By a limestone hollow in County Cavan, water rises cold and constant from deep underground. Log na Sionna, it's called in Irish - the Shannon Pot in English - the source of the longest river in Ireland.

(In the old poems regarding Sionna we learn that this spring connects directly to a mysterious Otherworld Well).

So Sionna is a river goddess. Her name - which can also be rendered Sinann - is the name given to the river Shannon. And the stories we have about her connect her directly to the river. 

And yet if you search for this goddess online you will find many references to her being associated with foxes. 

Like this absolutely beautiful illustration "Sionna" by Elaine Bayley. (The original is sold but she does prints here).

In Kat Shaw's Goddess Oracle deck - which I love! - she also appears as a fox (the card pictured on the header image of this post).

And you'll also find Sionna/ Sinann images, and other items, on Etsy and other places with the fox woven in, like this beautiful statue by Wandsuponatime:

So why all the foxes when that was not part of her original story?

That is the question I want to explore with this post (and the conclusion may surprise you). 

Is it just a linguistic error?

The goddess's name in the medieval text is Sinna, also written Sinann, Sionna or Sionnan. It perhaps means "the old one" or "the ancient one," from a root shared with the Latin senex - the word that gives us "senile."

Apparently, Ptolemy, writing in the 2nd century AD, recorded a name for the river Shannon that later scholars have read as Senā - "the ancient (goddess)." From there, T. F. O'Rahilly, a serious 20th-century authority on early Irish, argued the name behind Sinann was originally Senunā, meaning something like "the old, honoured one." I haven't been able to check this against his book directly (only via this blog post which references it) so I'm passing it on as reported, not verified firsthand.

Isolde ÓBrolcháin Carmody, who works directly with the Old Irish and has translated the goddess's poems herself, argues for something different: sine, meaning "teat" or "breast," on the grounds that the poems consistently describe Sinann as young (which they do) and which sits awkwardly with "the old one." Or she says it could mean storm/ bad weather. 

So, maybe her name means "old", maybe it means "breast", but what it does not mean is fox. 

Sionnach is the Irish word for fox. It looks similar. It sounds similar to an English-speaking ear, but it's a different word. 

Here's where it gets properly strange, though. I found this "sen + nech" etymology for sionnach attributed to Cormac's Glossary - one of the earliest etymological dictionaries in Europe, compiled around 900 AD - in several places online. It proposes the word comes from sen + nech - "old person" - supposedly because of the fox's pale, beard-like face. But I went searching for it in the actual 1868 edition myself, and couldn't locate it. That doesn't mean it isn't there (the old typeface is hard to search) but I also can't confirm it. 

If it is legit, then we have Sen. Old. The same root proposed for both fox and Sinann/ Sionna's own name.

I want to be careful here, because this is not proof of a connection between Sionna and fox.

What we actually have is one claim I couldn't verify as existing at all, and one claim that exists but I haven't been able to read firsthand - both, if true, landing on the same shared root. So, if there is any linguistic connection at all, it is something much older and stranger than the words sounding similar to non-Irish ears. 

This is a goddess who is elusive indeed (which you could say is kind of fox-like).

 

 

What We Actually Know about Sionna / Sinann the Goddess

In contrast with all of the beautiful modern lore and art that has been created around her, the primary record for Sinann is remarkably small: two poems in the Metrical Dindshenchas, plus one short prose account. That's the entire surviving foundation of our information on this goddess.

The Dindshenchas (the name means "lore of places") is a large body of medieval Irish poems and prose whose entire purpose is explaining how places in the landscape got their names. It's not a single unified text, but a collection, gathered and copied across several manuscripts. The principal one is the Book of Leinster, compiled around 1150, with further copies preserved in the Book of Ballymote, the Book of Lecan, and the Yellow Book of Lecan. The poems were written down by Christian monastic scribes, working centuries after whatever oral memory they were recording was already old, so what survives today is pre-Christian material, filtered through a medieval Christian lens, so we're already reading it several steps removed from however it was first told.

Sinann gets two of these poems to herself, both concerned with explaining her name and the connection with the river Shannon (they are one and the same). That's the whole surviving foundation this goddess rests on.

