Legends

Bronze Age roots of European Paganism

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A deep and insoluble question that dogs the history of paganism in northern Europe before the advent of Greek and Roman expansion and christianity is that which asks about its structure and theology. Was it generally polytheist – believing in a host of different gods each with individual functions? If so, did it follow a similar system to the southern European religions? …. Or was its focus dualist – having god and goddess figures representing the perceived universal polarities? What if the dualist interpretation is the root of the polytheist, even?

Romans such as Julius Caesar (1stC BC De Bello Gallico) wrote that the ‘barbarian’ Gauls worshipped similar gods to them, but scholars consider such accounts as undetailed and lacking useful context. The fact that some Gauls in the south appear to have become quite Hellenized by the time of Caesar’s wars demonstrates the complicating factors at play. From the accounts we can see there are some apparent differences in theology and organisation between Gaulish/British and Roman official religion: Foremost was the system or college of learned druids at the apex of these societies, and also the reported emphasis on reincarnation, and the ideas about human ‘sacrifice’ that these appeared to engender:

They are said there to learn by heart a great number of verses; accordingly some remain in the course of training twenty years. Nor do they regard it lawful to commit these to writing, though in almost all other matters, in their public and private transactions, they use Greek characters. That practice they seem to me to have adopted for two reasons; because they neither desire their doctrines to be divulged among the mass of the people, nor those who learn, to devote themselves the less to the efforts of memory, relying on writing; since it generally occurs to most men, that, in their dependence on writing, they relax their diligence in learning thoroughly, and their employment of the memory. They wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another, and they think that men by this tenet are in a great degree excited to valor, the fear of death being disregarded. They likewise discuss and impart to the youth many things respecting the stars and their motion, respecting the extent of the world and of our earth, respecting the nature of things, respecting the power and the majesty of the immortal gods. 

In the same book (De Bello Gallico Book 6 ch.21) Caesar claimed that the German peoples of the 1stC BC:

” … rank in the number of the gods those alone whom they behold, and by whose instrumentality they are obviously benefited, namely, the sun, fire, and the moon; they have not heard of the other deities even by report…”

Coupled to his assertion that the Germans had no Druids, Caesar was possibly making a declaration of their apparent primitivism and lack of philosophical gods and ideals. Surely no Roman would stoop to this? Caesar had his eyes on conquest…

However Caesar’s life was curtailed by jealous forces, and when his successor Augustus commissioned Vergil to write the Aeneid about Rome’s supposed cultural origins at Troy, Caesar’s comment on reincarnation (seemingly a barbaric tenet) has its waters somewhat muddied by Book 6 which depicts Aeneas’ visit to Hades to his father, Anchises. During this he is instructed how purified souls drink the waters of forgetfulness from the River Lethe before crossing into reincarnation. This crossing is sometimes associated with entering Elysium – a place Homer placed on the banks of the world-encircling river, Okeanos, and which Hesiod referred to as the Blessed Isles, watched over by the Titan god Cronus (Saturn to the Romans). This is not actually that unusual as Pythagoras had a well-documented belief in metempsychosis that – along with the writings of Plato (Timaeus) and with the Greek mystery cults – had a popular following among the intellectual elites of the Roman Empire, Vergil and Ovid being particular examples. Here is that part of the Aenied:

[723] Meanwhile, in a retired vale, Aeneas sees a sequestered grove and rustling forest thickets, and the river Lethe drifting past those peaceful homes. About it hovered peoples and tribes unnumbered; even as when, in the meadows, in cloudless summertime, bees light on many-hued blossoms and stream round lustrous lilies and all the fields murmur with the humming. Aeneas is startled by the sudden sight and, knowing not, asks the cause – what is that river yonder, and who are the men thronging the banks in such a host? Then said father Anchises: “Spirits they are, to whom second bodies are owed by Fate, and at the water of Lethe’s stream they drink the soothing draught and long forgetfulness. These in truth I have long yearned to tell and show you to your face, yea, to count this, my children’s seed, that so you may rejoice with me the more at finding Italy.” “But, father, must we think that any souls pass aloft from here to the world above and return a second time to bodily fetters? What mad longing for life possesses their sorry hearts?” “I will surely tell you, my son, and keep you not in doubt,” Anchises replies and reveals each truth in order.

[724] “First, know that heaven and earth and the watery plains the moon’s bright sphere and Titan’s star, a spirit within sustains; in all the limbs mind moves the mass and mingles with the mighty frame. Thence springs the races of man and beast, the life of winged creatures, and the monsters that ocean bears beneath his marble surface. Fiery is the vigour and divine the source of those seeds of life, so far as harmful bodies clog them not, or earthly limbs and frames born but to die. Hence their fears and desires, their griefs and joys; nor do they discern the heavenly light, penned as they are in the gloom of their dark dungeon. Still more! When life’s last ray has fled, the wretches are not entirely freed from all evil and all the plagues of the body; and it needs must be that many a taint, long ingrained, should in wondrous wise become deeply rooted in their being. Therefore are they schooled with punishments, and pay penance for bygone sins. Some are hung stretched out to the empty winds; from others the stain of guilt is washed away under swirling floods or burned out by fire till length of days, when time’s cycle is complete, has removed the inbred taint and leaves unsoiled the ethereal sense and pure flame of spirit: each of us undergoes his own purgatory. Then we are sent to spacious Elysium, a few of us to possess the blissful fields. All these that you see, when they have rolled time’s wheel through a thousand years, the god summons in vast throng to Lethe’s river, so that, their memories effaced, they may once more revisit the vault above and conceive the desire of return to the body.”

In truth, the Greek and Roman spiritual worldviews were a composite of oral traditions woven into the dialectic transmissive mediums of art, poetry, song and theatre. Although deriding ‘barbarian’ religion, the ‘occult’ practices of the mystery religions of Orphism, Mithraism etc allowed Romans to stay in touch with the primitive fundamentals of paganism. In this manner they mirrored what Caesar had seen among the Atlantic peoples and their druidic religious system. The difference with the Roman system of priests of the ‘Olympian’ gods was that they were often simply members of the patrician and aristocratic classes, acting out pietous civic duties. As such we have little evidence that they formed a primary collegium – it was more often a secondary role. The core and perhaps oldest Roman religious cult was that of the household – of the genius, the gens, the lares and manes – representative of the ancestral cults of traditional European societies. These are some of the ‘peoples’ Aeneas sees in Virgil’s vision of Elysium and Hades.

The peoples who the Greeks and Romans interfaced with and conquered generally took on their ways, and they ways of the conquered were fitted in to their cultures (albeit in a demoted form). As the Mediterranean cultures expanded their influence and merged during the progress of the 1st millennium BC, so the Pantheon became a reality. During the process, the figurative realities of poets and philosophers became increasingly concreted by power, religious celebrity and literature.

Rome’s active policy of the plantation of (not just ethnic Roman) migrants among conquered cultures, coupled to the introduction of vigorous consumerism successfully displaced native traditions and imposed Roman worldviews and practices in a relatively short period of time. The fact that we know so little about the paganism of the Atlantic Europeans is because the process was so successful that there was no need to make a detailed religious assessment as the machine of Empire marched sandle-shod across Europe. The final leverage from paganism to christianity was an easy step after Rome’s political multiculturalism ensured the breakdown and replacement of indigenous religious cultures.

Even before the advent of christianity, much derision was heaped upon this overly-complex, often contradictory mass of deities and interpretative ‘mystery cults’ began to become more common. Jewish theologians struggling to establish their model of post-exilic monotheist orthodoxy and theocratic rule in Judaea had been revolting against the cultural aspects of Seleucid Hellenization. This culminated in the Roman occupation of Judaea and within a hundred years, the cataclysmic fracturing of that nation whose emergent monotheist faith began to subdivide all over again. It would eventually partition into three parts during the subsequent displacement and migration of its peoples across the middle east and Mediterranean basin and beyond in the following 600 years.

The more pro-Hellenic ‘Christian’ faction of Judean monotheism would find itself increasingly leading the intellectual (and political) arguments against paganism as the empire of Rome fractured under the strain of the cultures it had absorbed. Christian polemicists such as Cyprian and Augustine of Hippo were to argue that pagan gods were nothing but deified ancestors and leaders, and that the various spirits, daemones, lares and genii that populated the pagan spiritual world were in fact evil: a simplistic but effective argument that suited an intensely confusing, doubt-ridden and stressful period in European history. This approach to Mediterranean polytheism was to influence the tone of subsequent Christian interpretation of paganism, no matter what its actual true form was.

During and after the establishment of christianity in their country, Irish monks began to compile a similar Christian narrative tradition to deal with their own land’s pagan gods and ancestor-traditions, following the template laid by the ‘Augustinian’ polemical style of the ‘New Empire of Light’. The Irish invented their own highly stylised euhemerist Christian literature to match and exceed these: it would consign paganism to the same fate as on the continent, and paint its divinities into a pseudo-history of failed invaders and tyrannical warlike and venal rulers. In the same manner, christian Scandinavians of the 12th and 13th centuries would produce saga traditions which portrayed their (more recently) former gods in a similar manner: multiple, hierarchical, euhemerised, amoral and modelled largely after the deposed ‘Olympian’ gods of the Mediterranean.

The widespread use of euhemerist interpretation, the control of literacy by Christian elites and the difficulties inherent in expressing aspects of oral traditions using the fixed literary medium means that there is little good historical evidence about what pagan North Europeans believed.

The answer to the difficult question about northern pagan identity and belief lies in a fundamental understanding of what ‘paganism’ actually is and was. The state-sponsored religious cults of the Mediterranean classical age were designed to reflect the temporal power of the civilisations promoting them, and as these temporal powers grew so did their religions, the spiritual system reflecting the temporal one in its hierarchy and complexity after the manner of the older religions of ancient Egypt and the ‘Fertile Crescent’. Christianity simply followed in these footsteps.

In fact, the popular religion of country peoples and tribal groups under the classical empires was quite different to that of those involved in expansionism and regional overlordship. It was much simpler and reflected the necessities of the worldview of those who subsisted with the land, and left fewer relics in art, masonry and literature. To metropolitan elites, these simpler versions of religion were considered barbarism and tended to be derided, or to be absorbed into the popular spectacles of the fast-moving, ever-changing mainstream metropolitan cultures. The adornments and trappings of paganism that survived in the archaeological remains to the current day are generally elite interpretations of this core spiritual root.

