Tag: Irish mythology

Crom Cruach: Ireland’s Most Ancient God and What Sacrifice Actually Means

Crom Cruach is the oldest and darkest Irish god in the mythological tradition. He predates the Tuatha De Danann. He predates the written record entirely – what we know of him comes from texts written centuries after his worship had officially ended, by Christian writers with their own reasons for framing him the way they did. And the only reason he comes to me for Lúnasa is because of his potential links to Crom Dubh.

That framing is worth keeping in mind. But it doesn’t make him less interesting.

Crom Cruaich and St. Patrick. Illustrated by L.D. Symington.

What the sources say on Crom Cruach, Irish god

The primary account of Crom Cruach comes from a 12th century dinnsenchas poem in the Book of Leinster. It describes his cult image – a central figure of gold surrounded by twelve figures of stone or bronze – standing on Magh Slécht, the Plain of Prostrations, in what is now County Cavan. The people would prostrate themselves before him. And they would offer him their first-born children in exchange for good yields of milk and grain.

The story of how this ended is one of the most dramatic in the Patrick legend. Patrick approaches the idol with his crozier raised. The central figure falls face down, the twelve surrounding figures sink into the earth, and the demon inhabiting the image is cast to hell. The imprint of the crozier remains in the stone. ( Although, Crom Cruach isn’t necessarily the only Irish god to be dealt with in this way by Patrick)

That’s the Christian telling. It’s worth noting that this particular story doesn’t appear in Patrick’s own writings, nor in the two earliest seventh-century biographies of him. It arrives later, when the narrative of Patrick as destroyer of paganism had become well established. The single Duchas entry on Crom Cruach – recorded in Leitrim in the 1930s from an 83-year-old teacher – places him a quarter of a mile north of the city of Fenagh, where the head college of the bards once stood. Twenty-five thousand of the leading men of Ireland, the account says, and the entry trails off there, the story continuing on the next page.

One singular entry on Duchas – compared to the multiple entries for Crom Dubh. That absence is telling. Crom Cruach was, perhaps, too dark, too old, too far outside living memory to survive easily in the folklore record.

The logic of first-born sacrifice

The first-born sacrifice is a motif that appears across many ancient cultures – it even surfaces in the Bible – and it’s easy to dismiss it as evidence of barbarism. But that reading misses what the practice was actually communicating. Crom Cruach is known as an “evil” Irish god because of the practice, and yet…

Our ancestors understood, in a way that modern life often obscures, that food and prosperity come with a cost. The harvest is not free. Something has to be given. Something has to be relinquished. The first-born – the most precious, the most full of promise – was the ultimate statement of that understanding. We give you our best. We hold nothing back. In return, let the harvest come in.

This is not a comfortable idea. It was never meant to be. But it is an honest one.

What it means now

We don’t sacrifice first-born children in modern Ireland. But the underlying logic – that prosperity requires sacrifice, that something must be given up for something else to grow – hasn’t gone anywhere. It plays out constantly, just in different forms.

Women are told, repeatedly, that we can have it all. Career and family and presence and ambition, all at once, with no conflicts and no costs. This is, as most women discover at some point, not quite true. You can have a great deal. You cannot have everything simultaneously, at full intensity, with no trade-offs.

The woman who maintains a steep career trajectory and is also the parent who is always available, who misses no school play and no important meeting, who gives fully to her partner and her friends and her own health and her creative work – she does not exist. Not because women aren’t capable, but because there are only twenty-four hours and certain things genuinely cannot occupy the same space at once.

This is not a counsel of despair. It is what our ancestors understood when they stood before Crom Cruach. You choose what you sacrifice. More importantly, you choose what you’re sacrificing it for. You make the offering consciously, with full knowledge of what it costs, rather than pretending the cost doesn’t exist.

That’s different from having things taken from you without your consent. That’s different from a system that demands sacrifice from women specifically while exempting others. But within the constraints of actual life, the question Crom Cruach asks is still a live one.

What are you offering? And what are you expecting in return?

