My talk this evening is on the goddess and saint Bridget, who's the most popular Celtic goddess or saint in modern Western culture, but she's also problematic. No one is quite sure if she actually existed as a saint. No one's quite sure what sort of goddess she actually was, although we've plenty of ideas. No one is quite sure whether the saint actually was what the goddess became. What I'm going to do with this talk is explore the actual evidence for her as goddess and saint in depth from the original sources, and then leave it to you to make up your own minds about it, with the actual data laid out for you. And in doing so, showing how complex, how vivid, and how truly exciting it is. And they're mostly dodgy because they're scary. But there are a couple who are dodgy because they're baffling, and Bridget is one of those. Her name, Bridget, on the screen, is the English version of a goddess or saint known in Gaelic as Brigid, Bridget, Brige or Bride. And by whatever name, she is the most popular Celtic goddess or saint in modern alternative spirituality, possibly in modern spirituality altogether, across the entire Western world. She unites druids and pagans of all kinds, followers of goddess spirituality, and Celtic Christians with the Roman Catholic Christians, who have always been the main constituency for the saint. And her popularity is explained partly by her own attractions and partly by the lack of competition. There just aren't many other figures who straddle the Christian and pagan boundary as she does. She's also got a powerful feminist appeal in that the skills which she represents, medicine, handicrafts, and the performing arts, all offer viable and respected careers to women in current society. Moreover, they're also attractive pursuits and occupations in their own right. In addition, Bridget completely lacks some of the darker and more violent aspects of other Celtic goddesses, being entirely benign while remaining a resolutely independent and capable figure. There's really no problem, therefore, in considering her as a role model or a focus of reverence today. She can simply be worked with, revered, and appreciated. This has produced some wonderful modern invocations and representations of her, in art or literature, of which the following is my personal favourite. It's the work of a modern pagan poet calling himself Omar, published in 1971. Elliptical enfoldments of the sweeping wings, in dreaming ecstasies, the colours sleep, caressing us in healing essence, transforming static forms to flame. Springtime's mother, with new power adorned, stately and solitary, with fire points crowned, illumined by returning spring, in sparkling silver robes of frost, she walks with time and space, and showers love from her eyes, and thus our land by her sustained is filled with life incarnate, as she treads softly on her way and vanishes in amber mist. This vision of her is entirely in keeping with a mainstream modern representation of Bridget as a goddess of fire and of the spring. Only when one considers her as a historian do the problems arise. In the present context, for example, it's notable that until the late 19th century, nobody seems to have thought of her as a goddess either of fire or of the spring. There are in fact four different bridges the modern one, the folkloric one, the medieval saint, and the medieval goddess or ancient goddess, and each one is different from the others. I shall now consider each in turn. First, I shall look a bit further at the modern Bridget. It should be emphasized what a reappearance she represented, because as a goddess, she seems to have been more or less completely absent from the historical record between 1200 and 1860. Her sudden return to notice and popularity was due to three developments. The first was a crisis in the national identity of the French. Until the 1860s, they tended to think that they were Germans, descended from the Germanic tribe, the Franks, who'd given them their name. In the 1860s, however, the different German states unified into a single superpower, which defeated and humiliated France and wrenched away two of its provinces in 1871. Suddenly the French didn't want to be German anymore, and regarded the new German Empire as their mortal enemy. Instead, they turned to their more ancient Celtic heritage as the true basis of their identity. As part of this, French scholars, and especially Marie-Henri Dabois de Jubainville at the Sorbonne University, set about claiming a position for France as the centerpiece and most important part of an ancient Celtic cultural zone, possibly an empire, which had stretched from Ireland to Asia Minor. As part of this, they set about linking up ancient deities with similar names, to prove that the ancient Celts had shared a common religious pantheon, as well as much else. One of these was Bridget, whose name seemed to be similar to those of Celtic tribes such as the Brigantes in Britain, and goddesses such as Brigantia. Rivers with names beginning in BRI were then drafted in to be linked to her and strengthen the case for her as a mighty pan-European deity. At the same time, the Irish were increasingly campaigning for independence from a United Kingdom dominated by England, or at the very least for greater recognition of their identity and