The Mystery of Brigit: A Video Poem

Brigit as Goddess of the Dawn

In a hymn in the Rig Veda, Uṣas, the Dawn goddess, "shines forth and with her lovely face wakens us to happiness". The feminine adjective br̥hatī  meaning ‘high, great, lofty’ is applied to her several times in the Rig Veda and, as you might know, the names Brigantia and Brigit come from a cognate word, the feminine PIE*bhr̥g'hntī, from a root berg'h 'high, lofty, elevated'.  

It seems likely that the name Brigit or Brigantia is actually a title rather than a personal name, meaning ‘high one’ – something similar to the royal title, ‘Your Highness’. In the Indo-European (IE) tradition, among others, sometimes gods’ names were not spoken aloud because they were taboo and it was not uncommon for them to be displaced by a title or epithet. As M L West points out in his book Indo-European Poetry and Myth which I am drawing on in this post, we do the same with the Christian god Yahweh, referring to him instead as Lord or Almighty Father or simply God. J K Rowling reflects this in the Harry Potter books where Voldemort is so feared that he is known as He Who Must Not Be Named in case uttering the actual name will invoke his presence.

West considers Brigit a candidate for a lost Irish goddess of the Dawn. He notes that the details and imagery of Brigit in the saint’s Lives are in keeping with such a goddess. She is born at sunrise, on the threshold of the house, and her mother has a foot either side of the doorway. She is the daughter of Dubthach, (Dark), son of Dallbrónach, (Dark and gloomy), the house she is in appears to be burning with a fire that extends up to heaven but extinguishes nothing and she is only able to be fed by drinking the milk from a red-eared cow - Uṣas is associated with red cows. He also mentions that she is said elsewhere to be the daughter of the Dagda, the Good God (a statement which actually comes from Cormac’s Glossary). Uṣas is thought to be the daughter of Dyeus (Zeus in Greek mythology), the Father god, the all-knowing God. (West, p 218)

Dawn as the Inspirer of Poets and Bringer of Wisdom

Reading a hymn to Uṣas in the Rig Veda, I was delighted to find her described as the inspirer of poets:

"Gazing out over all creatures, the Goddess shines from the distance facing straight towards every eye. Awakening into motion everything that lives, she has found the speech of the inspired poet." (RV 1 92 9. O’Flaherty)

A note by the translator Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty tells us that ‘found’ has two meanings – both that Uṣas finds poetry for the poet, inspiring him, and finds it in him, accepting his praise. In his glossary, Cormac describes Brigit as "the goddess whom poets adored". It would be natural, of course, that the beauty of Dawn who brings with her the return of the light, of the day, of the riches that the day offers, inspires poets and is the subject of their praise.

As the bringer of light to mortals, and bearing in mind the metaphor of light as enlightenment, dawn can easily be associated with wisdom – and again Brigit is hailed by Cormac as a female sage or woman of wisdom. Both Uṣas and the Greek goddess of Dawn, Eos, are described as ‘far-seeing’ or ‘all-seeing’ and we know that the Sun god’s status arises from his position of being high in the heavens giving him likewise the attribute of being all-seeing as well as all-knowing (even in Christian prayers in the Carmina Gadelica the sun is revered as the eye of God). The Dawn goddess through her position in the heavens is all-seeing with its implication all-knowing, wise.

Cows and Dawn

West considers the cow with the red ears significant because Uṣas is particularly associated with red cows – probably a metaphor for the redness of sky at dawn.The Rig Veda refers to both Night and Dawn as cows:  “Dawn and Night are a cow good for milking”. (It should be noted though that Brigit’s cow is white with red ears and such animals appear elsewhere in Celtic language tales notably The Mabinogi, the implication being that they are Otherworldly beasts. But then why is this so? Is it because they were at one time associated with a goddess of the heavens?)
St Brigit’s lore undeniably associates her with cows – she is a protector of domestic animals. In one of the medieval accounts of her life she is able to milk her cow three times to provide hospitality to visiting bishops and in her iconography she is often shown with a cow. In milking songs in the Carmina Gadelica she is referred to as ‘the milkmaid Bride’ and a milking blessing (no 95)  affirms that:

   "The calm Bride of the white combs
   Will give to my loved heifer the lustre of the swan."

  "Bheir Bride bhith nan cire geala,
   Li na h-eal am aghan gaoi."l

Bride is often referred to as a maid or maiden in the Carmina Gadelica – as is Uṣas.   

Dawn and Night as Sisters

Night and Dawn are seen in the Rig Veda as sisters, the one driving away the other. West quotes from the Rig Veda:

"Bright with bright calf the white one has come; the black one has vacated her seats for her.
Cognate, immortal, consecutive, Day and Night, alternating colour, move on…"(RV 1 113 2. O’ Flaherty)

He also quotes from Greek literature where Hesiod states:

                                "Night and Day approaching
   greet one another as they cross the great threshold
   of bronze: the one goes in the other comes out…
   the one carrying far-seeing light… for men on earth
   the other with Sleep in her arms, the brother of Death…"

while Parmenides has “There stand the gates of the paths of Night and Day, kept apart by a lintel and a stone threshold…”

A Latvian riddle offers “Two sisters who are at odds; one appears, the other runs away; one is white the other black”.  (West, pp 222-223)

The Two Faces of Bride

All this reminds me of a rather tantalising remark in Lady Gregory’s Of Gods and Fighting Men regarding Brigit: “And the one side of her face was ugly, but the other side was very comely”. I recognise the source of everything else Gregory says about Brigit and though I tried following up the booklist she gives as sources at the end of her book, I was unable to find this. It was a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack however and perhaps I shall try again at some point. Since I do recognise the authenticity of the other descriptions of Brigit, I’m inclined to believe that she had a good source for this statement, though it could have been lore she had collected locally and so unverifiable.      

