Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference)

by James MacKillop

  Her mother was a slave-girl; but the child was acknowledged by her father and given to a foster mother to rear. Having been instructed in letters and the accomplishments of embroidery and household duties, she was sought in marriage by an eager suitor whom she rejected on the ground that she had vowed ‘her virginity to the Lord.’ After paternal objections were overcome she took the veil, the symbol of the religious state; she founded in the Liffey plain a church called Cill Dara (Kildare – ‘the church of the oak’) and associated herself with the pious hermit, Conleth, who lived alone in nearby solitude.

  (New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2003: 617)

  Conventionally known as the ‘Mary of the Gael’, St Brigid has long been venerated as one of the three patron saints of Ireland, along with Patrick and Colum Cille (or Columba). Her feast day, 1 February, is celebrated today in Ireland, in Gaelic Scotland and the Isle of Man, as well as in several British Commonwealth countries. St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, London, is dedicated to her. The New Catholic Encyclopedia takes no note of the Celtic goddess of virtually the same name, Brigit, the patroness of fire, poetic arts, crafts, healing, smithing, prophecy, divination, cattle and crops. As multiple spellings are available for both figures (Bríd, Bride, Brighid, etc.), it may save confusion here to follow the Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology to cite the Celtic goddess as Brigit and the Christian saint as Brigid.

  The often enigmatic tenth-century Glossary of Cormac mac Cuilennáin implies that Brigit is the name of three different goddesses, without giving details of the other two. The prime Brigit is the tutelary goddess of Leinster, eastern Ireland. Often compared with the Roman goddess of wisdom, Minerva, Brigit is probably identical with the British goddess Brigantia, worshipped in what is now Yorkshire, and the Gaulish Brigando. Several rivers in Britain and Ireland are named for her. According to separate Irish traditions, Brigit is the daughter of Dagda, a leader of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and wife of Senchán Torpéist, a purported author of the epic Táin Bó Cuailnge. Other romantic and sexual adventures are attributed to her, including mating with handsome but villainous Bres, a leading figure of the struggle of the gods, Cath Maige Tuired [The (Second) Battle of Mag Tuired]. She was probably worshipped at Corleck Hill, near Drumeague, Co. Cavan, where a stone head thought to be hers once stood. Her feast day, Imbolc (also Óimelc, etc.), 1 February, the day ewes were thought to produce the spring’s first milk, was a major Celtic calendar feast (see Chapter 5).

  Commentators on early Ireland, such as the influential Proinsias MacCana, assume that the Christian saint is merely a personification of the Celtic goddess, but the Vatican saw no reason to desanctify her along with the others in 1961. The earliest Christian sources on the life of St Brigid date from no earlier than the seventh century, or more than a hundred years after her death. One Broccan is credited with a Latin hymn celebrating her life, and Cogitosus, a member of the Brigidine community at Kildare, wrote a prose Life of Brigid, transmitting what had been handed down about her. According to Cogitosus, she founded a sexually segregated religious community, the male half presided over by a bishop, the female by an abbess, who shared a partitioned timber chapel. Cogitosus does not comment on the origin of the name cill dara, ‘church of the oak’, although the oak tree took a prominent place in druidical worship. Neither does he acknowledge that Cill Dara was five miles from Knockaulin, the extensive Iron Age earthworks that had been a pagan sanctuary.

  Cogitosus describes Brigid as a radiant beauty, who was never in want of suitors. Withdrawing from the world, she consecrated herself to Christ along with seven other virgins, eventually returning to her father’s lands in Kildare, where her monastic community flourished. In the Life of Brigid are cited her many miracles of plenty, such as dispensing butter that is immediately replenished. She could perform triple milkings and could change water into ale and stone into salt.

  Early tradition outside Cogitosus links Brigid with Faughart, two miles north of Dundalk, Co. Louth, her reputed birthplace. Site of a stream and a holy well, Faughart had been a place of pilgrimage in pre-Christian times. Nearby are megalithic tombs, underground passages, forts and antiquarian artefacts.

