The Oak of Kildare

A third piece of evidence some cite for pagan survivals at Kildare is its great oak tree, first encountered in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century when it was added to Brigit’s Vita I by the redactor identified by Richard Sharpe as ‘D’ as he wrote out what was to become the Vita IV. The tree is not mentioned in any earlier source, but appears to have really existed in D’s day, for he saw it as explaining the origin of the name of Kildare, ‘Cell Dara’:

Vita IV, book 2, ch. 3: ‘For there was a very tall oak tree there which Brigit loved very much, and blessed, of which the trunk still remains. No one dares cut it with a weapon, but whoever can break off a part of it with his hands deems it a great advantage, hoping for the help of God by its means; because through St Brigit’s blessing many miracles have been performed by that wood.’

For nineteenth century scholars.. the implication of the oak tree, the druidic cult, and the Kildare legend was obvious. Kildare was built in a druidic oak grove and the great tree was venerated even in Christian times. This assertion, resting on this same constellation of evidence, is found in the late twentieth century, too, though not in academic writing. [in the work by Irish feminist Mary Condren, The Serpent and the Goddess]. The true origins of the name of Kildare are almost certainly the building material of the church, i.e. ‘oaken church’, suggested by both annal entries and archaeology.

The community at Kildare was clearly neither semi-pagan in its Christianity, nor even sympathetic to native druidic religion. It was, in fact, anti-pagan. Its hostility in the seventh and eighth centuries is epitomized by the verses left by one Kildare clerical poet who saw in the comparative fortunes of his monastery and its neighbouring pagan religious fortress a cause for gloating. Brigit’s church went from strength to strength, he crowed, but druidic Dun Ailline (‘Alenn’) was now an abandoned, empty ruin:

It is not worth listening to the worship of auguries, or of spells or prophecy that predict death for, when tried, they are all falsehood, since Alenn is a deserted fort. Bright is the smile that shines on you from the plain north of Corc’s land; Liffey of Lorc has made ashes of every generation it has reared. . . . Brigit, in the land I behold, where each king has lived in turn, your fame has proved greater than that of the king, you are superior to them. You have an eternal domain with the King, as well as the land where your sanctuary lies. Granddaughter of Bresal mac Dian, sit safely, Brigit, in triumph.

Brigit may have started out as a pagan goddess, and may live in the twenty-first century as one again, but in the early middle ages she was a very Christian, very determined crusader for Christ. She sat safely, indeed, in a very Christian and very orthodox, triumph.'

[emphasis mine]

Christina Harrington, Women in a Celtic Church - Ireland 450-1150 (Oxford University Press, 2002), 66-7.

To which conclusion I can only add Amen!

It was refreshing to see a scholar subject the thesis that Brigid the saint is really only Brigid the goddess with a thin veneer of Christianity to scrutiny. This seems to be a case of 'if you state something often enough it is accepted as true'. The evidence, however, is surprisingly weak. Harrington remarks that she is able only to give a summary of the evidence as the subject deserves a monograph. Let's hope she will write one!

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An Analysis of the Perpetual Fire at Kildare

Now we can turn to Harrington's analysis of the famous fire at Kildare:

The popular belief in Kildare having been a pagan centre depends upon saint Brigit being either a Christianized version of that goddess or an eponymous high-priestess of her cult, and that, as discussed above, is far from established. It also depends, less directly, upon the existence in pagan times of female druidic enclaves —a point treated in the previous chapter and shown to be equally tenuous. The reports of Kildare’s vestal flame and the question of its allegedly pagan antecents have a bearing on how one approaches the Christianity practised there in its first centuries. If one believes that it was a transmogrified druidic centre it is reasonable to ask, were the devotions practised semi-druidical? Were the nuns more like priestesses than orthodox Christian devotae? For this reason the key piece of evidence for this model must be addressed, i.e. the supposed perpetual flame at Kildare, the alleged sign of surviving fire worship or vestal devotion. There is no mention of it in any of the three early Lives of Brigit, namely the Vita I, Cogitosus, or the ninth-century Bethu Brigte. It is hard to imagine that it could be overlooked in all three Lives. It is, in fact, absent from all other Lives, from annals, from the martyrologies and their glosses—all sources, in fact, until Gerald of Wales, a visitor in the twelfth century, almost 700 years after the alleged pagan-Christian transition took place.There is no doubt that Gerald was referring to a genuine, existent perpetual flame, for it is confirmed in other sources, in particular in a twelfth- or thirteenth-century gloss on a Middle Irish tale, and in Anglo-Norman documents for the year 1220. Today at Kildare there are the ruins of a smallish stone building called the ‘fire-house’, in which the fire was known to be kept through the fourteenth century at least, for a ‘fyre house’ is mentioned in a 1397 close roll. The fire-house itself may not be very ancient, certainly not dating to the pre-Christian era; it may have been built as late as the tenth century, or, if it was built in earlier centuries, it may have previously had a different use. That the fire was a ‘vestal’ one also needs considering. Gerald did say that only nuns were allowed to tend the fire, and this may have been the case, but Kildare did have monks and clerics on its premises in his day as in earlier centuries. Nor was the presence of a perpetual fire unique to Kildare: in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries seven others are mentioned in the hagiography, all of them at male monasteries. The inescapable conclusion is that such flames in Ireland were not especially associated with women and appear rather late in the historical record. The reasons for their existence were probably Christotheological: the luminary imagery of Christian deity was as ubiquitous in Ireland as it was elsewhere in the West. Why they appeared suddenly in the twelfth century is a question not ventured here.

[Emphasis mine]

Christina Harrington, Women in a Celtic Church- Ireland 450-1150 (Oxford University Press, 2002), 64-5.

I think Harrington has raised a very important question here - if this perpetual fire was such an important part of Brigid's cult, why is it totally absent from any of the earlier Irish sources? Effectively we seem to have taken the unsubstantiated claims of Gerald that these rituals went back to the time of the Virgin i.e. Saint Brigid, as fact. But where is the evidence?

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Gerald of Wales and the Perpetual Fire at Kildare

Before going on to examine Harrington's analysis of the famous Perpetual Fire at Kildare, it may be helpful to have the text of Gerald of Wales to hand. He writes about the fire in his 12th-century work, The History and Topography of Ireland. Indeed, it seems that Gerald is just about the only source of information on the fire, and it is thus important to remember that he was writing some six centuries after the time of Saint Brigid.

CHAPTER XXXIV

AT Kildare, in Leinster, celebrated for the glorious Brigit, many miracles have been wrought worthy of memory. Among these, the first that occurs is the fire of St. Brigit, which is reported never to go out. Not that it cannot be extinguished, but the nuns and holy women tend and feed it, adding fuel, with such watchful and diligent care, that from the time of the Virgin, it has continued burning through a long course of years ; and although such heaps of wood have been consumed during this long period, there has been no accumulation of ashes.

CHAPTER XXXV

HOW THE FIRE IS KEPT ALIVE BY ST. BRIGIT ON HER NIGHT.

As in the time of St. Brigit twenty nuns were here engaged in the Lord's warfare, she herself being the twentieth, after her glorious departure, nineteen have always formed the society, the number having never been increased. Each of them has the care of the fire for a single night in turn, and, on the evening before the twentieth night, the last nun, having heaped wood upon the fire, says, "Brigit, take charge of your own fire ; for this night belongs to you." She then leaves the fire, and. in the morning it is found that the fire has not gone out, and that the usual quantity of fuel has been used.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

OF THE HEDGE ROUND THE FIRE, WHICH NO MALE CAN ENTER.

THIS fire is surrounded by a hedge, made of stakes and brushwood, and forming a circle, within which no male can enter ; and if any one should presume to enter, which has been sometimes attempted by rash men, he will not escape the divine vengeance. Moreover, it is only lawful for women to blow the fire, fanning it or using bellows only, and not with their breath. Moreover, by virtue of a curse pronounced by the virgin, goats here never have any young....

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Brigid the Fire Goddess?

