Is St. Brigid a pagan goddess?

[Tabby]

Recently I have been doing some reading on Celtic mythology and came across the strange claim that the Catholic saint, St. Brigid of Ireland, was originally a Celtic goddess named Brigid whom the Catholics started venerating as a saint. What am I to make of this?

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

While researching your question, I came across an explanation of the relationship between the Christian and pagan Brigids in Wikipedia that I thought particularly helpful.

That she shares both her name and her feast day with those of the earlier pagan goddess Brigid may indicate that Saint Brigid is partially or entirely a fictional creation based on the pagan figure in order to convert Celts to Christianity; the euhemerization of pagan figures and tradition was a common practice of Christian missionaries. However [St. Brigid] may merely have been named after [the Celtic goddess]. … Most historians say that she [St. Brigid] was a real person whose life was embellished by imaginative hagiographers, and this seems the most likely scenario (source).

If the theory is true that St. Brigid was “a real person whose life was embellished” by the Christian missionaries, this is common to how the stories of real-life iconic people are passed down. A more modern example of this phenomenon is Parson Weems’ tales of George Washington, which were intended to inculcate virtue in his readers by attributing those virtues to the beloved first president of the United States, whom early Americans admired and wanted to emulate.

Recommended reading:

Is Catholicism Pagan?