There are some echoes of this idea – of the two faces – in 'The Story of the Coming of Angus and Bride' in Donald Mackenzie’s Wonder Tales from the Scottish Myth and Legend. In it, Beira, who reigns over the winter is dark and old in her winter aspect (“Why is my face so dark, so dark?”) but when she renews herself by drinking from the Well of Youth she becomes young and beautiful with golden hair and we are told "there is none more lovely save Bride". Beira keeps Bride prisoner all winter but on the first day of spring she is rescued by Angus. A battle ensues between the forces of winter, Beira, and of spring or summer, Angus and his consort, Bride; Beira rides a dark horse, Angus a white one. Mackenzie comments that “The story of the struggle between Angus with his consort Bride and Beira is the story of the struggle between spring and winter, growth and decay, light and darkness, and warmth and cold” but he does not name sources for the story. It was published in 1917, thirteen years after Of Gods and Fighting Men but it is a least possible that Lady Gregory had heard of it.

Digressing rather, there is a pleasing account by the poet W B Yeats, a friend of Lady Gregory, which shows that he was aware of the Carmina Gadelica:

“I find in my diary that on December 27, 1897, a seer, to whom I had given a certain old Irish symbol, saw Brigid, the goddess, holding out ‘a glittering and wriggling serpent’, and yet I feel certain that neither I nor he knew anything of her association with the serpent until the Carmina Gadelica was published a few months ago.”  (From the essay 'Magic', quoted in A. Norman Jeffares, Yeats: Selected Criticism, Macmillan, 1964, pp 88-8)

To return to consideration of the two faces of Brigit - in the Scottish tale there are then two women, one old with a dark face and one who is young and lovely, who represent the opposing forces of dark and light, winter and spring or summer. In Lady Gregory’s description ugly and comely are not the same as black and white of course, but they signify duality and carry the idea of a welcome and unwelcome aspect.
These are the only two sources I’ve come across which suggest this type of duality and neither are substantiated – but I think it is at least worth considering that there has been a tradition of the two faces of Brigit and if so there might have been an older concept of the light and dark sisters.

In the Rig Veda, Uṣas herself has something of a dual nature. She is immortal, being reborn each day, and wakens mortals to happiness, giving them the riches of the day. But she also causes them to age, wearing away their life span because their days are numbered. ’Bringing old age, thou hast come, O unageing Dawn. Unageing, thou dost make to age all else’. (Taittirīya Saṃhāta. 3. 11. 5. quoted in West, p 225) In this she is, in a sense, an ally of Death as well as Life.

The Colours of Dawn

The IE prototype for the word dawn, *h₂ewes- (→ *awes-), is a verbal root meaning, according to West, ‘glow, (red) flame’, related to the Latin and Old Prussian words for ‘gold’among others. From these come Latin aurora and Welsh gwawr. The name Eos for the Greek goddess of Dawn, the Roman Aurora, and the Indian Uṣas are related. (West, p 217)

In the Rig Veda Uṣas is associated with red-gold and described as being many-coloured or brightly-coloured. Her cows and horses are variously described as red or red-gold, although in hymn 113.14 she awakens the world on her chariot drawn by purple horses. Also, as in the example above, she is described as both bright and white - 'the white one'.
Famously, Homer celebrate Eos as 'rose-fingered' and 'saffron-robed' while elsewhere the epithets 'rose-armed' and 'gold-armed' are applied to her. The poet Sappho calls her 'gold-sandalled Dawn. The redness described is often qualified as a soft rose-red or golden red. These are, of course, the colours of dawn.

Kilmeny, in her blog 'Reul-iuil Bride', has an interesting post, The Colours of Bríde, which shows Brigit is repeatedly linked with the colours white and gold in the extant lore, rather than the bright red we might associate her with today in current neo-pagan narrative.

Incidentally, the picture of Brigit at the top of this post fits very well with her as goddess of Dawn bringing light out of the night sky, dressed in white with golden hair. I came across it unattributed but the style is so like that by the artist Gail Donovan in a leadlight window in Kildare College Chapel, Holden Hill, South Australia, "dancing the dance of the new life of creation…" (which I have on a card given me by the Brigidine sisters in Kildare) that I assume it is by her. 

The Dawn Goddess Mourns Her Son

A rather curious and unexpected correspondence I came across exploring the dawn connection concerns the Greek goddess of Dawn, Eos. Eos, a Greek, has a son, Memnon, by the Trojan Tithonus. He is killed by Achilles fighting for his father's people against the Greeks in the Trojan War. His death is told of in the now lost epic Aethiopis, composed after the Iliad, circa the 7th century BC but recounted in other texts which have come down to us. Eos mourns the death of her son, in one account she prevents the sun from rising and flees to Hades until Zeus persuades her to return. Virgil says that when her son Memnon was going to fight against Achilles, she asked Hephaestus, the Greek smith god, to give her arms for him. When Memnon was killed, her tears fell down in the form of morning dew.

Compare this account with a scene from The Second Battle of Maigh Tuiredh:

…the Fomoire… picked a man to reconnoitre the battle and the practices of the Túatha Dé — Rúadán, the son of Bres and of Brig, the daughter of the Dagda—because he was a son and a grandson of the Túatha Dé… They sent him back to kill one of the áes dána, Goibniu [the smith of the Túatha Dé]. He requested a spearpoint from him, its rivets from the brazier, and its shaft from the carpenter; and everything was given to him as he asked… But after the spear had been given to him, Rúadán turned and wounded Goibniu. He pulled out the spear and hurled it at Rúadán so that it went through him; and he died in his father's presence in the Fomorian assembly. Bríg came and keened for her son. At first she shrieked, in the end she wept. Then for the first time weeping and shrieking were heard in Ireland. (Gray, paragraph 57, p 39) 

In the Greek story, the Greek Eos has a son with Memnon, a Trojan and Memnon fights on the Trojan side and is killed by Achilles, a Greek. The Greek god Hephaestus made a weapon (or armour in some accounts) at Eos’s request, because she is of his tribe. In the Irish account Brig, of the Túatha Dé Danaan, has a son with Bres of the Fomoire. Goibniu, the smith and other craftsmen of the Túatha Dé Danaan make a spear for Rúadán because they are of his mother's tribe. Rúadán tries to kill Goibniu but fails and is killed by him, a member of the Túatha Dé Danaan. Both mothers grieve deeply for their sons.

It seems to me there is too much similarity between these two accounts for it to be accidental and we know that the Irish literati were interested in the intellectual heritage of classical civilization and copied classical texts. If the story of Eos and Memnon did influence this account, it is surely significant that Brig is given the role of Eos, the Dawn goddess.