accomplishments as a separate people. This entailed making a renewed study of Ireland's very rich medieval literature and a reclamation of its mythology. As a result of this, a leading scholar of both, called Whitley Stokes, became in 1862 the first person to suggest that the saint called Bridget, found in that literature, was the same figure as the goddess found in it with the same name. Subsequently, the greatest poet of the Irish literary revival, W. B. Yates, gave her the longest and most iconic passage about a deity in his magical notebooks. His great love, the nationalist heroine Maud Gone, lectured on Bridget in Dublin in 1899, stressing her in her newfound role as a goddess who'd become a saint. This idea was taken up by Scottish nationalists during the late 19th century, who embarked on their own quest for a strong and independent identity for their nation in the face of English dominance. They found it in Scotland's own Celtic heritage, that of the Highlands and Islands, and there too they encountered the figure of Bridget, and hailed her as a pagan goddess who had turned into a Christian saint. One of the most fervent and intellectual to do so was William Sharp, a lowland Scot who found fame by writing in the guise of a Gallic woman from the Hebrides called Fiona MacLeod. Here is his Epiphany of Bridget, as the goddess behind the saint, in The Wings Destiny, published in 1904. I am older than Bridget of the Mantle, and it is you that should know that. I put songs and music into the wind before ever the bells of the chapels were rung in the west or heard in the east. I am Bridget of the Mantle, but I am also Bridget the Wave Born, and Bridget of the Hosts, Bridget of the Slender Fairies, Bridget the sweet mouth of the people of the green garments, and I am older than Friday, and I am as old as Monday. In the land of youth my name is Mountain Goer, in the land under the waves it is Grey Hunter, and the land of old age makes it seek beyond. And I have been abreath in your heart, and the day is afoot that will see me coming into the hearts of men and women, like a flame upon dry grass, like a flame of wind in a great wood. By the early 20th century, the idea of Bridget as goddess termed saint was firmly established, although the traits attributed to the goddess took different forms. It was conveyed to the public on a massive scale through a range of popular books. One of these was The Golden Bough, the most widely read work of anthropology ever written by the Cambridge academic Sir James Fraser. Here is his version of Bridget. Bridget or Bride was an old heathen goddess of fertility, disguised in a threadbare Christian cloak. Probably she is no other than Bridget, the Celtic goddess of fire, and apparently of the crops. Another was that of the poet Robert Graves in the next generation, in his hugely influential reworking of traditional mythologies, the white goddess. Saint Bridget, the Virgin Goddess's muse, was popularly identified as Mary of the Gale. Bridget as a goddess had been a triad, the Bridget of Poetry, the Bridget of Healing, and the Bridget of Smithcroft. In Gaelic Scotland, her symbol was the white swan, and she was known as Bridget of the Golden Hair, Bridget of the White Hills, Mother of the King of Glory. In the Hebrides, she was the patroness of childbirth. It may be seen that these envisionings lie directly behind the image of Bridget, found in Western alternative spirituality at the present day. It is time now to turn to the folkloric Bridget. She features in Gaelic folk tradition as the most popular female saint, above all the mother of Ireland, but also revered in the Isle of Man, the Hebrides, and the Scottish Highlands. Her feast day was the first of February, the traditional opening of spring in the Irish and British calendar, and the ancient Gaelic festival of Imolk. Across the Gaelic world, it had by the 18th century, and probably long before, become a tradition to believe that the saint would visit the households who welcomed her on the night before her feast day. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, folklorists therefore collected a great number of customs found throughout this large span of territory, which were designed to make the saint feel welcome in particular houses and bless them. One of the simplest was to lay out food for her on a window ledge before the family went to bed, but many were more elaborate. One of these was to make a sheaf of rushes or straw to represent the saint, and have a young woman bring it into the house. It was them formally welcomed. Other families made up a bed for the saint to rest upon while visiting, sometimes with food beside it. After all, Bridget had a lot of households to get round that night, she might fancy a short kip. Yet others left a cloth or garment on an outside windowsill for her to bless in passing. It was them thought to have healing powers. Very commonly, women or young men would carry a straw figure, wrapped in clothes and decorations around the village during the day. This would bless the houses, and the bearers would be given food or money in return with which to celebrate the coming feast. Sometimes the same kinds of people carried round a large circle of straw, Bridget's girdle, through which the villagers stepped in order to be