The course

The Crom Cruach course at Brigid’s Forge School (€37) goes into the sources in detail – the texts, the archaeology, the Patrick connection, and the question of what we can reasonably know about a figure this old and this contested.

Next week is the final post in this Lúnasa series – and it lands the week before the 1st of August itself.

What do you make of the sacrifice motif – ancient or modern? I’d genuinely like to know what lands for you in the comments.

Crom Dubh: The Elder God Behind Garland Sunday

Crom Dubh is one of those figures who appears at the edges of Irish tradition – not as central as the better-known Tuatha De Danann, not as dramatic as the Morrigan, but persistent. He keeps showing up in the folklore, particularly in connection with the last Sunday of July, in ways that suggest something older and more significant than his relatively sparse written record might imply.

I first came across him through Duchas.ie – the Irish Folklore Collection – and what I found there sent me down a very interesting path.

What Duchas tells us

One entry in particular stopped me. It describes Domhnach Crom Dubh – literally, Crom Dubh’s Sunday, anglicised as Garland Sunday by the English-speaking people of the area – and mentions a place called Altóir na Gréine, which translates roughly as the Altar of the Sun. This was a gathering place associated with Crom Dubh, where feasting, games, racing, hurling, dancing, and singing were held on this specific Sunday.

The entry offers an interpretation of the name worth quoting directly: that Chrom was a god, and that Dubh or Dua meant a sacrifice – making Crom Dubh, in this reading, something like “Crom’s Sacrifice.” (Dubh also means black, but this was the explanation given in the Dúchas entry) Whether that etymology holds up to scrutiny is a separate question, but the association between this figure, this day, and the idea of offering or sacrifice is consistent across multiple sources.

What happened to the Buaile na Gréine gathering? The priests and wise men of the surrounding parishes grew tired of it, according to the entry, and counselled the people to abandon the custom. They set up a patron at St Muchan’s in Ennistymon instead – a church gathering to replace the older hilltop one. The people, broadly, went.

This pattern – older gathering place replaced by a church-controlled alternative, the original customs gradually absorbed or redirected – is one of the most consistent threads in Irish folk practice. It’s worth recognising it for what it is, without bitterness and without romanticising what came before.

The Irish language connection

Something significant about the Crom Dubh entries on Duchas: the majority of them were recorded in Irish rather than English. This tells us something. These traditions were held more closely in Irish-speaking areas – in the west and south-west particularly, in communities where the older language and the older ways persisted longer together.

This matters for how we understand Crom Dubh. He is not a figure who survived primarily in the anglicised, more accessible parts of Irish tradition. He survived in the places where Irish was still the living language – which means the communities who remembered him were, in many cases, the communities most connected to the older ways of understanding the land and the year.

Who Crom Dubh might have been

The honest answer is that we don’t know with certainty. He appears in folk tradition as a figure associated with the harvest, with the hilltops, with the last Sunday of July. Some sources connect him to Crom Cruach – the darker, older figure I’ll be writing about next week – and suggest he may be a related or evolved form of the same deity. Others treat them as distinct.

What we can say is that he represents something genuine in Irish folk memory – a presence acknowledged at a specific time of year, in a specific way, by people who thought the acknowledgement mattered. The Crom Dubh course at Brigid’s Forge School (€37) goes into the sources in detail and sits with the uncertainty honestly rather than papering over it.

The tradition that survived

Here is what I find remarkable. In Ireland today, the August bank holiday weekend is still, for many families, a day trip to the seaside. The roads to coastal towns fill up. People walk seafronts and eat chips and let children run on beaches. The weather, as often as not, obliges.

Almost none of them are thinking about Crom Dubh. Almost none of them know that the impulse to go to the coast on this specific weekend has a name, or a history, or a figure associated with it that predates Christianity by an unknowable amount of time.

But the tradition survived anyway. The people kept going to the water. They kept gathering on the last Sunday of July. They kept doing, without knowing why, something their ancestors did with full awareness of why.

That persistence is its own kind of evidence.

Had you heard of Crom Dubh before this? Or Domhnach Crom Dubh? Drop a comment – I’m curious how widely known this is outside of Irish-speaking areas.

