The earliest Christian priests were canny: they merged ancient pagan rituals with new Christian thinking in order to improve Christianity’s chances of taking root in the general populace. The cult that grew up after St Brighid’s death is a good example in that it is an amalgamation of a legendary woman with a real woman and her real achievements. The legendary woman was the daughter of a Celtic goddess; the historical woman was the daughter of a Christian slave.
The story goes that Brighid was born c.453 at Faughart, near Dundalk, County Louth. Her mother, Broicsech, was a bondswoman or indentured servant, and her father was Dubhtach, probably a member of the warrior class. Brighid’s mother was a Christian and she reared her daughter in the faith; some stories say the child was baptised by St Patrick himself.
At an early age, Brighid became renowned for her acts of charity. In Lady Augusta Gregory’s retelling of Brighid’s life, she relates how ‘every-thing she put her hand to used to increase … she bettered the sheep and she satisfied the birds and she fed the poor.’ (A Book of Saints and Wonders, 1906.) According to Ancient Legends of Ireland (1888) by Lady Jane Wilde, Brighid also had the gift of healing and was able to cure lepers.
Of course, Brighid was also very beautiful and very marriageable. In due course her father did the obvious thing and selected a high-status husband for her, but Brighid prayed to God to make her ugly and preserve her chastity. Her prayers were answered: she developed a pox that disfigured one side of her face while leaving the other as beautiful as ever. Now unmarriageable, she was free to form the first community of nuns in Ireland, which she did with just seven other like-minded women.
Chaste she may have been, but Brighid, whose name means the ‘fiery arrow’, was no shrinking violet. She is reported to have been direct, confident and outgoing. She was a very skilled chariot driver and she travelled all over the country, making conversions, tending the sick and starting religious communities. Despite her vow of chastity, she was at ease in the company of men, all of whom she treated as equals – even the great chieftains she visited and attempted to convert.
Near the end of the fifth century, a local chieftain granted Brighid the area of land now known as the Curragh in Kildare (in Irish Kildare is Cill Dara, meaning Church of the Oaks), where she founded the first monastery in Ireland. Brighid gained the land by trickery: the chieftain said he would only give her as much land as her shawl would cover, to which terms Brighid agreed. Six months later she arrived back with the shawl and in front of the chieftain gave the four corners of it to four nuns, who ran north, south, east and west. The magical shawl unravelled until it covered the whole of the Curragh.
Once the new community had been established, Brighid turned it into a large double abbey, comprising celibate nuns and monks working side by side, healing the sick and helping the poor. Although there was a bishop responsible for the monks, Abbess Brighid outranked him, such was her undisputed standing in ecclesiastical circles. She had jurisdiction over all the churches in her area. Some sources report that she was actually made a bishop herself (she is seen holding a bishop’s staff in some early monuments), but rather than this story being the literal truth, it may have been a way of emphasising just how powerful she was. Such was her influence that even after her death, her successor abbesses continued to benefit from her precedent, having more episcopal power than was usual.
In keeping with the druidical associations of the oak grove at Kildare, Brighid adapted a pagan symbol for her own use – the eternal fire – as reported by the twelfth-century Welsh historian Geraldus Cambrensis. The eternal fire, tended by nineteen nuns, one of whom was constantly on watch, had been burning for 600 years by his time, but, according to him, there were never any ashes. On the twentieth night the nuns left the fire in the care of the spirit of Brighid with the words: ‘Brighid, take care of your own fire for this night belongs to you’, and in the morning the fire would still be burning brightly.
The fire was extinguished in 1220 by Henri de Londres, archbishop of Dublin. The fire-house, said to be located at Kildare Cathedral, remained an important part of local folklore. In the eighteenth-century, Austin Cooper sketched the remains as they then stood, and recorded it as the ‘fire-house of the Nuns of St Brigid at Kildare’. Today, there is very little left to see, just a low, square wall to the north of the cathedral.
Another of Brighid’s miracles concerns the story of Dara. One night she was sitting with Dara, a sister nun who was blind, and they were discussing God. They talked all night and as the beautiful dawn broke, Brighid felt a great compassion and desire that Dara should see God’s work with her own eyes. Brighid placed her hands over Dara’s eyes and miraculously removed her blindness. Dara sighed with delight when she saw the beauty around her, but immediately asked to be returned to darkness. When the world was so visible, she said, God was seen less clearly in the soul.
Brighid died c.525 at Kildare. About fifty years after her death, her body was disinterred and subsequently re-interred at Downpatrick, County Down, in order to protect it from the marauding Vikings who had invaded the south and east. There, according to tradition, Brighid was laid to rest beside St Patrick and St Columba.
One of the ways in which she is remembered today is the St Brighid’s Cross, a cruciform of equal lengths made out of rushes with which, it is said, she converted a pagan on his deathbed. Every St Brighid’s Day (1 February), schoolchildren all over Ireland make these crosses and they are to be seen in most homes and businesses.
Often compared to one of the holiest women of all time, the Virgin Mary, and known as ‘Mary of the Gael’, St Brighid continues to hold a special place in the canon of saints in Ireland. As well as being a patron saint of the country, she is also particularly responsible for babies and illegitimate children, the sea and fishermen, dairy-workers, healing, learning and metalwork.