The Source of the Flame
Before the moon was born, before the sun,
Before all the worlds were born,
I was as I am now.
Brigid the Goddess
The ancient goddess Brigid is enshrouded in veils of conjecture. Modern writing about Brigid draws from older writing—up to a point. The further back you go, the less there is. The Celts didn’t write down their religious beliefs, and they didn’t freely share them with cultures that did record such things, such as the Romans. Celts believed that important tales should only be told to good people, to the initiated, and to those who understood their context. We mostly know about the deities of pre-Christian Celts through descriptions written by their conquerors or by monks in a much later age, and we can add some speculation based on archaeological finds and sacred sites. Many customs and legends associated with Brigid have made their way through in the form of folklore. We also can guess and intuit the powers of the goddess Brigid by looking at which attributes were preserved when the goddess was called a saint. Piecing it all together, a vision of Brigid begins to shine through the veils.
You may know her as Brigid, Brigit, Brighid, Brighidh, Brigindo, Bride, Bridey, Brigantia, Brid, or Bridget. Pronunciations vary according to local dialect, and you’ll see various sources firmly telling you that she should be called “Breej” or “Breed” or “Breet” or “Bree-id” or “Brigg-it.” I simply say “Bridge-id.” Some say her name comes from the Old Irish brig, “power,” or the Welsh bri, “renown.” Others say it comes from breo-saigit, “fiery arrow,” or breo-aigit, “fiery power.” Still others say that her name just means “high one” or “exalted one,” and that “Brigid” may have been used as a general term for “goddess.” As all the name variations attest, her worship was widespread, encompassing not only Ireland, Scotland, and Britain, but also much of Europe.
Knowing Brigid begins with knowing the people who worshiped her from ancient times. Celtic history, mythology, culture, archaeology, spirituality, and so many more topics on all things Celtica fill shelf upon shelf in most libraries. I offer just a wee bit of their tale to set the scene and provide a context for what follows.
The Celts
The Celts (pronounced “Kelts”) as a particular society are said to have originated in central Europe around 1200 BCE. They were tribal people rather than a centralized empire, and they probably didn’t call themselves Celts at all, but that’s the name that stuck, courtesy of the Greeks, who called them the Keltoi. For more than a thousand years, the Celts spread throughout Europe, leaving their mark and memory wherever their journeys took them. Moving ever westward, the Celts eventually crossed the water into Britain.
Through the Bronze and Iron Ages, the Celts became masters of the metal arts, and rich archaeological finds of these pieces have given many clues as to the nature of Celtic culture and religion. But much remains a mystery—or at least a subject of passionate debate. When very early history isn’t recorded in words but only in symbols, those symbols are always subject to interpretation. To paraphrase the old joke, if you read three books on the Celts, you’re going to get six opinions. In the words of classical archaeologist Paul Jacobsthal (writing about Celtic art, though to me it applies to the culture as a whole), it is “elaborate and clever; full of paradoxes, restless, puzzlingly ambiguous; rational and irrational; dark and uncanny.” 2
What we think of now as Celtic culture is a potent distillation of what was retained over centuries of tribal movement. Everywhere they went, the Celts found their goddesses and gods in the land itself. Each individual tribe had their own deities: “I swear by the gods my people swear by.” The result was a complicated and chaotic religion, largely lost over time and much debated. More than four hundred names of Celtic goddesses and gods have been recorded. A multitude of earth goddesses were known, each with her own well, her own grove, her own hill. Because the Celtic tribes were always on the move—whether warring on others or being exiled themselves—ultimately these local deities didn’t serve as well as a portable deity who was ever-present, and some “superstars” in the Celtic pantheon had wider influence. We know who had predominance by looking at whose stories survived once the tribes settled permanently. And one of those was Brigid.
Romans and Christians and Celts (Oh My!)