The core basis of the Greek mythos (derived largely from Hesiod and Homer) is that there were 3 phases of overlord gods: Ouranos, Cronus then Zeus. Ouranos was the sky, who coupled with the Gaia, the Earth. Her offspring were the Titans who deposed Ouranos, and led by Cronus (who famously castrated his father) ruled over the ‘Golden Age’ (which was something akin to Elysium – showing the conflation of historical time with contemporary ‘place’ in the ancient worldview). Cronus then fathered Zeus who in turn deposed him, and the rest – as they say – is ‘history’ (in other words, where the bard Homer picks up the tale). Similar tales of one order replacing the other are echoed much later in the Scandinavian saga literature of the 12th/13thC, which records some original epic verse and stories of their late pagan era. The similarities are interesting.

The Olympian Gods were the third order, but their inception and promotion of their respective cults is very much linked in history to the growth and expansion of powerful kingdoms and city states during the late Greek Bronze Age. During this age (that of Homer and Hesiod – creators  of ‘historic’ epic verse for a new order), the idea of a ‘civilisation’ that was better than that of its ‘barbarian’ origins was born. The second and first order of Greek gods seem to be of the elemental order that existed much further afield than the Mediterranean, and which persisted in the folklore of the Atlantic peoples down to the modern day. Cronos, as Lord of the Golden Age and Elysium/The Blessed Isles  becomes functionally identical with the British & Irish Isles’ own god – Manannan. Greek writer Plutarch even stated explicitly that Cronus was worshipped in an actual Island called Ogygia believed to lie west from Britain. To Homer (in the Oddysey), this ?mythical isle was home to Calypso and her father Atlas/Atlantis. Add in the mythology about Leto mother of Apollo, the river Lethe, and Leda and things become distinctly more interesting. These again, are so curiously similar to Irish and Manx legends that they are either the cause or derived from a common mythos…

St. Kentigern – a christianised pagan tale?

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Kentigern, often known as Mungo, was a saint of the early medieval Christian church who was supposed to have lived in the 6th century and to have been responsible for christianising the ancient Cumbric British Kingdom of Strathclyde, now a part of Scotland.

The region of Strathclyde forms the southern gateway to the Scottish Highlands, and is formed by the plains and foothills surrounding the great River Clyde which discharges into the Irish Sea, and was therefore an important region in the historic interplay between the various cultures of this region during the first millennium, including the peoples of the Scottic Dalriada provinces, Gallovidians, Picts, Cumbrians and peoples of Rheged and later the Anglians and Norse settlers. Its capital city of Glasgu (Glasgow) was supposedly founded by Mungo.

Most of what we know of him is dependent upon the hagiographic writing of the great 12thC Cistercian Abbott, Jocelyn of Furness, who was instrumental in assisting with the mission of the continental (Norman) church to establish dominance and the episcopal system in the northwest Atlantic provinces and who translated Gaelic hagiographical traditions into latinate ones to suit the new ‘Anglo’-Norman world. Jocelyn provided new saints’ lives for Patrick (who supposedly originated in Strathclyde) as well as Mungo/Kentigern. His patrons for the work on Patrick were John de Courcy, and probably also his ally – the King of Mann and the Isles, Godred Olafsson whose sister Auffrica had married de Courcy, and who had assisted in the Norman lord’s conquest of Ulster and the subsequent consolidation of Ireland’s religious power under a post-Gregorian reformed episcopacy. For the work on Kentigern, his sponsor was the Norman Abbott Jocelyn of Melrose who was also Bishop of Glasgow, Strathclyde’s principle town.

The coat of arms of Glasgow depicts the miracles of St Kentigern (Mungo)

The coat of arms of Glasgow depicts the miracles of St Kentigern (Mungo)

Jocelyn’s Life of Kentigern starts with an apology for the problems he encounters in interpreting the various gaelic language traditions of the saint he a had gathered in order to flesh out a text already being developed by the bishop of Glasgow. The stories he gathered were mainly from Strathclyde and from St Asaph’s in Wales: all important ports, along with Furness, in the Irish Sea region. Many of these tales he implies were improper and contained too many elements of heathenism, ‘contrary to certain doctrine and catholic faith’ to use the narrators own words. In fact, it is fairly clear from reading the Furness monk’s work that there is plenty of pagan material still within it, as well as much promoting the other seats of the new continental religious power and spirit of the Gregorian Reforms of church probity and religious rigor that underpinned the Cistercian worldview of the 12th and 13th centuries. His aim was obviously to rid the tale of aspects of what he perceived as syncretic heathenism in the Gaelic forms of Kentigern’s life so as ‘to season with Roman salt what had been ploughed by barbarians’.

Before I embark upon my commentary of the pagan aspects of this legendary text, I urge readers to take a look at a recent translation of the work by Cynthia Whiddon Green.

The first aspect I’d like to examine is the ‘origin story’: This is one of a fallen and rejected heathen woman Thaneu – fallen both in Jocelyn’s medieval Christian moral sense and fallen also in the physical sense that she was apparently thrown off a cliff at the top of Traprain Law in Lothian. The tale mirrors the biblical narrative of the Cistercians’ favourite ‘mother goddess’ – Mary,  with Mungo’s mother pregnant through an illicit extra-marital union with a nebulous and unspecified paternal donor. For such a ‘crime’ her father, the King of Lothian, has her thrown off a crag on Dumpelder (Traprain Law) but she is carried softly down to the ground, as if by wings. She is then cast adrift in the ocean in a coracle – her fate dependent upon the spirit of the seas. It so happens she drifts ashore near to an early Christian centre of learning run by St Servanus/Serf, and she builds a fire for herself on the shore and gives birth to a boy – Mungo – before being discovered by the monks.

Those astute in the folklore originating from Atlantic paganism will recognise that these motifs are to be found in many of the ‘syncretic’ literary and folktales that survive from Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man etc. Conception by spirits of magical children, the leapss and falls of giants, the casting adrift of sacred children and female personages who come ashore to figuratively give birth. The narrative is one based in the seasonal drama, and passage of the sun across the sky.  The female character (Thanue) is the Earth Goddess and the male (Mungo) represents the Sun/Son – in the story, the Sun is born out of the land in the east and travels west towards the Atlantic ocean into Strathclyde. The theme of a magical character washing ashore occurs in the Isle of Man’s Caillagh y Groamagh legend attached to Bridget’s day or Imbolc as it is sometimes known. The same theme is used in the Bethu Brigdhe hagiography of Bridget which mentions the bandit-turned-saint Machaldus (Maughold) being cast into the sea and washing up in the Isle of Man. Thanue is therefore a character replacing Bride-Aine, but what of her son?

The fact that Mungo enters his floruit (recorded life) from the sea and spends an awful lot of time in water and controlling water during the rest of his hagiography is highly suggested of the solar deity motif, identifying him with reasonable certainty as a hypostasis for the shining god Manannan who strides so actually godlike among the lesser characters of many of the euhemerist legends of medieval Irish literature and later folk tradition.  Even his name seems to refer to ‘Man’ in the form of ‘Mun’, just like Mongan mac Fiachna in the Irish Manannan legends. Mungo = Manannan.

Christian narratives did their best to replace the dualist Atlantic god and goddess with a masculine counterpart, particularly after the Brigitine church period, so Mungo subsumes the roles of both in the rest of the Vita. Here is a list of some of the features of Jocelyn’s tale which illustrate the pagan legends he was trying to weave in:

1. He emerges from the sea and has power over the waters.

2. He has the power to resurrect (e.g. – the little ‘red bird’ of St Serf – either a Robin or a Wren).

3. He has a magical branch (hazel or holly – the gaelic names can be confused) with which he keeps Serf’s eternal holy flames burning.

4. He resurrects a man who describes being conveyed back from the afterlife by a man of shining fiery light.

5. He conveys the dead to their resting place (the bullock cart is an interesting celestial motif)

7. Like the Cailleach of highland legend, while living as a ‘Culdee’ he exerts control over flocks of deer and wolves, who he treats like cattle, and hitches to his plough.

8. He spends an inordinate amount of time dousing himself in water and radiating holy light. When others are asleep he is awake praying – the Otherworld Inversion.

9. He disappears from the world in winter to fast. His food is the underground parts of dormant plants.

10. He sleeps in a stone sarcophagus and wears goat skins. There are a number of references to paganism in medieval and later literature which attest to ‘saints’ or spirits living in stone sarcophagi covered in water. Brownie/Phynnodderee/Glastig was a hairy half-human.

11. He is associated with a magical white boar, a special ram, and bullocks.

12. He finds a ring in the belly of a salmon. This motif also occurs in a number of traditional ‘fairy tales’ and medieval irish otherworld literature. For example, the Irish legend of Macaldus, the English fairy tale ‘The Fish and the Ring’ and the Irish Tain Bo Fraich. The Salmon returning is a motif of the returning year and the ring also – the goddess name Aine signifies a ring as well.

There are quite a few more referenes which emerge upon careful study of Jocelyn’s work, but these are the most important! Read the text and see what you think…

Otherworld themes in “Aislinge Meic Con Glinne”

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The Middle-Irish prose tale Aislinge Meic Con Glinne (‘The Dream-vision of MacConglinne’) is supposed – by the style of its language and themes – to have been composed and written in the late 11th or early 12th century. Two versions of it have survived to the modern day – one (‘B’ recenscion) in the 15thC manuscript collection known as An Leabhar Breac (‘The Speckled Book’ – RIA MS 1230) and the other in the manuscript TCD MS 1337 (‘H’ recescion).

You can read a translation of it here.

Set during the 8th century, it is styled in the form of a somewhat satirical prose-tale interspersed with poetic verses, and revolves around the power of a ‘dream vision’ (Aislinge) to sway the fate of the hero of the plot – a scholastic Armagh monk by the name of Aniér Mac Conglinne, saving his life and saving the kingdoms of the South of Ireland by exorcising their High King, Cathal mac Finguine of a ‘Lon Cráis’ (sometimes translated perhaps erroneously as ‘demon of gluttony’) that had taken up residence in him.