The so-called "Memnon pietà": The goddess Eos lifts up the body of her son Memnon (Attic red-figure cup, ca. 490–480 BC, from Capua, Italy) Courtesy ofWikipedia 

The statues of Mary with the body of her son Jesus that I’ve seen in Ireland always make me think of Brigit and her son Rúadán and in fact the Christian Pietà may have its origin in ancient depictions of the Greek legend of Eos and Memnon.

Pietà of Tubądzin c. 1450 Courtesy of Wikipedia

Goddess of Springtime

The Agniṣṭoma, the Vedic springtime festival at the beginning of the year, began with songs to Uṣas. (West, p 225) Elsewhere too the Dawn goddess was associated with a springtime festival. West comments that many IE peoples had a festival to celebrate the returning warmth of the sun and traditionally people would rise at or before dawn to greet the sun. It would therefore be natural for the dawn goddess to be the subject of more veneration at this time of the year. He later states that:

"The plainest example of the Dawn goddess’s becoming attached to a single festival, and that in the spring, is that of the Anglo-Saxon Eostre and her postulated German counterpart Ôstara, who have given us Easter and the Ostertage. Our source [Bede] does not connect Eostre with dawn, but that is undoubtedly the meaning of her name. (West, p 227)

Brigit’s festival, as we know, is earlier than Easter, at the very beginning of spring, when the light of the sun is just starting to visibly strengthen. To my mind, if Dawn were to be associated with a spring festival, the very start of the season would have a logic to it since dawn is the very beginning of the day.

Dawn as Upholder of Cosmic Law

Because he sees all, the Sun is witness to all and was widely known to be invoked as a witness of oaths. (West, p 200) Moving rightways with the sun is also of major importance as an expression of cosmic order and truth. In the Rig Veda Dawn, who resides on high, also upholds cosmic law:

"Truly she followeth the path of Order, nor faileth, knowing well, the heavenly quarters." (RV 1 124 3, Griffiths)

"Foe-chaser, born of Law, the Law's protectress, joy-giver, waker of all pleasant voices." (RV 1 113 12, Griffiths)

This resonates with me, at least, since I believe that Brigit, as a woman of wisdom, calls us to uphold the Truth, the right order of things.

Like the Sun, the Dawn looks down on all alike:

"She, verily, exceeding vast to look on, debarreth from her light nor kin nor stranger.
Proud of her spotless form she, brightly shining, turneth not from the high nor from the humble." (RV 1 124 6, Griffiths)

For those who consider that Brigit has connections with the law and justice, perhaps in the guise of Bríg ambue (the jurist who is said in the Irish law tracts to have intervened in or corrected judgements made by Sencha, king Conchobar's judge) these attributes of Dawn may be potent.

Dawn as a Provider of Riches

Finally, Uṣas, like Brigit, is a provider. First of all she brings Light and Life and by extension the plenty that accrue from them:

"Arise! The breath, the life, again hath reached us: darkness hath passed away and light approacheth.
She for the Sun hath left a path to travel, we have arrived where men prolong existence.
Singing the praises of refulgent Mornings with his hymn’s web, the priest, the poet, rises.
Shine then to-day, rich Maid, on him who lauds thee, shine down on us the gift of life and offspring."
 (RV 1 113 16-20, Griffiths)

Perhaps the idea of a goddess as midwife might have developed from the concept of one who is herself reborn each day and then awakens mortals into life?

Conclusions

There is an inscription at Corbridge on Hadrian’s Wall to caelestis Brigantia, celestial or heavenly Brigantia, which would be consistent with a Dawn goddess who is seen on high – the High One. In the past I’ve considered that it might refer to a sun goddess but a dawn goddess is just as possible.

Considering the idea over the course of this post, I find myself persuaded that there is something tangible here, that being a goddess associated with the dawn is part of Brigit’s story, though buried in the mists of time. 

In some medieval Irish texts Brigit is compared to the sun rather than the dawn. For instance, in two of the Lives, a wizard prophesies, on hearing the sound of Dubthach’s chariot, that Dubthach’s bondmaid Broicsech will give birth to a daughter “conspicuous, radiant, who will shine like a sun among the stars of heaven” and the 11th c hymn Brigit Bé Bithmaith says:

Brigid, excellent woman,
Flame golden, sparkling,
May she bear us to the eternal kingdom,
(She), the sun, fiery, radiant!  

Also, her four-armed cross has been identified with a ancient symbol of the sun. However it could well be that in later times the dawn goddess developed into a goddess of the sun. In Homer, the dawn goddess Eos accompanies Helios, the sun god, throughout the day, and she sometimes stands in for him. There is also some identification or confusion of her with Hemera, the Greek goddess of the day, and later retellings assign Eos's myths to Hemera. Something similar might well have happened in Irish tradition. We should remember though that images of fire and the sun are not unique to accounts of St Brigit and appear in other descriptions of Irish saints and heroes.

None of the material here amounts to evidence that Brigit or Brigantia was at one time known as a goddess of the Dawn – it is suggestive rather than conclusive, poetic rather than systematic. I’ll leave you with words from Ruth Bidgood’s Hymn to St Ffraid (Brigit’s name in Wales) from the collection Symbols of Plenty,which describes the situation beautifully:

   It is fitting that you
   should be saint of poets,
   you are mysterious, as a poem is.

   We cannot say of you
   she is exactly this or exactly that,
   or name with certainty your origin,
   or set limits to your meaning.
   You were a poem waiting to be written.
   Found and revealed,
   you make for us
   resonances with things nameless,
   deep, ancient and to come.

May Brigit shine her lovely face upon you and awaken you to happiness!

Sources

M L West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, Oxford University Press, 2007

The Rig Veda, An Anthology, translated by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Penguin Books, 1981

The Rig Veda, translated by Ralph T. H. Griffith http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Rig_Veda/

The Second Battle of Mag Tuired, translated by Elizabeth A Gray, 2003 http://www.ucc.ie/celt/online/T300010.html

Donald Alexander MacKenzie,Wonder Tales from Scottish Myth and Legend, Dover Publications Inc., 1997

Ruth Bidgood, Symbols of Plenty, Canterbury Press, 2006

Tending Brigit's Flame

I've recently rejoined Ord Brighideach, becoming a flame-keeper in Cill na Craoibhe Olóige, the Olive Branch, a group within the Order that I inititated about 12 years ago. I lapsed from it when my life went a bit haywire but  last month I finally decided the time was right to make the commitment to tend the flame again.

