Re: St. Brigit and the goddess Brigit –
Actually, that’s a good example of misunderstanding the relationship between Irish saint and Irish memories of pagandom.
St. Brigit is an extremely famous saint, and she founded the extremely wealthy, powerful, and learned monastery of Kildare (Cill Dara), with its double houses of monks and nuns, its incredibly big cathedral (for early medieval times, and for Ireland), which was made of nothing but wood. Cill Dara’s library, lost to us now, was unsurpassed except perhaps by its facilities for the copying and distribution of books.
Cill Dara’s influence was great; its histories and legends spread the idea that it is equal to St. Patrick’s primacy, and perhaps even superior to the Irish primate’s see in Armagh. Its abbess had many of the powers of a bishop, and just as the great Irish monasteries were headed by abbots who had many bishops under them, the abbess had many bishops as her subordinates, too.)
Cill Dara was an empty, wild, worthless place until St. Brigit arrived and made it useful and beautiful. And this is typical of late Roman Empire and early medieval monks and nuns, because they were always setting up monasteries in empty wilderness places that weren’t very attractive to humans, or good for hunting or raising animals. Irish lords and clans could be generous, but nobody was going to give away a good piece of land to weird experimenting Christian women.
The goddess Brigit, on the other hand, is pretty much a non-entity. The monks and nuns of Cill Dara seem to have tried hard to find legends and stories that involved their saint’s namesake, because they were scholars and that was what they did. But there just wasn’t much material.
The biggest thing the goddess Brigit (who was one of the Tuatha De Danaan, a latecomer ethnic group of gods) did was to be married off to Bres the Beautiful (one of the Fomor, the previous ethnic group of gods) who was elected king of Ireland, ruling both the Fomor and the De Danaan, because he looked good, like a king should. It turned out that Bres was actually a giant jerk, whose horrible inhospitable behavior and lack of generous giftgiving made him cursed by poets and by the land itself. Ireland’s ground refused to produce any food while he was king.
Meanwhile, Brigit tried ineffectively to get Bres to change or for people not to inflict curses on him.
Bres and Brigit had a son named Ruadan, who ended up being killed (in one of the big battles between the Fomor and the Tuatha De Danaan) by his own uncle on Brigid’s side, the smith god Goibhniu. (This story seems to borrow a lot from the Welsh story of Dylan ap Ton, who was killed by his uncle, the smith god Govannon.) I seem to recall that there’s also a lament poem included in some versions, which has Brigit mourning Ruadan. (A lot of Irish epic stories include famous poems from the POV of the characters, sort of like musicals include songs giving characters’ feelings.)
There’s also a very brief, very dubious monkish comment claiming that the name Brigit comes from breo (fire) + saighitta (a term borrowed from Greek, and meaning arrow), and that she was a goddess of smithcraft, war, and poetry. But she doesn’t do any warring in the Fomor vs. De Danaan stories that we have, she doesn’t do any smithing (although her brother Goibhniu does), and her only involvement with poetry is that lament for her son.
There are also a few people who claim that the cursed sons of Tuirenn were his sons by Brigit, although mostly they say it was Dana. Anyway, all three sons of Tuirenn were nasty customers who deserved their horrible epic fate. So it doesn’t say much for Brigit if she was their mom.
Meanwhile… there are all sorts of legends about St. Brigit. It used to be thought that the more legendary or mythic-seeming stories about her were all Celtic goddess motifs, but actually they tend to use a lot of the same motifs as Greek, Roman, or Coptic saint stories, most of them about male hermits, male monks, male bishops, or male abbots. The basic point (if you would have asked the monks and nuns at Cill Dara) was that St. Brigit in Ireland was just as holy as any desert monk in Egypt.
Yeah, I was shocked to find out that the “hanging a cloak on a sunbeam” thing was early Christian and Greek. But there you go. We make assumptions and they come back on us.
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