Brigid

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A ninth-century monk, compiling a glossary of difficult Irish words for the use of scholars, paused over a single term and wrote that it had once been the name of a person. Brigit, he noted — a poetess, a daughter of the Dagda. But the word had outgrown its owner. So great had her cult been among the filid, the learned poets, that the name detached itself from the goddess and became a common noun: among all the Irish, he wrote, a goddess was simply called brigit. The entry is the oldest surviving native testimony to her, and it already speaks of her in the past tense, the way one speaks of a thing that has become a word.

That glossary — Sanas Cormaic, ascribed to Cormac mac Cuilennáin, bishop and king of Cashel — was written by a churchman roughly four centuries after Ireland’s conversion. It is the condition of nearly everything that can be said about Brigid: the gods of the Tuatha Dé Danann survive only because Christian clerics, the very class that had displaced them, chose to write them down, copy them, and gloss them. The record is at once intimate and oblique. It preserves the goddess and frames her as antiquity in the same breath.

Genealogy: the daughter of the Dagda and the three crafts

Brigid is named among the children of the Dagda, the great father-god of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the divine race that in the medieval pseudo-history held Ireland before the coming of the sons of Míl. Her name, in the older spellings Brig or Brigit, is generally derived from a root meaning “the exalted” or “the high one” — a name that is also an elevation. She married Bres, the half-Fomorian king whose stinginess and misrule provoked the war between the two races, and bore him a son, Ruadán. By that marriage she stands at the seam between the Tuatha Dé and their adversaries, kin to both sides of the quarrel that the whole mythology turns upon.

Her kin place her near the center of the divine race. The Dagda — the “good god,” not morally good but good-at-everything, the club-bearing father with his cauldron of plenty — was among the chief powers of the Tuatha Dé; to be his daughter is to stand close to the source. The fuller genealogies make her sister or half-sister to such figures as Aengus and Bodb Derg, and set her in the same generation that fought the decisive wars of the mythological cycle. The Lebor Gabála gives her a small, vivid household of beasts: two royal oxen, Fea and Femen, who gave their names to two plains of Ireland; the king of boars, Torc Triath; and the king of wethers, so that the very landscape carries her livestock as place-names. The detail is the kind of thing a learned monk sets down — half mythology, half toponymic lore — and it shows the goddess being filed into the map of Ireland, her cattle woven into its fields.

The fullest portrait of her, though, is the one Cormac’s Glossary gives, and it is strange. Brigit, the entry runs, was “the goddess whom poets adored, because very great and very famous was her protecting care”; and she had two sisters, “Brigit the female physician” and “Brigit the female smith” — three daughters of the Dagda, all bearing the one name. The text presents a single goddess who is also three: a goddess of filidecht, the sacred art of poetry; a goddess of healing; a goddess of the forge. These are the three crafts the early Irish ranked among the high arts, the skilled professions a king’s household could not do without, and what binds them is fire. The poet’s inspiration, the leech’s transforming art, the smith’s furnace — each is a kind of heat, a controlled burning that makes a new thing out of raw matter: the made poem, the mended body, the forged blade. Brigid is the deity of that triple fire, and the medieval glossator, whatever distance he kept from the cult, set the three faces down as one. This is a different triplicity from the maiden-mother-crone of later popular paganism; it is a division by craft, three goddesses of three arts, and the single name that holds them is the older and stranger figure.

John Duncan, “Saint Bride” (1913), National Galleries of Scotland. The Celtic-Revival painter renders the saint borne across the sea by angels — an image in which the radiant Bride and the older fire-goddess are deliberately hard to separate. Public domain (artist d. 1945; published before 1931).

This is the place to mark a difficulty that runs under the whole subject. The category “Celtic,” when applied to the insular peoples, is itself disputed; the Iron Age inhabitants of Ireland left no record that they called themselves Celts, and some scholars hold the term to be a modern scholarly imposition. The Tuatha Dé Danann as the medieval texts present them — euhemerized into a race of kings and settlers in the Lebor Gabála Érenn, the “Book of the Taking of Ireland” — are a learned Christian reconstruction, not a transcript of pagan theology. When the Lebor Gabála lists Brigid among the Tuatha and credits her with two royal oxen and a king of boars, it is sorting the old gods into the genealogical scheme of a monastic chronicle. The goddess is real within the world the texts describe; the texts are documents of the people who had stopped worshipping her.