It's coincided with wanting to suspend writing any more articles - including the one about the Cauldron of Poesy - because I think I've had enough of such left brain activity (researching, ordering, codifying, making a coherent argument) and want to concentrate more on poetry, inner work and practice for a while. I'm sure I'll come back to the Cauldron at some point (maybe in the winter when I'm not in the garden so much) but it feels right to put it aside for now and move into something more free-flowing. 

My first shift was a wonderful experience. I have two shrines in my house now; one by the fire in the living-room and one in the hall. The latter came together in a totally unplanned way; the hall is very large and when I moved in 3 years ago it felt bare. The bottom part of a pine dresser needed somewhere to go so I put it there and it seemed to belong. Then I wanted a place to put a mirror that had belonged to my parents; the one thing I wanted most out of their house. It's antique, of dark wood with curly edges and a golden phoenix (or probably an eagle) on the top and it became for me a symbol of renewal. (I was reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix while I was staying in my parents' house, clearing and sorting out their things with my siblings. Harry's grief at the death of Sirius seemed to mirror my own.) The Phoenix mirror hangs comfortably above the dresser cupboard - in spite of being in a totally different style - and since it had been above the hall table in my parents' house that seemed fitting.

Next came a Buddha... My son and daughter-in-law had given it to me for a house-warming present (they bought it in Sainsbury's!) It was for the garden but after being there the first winter the paint started to crack so I brought it indoors, repaired it and put it on the dresser cupboard. It's rather beautiful. I'm not a Buddhist but I think of him as the Spirit of Contemplation and seeing him calm and at peace as day changes into night, summer into winter and sun into rain helps to remind me to keep a philosophical outlook as I go through the changes life brings.

Finally, the little head of Brigit I made in pottery class needed somewhere to go and I put her to the right of the Buddha and she was happy there. I spent 8 weeks making that statue. I used as a model the statue of a goddess or priestess wearing a torque found at a healing spring in Chamalieres, France and dated to the first century AD.

I thought of it constantly in between the weekly classes and couldn't wait to work on it. Sadly it came to pieces in the kiln but all was not lost: the head was intact and the body was in quite large pieces so it was possible to glue it together and in way, as it was a copy of an old statue, I thought it would add something to it. The pottery teacher said he would glue it and I decided he might make a better job of it than me so I left it to him. But horror of horrors - he didn't do it right away and someone from another class saw it lying on one of the shelves and threw it out! Thankfully, they left the head. I was devastated, as you can probably imagine! I do have a photograph of it though:

A patient of mine, a carpenter, made me a plinth out of reclaimed cedar, for the head to rest on and all was not lost. I was left with a gap on the left side of the Buddha and so it was natural to put the little statue I had made of Cernunnos based on the Gundestrup Cauldron there.

 



After this I realised that the hall was the perfect place for the shrine. It's in the centre of the house and I pass it several times a day.

A week or so before I started tending the flame again I bought a candle holder I'd had my eye on last year. It came from a sea-side shop selling useful items for caravanners and campers and what my mother would have called 'tat' - which I actually quite like! Shells and little ornaments and mobiles and windmills... But I had resisted buying this particular 'thing' because clearing out my parents' house and moving a couple of years later has made me very wary of 'things' - I've got too many of them and I'm not good at dusting... But one day, in  a weak moment, when I was in the shop buying some windmills (to put beside the baby leeks to keep the cats off) I bought it. And I'm so pleased I did - it's perfect. Not only is there space for two tea lights but there is a hidden pump (not too loud) which makes water cascade down the wall of the holder. The flame of the tea lights is reflected in the water giving the effect of fire in water, which I associate with the mystery of Brigit, and  the sound is gentle, evocative, musical.

It's called a Cordless Tealight Tranquility Fountain and cost £6.99. I thought it would also be a very nice thing to have if you had to go into hospital or somewhere rather sterile. (You could use some LED tealights.) They have them at Redsave if you're in the UK, or at Amazon.com.

I don't know how it will be in the winter sitting in the hall by the shrine when I'm tending the flame, (not for the whole 24 hours of course!) but for now it is fine. How lovely it was to go into deep meditation, to say poems and prayers, to talk to Brigit, to connect. Willow, one of my cats, came out of the kitchen into the dark hall, lit only by the candles, and sat, unmoving, beside me for 20 minutes - both of us honouring the space.

One thing I noticed is that there are gaps in the 19 day cycle of tending the flame in Cill Olive (Brigit herself tends it on the 20th day) - shifts 8, 12, 15 and 17 need to be filled. This saddens me because it means the flame is not being kept alight on a permanent basis. If you would like to join me and the other flame-keepers at Cill na Craoibhe Olóige, the Olive Branch to tend Brigit's perpetual flame, that would be wonderful!

Here is some information from the site: "Each Flamekeeper is assigned a shift to tend Brighid's flame on a 20 day cycle - 19 shifts, plus one day upon which Brighid tends the flame herself. Since the Celtic day runs from sundown to sundown, we tend from sundown to sundown. The expectation is that you will tend the flame for as much of the day as possible, taking safety into consideration. If you can only manage a few minutes, that is acceptable, although tending the flame the entire day is optimal. The longer you are able to tend, the more energy we will be able to generate: an offering to this world and the otherworld, as well as to Brighid."

As I envisaged it originally, the Cill had the particular purpose of praying for peace - as it appears the Abbesses of Kildare once did. When I lapsed, the Order took over the Cill and its origins seem to have been lost and it is not now a requirement. However, if you're interested and you'd like to, you could say a prayer or a poem or think about peace - in the world or in your own life.

Here's a peace prayer I wrote:

Brigit,

We ask for the light of your flame

To enable us to see clearly,

To illuminate the darkness,

To show us the shadows

Cast by our own light.

May the flame of your inspiration

Help us to express and comfort,

To understand and explain -

Encourage us and guide our actions.

We ask for the gift of your healing

To soften our pain,

And mend the wounds

We have inflicted on one another -

Bless us and make us whole.

May the fire of your forge

Enable us to shape our future

With courage and determination,

Using the flame of justice,

Tempered by compassion.