The story contains a number of highly amusing and incisive aspects to its narrative. The first introduces the humourous, energetic, ever-fasting and hungry monastic hero-adventurer whose destiny is to save King Cathal and his subjects from their greedy and sinful ways. So eager and restless is he in his mission that he runs from Armagh to Cork in the space of a day or so. Upon arriving at the monastic hostel in Cork he finds their Benedictine christian values of hospitality severely wanting and sets about causing an annoyance to advertise this fact. This mortally upsets the monks who report his activities and (worse) his biting satires to Abbott Manchín who demands his arrest and has him tortured and prepared for execution. MacConglinne goes willingly to his fate, seeking to demonstrate his piety to the monks by way of example. This part of the tale is obviously an exemplar of the popular spirit of the late 11th and early 12th century ‘Gregorian Reforms’ of church probity and the monastic orders. which led to the explosion of new and disciplined monastic institutions. The character of MacConglinne – being a monk from Armagh who wears a white habit – is obviously designed to represent a forerunner of Malachy of Armagh who promoted the reformed Cistercian Order during the era of the tale’s apparent authorship. This allows him to hold no punches in castigating the lazy, fat, greedy and cruel monks of Cork and refer to them as ‘shit-hounds’ among other choice and amusing epithets!

The most amazing and amusing aspect of the tale comes when the starved MacConglinne is tied to a pillar-stone to await his execution and in delirious depths of his abject suffering and hunger, he is visited by an angel or spirit who grants him a vision of a land made of and peopled by food!

The fort we reached was beautiful,
With works of custards thick,
Beyond the loch.
New butter was the bridge in front,
The rubble dyke was wheaten white,
Bacon the palisade.

Stately, pleasantly it sat,
A compact house and strong.
Then I went in:
The door of it was dry meat,
The threshold was bare bread,
cheese-curds the sides.

Smooth pillars of old cheese,
And sappy bacon props
Alternate ranged;
Fine beams of mellow cream,
White rafters – real curds,
Kept up the house. (Trans. Kuno Meyer, 1892)

When the abbott arrives to see him executed the next day, MacConglinne relates his vision and the abbott and monks have second thoughts and refer him to King Cathal, believing that he may be tasked by god into casting out the King’s Lon Cráis. This ‘demon’ has made the King into a man who only takes food from his vassals and never distributes it, giving him an insatiable hunger.

MacConglinne dons the garb of a poet-juggler and arrives at the court of a local petty-king whom Cathal is visiting. He impresses his way in with his antics and satires and gains an audience with the king and promises to cure him, after relating his vision of a land of food. The king is so impressed by his abilities and religious piety that he begins tossing him apples (having given food to no man for many years) which the hero gladly eats, and this obviously causes MacConglinne’s powers to sally forth even further! He convinces the whole court (including Cathal) to fast overnight, and in the morning has Cathal bound with ropes and orders the most sumptuous foods be prepared which he then taunts him with while reciting a tale he himself has composed which embellishes upon the themes of his vision.

His new tale involves him being approached by a Scál (usually interpreted as a ‘phantom’, but in Irish tales always referring to an otherworld being who tests and/or instructs a hero). The scál sees he is sick with hunger and disease (or ‘original sin’) and instructs him to find (in the land of food) a magical healer or ‘fairy doctor’, known in Middle Irish as a fáthliaig (an archaic term meaning ‘vision-healer’ which survived into 19thC Manx Gaelic in the word ‘fallog’). In MacConglinne’s telling, the fáthliaig advises him that he is sick, evoking a description of him suffering from a spiritual (and physical) inversion of King Cathal’s own predicament (which also reflected the poor traditional values of hospitatlity the monk had found in the South). This is typical of shamanic practice – the figurative/spiritual assumption of the sufferer’s disease by the healer in a dream-vision in order to combat it:

‘‘Pray for me!’ said I to him.’

‘‘In the name of cheese!’ said he to me. ‘Evil is the limp look of thy face,’ said the Wizard Doctor. ‘Alas! it is the look of disease. Thy hands are yellow, thy lips are spotted, thine eyes are grey. Thy sinews have relaxed, they have risen over thy eyes and over thy flesh, and over thy joints and nails. The three women have attacked thee, scarcity and death and famine, with sharp beaks of hunger. An eye that sains not has regarded thee.

The fáthliaig‘s prescription is, again, humorous – MacConGlinne must eat the finest foods, and be tended to by a beautiful woman while reclining upon soft animal skins in front of a roaring fire!  There follows a recitation of the delightful foods he must be fed which so inflames the ‘Lon Cráis’ in Cathal’s throat that it jumps out and hides under a cauldron in the fireplace, at which point after MacConglinne offers thanks to God and Brigit!

So… what is a Lon Cráis? There are repeated references in Gaelic folklore to a creature – often a type of lizard or newt – which can enter the mouths and throats of the unwary and cause a great unsatiated hunger or thirst. In Gaelic Scotland, Robert Kirk (17thC) spoke of possession by the spirit of a ‘great eater’. This was explicitly called the Lon Craois during the 19th century (see JG Campbell’s ‘Popular Tales of the West Highlands Vol.2 p.366), and in Ulster and the Isle of Man the English term for it was ‘Man-Creeper’. In both cases the cure was to tempt it out with delicious food (as with Cathal) or to eat salt and lie near a well with your mouth open (Isle of Man). In both cases it appears that the condition refers to Diabetes Mellitus, where the blood is rick with sugar but the body’s cells cannot take it in. This results in dehydration, great hunger and thirst. Kuno Meyer (1892) preferred to translate the Lon as a ‘demon’, which in the context of the characters of the narrative and their beliefs seems a correct choice, even though he knew of the Scots Gaelic term. The term does not translate literally as ‘demon’ –Lon may be the otherwise attested word Lionn, which is the Irish word for ‘humor’, meaning one of the four classical/medieval humors of the body, and an imbalance of these was believed to be the mode through which disease (and moral failings) was supposed to operate. The OI/MI word Cráes means gluttony or hunger – the latter being invoked as ‘three women’ (an implicit Cailleach reference) by the vision’s seer-leech.

SO…

The ideas of food and gluttony are explicit themes around which this whole tale revolves. The implication is that the Monk of Armagh (MacConglinne, representing both Patrick and the hegemony of Continental christianity under Malachy and the Gregorian reforms) is spiritually proper in his fasting and starvation and that having plenty of physical food and not sharing it with the poor is a form of spiritual starvation. This is another ‘Otherworld Inversion’ similar to many pervading the spirituality of the Gaels or Atlantic peoples and which were deeply influential upon early European Christians. The Lon Cráis was an ‘otherworld’ force which transformed gluttony into hunger, and MacConglinne evokes an ‘otherworld’ vision of the world of this ‘creature’ (a world of food) in which he meets a ‘fairy doctor’ or ‘seer-leech’ who details his cure by having the hero invoke an inversion of Cathals’s disease upon himself so as to defeat the spirit by evocation and provocation. By causing the spirit to escape under the pressure of his bardic or poetic genius, he fulfils his original ambition to exceed his monastic limitations, and the cure is ultimately based in Atlantic otherworld doctrines, and not purely Christian:

It is clear from this text that the hero’s poetic creation of a world and narrative made of food is the force which expels the hungry spirit, not the Christian god who (along with Brigit) gets the credit at the conclusion.

As with all Middle Irish texts and stories, this tale is beset with contradictions between a pagan and a Christian narrative. The explicit connection between fasting and spiritual purity is made in the ancient Hebrew stories collected in the 5th and 4th centuries BC into the written canon of the Hebrew Bible, from which Judaism, Christianity and Islam eventually grew, and is common to many other ancient faiths. What is interesting is how the Atlantic/Gaelic view of the Otherworld and its interaction ‘through a mirror’ with ours influenced the Christian aspects of this narrative by providing a more rational idea of spiritual balance, largely lost from continental christianity in the cultural confusion of the post-Roman period….

The fate of the early Irish Brigitine church

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We know from the earliest surviving hagiographic literature from Ireland (written by Cogitosus, Abbot of Kildare some time in the 7thC) that the original Irish ‘Brigitine’ monastic movement was probably one of the first forms of organised christianity that flourished in Ireland, sociologically interesting in that their communities or ‘abbeys’ apparently combined chapters of both male and female ascetics. These abbeys and their leaders are generally accepted to have been places where the children of the local aristocracy would be fostered to the care of the new political and spiritual forces influencing Ireland and Britain in the period, offering opportunities for learning and travel. It appears to have preceded the ‘Patrician’ movement which established its retrospective dominance in the ensuing four centuries of Uí Néill ascendancy, leading to Patrick becoming seen as the main patron saint of Ireland. Even by the 12th century, monastic writer Gerald of Wales was able to comment (perhaps to highlight in his eyes its need for reform) upon the strange setup at Kildare with its holy enclosures, sacred meadows and sanctuary with its eternal flame.

Cogitosus claimed that there had been an explosion of Brigitine missions and Abbeys in his own lifetime that had spread across Ireland, yet it is somewhat difficult to ascertain what and where all of these were. We can be certain that some of these were taken over by the subsequent movements of the male-centred order of Finnian and his students, perhaps in continuity of the Brigitines’ probable appropriation of goddess-centred sanctuaries for their own establishments. Indeed, the language and forms of popular legend and hagiography about characters such as Cóemgen (St Kevin of Glendalough) and Senán mac Geircinn (St Sennan of Scattery Island) contain coded references to deposed female characters and conquered ‘beasts’ – typical motifs used in dealing with indigenous paganism. It is very likely that these Irish early-christian religious institutions were established at the sites of former pagan shrines, and that many if not most of these were associated with well-springs, islands in sacred lakes and rivers and river-crossings, as well as fertile meadowlands – the typical sites of earthly goddess-worship and legends. The attributes of <Christian Brigit> in the accounts by Cogitosus and from later texts such as the Bethu Brighde were loquaciousness, fecundity, hospitality, healing powers, associations with fire and light, and some mechanical miracles.

With this in mind, Cormac’s Glossary (probably 10thC) had this to say about Brigit (trans. by John O’Donovan, Ed. Whitley Stokes):

“Brigit i.e. a poetess, daughter of the Dagda. This is Brigit the female sage, or woman of wisdom, i.e. Brigit the goddess whom poets adored, because very great and very famous was her protecting care. It is therefore they call her goddess of poets, by this name. Whose sisters were Brigit the female physician (woman of leech craft), Brigit the female smith (woman of smith work), from whose names with all Irishmen a goddess was called Brigit.”

