Brigid

Wednesday 4th February is the midpoint between the Winter and Spring solstices. This is a quarter day; there are four of these a year, one between each of the solstices. In the ancient Celtic calendar this particular quarter day was called Imbolc; it marked the end of Winter and beginning of Spring. Imbolc was essentially a festival of fertility that celebrated the coming of Spring and was first practiced by small farming communities that settled these islands some 6000 years ago. This celebration fits well with the rhythm of the land as early February often brings snowdrops and the birth of the first lambs.

In early Mediaeval times the long-standing pagan fertility festival of Imbolc began to be appropriated by the Christian church who initiated St Brigid's day on Ist February. Brigid was an ancient Irish goddess who was of the bringer of Spring, as well as the patroness of smithing, poetry, crafts and medicine. St Brigid was an Irish nun who lived in the 6th century, she founded a monastery and was said to have performed miracles of healing.

After the church fused St Brigid with the mythological Brigid, the saint was able to take on the functions and powers of the pagan goddess but with some interesting twists. St Brigid became typically portrayed with a cross woven from reeds (a fertility symbol) and a lamp with a sacred flame. Importantly, one of the greatest saintly acts of the nun Brigid is said to have been that she blinded herself to preserve her chastity from the amorous advances of a nobleman.

I attended a service at St Columba’s in Derry yesterday, which illustrated the complex interrelationship of the saintly and pagan myths. The homily described St Bridgid as the harbinger of Spring and new natural growth. Later, babies that had been born in the past two months were brought to the altar, blessed and given small crosses woven from reeds. Clearly the power of this saint was being invoked in relation to fertility (in plants, animals and humans) but this saint was also a nun who blinded herself to preserve her chastity (a symbolic inversion of the pagan meaning).

So the contemporary church manages to both reiterate the pagan meaning and take on its power (the giving of blessings for fertility) as well as to reverse it, embodying this paganism in a saint who emphasises the values and rules of the church itself (sacrifice, chastity).