What has St. Patrick got that St. Brigit does not.

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What has St. Patrick got that St. Brigit does not. Besides a y- chromosome and all that comes with it, he has a feast day on the Universal Calendar of the Roman Catholic church, the status of Ireland's patron saint, and parades the world over on his feast day of March 17. Brigit, born (ca. 452) in the same century as Patrick (ca. 412?), is also an Irish saint who maintained her place on the calendar during the Vatican II purge of dubious saints. Unlike Patrick, a native Briton, she was actually born in Ireland, probably near modern Faughart in Co. Louth. Her biographers, medieval and modern, maintain that she, like Patrick, led an exemplary life enriched almost daily by her miracles. She won converts to Christianity and established many churches in Ireland. As with Patrick's main church at Armagh, Brigit's seat at Kildare became the chief establishment in a

whole network of congregations. At one time her church and her cult even competed with those of Patrick for the leadership of Ireland. She was, and still is, venerated by thousands of Christians, Irish and other, throughout the old world and new, in churches named after her on her feast day of February 1. . Along with Patrick and Columba, she presides as one of the three main patrons of Irish Catholics. Brigit has one thing that Patrick lacks: a reputation as a goddess. Worshipers say she has always been a divinityñor perhaps three divinities for Celtic peoples in Ireland, Britain, and Europe, reigning for centuries before she was appropriated as a saint by crafty Christian missionaries and reluctant converts. Modern Celtic Christians, pagans, scholars, and webmasters all tout Brigit's pre- christian past and powers in rituals, books, articles, and colorful

websites. According to revivalists, Brigit's attributes, her miracles, her very nameñ"the Exalted One"ñall derived from her original divinity long before Patrick was ever kidnapped to Irish shores. Brigit was the native, Patrick the foreigner; Brigit was there first, but Patrick became the national saint. To journey through the scholarly literature on the saint-goddess is as wild a pilgrimage as surfing the web for Brigit-sites. In the past twenty years, scholars have cast Brigit as a pre-Christian tripartite hospitaller, lawgiver, and warrior based on the British goddess Brigant_; a goddess of "sun and fire" (McCone); a structuralist hero who manifests power by crossing boundaries of time and space (also McCone); the "most powerful female religious figure in all of Irish history....a Triple Goddess, a Virgin Mother, a Lawmaker, a Virgin Saint, and...a folk

image whose shadows still move over Ireland" (Condren); "a suitable patron for the Irish women's liberation movement"; and the Irish equivalent of Pan and Kali (De Paor). [1] . Brigit has also been the target of Irish Folklore Commission Questionnaires about strangely unchristian practices during post- famine times. According to folklore material collected earlier in this century, Donegal wives used to cast the brat BrÌde (Brigit's cloak) over calving cows to ease their pain, while in Mayo cross- dressing boys and girls carried a turnip-headed corn dolly called the brÌdeog (little Brigit) from house to house on Bridget's Eve. [2] [3] Yet even to believe in Brigit's existence is a scholarly leap of faith since we have no good evidence of her historicity. Patrick, by comparison, left us a Confession by his own hand. We have no writings by

Brigit herself, nor any biography of her until a century- and-a-half after her death, written around 650. The monastic annals from early Ireland list two birthdates (452, 456) and three different dates for her death (524, 526, 528). [4] [5] But why. Why would clerical writers try to identify their own saint with any pre-christian goddess. It was hard enough for the first generations of Christians to maintain the reputations of female saints and to create persuasive cases for their veneration. Women were denied most of the avenues to sainthood available to men until long after Brigit's time; they could not be bishop missionaries like Patrick, or extreme ascetics, like St. Simeon who sat atop a pole for forty years, or public officials, like St. Germanus. In Ireland, they could not even be martyrs, since the Irish never persecuted Christians. In the late fifth

century, when Brigit worked, women had hardly even begun organizing professional nunneries. The rumor of pagan sympathies would have endangered the reputation of a holy woman elsewhere in Christianizing territories. Nonetheless, the literati of medieval Ireland knew what they were doing. They were neither simple-minded traditionalists, unwittingly preserving their Celtic past, nor closet pagans, hiding evidence of heresy in stories of saints. The Irish were proud of their willing conversion to Christianity. No one forced believers to give up their goddess for saint Brigit. If early medieval writers invoked a prechristian past in stories of a saint, they had good reasons. If they sought a more ancient Brigit in pre-Patrician Ireland, just as modern Brigit- lovers do, then it was purposeful. And if we can figure out when and how Christian writers first invoked pagan