The passage is remarkable as it makes a specific reference to a pagan Brigit and claims this was the name by which all the goddesses of Ireland were once called by the Irish! She is referenced as a creatrix through the Smith-association, a mistress of nature’s healing bounty, and an exciter of the human imagination in expressing the things of the world. Explicitly in the Sanais Chormac, she is a triple goddess of the sort seen in the characters of the Matronaes depicted in some of the statuary and bas-relief traditions of late Iron Age Atlantic European cultures: Mother goddesses perhaps representing the three generative seasons of the year…

Brigitine monasticism is likely to have taken over the reigns of traditional goddess-worship in Irish society during the 5th/6th centuries (if not earlier), and then to have been supplanted by a male-centred order under the acolytes of her supposed contemporary Finnian of Clonard (attrib. 5th/6thC) who promoted a non-feminine regime magnifying the missions of Palladius and Patrick (sometimes now referred to as the ‘two Patricks’) as the main forebears of Irish christianity. Finnian is the character that the ‘second wave’ of Irish saints depend upon for their education at his great school. However, we must necessarily question whether these religious establishments that began to cascade as far as Ireland’s westernmost extremes and into Scotland, Mann, Wales and Cornwall before leaping to the continent, were based upon pre-existing (possibly syncretic) Brigitine sites.  There is no explicit evidence to demonstrate this, but much that is oblique or indirect, as formerly commented on.

One particularly interesting piece of literary evidence from the 15thC Book of Fermoy (roughly contemporary with Chaucer) contains an explicitly Christianised version of an older tale also known as ‘The Wooing of Etain’ (earliest surviving version is from the early 12thC), but referred to in this context as Altram Tige Da Medar (‘The Fosterage of the House of the ?Two Pails’). It is set in the pseudo-historical world of the ‘Gebala Eirenn’ mythos, and tells of the warrior tribes of Tuatha De Danann and their ruler Manannan who settles them in various Sid mansions and governs them with the laws of the Otherworld. In this tale, the fairy Eithne (apparently the same character as the earlier Etain, possibly also a version of the name ‘Aine’) has an inverted ‘otherworldly’ encounter with a christian priest and his church after being abstracted from her friends while batheing in the Boyne and becomes fostered by him and becomes a Christian!

You can read a copy of it here: @MaryJones

Readers may recognise ‘Eithne’ or ‘Ethniu’ (‘Enya’) as a character who makes a number of appearances in the mythological cycle tales – as the mother of the hero Lugh. Here she is daughter of a minor Tuatha Dé Danann (TDD) noble called Dicu, fostered by Aengus, and Manannan is portrayed – curiously – as the (Christian) god-fearing ruler of the TDD who tries to bring a new rule of law and order to the fairy tribe to whom he grants their Sidhe mansions or hills. The narrative hands to Eithne (for which we might also read (C)ethlinne or ‘Aine’) the role as the first TDD to become a Christian – fostered by one of Patrick’s priests. It is almost analogous to the early Bridget hagiographies in this regard – building a sympathetic or syncretic bridge between the pagan past and the Christian future which the Book of Fermoy’s 15thC aristocratic patrons must have enjoyed.  Manannan also fulfils the function of ‘Christian Godsend’ that Charles MacQuarrie suggests in his ‘Waves of Manannan’ thesis – an acceptable pagan analogy of the Christian god, who the narrator has Manannan hail and recommend in his role as benevolent otherworld leader of the TDD:

‘…The nobles inquired of Manannan where Ealcmar would find rest. ‘I know not’, said Manannan, ‘and no prophet or sage in the whole world knows, but the one God almighty knows.’ …. ‘

The displacement of Brigitine syncretism became a significant ambition of narrative traditions from the 6/7thC and therefore appears to have continued as late as the 15th century. After all, heresy was always the main home enemy of western christianity and from the 15th century would evolve into something known as the ‘witch craze’ where pagan folk-traditions would eventually under intense scrutiny by both the religious AND secular authorities and become a victim of the polemic of popular culture.

Bride

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“Brede, Brede, tar gys my thie, tar dyn thie ayms noght.
   Foshil jee yn dorrys da Brede, as lhig da Brede e beet staigh.”


” Bridget, Bridget, come to my house, come to my house to-night.
   Open the door for Bridget, and let Bridget come in.”

Manx invocation to Brighde (taken from William Harrison’s Mona Miscellany – Manx Society Vol. 16, p.137).

This was a tradition recorded from the second half of the 19th century in the Isle of Man. The invocation was made at the threshold of the house at sunset on the eve of St Bridget’s Day (1st Feb) while holding a handful of green rushes – symbolic of hospitality from ancient times. The rushes were then sprinkled to make a welcoming path into the house, which Harrison describes as a ‘carpet or bed’ for the saint or goddess. In the Hebrides, Carmichael recorded the tradition of women making an actual bed for Bride who they represented by a ‘Corn Dolly’ (Carmina Gaedelica Vol.1). Those familiar with the rush-bearing traditions of the Isle of Man will know that these were also related to Manannan – as a tax the people of the island used to pay the god, and that are still sprinkled on the processional way at the annual Tynwald midsummer festival. They exude a sweet smell when trodden and are soft under the feet. On old Irish welcome greeting was ‘May we strew green rushes under your feet’ (from the Folklore Commission Collection, Delargy Centre, University College Dublin).

The idea was one of welcoming the returning year. When it was recorded, the island had been Protestant since the 16th century but saints such as Bridget, Columba and Patrick still had popular currency as they were held to be the originators of christianity in the region. Curiously though, the saint’s day in the Isle of Man had another name with a distinctly pagan flavour – perhaps unsurprising at it also fell on the ancient Atlantic cross-quarter-day festival known in Irish as Imbolc. In the Isle of Man, the day was also known as the day of the Caillagh ny Groamagh, meaning ‘Old/Veiled Woman of the Gloom’.  It was celebrated on Old St Bridget’s Day (i.e. – by the Julian calendar) on the 12th of February, the Manx preferring to keep the Julian calendar for many of their important festivals including Christmas (Shen Laa Nollick) and Midsummer’s Day (Tynwald Day).

It is quite important to understand that there is an etymological connection between the words Caillagh (Irish/Scots: Cailleach) and the name ‘Brighde’ or ‘Bride’: This is expressed in the Manx Gaelic word for ‘a veil, cover, hood; a sheltered part of the mountains…’, which is ‘Breid’ (Source: Kelly’s Dictionary), and ‘Brat’, ‘Brut’ or ‘Brot’ (Source: eDIL – consider the Germanic words for ‘bread’ when interpreting these!). In other words – they appear to be the same character: The ‘Old Woman’ whose ‘veil’ was ‘ever- renewed’ as the ancient Irish poem related… The Goddess as a metaphor for the annual cycle – the ‘saint’ known as Brighid or Bride.

Naomh Pádraig – commentary on the hagiographies Part 1

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There is some controversy about who the ‘real’ Patrick was: Although traditionally credited with the Christianisation of Ireland, we know that an important Roman Gaul called Palladius (also known by the ‘power name’ Patricius) was a church leader (Archdeacon and/or Bishop) in Ireland during the early 5th century before the conventional ‘Patrick’, as were a number of other British and continental churchmen. Britain (and Ireland) had remained under the influence of a strain of christianity called Pelagianism deemed heretical by the continental church as it denied original sin and the need for infant baptism. Palladius was probably one of the people given the task of bringing the Irish and British into conformity. Pelagius was an Atlantic European whose Christian doctrines were probably influenced by syncresis with Atlantic paganism, and whose mission and philosophy sought to influence the heart of Christian doctrine and the  Mediterranean church hierarchy during the 4th century. Even in the 2nd century, there was a theologian and bishop of Lyons (Lugudunum) called Ireneus which might well mean ‘Irishman’. Remember – the Druids were an intellectual collegium of northern Europe who were said to have partaken of the study of a number of non-native philosophies, of which christianity was only an interesting new development!

No – Patrick (ca. late 5thC) was NOT the first to bring Christianity to the Irish, but left his name to represent this process in posterity. His prominence appears to emerge with the creation of a political historical ‘event horizon’ formed by the saturation of Christian culture and the apparent establishment of Christianised sacral kingship during the 6th-7th centuries. The earliest Irish hagiography that survives today is that of St Brigit of Kildare, which somewhat surprisingly makes no mention of him. 

The earliest accounts of St Patrick are found preserved in the 9thC Book of Armagh (Ard Macha or Armagh layed claim to be Patrick’s founding church) and include works seemingly written by the actual saint himself as well as two significant 7thC hagiographies. The two original works are two latin letters known as the ‘Confession‘ and the ‘Epistle to Coroticus’: The first is a justificatory account written in the first person of his life and principles. The other is addressed to a military leader or king called Coroticus  (a Romano-British name), complaining about the slaughter and enslavement of some of Patrick’s white-clad Irish missionaries.

The Confessio contains to magical exploits or much in the way of Christianised pagan themes, but is replete with accounts of visions and the saint’s interpretation of providences. It seems to suggest that Ireland was completely subjugated to christianity by the time of Patrick writing it towards the end of his life, although in reality it is more a description of his mission’s popularity among the nobility and their slaves (many of whom were Christians from Britannia). It neither mentions magi or druids or says anything about native Irish religion save for a reference to ‘idola et inmunda’, usually translated as ‘idols and unclean things’ but which might also be read literally as ‘spirit images and worldly things’ – a good appraisal of the Atlantic religion in my opinion. The Latin ‘idola’ is the same as the Greek word ‘eidola’, meaning ‘spirit image’ – it came to represent physical statuary images in the later classical period as christianity increasingly defined these in terms of their material rather than spiritual value. The word munda means ‘refined’, ‘subtle’ or ‘delicate’ (properties synonymous with spirit, and possibly fire and air in the elemental doctrine of the ancients) so inmunda is the opposite. Remember that Christianity was a purificatory religion that rejected worldly things in favour of its ‘higher’ intellectual religious interpretations… Paganism looked to the world to extrapolate its visions.

