Lá Fhéile Lúghnasa Sona Daoibh go léir

Lá Fhéile Lúghnasa Sona Daoibh go léir. Lá fhéile' translates as 'feast day', 'lá' is 'day'. Sona translates to 'happy'. Sort of. And, 'daoibh' means 'to youse'. Singular is ‘duit.’ And ‘go léir’ is an extra everybody and y’all thrown in for good measure. The ‘go’ is a timeless oddity sometimes translated as may (you) as in may you all have a right grand time. And if you wanted to toss some extra blessings in you’d tack on Beannachtaí to the front end of that sentence.

“Peace to sky. Sky to earth. Earth under sky, strength in each, a cup full, full of honey, mead in plenty. —Cath Tánaiste Maige Tuired (2nd Battle of Moytura).

And as promised, the second installment of Lúghnasadh. 

Lúnasa, the beginning of harvest season, technically begins Aug 7 because our modern calendar doesn’t quite jive or jibe if you prefer, with cross-quarter celebrations juxtaposed halfway  between the solstice and equinox. 

Lúghnasadh is one of four agrarian festivals, once called Brón Trogain (the earth’s sorrow), followed by Samhain, Imbolc and Beltane. The Welsh equivalent of Lúghnasadh is Gŵyl Awst, in Breton, Gouel Eost (August festival), and the English equivalent is Lammastide (I mentioned that last week). 

The beginning of the harvest season is called Lúnasa in modern Irish (also the name for August—no Caesar here!), Lùnastal, in Scots Gaelic, and: Luanistyn in Manx/Vannin. But it’s the same bringing in the sheaves party however it’s spelled.

Dedicated to the god Lugh Lámhfhada, Lugh of the Long Arm—master of all the arts, this end of summer celebration marks the beginning of harvest season, also referred to as Lammastide, and to the Tailteann Games. Lúghnasadh ( -násad means an assembly) was a time of visiting holy wells, with lots of feasting, fighting, and fu- I mean, matchmaking, and horse and cattle trading. Possibly some raiding too.

The earliest written reference recording the Games and festivities is during the 15th c. in the redaction of Tochmarc Emire ("the Wooing of Emer"). Writing came rather late to Ireland, a country steeped in oral tradition since time immemorial, during the early Medieval era—there was a lot of catching up to do to record and preserve the distant past. First came the threat of the Vikings to annihilate Irish culture, followed by the larcenous British Monarchy. My grandmother said, Sinn Féin: Ourselves, Alone. Or, We, Together are saving culture story by story, no matter how imperfectly told.

Lammastide and Lúnasa

Image: “Lammastide,” British postage stamp, 1981.

Lúnasa, the beginning of harvest season, technically begins Aug 7 because our modern calendar doesn’t quite fit with the cross-quarter day celebrations between the solstice and equinox. Dedicated to the god Lugh Lámhfhada, this harvest celebration and Tailteann Games, marks the beginning of the harvest season, also celebrated as Lammastide in Britain and Northern Ireland. I’ll give Lugh his due on Aug 7.

Today, Lammas Day, aka Loaf Mass Day, from Hlaef-masse, is celebrated Aug 1. The hlafsenunga, 'blessing of bread,' from segnian, is 'to make the sign of the cross.’ The Auld Lammas Fair, a traditional fair dating back to the Renaissance, is held in Ballycastle, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, every year on the last Monday and Tuesday of August. There is also a Welsh variant, Gŵyl Awst that ties in with Lammas Day rituals. 

In a book of Anglo-Saxon charms (no, not Bede who was strangely silent on the subject), Anglo Saxon monks blessed the first loaf of the new harvest, the Lammas bread, decorated and baked in the shape of a sheave, an owl, or a corn dolly, broken into four farls, and tucked in the corners of the barn to protect the new harvest from vermin and harm. 

Corn dollies were made with the last sheaf of grain so that the spirit of the corn had a place to winter over until they were turfed into the ground during the first plow. (Corn means grain, not maize.) The time of the agrarian goddess and the Greenman, a time of blessing of the First Fruits of harvest. 

The Old English name for autumn is hærfest. A sheep was let loose in the stubble fields and whoever caught it got to keep it. It was also rent day. In many parts of England, tenants brought sheaves of freshly harvested wheat to their landlords on the first day of August. The landlords in turn, gave their tenants a gift of a pair of gloves at Lammastide to show their authority and benevolence. 