Brigit,

We ask for your protection

Against all that would harm us.

May the beacon of your flame

Show us a path to peace

That all may follow.

Rob fír/May it be true.

The Way of Brigit, Goddess and Saint: Towards a Post-Christian Paganism

Sulamith Wülfing: The Way 

Goddess as saint: my dilemma

Some time ago I wrote about how a visit to Brigit’s church by Llanon had unsettled me and made me wonder about my relationship to her as goddess and saint. I had first read about Brigit in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess where the connection between goddess and saint was stated and so from the first I didn’t question it but incorporated material from St Brigit’s story into her lore. But walking into a church, seeing the prayer books, the cross on the altar and the east window with its depiction of the risen Christ suddenly brought it home to me that Christianity also claimed Brigit and that she had her own relationship with the Christian god. The church was not my church and I was unsure how to relate to the figure of Jesus behind the altar. I felt I needed to make some sort of response and so gave a short nod and muttered something about ‘just having come in to have a word with Brigit’ as I went to the pew beside her own window…

When I first started researching Brigit and other Celtic material, I wanted to dismiss the references to Christianity, to God and Jesus and the other saints beside Brigit. I was trying to sift Christianity out of the narrative and reach further back to a pagan past which I believed was still discernable in such accounts as Giraldus Cambrensis’ description of the keeping of the flame at Kildare. Like many pagans I rewrote some of the charms and prayers in Scottish, Irish and Welsh sources for my own use, missing out the Christian references.

But then as time went on I found myself less sensitive to these and in a subtle and almost imperceptible way began tuning in to the manner in which the Irish, Scottish and Welsh folk and poets related to and interacted with their God and saints. So, for instance, I noted how there were folk traditions concerning Jesus, his mother and the saints, such as this one from the Western Isles where it was told that Christ asked Peter to row 707 strokes from the shore when he was going to fish for tribute money. According to Alexander Carmichael, because of this, the old men of Uist required the young men to row out 707 strokes before casting their nets on Christmas Day and whatever fish they caught were given to the poor as a tribute in the name of Christ, King of the sea, and of Peter, king of fishermen.(1)  Again, certain woods were seen as evil or poisonous, such as aspen, because they were said to have been the wood the cross was made out of.

I saw the way that Christian prayers were used as invocations or charms for healing and protection – for instance the Credo, the Pater Noster and the Prayer of Mary Mother had to be recited by a person needing protection when she had a caim, or circle of protection set around her – and how the actions of Christ and the saints were recounted in healing charms for toothache and other ailments. The attitude to God, Christ, Mary, Brigit and other saints was in general positive and trusting. They were petitioned for protection and healing, their powers seen very often as benevolent and magical – there is a sense that deities and saints are part of the family. A prayer in the Carmina Gadelica for the kindling of the fire says:

Who are they on the bare floor?
John and Peter and Paul,
Who are they by my bed?
The lovely Bride and her Fosterling.
Who are those watching over my sleep?
The fair loving Mary and her Lamb.
Who is that anear me?
The King of the sun, He himself it is.
Who is that the back of my head?
The Son of Life without beginning, without time.

Eventually I began to mentally translate ‘God’ as ‘Godness’ or ‘divinity’ and after a while I stopped having to translate but saw the word ‘God’ as signifying this.

The hagiography, the texts about the saints, were usually written with a specific purpose in mind. Often this was political such as Cogitosus’ life of Brigit which was probably aiming to promote the See of Kildare against the spread of Patrick’s centre at Armagh, or 12th and 13th century Welsh hagiography which was used to further the cause of an independent Welsh Church against Anglo-Norman culture and traditions. The authors of these stories used folklore narratives and motifs as part of their armoury and as a result they drew on concepts and beliefs from traditional patterns. This is especially true in Wales where the values of the native culture were emphasised over traditional church concepts and values.(2) In the Welsh lives of the saints, secular or pagan characters – even the tylwyth teg, the fair people or fairies – figure alongside the Christian saints.

So I began to blur the boundaries between pagan and Christian and exposure to this way of being Christian – essentially a folk tradition – led me to tune not so much into the name of the religion and its divine beings but the way in which the people of the three Celtic-speaking countries of Ireland, Scotland and Wales related to them and worshipped them. And the way they were worshipped seemed to me to emphasise intimacy and immanence (God’s presence in the material universe).

One of the ways folk Christianity differs from orthodox Christianity or the Christianity of the established Church is that it is often conveyed through story-telling which weaves a narrative around the particular culture and landscape of a people. It is more concerned with what Edward Conze has called the ‘initial tradition’ of Christianity – which I think of as that of Gospels and Acts – than the ‘continuing tradition’ that consists of the Fathers and doctors of the church, the decisions of councils and synods and the pronouncements of various hierarchies’.(3) So unlike much of theology which seeks to apply logic and reasoning to religion in an attempt to make it into an ordered system, story-telling is multivalent, fluid, adaptable, forgiving of inconsistency and paradox. It has its roots in the people and their landscape and is therefore less susceptible to the control of a central agency, unlike a top-down theology, the product of an élite which may have political considerations as well as spiritual ones.

I am personally much more influenced and inspired by story than by theology which is often an intellectual exercise designed to apply logic to things which are beyond reason. The word for ‘supernatural’ used by the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso means ‘that which knowledge cannot eat’. So story, art and symbol become valid means of approaching an interaction with the supernatural and the divine; Jesus understood this and often used parables to convey spiritual lessons, or esoteric speech, ‘secret sayings’. The truth of a story does not depend on its factuality or historical accuracy, the story is a container or vessel for truth. As a poem attributed to St Columba says:

If every poem is a lie,

then clothing and food are lies too,

as are the whole world and even clayey man..

Masa brec gach dan suad,

Is brec brat’s as brec biadh.