  A modern explanation of the relationship of Brigit and Brigid, entirely speculative, is that the historical saint was an early convert to Christianity who consciously modelled her life on aspects of the fire goddess. Her purpose would have been to lead people to the Gospels by seeing that traditions of worship in the old faith could be transferred to the new.

  The Welsh traveller Giraldus Cambrensis reported in 1184 that a company of nuns tended an ‘inextinguishable fire’ at Kildare in St Brigid’s honour. Although it had been kept burning for 500 years, it had produced no ash; men were not allowed to go near the fire. In 1993 the Brigidine Sisters rekindled Saint Brigid’s fire in Kildare Town.

  Because of her primacy in Irish tradition, Brigid attracted volumes of lore. One of the most enduring of these legends is that she converted a pagan on his deathbed while holding a cross plaited from rushes on the floor. At one time a folk drama commemorated this moment. In it a young girl, honorifically if not actually named Brigid, knocked on the door three times, seeking admittance, asking that all within go down on their knees and do homage. On the third knock, those within would welcome her. In some areas remnants of the rushes were gathered up and woven into spancels for cattle and sheep, girdles and crosses; others could be made into mattresses. These protected the believers from natural calamities, such as fire, storm and lightning. Closer to the body, Brigid’s artefacts had curative powers, especially for the illnesses of childbirth and in countering barrenness. A survival of this ceremony is the Brigid’s Cross, a distinctive design in which four stalks of rushes extend from a square. It is still one of the most common folk items on sale for tourists in Ireland.

  Popular tradition has unwittingly attributed to St Brigid many of the powers once held by Brigit the goddess – the spring rite, the rebirth of nature, as well as fertility and guardianship of the land.

  5

  Calendar Feasts

  SUN, MOON AND TIME

  Hallowe’en does not stand tall among our holidays. Banks remain open, and the post is still delivered. Small children gorge themselves on sweets while their older siblings practise mischief. October 31 signals no marker in the solar or lunar cycles. The day has no political significance, and its only place in Christian reckoning is that it anticipates the holy day of All Saints, 1 November. In America in recent years Christian fundamentalists have objected to Hallowe’en celebrations in public schools because of its purported pagan origin. Meanwhile, self-styled neo-pagans have come to look upon the day, and especially its evening, as the major feast of the year. Discussions of Hallowe’en on television and in the popular press are the most likely places in everyday discourse where one will encounter the word ‘Celtic’.

  What we call Hallowe’en (short for All Hallow E’en or Evening) is indeed a much-changed survival from the ancient Celtic calendar. Together with its spring counterpart six months later, May Eve, the two celebrations are the most vivid remnants in industrial, secular English-speaking society of what was once the Celtic worldview. Two other days were once prominent, 1 February, still known as Saint Brigid’s Day in Ireland and parts of the British Isles and Commonwealth, and the August holiday, or Lammas Day, which survives as the very secular August Bank Holiday in Britain and Ireland.

  The perception of predictable movements of the sun and moon precedes the beginning of written records by many centuries. The builders of Newgrange (3200 BC), to take a prominent example, knew that a shaft of sunlight would extend the length of a 68-foot passage on the winter solstice. Details in the construction of the pyramids a few centuries later reveal a comparable knowledge of earth–sun relationships in the eastern Mediterranean. The sun alone, however, would not be the sole determinant in the measurement of time.

  The calculations of time that came with written records in widely separated parts of the world are based on
three predictable phenomena in nature: the moon, the sun and the change of seasons. Basing time on the phases of the moon, the lunar calendar, gives us the concept of months; we can hear an echo of the word ‘moon’ in the English word ‘month’. The lunar month is only 29.5 days, however, or 354 for the year, more than eleven short of the 365.2422 days on the solar calendar. A fixed day on the lunar calendar, such as the sixth day of the third moon, would fall eleven days earlier in the following year by solar calculations, unless allowances and adjustments were made. Our calendar, the Gregorian, first adopted in 1582, is lunisolar, a synchronization of lunar and solar. Our determination of the seasons has come to follow moon and sun movements, the two solstices and the two equinoxes, which we observe with expensive, very precise instruments. The ancients relied on evidence closer at hand, such as vegetation cycles, the breeding patterns of domesticated animals, and, especially among the Celts, the driving of cattle to different seasonal grazing grounds, called transhumance.