Tailtiu: The Goddess Who Gave Everything So Ireland Could Eat

Tailtiu, an Irish goddess, is not the most famous figure in Irish mythology. She doesn’t have Brigid’s longevity or the Morrigan’s dramatic presence in the popular imagination. But she is one of the most important figures associated with Lúnasa – and her story is one that I keep returning to, because what it says about work, sacrifice, and the value of what often goes unacknowledged is quietly remarkable.

The only image of Tailtiu I can find - an image of a woman in long dress, picking crops from the ground, in black and white
The only image of Tailtiu I can find!

Who Tailtiu was

Tailtiu was a member of the Fir Bolg – the people who inhabited Ireland before the Tuatha De Danann arrived. After the First Battle of Moytura, when the Tuatha De Danann took control of Ireland, Tailtiu maintained good relations with the new order. She became the foster mother of Lugh – one of the most significant of the Tuatha De Danann, the god of skill and craft and the figure most directly associated with Lúnasa.

This matters. In Irish tradition, the foster relationship was often as significant as the blood relationship – sometimes more so. Tailtiu chose to raise Lugh, or was selected to do so, to shape him, to give him what he needed to become who he was.

And then she cleared the plains.

The work that killed her

The story of Tailtiu’s great labour is stark and doesn’t soften itself. She cleared the forests of what is now County Meath – the great plain of Brega – to make way for agriculture. She cleared it so that Ireland could be farmed. So that the people could eat.

The work killed her.

She died of exhaustion from the effort, and before she died she asked Lugh to hold funeral games in her honour every year at the time of the harvest. He did. Those games – held at the Hill of Tailteann in Co. Meath – became the Lúnasa festival we know, the great assembly of the Irish people at harvest time. They were called the Lughnasadh, named for Lugh, though it was Tailtiu’s death (among others) they commemorated.

She did the work. He got the naming rights. This is perhaps not as surprising as it should be.

The quiet necessary work

What strikes me most about Tailtiu, our little known Irish goddess, is not the scale of what she did but the nature of it. Clearing land is not glamorous work. It’s not the work of warriors or poets or kings. It’s backbreaking, repetitive, essential labour that produces no immediately visible result – you clear a section, you clear another section, you keep going, and gradually the land becomes something it wasn’t before.

Nobody writes heroic poetry about land clearance. Nobody remembers the names of the people who did it. But without it, there is no harvest. Without it, there is no Lúnasa. The entire festival rests on work that is rarely celebrated in the way the festival itself is.

Tailtiu, to me, represents that quiet necessary labour – the kind that doesn’t get lauded, that doesn’t make the headlines, but that everything else depends on. The support work. The maintenance. The showing up day after day to do something that needs doing even when nobody is watching.

I think most of us know what that feels like. I think most of us have done more of it than we’ve been credited for.

The Fir Bolg connection

There’s something else worth noting. Tailtiu was Fir Bolg, not Tuatha De Danann – and she maintained good relations with the new order after a battle that could easily have produced only bitterness. She chose to engage. Chose or was chosento foster. She chose to give her labour to a land that was now governed by people who had defeated her own.

That’s a complicated position to be in, and the mythology doesn’t flatten it. She isn’t simply absorbed into the Tuatha De Danann narrative. She remains herself – Fir Bolg, foster mother, woman of the land – while choosing to be part of something larger than her original tribe.

There’s something worth sitting with there about adaptation, about finding a way to continue when the world has changed around you, about the difference between capitulation and conscious choice. (Yes, Tailtiu might also be another Irish goddess I can relate to as an engineer, even if this one has no major engineering connections)

Going deeper

The Tailtiu course at Brigid’s Forge School (€37) goes into the lore in detail – the sources, the context, what the texts actually say and what we can reasonably infer. If she’s a figure you want to know better, it’s a good place to start.

Does Tailtiu’s story resonate with you? The quiet necessary work, the foster relationship, the choice to engage across a divide – I’d love to know what lands for you in the comments.

