BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… THE DIVINE HAG. The Ozarks are beautiful in springtime, but springtime is not yet here. I stand atop my own meadow mountain, wind gusts hitting something like 50 miles an hour, and squint into the gale, into the dust, briefly losing my footing and catching myself from falling as the wind intensifies. Brown grasses ripple. The bare elm limbs above make popping sounds. Dead branches fall, crashing. I remind myself not to stand long beneath the trees. To the South, bright sun. To the West, squalls, rain sheets moving in sharp line, marching northward. Narrowly, the storm will miss me, my house. I breathe a sigh of relief, even while whispering a prayer for those in the path of the late winter storms. Lightning traces the western edge of the horizon. The Cailleach is strong tonight.
The old Scots-Irish settlers in the Ozarks would know what I was talking about. The Cailleach is a weather-personification deity, the divine hag of winter. Her season began in November and continues until the end of April. She is the harsh winter wind, the ice and sleet and freeze that, in an unforgiving landscape, yields no mercy. Man, woman, child, all can die before the terror of the Cailleach, the goddess who froze the mountains and breathed depth into the whirlpools. The Cailleach commands snow and sleet, wind and lightning with abandon. Let the old German cunning folk of the Ozarks have their folk magic and herb gathering and healing stones cut from the belly of a doe. Leave instead to the Scots-Irish, Bible in hand as they kept their old rites to ward against evil, the great sky magic of the North. Leave it to the Scots-Irish to understand magic and death and hope in equal measure.
As I write late this Saturday night, photos of devastated towns across Missouri and Arkansas continue to flood my timeline. I pause over the video of the tornado filmed from beneath the lighted canopy of the gas station in Rolla. I’ve gotten gas there. Too many families are left with nothing but wreckage of their former lives. My heart breaks, even as I breathe thanks of my own, mostly intact, life. Storms of all kinds take their toll, storms that are seen, storms that are unseen. No matter how we cut it, life is rough.
Patronizing images of settler wagons and sunset grandeur tell little of the real story of American westward expansion. We remember the pioneers with single-dimension homage, sometimes heroically, now more often with trivialization: White settlers storming stolen land, driven by misplaced destiny. Easy story to remember, easy story to catalog. We recite meaningless “land acknowledgements” stripped of human context in order to make us feel better about ourselves before returning to our own lives as bland consumers, cut off from a real world teeming around us, a real world that sometimes slaps us back into reality with storms from within or without. The Cailleach cannot be spurned forever.
Human beings are complex things, just as is the natural world in which we reside. We cannot be summated by a brand, a job, an academic degree. A single human is the cosmos in micro, unimaginably complex, teeming with life and sentience now only beginning to be understood again. Our modern-day ignorance is due to all we have thrown away over the past hundred years, victims of our great-grandparents’, our grandparents’, our parents’ own hubris. Those old Ozarks superstitions? Hiding beneath the superstitions lie ancient knowledge, secrets to the complexities of our personal and outer cosmos. And therein lies the secret to the divine hag.
I thumbed carefully through the stack of LIFE magazines from the 1950s, magazines handed off by a neighbor who was clearing space from her shelves. “Take all of them you want,” she said and I took her at her word, I an ingenuous 14 year old. My mom’s eyes narrowed in disapproval, even as I staggered under the weight of the stacked magazines. There was cool art on the yellowed pages. Who knew what sort of interesting reading was hiding within. The magazines proved less interesting than I had hoped, mostly housekeeping and beauty tips and a hundred ways to use gumdrops for a classy bridge party dessert. But one thing that stuck with me was the emphasis on beauty. Women were supposed to be young, beautiful, perfect. Hags were definitely not part of the party.
Perhaps the real nail in the coffin was the Disney retelling of the old fairytales. Deep archetypal lessons of the complexity of the world explored through the intricacies of male and female differences were lost. Good, the beautiful princess, bad the evil old witch. The witch became single-dimensional, with no lessons of her own, only good for getting pushed off a cliff. The Cailleach would not suffer such one-dimensionality without a cost, for she was winter and storm, and just as unavoidable. Evil? Maybe. But, like winter, she would go, and come again. Light and dark, good and evil. In the wheel of life, we must face both, braving tragedy and joy in the measure of the fates, even as we hope and claw our way to the gates of heaven.
A modern world’s promise suggests false hope, the possibility of no pain, no strife, all the good things, if only for the right price. If that is our premise, we will remain forever incomplete, growing old but never wise. Our price in this life is pain, challenge, horror, sorrow. Old, “primitive” generations understood such. We often remain broken, victimized by our own simple reality, lacking in any way to tell the story. Darkness is there of course, the divine and terrifying hag, bringer of doom and death. But the hag also reminds us of simple hopes — that nothing lasts forever, that even the ugly and the old bring great lessons, and even in the darkest moment there is faith, should we but reach out to one another and light a candle, believing for a moment, even in the night.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2025