‘s as brec an domhan uli,

‘s as brec fos an duinecriadh. (4)

The story of Brigit and Jesus

Returning to my crisis about Brigit as saint, over the weeks following my visit to Llansantffraed, I began to think again about her story as it appears in folklore and poetry. The Carmina Gadelica recounts that Brigit was Mary’s aid-woman or midwife and that she was present in the stable in Bethlehem and helped to bring Jesus into the world. After he was born, she became his foster-mother. She was known as ban-chuideachaidh Moire (the aid-woman of Mary), Muime Chriosda (foster-mother of Christ); Bana-ghoistidh Mhic De (the god-mother of the son of God) and Bana-ghoistidh Iosda Criosda nam bann agus nam beannachd (godmother of Jesus Christ of the bindings and blessings). And Jesus is called Dalta Bride (the foster-son of Bride); Dalta Bride bith nam beannachd (the foster-son of Bride of the blessings) and Daltan Bride (little fosterling of Bride). Foster parenting was very important in Celtic society, sometimes more tender and close than blood ties and it commanded obligations and duties.

In Ireland two poems or hymns refer to her – rather surprisingly - as the actual mother of Jesus:

“she, the branch with blossoms,

the mother of Jesus!”

in chróieb co m-blathaib

in mathair Ísu  

(Ultan’s Hymn: Brigit Be Bithmaith)

and

Brigit, mother of my high King,

Of the kingdom of heaven best she was born

Brigit mathair mo rurech

nime flatha ferr cinis

(the 7th c St Broccan’s Hymn to Brigit)

(This may be referring to a concept based on a reference to Matthew xii, 50: 'Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother.')

There is a story that in order to divert Herod’s men away from Jesus so that he could make his escape to Egypt with his mother, Mary, Brigit put a crown of candles on her head and dancing away, led them in another direction. Another story from Ireland told that Brigit walked in front of Mary with a lighted candle in each hand when she went up to the temple for Purification. In spite of strong winds the candles did not flicker or go out.

So Brigit helped at the birth of Jesus and protected him and Mary afterwards. She was Jesus’ foster-mother, his god-mother (or perhaps his goddess-mother) and his protector.

Now there are multiple interpretations of how this story might have come about. If you believe in the reality of Brigit as goddess, she may have chosen to express herself through the new religion. Or perhaps you prefer to think that the people had known a goddess Brigit (perhaps particularly associated with Leinster where Ptolemy’s map shows a tribe called the Brigantes) and did not wish to abandon her when they took on Christianity. There again there could have been a nun called Brigit whom the folk simply equated with the goddess of the same name or perhaps the fathers of the new religion in Ireland wanted to make it more palatable to the people by making this link with the much-loved goddess of the older religion. But whatever interpretation you put on its genesis, the cult of Brigit chose to accept and nurture Christianity and the implicit meaning of this narrative, the truth that is being expressed through it, is that Brigit existed before the birth of Christianity and assisted in bringing it into the world.

Why would Brigit take Jesus as her foster-son?

Thinking of Jesus as the foster-son of Brigit made me consider him differently and I began to look at what is positive about the story of Jesus and why Brigit or her people would have wanted to embrace it. What did Christianity bring that was an improvement on what had gone before?

Meditating on what I like about the Christian story was an interesting exercise. As a child I liked the story of Jesus, responding to its underlying mythic patterns: the magical child whose birth is foretold and who shows wisdom at an early age; the dying and rising god, the sacrificed god: Jesus himself describes himself  as a grain of wheat which by dying bears fruit (John 12: 24):

'Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit'.

I found very attractive the idea of the child born in the humblest of surroundings who went on to champion the poor and sick and offer the promise of healing and forgiveness to all and I also particularly liked the facility Jesus had with words, the clarity and acuity of his thought. So that when, for instance, he was put in a tight spot when he was asked whether the Jews should pay taxes to the Romans he said ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what belongs to God’. This prevented him being arrested by the Romans for advocating that the people should not pay tribute while the Jews would have understood the deeper message, implicit rather than explicit, that everything belongs to God. He was saying something but not saying it - which is potent speech.

Again, with the woman taken in adultery, his challengers tell him that according to the Law of Moses she should be stoned. If he agrees with this, he would become responsible for the act of execution but if he does not he will be seen not to uphold Mosaic Law. The way he deals with this test is skilful. He says: 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone'. This takes the responsibility for any murderous act away from himself as well as commanding the crowd to look at themselves and their sins and take responsibility for them. When the people leave he tells the woman he does not condemn her and enjoins her to go away and ‘sin no more’. Presumably he thinks that she is guilty of adultery but he effectively forgives her and offers her a second chance; he is merciful. And he is clearly not anti-women in this encounter.

This story appears only in John, whose gospel is later than the other three and differs from them since it puts forward a theology of Christ which was based on Greek philosophy, especially Stoicism. John refers to Jesus as the ‘logos’, which is usually translated as ‘the Word’ but is a Stoic idea which has a wider meaning, denoting also ‘meaning’ or ‘pattern’ – the divine animating principle pervading the Universe. So Jesus is the incarnation of this principle – of the way of heaven on earth.

Rightly or wrongly I can’t help but associate this idea with the Vedic idea of the rita, which, similarly is a vital force which underlies the Universe and human and divine behaviour; the ‘cosmic order or law’ - and also with the Irish concept of fir flathemon, the principle of the truth of the ruler which, means that when the king rules in accord with the rightness of things, being just and righteous, he ensures peace and prosperity for the land and the people. When he forsakes this principle however chaos ensues –the weather is erratic, crops fail and so on.

John also records that Jesus brought grace and truth and that he said that he was ’the way, the truth and the life’ and that no-one could come to God except through him. Rather than meaning that Christianity is the only religion which promises reconciliation with the divine, to me this means that only by following the way of truth, embodied by Jesus, can one achieve the kingdom of heaven – not necessarily in the after-life but in this one – the kingdom of heaven is inside us, not outside us, and therefore accessible to everyone so that “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” as the Lord's prayer puts it. And what God wills, as Jesus sees it, is a kingdom in which compassion, truth, justice and non-violence reign and which give everlasting life to the spirit.

In their book The Last Week, Borg and Crossan point out that it was the passion of Jesus for this kind of kingdom that led to his death since it came into conflict with the domination system of the Roman Empire – a system which is, in fact, pretty much the norm even in the world today. So it was the injustice of the domination systems that killed him because he was upholding an antithetical system of peace and compassion. He was killed not so much for the sins of the world but by the sins of the world.(5)

This Jesus is then the embodiment of the way of truth, the divine order that upholds the universe; a speaker of truth to power; an advocate of non-violent opposition to domination systems by believing in and acting in accordance with a system which depends on compassion, mercy, justice, love. In many ways then, he is the ideal of the king in the Irish sense – he upholds fir flathemon, he may even be to some extent the ideal that the concept is built on since the Irish texts which refer to it were written down in the Christian period.