Lúnasa: The Irish Harvest Festival and Why It Still Matters

Lúnasa – the Irish harvest festival – falls on the 1st of August, or the Sunday nearest to it. In modern Ireland, most people know it primarily as a bank holiday. An extra day off, a long weekend, maybe a trip somewhere if the weather obliges.

That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a bank holiday. But there’s considerably more to this time of year than a Monday off work, and I think it’s worth knowing what our ancestors were doing here – and why some of it still makes sense.

An image of sheaves of corn just harvested and propped up to dry. A traditional image from Lúnasa season in Ireland
This would have been a common sight in Ireland around Lúnasa in generations past. We still see it, jut less often!

What Lúnasa actually is

Lúnasa is one of the four great Irish seasonal festivals, sitting opposite Imbolc on the wheel of the year. Where Imbolc marks the very beginning of spring – tentative, hopeful, the first green shoots – Lúnasa marks the beginning of harvest. The work of the year is starting to show its results. What you planted, literally or metaphorically, is coming in.

In agricultural Ireland, which wasn’t very long ago at all, August was a serious month. The harvest had to come in. The work was physical and communal and urgent. And before it began in earnest, there was a moment of pause – of gathering, of ceremony, of acknowledging what the year had produced and what it had cost.

That moment was Lúnasa.

The GAA, the harvest, and Hungry July

For much of the twentieth century, the August bank holiday in Ireland was associated with the GAA All-Ireland semi-finals. That calendar has shifted – the All-Irelands are played in July now – but the cultural association between August and communal gathering hasn’t entirely disappeared. It’s just harder to see.

What is still very present, for the significant percentage of Irish people connected to farming, is the reality of harvest month. August is busy. It’s also, historically, the end of what was known as Hungry July – the period between the old stores running out and the new harvest coming in, when food could be genuinely scarce. The first fruits of August were not taken for granted. They were celebrated.

Most of us don’t experience Hungry July any more. But the housing crisis, the rising cost of living, the general sense of precariousness that many people carry right now – these are a different version of the same question our ancestors were asking at Lúnasa. Have we enough? What have we harvested this year? Is it sufficient to see us through what’s coming?

These are worth sitting with, even if your harvest is metaphorical.

Garland Sunday and Reek Sunday

The folklore records at Duchas.ie are full of Lúnasa traditions, and two in particular stand out.

Garland Sunday – the strewing of flowers, documented across many counties – connects to the idea of honouring the abundance of the earth at its peak. Reek Sunday – the climbing of mountains, most famously Croagh Patrick in Mayo but also mountains in Kerry and elsewhere – connects to something older and harder to name precisely. A landscape devotion. A marking of the high places at the height of the year.

Both traditions appear to carry traces of something pre-Christian underneath them. Both are still observed in various forms today. And both point to the same underlying impulse – to acknowledge, at this specific moment in the year, that something significant is happening.

The Lúnasa post I wrote a couple of years ago goes into more detail on the festival itself. And if you’re wondering how to navigate a time of year that belongs to figures other than your primary deity, this post on working with multiple deities might be useful.

What Lúnasa is for

At its heart, Lúnasa is a festival of stocktaking. It asks you to look honestly at what the year has produced so far – what has grown, what has been harvested, what has failed to come in and why – and to do that assessment before the darker half of the year begins.

That’s genuinely useful. Not as a spiritual performance, but as a practical act. What have you actually achieved this year? Are you still carrying something that needs to be set down? What do you have enough of, and what are you running low on?

August is a good month for these questions. The light is still long. There’s still time to adjust before the turn.

What’s coming

Over the next three weeks I’ll be writing about the three figures most closely associated with Lúnasa in the Irish tradition – Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, and Crom Cruach. Each of them has a course at Brigid’s Forge School for those who want to go into the lore properly. And each of them has something interesting to say about what this time of year meant to the people who understood it from the inside.

How do you mark the August bank holiday – or Lúnasa, if you observe it more deliberately? I’d love to hear what this time of year looks like in your practice.

Six Months from Imbolc: What the Opposite Side of the Wheel Teaches Us

Imbolc and Lúnasa sit directly opposite each other on the wheel of the year. Six months apart, as far from each other as it is possible to be.