blessed. In the Isle of Man, people stood at their doors with a bundle of rushes, calling out a welcome to the saint. They then strewed the rushes over the floor inside the house to carpet her way in. In the Hebrides, householders dressed an oat sheaf as a doll, and laid it by the fire with a wooden club or wand beside it. The saint was then formally welcomed to the house. If the mark of the club or wand was found in the ashes at dawn, this was a sign that she had passed by. Across Ireland, the most popular and enduring way of welcoming Bridget on the night before her feast was to weave a cross out of rushes and hang it over a door or window as an invitation to her to enter. These were usually four-armed and kept up for the next year to protect the house from ill fortune. Here the records allow us to chart the growth of a folk custom, as they rarely do. The four armed woven crosses are mentioned in Ireland from the late seventeenth century, but at other festivals. They become associated with Bridget only in the early 18th century, and the association was complete by its end. This development is one of many examples that the study of folk customs provides of how dynamic popular culture is, constantly both adopting and phasing out traditions even in remote rural communities. Even so, while the precise nature of the activities changes, the basic custom, in this case, a ritual to attract the saint to bless a household, does not. In the British cultural zone, the area most strongly associated with folklore concerning Bridget is the Western Isles of Scotland, the Hebrides. These, and especially the Roman Catholic communities there, have furnished most of the detailed seasonal customs and texts associated with the veneration of the saint. In the late 20th century, many of these were transferred to an honoring of the goddess. In the process, one collection of Hebridean customs and prayers became especially influential, the Carmina Gedelica of Alexander Carmichael, published between 1900 and 1971. Carmichael himself died in 1912. The haunting beauty of the prayers and invocations in Carmichael's great book is responsible for their popularity in contemporary Celtic spirituality. Here is a typical example entitled The Descent of Bridget. Bridget of the mantles, Bridget of the Peaat Stack, Bridget of the Twining Hair, Bridget of the Prophecy, Bridget of the White Feet, Bridget of the Stillness, Bridget of the White Palms, Bridget of the Cowls, Bridget's woman comrade, Bridget of the Fields, Bridget's woman helper, Bridget's woman mild, Bridget's tress of Mary, Bridget's nurse of Christ, each day and night that I say the descent of Bridget. I shall not be slain, I shall not be wounded, I shall not be put in cell, I shall not be gashed, I shall not be torn apart, I shall not be looted, I shall not be downtrodden, I shall not be left naked, I shall not be broken, nor shall Christ let me be forgotten, nor sun shall burn me, nor fire shall burn me, nor beam shall burn me, nor moon shall burn me, nor river shall drown me, nor sea shall drown me, nor flood shall drown me, nor pool shall drown me, nightmare shall not lie on me, coma shall not lie on me, spell sleep shall not lie on me, illusion shall not lie on me. I am under the keeping of my Saint Mary, my companion beloved is Bridget. It can be seen how easily such a text can now be paganized or rendered religiously neutral. For historians and folklorists, however, there is a problem with Carmichael's text, which was revealed when his field notes were studied in the 1970s. It is that his usual practice. Was to collect different versions of a folk prayer or charm and then combine them into a single one, touched up with his own creative genius. In other words, the numinous beauty of the end product is mostly a result of his own poetic talent presented to us as an emanation of the Celtic soul. Well, since he was a Gallic Scot, that's actually what it is. As a result, it's perfectly feasible and virtuous to use his texts as vehicles for personal spirituality and modern religious tradition. There's only a problem if you try to use them straightforwardly to represent the actual work of 19th century Hebridean folk. So now to the medieval saint. The sources for her are very abundant, reflecting her importance as the leading female saint of the Irish. There are no less than five early medieval lives of her, plus more produced later, and further anecdotes about her in poems and other texts. It should be on the face of things, therefore readily assumed that we are dealing with a real person about whom genuine things are known. The assumption, however, would be wrong. The trouble, which is common to most Irish and Welsh saints, is that the information provided on her comes from periods long after the time of her presumed life. All of the biographies of her are really just imaginative elaborations of the first two. Behind both of those, in turn, is a lost original, apparently written in the 650s or 660s, that was in turn used as a basis for the earliest surviving one, the so-called First Life, which seems to date from the second half of that century. And the second oldest surviving life, then made selective use both of the first life and the lost original. It's written by a churchman at Kildare, which was by them Bridget's