Very few facts about Brigid were recorded by early chroniclers. The Celts didn’t go in much for pantheons with complicated familial relationships, as the Romans did. Generally speaking, Celtic goddesses were associated with the specific place the tribe inhabited, the earth, and fertility, while gods were associated with the tribe itself, the sky, and war. Julius Caesar associated the Celtic deities with Roman ones, and he said that the goddess the Celts called Brigid was in fact Minerva, the goddess of all arts and industry, crafts, poetry, learning, and wisdom. (Minerva’s Greek counterpart is Athena.) It was recorded that Brigid’s father was the Dagda (the “good god”). A ninth-century Irish glossary briefly referred to Brigid as a “matron of filidhecht,” the lore that includes poetry and learning, divination and prophecy.3
And that’s about it. Little else was written, or if it was written, it was lost.
Christianity was present in Britain as early as the first century CE, probably brought there by Roman traders and artists along with tales of their own gods and goddesses. In Ireland, monasteries and hermitages were well established by 400 CE. In 432, Patrick arrived, with the assignment to establish an organized Catholic Church in Ireland, which he quite successfully did. (More about him later.)
The Irish Church became renowned for scholarship and the preservation of history and literature. It was much more independent from Rome than the European branches. Communication was slow and unreliable, and what communication there was tended to be, shall we say, argumentative. The Irish clergy had their own ideas about how things should be done and saw no reason why they should take orders from higher-ups they had never even met. Because of this, old pagan observances were kept alive, and some deities were simply rebranded as saints. The Celts had been adaptive all along. For instance, when they arrived in Britain, they absorbed the even more ancient culture of the megalithic people, those who loved the great stones. When the Christians came, they adapted again, keeping their old beliefs while adding the new religion’s ideas. Even today, Celtic Christianity is earth-centered, heroic, otherworldly. The magic was never lost.
The downside is that, because the old and the new were blended together, Celtic history was largely overlaid with Christian interpretation. Lore and mythology recorded by monks and nuns were inevitably put through their own filters, no matter how much integrity they had about preserving the truth. It’s likely they just left some things unwritten, rather than compromise their beliefs by seeming to approve of questionable elements of the older culture. Some of the information we have has to be put back through those filters to see the underlying essence. And this is where our beloved goddess Brigid comes back into the tale—a tale that survives because of Saint Brigid.
The Flame Endures: Brigid the Saint
Why include a saint in a book largely intended for Pagan readers? To put it plainly, it’s because the saint and the goddess are one and the same. She never left. No other Western goddess has an unbroken history of worship. No other goddess has been clung to so passionately by her devotees, no matter what other canons of faith they accepted. To write a book about Brigid without including her saint aspect would be denying half her powers:
• The power of endurance
• The power of practical love
• The power of bridging differences
As a Pagan, there was a time when I assumed that the goddess Brigid had simply been co-opted and whitewashed by the Church into something more manageable, less powerful. I see it somewhat differently now.
Travel back through time and imagine yourself as a Celtic woman in the mid-fifth century or so. Yours is a warrior society, and violent conflicts frequently end in brutal death. Women are often captured as slaves and their children raised as slaves. You are proud of your heritage, but life is hard, so hard. A new religion makes its way through the land, a gentle faith that promises peace. The new faith has a holy trinity, a concept familiar and dear to Celtic hearts, whose deities often appear in threes. It espouses hospitality, charity, care for the humble and downtrodden, and freedom from slavery. These are all things that your goddess Brigid has always meant to those who love her. What mother wouldn’t welcome the chance to spare her children a lifetime of war, exchanging it perhaps for a lifetime of learning? And if this means that the new religion wants to call your goddess a saint, does that really matter so much? She is still Brigid.