Hagiographies of the 7thC:

After these the next texts dealing with his life are hagiographical and therefore of a style including miracles and fantastical accounts. These come from the 7th century – a considerable period after the time of his supposed ministry – and are by two quite different authors. The first is by Muirchú moccu Machtheni and is called Vita sancti Patricii or ‘Life of Patrick’. This work (which exists in several fragmentary copies surviving from different eras) credits Patrick with the conversion of Ireland, as well as name-checking Cogitosus of Kildare (author of the earlier Vitae Sanctae Brigitae) as the author’s spiritual ‘father’, perhaps implying that Muirchú was following his hagiographical lead. This also suggests that Brigitine monasticism may have preceded Patrician monasticism in Ireland, as Cogitosus made no mention of Patrick at all – something which would be surprising if he held such precedence throughout Ireland in the late 5th and early 6th centuries during Brigit’s supposed lifetime! Muirchú’s work is marked by its employing Cogitosus’ style of fantastical miracles, but in particular (perhaps befitting the saint’s gender) these are achieved in acts of magical combat mano a mano with a series of Druids. It is written with a distinct Northern bias, and makes particular mention of Armagh. It dismisses the mission of Palladius as irrelevant.

By contrast, the other 7thC ‘hagiography’ of Patrick from the Book of Armagh – the Collecteana of the Bishop Tírechán – is a much more diverse affair, that spends more time dealing with Patrick’s supposed missions outside of the North and deals more with his conversions of Ireland’s western and southern monarchs as well as the Kinf of Tara.  Tírechán spends more time discussing Patrick’s acquisition of specific pagan locations and conversion of these and their pagan celebrations or traditions to Christian alternatives. The Collecteana contains somewhat more detail of paganism than the Vita. For instance, in the famous passage where the saint and his party are met at a pagan holy well by two princesses who had gone there to make their ablutions or devotions:

26

(1) Then holy Patrick came to the well called Clébach, on the slopes of Cruachu to the east, before sunrise, and they sat beside the well, (2) and, behold, the two daughters of king Loíguire, fair-haired Ethne and red-haired Fedelm, came to the well, as women are wont to do, in the morning to wash, and they found the holy assembly of bishops with Patrick beside the well.(3) And they did not know whence they were or of what shape or from what people or from what region, but thought they were men of the sid (the word used in the original latin text!) or earth-gods or a phantom; (4) and the maidens said to them: ‘Whence are you and whence have you come?’ and Patrick said to them: ‘It would be better for you to profess our true God than to ask questions about our race.’ (5) The first maiden said: ‘Who is God and where is God and whose God is he and where is his dwelling-place? Has your God sons and daughters, gold and silver? Is he ever-living, is he beautiful, have many fostered his son, are his daughters dear and beautiful in the eyes of the men of the earth? Is he in the sky or in the earth or in the water, in rivers, in mountains, in valleys? (7) Give us an account of him; how shall he be seen, how is he loved, how is he found, is he found in youth, in old age?’

The passage is replete with references to themes that Tírechán considered essentially pagan – of particular interest is the motif of the well (a spring) which recurs again and again in Irish hagiographies as a place of pagan worship, to be converted to Irish Christian use. Next the use of the word Irish word sid in this Latin text, and its use in contradistinction to the deorum terrenorum (earth gods) and fantassiam (‘phantoms’ or ‘images in the mind’). In fact, Tírechán used a number of native words dealing with pagan things, where no Latin equivalent would suffice. For instance, the word erdathe is described as the pagan name for the ‘day of judgement’, and the druid’s tonsure is called airbacc giunnae.

Discussion of some of the magical acts attributed to Patrick in Tírechán and Muirchú:

General note: Muirchú (M) and Tírechán (T) use the term magus – ‘druid’ is an invention/insertion of later writers and translators.

The M hagiography is explicitly designed to show Patrick to be equivalent to and greater than the magi (druids) at the court of the King of Tara. It even gives credence to the prophetic powers of these magi by having them accurately foretell the coming of Patrick and Christianity before being defeated by the saint, and either being killed or converted. This is a vehicle expressing some form of continuity from druids to monks and priests. The Hill of Tara appears to have been a spiritual omphalos for Ireland, and M tells of the sacred fires first lit there to be propagated to the rest of Ireland – somewhat akin to the teine-éiginn mentioned by Martin Martin and other Celtic-region  folklore observers between the 17th and 19th centuries. This is why M choses it as Patrick’s primary destination for spreading his ‘spiritual fire’. It is likely that the event was Beltain rather than Easter. The Hill of Uisneach was also associated with Beltain fires. M’s account makes Patrick’s showdown with the Tara druids seem like the showdown between the wizards Gandalf and Saruman in Tolkein’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ epic –  bodies are levitated into the air and dashed to pieces, the sun is blotted out, snow and fog is summoned, and armies are scattered with the twitch of a finger! M wishes to portray a definitive victory over the magi (druids)… The style parallels that of Cogitosus, from whom M admits to have taken his lead. Whereas Cogitosus’ Vita and the Bethu Brigte tries to make Brigit the symbol of the ‘new flame’ of Ireland, the Patrician hagiographers of the 7thC – M in particular – try to assert Patrick’s replacing the pagan fire-kindling festivals (Beltain) and instituting his own Christian Easter fire. Easter or Pascha is/was the most important Christian festival.

The T hagiography is somewhat more reserved, also mentions the assembly at Tailtiu as a place Patrick attended in his combat with the druids – associated (according to the ‘Book of Invasions’/LGE) with Lughnasadh (a harvest-fruition festival) rather than Beltain. Both the Tara and Tailtiu assemblies that T’s Patrick attends are at Easter – Christianity was unable to relate to the cross-quarter-day festivals of the Atlantic peoples! T takes the story of Patrick throughout Ireland, giving a blow-by-blow account of how pagan sites were converted to Christian usage. He even combats birds on what later became the pilgrimage site of Croagh Patrick (‘Cruachán Aigli’) in Co. Mayo in the west – a theme for resisting the principle of ancestral-souls-as-birds, associated with hilltops in the Atlantic religion.  Legends about both Brigit and Kevin also refer to birds, as do those about Brendan and other Irish saints: the association of birds with the dead was an important part of the pagan faith! An anonymous 7thC Irish monastic author (known to scholars as Augustinus Hibernicus) even wrote of this belief in an essay on biblical miracles called De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae:

An unknown Irish author of the early 7th century who wrote a tract known as De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae

In this work, the monkish author makes the following statement about ?local magi when discussing evolution (yes – in the 7th century!): He says that to suggest that one species might actually turn into another (there was a belief in the possibility of interspecies metamorphosis until quite late in the middle ages) was to give assent to:

`… et ridiculosis magorum fabulationibus dicentium in avium substantia majores suos saecula pervolasse, assensum praestare videbimur’ (PL 35.2164).

`… the ridiculous myths of the magicians who say that their ancestors flew through the ages in the form of birds’.

‘Augustine’ was a philosopher-theologian with an excellent grasp on classical latin for a monk of the period. As there are no precedents in Roman, Egyptian or Greek paganism, we have to assume he was talking about the Irish magi – otherwise known as the ‘Druids’!

 

Understanding stories about the Celtic Saints

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Christianity's super-heroes

Christianity’s super-heroes

‘Hagiography’ is the form of literature dealing with accounts of the lives of saints, specifically Christian saints. The word ‘Saint’ comes from the latin word ‘Sancte’ meaning ‘Holy’, and ‘holy’ is defined by the standard entry in the OED as:

‘dedicated or consecrated to God or a religious purpose; sacred:’

The English word ‘holy’ is derived from the Germanic languages: In Old English, it is hālig and in German heilig. This has connotations of ‘whole’ and the words ‘hale’ and ‘health’ are related. We might consider the English use of the word to refer to the wholeness of the spiritual world linked to the material world – a ‘holy’ person being akin to what the Greeks would call a ‘philosopher’ who understands how God(s) influences the mundane, by virtue of a higher knowledge. The Romans characterised the holy men of the pagan Britons, Gauls, Germans etc as ‘philosophers’ so it is perhaps unsurprising that their Christianised descendants would continue with the Germanic epithet denoting a ‘wholeness’.

Naomh Pádraig - the 'Shining Daddy'

Naomh Pádraig – the ‘Shining Daddy’

The Gaelic equivalent word was Naomh – pronounced ‘Neev’ if you are Irish or Scots and ‘Noo’ if you were Manx (who converted the ‘m’ to a ‘w’ sound rather than a ‘v’). This appears to have originated from the word noíb and to have mutated through naem(h) to naomh (source: eDIL online = Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language- níam(h). The ocean-going currachs of Ireland’s west coast are called naomhóg – presumably because they might carry you to those fabled lustrous western isles where the sun sets: the pagan Atlantic equivalent of heaven, or possibly some far-flung monastery! ‘Saint Patrick’ would be Naomh Padraig… The Old Irish word for heaven was Nem – curiously close to the word for ‘poison’: neim(h) – a paradox which is understandable when you consider the otherworld-inversion principle by which a place (death) to which life flowed and from which it would again be reborn!

Right – enough of the philology and linguistics and back to the topic:

When discussing the ‘Celtic’ saints, I am referring to the traditions of Christianity’s ‘holy heroes’ originating in Northern Hispania, late sub-Roman Gaul, Brittany, Cornwall, the West and Northwest of Britain, Wales, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Scotland, the Hebrides and the Orkneys. There are a vast number of them and not all have official recognition by the Vatican.

They assumed special ‘superhero’ names, as it was the custom of monks to relinquish their birth names and take on a name with specific holy meaning. Some of these names may even have been designed to reflect pagan names or traditions in order to Christianise them in the Theodosius II tradition. This may have been particularly true of the ‘ahistoric’ saints – heroes who existed only in storytelling traditions.

Stories about the ‘Celtic’ saints have existed in written form and in oral folklore, and the written stories (known as ‘hagiographies’ or ‘lives’). The earliest accounts would have relied upon the collection of oral testimonies as very few of these persons (where they actually existed at all) left surviving identifiable personal writings, let alone autobiographies. The ‘peri-christianisation’ hagiographies relate largely to saints of the 5th-7th centuries,  a period often formerly referred to by historians as the ‘dark ages’ on account of the paucity of surviving written evidence we have from it – many early accounts are copies from much later on.  It didn’t help that the ‘Black Gentiles’ (Vikings) freely burnt many of the early Christian records in a futile attempt to stamp out the spiritual ‘invaders’ who had overturned paganism. Many of these lost works probably contained significant details of paganism, now largely lost.

