Brigid and Poetry

Brigantia in Romanized form, Dumfries, Scotland, 2nd c. CE

From 2023 on, Imbolc (Feb 1.) will be a public holiday in Ireland.  This is an interesting development, which completes the official recognition of the traditional four Celtic holidays (the other being Bealtaine, Lúnasa, and Samhain).  Of course many have already been observing Imbolc in their own ways, all along.  In its Christian guise, it is St. Bríd’s (Brigid’s) Day, but it is surmised — from some specific references and the importance of the day itself in the Christian calendar — that, given that religion’s propensity to “take over” the preexisting pagan holidays, Imbolc would have to have been a pagan festival of fairly major importance long before the appearance of any saint.

For those “in the know,” the goddess Brigid is important for poets, as the Sanas Cormaic (circa 10th c. CE) describes her in this way:

Brigit i.e. a poetess, daughter of the Dagda. This is Brigit the female sage, or woman of wisdom, i.e. Brigit the goddess whom poets adored, because very great and very famous was her protecting care. It is therefore they call her goddess of poets by this name. Whose sisters were Brigit the female physician, Brigit the female smith; from whose names with all Irishmen a goddess was called Brigit. Brigit, then, breo-aigit, breo-shaigit, ‘a fiery arrow’. [The latter etymology is likely speculative on the ancient glossator’s part.]

The exact meaning and origin of Imbolc, though, seem to be in some dispute.  The word itself has been interpreted variously as (cribbed from Wikipedia):

i mbolc (Modern Irish: i mbolg), meaning ‘in the belly’, and refers to the pregnancy of ewes at this time of year. . . . the Old Irish verb folcaim, ‘to wash/cleanse oneself’, [referring] to a ritual cleansing, similar to the ancient Roman festival Februa or Lupercalia, which took place at the same time of year. . . . [Or] a Proto-Indo-European root meaning both ‘milk’ and ‘cleansing’. . . . [Or] from the Proto-Celtic *embibolgon, ‘budding’.

That it was a day of import in Ireland is not in dispute as this is mentioned in a number of ancient sources, such as the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Hibernica Minora, and the aforementioned Sanas Cormaic.  Yet, I have more recently seen the connection between Imbolc and a goddess Brigid called into question.  It has often been assumed that the saint was essentially just a Christianized version of the goddess, who was therefore easily able to subsume the earlier pagan rituals and goddess cult.  What is unclear is the extent to which the goddess named Brigid/Bríd was worshipped in Ireland.  The suggestion is that maybe there was no such goddess in any real way in Ireland, or that she was a minor figure at best, that the association may be merely a retroactive conceit, despite the fact that the goddess is indeed mentioned in certain Irish texts (Sanas Cormaic [see above], and the Lebor Gabála Érenn), and there is evidence for her existence in Gaul and Britain as well.  Still, some would wish to dismiss the whole conversation as a fantasy, to say that “because of this technicality in the history of naming and documenting, your whole way of looking at things is wrong, and you are fooling yourself” (as if there is some other deistic religion whose stories are inherently more authentic).

Whether or not a goddess named Brigid was the direct forebear to the hagiographical Christian saint, we don’t know for sure, but in a way it really doesn’t matter.  We do know that goddess worship was strong in Ireland (as it was in many places before the arrival of Christianity) up through the Iron Age, and for millennia even before the arrival of the culture we now commonly call Celtic.  It seems that the derivation of the name is ultimately an Indo-European root meaning “high” (with the connotation of “exalted”) and so could ultimately be an epithet applied to any significant goddess figure throughout different periods and places.  We don’t have to have an elaborate or even specifically documented explanation of a specific goddess Brigid whose identity was then coopted by the early Christian church as stated in their recorded annals, to surmise based on the texts we do have and the importance of Imbolc through time, that Imbolc has since early antiquity been a holy day connected with goddess worship in Ireland.

Whether the primary goddess was even called Brigid or not is of little import.  It is what many people have chosen to name her, for a long time now.  Though I’m not entirely convinced that the syncretic process of goddess→saint didn’t occur, either, it is enough that a critical mass of well-intended people have created such a tradition and termed a conception of a goddess figure “Brigid.”  For, ultimately, is not all religious thinking grounded in human ritual, cultural, and possibly mystic practice?  (The answer is: yes.)  (I don’t think anything I’m saying here is especially original, by the way.)

I suppose this raises the question of why the image of a deity, of whatever gender or form, is relevant at all.  I would not say that I personally especially believe in a divine incarnation of a goddess “officially” named Brigid/Bríd (or anything else), because whatever cosmic force may be immanent to the world or universe is certainly beyond our conception of names and forms (though, being immanent in the material world, is also not merely metaphysical or abstract).  As the opening lines of the Dao De Jing go, “The Dao that can be spoken of is not the true Dao; / The name that can be named is not its true name.”  I suppose then that personifying the ineffable, the reversion into deistic thinking and even language, only moves us further away from it, whatever “it” is.  (Now, if someone were to tell me that some kind of perception of or communion with a personified divine figure is indeed their experience, if Brigid comes to you in that form, then I can only say “fair play.”)

Language and images, however, are an inextricable part of how we negotiate the world and the society around us.  Thus, I approach the idea of Imbolc (and all such holidays) from poetic and (in some small way) ritualistic perspectives.  For me, it is not about paying homage to an actual divine figure, so much as it is about being oneself as an expression of the above-referenced immanent “cosmic force,” whatever that means exactly (“I do not know its name; / If I were to refer to it, I would call it ‘Dao’”, DDJ 25).  Maybe it is also about inhabiting a system of recognizable (and now to some degree in Ireland, anyway, recognized) public or “holy” days that represents a framework of thought that is counter to the dominant narratives.  Culturally specific expressions of holidays or of specific figures may orient us to the world around us, whether it be in regard to fellow human beings and/or to the environment.  This latter is especially relevant given the obvious connections to animals and the natural world embedded in what little we do know about Brigid.  The very early hints of the changes of spring are upon us, despite the cold — there is already regeneration within the seeming lifelessness of a northern-hemisphere February.  Etc.

And, in one of her triple forms, Brigid is said in the ancient sources to be the/a source of poetry.

My Imbolc poem (2016) is accordingly about embodiment, language, fellow animal beings who are us, or we are animals, or brightness of fire within the water temporarily frozen in snow forms?