I can easily understand this from a Pagan perspective, because the cauldron of modern Goddess spirituality is also a melting pot. We love Demeter and Isis and Sarasvati and Pele and Changing Woman and Kuan Yin. Many of us also love Mary. It’s not a stretch for me to believe that the nuns in Saint Brigid’s monastery and the countrywomen tending their cattle, and all the thousands upon thousands of people since, loved the same qualities in their saint that I love in my goddess. As Celtic scholar Proinsias Mac Cana writes:
Paradoxically, it is in the person of her Christian namesake St. Brighid that the pagan goddess survives best. For if the historical element in the legend of St. Brighid is slight, the mythological element is correspondingly extensive, and it is clear beyond question that the saint has usurped the role of the goddess and much of her mythological tradition … It must be accepted, therefore, that no clear distinction can be made between the goddess and the saint and that in all probability Brighid’s great monastery of Kildare was formerly a pagan sanctuary … . Brighid became St. Brighid and her cult continued uninterrupted. 4
“Continued uninterrupted”—how wonderful that is! Envision a perpetual flame dedicated to the Goddess, tended faithfully by women. When the new religion came, the holy women built a monastery on their sacred site, and the flame continued to burn there uninterrupted, tended now by nuns. As late as the twelfth century—six hundred years after Saint Brigid’s death—the flame still burned. It may have burned until the sixteenth century, when the monasteries were suppressed. In 1993, the perpetual flame was relit, and it burns to this day.
Brigidine Sister Mary Minehan has said, “There are no historical facts about [Saint] Brigid at all but an amalgamation of folklore, myth, and legend—which is in our collective memory and which we must not dismiss.” 5 I love that idea that what we carry within our collective memory is a deep truth, no matter what facts may or may not have been recorded. This is at the heart of Paganism, too—folklore wisdom handed down not just from person to person but from lifetime to lifetime. The stories of the lives of saints reveal more about the hearts and minds of the people who tell them than about actual fact. The people loved the goddess Brigid so much that they would not let her go. Much in the same way that some other saints are venerated for having the qualities of Jesus, Saint Brigid was venerated for having the qualities of, well, Brigid. Saint Brigid was and remains a very goddess-y saint. Let me tell you her tale, and see if you will love her as much as I do.
A Sun Among the Stars of Heaven
Saint Brigid was marked for mystical greatness from her birth—and indeed, before her birth. A “wizard” (druid) prophesied over her pregnant mother: “Marvelous will be the child that is in her womb. Her like will not be seen on earth, radiant, who will shine like a sun among the stars of heaven.” 6 The daughter of an Irish chieftain named Dubthach and a slave woman named Broicsech, Brigid was born around the year 450 CE. Her birth came at sunrise as her mother stepped over the threshold, one of the magical between-places that have such power in Celtic lore. She was neither in the house nor outside it, both in the world and not in the world. Broicsech was returning from having milked the cows, and the newborn Brigid was bathed in lemlacht, new milk still warm from the cow, which was thought to have magical powers.
As an infant, Brigid refused all nourishment until she was given the milk of a white cow with red ears—a faery cow, in other words. Another legend from her infancy says that her mother went out to tend the cattle while Brigid was sleeping and was called back in haste by a neighbor screaming that the cottage was on fire. Broicsech saw her house all ablaze but rushed in anyway, and there was Brigid sleeping peacefully in her cradle, in a house that was not burning at all. The radiance of the sleeping child had made the cottage appear to be in flames. A wee fire goddess, to be sure!
Brigid grew in skills and virtues—“She tended the sheep, she satisfied the birds, she fed the poor.” Though born to a slave, Brigid was given her freedom as a maiden (“when boldness, strength, and size came to Brigit”), perhaps because her habit of giving away her father’s goods to the poor made her less than popular at home. She wandered for a time, and on her travels her miraculous feats became intentional, rather than the early miracles of fire that signified her supernatural nature—she turned well water into beer, for example, and magically increased foods such as bacon and butter.
Brigid’s mother was still bound in servitude, having been sold as a dairywoman to another master. A more powerful and confident Brigid was now determined to free her. She found Broicsech ill and exhausted from the ceaseless labor demanded of those who worked in bondage. Brigid tended to her sick mother and “began setting the dairy to rights.” I love this description, imagining Brigid pushing up her sleeves and putting things in order the way she thought they should be done.