How easy was it for the Irish people to accept Christianity?

One particular problem was that the honour price (the system of payment for injuries suffered depending on one’s wealth and position in the clan) was antithetical to the Christian teaching of merit based on spiritual achievement not material possessions or status.(6) Another, significantly, seems to have been the Christian doctrine of Mercy.

In the Pseudohistorical Prologue to the Senchas Már, dating from the early eighth century, there is a story in which the men of Ireland, after the arrival of Patrick and Christianity, met up with their king, Lóegaire, who asked them what would be the most difficult thing about converting to the new religion. They replied that the Christian doctrine of Mercy would mean that they wouldn’t be able to put murderers to death as was their usual practice and so the social fabric would be destroyed. A compromise was reached and the men of Ireland converted to Christianity. Lóegaire then ordered that the whole of the oral native tradition of law and poetry was to be examined, reviewed and edited so that it conformed to Christian standards.(7) (It is implied that there is much to keep and that in some way the native, oral lore of Ireland prefigures the Christian law.)

The reason why this story seems significant to me is that in the Life of Brigit in the Lebar Brecc, when she is consecrated Brigit chooses, out of the eight beatitudes, the beatitude of Mercy. By doing so, if the Pseudohistorical Prologue is to be believed, she is putting herself at the heart of a fundamental early opposition between Christianity and Paganism and choosing to espouse a way of Mercy rather than one of retribution.

Certainly, by the end of the 7th century/ beginning of the 8th Mercy had become a desirable quality. The Audacht Morainn (Testament of Morann) is an Old Irish text which belongs to the medieval genre of Speculum Principis or Mirror for Princes. These texts were instructions to kings or princes on aspects of rule and behaviour. The text mentions fifteen virtues proper to a ruler appearing in this order: Mercy, Justice, Impartiality, Conscience, Firmness, Generosity, Hospitality, Honour, Stability, Beneficence, Capability, Honesty, Eloquence, Steadiness and Truth in Judging. ‘Let him exalt mercy/ it will exalt him’ (Ocbath trócairi, cotnocéba) announces the judge Morann Mac Moín and so it has exalted St Brigit, herself the exalted one.(8)

Portia’s speech on Mercy from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (late 16th century) is relevant here and a good description of the workings and blessings of mercy:

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless'd,

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:

'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown:

His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty,

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

But mercy is above this sceptred sway,

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;

It is an attribute to God himself;

And earthly power doth then show likest God's,

When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,

That in the course of justice none of us

Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;

And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mercy.

Brigit's foster-son

So, to recap, my research and meditation on Jesus as the foster-son of Brigit led me to consider him in this way: as an example of the deep mythic patterns of the divine child, the dying and rising god, (wheat and fruit), the sacrificed god; as a prophet who spoke truth to power, who had a facility with language and sharpness of thought, who advocated non-violence but challenged the power structures of his day, who was seen as the way of truth, like the ideal of Irish kingship, the embodiment of the logos, the divine power pervading the Universe, and who preached that this logos, this way, is a way of compassion, love, justice and mercy. What is unique and radical about his story of course, is that he advocated loving one’s enemies as well as oneself and one’s neighbour and that he himself suffered the worst of torments and still retained his ability to love and forgive.

This figure seems to be a fitting foster-son of Brigit – both of the culture goddess, with his facility for thought, language and the Word, and of the saint with his advocacy of mercy and compassion. His actions as a conveyer of abundance e.g. (the loaves and fishes) and of celebration (turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana, his first miracle) makes him a figure consistent with Brigit as goddess of fruitfulness and abundance as she appears in many of the stories of the saint and in folklore. In her Life in the Book of Lismore she refers to him as Mary’s son, her friend, and asks him to bless her kitchen with abundance:

May Mary’s son, my Friend, come

to bless my kitchen!

The Prince of the world to the border,

May we have abundance by Him!

Ti Mac Mare mo chara

do benna chad mo chule!

fiaith in domain co immel

ro[n] be immed la sude.

Perhaps during the missing years of Jesus’ life he was being taught by Brigit, as would be consistent with her role as his foster-mother! That might account for the more enlightened view he had of women. Not only did he effectively defend the woman taken in adultery, Mary of Magdala was one of his close circle and in Thomas’s Gospel (114) Simon Peter said to Jesus, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of Life." Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven." I take this to mean that Jesus taught her as men were taught so that she became enlightened – an unusual perspective and action for his time.

Christianity and interpretation

This Jesus I have outlined feels like a person I can connect with Brigit and can relate to when I visit the church of Llansantffraed. Of course I have ‘cherry-picked’ the parts of the Christian story which appeal to me, make sense to me and are consistent with my values and aspirations. But there is a long and honoured tradition of such cherry-picking or spinning. Paul and the writers of the gospels had their own way of seeing and shaping the story and its meaning. Before 200 ce early Christian groups held different beliefs but in the 3rd century Christianity became an institution with a hierarchy and fixed set of beliefs, other forms becoming heresy but still existing.
Christianity also took on attributes of other religions apart from the Jewish from the outset: the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, the Roman (and maybe originally Persian) religion of Mithraism and Greek Stoicism. The story was further interpreted by the Church Fathers such as Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo and other leaders, theologians and bishops who formulated the dogma and doctrine and seemed to have added to it the obsession with sex and the vileness of the body and made sure it was a patriarchal religion. Of course the biggest distortion of the Christian message in the West occurred when the Roman emperor Constantine became a Christian and then made it the official religion of the Empire, effectively turning the religion from one whose followers were brutally persecuted to one which itself became an instrument of imperial oppression; a practice continued by some of the popes down the ages as they sought to use it for temporal power and wealth, turning on its head Jesus’ message.