If Brigid is your primary deity – as she is mine – that means that right now, in late June and into July, you are at the furthest possible point from her festival. Imbolc is behind you. It won’t come around again until February. And Lúnasa, which belongs to a different set of figures entirely, is approaching fast.

This is not a problem. But it is worth paying attention to.

A picture of daffodils in my driveway
Yes I know, daffodils aren’t July flowers – it’s the only pic of flowers I have! lol

What the opposite point on the wheel actually means

The wheel of the year (as much as I dislike the term, it is commonly used…) is not just a calendar. It’s a map of energies, of what the land is doing, of what our ancestors understood about the rhythm of the year. And every festival has its opposite – a point of tension and balance, six months away, that helps define it.

Imbolc is about beginnings. The first light after the dark. The earliest stirring of spring. Brigid’s flame lit against the cold. It’s tender, hopeful, and small – a green shoot, not a full harvest.

Lúnasa is its opposite in almost every way. It’s the height of summer, the beginning of harvest, the moment of abundance before the slow turn toward darkness begins. Where Imbolc is about potential, Lúnasa is about what has actually grown. Where Imbolc is Brigid’s, Lúnasa belongs to Tailtiu, to the old gods, to something that predates even the Tuatha Dé Danann in the layers of Irish tradition.

Understanding that opposite point doesn’t diminish your relationship with Brigid. It deepens it. Because you can’t fully understand a festival without understanding what sits across from it on the wheel.

What sent me looking at this time of year

I started exploring the Lúnasa figures – Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, Crom Cruach – because I wanted to know what my ancestors were actually doing at this point in the year. Not what the books said in general terms, but what people in Ireland were specifically doing, in specific places, in specific ways.

I found my way to Duchas.ie – the Irish Folklore Collection, which is one of the most extraordinary resources available to anyone interested in Irish folk tradition. And what I found there stopped me in my tracks.

Garland Sunday. Also known as Reek Sunday. The last Sunday of July, celebrated in two main ways across Ireland: the strewing of flowers, and the climbing of mountains. Both traditions appear in community after community across the folklore records, often with details that suggest something far older than Christianity underneath them. Far older, in some cases, than the Tuatha Dé Danann themselves.

The flower strewing connects to the idea of honouring the earth at its most abundant. The mountain climbing – most famously on Croagh Patrick in Mayo, but not exclusively – connects to a landscape-based devotion that predates any of the named deities we know. These are the traces of your ancestors’ practice. They’re worth following.

Brigid at this time of year

Brigid doesn’t have a specific role in Lúnasa – and I want to be honest about that rather than force a connection that isn’t there in the lore. She and Lúnasa belong to different layers of the tradition, and that’s fine. Not every deity needs to be present at every festival.

What she does offer at this time of year is continuity. The relationship you’ve built with her doesn’t go dormant because her festival has passed. She’s still there. The water aspect is still available to you. The forge still burns.

But Lúnasa invites you to expand your attention. To begin to know the other figures who belong to this season, to ask what your ancestors were doing in late July, and to let the wheel of the year be a genuine guide rather than something that only matters at Imbolc and Samhain.

What’s coming

Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing about the three figures most associated with Lúnasa in the Irish tradition – Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, and Crom Cruach. Each of them has a course at Brigid’s Forge School for those who want to go deeper into the lore. And each of them has something genuinely interesting to say about what this time of year meant to the people who lived here before us.

If you want to mark Garland Sunday this year, you don’t need to climb a mountain. Put flowers in the house. Go outside if you can. Remember that the last Sunday of July has been considered significant in Ireland for longer than anyone can fully trace – and that your ancestors were part of that.

That’s enough. It’s more than enough.

Have you ever marked Garland Sunday or Reek Sunday? Or discovered something in the folklore records that surprised you? Drop it in the comments – I’d love to know what you’ve found.

Brigid in the Irish Lore: Why the Texts Matter – and What It Can’t Tell Us

Brigid Irish lore sits at the intersection of several things that are easy to get wrong – reconstructionism, hagiography, mythology, and the complicated question of what we can actually know about pre-Christian Irish practice.