A day that debts were settled, labourers hired, households moved, contracts and promises made. And from that, arises the term, “latter Lammas,” a day that will never come. And of course, there is John Barleycorn, who must die.

Thanksgiving in the New World

We tend to think of Thanksgiving as a uniquely North American holiday, but its roots are embedded in the mists of time. The November harvest festival that British-American pilgrims celebrated, prior to emigration, was called the Feast of St. Martin, or Martinmas. 

The first New England settlers were zealously pious British separatists and Puritans who left Britain during the Protestant Reformation. The dour Puritans believed the Church of England’s reforms did not go far enough in breaking away from Catholic tradition, and so they left Britain for the Netherlands.

The Pilgrims even found the Protestant Dutch of Leiden who gave them safe harbor from Britain, too lenient, hence the 1620 voyage on the Mayflower to establish a strict, if not a downright grim, religious utopia in the New World. After a reading, we went to the Pilgrim’s Pub in Delftshaven, raised a few pints at the place where the pilgrims shoved off for America.

The Wampanoag Nation, the “People of the First Light,” saved the Pilgrims from starvation during that harsh winter of 1620–21. But they too had an agenda shaped by years of tense interaction with European explorers and fur trappers, plague and disease—not to mention displacement. And you know what that led to.

When I brought home the usual Thanksgiving tropes from second grade, the hand-traced turkey, cut-out pilgrim hats, collars and buckles, instead of admiring my handiwork, my Irish grandmother grumbled that American Thanksgiving was a Protestant holiday. 

I was shocked, and fearful of losing my favorite holiday, I didn't know what she was referring to at the time. I didn't have my history down. However, I am thankful that the holiday has become re-secularized over time as it's my favorite holiday (and sometimes my birthday too)—despite its interim origin and political implications. 

Thanksgiving is merely a Protestant-American spin-off on an ancient harvest celebration—updated to expunge longstanding Catholic (and pagan) traditions centered around the feast of Martinmas, or Old Halloween, cognate with the Irish festival of Samhain/Calan Gaeaf— replete with gift giving. Samhain was not only the New Year, but also a time when the gates to the Otherworld were open. In Wales too, the entrance to the Otherworld (Annwn) was thin. Magic (and the dead) was afoot. 

Martinmas marked the end of the harvest season and beginning of winter and the "winter revelling season". Traditions include feasting on 'Martinmas goose' or 'Martinmas beef', drinking the first wine of the season, and mumming.

So this year, we celebrated an unThanksgiving of sorts, small bubble gatherings. In our case, it was just me, my cousin and a friend. A far cry from the the days of thundering herds of relatives, friends, and orphans, where dinner was served on doors propped up on sawhorse planks in the yard because there weren’t tables long enough to go the distance. 

Who remembers staging boxing matches with pitted black olive puppets on all of our fingers? And eating the losers? Playing conkers or marbles with loose cranberries, or sword-fighting with the crudités? Pasting deviled eggs on your nose? Stealing food before dinner? Strange gelatin salads and odd casseroles. Smoking dope in the closet with the cousins and fooling no one? That momentous graduation from the kids’s table to the big table.

Harvest festivals were traditionally linked with the September harvest moon or the October(ish) hunter's moon (first full moon in October or November): my Canadian cousin reminded me that Canada celebrates Thanksgiving, which predates our Thanksgiving by 22 years, in October. (But there were multiple Thanksgivings, by nationality—truly a movable feast.) Germany’s Erntedankfest, is celebrated at the end of September or early October, aka Octave of Allhallowtide. Goose was the turkey of choice, as turkeys were introduced from North America.

The Old English name for November was Blōtmōnaþ ('sacrifice month'). One could easily add the Celtic New Year, Samhain into this litany of feasts list (after all, Samhain was the Celtic New Year’s Eve). Christmas and New Year were winter holidays moved to coincide with calendrical reform. 

St. Martin distributed food to the poor on horseback, and gave presents to the children who made turnip, or paper lanterns to guide his way. During the English Reformation, festivities were expunged, the bonfires reignited as Guy Fawkes Night.

