Brigid- Celtic GodDeity"The Exalted One"

Three Sisters, One Name

Cormac's Glossary, compiled around 900, describes Brigid as three sisters, all named Brigid. One governed poetry, one healing, one smithcraft. All three worked through fire: the imbas that burns in a poet's mind, the forge that turns ore to blade, the hearth where healing herbs are dried.

She was the Dagda's daughter, high among the Tuatha Dé Danann. Poets claimed her above all. In the bardic schools that survived into the seventeenth century, students lay in darkened rooms with stones on their chests, composing verse in blindness until vision came. What they sought was Brigid's fire.

The First Keening

Her son Ruadán fought on the Fomorian side at the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, drawn there by his father Bres, the half-Fomorian former king. During the battle, Ruadán infiltrated the Tuatha Dé Danann's camp and drove a spear into Goibniu the smith at his forge. Goibniu pulled the spear from his own flesh and hurled it back. The boy staggered to the Fomorian lines and died.

Brigid found his body on the field. The sound she made had never been heard in Ireland: a shriek, then a weeping, then a lamentation. The Irish called it keening, and it was the first such cry ever heard in the land.

The Flame at Kildare

At Kildare, the Church of the Oak, a fire burned in Brigid's honor behind a hedge no man could cross. Nineteen priestesses tended the flame in rotation. On the twentieth night, no one watched it. The fire burned on its own, or Brigid tended it herself.

When Christianity came, nuns replaced the priestesses but kept the fire. Gerald of Wales saw it still burning in the twelfth century and wrote that men who crossed the hedge went mad or died. The flame lasted until the Reformation. In 1993, the Brigidine Sisters relit it. It burns today.

Imbolc

On the first of February, spring returned and Brigid with it. Families cleaned their houses, lit candles, and made a bed by the hearth for her spirit to rest in. Food and drink were left beside it. They wove crosses of rushes and hung them over doors for protection against fire and lightning. Brigid wove the first one at a dying chieftain's bedside, plaiting rushes from the floor while she spoke of the Gospel.

Children carried a Brídeog from house to house, a small figure of Brigid dressed in cloth. Each household that welcomed it received her blessing for the year ahead.

The Saint

Cogitosus wrote the first life of Saint Brigid around 650. In his telling, she hung her wet cloak on a sunbeam to dry. She turned water into ale for a colony of lepers. When she took the veil, a pillar of fire rose from her head to heaven. Her feast day stayed on February 1, and her monastery rose at Kildare, on the same ground where the sacred flame had always burned.

Brigid and the Cailleach

In Scottish and Irish tellings, Brigid and the Cailleach are the same woman. The Cailleach rules from Samhain to Imbolc, old and hard as frozen ground. At Imbolc she drinks from the Well of Youth and becomes Brigid, the maiden of spring. At Samhain, Brigid ages back into the Cailleach.