I want to be honest about where I stand on this, because I think it matters for how you approach the material.

An image of the Book of Fermoy from Irish Scripts on Screen
The lore is more accessible now, with the help of places like Irish Scripts on Screen, than ever before!

What the lore is – and isn’t

I’m not a reconstructionist. I don’t believe we have enough information to accurately reconstruct practices from two thousand years ago, and I think attempting to do so with confidence tends to produce something that tells us more about modern wishes than ancient realities.

But I also don’t think the Brigid Irish lore is therefore useless. Quite the opposite.

The stories that survived – about Brig in Cath Maigh Tuireadh, about her appearances in Lebor Gabála Érenn, about what Sanas Cormac records about her – these are the stories our ancestors thought important enough to keep. In most cases, they were preserved by Christian monks who were making active choices about what deserved to survive. That context doesn’t invalidate the material. It makes it more interesting.

When a bishop or a monk in medieval Ireland sat down to record a story about a pre-Christian goddess, they were doing something deliberate. Understanding what they chose to record, and how they chose to frame it, tells us something about both the tradition and the people doing the recording.

Brigid stayed

There’s something else worth saying before we go any further. Brigid is unusual among Irish deities in that she never really went away.

She didn’t disappear with Christianisation. She became a saint – one of the most significant saints in the Irish tradition, with a feast day, a network of wells, a flame at Kildare, and a body of hagiography that borrows heavily from her earlier forms. The St Brigid of Ireland course covers this in detail, but the short version is: the saint and the goddess are so entwined that treating them as entirely separate figures does a disservice to both.

I think we do Brigid a disservice if we ignore her saint aspect in favour of a purely pre-Christian reconstruction. She stayed with the Irish people through Catholicism. Helped them adapt, and adapted herself. She evolved. That’s not a corruption of something purer – it’s part of who she is. Irish practice has never been held in stone. It has always adapted to the times, absorbed new influences, and continued to serve the people it belonged to. Brigid is a particularly clear example of that quality.

What the lore actually tells us

So what do we learn when we go to the old texts? More than you might expect – and in some cases, something quite different from what devotional experience alone would suggest.

The Brigid of the Irish lore is a figure who can fight but chooses not to be a warrior. She is a mother – of one son, or three, or four, depending on which source you’re reading – who experiences profound grief and loss. Always associated with poets and poetry without any surviving record of her writing verse herself. She appears at crucial moments in the mythology as a support figure rather than a central protagonist.

None of that is what people usually lead with when they talk about Brigid. But it’s what the ancestors thought worth recording. And sitting with those choices – why these stories, why these details, why preserved by these particular people at this particular time – is one of the most useful things you can do if you want to understand her.

The lore doesn’t replace experience. But in my own practice, it has repeatedly put experience into context – given me a framework for understanding what I was encountering before I had words for it.

The courses

The lore courses at Brigid’s Forge School are designed to take you into these texts directly. Each one focuses on a specific source:

For those who want to go deeper into the Ulster material specifically, The Three Brigs in Ulster is a five-week course (€275) covering the Ulster Cycle appearances in detail.

None of these require prior knowledge of Old or Middle Irish. They’re designed to be accessible to anyone who is curious about Brigid and willing to sit with material that doesn’t always give easy answers.

Have you spent time with any of the old texts? Or does the idea of going to the lore feel daunting? Drop a comment below – I’d love to know where you are with this.

Brigid: The Irish Saint and Goddess Who Makes Sense After You’ve Left the Church

Why did I end up working with Brigid, Irish saint, goddess, on my spiritual path? Well you might ask.

It was a Travel Lodge in Holyhead. Two in the morning. I was waiting for the night ferry back to Ireland after a women’s empowerment weekend, sitting on the edge of a bed that had seen better days, crying my eyes out and asking for guidance from anything that might be listening.

What arrived was not what I expected.

