Brigid, Goddess Guide of the Three Fires

Ireland, Celtic land of dreams and music: In rural pubs like the one I visited on the Dingle Peninsula no food is served. All evening it is Guinness and guitars, pipes, drums, bones and singers. When a new musician arrives, they have a drink or two and then join in, and room is made for beginners. Music fills the Irish soul.

Language itself is turned into music, even the English language becomes song in an Irish voice. For it is also a land of storytellers where everyone has stories to delight a listener: the taxi driver from the airport, your hostess in a B & B in Kerry or Clare, a student guide around Trinity College who makes the most serious visitor smile with droll secrets about famous former scholars and masters, or a passionate guide on a walking tour of Dublin, whose grandfather had been imprisoned during the Troubles.

Ireland has claimed Celtishness, and rightly. Celtic spirituality survived the longest there. Roman armies never got around to invading Ireland and after the arrival of Christianity, rather than undermining indigenous culture, for centuries it blended in harmoniously.

Yet the emerald isle would suffer – from Viking raids to harsh repressions when the Catholic church triumphed, and the unremitting cruelty of English landowners. Still its magical spirit endured beneath the pain. Then came the late nineteenth century Celtic revival. The intricate symbols were adapted to new uses, from wallpaper to rings. Old folk were recorded, those who remembered the legends and told the stories in Gaelic. William Butler Yeats, a driving literary force wrote: ‘The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.’ And of Ireland’s precious heart and dreams poems were written, plays performed and songs sung.

After all the dark history, you still experience the warmth and generosity alive in the people right across this land. I fell in love with its ancient sites, the quiet winding roads, the cliffs and lakes and windy peat moors – all this is part of the haunting landscape that seeps in as a kind of knowing.

Who were the Celts?

The tribes known as Celts or Keltoi came from central Europe. From about 1000 BCE they spread westward and reached as far as the British Isles, planting their individualistic societal structures into indigenous culture. Warrior leaders were elected as kings although real authority lay in the hands of Druids, who had secret knowledge of the spiritual realms and acted as conduits to those other worlds. Their sacred meeting places were oak forests. Female druids, the Bandrui, had their own mystery schools. Then there were the poets, called fili and banfili (from ‘to see’), They set timeless knowledge to words and music. And in a largely verbal culture Bards who memorised the songs and stories brought them to the people. 

Celts were respectful of the existing spiritual traditions, an integral part of life since prehistoric times. They too worshipped gods and goddesses of rivers, lakes and hills, the divine in nature based on seasonal rhythms and the movement of the heavenly bodies, in particular moon and sun, behind which worked the power of divine beings. Through their high god they were attuned to the sun worship of their megalithic ancestors with their under-hill chambers and massive stone rows and circles, aligned to significant points in the sun’s passage through the year.

The great goddess of the flame red hair

The feminine spirit was integral to Celtic life. This has not always been acknowledged by those who wrote the histories, focused on tribal chiefs and kings.  Their most important goddess Brigid was known under variants of the name throughout the Celtic lands. She was especially loved in the westernmost island then called Hibernia. She arrived there with her father the high god Dagda and the other Tuatha dé Danann (‘children of Danu’, the river goddess). They are deities who dwelt in the otherworld and passed between worlds via the passage monuments such as at Brú na Bóinne (Newgrange).

Brigid whose name derives from proto-Celtic briganti ‘exalted one’ (as do our ‘bright’ and ‘bride’) is goddess of the ‘in-between’ realm, of rosy hued dawn and the rising sun. Her hair is like the sun aura; her cloak is made of sunbeams. She is usually visualised as young although she is ageless. Her feast is Imbolc on February 1, when the sun promises to return, the ground begins to thaw, seeds are planted and in wombs new life quickens. 

Christian missionaries arriving to convert Ireland in the fifth century found it already established there. Legends are our main source for how Christianity emerged. There’s the story concerning the Chief Druid on the sacred island of Iona. He had a vision of the goddess Brigid with the child Jesus cradled in her lap. Brigid was the mother in a divine family, a trinity, along with the father Dagda and Lugh or Beli her son who was god of light, a characteristic enabling ready association with the Christ.

