastrophe. Knowing this, many heroes met their end when their enemies discovered the heroes’ geas and plotted a situation in which it was impossible to avoid breaking them. For example, Cu Chullain was under a geas not to eat the meat of dogs, and also to always sample food being prepared at a roadside. On the day he was killed in battle, he stopped to sample some food according to his geas but it was dog meat, and so he could not avoid breaking one or the other geasa.

Each geasa is unique and appropriate to each person, and can have any sort of purpose whatsoever. A geas can be a blessing or a curse. Cu Chullain’s prohibition against eating dog meat is related to his name, “the Hound of Cullain”, so it would seem that for him to eat dog meat would be a kind of cannibalism. This personal and intimate aspect is why the geas is so serious to those who possess them, and why they are usually kept secret.

2. Geasa : A modern Celtic “black metal” band, often classified as Goth, whose music is recorded under the Season of Mist label. A review of their 1999 album “Angel’s Cry” can be found here.