The lord of this house was a druid, and he asked about the new woman who had taken charge of his dairy. Could it be that he had heard of Brigid’s magical feats and wanted to test her skills? He and his wife went down to the dairy, taking with them a hamper that was eighteen hands high. Brigid welcomed them with good cheer, washing their feet and giving them food in the Celtic tradition of hospitality. The druid’s wife then asked Brigid to show them how much butter she had made. There were only one and a half churnings left in the dairy, and the wife mocked her, saying sarcastically, “This quantity of butter is good to fill a large hamper!”
With a knowing smile, Brigid went back into the dairy kitchen and sang a chant asking to be blessed with abundance. She emerged with another churning of butter, and then another, and another. Again and again she came forth, singing all the while. She filled the huge hamper with butter, and indeed, “if [all] the hampers which the men of Munster possessed had been given to her, she would have filled them all.” The druid and his wife marveled at this wondrous feat and offered Brigid their kine (cattle) as a tribute. But she refused them, saying, “Take thou the kine, and give me my mother’s freedom.” Both were given to her—and not surprisingly, Brigid gave the cattle away to the poor.
Brigid of Kildare
Brigid refused all suitors and sought a life of service to the wider world. Becoming a nun in that day (and maybe today, too!) can be seen as an act of independence, even defiance. To follow the call of a sacred vocation was fairly revolutionary in a land where women were expected to stay at home and have children. Brigid chose not to marry, to remain celibate, a virgin. From our modern perspective, this may seem like a weak choice—to remain forever a maiden, sheltered and naïve. On the contrary, Brigid’s decision to have a career in the church was an act of courageous self-determination. She was setting herself up to follow her inner guidance.
Brigid and eight other women journeyed to a certain Bishop Mél to take their vows as nuns. Mél plays a part in many of Brigid’s legends, acting as advocate and champion. He recognized her holiness immediately, not least because as he moved to place the veil upon her, “a fiery pillar rose from her head to the roof-ridge of the church.” Mél declared that rather than merely consecrating Brigid as a nun, he must ordain her as bishop. When another priest protested, Mél said, “No power have I in this matter. That dignity was given by God unto Brigit, beyond every other woman.”
After taking their vows, Brigid and her sisters formed a monastery on the sacred site of Kildare, with Brigid as abbess. (More about Kildare on page 105.) No husband or father was going to control or limit her—and that included the Holy Father in Rome. As I mentioned earlier, the Irish Church at that time wasn’t as constricting as the European Church, and communication with the Vatican was sporadic (and often ignored). Unlike monasteries in other countries, Brigid’s at Kildare had both nuns and monks, and although the men had a male bishop overseeing them, Brigid was abbess over them all. Men as well as women looked to her for leadership and spiritual guidance, though only women were allowed to tend the perpetual flame, honoring the tradition that predated Christianity.
From the place of authority and grounded power that Brigid found in her own monastery, her miracles and magical workings on behalf of the needy began to pour forth. Unlike other saints whose miracles were meant to make a statement of faith or an example of martyrdom, most of Brigid’s miracles were practical, homely acts of magic. She mended broken vessels by breathing upon them. She turned stone into salt, water into beer. She enchanted cows to give more milk than was possible, “a lake of milk” on at least one occasion. Over and over, the stories of Brigid tell how she increased food to feed far more people than the original quantity could have fed, providing “bread and butter and onions and lots of courses.” Making sure the people did not go hungry was a passionate cause for Brigid, and if a precious domestic animal died or was stolen, Brigid would magically restore it to the grateful family.
Her power as healer came into its fullness too. Brigid healed lepers, sometimes with her touch and on one occasion with her own blood. She also insisted that others care for the lepers in practical ways and not shun them. Once a woman visited Brigid with a gift of a basket of apples, which Brigid proceeded to give away to the lepers. When the woman protested that the apples weren’t meant for such untouchables, “it was an annoyance to Brigid,” who then cursed the woman so that all of her apple trees would be barren ever afterward.