And when Jesus died at Golgotha in Palestine, it is said that the Druids beheld the events inwardly. The extraordinary transformation taking place through the incarnating Christ being came to those druidic seers as a symbolic picture which they had the knowledge to interpret. For they knew Christ, the Logos as their spirit of the sun, and they experienced it most strongly in the elements and seasonal rhythms in the care of Brigid.

Legends are external reflections of a deeper reality. Brigid, keeper of the sacred etheric flame, nurturer of the elemental realm where heaven and earth touch and mingle – it was this Irish goddess who opened her great heart to welcome the Christ spirit.

That’s why the Christ impulse as it came to expression in Ireland was imbued with the divine feminine. When Christian communities began to form, as with druidic training, the teachings emphasized both the divine expressed in nature and the personal path to union with the divine. Spirit and the flesh, the heavens and the earth were experienced as the harmonious interplay of one reality. Men and women were equals in spirit unlike when the Catholic church became dominant.

Brigid, goddess guide then and for us today

As a unique kind of triple goddess Brigid was known by the same name in her various functions. She was an all-encompassing goddess, relating both to the cosmos and personally to every human.

Radiant Brigid upheld the order of nature and worked equally in fire, water, air and earth. The fruits of the earth were offered at her feast. Wells and rivers were sacred to her, as was fire. You can still visit her sacred well and the Flame of Ireland at Kildare. Although now dedicated to the Christian Saint, also called Brigid, and served by nuns, there is a direct lineage back to the goddess and her priestesses. Much loved like her namesake, Saint Brigid kept many of the goddess’s functions – simply because they were integral to life in the world. She is patron saint of childbirth, midwives; infants, including those born out of wedlock; blacksmiths; metalworkers; cattle; dairymaids; poultry raisers; printing presses; fugitives; mariners; travellers, scholars; artists and poets.

I believe there is a powerful message for today in the way the bright goddess brought her fire energy and light to the Celts’ three main areas of human activity.

Fire of the Hearth – she cherished the home and oversaw birth and rearing the young, both humans and animals. She taught the healing wisdom of nature and the keening chants needed to guide a soul in death.

Fire of the Forge – she oversaw industry and making. She guided the metalworking crafts so important to the Celts – the forging of strong weapons and the fashioning of richly symbolic ornaments depicting spirals and magical creatures. And she was goddess of building, especially sacred structures.  

Fire of Poetry – she inspired poetry, song, epic stories, and the keeping of sacred history – the spiritual matters that draw humans into harmony with the heavens, the elements, and the whole of nature. Irish poets today still call on Brigid’s inspiration. 

Brigid maintained the integrity of these vital realms so that none dominated yet she enabled their interweaving. She remained mutable and fluid while always holding true to the necessity of their essence in the outer world. Thus, she ensured her people were not overwhelmed by external drifts and dislocations.

One secret of the longevity of the Celtic spirit is that Brigid still guides Three Fires. Through the bright goddess’s authority the essence of these Fires endures while names, expressions and manifestations in the world continue to change with the times.

I am sure this kind of threefold culture is still deeply significant. Imagine our modern societies with a balance between the activity in the realm of nurturing, the ‘domestic’, in the realm of doing and making, the ‘economic’, and expression of the sacred and spiritual, knowledge of which feeds into the other areas. This third fire ‘of poetry’ is so often ignored as trivial in the contemporary world. Or it is misunderstood, especially when the expression of life’s sacredness is so bound by rules and prejudices it cannot breathe.

In Ireland that fire still lives in the people’s heartfelt sense of being, and somehow the goddess speaks there. Seeking her, people still make pilgrimages to the old sites and walk the paths from shrine to sacred place. And there are groups and communities in these old Celtic lands across the British Isles and far across the world where individuals welcome a spirituality that truly embraces all life. And it’s true that when we listen behind the noise and busy clatter around us, we do hear the voice of the bright goddess who lovingly offers the poetry of the heart, which we so desperatley need.