7: Nymphs and Celts
A second theory for the origins of Geel's family care system
This is the seventh part of a series. You can find part one here.
When I visited the museum on site at the OPZ, it stuck out that the boarders were all required to visit bathhouses regularly. This was still true in 1979, when Mental Patients in Town Life was published. During the tour of the church I asked my guide about it. Was there some connection to that and the sacred well at the Dymphna chapel in Zammel? He assured me there was not. It was purely a matter of health and hygiene. The bathhouses were built because the peasants lacked running water and the hospital had the obligation to provide them with sanitation facilities. Were the bathhouses open to the public or were they only for the use of boarders? They were only for the boarders.
I didn’t dig any further for a while. The well, the bathing ritual, and the bathhouses are weird, sure. This was towards the bottom of a pretty long list of weird things.
More details accumulated. Saint Digne is from Digne les Bains. There are all these sacred wells in the Campine. The wetlands kept coming up in accounts about care for the mad in Geel. I finally gave in when I came across a story where Dymphna was called Nyphna and I realized that clearly her name does not mean ‘poetess.’
Nymphs are minor nature deities connected to a specific place. They’re always beautiful maidens. In Greek mythology viewing a nymph could drive you mad, potentially with lust. There’s even a famous nymph with a story that sounds familiar: Arethusa was bathing in a stream without realizing it was the river god Alpheus. He fell in love with her. She shot him down, because she was a chaste attendant of Artemis (often conflated with Diana). Artemis turned her into a stream and she flowed under the sea to escape, eventually rising as a fresh water fountain on an island in Sicily. Her myth became newly popular during the Renaissance.
Sacred springs and wells
William of Worcester believed that the proximity of sacred springs known in the middle ages to neolithic and iron age settlements suggests that the sites have been in use continuously. Of course, not all healing springs are tied to madness. Pwll-y-Llethr, Ffynnon Fair, and Saint Non’s Well specialize in healing eye ailments. Ffynnon Gelynin can tell you if your sick child will live or die. Tobar Churadain could heal your sick children if you left them overnight. Pilgrimage sites with general healing powers that remain popular today include Bath, Chalice Well, and Spa. While Catholicism has a complicated relationship with sacred wells, those in Protestant areas are most likely to be forgotten or destroyed. When I visited Thonon-les-Baines there was no religious overtone.
Researching sacred springs, I found references to local madmen being chained up to sacred stones or otherwise kept prisoner in churches. In 1508, an Augustine Canon protesting the treatment of churches made an exception for the continued practice of “curing lunatics” by chaining them to church pillars. Rituals where the mad were nearly drowned were also popular.
While some sacred wells are prehistoric, many more emerged during medieval and contemporary times.
Damona
Paul Vandenbroeck identified the Celtic deity Damona as the precursor to Dymphna. Damona was a spring goddess of wealth, fertility, and healing. Her primary shrine was in Gallia Belgica at Bourbonne-les-Bains.
Damona means ‘divine cow’ or ‘great cow.’ Some sources suggest she was connected not to cattle but to deer. Worship of Damona, also known as Sirona, was spread across Europe. Sirona means ‘star.’ The shape of the pretzel is believed to be related to the worship of Sirona.
I was not seeing the connection between Dymphna and Damona and could not wait two months until I could go to an archive. I needed to know. Vandenbroeck kindly sent me a PDF. The connection seems to be based on her name, means ‘elevated.’1
Vandenbroeck points out that worship of Dymphna and other saints connected to sacred springs involved bathing and then sleeping at the gravesite. The saint would then appear to the pilgrim in a dream and be cured. He posits the spring at Zammel was originally the center of worship.
He explains that since nymphs and, later, elves were linked with causing insanity and epilepsy, Dymphna came to be seen as able to both cause and cure these afflictions.
I keep coming across references to elves and gnomes. I don’t have it in me to even start looking into it. Not today, Satan. Please tell me how they fit into all of this.
Gleann na Gealt: Valley of the mad
Of the many sites, one stands out: Tobar na Gealt, the spring of the mad. Located in Gleann na nGealt, it is a magical well whose story is believed to come from the Finn Cycle, dating from the 15th century.
The story goes that a daughter, Mis, sees her father decapitated in battle and goes mad with grief. She became feral and would cannibalize anyone she encountered. The King of Munster decided that this geilt, or lunatic, needed to be stopped. She ate all the men who tried to capture her.
Finally, the king’s harpist used his music to lure her out of hiding. He scattered gold coins at his feet and she seemed to be transformed by the memory of civilization. He played until sunset and said he was hungry. She brought him a deer, he cooked it, and they ate together. Sharing a meal “pushed aside the madness and violence inside her.” He heated water from the spring and poured her a hot bath in a hollow basin in the rocks. He bathed her, completing her transformation from a geilt back into a woman, and they became a couple.
The earliest account of Tobar na nGealt was written in 1584. Drinking the water2 and eating the watercress cures insanity. It was said that all lunatics, when left to their own devices, would naturally find their way to Glen na Galt.
Galt, geilt, gheel
The tourism office really runs with the fact that geel means yellow. Everything is yellow, most notably the giant wooden letters spelling out GEEL in the city center.