It is commonplace on neo-pagan websites to present the Christian saint Brigid as a watered-down version of an Irish goddess whose cult has fire as an essential element. This is expressed in her alleged patronage of smithing and other arts involving fire. But as Christina Harrington points out, actual evidence for these assertions is thin on the ground:

As was mentioned in the previous chapter, we know very little about the pagan goddess of the name Bríg or Brigit in Ireland, owing to a lack of evidence, written and archaeological. Because no one has ever dug underneath Kildare to see if there is a pre-Christian temple site, even the presumed cult centre, if there was one, is not known to exist. The earliest evidence for the goddess is in the Irish vernacular law tracts, written down c.700, which contain a few little legal stories in which Bríg is the daughter, wife, or mother of the legendary judge Sencha of the distant Irish past. According to these she sat by Sencha’s side as he made pronouncements on law, and on occasion intervened to correct or contradict him. Nowhere in this material is she equated with the saint of the almost-identical name. Then in the tenth century the compilers of Sanas Cormaic (Cormac’s Glossary) included an entry on Brigit calling her the goddess worshipped by poets, adding that she had two sisters of the same name who were patronesses of smithcraft and healing respectively, and that her name was derived from bri-sagit, ‘fiery arrow’. It is uncertain whether they equated the deity Brigit with the saint Brigit, but it is impossible that the saint was unknown to them; for some reason they chose not to make explicit their understanding of the relationship between the two. It is with Sanas Cormaic that we find the first explicit link made between this goddess and the element of fire, in the word bri. McCone has convincingly shown that the three arts it claims Brigit supervised — healing, smithcraft, and poetry — were in early Ireland all associated with fire. The authors of the saints’ Lives of Brigit seem to have been aware of the same-named goddess, though they never say so explicitly: all of her Lives give Brigit a druid father figure, so she is made into a member of the druid class, the same class as poets and judges. The hagiographers do not carry through the parallels, though, for the saint is not portrayed as a judge, nor a law-maker, nor a poet; she has no noticeable interest in smithcraft, and her healing miracles are not very physician-like. The only significant overlap is the motif of fire and light, but the references can all be attributed to common motifs and have equivalents in male Irish Lives. Another association between Saint Brigit and fire would in the twelfth century be reiterated by Gerald of Wales, but that too was not specific to her.

McCone has pointed out that another saint, the virgin Lassair, also has a fire name, from lassar, flame. In his view Brigit, like Lassair, was a goddess who became a saint in Christian times; both succeeded in the new religions because their attributes could be harmonized with those of the Christian God, for the Bible is filled with light and fire imagery. The fire element in the name, then, betokens a goddess origin, for him, in spite of the insignificance of fire and its attendant crafts in the early texts from Brigit’s cult.

Christina Harrington, Women in a Celtic Church- Ireland 450-1150 (Oxford University Press, 2002), 63-4.

[Emphasis mine]

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Saint Brigid and Imbolc

Having touched on the aspects of Saint Brigid as the harbinger of spring in Ireland, it is perhaps now time to examine the notion that Saint Brigid is no more than a thinly-disguised pagan goddess, whose feast is an unconvincing Christianization of the Celtic festival of Imbolc. This line is trotted out as unquestioned fact on neo-pagan websites and has even been accepted by popular writers on modern 'Celtic Christianity'. However, as scholar Christina Harrington points out, the evidence for this belief is neither strong nor conclusive. She sees the patronage of women as being the only real connection between the goddess and the saint:

The saint’s feast day fell in Imbolc, the official start of spring in the native Irish calendar. Cormac’s Glossary has an entry on imbolc, defining it as ‘the time the sheep’s milk comes’, but does not identify the festival with Brigit. Care of sheep was a specifically women’s activity in early Ireland, and there are stories of Saint Brigit shepherding and making dairy products, but it must be remembered that the girl, as the daughter of a slavewoman, is portrayed doing what non-noble girls would do normally. Nowhere, in fact, is Imbolc said to be the festival of the goddess Brigit, and beyond that, the goddess’s attributes do not include sheep care. It is only the connection to women that is marked.