The two poems referring to Sionna - Sinann I and Sinann II - are translated by Edward Gwynn and freely available through CELT at University College Cork. A more recent translation of both, by Isolde ÓBrolcháin Carmody, working directly from the Old Irish, is available through Story Archaeology (I'd recommend going there first, as with other Victorian translations of Celtic texts, Gwynn was far from neutral). The shorter prose version, translated by Whitley Stokes, is in various locations online. (The easiest access one I could find is the internet archive page 456). 

In these she's named as daughter of Lodán, of the Tuatha Dé Danann - the divine race of Irish myth. Lodán is the son of Lír, the sea god, which makes Sinann the granddaughter of the sea. 

All three of these sources tell the same basic - and short - story, though with some variations in each. I will retell it here.

The Story of Sinann/ Sionna 

Connla's Well lay beneath the sea, deep in the Otherworld. Seven rivers flow from this well. Six are already known, Sinann would become the seventh.

 

Nine mystical hazel trees grew over the well. These hazels were special because they bore leaves, flower, and fruit all at once. And when the fruit - the hazelnuts - ripened from the trees they fell into the pool below. There they were eaten by the salmon. From these salmon rose up imbas, mystic bubbles of wisdom, and floated on the surface.

 

Sinann had everything. She was beautiful. She was respected and immortal, holding a place among the Tuatha Dé Danann. The only thing she lacked was imbas, the mystical knowledge. So she went to the well to get it.

 

When she looked at the bubbles on the water the well bursts forth and flees from her. She chases it, until eventually they meet and the water overwhelms her. The river that burst up from the well and Sinann are one and the same.

 

I recommend reading the original sources, some of the differences between them are interesting, especially how they deviate on the sequence of events. In the first poem, her drowning creates the river. In the second, the river already exists and she gives it her name by going under in it. The prose version adds a third place-name entirely — Tarr-cáin, "Fair-back" — from the specific detail of how the water lifted her up. 

What I take from this story - and this is personal gnosis - is that Sinann is a goddess of transition. She is portrayed as active, seeking the one thing that she lacks - that mystical knowledge and by the end of the story she is very different from how she started. It could be read that she is dead/ drowned at the end, however as she is immortal (deathless) this doesn't really fit. I feel this is more a story of her becoming transformed into the river itself. It is a metamorphosis. 

This story places Sinann in a wider tradition of river goddesses. 

Boand's story, also in the Dindshenchas, is almost identical - she goes to a sacred well, the water rises against her (or to meet her?), and she becomes the River Boyne. Two of Ireland's major rivers, born the same way, within the same body of texts. 

It's not only an Irish pattern, either. Sequana becomes the Seine in Gaul. Other cultures, too carry their own versions of a river that was once a woman, or a goddess who is the river. 

What the texts don't explain is why. Why Sinann, and not others who must have visited these same sacred wells before them. The poems don't answer it. But to me it feels destined, that they already were the river in some way. And even that there is an element of deliberately seeking that merging of goddess and river. 

What you'll notice is missing from the story is any mention of fox. 

So, where does the fox come in?

From what I could discover the rise of the association of foxes with Sionna/ Sinann was started by Jim Fitzpatrick in the 1970s. 

Jim FitzPatrick is one of Ireland's best-known artists working in Celtic mythological subjects. He's the artist behind Thin Lizzy's most iconic album covers, including Jailbreak, and the infamous Che Guevara poster that's been reproduced more than almost any image of the twentieth century.

In 1976, he painted a piece called "Sionna, the Fox Goddess." On his own site, describing the work, he writes: "I first heard the story of the fox goddess from a story-teller in my mother's home county, County Clare, in the west of Ireland." He also says, "Sionna is the eponymous goddess of the Fox tribe, their protector and their guardian." 

It's likely that much of the fox/ Sionna connection that we see all over the internet today traces back to this one painting and the story behind it.

I am not dismissing Fitzpatrick's story. He is a native Irish person, from a family rooted in Clare, describing something told by a storyteller from his own community. It does not match with the story from the medieval sources, but what we have  - two poems and one prose account - is vanishingly small next to the probable actual scale of a centuries-deep oral tradition.

It is possible that a fox connection existed somewhere in that oral tradition, regionally, locally, never written down, and lost everywhere except in whatever reached FitzPatrick secondhand through his mother's county. Though, of course, I can't verify that. 