It was reading about Gleann na Gealt that I was able to gather some evidence for a hunch of mine. In 1882, Daniel Hack Tuke wrote something hinting that the tourist office isn’t simply enthusiastic about their sunny color scheme:
“Dr. Oscar Woods, the medical superintendent of the District Lunatic Asylum, Kilkenny, informs me that the superstition has nearly died out since this asylum was opened, about thirty years ago. Dr. Woods gives a different etymology, namely, bright, for galt; the valley in that case deriving its name in contradistinction to that on the other side of the hill, Emaloghue, on which the sun scarcely ever shines. He thinks the superstition arose from persons labouring under melancholy going from the sunless to the bright valley. "Why this place," wrote Dr. C. Smith in 1756, "rather than any other should be frequented by lunatics, nobody can pretend to ascertain any rational cause, and yet no one truth is more firmly credited here by the common people than this impertinent fable."
He, however, says that having regard to the awful appearance of these desolate glens and mountains, none but madmen would enter them! Recurring to the meaning of the word galt, a gentleman in Ireland, a professor of Irish, states that geilt is a mad person, one living in the woods, and that gealt is the genitive plural. It is interesting to find, also, from the same source, that the Irish word for the moon is gealach, indicating a probable etymological connection.”
Tuke later is relieved to recount how Glen-na-Galt has been substituted for the asylum at Killarney, as previously the lunatics were miserably situated “in hovels, where their needs could not possibly be attended to, even when, as was doubtless frequently the case, they were regarded with great affection.”
The lack of standardized spellings and existence of Flemish, French, and Latin names for everything made finding sources a bit of an adventure. The earliest written references to Geel have a variety of spellings: Ghele (1227), Gheele (1247), Gele (1253), and both Gheel and Geele (1270). When I searched for “Gheil” I found a Gaelic war cry, meaning “no surrender.” This is when it clicked that much of what is now France and Belgium was settled by the Gauls, who spoke Gaulish.
More interestingly, an English-Irish dictionary provided me with this result:
“He flung himself about like a madman, bhí sé á thuairteáil féin timpeall ar nós geilte.”
When I clicked on ‘geilte’ I got:
“gealt, f. (gs. geilte, npl. ~a1, gpl. ~). 1. Crazy person, lunatic. Tá sé ina ghealt bhuile (mhire, nimhe), he is stark mad. Teach ~, madhouse. 2. Panic-stricken person; naked fugitive. D’imigh sé ina ghealt, he took leave of his senses; he ran wild. Chuir siad abhaile ina ghealt é, they sent him rushing home in his bare pelt.”
Geel is a recent spelling of the town’s name. Until recently it was usually written as Gheel. In 1863 P. D. Kuyl wrote that prior to the 17th century it was rare to see Gheel, “but usually Gele, Ghele, Gheele, Ghelle and in 1499 one encounters Gheile.” The ending “le” and “lo” are interchangeable and mean “a place lying by marshes or rising from a height there”. He notes that the ground near Sint-Dimpnakerk “shines from the marshes of Kievermont, Malesand and the Laer to rise, and is also more elevated there than on any other side of the village”.
Long before Geel had a tourist office, Kuyl was told that the name refers to the yellowness of the soil. He find this unconvincing. Instead, he explains that yellow used to also mean fat, fertile, and horny.3 He cites N. Kreglinger “Since very early on there was a kind of oasis among the heathen” to support this.
Kuyl explains that Antwerp was chosen as an obvious destination by both Dymphna and her father because it was a major trading destination and because “both peoples spoke almost the same language. Hence so many Irish priests and bishops, who already came to preach the Faith here in the Vl, but especially in the VII century.”
In discussing other saints, Vandenbroeck’s essay has me rooting for him to make the connection:
“In Normandy and Brittany, [Aegidius/Gillis] was invoked against mal des gilles, epilepsy or insanity. Also worth mentioning in this context are the well-known carnival fools, the Belgian gilles of Binche. In late-medieval drama on the Iberian peninsula, Gil was also the stereotypical name of the simple and ludicrous shepherd.
Likewise, St. Ghislain became the patron of fools in Hainault, while in Luxembourg this title was bestowed upon St. Willibrord (gil-/wil-). In Brittany, Gildas of Rhuys (sixth century) fulfilled a similar role, even though his legend provides no clues as to why. It would seem, then, that the occurrence of the sound gil- in these saints’ names is the main reason they were associated with madness and came to be seen as patron saints of the mentally ill.”
Trying to determine if there’s a connection between Dymphna and ancient nymphs feels so speculative that I feel like I’m hallucinating the connections. There is just so little evidence to work with and most of the interpretations by experts are contradictory.
I try to let the fairytales and legends wash over me. I want to be Sabrina Orah Mark narrating Happily: A Personal History-with Fairy Tales. I want to let go of needing all the answers. I long to embrace the cyclical, eternal time in City of Laughter. To dip back before the Age of Discovery, when everything we found was assumed to have simply been lost, to have always been known.
