How to build a Goddess

The changing face of St Brigid

St Brigid in

Today is the feast day of St Brigid, one of Ireland's three patron saints. But who was Brigid - and why do we hear less about her these days, and more about the ‘Goddess Brigid’ who seems to be taking her place? This is a slightly rewritten version of an essay originally posted here in 2024. I think it’s more relevant by the year.

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I’ve been spending a lot of time these past few months with St Brigid of Kildare. Last year, my priest asked me to take on the intimidating task of writing an Akathist hymn for her¹. An Akathist is a long hymn of praise dedicated to a particular saint, the formula for which is long-established, traceable as it is to 6th-century Byzantium. There are not many Akathists to Western saints, given how new the Eastern Orthodox tradition is here, and since St Brigid is one of Ireland’s three patron saints, it seemed about time to give her her own Akathist hymn, to be sung on her patron day - which is today.

I can’t say how well I did at this endeavour, but I like a challenge, and when a saint prods you in this way, it is not right - maybe it is not possible - to refuse. Regardless of the result though, this project meant that I had to go back to the sources for the life of St Brigid, which gave me an interesting insight not only into what the life of this early Irish saint may have involved, but also of how it was seen by others - then and now.

You don’t have to read many lives of early Christian saints, be they in Ireland, Egypt or anywhere else, to notice some themes emerging. These ‘lives’ are not biographies in the modern sense; rather they are stories of spiritual warfare. They are an attempt to demonstrate the holiness and importance of the saint in question, and through them the truth of the Christian faith. Sometimes this spiritual warfare is spoken of in terms of the inner struggle, but more often - overwhelmingly so in the life of St Brigid - they manifest externally as tales of miracles and magic.

Brigid was a Christian nun, Abbess and, interestingly, Bishop (at least technically, if not in practice) who founded a monastery at Kildare in Ireland in the sixth century, and was an influential figure in the Irish Christianity of the time. There are several sources for her life, the most comprehensive of which is the Vita Sanctae Brigitae, written by a monk named Cogitosus around the year 650, about 125 years after her death. The Vita tells of Brigid’s early life: she was, we learn, the symbolically-intriguing daughter of a slave and a king, adopted and raised by a druid, who prophesied her future greatness. A saintly figure from a young age, her love of Christ led her early into the monastic life (she refused several offers of marriage, going so far as to pluck her own eyes out when one suitor told her how beautiful they were) and set out instead on a monastic life.

As a nun and Abbess, Brigid became renowned for giving everything she had (and sometimes things that other people had) to the poor. This was a pattern begun in childhood, when she had given her mother’s entire store of butter to a poor family and her father’s jewel-encrusted sword to a beggar. She once said she would give the whole of the Kingdom of Leinster to the poor if she could. The force of her personality, her love for the weak and the work done by the monastery she founded had her considered a saint in her own lifetime, as did her miracles, of which my favourite is the turning of water into beer: a very northern European version of Jesus’s wedding gift. After her death, the ‘Mary of the Gael’ became the centre of a cult across Ireland and further afield. Her miraculous help with childbirth, her protection of flocks and herds, and the healing power of her wells testified - still, in fact, testify - to her continued presence in the landscape.

That, at any rate, is the Christian version of her life. But there is a neo-pagan version too, which is gaining in popularity as Irish Christianity withers. This has it that St Brigid - if she even existed - was a Christianisation of the pre-Christian ‘Celtic’ goddess Brigid, said to have been the goddess of fire, smithwork and poetry, amongst other things. St Brigid’s Day is, we are told, the same date as the old pre-Christian festival of ‘Imbolc’, which was reworked by the Church as a means of suppressing or appropriating the old religion. Mother goddesses are more fashionable these days than Christian saints, and so it goes with the grain of the times to tell a tale of a female goddess displaced by a male God.