The Dagda 0 father figure of the Tuatha Dé Danann, one of the old Irish gods – turned up. Not dramatically. Not with thunder or visions. His first suggestion, after I’d poured out everything I was carrying, was to drink some water. By the time the night was over, he had one more piece of advice: go and look into his daughter.

His daughter is Brigid.

Brigid is probably not who you think she is

If you grew up Catholic in Ireland, you know Saint Brigid. February 1st. The cross made of rushes. The secondary patron saint, the one who wasn’t Patrick. Maybe a school named after her, or a church, or a prayer you learned and forgot. (Indeed, and a GAA club either!)

What most of us weren’t taught is that Saint Brigid possibly/ probably absorbed an older figure: a goddess of the same name, part of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the pre-Christian Irish pantheon. A goddess of poetry, smithcraft, and healing. Protector of the vulnerable. Keeper of the sacred flame at Kildare, which burned for centuries and was tended by women.

Listen, a spiritual path away from organised religion doesn't have to start with Brigid Irish saint & goddess. But like this candle in the picture - it doens't hurt either...
I know, I often use a candle to start people off with Brigid. But there’s reasons!!

The two figures of Brigid, saint and goddess, are so deeply entwined on the spiritual paths they walk that scholars still debate where one ends and the other begins. For our purposes, that ambiguity is not a problem. It’s actually the point.

Why she works for women like us (saint or goddess)

Women like us – ex-Catholic, ex-evangelical, ex-whatever-it-was, still spiritual, not sure where to go next – tend to have a complicated relationship with religious figures. We’ve spent years being told what to believe about them. The last thing most of us want is another authority telling us who to pray to and why.

Brigid doesn’t work like that. She never really did.

Brigid sits at a threshold: between Christianity and what came before it, between the institutional and the personal, between the historical record and lived experience. Most certainly, she doesn’t require you to become pagan to approach her. She doesn’t require you to abandon whatever remnants of your Catholic upbringing still feel meaningful. She has been navigating that in-between space for over a thousand years.

Unusually, she is also a figure who has belonged specifically to women for most of her history. The flame at Kildare was tended by women. The traditions around her in Irish folk culture were carried by women. Her feast day, Imbolc, marks the first stirring of spring: a threshold moment, a beginning, which is exactly where a lot of us find ourselves.

What she’s not

She is not a replacement religion. Approaching Brigid doesn’t mean you’re signing up for paganism, or Irish polytheism, or any other label you’re not ready to take on. Brigid, Irish saint and goddess know better than to try to force anyone on a spiritual path that’s not right for them.

She is not going to fix everything. No single figure, practice, or tradition does that.

She is not exclusively Irish either – though her roots are deep in this land, and if you have Irish ancestry, that connection is worth exploring. She has travelled all over the world with Irish emigrants, and as I’ve mentioned before, there’s a chance she might have originated with our neighbours to the East.

What she is, in my experience, is a reliable point of entry. A figure grounded enough in history to withstand scrutiny, flexible enough in tradition to meet you where you actually are, and specific enough to give you something real to work with rather than a vague spiritual fog.

How to start with Brigid, saint or goddess, on a spiritual path

You don’t need to do anything dramatic. You don’t need to build an altar or declare a belief or join anything.

Start with curiosity. Read about her: both the saint and the goddess, and the places where they overlap. Notice what resonates and what doesn’t. Light a candle on February 1st if it appeals to you. Look into the history of Kildare. Find out which stories about her have been told in your own family’s county, because there will be some. (And if your family doesn’t come from Ireland, check out the other posts in the blog to get you started!)

Most of all, stay honest with yourself about what you’re actually drawn to versus what you think you should be drawn to. Brigid has been around long enough not to need your performance. She just needs your attention.

Your spiritual path may align with or veer away from Brigid, either the saint of the goddess. That’s ok. She won’t mind at all.

Where this is going

Next week I want to talk about what the actual inner work looks like – not the aesthetic of spirituality, but the practice of it. What it means to sit with uncomfortable questions, and why that is worth doing.

If you don’t want to miss it, make sure you’re on the list.

Have a question about Brigid, or something from this post that’s sitting with you? Drop it in the comments or reply to any of my emails. I read everything.