I write this on February 1st - Saint Brigid’s Day. In Celtic lore it is celebrated as her “feast day.” The night before on the evening of January 31st, people would celebrate Threshold Rites which included literally standing in one’s doorway while invoking her presence, in addition to making a place for her at the family table, near the hearth. Although playfully, men would have to beg for a seat at the table. Brigid’s Eve was a symbolic way for people to celebrate the return of the light and the gradual recession of the darkness. It also symbolized a sort of Hallow’s Eve, where those who had died that year were close to the veil of the living that night. Who was this woman?
St. Brigid of Kildare, Ireland, (451-523 CE) was alive during the pre-Christian world, when men and women lived communally under the leadership of a woman. This was back in the olden-olden days when the feminine was held as sacred, as was the Earth and her creatures. Brigid’s life is shrouded in myth, since the first biographies written about her appeared around a hundred years after her death. Legend has it that she was born in the doorway of her family home during the early morning twilight. Celtic legend has her depicted as the midwife at the birth of the Christ Child - somehow time-traveling backward from fifth-century Ireland to first-century Palestine.
The Hebridean legend of the Western Isles of Scotland, where I write this, places Brigid there also, but in a different role - as the barmaid at the inn in Bethlehem. (Sidenote: the editor function in Microsoft Word wanted me to use the word “bartender” instead of barmaid. Huh.) It was a time of famine, and Brigid had only one cup of water and an oatcake left for herself to eat.
The CliffsNotes version of the rest of the story is this: she gives Mary and Joseph her water and bread, (while the “bartender” of Microsoft Word might have eaten the bread and drank the water himself) sends them to the manger, meets up with them in time to deliver the baby Jesus, and then flies away to the Isle of Iona to establish a nunnery. I like the flying (nun) part especially - which is the general vibe when walking anywhere outside here in Scotland, whether island or mainland. I always feel the urge to strap on a hang-glider, run off the edge of a cliff, and fly. It really does seem like a reasonable way to travel and see the sights. But I digress.
Back to Brigid and the nunnery on Iona…one strand of legend states that she grew up on the Isle of Iona with the Druids and her Druid father. Even though a sacred site in the Celtic Christian world, the Isle of Iona was a Druid place of pilgrimage long before Saint Columba reached its Southern shore in the sixth century. We do not know her exact association with Iona, but we do know that the Isle of Iona is part of the Hebrides, meaning “islands of Brigid or Bride.”
More flying…there is a painting in the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh called “St. Bride,” by the Scottish artist John Duncan (1866-1945), depicting Brigid being carried by the angels to Palestine from Iona for the birth of Jesus.
A twelfth-century Irish manuscript, The Book of Leinster, says that Brigid was a Druidess. She was the leader of the Holy Oak in Leinster, the most significant Druidic site in Ireland. Oak trees being especially sacred to the Druids, they established their communities near Oak groves. The translation of the word Druid is simply, “Oak-knower.” Brigid’s community in Leinster was located near a 1,000-year-old Oak tree. Her community became known as Kildare, which means “Church of the Oaks.”
There were many homes in the Hebrides of Scotland that kept the fire burning in her name known as the “ritual of the hearth” for hundreds of years. The matriarch of the household would place three pieces of peat on the fire before retiring at night, fortifying it again in the morning. In this “tending of the mother fire,” she would invoke the blessing of Brigid upon the land and all its creatures. These origins began in Kildare, Ireland, where the pre-Christian rituals of the Goddess Brigid were performed - including the centuries-old ritual of perpetual fire.
This continued into the Christian era for over a thousand years until the Protestant reformation in the sixteenth century literally and violently extinguished it. This marked one of the many tragic transformations of the worship of the divine immanent and feminine representation of the Goddess into the solely masculine and transcendent Godhead worship.
The celebration of the sacred feminine became suspect. And here we stand.
“We live in a threshold moment. We are waking up to the Earth again. We are awakening to the feminine and the desire to faithfully tend the interrelationship of all things. In this moment, politically, culturally, and religiously, we are witnessing the death throes of a shadow form of masculine power that has arrayed itself over against the Earth and over against the sacredness of the feminine. This shadow form of power, however, has no ultimate future, for it is essentially false in its betrayal of the Earth and the feminine. In fear it is lashing out with unprecedented force. But it is not the deep spirit of this moment in time. Something else is trying to be born.” - John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul
The pre-Christian element of men and women living together in shared communal and monastic life under the leadership of a woman can still be found today. Buddhist temples such as Tara Mandala in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, headed by Lama Tsultrim Allione as well as Plum Village monastery in the south of France; the Yoga ashram of Swami Chidvilasananda in upstate New York and Amma-Mata Amritanandamayi, who has ashrams and centers all over the world.
Water your trees.
Playlist: Light
Blessings & Love,
Photo Credits: Melanie McLeod | top - Tarbert Pier, Isle of Harris | center - Omaha, NE | bottom - January 31st St. Brigid Snowdrop-blooms in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis
Wonderful. Avoid hang-gliding please... Let the angels bear you to Bethlehem.
Very informative and interesting earlier religious and mythological history!