The ‘magical’ aspects of hagiography reach their greatest and most fantastical heights in medieval Irish texts. However, it is always worth considering how important the use of allegory was in early Christian expression, so apparently magical occurrences need not be taken literally: For instance, the ‘miracle’ of giving ‘sight’ or ‘light’ to the ‘blind’ is an allegory for conversion to the Christian faith. Magicians ‘rising’ into the air before being discomposed by a saint may be an allegory for the inevitable result of haughty pride. A ‘mute’ being given the power of speech is the conversion of a person who then becomes a preacher. A ‘leper’ is someone who – after the Old Testament sense – is a ‘sinner’ suffering in some worldly way as a result, and their ‘healing’ is the committal of penance or confession of faith.

The functions of hagiography can be summed up as follows:

The ‘unbroken’ continuation of Apostolic authority:

As far as the church as a corporate entity was concerned a saint was a person who displayed divine apostolic holiness, inherited through a direct chain of authority deriving from the ‘commission’ the biblical Jesus passed on to his first disciples, to whom he supposedly gave the same holy powers of healing and converting. The Nicene Creed established a doctrine of Jesus as equivalent to God, rather than just a prophet, thus the chain of disciples following on were believed to display signs of this divine gift. Apostolic sanctity was therefore confirmed by providing evidence of miracles performed by the saint both during their life and after their death. As there is no objective way of proving this, the process depended upon oral and written testimony of persons considered suitably holy and trustworthy, and for this reason the science or art of hagiology and hagiography developed. This allowed a special status to be posthumously granted to the founders of religious institutions and dynasties who served the political and ideological ends of the church. By the sixth century, it may have been apparent that in contemporary time people were not being ‘actually’ raised from the ‘dead’ or cured of ‘blindness’ or ‘leprosy’, but a belief in this power was very strong, and ordinary people were willing to accept stories of what appears to have been the figurative ‘otherworld’ healing in a more literal sense: ‘death’ was paganism, ‘blindness’ was recusancy, and ‘leprosy’ was sin – the marks left upon the body by imperfect living and faith.

Hagiographies boosted the claims of Abbeys:

Early medieval abbeys served several purposes: On one level they were communities designed to reinforce the message of christianity by acting as an exemplary focal point of the religion and source of Christian learning. In early medieval Ireland, they also offered an alternative for young freemen to joining the cultural institution of the Fian, where they would learn traditional hunting, social and fighting skills before re-entering Irish society in their majority. By implication, they might also have had the option to join the hedge-schools of the pagan philosophical/religious scholars referred to in tales as the Draoi otherwise translated as ‘druids’, although by the time of the writing of early law tracts during the Christian period, this had been supplanted by the system of Abbeys. Either which way, Abbeys would provide a form of economic relief and education and – like other courtly institutions – allow the forming of alliances outside of the usual tribal sphere and the chance to interact with others from outside of the tribe. They offered education and opportunities for travel and adventure to young men, and to young women they relieved their parents of the burden of marriage dowries (often cattle); In fact, due to the marriage system referred to as lánamnas comthinchuir (?’marriage of equals’) it also relieved the bridegroom’s family of the burden of donation of land equal in value to the dowry to a bride’s family: celibate monks and nuns were economically independent of their families, yet would still be able to interact and take part in family life and politics. They would bring power and influence without economic outlay, and in a time of polygamous marriages (7th/8thC) could offer a buffer against successional disputes among siblings and step-siblings.

So … Abbeys could bring, stability, new contacts, peace and prosperity. To support them further, keeping and maintaining an official memory of their founders would have been essential to their establishment and power. As they expanded their influence to ‘daughter’ houses, the influence of the patron saint and his/her stories would expand to a wider geographical area and fix the importance of the parent house in the emerging Christian kingdoms of the early medieval period. This would ensure the wider propagation of the hagiography, which would support central canonisation through the Vatican.

Hagiographies boosted the claims of secular powers:

Hagiography gave historicity and power to the claims of the secular leaders who were responsible for introducing and promoting christianity in their districts, or of offering overt material support to an institution in their territories.

‘The sons and daughters of the leaders of the Irish are seen to be monks and virgins of Christ!’ (St Patrick, Confessio, ?late 5thC)

They were, after all, allying themselves to the international power of the Church and its secular ‘Holy’ Empire (Rome and Byzantium). In Ireland, the Saints of the ‘first’ and ‘second’ waves of historical Christianisation were almost invariably (except for Patrick) the close relatives of the secular leaders. Given the dynastic and tribal nature of early medieval society in Ireland and its allied cultural territories, power with provenance was generated by sponsoring abbeys and the expensive task of writing books which effectively ‘fixed’ a version of history in the official schema. As the orature of pagan learning and power was supplanted by the written word, so there was a shift of authority to the literary medium (albeit probably still supervised by the traditional keepers of law, lore and history who had converted and learned to write under church supervision). There is good evidence that early hagiographies were often rewritten to suit the claim of successive dynasties, and this process may be repeated a number of times across the centuries. This is why hagiographies do not make good historical sources.

Hagiographies were designed to give a Christian face to a pagan narrative:

Being a religion founded on the hegemonic leanings of some far-off desert tribes coupled to a lot of figurative Greek philosophy, Christianity had little to tell people of Atlantic Europe about how their world worked. Where it did work was in the circles of secular leaders who admired hegemonic power, and in the spiritually-bereft, consumerised multi-cultural wastelands of the collapsed western Roman Empire, where a longing for healing and future glory amidst an apparent landscape beset with disease, decay and barbarity inspired people to take up their leaders’ new religion. In such an atmosphere of cognitive dissonance, people will latch on to anything with the appearance of a cohesive paradigm and christianity was just that. The decay of paganism had started earlier with Romanisation, and the process had started earlier within the Roman culture due to ambitious over-assimilation of some very carefully crafted religious philosophies of the ‘Golden’ or ‘Bronze Age’.

The Byzantine Roman Emperor Theodosius II enacted laws in 439AD establishing Christianity as the state religion, and stipulating how paganism was to be officially replaced – by converting its holy sites and festivals to Christian purpose. The expense and cultural resistance to destroying all of these and starting afresh was too great to do otherwise. Armed with this principle, missionaries took up the spirit of this and sought to perfect it in the furthest reaches of Rome’s former western empire.

Culturally, such ‘barbarian’ regions were based on a tribal model, although with Christianisation came the concept of hegemonic Kingship which was to progressively erode this. These tribal cultures were illiterate, agricultural and warlike, and therefore had a rich and highly sophisticated narrative tradition dealing with survival skills, interpretation of the natural environment, and the tales of heroes and genealogies of tribal leaders. To fit into this culture, it became necessary to fit Christians into this form of narrative: Historical stories of why the tribe was successful and why their environment was formed the way it was could be replaced by tales of saints! These could either be invented or embellished upon the memories of  real persons who acted in the christianising process. By forming a literary tradition, the oral culture could be influenced by a more persistent and less evolutionary (and therefore potentially devolutionary) propaganda. Christianity was, after all, a wholly consumerist religion! For this reason, the hagiographies of Celtic saints are some of the most fantastical and amusing of any in the Christian world, far outstripping the New Testament antics of their Apostolic anticedents, including Jesus himself!

Hagiographies as repositories of Pagan knowledge:

When the Viking invaders began their religious war against the Christians centres of Britain, Ireland and northern France in the 8th century, they sought out and destroyed many of the books held by the great Abbeys. The unfortunate consequence of this ultimately futile gesture is that we may have lost many of the only contemporary records of pagan beliefs, recorded in christianised form within hagiographic stories or actual written accounts kept for technical reasons. A few survive today, and it is from these that we have been trying so hard to unravel the mysterious jigsaw of these sleeping mysteries and knowledge of our ancestors. If you wish to find this knowledge in medieval hagiographies, then you need to have some understanding of a number of types of knowledge: An understanding of Christian stories and doctrines – to see what is not Christian; An understanding of the cultures from which the hagiographies derived – including monastic, secular and contemporary narrative styles and traditions. Finally, you will need to look at the non-Christian folklore of these cultures, surviving into more modern times, including legends, fairy tales and cultural beliefs – both Christian and otherwise. Added to this, it is worth mentioning that:

Paganism itself was an empirical reaction of a pre-literate culture to the science and philosophy of the natural world, expressed in the arts of story, song, performance and practice.

From Cogitosus to Giraldus Cambrensis – Brigit replaces the Goddess

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It is generally accepted that the oldest surviving account we have of the life of Brigit of Kildare is the Latin ‘Vita Sanctae Brigidae’ written by ‘Cogitosus Ua hAedha’, believed to have been a monk or even Abbott at the joint monastery-nunnery establishment of Kildare (of which Brigit is supposed the founder) during the 7th century. His account (widely copied and transmitted outside of Ireland) may be one of the oldest surviving works of this class of somewhat fantastical hagiography, as well as providing a contemporary architectural description of features of Kildare Abbey church and environs, no doubt designed for the consumption of monks distant to Kildare during a time when the Abbey and its Brigitine order was expanding. This order was marked as unusual for its day on account of its joint-establishments which had monks and nuns working together and in parallel, and which at the time of Cogitosus’ writing appeared to be taking the monastic scene by storm, if you believe his own hyperbolisms. Cogitosus’ Vita reads as a document designed to make or reinforce the case for formal canonisation by the Vatican, so formal and methodical is it in ‘ticking the boxes’ that prove sainthood. It reads like a saintly Curriculum Vitae…

Although lacking any historical timeline and detail save a basic account of her ancestral pedigree, and the remarks about the contemporary functioning of the Abbey, the Vita is rich in legendary and magical details of the saint’s powers. It was obviously used as a source for the later Bethu Brigte which appears to be an attempt to weave the miracles into a more historical timeline and flavour it with additions (eg – that she was ordained by Patrick) designed to suit its contemporary sponsors and readership. The essential important facts of the text which suggest that Brigit is a hypostasis of the pagan goddess can be summarised from the list of miracles in the text:

1. She is strongly associated with milk, butter and dairying.

2. She is invested with her nun’s veil by a character (a bishop) called ‘Mac Caille’, a name strongly associated with the word ‘Cailleach’ that we later know from folklore to be a name of the ancient ‘Fairy Queen’.

