Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 14: Bride

Bride;

Sources and Influences

BAM: - (not present in BAM version of the Charge)

Thealogy

Bride is the Celtic Goddess Brigit/Brigid, whose name comes from the Celtic word brig, meaning power or authority, so the Goddess's name means High One or Exalted One. She has a long history of conflation with other figures, being paralleled by the Northern British divinity Brigantia, also sometimes identified with the Roman Goddess Minerva, with her connections with craft and healing, and finally is supposed to have acquired a Christianised identity as Saint Brigid. (Miranda Green: Celtic Goddesses: Warriors, Virgins and Mothers. British Museum Press, London, 1997.)  There is no agreement on these various identities, and Green warns against reading aspects of her role as a saint into her identity as a Pagan Goddess.

Brigit was one of several occurrences of triple figures in Celtic myth, being a guardian of childbirth, mother, and goddess of prosperity, patroness of poets, smiths, and doctors. At Imbolc a fowl would be sacrificed to her by being buried alive at the confluence of three waters. (Miranda Green: Symbol and Image in Celtic Religious Art. Routledge, London, 1989.) 

St Brigid of Kildare (c.452 – c.524) was abbess of a double monastery of monks and nuns, in a church which was influenced by pre-Christian Celtic culture. At this monastery the nuns kept a perpetual flame burning in the enclosure, and legend has it that after her death St Brigid returned every twentieth night to tend the flame herself. Burns feels that this legend may have its origin in the myths of the Goddess Brigid, acknowledges that there are further aspects of her cult influenced by pre-Christian Goddess mythology, and feels that these two strands are difficult to disentangle. ( Paul Burns (editor): Butler's Lives of the Saints: February. Burns and Oates, Tunbridge Wells, 1998.)

The modern Pagan myth of Brigit is perhaps best summarised by Barbara Walker: Brigit was a triple Goddess of the Celtic empire of Brigantia, the 'Three Blessed Ladies of Britain' or 'Three Mothers', who governed healing and smithing. At Kildare her nineteen priestesses (mirroring the nineteen years of the Celtic 'Great Year') kept a perpetual fire burning. Walker identifies an early shrine at Brigeto in Illyricum, from whence she was taken to Ireland by the Gaelic Celts. Her popularity was such that it could not be uprooted and the Christians were forced to canonise her, and place her feast on the 1st February, the Pagan feast of Bride, and Walker parallels her with St Bridget of Sweden, who was another Christianisation of the same Goddess. ( Barbara G Walker: The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. Harper and Row, San Francisco, 1983.)

Brigid is connected with the pre-Christian festival of Imbolc, but there is no evidence extant as to its origins or early celebration. There is speculation that the festival is connected either to milking of sheep or to purification. Hutton writes that it was only later connected with Brigid, and feels that there is not enough evidence to reach firm conclusions on Brigid's ancient cult, but that there is much room for imaginative constructions. There is no record of plaiting Brigid's crosses before the eighteenth century, nor for the laying of straw dolls in 'Brigid's beds'. Whenever they started such customs were known only to the Irish and areas of strong Irish influence, such as the Isle of Man and the Hebrides, and celebrations on this day show further conflation with the Christian saint.( Ronald Hutton: The Stations of the Sun. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996.)  An interesting occurrence of her name in the folklore of the Hebrides as late as the nineteenth century is found in a familiar folk-spell collected by Alexander Carmichael, which is perhaps more familiar in its earlier form with Wode instead of Bride:

Bride went out

In the morning early,

With a pair of horses;

One broke his leg,

With much ado,

That was apart,

She put bone to bone,

She put flesh to flesh,

She put sinew to sinew,

She put vein to vein;

As she healed that

May I heal this. 

(Alexander Carmichael (edited by C. J. Moore): Charms of the Gaels. Floris Books, Edinburgh, 1992.)

The modern Wiccan ritual for Imbolc is unusual for Wicca in that the Goddess is not drawn down into the High Priestess, but rather the God drawn down into the High Priest; a corn dolly – the 'biddy' – is laid into Brigid's bed; three of the women of the coven take the roles of Maiden, Mother, and Crone. The Farrars write that the ritual for Imbolc is a fertility rite, welcoming the Spring.( Janet and Stewart Farrar: A Witches' Bible.  Robert Hale, London, 1984.) 

The chief significance of Bride here may therefore be the simple fact that she has a shadowy past, murky origins, a history of conflation with other triple Goddesses, and may be one of the Goddesses 'Christianised' as a Saint. All of this makes her a perfect Goddess to be incorporated into Wiccan thealogy, since this bare account incorporates most of the aspects of this thealogy in one sentence. One proviso here must be that it is important to note that the titles of Maiden, Mother and Crone date only from Graves in the twentieth century (this history is covered in part 5 of this commentary) so that while the history in this part seems to invite an interpretation as evidence for an ancient cult who worshipped their Goddess as Maiden Mother and Crone, the evidence would not support this conclusion. This invitation to misinterpretation, however, illustrates perfectly another aspect of the modern witchcraft milieu: that out of murky ingredients we create things anew, creating both future and a recreated past in the process. The Maiden, Mother and Crone may be seen as representative of this process of creation, birth, growth, death, and rebirth, the central mystery of life.