Brigit, Sarasvati and Sacred Sound
As has been pointed out, it is no easy task trying to understand ancient Celtic religion since we don't have any substantial texts or scriptures left by the pre-Christian Celts themselves. Hindu religion doesn't have this problem since the earliest Hindu sources, the Vedic scriptures, orally passed down in an ancient version of Sanskrit, originate in the second millennium BCE. The people who practised the Vedic religion were Indo-Aryans who shared a common cultural ancestry with other Indo-Europeans, including the Celts. It is sometimes helpful therefore to look at Hindu religion as a way of gaining some insight into the general patterns that lie behind the details we do have about the religion of the ancient Celts.
Bearing this in mind, let us look at the Hindu Sarasvati, goddess of learning and the creative arts, who bears some striking resemblances to Brigit, as well as some important differences. I shall start by exploring the image of Sarasvati as she appears in the Vedas and is developed in later Hinduism, and then go on to look at how this image compares with that of Brigit.
(This essay is best read after the essays on Brigit the Goddess and Brigit the Saint
Sarasvati: Divine River of Healing and Fertility
Sarasvati has her beginnings in the Rig Veda, the oldest of the four Vedas, which was composed between 1300 and 1000 BC in Northwest India. In this collection of hymns she is associated with a particular river, the Sarasvati, which has since disappeared but which appears here as the chief of rivers. The river is often addressed as a great and mighty goddess but it is no ordinary river; it originates in heaven and flows down to earth, blessing it and giving it fertility. In one hymn it is said to permeate the three realms of earth, atmosphere and the heavens. The associations then, are with bounty and fertility, and requests are made to Sarasvati for wealth, nourishment, immortality and children. She is seen as a great mother:
Your inexhaustible breast, Sarasvati, that flows with the food of life, that you use to nourish all that one could wish for, freely giving treasure and wealth and beautiful gifts - bring that here for me to suck. (1)
The Vedic religion was essentially the religion of a nomadic people in which the centre of worship was not a fixed temple but the fire altar, which could be constructed wherever people moved. The veneration of the river Sarasvati is significant because it showed a nomadic people who had begun to settle and to extend the focus of their sacred rituals to features of the land. A river was of the utmost importance for providing water for drinking, growing crops and cleansing and it is not surprising that Sarasvati was seen as a nourishing and beneficent goddess.
She is also a goddess who assists at birth, invoked here in an incantation for a safe pregnancy and birth:
Let Visnu prepare the womb; let Tvastr shape the forms. Let Prajapati shed the seed; let Dhatr place the embryo in you.
Place the embryo, Sinvali, place the embryo, Sarasvati. Let the twin Asvins, the lotus-garlanded gods, place the embryo in you.
With golden kindling woods the Asvins churn out fire. We invoke that embryo for you to bring forth in the tenth month. (2)
She is associated with virility, and a charm in the Atharva-Veda (the latest Vedic text from around 900 BCE) asks:
Now, O Agni, now, O Savitar, now O goddess Sarasvati, now O Brahmanaspati, do thou stiffen the pasas as a bow!
Sarasvati the Healer
As well as being a goddess of childbirth, she is also one of the divine physicians along with the waters, Rudra, and the Asvins. The waters hold a powerful and central place in Vedic thought. In the cosmology the earth is a disc floating on the ocean, and space also has the qualities of an ocean made up of two, three or four seas. Water surrounds the sun and the seven Vedic rivers flow from the sky. (3) The waters are usually seen as the original substance in the Brahmanas, and one scholar, Coomaraswamy, has described them as the home of the ambrosia, the source of universal life and the mother of mothers. (4)
In Hymn VIII, 7 in the Atharva-Veda the waters and the medicinal plants are seen as the main healers:
The waters and the heavenly plants are the foremost; they have driven out from every limb thy disease, consequent upon sin. (5)
The Rig Veda contains a beautiful hymn (10.9) to The Waters of Life:
Waters, you are the ones who bring us the life force. Help us to find nourishment so that we may look upon great joy.
Let us share in the most delicious sap you have, as if you were loving mothers.
Let us go straight to the house of the one for whom you waters give us life and give us birth.
For our well being let the goddesses be an aid to us, the waters be for us to drink. Let them cause well-being and health to flow over us.
Mistresses of all the things that are chosen, rulers over all peoples, the waters are the ones I beg for a cure.
Soma has told me that within the waters are all cures and Agni who is salutary to all.
Waters, yield your cure as an armour for my body, so that I may see the sun for a long time.
Waters, carry far away all of this that has gone bad in me, either what I have done in malicious deceit or whatever lie I have sworn to.
I have sought the waters today; we have joined with their sap. O Agni full of moisture, come and flood me with splendour. (6)
(trans. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty)
The waters then, like Sarasvati herself, have healing powers. They are seen as bringing the life force, providing nourishment and being able cure and to carry away disease - thus indicating a cleansing function. This ability to cleanse is not only physical but also spiritual as indicated by the reference to carrying away what has gone bad in the speaker through malicious deceit or lies, and in the Atharva-Veda, to their driving away of disease "consequent on sin".
Hymn 7.49 identifies the waters as goddesses, and the refrain asks "Let the waters, who are goddesses, help me here and now."
In the Rig Veda Sarasvati, along with the twin gods the Asvins, is said to heal the god Indra and in the Atharva-veda she is invoked in a charm to cure worms. In the Satapatha-brahmana she is described as a healing medicine and called upon to cure sickness.
Sarasvati and Ritual Drink
Although Sarasvati is not identified so precisely as a river in the later texts, she continues to be associated with water, not only with clouds and rain which she is able to manifest, but also with water in general and the sacred drink Soma which pervades all creation. Soma is the sacrificial plant divinised, according to Renou. "It is the essence of the waters and ranks as a god of the waters... it is the amrita itself, the drink of immortality, the remedy par excellence which stimulates the flow of words, produces a sort of ecstasy and confers all the delights." (7)