3. She is strongly associated with the fecundity, welfare and genesis of flocks of all animals, particularly those useful to mankind.

4. She turns water into beer, and makes salt from rocks.

5. She is able to magically terminate pregnancies.

6. She has control over waters, and moves rivers.

7. Animals are her servants.

8. She moves giant and heavy objects far across the landscape by her powers.

9. She casts spells to deceive peoples’ eyes.

One of the major details by which the Bethu Brigte differs from the older account is that it associates her with Patrick and ‘Bishop Mel’, where Cogitosus makes no mention of him at all. This is a detail which he would surely have mentioned if Patrick indeed had such importance as he was supposed to during the 7thC. The Bethu was therefore establishing political primacy for Patrick, perhaps due to the syncretic aspects apparent in the cult of Brigit. Another detail is the Bethu’s repeated references to holy fires (ignis sacer) emanating from Brigit, and to the numerous ‘lepers’. The biblical and medieval construct of Leprosy as caused by a spiritual fire from god are no doubt behind this. Manx people in the 19th century were still calling cutaneous diseases ‘Chenney Jee’ (Teine Dia – God’s Fire) and curing them with poultices of the herb Foxglove (Digitalis Purpurea – notorious in Irish folklore as a weapon against fairies and their magic). Foxglove has a number of names in irish, one of which is Lus na mBan Sí – Herb of the Fairy Woman.

Brigit's cross

Brigit’s cross

Fire is again mentioned some 400 years later in an account of St Brigit’s sanctuary at Kildare in the late 12th century by Brito-Norman aristocratic scholar and churchman Gerald of Wales, who visited the newly conquered territories of the Brito-Normans and their Angevin King and wrote about them. His account was not without a good deal of prejudice, and at a time when the Angevins were seeking to legitimise their invasion of Ireland with the papacy, and when the papacy was seeking to further regularise Irish religious practice with continental norms. The following is a translation from the latin of Gerald’s account of Kildare (SOURCE: TOPOGRAPHY OF IRELAND (1185) (Trans. Thomas Forester; From: The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis; Pub. George Bell & Sons, London, 1894):

CHAPTER XXXIV.

OF VARIOUS MIRACLES IN KILDARE ; AND FIRST, OF THE FIRE WHICH NEVER GOES OUT, AND THE ASHES WHICH NEVER INCREASE.

AT Kildare, in Leinster, celebrated for the glorious Brigit, many miracles have been wrought worthy of memory. Among these, the first that occurs is the fire of St. Brigit, which is reported never to go out. Not that it cannot be extinguished, but the nuns and holy women tend and feed it, adding fuel, with such watchful and diligent care, that from the time of the Virgin, it has continued burning through a long course of years ; and although such heaps of wood have been consumed during this long period, there has been no accumulation of ashes.

AP: It may well be that the fire was of butter or tallow.

CHAPTER XXXV.

HOW THE FIRE IS KEPT ALITE BY ST. BRIGIT ON HER NIGHT.

As in the time of St. Brigit twenty nuns were here engaged in the Lord’s warfare, she herself being the twentieth, after her glorious departure, nineteen have always formed the society, the number having never been increased. Each of them has the care of the fire for a single night in turn, and, on the evening before the twentieth night, the last nun, having heaped wood upon the fire, says, ” Brigit, take charge of your own fire ; for this night belongs to you.” She then leaves the fire, and in the morning it is found that the fire has not gone out, and that the usual quantity of fuel has been used.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

OF THE HEDGE ROUND THE FIRE, WHICH NO MALE CAN ENTER.

THIS fire is surrounded by a hedge, made of stakes and brushwood, and forming a circle, within which no male can enter ; and if any one should presume to enter, which has been sometimes attempted by rash men, he will not escape the divine vengeance. Moreover, it is only lawful for women to blow the fire, fanning it or using bellows only, and not with their breath. Moreover, by virtue of a curse pronounced by the virgin, goats here never have any young. 

AP: This is somewhat at odds with the older hagiographies which generally describe the saint’s desire to promote fertility of useful animals. Perhaps there was an emerging prejudice towards goats as somehow evil in the 12th century?

In this neighbourhood there are some very beautiful meadows called St. Brigit’s pastures, in which no plough is ever suffered to turn a furrow. Respecting these meadows, it is held as a miracle that although all the cattle in the province should graze the herbage from morning till night, the next day the grass would be as luxuriant as ever. It may be said, indeed, of them,

Et quantum longis carpunt armenta diebus,

Exigua tantum gelidus ros nocte reponit.

Cropt in a summer’s day by herds, the dew’s

Refreshing moisture verdure still renews.

AP: This is a quote from Virgil. The sacred meadow seems to be something of a pagan origin. Most of the Sid mounds in the Irish legendary romances have a special ‘green’ adjacent to them where events are often portrayed.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

OF THE FALCON IN KILDARE WHICH APPEARED TAME AND DOMESTICATED.

FROM the time of Brigit, a beautiful falcon frequented that spot, and was accustomed to perch on the top of the church tower. Hence it was popularly called Brigit’s Bird, and held by all in great veneration. At the beck of the townspeople or of the knights in the castle, just as if it was tamed and trained for the purpose, it would chase ducks and other birds, both those which frequent the plain sand the rivers in the plain of Kildare, to the great delight of the spectators, pouncing upon them in the air, and striking them to the ground with its instinctive velocity. What chance of escape was left to these poor birds, when the ground and the waters were beset by man, and their cruel tyrant had possession of the air ! It was remarkable in this falcon, that it never suffered any bird to pair with it in the neighbourhood of the church which it frequented, but at the proper season withdrew to the mountains of Glendalough (Glindelachan),and pairing there, in the usual manner, indulged its natural instinct. This ended, it returned to the church without its mate ; thus setting a good example to ecclesiastical persons, and especially to those engaged in divine offices within the recesses and precincts of a church.

At the time of earl John’s first departure from Ireland, this bird, after existing so many centuries, and affording so much delight, as well as adding glory to St. Brigit’s shrine, at length, incautiously settling on a quarry it had pierced, and fearless of the footsteps of man, was killed by the staff of some passing rustic. Hence it is evident, that in prosperity we ought to be prepared for misfortune, and that we must not trust in the prospect of long life and cherished happiness.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

OF AN ARCHER WHO CROSSING ST. BRIGIT’S HEDGE WAS STRUCK WITH MADNESS ; AND OF ANOTHER WHO LOST THE USE OF HIS LEG.

AT Kildare, an archer belonging to the household of earl Richard leapt over the hedge of St. Brigit and blew the fire with his mouth. On leaping back over the hedge, he began to lose his senses, and blew into every one’s mouth he met, exclaiming, “See how I blew St. Brigit’s fire.” In the same way, running from house to house, through the city, wherever he found a fire, he began to blow it, using the same words. At last, having been seized by his comrades and bound, he entreated to be taken to the nearest water. Being conducted there, and parched with thirst, he took such deep draughts that he burst in the midst of them, and died in their hands. Another, who attempted to enter the circle round the fire, and with that intention had already planted one of his legs across the hedge, though he was dragged back and held by his companions, had his leg and foot instantly withered ; whence afterwards, as long as he lived, he was lame and an idiot.

…….

CHAPTER LV.

THAT THE SAINTS OF THIS COUNTRY APPEAR TO BE OF A VINDICTIVE TEMPER.

IT appears to me very remarkable, and deserving of notice, that, as in the present life the people of this nation are beyond all others irascible and prompt to revenge, so also in the life that is after death, the saints of this country, exalted by their merits above those of other lands, appear to be of a vindictive temper. There appears to me no other way of accounting for this circumstance, but this : — As the Irish people possessed no castles, while the country is full of marauders who live by plunder, the people, and more especially the ecclesiastics, made it their practice to have recourse to the churches, instead of fortified places, as refuges for themselves and their property ; and, by divine Providence and permission, there was frequent need that the church should visit her enemies with the severest chastisements; this being the only mode by which evil-doers and impious men could be deterred from breaking the peace of ecclesiastical societies, and for securing even to a servile submission the reverence due to the very churches themselves, from a rude and irreligious people.

The accounts of Kildare actually appear to be tales told to Gerald by his hosts, and possibly garnered from local people. They therefore lack any first-hand detail, although include a lot that is not otherwise known to scholarship about Bridget and Kildare. Most importantly the mention of the eternal fire, the circular wattle or wickerwork boundary hedge and the sacred ‘virgin’ meadow nearby. These are by no means typical of monastic practices of the era! The story about the bird is interesting – particularly the tale that it travels to Glendalough (ie – the sanctuary of NaomhCóemgen whose legends also equate him with birds) to mate…

Reading between the lines, you can detect many subtle and many more not so subtle digs at the Irish way of doing things. There are hints of a fear of that great bugbear of the 12th and 13th centuries: Heresy.This was, after all, the era of Catharism – something that tainted the alliances and loyalties within the house of Angevin. What is more, the Brigitine model of recreating a pagan goddess in a Christian mould had long before inspired and laid the models for the continental theological school known as Maryology, a banner now taken up by the continental reformed monasticism – especially by the Cistercians and their great leader Bernard of Clairvaux and his successors, including his Man in Ireland,  Malachy of Armagh. The Irish model was for them outdated, and touched with implications of heathenism and heresy and Gerald appears to have been out to promote this idea! Read the text yourself, and then read Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (first circulated c.1598) and you will become better aware of this style of prejudicial polemical literature designed specifically for a political cause. Nowadays we have WMD, Hollywood and Bin Laden as cover stories for our power-grabs…

"Holy Lactating Mothe of God!" - Bernard has his eyes 'cured' with a splash of milk...