(The Julian calendar was recalibrated by Pope Gregory XIII, in October, 1582, The Brits were a couple of centuries behind in implementing the Gregorian Calendar. Britain and its colonies resisted, because it was a Catholic edict, but succumbed to the Gregorian calendar on September 1, 1752. By that point the calendar was off by 11 days—the reboot caused riots.)

The feast of St. Martin, Christianized from the old pagan harvest festivities, was as big as Christmas, besides bonfires, mumming and mayhem, there was so much exorbitant feasting and drinking, that in the 6th c., the Catholic church established a post St. Martin-fast until the Epiphany. 

After gorging ourselves silly on Thanksgiving, we still make those collective vows to our expanding waistlines, to eat less leading up to the Christmas season. And then we begin those vows anew after the New Year. 

Rev. 11/23, (ref. The Atlantic, Wiki and Medievalists.)

Folklore: Death Customs

Genre: Folk Narrative/ Belief, Celtic  (myself)
Rhiannon’s Birds whose enchanted song could
“wake the dead and make the living forget everything.”

The Christmas of 1956, I was five, my Irish-born grandmother, Jennie Walsh Reilly (b. 1893), broke with tradition and dragged home a bare madrone tree from up the hill instead of an evergreen Christmas tree, and decorated it with stuffed birds. The previous New Year’s Eve, my grandfather died, we left 131 Third Ave., San Francisco, and moved to the summer home in Forest Knolls, Marin Co., Ca.,

When we moved, it broke up our large three-generation family. Grandma said that my parents were divorcing, and I knew both my uncle Myles and my grandpa were dead of cancer.

I remember my grandpa standing at the front door, suitcase in hand, saying goodbye. I wanted to know where he was going. Uncle Myles went away and never returned. I was not ready for the answer of “heaven,” so I asked where else it was beside in the painted dome of the Star of the Sea church on Geary St. where I was baptized. He pointed up to the clouds in the blue sky and said something about angels. I was relieved when he didn’t ask me along with him.

Our first Christmas on our own, I wasn’t ready to let go of the idea of a real evergreen Christmas tree, so I trudged up the ridge in the rain and dragged home my own tree—a Douglas fir, more sprout than tree. We made another cross for the base and the two trees stood tied side by side, my tree was too weak to hold ornaments or lights, and the one angel we had placed on the tip, kept doing swan-dives off the top.

But the red-skinned madrone tree, with its lights, silver glass balls and songbirds, was strong enough to hold up the Christmas angel. So I climbed up the ladder and placed her at the crown of Grandma’s skeletal madrone tree. Her madrone tree was beautiful, with its bare branches, but it just didn’t feel right.

I remember she told me the reason why she used the stuffed birds on the tree, with a Welsh story of the queen-goddess Rhiannon’s Birds, and how their enchanted song could “wake the dead and make the living forget everything.” She said we were building a new life, starting with the bones of the tree. And the red-skinned madrone, peeling from the heat of the fireplace, showed us the heartwood under it—green with the promise of life to come in spring.

I believe my grandmother, out of grief, was acting unconsciously, and was unaware of the metaphoric significance of her actions in choosing the birds, but I was so upset, she had to come up with something to appease me. She believed that wild birds entering the house were a sure sing of death, but since death had already visited the house, perhaps it was projected inversion of sorts.

I was fiercely attached to tradition, even at five, I knew there were patterns for everything, and I must’ve thought bad things happened (death) because we’d broken a taboo of sorts and were being punished. Ann Ross in “Pagan Celtic Britain” (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1967), writes: “The birds of Rhiannon are associated with...the blissful Otherworld...where there is no death...or decay.” (p 288).

UC Berkeley Folklore Collections
Kroeber Hall, Dr. Alan Dundes

SOURCE SYNOPSES ON BRIGID AS GODDESS & SAINT (notes for a paper and a poem)

SOURCE SYNOPSES ON BRIGID AS GODDESS & SAINT (bibl at end of each synopsis)

(parenthetical notes are mine; not text’s)

BRIGID/BRIGIT  A triune goddess of:

1) healing                                   therapy           

2) blacksmiths                            fire

3) fertility & poetry                    light, poets/seers, divination, prophecy

(also Patron saint of travelers, domestic arts; weaving & dyeing, agricultural abundance; the kitchen (bread), brewing;  arts/crafts learning; protectress of women; patroness of midwives/childbirth, water)

Mythological aspects: A daughter of the Dagda (The Good God ....Q is Boand (cow goddess) her mother??? her two sisters were also called Brigid, in other words, she was a triune goddess: that is, three in one). Must’ve been confusing having three goddesses with the same name.

