Brigid Beyond Belief

"Beidh réidh gach aimhréidh -- All that is tangled will be unraveled"

inscription on a plaque at St. Brigid's Well in Liscannor, Clare

The passageway to the well is filled with offerings – photographs, coins, candles, prayer cards, and, above all, Brigid’s solar crosses woven with Reeds.

The plaque near the entrance to the passage describes the rites to be performed there on the two Pattern Days --  February 1, the feast of Naomh Bríd, for whom the well is named, and August 14 – the first being close to Imbolc, which marked the midpoint of the dark season of the year in the ancient ritual calendar of the year, and the second being close to Lughnassadh, which marked the midpoint of the bright half of the year.   There are rumors that ancient rites well held at this place in late summer long before the well was given St. Brigid’s name, and of ancient chieftains buried deep below the graves that line the hill behind the well.

The words of the prayers pilgrims are instructed to make are unmistakably Christian – but rather than asking that Brigid intercede on the petitioner’s behalf, they implore Jesus and Mary to join the one making the prayer in saluting Brigid. 

Petitioners are instructed to walk five times around a statue, five times up and down a circuit of stairs, and five times around a cross – always walking deosil, sunwise, echoing very old understandings that moving in the same direction as the sun is the way of blessing.

Then they kneel and kiss the cross and go to pray at the well.   Many gather water to bring to others in need of healing.   Custom says that if after praying, you gaze into the waters and see an Eel, your prayer has been answered and the one you are praying for will be healed.

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The waters of the well are holy, but they are not blessed by any priest.   They are blessed by Brigid.

The waters are blessed also by the bones and stones and soil they filter through.    And the waters are holy because they come from below  -- they come from the Otherworld.

Who Brigid is – saint or goddess or ancestor or something else – is a contentious question for modern minds.   But how you answer that question matters little to She who blesses the waters of the well.    What matters is that you approach her with devotion and treat the well and its waters with respect and come with clear intention in your heart.

None of this has anything to do with belief.

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Belief is a very important thing in our culture.   We tend to define ourselves according to what we think is true and build communities around shared belief.

This is a very recent phenomenon in human history.   The furthest back I personally have been able to trace it is the Council of Nicea that set forward the set of teachings all Christians were expected to hold true.   It is possible that there are earlier examples, but the emphasis on “correct” thought is far from a universal concern of humans.

We assume today that in order to be coherent and meaningful, a worldview has be totalizing and consistent.   We expect cosmologies and ideologies to have fixed categories into which beings and objects are assigned.   Within the context of an ideology, we argue about correct and incorrect assignment of people and animals and plants and communities and all manner of aspects of the physical and metaphysical landscapes to particular categories, about the boundaries between different categories and how those boundaries are defined, and about how the different categories fit into a larger abstract map of the world.

As  Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen points out, this is not the only way people and cultures experience the world.   Animist worldviews tend to emphasize relationships over distinctions.  The way in which we experience and interact with other beings become more important than what we believe about them.

This is not to say that what we believe does not matter – but there is a significant degree to which our degree to which we emphasize the importance of belief determines the degree to which a system of abstract thought shapes our reality.     Belief is a drug whose effect depends on set, setting, and dosage.

Whether people “believe” in Jesus or in the Dagda, whether they call Brigid a goddess or a saint, is important primarily in terms of the way in which they experience and approach these beings.   The acceptance of any totalizing structure of belief is going to effect those relationships profoundly.    But in the absence of that kind of fixed ideological structure, I can have relationships with a wide variety of beings shaped by my experience of them rather than by set ideas about who they are supposed to be.   Terry Pratchett expressed this beautifully in his novel, Witches Abroad, where he wrote:

“Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.”

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 While Christianity arrived in Ireland in the first century, and the first bishops, Palladius and Pádraig brought its more orthodox form to the Island in the fifth century, a generation before the birth Brigid of Kildare, for most of Ireland’s history,  it was not the Christianity we associate with the official doctrines of any contemporary Christian denomination.   The harsh theology of guilt and shame we associate with Catholicism in Ireland and in the Irish diaspora is arguably a phenomenon that began in the late nineteenth century in the wake of before before  before The Great Hunger/ An Gorta Mór.  and reached its cruelest and most repressive forms as the Catholic Church replaced the British government and military as the dominant institution of social control in the decades leading up to and following the independence of 26 of the nation’s 32 counties.    This is not to say that that imposition of more and more rigid forms of Christianity on the population by various waves of outside forces over the course of a millennium did not have deleterious effects – but rather to begin to say that the conventional wisdom that Irish culture following the arrival of Pádraig was guided by the values and practices that we associate with Catholicism today is not remotely accurate. 