[Emphasis mine]

Christina Harrington, Women in a Celtic Church- Ireland 450-1150 (Oxford University Press, 2002), 63-4.

Harrington's book is an excellent read, and I will go on to look at other elements of the goddess versus saint debate which she reviews - the perpetual fire at Kildare and the oak tree. The evidence for those too rests on equally uncertain foundations.

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Is Saint Brigid Really a Celtic Goddess?

I recently enjoyed a very nice post for Saint Brigid's Day, on the New Liturgical Movement website. Yet I was saddened to see the first comment stating that the person thought the cult of Saint Brigid of Kildare had a pagan origin. Not that I am criticizing the individual who raised the issue, for the notion that Saint Brigid is really a Celtic goddess has become such an accepted and unquestioned 'fact' that when I first began my research a few years ago, I fully expected to find a body of irrefutable evidence for the link between the two. I was, therefore, genuinely surprised to find that when the sources and origins of this thesis are examined there is actually no firm evidence behind it, certainly none that would constitute the 'smoking gun' that puts it beyond dispute. Instead, the sources on which it is based do not inevitably lead to the conclusion that Brigid the saint inherited the name, festival and attributes of the pagan goddess. Moreover, the idea that saint and goddess are the same entity can be traced back, not to far bygone ages, but to Victorian scholars heavily influenced by the historical and cultural factors that shaped their own age. The concept has even been given iconographic expression in our own times in the illustration above, originally sourced here, from an article entitled Goddess or Saint, Multi-tasking Brigid is a True Inspiration. The image shows a prayer card of Saint Brigid, printed in Italy and widely available in Ireland, which shows her dressed as a nun, holding her abbatial staff, clasping the cross close to her heart and framed by a scene of her church and the floral emblems of white lilies and roses to symbolize her purity. Although it is not shown here, the reverse of this card contains a quotation from the closing paragraphs of the Homily on Saint Brigid from the Lebahar Breac, describing her as 'the prophetess of Christ and the Mary of the Gael'. The other image shows a modern pagan illustration of the 'triple goddess', a title which the author explains arises from her subject's patronage of 'three important skills: poetry, healing and smithcrafting'. So, let's begin with this 'triple goddess' and try to see whether the evidence does in fact confirm the link between the saint and the goddess suggested by the picture.

The main source for the triple goddess is the 9th-century text, Sanas Cormaic, Cormac's Glossary, attributed to the King-bishop of Cashel, Cormac ua Cuilennain, who died in 908. The 19th-century scholar Whitley Stokes published an edition of this text in 1862, which includes the gloss on Brigit:

Brigit, i.e. a female poet, daughter of the Dagda. This Brigit is a poetess, or a woman of poetry, i.e. Brigit a goddess whom poets worshipped, for very great and very noble was her superintendence. Therefore they call her goddess of poets by this name. Whose sisters were Brigit, woman of healing, Brigit, woman of smith-work, i.e. goddesses, from whose names with all Irishmen Brigit was called a goddess. Brigit then, i.e. breo-saigit, a íiery arrow. [1]

On the face of it, this goddess does not seem to have any obvious link to the Christian foundress of Kildare. Indeed, there is a separate entry for Sanct Brigit in the Glossary which reads Sanct Brigit .i. naem Brigit indsin, 'Sanct Brigit i.e. St. Brigit this'. Might not this suggest that rather than identifying the goddess with the saint, Cormac instead distinguishes between them?

Cormac's Glossary is also often quoted in connection with the pagan festival of Imbolc. The author of the article on the multi-tasking goddess saint confidently asserts that 'Brigid played an important role in the Celtic festival of Imbolc..' Yet in reality, evidence to back up this statement is lacking. As my  post Saint Brigid and Imbolc, looking at the analysis by Christina Harrington, pointed out:

The saint’s feast day fell in Imbolc, the official start of spring in the native Irish calendar. Cormac’s Glossary has an entry on imbolc, defining it as ‘the time the sheep’s milk comes’, but does not identify the festival with Brigit. Care of sheep was a specifically women’s activity in early Ireland, and there are stories of Saint Brigit shepherding and making dairy products, but it must be remembered that the girl, as the daughter of a slavewoman, is portrayed doing what non-noble girls would do normally. Nowhere, in fact, is Imbolc said to be the festival of the goddess Brigit, and beyond that, the goddess’s attributes do not include sheep care. It is only the connection to women that is marked. [2] [Emphasis mine]

A similar note of caution is sounded by Professor Ronald Hutton in his examination of the ritual year. He cites as a source a secular tale, Tochmarc Emire, the wooing of Emer, which although dealing with the pre-Christian hero Cú Chulainn, was composed in the 10th or 11th century. At one point in the tale Emer has occasion to name the main seasons of the calendar and one is named as 'Imbolc, when the ewes are milked at spring's beginning'. Hutton goes on to add:

The festival must be pre-Christian in origin, but there is absolutely no direct testimony as to its early nature, or concerning any rites which might have been employed then. There is, in fact, no sign that any of the medieval Irish writers who referred to it preserved a memory of them, and some evidence that they no longer understood the meaning of the name itself.[3] 

Once again the claims that the goddess Brigid was central to the festival of Imbolc, or that the customs once associated with Saint Brigid's Day in Ireland are direct pagan survivals, cannot readily be substantiated from the sources.

Another common claim, which supposedly proves our saint's true pagan origin, centres around the burning of a perpetual fire at Kildare, tended by 19 virgins and with a protecting hedge around it which prevents men from entering. The source of this information is the 12th-century Norman chronicler, Gerald of Wales. Gerald claimed that this fire had been going since the days of Saint Brigid herself. Now other sources do testify to the existence of a fire in the later medieval period, which was extinguished first on the orders of the Archbishop of Dublin in 1220 and finally as part of the Reformation suppression of the monasteries. I would accept, therefore, that it is entirely plausible that Gerald saw a fire at Kildare in the 12th century. We have only his word, however, that it went back to the time of Saint Brigid and his claim, written six centuries later, is not confirmed independently by any of her Lives or by any other other source. If fire was such an important part of the cult the saint supposedly inherited from the goddess, why should this be? Professor Hutton, who otherwise agrees with the basic premise that Saint Brigid became conflated with a pagan goddess of the same name, is nevertheless as a professional historian rightly cautious about going beyond what the sources support. Noting that the goddess, contrary to the claims neo-pagans make, 'was not especially associated with fire' and noting the absence of any mention of the fire from the 7th-century Life by Cogitosus, suggests that 'it is possible, therefore, that it grew up between the 7th and the 12th centuries as a derivation from the meaning of the saint's name'. [4] Here it is important to remember that fires are recorded in the medieval hagiography of other Irish saints, some of whose names also have a link to fire, as for example Saint Molaise. It is thus possible that for some reason, as yet unresearched, there was something going on in the 12th century which brought the burning of fires at the shrines of Irish saints into focus in the sources. If that is so, it might provide a different context for the fire at Kildare, one free of the pagan overtones inevitably associated with vestal virgins and men entering the sanctuary at their peril, despite the fact that Kildare was once a double monastery for both men and women.

Where the sources are frustratingly silent, imagination has, and still continues, to fill in the gaps. One of the most extraordinary examples is to be found in the writings of R.A.S. Macalister (1870-1950), a pioneering Irish archaeologist. In a 1919 paper on the remains of the pre-Christian site, the Hill of Tara, he mentions that some of our native saints, whilst he does not deny their historicity, nevertheless have had their names 'confused with other names which by reason of a much longer history, stretching far back into the unknown abysses of pagan ages, had made a deeper impression on popular memory'. Having started off his discussion with two male examples (Saints Ibar and Senan), he moves on to the example par excellence:

A case even more remarkable than the two above cited is that of the foundress of the nunnery of Kildare. There was doubtless here, in pagan times, a college of priestesses who tended a perpetual fire, and who (presumably with orgiastic rites resembling those of the Gaulish priestesses of Sena) honoured the fire-goddess Brigid, this divinity being immanent in the sacred sun-oak which gave to the place the name that it still bears. Probably the head of the college was regarded as an incarnation of the goddess, and so bore her name, as the kings of Temair bore the name of Eochu. But one of the succession came under Christian influence, and, embracing the Faith of the Cross, she accomplished the tremendous feat of converting the pagan sanctuary into a Christian religious house a work in its way far more wonderful than the miracles with which her biographers credit her. It is no detraction from the honour due to her for this achievement, that she could not quite rid the establishment over which she presided of all its pagan vestiges; "the bright lamp that lay in Kildare's holy fane" still "burnt through long ages," not, as Moore foolishly says, of "darkness and storm," but of Christian Faith and Works. And though it is most probable that she herself changed the official name "Brigid" which hitherto she had borne (for no Christian lady would willingly continue to bear a name so heathenish while paganism was still a force), it was too deeply rooted in the folk-memory, and continued to be used locally to designate her. [5]

With his use of the terms 'priestesses', 'orgiastic rites', 'sun-oaks' and 'fire-goddesses', we can see the clear influence of the Victorian scholarly conviction that early Irish Christianity preserved 'primitive survivals'. What is striking, however, is that Macalister produces not one shred of hard evidence to back up his view of Kildare as a place where paganism lived on beneath a thin veneer of Christianity. He says that there was 'doubtless' a college of priestesses who 'presumably' had Gaulish-style orgiastic rites and whose head was 'probably' considered the incarnation of the fire-goddess. These are some pretty big assumptions.

In a fascinating examination of the changing fortunes of Saint Brigid in the 19th century, modern scholar Catherine McKenna has traced the origins of the type of thinking that lies behind Macalister's views. She identifies the continental Celticist, Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville (1827-1910), as instrumental in placing the figure of Brigit in a mythological rather than a hagiographical or historical setting. His 1884 work, Le cycle mythologique irlandais et la mythologie celtique, marks the first time that Dr McKenna has seen an explicit identification of the triple goddess with the saint of Kildare made in print. Page 145 of this text makes what is now a familiar claim:

... Brigit, goddess of the pagan Irish, was supplanted in the Christian era by Saint Brigit, and the Irish of the Middle Ages transferred in some way to this national saint the cult that their pagan ancestors had addressed to the goddess Brigit. [6]

I can't help noting the use of the vague term 'in some way' (en quelques sorte) to describe the transference of the pagan cult to the Christian saint by the medieval Irish. It seems to me that right from the start this 'dual Brigit' thesis has been set forward with a great deal of imprecision. Sadly, this has not prevented it from being embraced wholeheartedly ever since, but things may at last be changing. Dr McKenna makes this valuable suggestion to other scholars:

A recognition of the historical conditions that give rise to our current assumptions about the origins and development of the cult and hagiography of St Brigit, of course, tells us nothing about their actual origin and development. It does, however, suggest that we might profitably re-examine the concepts that have become axiomatic, and question the usefulness of repeating the commonplace that Saint Brigit is a euhermerized divinity. [7]

I believe that this is sound advice for Christians too. Let's stop unthinkingly throwing in references to the goddess when speaking of our national patroness. Instead, let's firmly separate her from the unsubstantiated claims of neo-pagans and stand up for our Saint Brigid, the Prophetess of Christ and Mary of the Gael.

References

[1]Whitley Stokes (ed.), Three Irish Glossaries (London and Edinburgh, 1862). Translation from the preface, xxiii-xxiv.

[2] Christina Harrington, Women in a Celtic Church - Ireland 450-1150 (Oxford University Press, 2002), 63-4.

[3] Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun - A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford University Press, 1996), 134.

[4] Ibid, 135.

[5] R.A.S. Macalister, 'Temair Breg: A Study of the Remains and Traditions of Tara', Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 34C (1919), 340-341.

[6]Translation from Catherine McKenna, 'Apotheosis and Evanescence: The Fortunes of Saint Brigit in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries' in J. F. Nagy ed., The Individual in Celtic Literatures, CSANA Yearbook 1 (Dublin, 2001), 79.

[7] Ibid, 97.

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