She was married a while to Bres, the half-Fomorii ruler of the Dé Danann. By Tuireann she had 3 sons: Brían, Iuchar, Iuchara (twins+ 1, a mythic motif. It is said that at the death of her son, uttered the first cry of sorrow in Ireland.)

She appears as the equivalent to Dana, mother of all gods.

Counterpart in Brythonic Celtic (Brigantia; Totem of the Brigantes) and Gaulish (Brigindo) cultures. Her name seems to represent “High One”

(Exaulted One, Fiery Arrow. Bríg means god. A cognate with brihati in Vedic Sanskrit, correspondent in Britain with Briganti, latinized to Brigantia,)

Festival, Imbolg/Imbolc, Feb. 1, one of four great Celtic feasts. Pastoral festival assoc. w/the milk of the ewes and 1st day of spring.

(NOTE St. Brigid’s Night divided the year into 2 seasons winter/summer ....(from A& B Rees book, Celtic Heritage) Gemredh (winter half), Samhain (summer half), Earrach (spring or Oimelk/Imbolg or Imbolc -bolg+stomach/bag...ime is butter  butterbag??? cream bag/stomach? bainne = milk in Irish. If she’s the Indo European Cow Goddess, this all ties in. Cow, serpent, bird, cockerel assoc. w Brigid)

4. Brígid, 5th C. SAINT, AKA Mary of the Gaels; her tradition is often confused with the goddess. Attribute;  Icon: cow lying at her feet.

St. Brigid was born in Faughart in AD 540 and died in Kildare in 523; (note c.453 -523;

daughter of a slavegirl and Dubthach...a chieftain (or possibly a druid)

either sent to a druid or was born in a druid’s house...

She was baptized and returned to her father’s house, refusing offers of marriage (from a poet, no less), took the vow of virginity & with 7 companions, she founded Kildare, one of the greatest monasteries in Ireland. It was probably an important pagan site  kil= cell and dare= oak; Classical references state the druids worshipped in oak groves; it’s possible she was also perceived as a druidess. On the flat plains of what came to be Cell Dara were certain areas sacred to the fertility goddess Bríg, where her priestesses kept an eternal fire, The plains were left untilled  even though fertile, a sign that the goddess owned them.  Isle of the Saints: Monastic Settlement and Christian Community in Early Ireland, Lisa Bitel, Cornell  University Press, 1990  p 44).

Numerous accounts of her life were written soon after her death and her cult became widespread.. Her cult is second only to St. Patrick in Ireland (a paradox, if she was real, with 2nd generation monk-saints, a real misogyny seems to arise: it is said that St. Kevin disliked women as did Kentigern, and Columba, there’s even a tale attached to Brendan’s fear of women...a new element under Christianity : women lost many, if not most of their legal rights with the introduction of Christianity).

Many traditions and ceremonies assoc. w/ her predecessor, the goddess. Her Feast Day Feb. 1.  (Candlemas...interesting fire imagery here, also one description of her from the Hebrides has her head haloed with candles).

“RAS MacAlister put forward the theory that the saint was actually a priestess of Brigid who converted to Christianity. In most accounts of her life, her father is named as Dubhthach, a druid.”

p 50, A Dictionary of Irish Mythology, Peter Berresford Ellis, Oxford University Press, GB 1987.

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BRIGID (Brigit, Bridget, Bride)  d 525 Abbess of Kildare. Historical facts about her extremely rare; some scholars doubt her existence. Lives mainly anecdotes and miracle stories, deeply rooted in Irish pagan folklore.

Born near Uinmeras, 5 miles from Kildare, parents of humble origin, baptized by Patrick, became a nun at an early age, founded a monastery at Kildare and contributed notably to the spread of Christianity. Her miracles stories portray her as a personification of compassion. Themes: multiplication of food, butter to the poor, and her bathwater into beer! (kinky!!!) to satisfy the thirst of unexpected cleric visitors. Even her cows gave milk three times during the same day to ensure that some thirsty bishops has enough milk to drink.