Instead, I keep treating it like a mystery to be solved. Something sticks in my craw and suddenly twelve hours have passed and I am reading scans of archival documents translated from Latin and French and Dutch and German and Italian thanks to Google Translate, sending bizarre WhatsApp messages to friends to verify the accuracy of bits that seem particularly pertinent.
The story has jumped the shark, yet I can’t stop myself.
I went to Geel in order to figure out the logistics of how they created and maintained a successful adult foster care system. Instead I’m looking for historic measurements of minerals in the water in the Campine.
Peat bogs
Peat bogs were also potential sacred spaces. People used to bury people in peat bogs for several months in order to mummify them, before removing them and burying them. This preservation is reflected in folktales, often related to actions resulting in bodies being buried in the bog or the discovery of bog bodies. Bogs continue to be associated with hermits and witches. The peatlands of the Campine are said to be home to gnomes who live in ancient burial mounds.
In Ireland peatlands were sacred for their abilities to restore the powers of mind and body. When hydrotherapy was in vogue, peatlands became the site of asylums, hospitals, and health spas.
Peat bogs that are drained for use in agriculture dry up and blow away, as has happened in most of the Campine area, including in Geel. This environmental degradation dramatically changes the chemical composition of and quality of the water.
Theory two: It’s an ancient sacred site
I went from being told Geel’s family care system was 700 years old to believing it was less than 500 years old to thinking it could have neolithic origins.
So here’s a second theory: the story has not been lost to time because we didn’t keep records in the 7th century or 15th century – we did – but because the family care system has its roots in pagan practices that are far older.
There was a sacred site in what is now Geel, similar to the Irish “valley of the mad.” Most likely this site has been destroyed, either during the era of Christianization or during the era of agriculturalization after the founding of Belgium. The Geels Gebroekt was 500 hectares, or 5 square kilometers. This is why chapels and churches tied to the Dymphna story exist throughout the area – and why there were several bathhouses in Geel until recently. Aside from a small nature preserve, it’s been destroyed.
The story changed over time, as folklore does. They went from one language to another as the land was conquered. The rituals were Christianized. Just as her father was later named ‘Damon’ for demon, she came to be named ‘Dymphna’ for nymph.
Perhaps she was Irish because the story is Gaulish. Perhaps she is Irish to show the backwardness of the Celts. Perhaps she references the Celtic Christian tradition of the peregrinatio, where people left their homes permanently and put themselves into God’s hands, often spending the rest of their lives devoted to charitable work.
The powerful in Geel saw how shrines destroyed during the English Reformation led to serious economic decline for pilgrimage towns. When the Reformation came to their area, they knew what they needed to do in order to protect their power. They not only protected their shrine, they sought to fill the gap left behind by the many pilgrimage sites that had been destroyed.
In this scenario, Geel has always been both a refuge and a dumping ground. The shrine has been a boon to the local economy, providing money from pilgrims, money from boarders, and jobs in care. While pilgrims came in sporadic bursts, boarding-out was a stable source of income during times of poverty, war, and political instability. Regardless of the ruler at the top – be it Philip II of Spain or Adolf Hitler – there was still a single family or municipality that was responsible for payment for each boarder.
Geel was able to operate continuously because political instability allowed local officials to maintain control. As Eline Van Onacker wrote, “Campine peasants’ greatest power was their ability to circumvent formal institutions and create, mould, and employ custom to whatever ends suited their needs best.”
The people of Geel successfully ignored legislative changes, transfers of power, and the program being legally abolished. Power was constantly shifting among hierarchies of the nobility and the church, both within regimes and with the territory being conquered or transferred. This allowed the people of Geel – be they Gauls, medieval peasants, or today’s Belgians – to ultimately maintain control of the site.
“The name Dymphna is derived from the Celtic stem d-m-(b)-n, ‘high’, ‘elevated’. Old Irish domum, ‘world’, and Ibero-Aquitanian dumno, dubno, >duno, are derived from the same root. It also appears in the names of various Celtic tribes: the Domnainn (Ireland), the Damnonii (Strathclyde in Scotland), the Dumnones (Cornwall and Devon), and the Dicaly-dones (Scotland). And, of course, also in many names of people: Dumnorix, ‘Lofty king’, Dumnogenus (‘Son of the lofty one’, cf. Irish Domaingen, Welsh Dyfnien), Vero-dumna and Vero-dunum.
We therefore hypothesise that, before the emergence of such medieval names as ‘Dymp(h)na’, she must have been called Dimpna/Dumbna.” https://search.worldcat.org/title/Goswin-van-der-Weyden's-late-medieval-cycle-of-paintings-representing-the-life-of-St.-Dymphna-:-a-study-into-the-psycho-archaeology-of-a-Flemish-saint/oclc/436159821
It’s now believed that some sacred springs or wells renowned for curing madness contained naturally high levels of lithium.
I’m using Google Translate so this translation is questionable. I left it as-is because there’s a theme of words referring to an uncontrollable sexuality: nymphomania, slut stones, rebirthing and fertility rituals.
I am starting to wonder whether the reason we have a caregiving crisis is that we didn't have any of these powerful spiritual beliefs in saints and nymphs. Seriously. The saints served a real purpose.
What a roller coaster of a series! I'm learning so much.