Teaching and significance: poetry, the lament, and the quickening fire

Of the three crafts, poetry stood first, and Brigid’s bond to it is the deepest thing the sources record. Filidecht was not verse-making in any narrow sense. The fili was a seer; his art ran continuous with prophecy, satire, genealogy, law, and a magic of the spoken word that could raise blisters on a king’s face or unmake his reign. To say that the poets adored Brigid is to say that she presided over a whole technology of language held to be charged and dangerous. The filid trained for years in the dark, learning meters and tales and the lore of names; their satire was feared like a weapon and their praise sought like gold; the highest of them, the ollam, ranked with a petty king. She is the patron of that order and of the word that does work in the world — and it is fitting that the goddess whose name became the common noun for “goddess” should be the deity of the people whose whole craft was the right naming of things. The poets carried her cult, and the poets are the reason her cult was written down at all; the filidic order, kin to the older druids of the pre-Christian learned class, survived the conversion as a Christianized profession of scholars and chroniclers, and it is from their hands that the goddess descends to us.

Her second great association is darker, and it is the one piece of narrative the tradition attaches firmly to her. In Cath Maige Tuired, the tale of the second battle of Mag Tuired — the war in which Lugh of the many skills leads the Tuatha Dé and the Morrigan chants doom over the host — the Tuatha Dé and the Fomorians meet in the conflict that decides the order of Ireland. Brigid’s son Ruadán, being half-Fomorian through his father Bres, is sent into the Tuatha camp to spy on their smith. There Goibniu the smith is forging weapons that cannot fail; Ruadán seizes a finished spear and drives it into Goibniu, who pulls the weapon from his own body and casts it back, killing the young man. Then Brigid comes onto the field for her son. She raises over him a cry of grief — and the text says that this was the first keening, the first caoineadh, ever heard in Ireland: weeping and shrieking together, the formal lament that would become the ritual mourning of the Irish dead. The mother of poetry invents, over the body of her child, the poetry of loss. The same tradition makes her the one who devised a whistle for signaling through the night. The goddess who gives the inspired word also gives the cry that has no words.

Saint Brigid, by the Irish painter Patrick Joseph Tuohy (1894–1930). A modern devotional image of the saint who carries the goddess’s attributes of flame, fertility, and the dairy. Public domain (artist d. 1930).

Her third domain is the turning of the year. Brigid is bound to Imbolc, the first of February, one of the four great Gaelic seasonal festivals — Samhain, Imbolc, Bealtaine, Lughnasadh — falling roughly midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. The name is most often read as i mbolg, “in the belly,” and refers to the pregnancy of the ewes, the moment when the flocks come into milk and the sterile cold begins to break. Imbolc is the quickening, the first stir of spring in the frozen ground, and it is Brigid’s feast. Here the fire-goddess turns toward fertility and the dairy: the flame that warms, the milk that returns, the lambing that announces that the year has turned the corner of its death. The fire she governs is not only the poet’s and the smith’s. It is the heat of life resuming.

Two registers must be kept apart in all of this. The festival cycle and the agricultural year are matters of attested folk practice and seasonal fact. The meaning assigned to them — that a goddess presides over the ewes’ milk, that her cry founded the keening — is what the tradition holds from within. A reader should be able to tell the ground from the god standing on it.

Reception: the saint, the fire, and the unsettled question

Then Ireland turned Christian, and a second Brigid appears — Saint Brigid of Kildare, reckoned with Patrick and Columba among the patrons of Ireland, the only woman of the three. The hagiographers place her around 451 to 525. Her name is the goddess’s name; her feast is the goddess’s feast, the first of February, Imbolc; her monastery at Kildare, Cill Dara, the “church of the oak,” kept attributes that mirror the deity’s at nearly every point. The saint of the Lives is a patron of poets, of healing, of livestock and the dairy and the milk-yield — the goddess’s three crafts and her fertility, carried whole across the great divide of the conversion.

