The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog by Patricia Monaghan

Author:Patricia Monaghan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781577318026
Publisher: New World Library

Many cultures connect heat and fire with female power. The sun is a goddess on almost every continent. Fiery mountains, too, are usually female: the volcanoes of the Pacific Rim, from Fuji in Japan to Kilauea in Hawaii to Washington’s Mount Saint Helens, were envisioned as fierce strong women. Among the Celts, the archetype of the fiery woman was connected with a belief that virginity intensified feminine power. But what, exactly, virginity meant is a subject of some debate. No sexual relations? No sexual relations with men? No sexual relations with men except on ritual occasions? No sexual relations that led to childbearing? Each has been suggested as the Celtic definition of virginity. Since the valuing of the virgo intacta, the woman with no experience of sexual penetration, was not found among the Celts, it is possible that these priestesses were mothers past childbearing age, women who loved other women, or barren women, rather than virgins as we now define them.

The fire goddess worshiped by Kildare’s virgin priestesses was one of the few pan-Celtic divinities. Each Celtic tribe had its own deities, creating such an enormous pantheon that the generic Celtic oath was “I swear by the gods I swear by.” Not only were the Celts utterly decentralized politically, but they were also pantheists par excellence. They saw divinity everywhere, in this well and that stream and on top of that mountain and of course, over there in that great oak tree. Their innumerable specific holy places demanded equally innumerable specific holy names, so that there are scores of Celtic divinities known only in one location, like Aeracura in the Rhine Valley, or Metz of Trier, or Belisima on the shores of England’s Mersey River. But Brigit, sometimes called by her Latinized name Brigantia, is found throughout the Celtic world, from Central Europe through France and Spain and over to the islands of Britain and Ireland. She must have been a powerful goddess indeed to have inspired such widespread worship.

In Ireland, Brigit was depicted as a triple goddess or as three sister-goddesses who shared the same name. She ruled transformation: of rock into metal, as goddess of smithcraft; of illness into health, as midwife goddess of healing; of ideas into art, as goddess of poetry. The triple Brigit was daughter of the Dagda, the earth god, with whom she shares certain powers, especially that of promoting abundance. She was connected with a magical cow with an inexhaustible udder; with fire, both in the sun and in the hearth; and with water, especially that found in healing springs.

Although Kildare is believed to have been the center of worship of Brigit as goddess, we have no Celtic records of a pagan temple there. This is not unusual, for the Celts did not privilege written documents, relying instead upon the phenomenal memories of the filidh, their bards. Not that the Celts were illiterate, but their ogham alphabet — whose invention is attributed to Brigit — was used only for short inscriptions. The Celts

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