Other legends personify her with the Blessed Virgin (Mary of the Gael) based on a vision of Bishop Ibor the night before an assembly addressed by Brigid. When she arrived she corresponded exactly to his vision of Mary. Ibor also supposed to have consecrated her (or perhaps Mel “When Brigid went to Bishop Mel to receive the veil of a nun, he became so ‘intoxicated’ with the sanctity in his presence that he read the ritual for ordaining a bishop over her. Thus, Brigid is unique among Irish holy women in being a fully accredited bishop.” (Conversing With Angels & Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland,  Joseph Nage (Cornell 1997)  p233 ) 

ODS  author David Hugh Farmer states: claims of bishops and abbesses of Kildare supreme over others in the whole of Ireland were a principal reason for the existence of even the earliest Lives, such as that by Cogitosus *(c. 650). (Ultan of Ard Braccan, d. 657, also wrote a Life). Lives translated into Old French, Middle English, German (some 7 Lives written??? ).

(Cogitosus maintains that Brigid’s patruchia stretched throughout Ireland....Brigid remains so colorless as an historical person that one doubts whether she had lived as a saint at all.” Medieval Ireland: The Enduring Tradition, Michael Richter, St. Martin’s Press 1995  p78.

(In Conversing With Angels & Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland, UCLA Celtic Studies scholar Joseph Nage writes; “There is no serviceable modern edition of Cogitosus’s text (in Louvain)” page 234).

(“The cult of Brigid is the most spectacular example of the transformations effected by the medieval Irish hagiographic tradition, whereby pre-Christian divinity or divine trait becomes Christian saint or typical saintly behavior. There are incontrovertible references in medieval Irish literature to a pre-Christian divinity Bríg or Bright, who is obviously the inspiration for much of the cult of St.  Brigid.” Conversing With Angels & Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland,  Nage,  p 233).

Unusual Double monastery of Kildare Brigid and Bishop Conleth (it’s significant that he’s a metalsmith, in one story, he’s accused of fathering a child and Brigid makes the child point out its father, in another story the cleric is Brón (sorrow), Another more repressed story where she gets rid of a nun’s fetus “public determination of paternity...is at the heart of the story pattern.”  Conversing With Angels & Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland, Nage,  p231).

NOTE also suggested that the double monastery was w/ Patrick and / or her brother).

Her cult is second only to Patrick. Popular in England (19 ancient churches dedicated to her: St. Bride’s Fleet St.)  and in Wales: as many churches (NOTE numerology: 19 churches, 19 nuns) St. Bride’s Day, Dyfed emphasizes strong links w/ Irish Christianity. Many places in Wales called Llansantaffraid (=St Bride’s Church ...llan  santa FFraid: Welsh for Brigit). The cult of Brigid was popular on Continent, esp. in Alsace, Flanders & Portugal. (Also France & Italy...what’s amazing about this is that it is thought that women didn’t travel, so monks would’ve had to spread the word. But if she was indeed a bishop as Nage suggests, it would explain her power and widespread cult).

 

Brigid is patron of poets, blacksmiths and healers. Icon: cow lying at her feet, which recalls her phase as a nun-cowgirl.

A relic of her shoe in Nat Museum, Dublin (NOTE: she is often paired w/ Lugh...patron of shoemakers...get back to that later).

Folkloric elements important in her Lives and cult. Gerald of Wales d.c. 1200 (See orig. text, incl. & use in paper) described a fire kept burning continuously at her shrine for centuries, tended by 20 (19) nuns of her community. The fire was surrounded by a circle of bushes, which no man was allowed to enter.

Brig also means valor or might, personified as a goddess whose fire cult took place on Feb. 1; her translation to June 10. There is another feast on March 24 commemorated the discovery by St. Malachy in 1185 of the supposed bodies of Patrick, Columba and Brigid at Downpatrick.

—from p 50 Oxford Dictionary of Saints, David Hugh Farmer, ed. Oxford University Press, GB 1978. (he cites Plummer, among others) take tidbits from his intro on Celtic saints???

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(Note Morgan uses similar verbiage as Oxford Dictionary) Brigid...gathered together women from all over Ireland into protected monastic communities. (Why did they suddenly need protection? Viking invasions?) Brigid was legendary in her abilities to multiply food: turning bath water into beer & milking her cows successfully 3 x day (he misunderstands the information: it should say 3 x the yield, not 3 x day). She was an agriculturist: cowherd, shepherd, butter churner, baker, corn reaper (add more from Life).

