Brigit the Blessed

Brigit the Goddess, the Poetess, whom the bards revered, because her protecting care over them was very great and of wide fame.

                                                      -- Cormac's Glossary.

Brigit is the spring goddess of Scotland, Ireland and the Isles. In ancient times as Brigindo, the High One, she ruled the Gaulish, Iberian and Brythonic territories that made up the powerful Celtic empire of Brigantia. The Triple Brigit is the patron goddess of bards, craftsmen and healers, but like the northern Frigga, she also presides over marriage, assists with childbirth, and is the goddess of the hearth.

   As a goddess of fertility she promotes fruitful breeding among animals. Her feast day of Imbolg is the milk time of the ewes. Where she is the cows are rich in milk. Where she walks the flowers bloom and the shamrocks spring up. One of her cult plants, the torranan or figwort, was taken at the flow of the tide to enrich and sweeten milk-yield when placed beneath the milking pail. As the goddess of spring she brings everything to rich life after the Little Sun, the death season of the winter goddess, the Cailleach.

   Whipping all growing things with her harsh life-blasting wand, the wild hag of winter strives to keep Brigit captive on Ben Nevis until Angus the Love God rides through the storm on his white horse to rescue the spring maiden from the clutches of the frost. This is Imbolg, the feast day of Brigit, the awakening of the adder, and the coming together of the goddess and the god.

   Brigit was honoured as the daughter of the Dagda, the All Father Horse God, but as the great goddess Danu she was his mother in the matriarchal period. As Brigit of Kildare she rose to life with the sun (on which she drapes her cloak, wet with dew), born neither out of doors nor beneath a roof, and her milk nourishment came from the sidh cow, the white cow with red ears, the cow of the Otherworld.

   The original Brigit, Brigindo, was revered in Celtic Galatia during the time of Alexander the Great, and had a shrine in Illuria. Her sons were Brennos, Iugarios, and Iugorbos -- later Brian, Iuchar and Iucharba. The Celtic capture and sack of Rome in 387 B.C.E. and the 3rd century Celtic invasion of Greece was carried out in the name of the god Brennos, by warlords bearing his name.

   Although Brigit is mainly the gentle pastoral goddess, she is also a warrioress and strong in battle. From this martial facet of her nature we have such words as the Old Gaelic brigmar, mighty, powerful.

   However it is as the muse, the healer, and the spring goddess of fertility and prosperity that she is most widely famed. Brigit the goddess of Filidecht or the poetic craft, was revered by the filidh or bards, as told by Cormac the Glossator. And as token of his worship the sage bore a golden branch with bells jingling, while the goddess was called upon for inspiration at her sacred wells. The Brigit of leechcraft presided over childbirth, and it was as the ban-chuideachaidh, the aid-woman, that she was invoked in the Hebrides:

   Bride, Bride, enter ye.

   True is thy welcome,

   to the woman give thy help.

   Brigit bestows prosperity on a household by leaving her footprint in the ashes of the hearth. Her sacred flame of the reborn sun was kept burning by nineteen priestesses at Kildara.

   Brigit appears as a beautiful maiden with golden hair, wearing a blue mantle, carrying a pastoral staff and accompanied by the milch cow of her cult. Plants associated with the goddess are the primrose, the daisy, the broom and the bramble, the torranan or figwort and the Bearnan Bride or dandelion. Birds associated with the goddess are the Gille Bride or oystercatcher, and the Bigean Bride or linnet. An epithet and totem of the Scottish Brigit is the white swan, as mentioned in the Gaelic poem of Carmichael's Carmina Gadelica:

   The White Swan am I,

   Queen over all. 

Thormod Morrisson.