And at Kildare there was a fire. Centuries later the Welsh cleric Gerald of Wales, traveling in Ireland, recorded that a perpetual flame burned in the saint’s honor at Kildare, tended in turn by nineteen nuns, one for each night; on the twentieth night the saint herself was said to keep it. The fire stood within an enclosure that no man was permitted to cross. A perpetual sacred flame, guarded by a college of women, forbidden to men, burning beside a church named for an oak, kept for a saint whose feast is the old fire-festival of spring — the configuration is so saturated with the marks of the goddess that the inference seems to make itself.

The restored foundations of the structure traditionally identified as Saint Brigid’s fire temple, in the grounds of Kildare Cathedral. Photograph by A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0.

Many scholars have drawn it. The medievalist Pamela Berger argued that the Christian writers “took the ancient figure of the mother goddess and grafted her name and functions onto” the saint, so that the holy woman of Kildare is the fire-goddess baptized — the cult continued under a new theology, the flame relit on a Christian altar. On this reading the saint is the goddess’s afterlife: paganism’s longest survival in Ireland, hidden in plain sight in the calendar of the Church.

But the inference does not command the field, and this is the load-bearing point of the whole subject: the relation of goddess to saint is genuinely unresolved, and the prudent scholar marks it so. Against the wholesale derivation, historians such as Elva Johnston have argued that the case for a pagan goddess behind the saint has been overstated — that the goddess’s importance has at times been “exaggerated at the saint’s expense,” and that a historical abbess of Kildare, a real founder of a real and powerful monastery, need not be dissolved into a deity to be explained. Cogitosus, who wrote a Life of Brigid in the seventh century, describes a flesh-and-blood ecclesiastical politics — a double monastery of monks and nuns ruled jointly by an abbess and a bishop, a great church with its painted sanctuary and its press of pilgrims, a saint who organized consecrated religious life for women across Ireland and made Kildare a power to rival Patrick’s Armagh. That Life was written partly to advance Kildare’s claims, and a real institution with real ambitions does not need a goddess underneath it to account for its founder. The miracles Cogitosus reports — Brigid multiplying butter and ale, hanging her cloak on a sunbeam, turning water to milk — read as Christian hagiography in its own idiom, even where their dairy imagery happens to rhyme with the goddess’s domain. The shared name and feast may record a deliberate Christianizing of an older holy day; they may also reflect that Brigit was a common woman’s name precisely because the goddess had made it so, and that a real Brigit founded Kildare. Both accounts fit the evidence. Neither closes it.

What is not in dispute is the cult’s vitality on the far side of the question. The flame at Kildare was extinguished at the Reformation and, in recent decades, ceremonially rekindled. Across Ireland, holy wells dedicated to Brigid remain places of pilgrimage and cure, the saint’s healing function continuous with the goddess’s. On the eve of her feast, rushes are folded and bound into the Brigid’s cross — a small woven figure of three or four arms, hung over the door against fire and ill fortune, made new each year as the spring comes in. The custom is Christian in its frame and immemorial in its feel, and no one can say with certainty where one Brigid ends in it and the other begins.

A Brigid’s cross, woven from rushes and traditionally made on the eve of her feast, 1 February. Photograph by Culnacreann, CC BY 3.0.

In the twentieth century and after, Brigid was taken up twice over. The Irish literary revival, reaching for a native mythology, returned the goddess to art and verse; the Revival painters — John Duncan among them — gave her and her saintly double a luminous new iconography in which the line between deity and holy woman was left, by design, indistinct. And the modern Neo-Pagan movements, reconstructing a goddess-religion, restored her to active worship, keeping her flame, marking her Imbolc, addressing the deity of poetry and healing and the forge directly once more. These are reception — a goddess re-imagined under modern conditions, not a survival from antiquity unbroken. But they answer to something the medieval glossator already saw when he wrote that the name had become the word for a goddess. Brigid was never only a person. She was the high one the poets called on, the heat in the three crafts, the fire that is tended so that it does not go out — and a fire, unlike a person, is the kind of thing that can be passed from hand to hand across a thousand years and still be burning.

→ Related: The Dagda · Lugh · The Morrigan · Nuada · The Tuatha De Danann · The Fomorians · The Celts · Tara Hill · Newgrange · Uisneach · Emain Macha · Druids · The Norns · Sekhmet · Anat · Immortality · Soul