The association with Brig whose cult was celebrated with a ceremony of fire. “Brigid has experienced a relatively recent insurgence of popularity due to the interest of contemporary feminist and environmental groups, as well as the growing women’s movement in Ireland.”

p 29 Saints: a Visual Almanac of the Virtuous, Pure, Praiseworthy, and Good, Chronicle Books, Tom Morgan, San Francisco 1994.

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Brigid: Caesar includes her among major deities of Gaul (Interpretatio Romana) as Minerva, patron of the arts and crafts, but Celtic deities were larger and more complex, often assoc. w Mercury & Vulcan. Her cult was especially strong among the lower social orders, hence the patron of domestic arts: weaving & dyeing. Arts & healing, Brigid is honored at Bath (Aquae Sulis) and associated with Sulis.

Nearest counterpart, Irish Brighid in Cormac’s Glossary (c.8th c) states that she was the patron of filidhecht (poetry and learning, divination and prophecy-worshipped by the filidh).

Daughter of the Daghda, her two sisters also named Brighid: patrons of healing and smithing.

p 34  “Among all the Irish a goddess used to be called Brighid...her name used to be synonymous for Goddess.” Cormac’s Glossary (c.8th c).

There is slight historical evidence for her Christian namesake. “She usurped the role of the goddess and much of her mythological tradition”

In the saint’s Lives, she’s associated with livestock and any produce of the earth.

She was born at sunrise, a liminal boundary, neither within nor without the house (between worlds like Cuchulainn at the ford), and fed milk from a white, red-eared cow (supernatural Otherworld connection). And (while in conversation w/ St. Brendan) she hangs her wet cloak on the rays of the sun (Lugh/Griannos connection??) her house was ablaze when she entered.

Gerald of Wales quote: she and 19 nuns took turns guarding the perpetual sacred fire surrounded by a hedge, no men could enter (NOTE add Columba story of the man who went mad who crossed the threshold of bushes).

Solinus, in the 3rd c., mentioned that Minerva’s sanctuary (Bath?) in Britain contained a perpetual fire. Minerva’s epithet: Bélsima (most brilliant) Brigid: The Exalted one; cognate with brihati in Vedic Sanskrit, correspondent in Britain with Briganti latinized Brigantia, tutelary goddess of the Brigantes.

She gives her name to rivers: Brent in England, Braint in Wales and Brighid in Ireland.

There is no clear distinction between goddess and saint. Kildare was probably an important pagan site, Brigid was not a missionary saint, nor widely traveled (though chariot stories abound). There are dedications to her throughout Celtdom.

p 93 (compare w the Hag of Beare....re sovereignty) mother goddess, shaper of the land, consort of kings  “The composite legend of goddess and saint connected her to...learning, craftsmanship, healing...childbirth and animal abundance....predominantly pacific concerns.” War: she intervenes for Leinstermen as a tutelary goddess concerned with political and economic well being. A territorial goddess of the land assoc. with sacral kingship. Land should be prosperous and inviolate under his rule; only a legitimate spouse of the goddess personified.

p 132 ...the notion of sovereignty...abundant evidence that symbolism and function of both myth and ritual, still clearly perceived pagan traditions and cults thrived and flourished...under the mantle of the church...spurious seal of respectability, pagan deities canonized and assimilated.

pp 32-4; 93, 132  Celtic Mythology, Proinsius MacCana, Peder Bedrick Books, 1983

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p 53 springs and sacred wells associated with divine cults of healing, Brigid, Coventina

p54 Celtic Festivals 4 seasonal religious festivals  mythic tradition, farming year Imbolc Feb. 1-2 (lactation of ewes aka Oimelk) linked with Brigid (St. Brigid’s Night/Candlemas) a multifunctional goddess who protected women in childbirth who presided over the ale harvest; assoc. w poetry and prophecy.

p65 Brigid born in a druid’s household.

p66 Brigid patron goddess of seers, an expert in divination, prophecy, learning & poetry.

p 53, 54, 65, 66  Celtic Myths, Miranda Green, British Museum Press/Univ. of Texas, 1993

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p 78 Matres, triple goddess associated with food— loaves, fishes, a suckling infant and a dog at her feet (in this case, the symbol of dog equals abundance, note the Brigid story where she feeds the dog the bishop’s dinner and the meat is magically restored, a reference to abundance) (Brigid is also portrayed with a cow resting at her feet).