main shrine, called Cogatosis. That is also late seventh century. There are three big problems in using either of these earliest surviving texts as the basis of a genuine biography of a historical person. The first is that neither are biographies in the modern sense of the word. They're really lists of Bridget's miracles compiled to prove her qualifications as a saint. The second problem is that even the lost original list would have been written well over a hundred years after the presumed lifetime of the saint. Two of the Irish annals, lists of events recorded against each year, give the same dates for Bridget, born in 439 and dying in 524 of the Common or Christian era. It seems likely that these annals began to be kept from the 550s. And if the entries for Bridget are original, they'd be written with an easy living memory of her time. Unhappily, they may also have been inserted long after. The third problem with the oldest surviving lives is that they disagree with each other. The first life makes Bridget the daughter of a noble and loving Christian married couple. Cogitosus makes her father a cruel pagan druid and her mother a slave girl. They couldn't be more different. The first life situates her activities in a broad swathe of country across the northeast Irish Midlands. Cogitosus locates them firmly at Kildare, which is sixty miles to the south. He makes her the first abbess of the nunnery there. So what's going on? Well the answer is some rather violent politics, because the two areas were in rival kingdoms. The northeast Midlands were ruled by the kings of Tara, while Kildare was in Leinster, ruled by the kings of the Loyan. In 722, the two kingdoms fought each other at a place called Alan, and the Tara army allegedly called on Saint Colum Killer, the saint known to Brits as Columba. He appeared to aid it. The Lensterman then prayed to Bridget, and she appeared raging in the sky behind them and gave them the victory, or so they said. What is certain is the loyan defeated the army of Tara and thereafter had custody of Bridget. So she becomes firmly associated with Leinster and Kildare, but not before. Both of the earliest lives, moreover, were written to advance the claims of Bridget to be the greatest saint of Ireland. In each, therefore, she is represented as superior to all the others, including St. Patrick himself. So there is some fiercely partisan local politics engendering these lives. Just to mess things up totally, sorry about this, folks, a medieval Irish inventory of saints lists ten different bridgets and twelve Briges, all of whom may be local versions of the famous Bridget or completely different people. At this stage, I simply throw up my hands in despair. So if there was a real woman behind all this, she's inaccessible. We can neither prove nor disprove her existence, and so she is not a historical character. She might, however, actually have been one. Left with the legend, we do have a well-formed personality with an entertaining corpus of stories about her, eighty of them, in fact. All are about her miracles, and they mostly consist of the acts, usually associated with folk magicians, the wise folk or cunning folk. The vital distinction to medieval Christians is that she allegedly worked them through prayer and not spells. Most of them concern healing, above all of blindness. She also located lost or stolen goods. There are, however, some activities which seem especially characteristic of her. She really liked food and drink, and was very good at increasing the abundance of both. Often she did this by giving things to the poor that belonged to other people, but were then miraculously replaced, or by conjuring up huge feasts out of the air for distinguished guests, like St. Patrick. She was also adept at turning water into milk or alcohol. She could make rivers swell or shrink, and springs appear from the earth, and time stand still. She could keep a wheel on a chariot when the pin came out, and like many medieval saints, befriended animals, ducks, wolves, horses, and fox. She could also make an unwanted pregnancy disappear, turn a nagging wife into a loving one, and stop mortal enemies from fighting. Conversely, in a mean mood, she could inflict hunger, disease, or death. She really disliked crime, unnecessary cruelty, and sex. I personally have three favourite stories among those told about her. The first is that Kildare is and always has been, next to a large fertile plain called the Kurra, which is especially good for horse breeding and horse racing, still is. And therefore the local princes used to breed and tame their horses on the courage of Kildare. And Bridget, with her knack with animals, was especially good at horse taming. So princes would deferentially bring difficult stallions to Bridget, who would jump on their backs and bring them round to be loving and devoted steeds, tearing across the curror on their backs, whooping, and doing a good job. She became the nun who rode the range. The second aspect of her is a story told about how the great navigator, the voyager among Irish saints, St. Brendan, came to see her, having heard her fame. And when he came in, it had been raining, and she was out. And she then came in as the sun came out and sent a beam through the open doorway of her humble hut. And