  The Celtic calendar feasts harmonize the seasons with cycles of the moon. The autumn feast that anticipates Hallowe’en was originally the first day of the eleventh month, but Christian influence, as we shall see, moved it back to the last day of the tenth month, what we now designate as 31 October. Similarly, the other holidays fell on the first days of the second, fifth and eighth months, which we now equate with February, May and August. The four holidays have no calculation in the sun’s cycle, that is, they are not a fixed number of days before or after a solstice. Surprisingly, considering the importance of the winter solstice at Newgrange and at Gavrinis, a similar passage-grave in Brittany, sun cycles do not appear to have inspired any holidays in the ancient Celtic calendar. Then again, both were constructed long before the arrival of the Celts even though they survived in Celtic lands. Celebrations by neo-druids and neo-Celts at places such as Britain’s Stonehenge (c. 1700 BC), also built before the arrival of the Celtic culture, are modern innovations, dating no earlier than the eighteenth century.

  Key to our understanding of the Celtic measurement of time are the first-century AD bronze tablets found at Colingy in eastern France and thus called the Coligny Calendar. Employing Latin characters to express the native language, it was the most extensive extant document in Gaulish we had until the discoveries of the 1990s. The tablets detail sixty-two consecutive months, approximately equal to five solar years. Months are thirty or twenty-nine days and divided into halves. The lunar year was adapted to the solar year by the intercalation of an extra month of thirty days every third year. Months were ascribed character, as they were not in later Celtic calendars. They might be indicated MAT (good or auspicious) or ANM (an abbreviation for anmat, not good), implying that any calendar came with its build-in proscriptions.

  Other information found at Coligny has much resonance for later centuries. The equivalent of New Year’s Day, which falls in the autumn, is Samonios; and it marks the beginning of the new year because the dark precedes the light in the calculation of time. Although our reliance on scientifically measured solar time has caused us to put the beginning of the day at midnight, literally the middle of the night, the notion of dark preceding light is not strange to us, as Jewish religious practice measures time the same way. The Sabbath, Rosh Hashanah, Passover, etc., begin at sundown. Put in this context, the notion that the darkest part of the year, winter, begins the annual cycle in the northern hemisphere seems most logical, even if it has few counterparts elsewhere in human experience.

  The Gaulish Samonios provides an unmistakable cognate for the classical Irish Samain, New Year’s Day in pre-Christian Irish heroic literature. Such clear links between the continental and insular Celts are not always available. This endorsement of Irish antiquity’s inheritance from earlier antecedents, added to the extensive texts and critical prestige of early Irish tradition, has meant that commentators prefer the classical Irish names for three of the calendar feasts. They are Samain (1 November), Imbolc (1 February) and Beltaine (1 May). The influence of Máire MacNeill (see below) favours Lughnasa for the fourth (1 August). The four days are also known by other names in other Celtic countries.

  The Celts, like most other ancients, did not number each year. One year was, in a sense, much like another. Changes in technology came so slowly, even in the passage from the Bronze to the Iron Age, that one year was like another. We call such a vision of time circular, just as the stone calendar of the Aztecs in early Mexico was a large circle. The linear vision of time that seems so inevitable to us, where years are numbered and we remark on how styles and the ways we live change quickly, is derived from the Hebrew tradition, specifically the Book of Isaiah (eighth to sixth centuries BC) in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. Anticipating a Messiah, the Hebrews began numbering years in the second millennium BC, and projected the beginning of the calendar back to their understanding of the beginning of time, 3761 BC. Thus the Jewish calendar is always 3,761 years older than the Gregorian. The last turn of the century in the Jewish calendar was 5700, or 1939 in the Gregorian. The beginning of this millennium in the Gregorian calendar, 2000, was 5761 in the Jewish, and so on.