“Triplism a basic phenomenon of Celtic religion...mother goddesses abound...a type  of Celtic divinity...and the triadic form appeared to have played an important role in her worship and cult expression.” Note the three-headed goddesses...and Mercury was triple phallused! (The Welsh saint had three breasts).

p 101  ...native /fertility goddess mates with mortal sovereign to ensure continued prosperity of Ireland.” The idea of Triplism is ethnically important. War was also an important aspect of fertility symbolism. “Irish fertility goddesses combine features of war, maternity, youth, age, monstrosity, always part of a fundamental life/death protective symbolism.”

p 150  Healing cult of sacred springs—votive offerings, replicas of heads, organs, legs, offered to the goddess. Blindness, arthritis, goiter, hernia clearly represented. Breasts, genitals (archaeological evidence in Britain and on the continent)  regenerative powers of water, a kind of fertility motif.

p 153  Epona, Apollo/belenus, bricta 7 Luxouvious,  couples who was Brigid’s?

154 Coventina counterpart? w/ sulis minerva? Bath again.

pp 78, 85, 101, 150, 153, 154  Gods of the Celts, Miranda Green, Sutton Publishing, Ltd. 1986

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“The abundance of cow imagery reinforces the dependence of Ireland upon cattle. The goddess Brigid was reared on the milk of an otherworld cow.” This is a significant trope.

pp184-5  Animals in Celtic Life and Myth, Miranda Green, Routhledge NY 1992

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p 20 threefold goddess of light/fire/healing; worshipped at a fire festival Feb. 2 called Brigantia or Imbolc

Cormac’s Glossary (9th c) the bishop wrote: “A goddess whom the bards worshipped, for very great and noble was her perfection. Her sisters were Brigid, the woman of healing, and Brigid, the smith-woman.” This is when Christianity replaced polytheism, ...(did) a priestess-guardian of the shrine became identified mythically with the goddess (use Giraldus’ description of the sacred fires like the Vestal Virgins of Rome)

“Until 1220, a perpetual fire, tended by 19 nuns, burnt in a shrine near her church at Kildare. ..no bellows were used to keep the fire burning, only the breath of women.... there were attempts to rekindle it in the 1990’s.”

St. Brigid is also the epitome of kindness and charity: assisting and feeding the poor, freeing slaves, interceding on behalf of the unfortunate.

p21  Story of her father beating a servant, she stopped him “‘Would to God you were always here to protect us from the Master’s violence,’ a servant told her. Because of this, St. Brigid is the protectress of women.” Wild geese and ducks came to her for caresses, and foxes...

Brigid was famous for her ale (from bathwater?) “...on one occasion she supplied 17 churches in Meath with ale from Maundy Thursday to Low Sunday.” 

Under the name of St. Ffraid, Brighd was a popular saint in Wales.

Travelers said this prayer; “St. Ffraid bless us on our journey.”

She was sometimes conflated with Mary. St. Broccan called Brigid “The one-mother of the Great King’s son, wrote a hymn, Brigid, mother of my king,/ of the Kingdom of Heaven,/ Best was she born.”

There was more than one St. Brighd, who were disciples, or former devotees of the Goddess. “In Ireland, at Candlemas, it is the custom for people to make special St. Brigid crosses out of rushes, The rushes must be pulled up, not cut on St. Brighd’s Eve., and must be woven from left to right, Then the Brigid’s Cross is set above the door, as a sacred protection for the house, and left there until the next year, when it is replaced by a new one. Traditionally Brigid is welcomed back at her festival by rekindling the hearth fire after the house has been spring-cleaned.”

pp 20, 22  The Celtic Saints, Nigel Pennick, Bridgewater Book Co., Ltd., GB 1997.

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misc notes:

Synopses of L Gregory’s collection: some 20 tales of Brigid which seem to incorporate most of the earlier Lives themes, some are barely recognizable and some are skeletal remains of the earlier miracles; most have interesting accretions that include many aspects of the heroic tradition; especially the supernatural signposts surrounding her birth. She was born at sunrise (another tale has her born half-way between day and night) on the first day of spring (between the 2 halves of the year) in a druid’s house...she drank the milk of a white, red-eared Otherworld cow (which is her totemic animal), everything she put her hand to used to increase, feeding a dog (another totemic animal).