having a soaking wet cloak, she calmly hung it on the sunbeam and then took it off when it seemed dry. And Brendan, not to be outdumb, tried to hang his cloak on the sunbeam and failed three times. But after that it worked. And by now, thoroughly flustered and humiliated, you can see this as part of bigging up Bridget as the greatest Irish saint. Brendan uh said that uh he felt inadequate compared with her. And Bridget said, no, dear, the problem is you've done all that sailing and have had to think about other things than God a lot of the time to keep your men alive. Whereas I think about God all the time. And so I can do this kind of thing more easily. There. And lastly, uh is the tale of how she set out with her charioteer to attend a service at some distance. And the charioteer said, uh, I know a shortcut. And Bridget said, Do you? And the charioteer, trust me, trust me, I've got the knowledge. I'll show you. And he then drove her, and they encountered a field bank right across their path. And the charioteer said, Don't worry, don't worry, my horses can do it, and put the chariot and the horses straight at the bank. And the horses jumped it, the chariot didn't. And the charioteer, I climbed say the taxi driver, and Bridget spilled out on the grass, safely, but uh rather disgruntled. And Bridget stood up, smoothed herself down, and said, That does it. Short cuts make long delays. And it became a proverb. So finally, to the goddess. Compared with the saint, she's barely present in the medieval literature. There are actually just three references. One of the is the really famous and definitive one. In Shannas Cornac, Cornac's Dictionary. A dictionary probably started around the year 900 and attributed later to a king and bishop of Munster, the main southwestern Irish kingdom called Cornac, who was around at that time. It is the most exalted and specific description of any goddess in the whole of Irish medieval text. Bridget, a female poet, daughter of the Dachda. She is Bridget, the woman of poetic skill, that is, a goddess whom poets used to worship, for very great and splendid was her application to the art. Therefore, they used to call her goddess of poets, whose sisters were Bridget the Healer, Bridget the Smith, daughters of the Dachda, from whose names Bridget was called a goddess by almost all, the Irish. So what are the problems? Well, the first is it was started around 900 by somebody, but a lot of it was added gradually over the succeeding centuries. So a lot of it is by no means as old as its origin, and what we have is a composite text by many hands. And the second is that we don't know when the entry about Bridget, which I just quoted, was added, whether it's early or late, or indeed whether it is itself a composite of different dates by different hands. There is, for example, a separate entity for Saint Bridget, making the point that the goddess and saint were different beings, but many think that was a later insertion. As we have it, the text certainly calls her a goddess and the daughter of one of the most beloved, earthy and strong father figures in Irish mythology, the Dachda. But the entry is all in the past tense, referring to a hazy former time. And what's more, note that I've put some of the text in italics. Those bits are all in Latin instead of Irish. And this matters because whenever Cormac's glossary turns to Latin instead of Irish, it's flagging up bits it doesn't regard as reliable. So they're actually being red flags hoisted over these bits, which are mostly about the goddess in the text. The glossary also states that Bridget's name means fiery arrow, something which modern philologists think is simply wrong. They derive it instead from a Celtic root word signifying exalted one, and if the dictionary can get her name wrong, then it can probably get a lot else wrong as well, but it might not. No other trace of the Triple Bridget described in Shannus Cormac is found in any other source. Instead, another text of around 900, Kaf Maya Turaf, gives her a role in a narrative epic, but it's a very different one. There she is married to the rather unpleasant king of the gods, Brez, and has a son called Ruadam, who gets killed and for whom she utters the first mourning cry, hers in Ireland. The third text is a gloss on a dialogue called The Conversation of the Two Sages, Imagalov Anda Furach, Fuarf, where she and Brezh are called the parents of the three gods of skill. From other sources we know that these gods were Govnu, the ironworker, Krevna, the bronze worker, and Luchta, the woodworker. So here there's a connection with crafts again, but not with medicine or poetry, as in Cormac's glossary. Furthermore, if Bridget was a goddess of poetry, she wasn't the only one around. An early 8th-century narrative of invasions, which is quite early, found in a later text called Lower Bretnach, has a goddess called Aidan as patroness of poets. To complicate matters further, we're doing this again. Early Irish legal texts refer to a personality called Bridget, who was a great legal expert. It's not clear whether she's the goddess in the glossary or a different personality or a human being with the same name. So frankly, it's a bit of a mess. A small heap of discordant and unrelated references, which do not add up to a single