As her influence grew, Brigid began to use her power on behalf of slaves and others in captivity—a cause dear to her no doubt because her own mother had been a slave. She magically transported political prisoners and prisoners of war back to their homes. One such prisoner merely called out in despair, “O Brigid, carry me home!” and found himself at his own cottage door.
Known by now as Muire na nGael, Mary of the Gael, Brigid was an advocate for all who suffered and could not speak for or defend themselves. When one of her nuns became pregnant, Brigid refused to censure or punish her. Her seventh-century biographer Cogitosus says, “Brigid, exercising with the most strength of her ineffable faith, blessed her, caused the fetus to disappear without coming to birth and without pain”—hence, Saint Brigid is the matron saint of Ireland’s pro-choice movement today.7 She was said to confer blessings of victory in righteous battle, sometimes appearing as an apparition in the sky above the battlefield. Over and over in her legends, she offers healing and protection, healing and protection: “For this was her desire: to satisfy the poor, to expel every hardship, to spare every miserable man.”
In her youth, Brigid had given her father’s bejeweled sword to a starving family, incurring his wrath but remaining true to her principles, which never wavered during her lifetime. Though she was often given costly treasure as a tribute, she gave away so much to the poor that her nuns used to hide some of it to make sure there was enough left to take care of their own needs too: “Little good have we from thy compassion to everyone, and we ourselves in need of food and raiment!” (They didn’t get away with this, by the way. Brigid always knew where the cache was stowed.)
Brigid and Patrick
While most nuns in cloistered convents tended to the needs of those in their immediate communities, Brigid traveled widely and met with other religious leaders, including Saint Patrick. So, what about this Patrick? Is he a villain, the one who destroyed the beautiful pagan faith and replaced it with oppressive Christianity? Some say the story of him driving the snakes from Ireland is a reference to the druids or to the pagan Celts with their snakelike tattoos, since there never were any snakes in Ireland. It’s important to remember that the tales of Patrick were written hundreds of years after his death by people who definitely had an ax to grind and an agenda to push. One thing that stays with me is that the conversion of Ireland to Catholicism was largely peaceful. This certainly wasn’t the case in the rest of Christendom, then or since. Something about Patrick and his mission appealed to the people—and these were strong, fiercely independent people, not sheep waiting for a shepherd. Most simply added the new religion to the ancient beliefs they held so deeply. Saint Patrick is well-beloved to this day, and there are few saints who are still so widely invoked and celebrated in any part of the Christian world. He and Saint Brigid appear together in many stories, and religious medals with Patrick on one side often have Brigid on the other.
Reading between the lines of the pious and reverential “Lives of the Saints” tales, the relationship between Brigid and Patrick has a certain sibling sassiness that is endearing. They treat each other as equals and as comrades with a common purpose. When Patrick spoke to the people, Brigid as usual magically increased the available food to feed the crowd that had gathered. “When Patrick had finished the preaching, the food was brought to Brigit that she might divide it. And she blessed it; and the two peoples of God, Brigit’s congregation and Patrick’s congregation, were satisfied.” Note that Brigid has her own congregation, which is not subordinate to Patrick’s. Throughout their mutual tales we get a sense of strong female power, dedicated and determined.
Both saints are associated with the elements—Brigid with fire and water, Patrick with wind and rock. Mystic power flows strongly in them both, and the tales show their respect for each other’s wisdom and autonomy. During one of Patrick’s sermons, a thunderous storm arose over his head. Afterward, the crowd turned to Brigid to ask what it meant. “Ask Patrick,” she said. Patrick replied, “You and I know equally well. Reveal this mystery to them.” On another occasion, Brigid fell asleep while Patrick was preaching. When he finished speaking, he woke her and complained that she hadn’t been listening, to which she replied that she’d had a vision in her sleep. Patrick listened with interest to her dream vision:
I beheld four ploughs in the southeast, which ploughed the whole island; and before the sowing was finished, the harvest was ripened, and clear well-springs and shining streams came out of the furrows. White garments were on the sowers and ploughmen. I beheld four other ploughs in the north, which ploughed the island athwart, and turned the harvest again, and the oats which they had sown grew up at once, and were ripe, and black streams came out of the furrows, and there were black garments on the sowers and on the ploughmen.