To an extent as well Christianity took on some of the practices and beliefs of the people who inhabited the lands which became Christian (known as contextualisation or inculturation). Famously, Pope Gregory the Great decreed in a letter to Abbot Mellitus in 601 AD that pagan sites in England should be built upon so that they would still be used by the people who worshipped there:

"To his most beloved son, the Abbot Mellitus; Gregory, the servant of the servants of God. We have been much concerned, since the departure of our people that are with you, because we have received no account of the success of your journey. Howbeit, when Almighty God has led, you to the most reverend Bishop Augustine, our brother, tell him what I have long been considering in my own mind concerning the matter of the English people; to wit, that the temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let water be consecrated and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed there. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more freely resort to the places to which they have been accustomed. And because they are used to slaughter many oxen in sacrifice to devils, some solemnity must be given them in exchange for this, as that on the day of the dedication, or the nativities of the holy martyrs, whose relics are there deposited, they should build themselves huts of the boughs of trees about those churches which have been turned to that use from being temples, and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting, and no more offer animals to the Devil, but kill cattle and glorify God in their feast, and return thanks to the Giver of all things for their abundance; to the end that, whilst some outward gratifications are retained, they may the more easily consent to the inward joys. For there is no doubt that it is impossible to cut off every thing at once from their rude natures; because he who endeavours to ascend to the highest place rises by degrees or steps, and not by leaps. Thus the Lord made Himself known to the people of Israel in Egypt; and yet He allowed them the use, in His own worship, of the sacrifices which they were wont to offer to the Devil, commanding them in His sacrifice to kill animals, to the end that, with changed hearts, they might lay aside one part of the sacrifice, whilst they retained another; and although the animals were the same as those which they were wont to offer, they should offer them to the true God, and not to idols; and thus they would no longer be the same sacrifices. This then, dearly beloved, it behoves you to communicate to our aforesaid brother, that he, being placed where he is at present, may consider how he is to order all things. God preserve you in safety, most beloved son.
"Given the 17th of June, in the nineteenth year of the reign of our most religious lord, Mauritius Tiberius Augustus, the eighteenth year after the consulship of our said lord, and the fourth indiction."
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, 731 CE, (book 1, chapter 30)

So I have no qualms then in spinning the story of Jesus and weaving my own interpretation of it; after all, it is a function of story-telling as opposed to dogma, that one finds oneself and one’s truth within it.

A post-Christian paganism

This process of reading and researching and meditating on these things has been a fruitful one for me. I moved to a Welsh-speaking area of Wales in 1977 when it was very strongly a Christian country, church and chapel, though it is less so now as secularisation creeps in. Anyone living in a Celtic country and wishing to engage in some way with the tradition, cannot do so without encountering Christianity. It is, on the whole, the medium through which the folk as well as many writers, poets and artists have expressed their understanding of a deeper spiritual reality for nearly 1500 years.

The Celtic lands are covered not only with dolmens and standing stones and stone circles but with churches which, as we have seen were often built on the sites of earlier pagan sites, and holy wells dedicated to the saints who took on some of the functions of earlier deities. So it is difficult to separate out the ingredients in the landscape as well as those in the early Welsh and Irish literature (which the scholar Kim McCone described as ‘a textual omelette’) in order to apportion with a hundred percent accuracy what is pagan and what is Christian.

It is also difficult to determine to what extent our world-view and ethics in the West have been determined by Christianity. It may be that the concept of a benign deity, rather than a capricious deity who has to be propitiated, which many modern pagans - though not all - ascribe to, is itself Christian in origin. And virtues, such as those in the Audacht Morainn which Alexei Kondratiev, a leading participant in the Celtic Reconstructionist movement, put forward for the basis of a Celtic moral philosophy for the movement, are very probably an amalgamation of pagan and Christian virtues devised after the oral native lore was synchronised with Christian law. While I agree enthusiastically with seeking to research and recover as much as possible about early pagan Celtic religion, I understand the limitations of doing so and, as I started by saying, I recognise that the spirituality of various communities in Celtic-speaking countries, has been expressed through Christianity as well as through paganism and to ignore that and marginalize it seems a grave oversight if one is at all interested in honouring the Celtic inheritance.

The Celtic Reconstructionist FAQ states that CR seeks to try ‘to envision what different Celtic Paganisms might look like today if they had been uninterrupted by Christianity, much as Hinduism has changed over the centuries, remaining the same religion but changing in form with the changing times’. I think my perspective is more pragmatic, taking Christianity in the Celtic lands as not so much a break in the Celtic religious or spiritual tradition but as a part of its development and evolution.Therefore a re-emergent pagan or polytheist approach may, to my mind, be inevitably coloured by Christianity just as Christianity was, to some extent, coloured by Celtic paganism.

Resolution

In conclusion, my exploration of the story of Brigit as goddess and saint and the meaning of the relationship between the two has led me to a path which may possibly be described as syncretic. I have not become a Christian, nor like the pagan Romans have I hedged my bets by including an altar to the Christian god in my shrine, but I have developed a way of honouring Jesus as the foster-son of Brigit so that when I visit her church by Llanon, I shall walk into it and be able to  greet him more whole-heartedly as I make my way to my special place, the pew beside the window depicting Sant Ffraid.

Of course, while I have entitled this post The Way of Brigit, it is naturally, my particular path and each of us will find our own.


 

The east window at Llansantffraed, Llanon

References

1. Carmichael, Alexander, FlorisBooks, Edinburgh, 1992 p. 119, pp. 601-2, p. 154 

This is part of the Fishing Blessing:

Thou King of deeds and powers above,
Thy fishing blessing pour down on us.
I will sit me down with an oar in my grasp,
I will row me seven hundred and seven strokes.
I will cast down my hook,
The first fish which I bring up
In the name of Christ, King of the elements,
The poor shall have it at his wish.


2. See Henken, Elissa, The Welsh Saints: A Study in Patterned Lives, D.S. Brewer, Cambridge, 1991 and also Henken, Elissa, Traditions of the Welsh Saints, D.S. Brewer, Cambridge, 1987

3. Conze, Edward, Buddhist Scriptures, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1959, p. 11

4. Nagy, Joseph Falaky, Conversing with Angels and Ancients, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1997, p.165

5. Borg, Marcus and Dominic Crossan, The Last Week, SPK, London, 2008, pp.162-3

6. Patterson, Cattle Lords and Clansmen, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame and London, 1994

7. Nagy, Joseph Falaky, Conversing with Angels and Ancients, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1997, p.201-202

8. Mary Condren, author of The Serpent and The Goddess, has been inspired by Brigit and by the benefits of Mercy rather than Sacrifice as a basis for modern society.