You can find versions of this story all over the web. It is harder, in fact, to find reliable information about the Christian saint than to find unreliable stories about the goddess she supposedly supplanted. Here, for example, you can learn all about this ‘ancient Celtic goddess’, who seems to have cleaved to some surprisingly modern values:

[Brigid was] a triple goddess – the goddess of healing symbolised by the element of water, goddess of the alchemical force of fire, and goddess of poetry. In this respect she represents every woman and our unique talents, skills and qualities. Too often we put ourselves in boxes, limited by cultural stereotypes in an effort to fit in. Brigid urges you to develop and express all your gifts.

This Brigid appears to be the goddess of the therapeutic age. The same website informs us that her namesake and successor, St Brigid, followed in her footsteps, being as she was a feminist, a lesbian, an abortionist and an ass-kicking social justice activist, who may have looked something like this:

You go girl!

Elsewhere, the organisers of a series of nationwide events to celebrate the saint’s life inform us that the ‘values championed by St. Brigid’ included ‘faith, spirituality, biodiversity, sustainability, arts and culture, social justice, peace, hospitality, and education.’ No mention here of Christ, the Church or the gospels, which you might imagine would be found somewhere amongst the ‘values’ of a Christian nun. Perhaps they ran out of space.

‘The study of the past with one eye upon the present’, wrote the great English historian Herbert Butterfield, ‘is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word “unhistorical.”’ He was right, of course, but he was also a Dead White Man, so nobody’s listening. Where I come from, the practice of rewriting history to promote the ideologies of the day is so common as to be barely worth mentioning anymore. This is how we now know that black people built Stonehenge, Horatio Nelson was gay and St Brigid performed abortions in her nunnery, amongst many other politically useful revelations.

There is nothing new in this, of course. History is always a battlefield: control the past and you control the present. Those who tell the stories set the tone, as we can see all around us today. The people who are currently rewriting St Brigid’s story for the age of therapeutic individualism are only doing what they imagine the Christians did to their ‘triple goddess’ in the first place. And to be fair to them, Christians throughout history have hardly been shy when it comes to doing the same thing for their own purposes.

Awkwardly though, the ‘goddess Brigid’ story appears to be built on sand. It seems that there is no evidence for the existence of a ‘pre-Christian goddess’ called Brigid in Ireland from any source before the tenth century - which is long after the attested life of the saint. The sole reference to such a deity is one mention in the Sanas Chormaic, or ‘glossary of Cormac’, a list of Irish historical figures from the early middle ages. Historian Phillip Campbell, in an essay which aims to challenge the new myth of ‘Brigid the goddess’, says this:

Given that the Sanas Chormaic was composed around 908, we must first note that a goddess named Brigit is not attested until roughly 383 years after the historical Brigid died. Perhaps the Sanas Chormaic reflects beliefs from a much earlier period, but it is just as likely that it represents, not paganism as it existed in the 5th century, but paganism as 10th century Christian authors imagined it may have looked. By Cormac’s time, pagan symbols and early Irish concepts were no longer comprehensible to Christian authors, at least in their original context.

There is no proof outside of the Sanas Chormaic that any deity named Brigit ever existed. The goddess may be a purely literary reconstruction, similar to the Anglo-Saxon Eostre, an alleged goddess who is attested only in the writings of the Christian monk Bede and nowhere else. At any rate, it is difficult to see how the cultus of St. Brigid could have developed out of a pagan deity that is not attested until four centuries after her own life.

As for the other stories about Brigid - that her saint’s day falls on the same day as the ‘pagan festival of Imbolc’, for example, thus demonstrating that it is a Christian appropriation of a pagan celebration - there is a lack of supporting evidence here too. Imbolc is a word that means ‘the time of the milking.’ It certainly corresponds to the coming of spring, but there is no evidence of the existence of any ‘Imbolc festival’ on what is now St Brigid’s day, as historian of paganism Ronald Hutton explains:

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.

Here you can watch a short lecture by Hutton - the pre-eminent British expert on this topic, who is certainly no Christian apologist - demonstrating the lack of historical evidence for the existence of any pre-Christian goddess called Brigid at all.