As is true in many parts of the world, the worldview and devotional practices of rural people in Ireland have historically been much more syncretic than those of urban people, and that distinction becomes even stronger among the prayers and stories and rites performed in a colonizer’s vernacular (English in the case of Ireland,) those performed in a liturgical language (think Latin,) and those performed in a native language (Gaeilge.)  The further you get from the seat of a diocese and the further west you go, the less and less the traditional forms of prayer and devotion resemble those most of us are used to associating with Catholicism, and the more they bear elements and echoes of what came before.   

How exact these echoes are is difficult to demonstrate or determine, given that the only written sources we have on older traditions were written by relatively Christian clergy centuries after Palladius and Pádraig.  How exact these echoes are is also largely irrelevant – unless you are making claims to be practicing an accurate reconstruction of pre-Christian rites or a hidden, suppressed Pagan tradition.   The culture that preceded Christianity in Ireland was a culture of oral tradition.   That oral tradition did not cease to be passed down once people became baptized and began to attend mass – but nor did it remain unchanged.   But it also was likely always a changing tradition  -- cultures that transmit knowledge by story and song and poetry and that practice rituals that are woven into daily life are infinitely changing in a very different way than cultures whose ideologies are based on interpreting a text (though textual interpretations have their own evolution as well, of course.)

So, in relation to a figure as old as Brigid, who we know as a woman who founded a convent and a monastery roughly 1500 years ago in Kildare, and who may have taken on the name and taken on the mantle and the role of a goddess (or three goddesses, or many) who blessed poets and smiths and “female physicians” (to use the terminology of one medieval bishop,) it is hard to say which elements of the stories and prayers and rites we have are Christian and which are Pagan and what that even means.   As folklorist (and artist and archeologist and musician) Billy Mag Fhloinn said in an interview on the Blindboy Podcast –

  "Trying to separate out the Pagan from the Christian is probably pointless. The themes that were relevant to the pre-Christian people continued to be relevant to Christian people. So themes, ideas, imagery, stories connected with the goddess probably continued and became thoroughly Christianized."

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To say that the “themes, imagery, stories connected with the goddess [ . . .] became thoroughly Christianized” does not mean that we cannot engage with Brigid in a way that is outside a Christian worldview.    The nature of living traditions is that they are – alive, and changing.   And as some of us extricate ourselves from the Christianized cultures we were born into, we can re-encounter Brigid on our own terms – and hers.

But this is not to say that anything goes.   Relational approaches depend on building relationship, not with archetypes or abstractions but with beings and forces that are part of the living world.

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I first encountered Brigid in the flames of a fire when my understanding of the world was crumbling.    I had devoted myself to a version of Catholic theology that asserted that Christ would come at the end of time to make all things right, and that our acts of solidarity and voluntary suffering would aid in the coming of the Kin-dom.   When I lost my belief that Christ was coming back to bring perfect justice, my world was shaken.    The woman in the flames told me there was another path of devotion that came before Christianity, and that the path was mine to take up in ways I am still learning to integrate and understand.  

That same woman in the flames was in the waters of the well in Liscannor and she carried the same name.    And she is known to the ancestors I connect with as well – some call her saint, and to some she is something else that our concept of “goddess” – a concept shaped by the English speaking world’s understanding of beings Athenians and Romans knew, filtered through our understandings of the monotheistic word “God” – do not quite adequately describe.

Indeed it is hard to put language to her at all, but there are elements of the traditions associated with the feast of Saint Brigid that become points of contact I can share.   Works by folklorists like Shane Lahane and Kevin Dannaher can reveal other traditions – and speaking with people carrying on living traditions can reveal even more.  But here is a simple starting place:

Brigid’s cross is woven from Reeds, from green Rushes that grow by in the rich soil at the water’s edge.

