February 1 marks the feast of St. Brigid in Ireland, a day most people in the country grew up with as the second most-important “Irish” saint’s day, with time spent in school making St Brigid’s crosses from reeds or rushes pulled from the fields that very morning.
In more urban areas, where rushes were not so easily found, poor paper substitutes were the order of the day. They were hung over doors and windows for protection against fire, lightning, illness and evil spirits.
St. Patrick’s Day, on 17 March, celebrates the patron saint of Ireland, with an associated national holiday, parades and a general greening around the world. Brigid, however, had no secular equivalent until 2022, when a new bank holiday was introduced to mark the survivors, victims and frontline workers of the coronavirus outbreak.
Brigid is the patron saint of midwives, newborns, Irish nuns, fugitives, blacksmiths, dairymaids, boatmen, chicken farmers, cattle, scholars and others. She is also said to have miraculously changed water into beer for a leper colony and provided enough beer for 18 churches from a single barrel. Indeed she is sometimes considered to be one of the patron saints of beer, in keeping with certain Irish stereotypes.
The rationale put forward for the new holiday was twofold. The first is the story of St Brigid, who was a hero of healing and compassion for the poor and the sick so a worthy figure to be associated with the national holiday proposed.
A tale told to schoolchildren growing up in Ireland was that, as the daughter of a rich landowner, she was in the habit of surreptitiously taking food from her father’s larder to give to the poor and needy. One day, with a slab of meat under her cloak, she was stopped by her father who wanted to know what she was carrying. When she revealed her goods, the meat had transformed into a bundle of flowers and she was off the hook.
There are many other stories and miracles associated with Brigid who was born in Ireland in the 5th century. However, there are others who contend that St Brigid did not exist at all and is a mythical Christianisation of the Celtic goddess Brigit, who pre-existed the Christian saint by centuries, and that the national holiday is a day dedicated to this entity.
The second argument put forward for a holiday commemorating St Brigid, or Brigit, was that Ireland already had three holidays dedicated to men – Christmas, St Patrick and St. Stephen’s day – and that it was time, given the spirit of the age, that there be a holiday dedicated to a woman. Anti-Christian groups supported the idea but were not happy that another holiday should be celebrated around a Catholic or Christian figure, proposing a list of other female figures that could be celebrated.
However, the feast of Brigid won the day, and a new bank holiday exists in Ireland on the first Monday of February every year.
Brigid the Saint though has not yet won the day: marking the first week in February, Dublin City Council has created a city-wide celebration honouring the women of Ireland, celebrating the coming of spring “inspired by the Celtic goddess, Brigit”.
The narrative is that St Brigid’s Day is celebrated on 1 February, the first day of Spring and a pre-Christian festival called “Imbolc”, and thus that Irish Christianity had gazzumped the pagan population by taking over this day. The Celtic goddess, Brigit, whom even less is known about than the Irish saint, is first mentioned in the 10th century, over 500 years after the birth of the Christian saint, yet the argument goes that this goddess pre-existed the saint with little or no evidence to back up the assertion.
Fr. Conor McDonough, OP, who has done some research into this, is perplexed:
“It’s really quite incredible how this paper-thin theory became so widely accepted. We know almost nothing about the pagan divinity identified as Brigit in the 10th-century text, Sanas Cormaic. Brigit there is described as a goddess worshipped by poets, while her sister, also Brigit, is a goddess of medics, and another sister, Brigit again, is a goddess of blacksmiths. That’s it; that’s all we know. We don’t know whether there was really a cult of Brigit(s) in pre-Christian Ireland, all we have is this very late report, written at a time when Irish intellectuals were actively fabricating elements of the pagan Irish past.”
The conflation of the Saint and the goddess or similar names provides a happy coincidence for people wishing to move the dial on the national holiday from a Christian feast day to a new-age universal celebration of a mythical goddess who may or may not have pre-existed the Christian saint. Almost every reference to the national holiday excludes the obvious and direct Christian heritage in favour of the more palatable and dubious Celtic background, pushing 1500 years of Christianity in Ireland to the margins.
Reflective of modern Ireland, the drumbeat is inclusivity and universality; spiritualism rather than religion. Yet, the triumph of dubious legend over 1500 years of real-lived experience is, similar to the denial of Europe’s Christian heritage by the European Union, a divisive marginalisation of Christian believers and their heritage.
Each celebration of ‘the goddess Brigit’ that is repeated in media and by government entities, ought to sit uncomfortably, knowing that the objective is not mere inclusivity but to establish a hierarchy of worldviews that disfavours Christianity in Ireland, while at the same time slowly erasing the contributions of a skin-and-bone Irishwoman who did great things in the 5th century, a time that was not very favourable to women.
Writing for RTE, the Irish national broadcaster, Niamh Wycherly of Maynooth University is scathing of the attempted erasure of St Brigid’s lived reality in favour of a mythical goddess:
“Perhaps most importantly of all, we know that there were women founders of churches and women’s communities in early medieval Ireland. While we know very little about their personal lives, it was hugely significant that these women managed to accomplish anything at all. There was no feminist idyll in medieval Ireland. The so-called ‘Brehon’ law was explicitly clear that women had few legal rights or status independent from their closest male relative.
“I now realise that it does a disservice to Brigit to hide her real achievements behind the unattainable ideals of a wondrous goddess or miracle-working saint. Brigit of the Fothairt, the Leinsterwoman, worked hard to build an inclusive church and found a community. In doing so she captured the imagination of a nation, creating a legacy that has lasted 1500 years. That she did all this despite being a woman is something special, and worth celebrating on the new public holiday.”