Where, then, did the story that St Brigid was a Christianised version of a ‘pagan goddess’ come from? The answer seems to be: ‘from the nineteenth century.’ As the Christian tide receded, to the sound of Matthew Arnold’s ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,’ there was a surge of Victorian interest in magic, mystery and non-Christian religions, be they the mysteriously enticing religions of the ‘Orient’ or the equally enticing, and mostly imagined, religions of the pre-Christian ‘Druids’ and ‘Celts’, who were typically re-invented as nature-loving pacifists. The notion that ‘pagan survivals’ lie behind almost every Christian tradition, from Christmas trees to Easter eggs, as well as being the origins of folk customs from Maypole dancing to the ‘Obby ‘Oss, was part of this Victorian legacy.

I remember being entranced by this Romantic notion when I was a teenager: I was a true believer in it for quite a while. It has had a long shelf life, which is why you will still find it all over the Internet. The neo-pagan tradition that I briefly followed some years back, Wicca, is a good example of a faith constructed on the basis of this ‘pagan survival’ myth. Wiccans for a long time told a story that their ‘old religion’ was a long-suppressed, pre-Christian mother goddess cult, forced underground for two thousand years by the patriarchal Church. It turned out, disappointingly, that this was a complete fiction; one that was sympathetically demolished by Ronald Hutton in his 1999 book on modern witchcraft The Triumph of the Moon. Wicca had in fact been patched together in the 1950s by its splendidly eccentric founder Gerald Gardner, from a bundle of rags made up of Thelema, Freemasonry, Theosophy, bits and bobs from the Western mystery tradition, and the ideas of Margaret Murray, James Frazer and Robert Graves.

Today’s ‘triple goddess Brigid’ story seems to be equally patched together from a rag bundle of medieval history, contemporary political and social stances and the need to fill the God-shaped hole left by the collapse of the Christian story in the West. For these reasons, perhaps we should not be too harsh on those who twist the saint’s story, even unknowingly, for their own ends. The growing cult of Brigid, I think, is interesting in its own right, as a sign of the times.

It’s notable, for example, that Brigid rather than Patrick is the Irish saint whose story is being bent into this post-modern shape. Why might this be? It may be partly that she was a woman, and partly because her story is less well attested (Patrick wrote his own autobiography, while Brigid’s life was written 150 years after her death.) The fact that Patrick’s life was explicitly a missionary one may be part of the answer too: it is impossible to separate Patrick from his life’s work of explicitly spreading the Christian faith to non-Christian peoples.

Still, I think there is more to the rising Brigid cult than this. The life of St Brigid of Kildare manifests a particular flavour of saintliness that still resonates in a post-Christian society, which remains marinated in Christian values even though it doesn’t know it. Her work for the poor and the marginalised; her close relationship to animals and the natural world; her status as a woman of significance in a very male society; her pioneering strength. All of these are popular contemporary values. On their own they can easily be slotted into the contemporary left-progressive worldview; indeed, they are the source from which that worldview originates. But secular progressivism, the dominant ideology in the age of the Machine, has no spiritual core. It is lacking in saints and prophets. Are we witnessing an attempt to create one?

What is stripped out of the story, of course, is the reason that Brigid did any of this in the first place: Christ. This was the motivation for her life’s work, and it is the reason we still remember her now, but it is a major stumbling block in the new world that is dawning - hence the transmogrification of saint into goddess. Ironically, the rewriting of St Brigid’s history, even as it seeks to highlight a Strong Woman from the country’s past, ends up erasing the actual life of one of the most remarkable female saints of early Europe. Her nineteenth-century biographer, Alice Curtayne, saw Brigid as a pioneer on her own terms. The female community of ‘Brigidines’ she gathered around her in Kildare, said Curtayne, was centuries ahead of its time:

Nine hundred years were to elapse before anything resembling the Brigidine group was to appear on the continent of Europe … In France there was nothing remotely resembling such feminine initiative until the seventeenth century; and in England nothing that at least recalled it until the nineteenth century … very astonishing indeed is the discovery that the feminine inspiration which delighted Europe in later centuries down to modern times was already an accepted feature of the early Irish church.