associations for the saint, what exactly they did wrote, and how they made their case, then we will know why they did so. . . Let us begin, then, with the evidence for Brigit as goddess and Brigit as saint, in order to see when the two were joined. Since the pre-christian Irish did not write, the hardest evidence for a goddess named Brigit or BrÌg comes from stone and metal, although unfortunately not from Ireland. In another Celtic territory across the Irish Sea in Dumfrieshire, Scotland, archaeologists have found a Roman-era statue of a female figure clearly inscribed with the name of Brigantia, crowned like a tutelary deity, and holding a spear like the Roman goddesses Victoria and Minerva. [6] Deae Nymphae Brigantiae (divine nymph Brigit). [7] /BRIGANT_N inscribed on a coin in Iberian script, suggest that Celts south of Britain also worshipped someone named

Brig. [8] . The names start to make sense only when linked with ancient ethnology. The town of Bregenz, at the eastern end of Lake Constance in Austria, retains the older name of Brigantion, a tribal capital of a people called the Brigantii, possibly after a goddess Brigant_. [9] . The rivers Brent in England, Braint in Wales, and Brigid in Ireland are all related linguistically and maybe religiously to the root Brig/Brigant. [10] [11] brenhin, from the goddess' name, Brigan_, understanding it to mean originally "consort of the goddess"; Cartimandua's own freedom in discarding one husband for another seems like evidence that she followed the goddess' model, selecting a mate with whom to rule the Brigantes. [12] . But the more ordinary Celtic words for king come from an Indo-European root, *regs- which has given us Irish rÌ, Latin rex, German reich; and Cartimandua

was unusual among Celtic leaders, who were normally men. None of this material evidence reached early Ireland and it is doubtful that early Irish writers ever knew of it. Only if we assume the people called Brigantes or Brigantii went to Ireland and brought the goddess Brig is it possible to suggest the goddess' worship there. Ptolemy, a second-century geographer, did mention a tribe calling itself the Brigantes in Leinster. . But nothing remains of the Irish Brigantes except this single tribal name on a Greek's map, the river Brigid, and much later literary references to saints and supernatural figures named Brigit. If a cult or religion dedicated to her existed, nothing remains of it from the time of its practice. No one scratched inscriptions on stone walls, no one lost coins in the dirt, no statue stands, no mention of ritual practice has lasted in

Irish literature, no priestess or queen dedicated to Brig or Brigit or Briganti deserved notice in Latin texts. No ruined shrine to Brigit remains on hilltop or tucked into forest grove. The kind of evidence that suggests the goddess in Britain and Gaul simply does not exist in Ireland. Irish Brigit's case for divinity is strongest by two kinds of deduction. First information about goddesses in other so-called Celtic societies suggests the kinds of goddesses that might have reigned in Ireland. Epona, for instance, the horse-riding goddess carved into the stones of Gaul and Germany, or the triple mothers (matronae) of Roman Britain resonate with literary figures from medieval Irish texts. By synthesizing the attributes of these goddesses left to us in hard stone elsewhere in Europe and comparing them with the observations of classical writers such as Tacitus or

the medieval Irish poets and taletellers, we can speculate that throughout Europe Celtic goddesses were generally of three types: warriors, mothers, or sovereignty figures, or some combination of these as territorial patronesses. Irish mythological literature of the Middle Ages mentioned similar female figures linked to particular territories or points on the landscape, in the same way that the tribal goddesses of British inscriptions were named after peoples of a certain area. The Irish of the Middle Ages wrote of an ancient queen named Boann, possibly a goddess of the Boyne Valley and BrT na BÛinne. A ninth-century poet wrote of Caillech BhÈirri, the hag or nun of Beare, who seems to have been a sovreignty figure of Munster tradition. We can guess that perhaps there was a territorial Brigit too. But these vague literary comparisons do not prove that the Irish

at the time of Christianization were worshipping a goddess name Brigit.________________________________HIMAVANTThe Layayogachakras-Group Owner!_______Join to:- prema-dharma- http://www.himavanti.orghttp://www.himawanti.orghttp://www.sacred-texts.com_______

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