  SAMAIN

  Calendar stories based on the vegetation cycle abound in comparative mythology, the best known probably being that of the lovers Aphrodite (or Venus) and Adonis in classical mythology. When the lovers are together, nature blooms. Adonis, a hunter, seeks out a wild boar against Aphrodite’s advice, and is severely wounded, descending to the underworld. Nature withers and dies. After six months Adonis makes his way to the land of the living, is reunited with Aphrodite, and nature flourishes anew. An antecedent of this story is found in the Babylonian myth of the lovers Ishtar and Tammuz, where, once again, the male figure ‘dies’ in the autumn and rises again in the spring. That fatal day when the hunters Tammuz and Adonis depart for the realm of the dead clearly corresponds to Samain of the Celts. As neither day was fixed in the solar calendar, however, they need not have been the identical day. Among the peoples of sunny Greece and Babylon, the day Adonis or Tammuz departs is the end of a cycle. The Celts, living in more northerly climes, saw it as a beginning.

  Learned commentators’ preference for the Irish form Samain (Modern Irish Samhain), pronounced ‘sow-ĭn’, should not obscure the importance of the day in the calendars of all Celtic peoples. The Q-Celts use variations of the Irish form; in Scottish Gaelic it is Samhuinn, in Manx Sauin. The root of the word, sam [summer] and fuin [end] signals seasonal change rather than worship or ritual. The P-Celts celebrate the day but do not inherit the same word root. In Wales the day is Hollantide or Calan Gaeaf [first day of winter]; in Cornwall Allantide; and in Brittany Kala Goañv [beginning of November].

  From the earliest records, Samain/Samonios is seen not simply as a day for the dead but when the dead might reach out to the living. Julius Caesar (first century BC) reports that the Gaulish Dis Pater was especially worshipped at this time. The Roman god Dis Pater [rich father] is an aspect of Pluto, ruler of the dead, but one ‘rich’ in the treasures of the underworld, especially the shades of all the living who have gone before. The native identity of his Gaulish counterpart is not known. More chillingly, other classical commentators depict deities venerated with human sacrifice. Sacrificial victims were drowned in vats to worship Teutates, the war god linked to Mars. Being burned alive in wooden vessels was the fate of victims sacrificed to propitiate Taranis, the ‘master of war’ sometimes linked to Jupiter. The spirits of the dead revisited their earthly homes on the evening of the holiday, and yet the time was thought favourable for examining the portents of the future and planning for future events.

  After the Romans conquered the Gauls and partially integrated the subject population into the empire, aspects of the calendar feasts began to attach themselves to the Roman festivals. Samain/Samonios coloured the celebration of the harvest festival at the calend of the eleventh month (approximately 1 November), dedicated to Pomona, goddess of the fruits of trees, especially apples. The Hallowe’en festivities using
apples, harvested just before this time, may date from this era.

  Celebration of Pomona’s day persisted well past the coming of Christianity. To lead the faithful away from such practices, Pope Boniface IV introduced All Saints’ Day in the early seventh century, simultaneously consecrating the Pantheon in Rome as the church of the Blessed Virgin and All Martyrs. To separate further the Christian holy day from the pagan feast, the Church moved the date to 13 May. It is still observed among Eastern Orthodox churches in the spring, on the first Sunday after Pentecost, but in the West All Saints’ Day moved back to 1 November, joined by All Souls’ Day, 2 November, still a Roman Catholic observance. The root of the English word Hallowe’en, All Hallow E’en, testifies to the official supremacy of the Christian holiday and the survival in demotic form of the pagan calendar feast on the previous evening. In Scotland the pre-Christian and Christian were sometimes separated, with Samhuinn observed on 11 November.

  Samain was the principal calendar feast of early Ireland. A festival, feis, was held at Tara every third year, to which each of the five provinces sent delegates. At Tlachtga, twelve miles west of Tara, the lighting of the winter fires was a key part of the Samain ceremonies commemorating Dagda’s ritual intercourse with three divinities, the Mórrígan, Boand (goddess of the Boyne) and the unnamed daughter of Indech, a Fomorian king and warrior. No record survives that these were fertility celebrations, but in later Irish and Scottish Gaelic oral tradition, Samain was thought a favourable time for a woman to become pregnant.