“Holy Lactating Mother of God!” – Bernard has his eyes ‘cured’ with a splash of milk…

Converting paganism to hagiography in the post-classical Atlantic world

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After the Theodosian edicts were enacted throughout the easternn and western Roman Empire in 439 CE, the official process of re-using pagan religious sites as Christian places of worship began in earnest. As paganism was a nature-landscape-ancestor-based religion, this process necessitated the re-interpretation of the oral history associated with these sites as well seeking a Christian narrative to replace that of the pagans at each site. Consequently it must have been fairly difficult for Christian officials to implement, as the laws gave little if any guidance as to how this might be achieved, save that sites, buildings and structures ought to be preserved for use by Christians. Having made paganism illegal, the laws were designed with Christianisation in mind, intended not to alienate potential converts. They were enacted with the metropolitan Romanised lifestyles of the southern Europeans in mind, and although the metropolitan centres of the British Isles were de facto Romanised by this period, these were islands in a pagan landscape that had its roots in a religion quite different to that of the southerners.

What evolved over subsequent centuries was a slow assimilation of the principles, histories and legends of those that frequented and relied upon them in maintaining the spiritual dimension of their lifestyles. This appears to have been achieved by the propagandistic method of coding these principles etc into popular stories about ‘saints’ – Christian antecedent heroes who were supposed to have bought this far-off religion to the peoples of Atlantic Europe. The greatest success (perhaps unsurprisingly) in re-envisioning Atlantic paganism came out of Ireland, where there had been no significant Romanisation and miscegenation, thus allowing a more sensitive and cohesive approach to the Christianisation of pagan peoples. The repercussions of the end of the western Empire meant that Ireland was to provide the stable ideological base and models for establishing the conversion of much of Atlantic Europe: This would be subtly syncretic, and whereas Kings and nobles (and their metropolitan followers) were expected to follow a pious continental model of Roman Catholic christianity and abandon the trappings of paganism, their peoples were largely to be allowed to keep their feet in both worlds, although were nominally seen as christian.

The stories of local saints’ lives that started to be generated from the 4-5th centuries onwards are therefore full of pagan details, as are various legends associated with the former pagan shrines they inherited. These were often written down for the use of clergy in establishing the canon for oral legend, which would still be the cultural mode of the vast majority (95%+) of illiterate ordinary people. Some of these have survived to modern times in written form, whereas others remain only in oral folklore. As many are realising, they contain a very significant amount of information for those seeking to recover the traditional religion of the Atlantic Europeans.

The main operators who pushed this process – and almost made it official – are the Irish monks of the 5th-6th centuries and their inheritors of the 7th-9th centuries who consolidated this approach. Of all of the names of the most significant chancellors of this new university of syncretisation, surely the most significant were those of Finnian of Clonard and his students (including the ‘Twelve Apostles of Ireland’) who propagated a network of Abbeys throughout Ireland. Finnian’s great British compatriot and apparent co-worker was Cadog of Llancarfan, who appears to have taken care of business on the eastern shores of the Irish Sea.  It is almost certain that the majority of these religious men were the brothers and sires of local tribal leaders if not kings themselves (Cadog was a king and Colmcille was a prince, for example) and therefore had access to the learned classes who were repositories of pagan knowledge and traditional learning. Although Finnian’s immediate fore-runners such as Patrick were often credited with Christianisation in Ireland, it was this next generation which were to provide the propaganda which pushed the Christian narrative back beyond the horizon of its advent and begin to replace paganism in earnest among ordinary people by using a concerted scheme. Although it had its origins in Britain, the Anglo-Saxon incursions and post Empire collapse of Britain pushed the emphasis of Christianisation into Ireland, Mann etc. This scheme, once established, then appears to have cascaded back outwards into Wales, Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, the Hebrides and the Isle of Man, western Scotland and Brittany during the 5th and 6th centuries, after which time the pagan invaders and settlers were becoming influenced by the international power and benefits of the Christian church, which continued the glory of the Roman imperium, modelled on Augustine of Hippo‘s allegorical and historically aspirational treatise known as ‘The City of God‘.

The historicity of these Atlantic holy men and women is often difficult to ascertain, and many of the sources that name them are much later than the supposed dates of their ministry. In addition, the details of their lives (where recorded in manuscripts or folklore) are often so full of fantastical or pagan details that we sometimes have to wonder if their existence was only required to be legendary. All of the saints operated under assumed pseudonyms, adding to their mystery, and perhaps their effectiveness as faceless vessels of the new order….

In some of my further postings I will detail a few of these and start to bring the pieces of the jigsaw to the table…

Textualising the Atlantean Bardic World

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Written annals surviving from the middle ages and early modern periods tend to employ the arrival of St Patrick as an historical ‘event horizon’ for the establishment of a Christian civitas of history and law in Ireland. Given that literacy followed hand-in-glove with christianity and that – until a very late period – the literate were generally the Christian elite, it follows that our interpretation of the cultural and historical veracity of such sources must be cautious at best.

One example comes from the Annals of Ulster, which commence with two important events: the coming of Patrick during the reign of Emperor Theodosius in 433, followed (after a few entries dealing with O’Neill primacy) by a statement against the year 438 : “The Senchas Már was written”. These events stamp the conversion of Irish religion and law into a form with written primacy – an ‘event’ important to the annalists, as it marks the transition of power from pre-Roman learned memorisers (the Druids, Brehons and Bards) to the Romanised literary system of power and precedent, controlled by the church. This was the selfsame church who had positioned itself at the side of the new model of kingship and land-dominance it had created, replacing the tribal systems of Iron Age Europe which had latterly been destabilised by mass-migration under the Roman Imperium.
Although monkish annals like to fix events on a historical timeline as fait accompli, it is wrong to take them at face value: Ireland probably did not wholly christianise with the coming of Patrick, and it is likely that christianity (perhaps in a form deemed too heretical to admit to) was present there long before Patrick, and that paganism survived for a fairly long time after him. Likewise, the statement in the Annals of Ulster about the codification of Breast Law (the memorised legal traditions of the traditional Brehon judges) into the Senchas Már text has little evidence to suggest a fundamental change occurred in Irish and Gaelic legal culture: We know for a fact that when the Isle of Man (which was culturally and linguistically closest to Ulster) ceded to the rule of the English Stanley potentates in 1405, its laws were still memorised ‘Breast Laws’ kept by oral tradition, in spite of the presence of a significant contingent of clergy and a number of Abbeys from an early period. The commissioning and writing of annals has been shown to serve a purpose of establishing a ‘historical’ argument for the primacy of the secular and religious sponsors of the work. Through the processes of continuous editing and re-copying Annals might evolve a stable and progressive timeline leading to the present, and such a work could be used to settle political disputes in favour of the sponsors – the church in particular.

Of the literature produced in Ireland by Christian scribes, Annals are perhaps the driest and most functional. Other popular forms of literature (other than copies of the gospels and the bible) produced in Ireland’s monasteries included hagiographies (stories of saints’ lives) and the transcriptions of various forms of oral culture knowledge, including laws and secular or pagan stories, which – typical to the artistic/poetic mode typifying oral culture – functioned as a synthesis of history, entertainment and education. Knowledge of the treasure trove of tradition of a pre-literate oral-culture society allowed the literate Christians to challenge the power structure of paganism and effectively replace it with their own model. In Ireland, which was probably ethnically and territorially more conservative (having not partaken to any large degree of the Pax Romana before the collapse of the western empire) this was a necessary method of Christianisation – almost unique in Europe until the pagan Scandinavians became introduced to the same principals. Elsewhere, migration was the cultural upsetter allowing Christianisation to proceed replacing as it did.

The vast majority of ‘Bardic’ knowledge pertaining to pagan religion would have been displaced and indelibly altered when it was transformed into its literary Christian context. The processes for achieving this were convoluted and evolved over a period of time, presumably between the 5th and 10th centuries. Simply banning paganism was impossible, as it pervaded every aspect of the peoples’ worldview and lives, and provided all of the signposts and models to explain the universe. Christianity and Judaism held no models explaining the movement of stars, the meaning of tides and seasons, the reasons why certain plants were useful; they held no history of the Atlantic peoples – simply those of dusty desert tyrants and the ancestors of other races in far-off lands.

The essential doctrines of christianity that would be impressed upon the pagans were that their gods and spirits were in fact devils, opposed to a single ‘true’ god from the middle east whose existence these devils had formerly kept people in ignorance. What is more, this god had created a son here on earth (but a long way from Ireland) who had been put to death in payment for the evil deeds and ignorance of humanity. By accepting this imported ‘truth’ it was supposed that adherents would find favour with this one God and earn a place in an eternal afterlife. This must have been so alien to the Irish that they must have laughed out loud in disbelief when confronted by the early continental and Mediterranean proselytes. Unlike in Britannia and Europe, the collapse of the pagan Roman empire was no argument in favour of christianity to the Irish, as they had not integrated the Roman belief system into their culture and had a perfectly functional religious model of their own.

When christianity did start to make inroads into the lives of pagans was when it started targeting and in fact creating an emerging new model of kingship that was propagated throughout post-Roman Europe. The religion ignored the people and their innate philosophies and targeted their leaders and lawmakers, beginning a drawn-out process of trickle-down acceptance backed up by the threat of power. By necessity, this subtle process would pursue a policy of replacement: like-for-like. It would also gradually subvert and alter the conception and memories of the true nature of paganism, using the following techniques:

1. Creating in stories a ‘pantheon’ of pagan gods similar to the Roman and Greek model, thus allowing the rhetorical methods of continental christianity to be applied. These ‘gods’ were given a history and context that implied they were euhemerised people from history falsely worshipped as a result of encouragement by demons.

2. Combining pagan stories elaborating the reality and functions of the deities into those of local saints. Pagan creation stories for landscape features, plants, animals and features of nature had their attributions transferred to saints.

3. Creating pseudo-historical accounts of the past history of Ireland that gave a middle-eastern or oriental provenance to the Irish.

4. Replacing the empirical human doctrine of ancestral spirits and reincarnation of souls with fairy-beliefs, producing an extra-doctrinal category of spirits ambivalent in their nature between Christianity’s angels and demons.

The model worked so well in Ireland, that Irish clerics and their ideas became vital to the christianising efforts of the rulers of the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks, as well as of the Scandinavians from the 9th century onwards.

So … the Irish mythological cycles, the Welsh ‘Mabinogion’, the Scandinavian ‘Edda’ legends and the other famous mythologies of the ancient north Europeans are products of a concerted campaign of cultural subversion by Christians seeking to obfuscate the true nature of paganism as it once existed in these regions. This process was started by the pagan Romans who sought to replace the worldview of those they conquered with one sympathetic to theirs.