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In researching the Celts, their beliefs,
practices and religion, we face a number of
difficulties. The ancient Celts themselves wrote
down almost nothing about their religion and so we have
to rely on other sources - the Classical authors
of Rome and Greece, the Christian scribes who
recorded the stories and myths, archaeological
evidence and folklore.
Yet examining these sources is like picking up a
pile of sand and watching it disappear between
our fingers. We have to remember that the
Classical authors may have had their own agenda
of portraying the people they conquered as
barbarians to justify themselves, and that they
did not always understand the beliefs and
customs of the Celts but tended to interpret
them by reference to their own beliefs. The
Christian scribes did not always know with
certainty the myths and beliefs they were
recording and they sometimes had their own
agenda of promoting Christianity and undermining
pagan practices. As for archaeology, this is
dependant on what has survived and been found -
there are vast areas where nothing is known.
Also the archaeological evidence has to be
interpreted by the experts who, like the
Classical authors, have sometimes made the
mistake of interpreting according to the
preconceptions of their own culture. In the
past, for instance, skeletons found with
jewellery were assumed to be female because in
the society of the archaeologists’ time only
women wore jewellery.
Although folklore in many instances reflects
ancient beliefs and practice, it is virtually
impossible to say with certainty for customs and
beliefs are easily transmitted and spread
between communities and countries without
documentation or authentication of their
earliest forms.
However this very lack of hard evidence is, in a
strange way, consistent with something we do
know of the Celts - that they lived comfortably
with ambiguity and a lack of stated facts. Diodorus Siculus (8 BC) writing about the Gauls
said that “In conversation they use few words
and speak in riddles, for the most part hinting
at things and leaving a great deal to be
understood.” Although it’s possible that
Diodorus, being from another culture, was simply
not privy to verbal and non-verbal cues that
could have been understood by the Gauls
themselves, there is other evidence which gives
weight to his observation. We know that riddles
and puns played an important part in Celtic
tales and that the poets were said to possess a
‘dark’ language which the ordinary person was
unable to understand. Many names can be
interpreted in two ways - the name Morrígan, for
instance means ‘phantom queen’ or possibly,
‘queen of the slain’. Again, much of Celtic art
is abstract; forms change one into another,
birds, animals and human forms are dimly
glimpsed through designs of intricate lines and
foliage. The place-name lore of the early Irish
gives more than one story explaining the name of
each place and does not choose one over the
others as though the author is quite comfortable
with multiple realities. And the Celtic
languages, unique among those of the
Indo-Europeans, use mutations so that words with
the same meaning in certain places, in certain
relationships to other words, change or shift
their form and sound. The early poetry makes
much use of alliteration and assonance which
gives connections between words whose meanings
are not connected, making what in Welsh
tradition is called cerdd dafod or tongue music.
(1)
The information we have about Brigit, both as goddess and saint, is subject to all the difficulties outlined above, except that she is not mentioned by the Classical writers. There is a little archaeological evidence in the form of statues and inscriptions, a few small references to her as a goddess in the glossaries and tales, several lives of the saint and a body of folklore, mainly Irish and Scottish. However the archaeological evidence tells us very little about her beyond her name and the fact that the Romans equated her with Minerva, and the references to her as a goddess were not written until centuries after Ireland had become Christian. In fact it is rather anomalous that these references to the goddess were not written down until two hundred years, and in one case, five hundred years, after the earliest lives of the saint.
As for Saint Brigit, there is no evidence that
she actually existed as an historical person and
the Lives are not about a real woman but are a
series of miraculous acts and happenings. In
spite of this, the person of Brigit,
half-glimpsed through the shimmering light of
innuendo, inference and illusion, is one of the
best-loved figures in Celtic lore. We have an
inscription to heavenly Brigantia; we are told
that as a goddess she was much loved because of
her protecting care; we see that as a saint her
worship grew so that she became one of the three
patron saints of Ireland. Even today, she is
much-loved and still much in evidence as both a
deity and a saint.
In the following essay, I have endeavoured to
make my research as accurate as possible and to
quote from the original texts and the poems in
order to go to 'y llygad y fynnon', the eye of
the well, the source of the information about
Brigit. In doing so I shall give some evaluation
of its relevant background, politics and so on,
that have a bearing on the way that the
mythology about her has evolved, but my overall
aim is to bring to light the poetry of Brigit.
For a poem is made up of layers of meaning; the
symbols and images woven into it have a greater
effect on the psyche than mere logic-carrying
prose, and like rhythms and patterns of sound
and form, engage both the senses and the spirit
as well as the rational mind.
© Hilaire Wood 1999