Clan of the Bloodthirsty Crow.

 As a battle re-enactment group we associate ourselves with the Crow for numerous reasons. The Crow has played an extremely important role in representing certain beliefs from all corners of the globe since before the dawn of time. The crow was the first emblem of Imperial China. Even Alchemists, the scientists of mediaeval Europe referred to the crow as the shadow on the sun, the mysterious predator from above cloaked in the colour of night, the colour of the unknown. This bird was a survivor it ate everything including the dead. Native Americans believed the crow took us from this world to the land of the next.

One of the oldest images that have been found of a God was carved on mammoth tusk dating from the Palaeolithic period. This carving was of a beaked goddess with razor sharp talons, a hunter, a predator, she gave hope and inspiration to the people of those hard times and she was a symbol of strength, survival and immortality.

Then around ten thousand years ago when goddesses’ became gods many disappeared but She altered her gender to survive and the Greeks called him Cronos (literally Crow), the Romans called him Saturn, "God of Time". To the Norse he was Odin, the "King of all Gods". The ancient Irish peoples worshipped "Danu", "The Mother". She had three forms. She was the creator, lover and hag (Death); it is in the latter form of the old crone, the Mórrígán, where the Crow has significance.

Mórrígán was the goddess of war she had different names and took many different forms. Some scholars don’t believe that she and Danu were one and the same. Danu was a mother a provider whereas Mórrígán was the opposite, she was death, but the name Mórrígán means Great Queen and Danu was the queen and mother of creation. This is believable from a pagan point of view, the pagans were closer to nature than the Christians that later inhabited the land. Pagans believed life and nature to be part of a cycle, love hate, life death, good and evil were different sides of the same coin. The early monks who undertook the task to chronicle the old Irish myths & legends would have separated Danu and Mórrígán into two different entities, one to represent good and the other evil.

To the ancient Irish she was goddess of war "the Badb" who visited battlefields in the form of a crow. This black sinister creature from the sky would live off the dead and wounded of the battle. She survived through the slaughter and violence as did the men and women left standing at the end of a great clash.