In a country which has, throughout history, very often silenced female voices, St Brigid’s story could be genuinely inspiring. But it offers a very specific kind of inspiration: a Christian one. What is happening at present is that some of those who want to champion the role of women in Irish society are sanding the awkward edges off of historical figures who don’t fit their mould. St Brigid, as her biographies attest, was a very Christian kind of Strong Woman, and her ‘values’ were those of the strict and often intolerant monastic ascetics of her time and ours. She would have had no time for the worldview currently being imposed on her by neo-pagan Oneness-seekers who just want to be their best self. After all, she had no tolerance for their spiritual ancestors. One story from the Vita tells of what happened when a Druid sent his corn to be ground in the mill at Brigid’s monastery:

And when that grain was spread between the millstones, nothing could budge them - not the power of the water, and no exercise of strength or skill. When the people who observed this sought its cause, they were quite perplexed. Then, when they learned that the grain belonged to a druid, they had no doubt at all that millstone upon which St Brigid had performed the divine miracle had refused to grind the pagan man’s grain into flour.

This was the kind of Brigid that her monastic biographers wanted to tell us about. Today, though, Brigid the fantasy goddess is rapidly eclipsing Brigid the Christian nun, whose distant voice is being smothered by a neo-pagan myth; one which is much more in tune with the mores of an individualistic, progressive Machine society. But though we have largely left the Christian faith behind in the West, it is so deeply embedded in our landscapes and psyches that it cannot be fully uprooted. Our supposedly secular contemporary culture runs on the fumes of its past Christian fuel, which is why all those neo-pagans have values derived from the Beatitudes. If you can’t abolish a saint, then, what do you do? Why, you remake her, in the shape of the new world you are building.

Whatever age of the West we are currently living through - whether it is the dawn of a new paganism or an example of the Christian virtues run amok, untethered from their source - we have long left the Christian age in Western Europe, and its memories are fading fast. It’s triple goddesses all the way down from here. The temptation for Christians is to either mourn this fact, or to react against it, but I think we should refuse both. The new cult of Brigid may be woolly, ridiculous, harmless - or even, to some, helpful - but it is happening for a reason. A saintless age hungers for saints, though it doesn’t know it. A Godless age needs God, though it denies it daily.

What can Christians learn from this? Maybe that instead of longing for a RETVRN to some fantasy Christendom we should learn to be actual Christians in today’s world. Living in a world dominated by people who think you are mad or weird, who sometimes persecute you but mostly ignore you, is how most Christians at most times have lived. Personally, I think the faith flourishes in these circumstances, and is quickly corrupted when it is in power or culturally dominant. I think that history bears me out here, and so do the Gospels.

There is plenty for us to learn from St Brigid today. The Vita tells us that even the wolves of the forest loved her, and the wild ducks ‘flew on feathered wings to her, without any fear’, after which ‘she praised highly the Creator of all things, to whom all life is subject, and for whose service … all life is given.’ So in tune with Creation was Brigid, in fact, that she could hang her cloak on a sunbeam and cause trees to move through prayer. Anything she ever found herself in possession of was given away to the poorest of the poor.

The story that Cogitosus seems eager to tell us throughout his life of this saint is, in fact, a beautifully simple one, and beautifully Christian. It is of this woman’s deep love for the neediest people and for the vulnerable creatures of the wild, all of it springing from a love of God Himself - and of how she put this love into action. Do we put this love into action, we so-called Christians? Do I? If not, why not? Maybe some prayers to St Brigid on this first day of spring can help us answer these questions.

1. If you’d like to read my Akathist to St Brigid, it’s available in full here. There is no copyright on prayers, so if you’d like to pray it, sing it or use it in your church, please go ahead.