It could also be possible that Sionna the fox goddess and Sinann the river goddess were once separate deities that have been folded into one over time, due to the names sounding similar. (Which would also be on point for a goddess who merged with a river). 

From what Fitzpatrick says on his site ("eponymous goddess") it does seem that the similarities between the goddess's name - Sionna - and fox (sionnach) is doing some heavy lifting, but that doesn't necessarily mean there is nothing in it. Perhaps there may be a real, if unrecorded, strand of connection between Sionna and foxes, running alongside the written record rather than descending from it.

This is the position I keep find myself in often with the Celtic deities: vanishingly little written material, centuries of gaps, and no way to fully resolve things from the recorded material alone. 

But, if we believe - as I do - that these deities are real and open to relationship with us, then people's direct encounters with Sinann didn't stop happening after the ninth century. Lore doesn't freeze the moment scribes write it down. It keeps moving through whoever stays in relationship with her, shaped by their own gnosis, same as it always has. FitzPatrick's storyteller, if the thread is genuine, would be exactly that kind of ongoing relationship, not a corruption of some "purer" original. The modern artists making Sionna Fox Goddess themed art are also in this lineage. 

And there is a thread in the written story that the fox association does fit with, even without any etymological connection. Sinann is seeking wisdom - that kind of magical/mystical knowing that you could call cunning. This is something - wilyness, curiosity, willingness to pursue - are characteristics that we often do associate with foxes. 

My own sense, is that whether the fox association is genuine or a linguistic mistake, or if there were once two separate goddesses who became merged into one, is that Sionna is not asking me to solve that puzzle - or at least not in a simple way. She's asking to be met as she is, whatever tide brought me to her. 

The river Shannon.

So how do we meet (or "work with") Sionna today?

After reading everything above I am sure you won't be surprised to hear that I don't have a prescription or set ritual for you to follow. But I do have some thoughts...

• What strikes me most about her story is the merging with the river, and the "tasting" of death rather than dying outright. She goes through death rather than into it, being immortal. Gwynn, working in the Victorian era, read this as a warning to girls with ideas above their station (read gender), but the story itself doesn't back that reading up. It's far stranger than that. There's a crossing over, and a merging. Which makes me think of her as a goddess we might reach out to when we're going through a big life transition of our own, something that will change us the way the well changed her, not something we come back from unaltered. 
• Then there's the detail of her seeking the one thing she lacked - imbas, that mystic knowledge, which as a Welsh witch reminds me of the awen in Ceridwen's brew. Sionna might be a goddess who helps those of us seeking to learn something we don't yet know, especially where that knowledge is mystical or magical rather than simply informational. This is where the fox thread layers back in naturally, whatever its true origin; cunning as a form of knowing.
• We could also take a cue from the past when looking to connect with Sinann. The Celts left offerings in rivers, lakes, and wells across Ireland, Britain, and Gaul - swords, jewellery, precious metalwork, deposited at fords and springs over centuries. Water was a threshold to the Otherworld. You could make an offering (non-toxic to wildlife) at a water source, to get her attention.

This is a goddess who is still acknowledged in her native Ireland. In 2019, when Athlone council commissioned a statue of a male "river god" for the town's riverside, locals objected, loudly. A campaign called "Reclaiming Sionann for Athlone" grew, arguing the river has always been hers. Whatever else is uncertain about her, the people living near her river want her name and legacy respected.

I visited Athlone last year with my family, but didn't find any references to, or statues of Sionna. We were only there one night. 

As for the fox, likely it is a linguistic connection and not historical, but I understand the appeal of it. Fox is an animal who has been a long-time companion and teacher for me, and there is something that intrigues me about Sionna that pulls on the same thread. It is something I am looking forward to exploring with the goddess personally as I connect with her in the MoonWise Membership this cycle. 

Follow the Thread

Sources and further reading:

• Sinann I & II, translated by Edward Gwynn — free on CELT
• The preferred more recent translations of the poem by Isolde ÓBrolcháin Carmody https://storyarchaeology.com/the-poems-of-sinann-2/
• Early Irish History and MythologyT.F. O'Rahilly 
  
• The prose Dindshenchas of Sinann, translated by Whitley Stokes, in Revue celtique https://archive.org/details/revueceltique15pari/page/456/mode/2up

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