It is not wrong to see her cross as a symbol of resurrection --  but understand that Brigid is a midwife to new birth in this world.   And understand also that the surviving tales of Brigid-who-came-before tell us that she was a woman who wept for a slain son – and her anguished cry was the beginning of the tradition of  caoineadh, or keening – the singing that opens the way for the journey of the soul from out of the dead body.

The form of her cross is likely older than Christianity.  It resembles carvings found in rock art in Ireland – and around the world.

Some suggest this “lozenge” form is the form of a passageway to other ways of seeing and being that people experience in rites that profoundly alter consciousness.

Some see it as a birth canal.

She and her cross are connected with fertility – and fertility of animals, of crops, of people, and of the land are only distinct from each other in the modern mind.  

Her cross has been hung in kitchens and larders to bring abundance of food.   It has also been placed under or hung over the beds of people trying to conceive.   And Billy Mag Fhloinn tells (in the interview linked above) of an instance of a partially burned Brigid’s cross being found inside a passage tomb --  and of the not so-long lost rite of lovers trying to conceive a child coming together in those ancient tombs, perhaps calling on the blessing of those buried there to help bring new life into the world (and echoing the tale of Diarmuid and Gráinne, a story for another day, but one well told in the chapter titled “Dolmen Love” in John Moriarty’s Invoking Ireland.)

A Brigid’s cross is not hard to weave for someone with a reasonable level of dexterity (ie. someone who is not me.)   Weaving her cross of Rushes can be a meditative act once you get the hang of it.   When your hands know what they are doing, consider gazing into fire or water – both have their connections with Brigid, that are hers to reveal.    Listening to or singing to songs devoted to Brigid – old or new – may deepen the experience further.

Weaving the cross, or gazing into fire or water, or walking out on the land where you live, it is worth considering the timing of the Feast of Saint Brigid as well:

February 1 very roughly corresponds with the old holiday of Imbolc.   The reckoning of Imbolc’s exact timing is another one of those contentious questions in today’s world, and likely had some degree of local variation.   But one key thing we understand about the ancient calendar is that it most likely divided the year into two seasons – the dark half of the year that began at Samhain (in November)  and the bright half of the year that began at Bealtaine (in May.)

When I feel and dream into the metaphysics of that calendar – which is the best we can ultimately do, while informed by elements of old texts and living traditions – the sense that I get is that at Samhain, life and vitality pour from this world into the dark, watery world – the place of the womb and the tomb, the place outside of ordinary time --  and at Bealtaine life blossoms forth into this world anew.    Imbolc then, is the turning point, the point when we begin to feel the return of life to this world – the quickening of the child in the womb, the sunlight starting to waken the seeds an roots and bulbs beneath soil and snow.  In parts of Ireland, Snowdrops and Dandelions often emerge at Imbolc, but even here in Maine where the weather is still bitterly cold, I can feel the stirring of life in my own body and in the body of the land.

We do not know whether Imbolc was directly connected to the Brigid(s) who came before Christianity – but its connection with the saint who was the patron of midwives is no mistake.   (Nor is it a mistake that it is connected with she who blesses poets – poetry in ancient Ireland was a sacred art that involved the passing of tradition and the speaking of prophecy – another subject for another day.)

Let Brigid and your body and the land help you come into relation with this mystery.

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In writing The Silver Branch and the Otherworld, I crafted a simple ritual for Imbolc that may offer you another way of experiencing this time and connecting with the changes in the land.   Before parting, let me offer you an even more simplified version of it (and an invitation to joining me in delving into some of these mysteries in my online class this Sunday -- https://otherworldwell.com/blogs/news/the-quickening-imbolc-and-the-fertility-of-the-land )

Here is

The night before your ritual, leave a white altar cloth outside. Bring it in when you wake and lay it out before you when it is time to begin your rite.

Put out an offering for Brigid. Honey, milk, and whiskey are quite nice.

Atop the white cloth, set out three candles, and place a bowl of water in front of each.

As you light the first candle, ask for the fire of the hearth to warm you.  Gaze into the water and ask what is needed to nourish your life and the life of the land.

As you light the second candle, ask the fire of the forge to warm you. Gaze into the water and ask how you can best shape the rhythms of your life to be in harmony with the life of the land.

As you light the third candle, ask the fire of inspiration to spark the fire in your head. Gaze into the water and ask how you can inspire people to live in ways that honor the land.

Let the candles burn down.

Pour the offerings out onto the land, giving thanks.