Patrick’s interpretation of her vision reveals his point of view as a missionary. He says that the four ploughs in the southeast are the two of them, working together to bring the four gospels to the people, and what they sow is faith, belief, and piety. Even before their teachings are complete (“before the sowing was finished”), the work has taken hold. And then, “the four ploughs which thou beheldest in the north are the false teachers and the liars who will overturn the teaching which we are sowing.”
It’s not recorded how Brigid responded to this interpretation. I’ll offer another one. The striking imagery of the clear shining streams and the black streams, the white garments and the black garments, speak to me of the light and dark times of the year, which were such an important part of the Celtic cosmology, as we’ll see later. The fact that Brigid dreamt that both ploughings brought forth grain could symbolize the fruitfulness of the dark time as well as the light. The harvest is turned over in the fields, the seed turned back into the soil and the darkness. The southeast, a place of sunrise and warmth, is balanced by the north, a place of darkness and cold. The four ploughs could be the four directions, each plough moving out from the sacred center, dividing the land just as the four holy days of Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh, and Samhain divide and mark the year. Brigid is an earth goddess, and her saintly counterpart is also profoundly connected to the earth and its seasons.
Because the histories of both saints were written so long after their lives, nothing factual about them can be accepted as absolute. Some scholars say it’s unlikely that Patrick and Brigid knew each other, because of the varying dates given for their births and deaths. In my view, whether they ever met isn’t the point. The stories that are told about them reveal the reverence in which Brigid was held, so great that it was important to include her in Patrick’s legends, which certainly stand on their own without such additions. Patrick’s presence in the tales of Brigid gives extra validation to her power too, but he isn’t there to prop her up or condescendingly approve; he’s a colleague.
From Goddess to Saint to Goddess
At the end of his biography of her, Cogitosus sums up Saint Brigid’s character in a list of virtues: she was “modest, gentle, humble, sage, harmonious, innocent, prayerful, patient, firm, forgiving, loving.” Based on the tales he told of her, he could easily have added that Brigid was powerful, courageous, generous, passionate, righteous, and brilliant. She was, in the true sense of the word, awesome.
It’s a mistake to pooh-pooh Saint Brigid as if she were a Brigid imposter, a pale substitute for the great goddess who preceded her. I was predisposed to dislike her, but the more I learned, the more she appealed to me. She is praised for her kindness and sweetness, but she’s feisty too. There is a fierceness about her. She is a woman with a temper and little tolerance for fools. She stands up for herself as well as for the downtrodden. She talks back. She has a sense of humor. (Her most famous prayer includes her wish to provide a lake of beer for Jesus, and I just know that was said with a twinkle in her eye.) It’s easy to love a saint who knows how hard it can be to find enough food to feed a family, who will summon up a cart full of bacon with a wave of her hand. This is not a forbidding holy father, lord, or savior. This is a sister.
The big question is: Was there ever really a living, human Saint Brigid? My feeling is that, yes, there probably was. Someone, after all, founded that monastery. The perpetual flame was burning when Brigid came to Kildare, and she kept that fire alive. Those who followed in her footsteps—and under her instruction—kept it burning for centuries.
Earlier I said that when I came to know the goddess Brigid, it was like she had always been there. Brigid has always been there—first as goddess, then as saint, and, when the world was ready, as goddess again. Through all the changes of the rolling world, her worship has never ceased.
2. Paul Jacobsthal, Early Celtic Art.
3. Stokes, Cormac’s Glossary.
4. Mac Cana, Celtic Mythology.
5. Interview with Sr. Mary Minehan by Melissa Thompson, February 19, 1999, www.tallgirlshorts.net/marymary/sistermary.html.
6. All the quotes in this section on Saint Brigid, unless otherwise noted, are from Stokes, Lives of Saints, from the Book of Lismore.
7. Cogitosus, Vita Sanctae Brigidae, circa 650.