Anu

Stand on the right road in east Kerry as the day closes and two hills rise ahead in near-perfect symmetry, each crowned with a heap of grey stone set exactly where a nipple would sit. The light goes amber across the heather, the wind carries the smell of wet bog and cut turf, and for a moment the land stops being landscape and becomes a body lying on its back. People have called these the Paps of Anu for longer than anyone can date. Dá Chích Anann, the breasts of Anu: two summits close to seven hundred metres high, each capped with a burial cairn raised in the Bronze Age, four thousand years of someone deciding the mother goddess needed stone where her body ended.

What can be said with certainty about Anu would barely fill the hand that points to her hills. She appears in the ninth-century Sanas Cormaic, Cormac’s Glossary, in a single entry that has done most of the work of keeping her alive: “Ana, mother of the gods of Ireland; well did she feed the gods.” That is the whole of it. A name, a title, and one warm clause about feeding, which is more tenderness than most entries in a medieval word-list receive. From that single line a goddess of plenty has been reconstructed, the divine mother who keeps the gods fat and the fields full.

Her name carries the sense of wealth, riches, and prosperity, and it settled most firmly over Munster, the southern province where the man who wrote the glossary happened to live. That detail matters. Cormac was a Munster scribe, and the goddess he chose to crown as mother of the gods was the one whose worship surrounded him, the local earth-mother whose hills he could probably see. Elsewhere in Ireland that role belonged to another name, Danu, the figure behind the Tuatha Dé Danann, the people of the goddess Danu. Whether Anu and Danu were ever two beings or only ever one is a question the old texts refuse to settle. The names blur, swap, and stand in for one another until it is rarely clear which goddess a scribe meant. She is a deity who exists partly as a problem of identification.

The blurring goes further still. In the Lebor Gabála Érenn, the medieval account of the successive peoples who took Ireland, Anand is listed as another name for the Morrígan, the shape-changing goddess of war and fate. So the same syllable that names a gentle feeder of gods also names a crow over a battlefield. Some readers have tried to make her the mother of three sons, Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba, the trio whose name the Tuatha Dé Danann are said to carry. Others keep her separate, a Munster goddess of the soil who has nothing to do with crows or kings. The stories disagree on this point, and there is no version old enough to break the tie.

She has no story of her own. There is no surviving myth in which Anu does a single thing, no quest, no marriage scene, no death. What she has instead is geography. The two hills of Kerry are her monument and very nearly her entire biography, and they are eloquent in a way no narrative could be. On each summit the prehistoric cairns sit like stone nipples on the breasts of the mother goddess, and from the slopes a traveller can see the small ringfort called Cathair Crobh Dearg, the Red Claw City, which seems to have been bound to the Paps as part of the same sacred ground. People walked these heights for the festival fires of early summer long before anyone wrote her name down.

Whatever physical shape Anu was imagined to hold has not come down to us; the early sources describe her by what she gives, not by how she looked. The land does the describing. She is the swell of the ground, the fertility read into a particular curve of two mountains, the warmth in that one line about feeding. When she crossed the sea into Scotland she dwindled into something people preferred not to name directly, a figure called Gentle Annie, the soft title used the way the fairies were called the Good People, to flatter a power best not offended.

Her gifts are the gifts of the ground: abundance, fertility, the wealth her name promises, the steady nourishment of an entire pantheon and the province that prayed to her. A goddess who feeds the gods themselves sits at the root of everything, since nothing divine endures without being fed. And there lies her limit. Anu is almost pure function, a source without a face, a mother without a tale, so thinly attested that she keeps dissolving into Danu on one side and the Morrígan on the other. She cannot be pinned to a single act or a single shape. What anchors her is not a myth but a place, two hills that have outlasted every story that might once have explained them, still rising over Kerry with their stone caps catching the last of the light.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Anu in Irish mythology?

Anu, also written Ana or Anann, is an Irish mother goddess associated with abundance, fertility, and prosperity, especially in the southern province of Munster. The ninth-century Cormac’s Glossary calls her “mother of the gods of Ireland” and says “well did she feed the gods,” which is the main source for her role as the nourishing source of the divine race.

What are the Paps of Anu?

The Paps of Anu (Irish: Dá Chích Anann, “the breasts of Anu”) are a pair of breast-shaped mountains in County Kerry, Ireland, both close to 700 metres high. Each summit is crowned with a prehistoric Bronze Age cairn positioned like a stone nipple, and the hills are said to be named after the goddess Anu, making them her chief monument.

Are Anu and Danu the same goddess?

It is unclear, and the early texts do not resolve it. Anu’s name is so often conflated with Danu, the goddess behind the Tuatha Dé Danann, that many readers treat them as one mother goddess under two names, while others keep Anu as a distinct Munster earth-goddess. Anu’s name is also given as another name for the Morrígan in the Lebor Gabála Érenn, which adds to the confusion.

What does the name Anu mean?

The name Anu carries the meaning of wealth, riches, and prosperity, which is why she was regarded as a goddess of good fortune and plenty in the land of Munster. Her name may derive from a Proto-Celtic theonym, and in Scotland a related figure was known by the softened title “Gentle Annie.”

Did Anu have any children?

Some medieval tradition makes Anu the mother of three sons, Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba, the trio whose name the Tuatha Dé Danann are said to carry. This is uncertain and depends on identifying Anu with Danu, since the sources blur the two goddesses and disagree on her family.

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Morrigan, Dagda, Brigid, Cailleach, Cernunnos, Aengus Óg, Nuada, Dian Cécht, Goibniu, Fomorian, Black Annis, Gaia, Cybele, Cōātlīcue, Pachamama