personality within an accepted pantheon of deities. It's the modern age that has constructed that for her. I'll end with one of the most famous references to the medieval cult of St. Bridget, which has been especially influential in the modern construction of her, or understanding of her. It comes from the description of Ireland written at the end of the 12th century by the Welsh Norman churchman and scholar Geraldus Cambrensis, Gerald of Wales. At Kildare in Leinster, which the glorious Bridget has made famous, there are many miracles deserving of being remembered. The first of these that occurs to me is the fire of Bridget, which they say cannot be extinguished. This is true in the sense that the nuns there have so carefully kept it, that through all the years, from the time of the Virgin Saint until now, it has never gone out. Although such an amount of wood over such a long time has been burned there, the ashes have never increased. Although in the time of Bridget there were twenty servants of God here. Bridget herself being the twentieth, only nineteen have ever been here after her death until now, and the number has never increased. They all, however, take their turns, one each night, in guarding the fire. When the twentieth night comes, the nineteenth nun puts the logs beside the fire and says, Bridget, guard your fire, this is your night. In this way the fire is left there, and in the morning the wood, as usual, has been burnt, and the fire is still alight. This fire is surrounded by a circular hedge made of woven branches, which no man may cross. If by chance one does enter, and rash men have tried it at times, he suffers divine vengeance. Only women are allowed to tend the fire, and blow on it not with their mouths but with bellows. Moreover, because of a curse of the saint, goats never have their young there. The fire was certainly there when Gerald visited Kildare in 1184, though of course as a man he wouldn't have seen it. It was briefly extinguished by a hostile bishop in 1220, but was soon replaced and lasted until the nunnery was dissolved at the Reformation three centuries ago. Later. The fire was relit in 1993 by the Brigadine Sisters at Kildare, and a monument to it was unveiled in the Market Square in 2006 by the President of Ireland, so it burns again. From the 19th century, it was often assumed that the nunnery at Kildare must have been built on the site of a pagan fire temple, from which it inherited the sacred flame. Bridget therefore became regarded in modern times as a fire goddess. There are two problems with this. The first is that no medieval text represents her as a fire goddess, while the imagery of light and flames is very often associated with early medieval Christian saints. The other problem is that none of the earlier lives of Bridget mentions the fire at Kildare. Cogitosis, in particular, before 700, gives a detailed description of the church there as it existed in the 7th century and its environs. An eternal, the sacred flame in its enclosure is not included. Moreover, the abbey at Kildare was destroyed 18 times in the 500 years between Cogitosis and Gerald. Early medieval island was that kind of place. And it was rebuilt painfully each time. An eternal flame would truly have needed a miracle to make it through so many interruptions. This has led most recent scholars to conclude that the fire was a Christian addition made at some point between the 8th and 12th centuries. It may indeed have been instituted after the final rebuilding as a morale booster to give some sense of continuity from Bridget's time. So with what are we left? The answer is a large amount of incoherent and rather contradictory medieval material, most of it to do with the saint and a little to do with the goddess. None of it adds up to a sufficiently cohesive story to enable us to tell whether the saint was a historical person or what the relationship was between her and the goddess, or how important the goddess was, and how far the little information we have upon her is accurate. There is no sign of any chance that this situation will alter, because we are unlikely to find any new sources. It would be wisest, therefore, for those wishing to work with Bridget as artists, creative writers, pagans, or different varieties of Christian, to treat this situation as an opportunity rather than a restriction. In other words, we should all feel free to draw on the images of Bridget found in the medieval and modern texts, and associations with her like the sacred fire, according to our own instincts and needs. There is no single cohesive medieval concept of her by which to be guided or controlled. Instead, there are various different images and ideas from which a range of modern bridges, pagan and Christian, can be developed by individual people and groups. This may dismay people who feel that both religious and artistic experience should operate within defined traditions. I respect that. It should, however, also delight people who prefer a greater degree of personal freedom. Nor need such personal choice necessarily rule out the divine. It may well be that divine beings contact individual people and encourage them to regard them in particular ways, likewise different communities. So in the lost analysis, how you feel about this is really up to you.