Two small, white-haired nuns addressed me in a soft lilt, apologetic. I was at a religious center on the outskirts of Kildare, a once-thriving medieval town in the rolling green of eastern Ireland. I’d come to see the perpetual flame of St. Brigid, who, in the fifth century, founded one of Ireland’s most powerful institutions when she built an abbey on a hill. She was so pure, it is said, that she could hang her cloak on a sunbeam, so powerful that her prayers could stop the wind and turn water to beer.
“I’m terribly sorry,” said one of the nuns. “But we’re inundated.”
“Just inundated,” said the other, tilting her head to her companion in agreement.
“But have you been to the parish church?” offered the first. “They’ve a relic there, a piece of her skull. It’s just lovely.”
“Oh yes, just lovely,” nodded her companion.
Brigid was no ordinary saint. She shared her bed and life with a woman “soul friend” and her idea of heaven was a lake of fine ale, “where every drop was a prayer answered.” One of her celebrated miracles involved undoing a pregnancy for a nun in need.
In the run-up to her Feb. 1 feast day, on which the saint is honored, Brigid’s image now appears across Ireland, on libraries’ coloring sheets, projected across medieval cathedrals and, of course, on social media, where influencers swap stories about finding a space in a medieval man’s world. The images are as diverse as her devotees: a flame-haired goddess with a flowing cloak, a wrinkled crone emerging from spring’s bloom, a placid and asexual abbess and a nubile youth in the impassioned embrace of another woman at the base of an oak. But it was not always like this. Despite being one of Ireland’s top three saints, arguably matching St. Patrick in popularity, interpretations of her significance have changed over the centuries, with the Catholic Church dropping her entirely from its calendar in 1969. Yet a 21st–century campaign by artists, scholars and poets saw her exalted position restored, and in 2023 the Irish government gave St. Brigid her own national holiday.
Brigid’s ambiguity has always been her greatest superpower, seeing her celebrated as a druid priestess and fire goddess, a cloistered saint and a gay abbess. In a country grappling with revelations of abuse by the Catholic Church, Brigid is once again considered a saint for our times, praised as a mediator between druid traditions and Catholicism. But part of this reputation is based on myth, and myths always tell us more about our present than the past. Today, she is admired as both nun and pagan fire goddess, though there’s no evidence such a goddess was worshipped in Ireland. This modern myth has meant a real woman, who founded one of Ireland’s most powerful institutions, risks being written out of history. The 21st-century love for the saint has overshadowed the phenomenal achievements of a real woman.
The oldest surviving texts about St. Brigid date from about a century after her death in 524 or 526 CE. One, “The Life of Saint Brigid” (“Vita Sanctae Brigitae”), was penned around 675 by Cogitosus, a monk of Kildare who likely drew from earlier written material. The second was the anonymous “The First Life of Saint Brigid” (“Vita Prima Sanctae Brigitae”). As the saint’s popularity grew with the centuries, so did the tales in her biography.
Her origins were humble. According to “The First Life,” Brigid was born to a pagan chief and an enslaved Christian woman around 450, at the time the Roman Empire was collapsing in the West and about 20 years after St. Patrick started touring Ireland to convert pagans to Christianity.
Such was her purity, it was said she could not stomach anything except milk from a white cow milked by a virgin. When it came time to wed, she refused, pledging her life to God. A ninth-century text relates that her brothers, expecting a hefty bride-price, told her, “The beautiful eye that is in your head will be betrothed to a man, though you like it or not.” Brigid gouged out her eye and said, “Here is that beautiful eye for you.” She became a nun.
According to a 12th-century tale, she asked the king of Leinster for land on which to build her church. The king laughed and promised whatever her cloak could cover. Brigid bid her companions to each grab a corner of the cloth and walk as far they could. To the king’s astonishment and dismay, it stretched over hill and dale. Whatever the truth of the tale, Brigid did, eventually, found an abbey of monks and nuns on a windswept hill and dedicated herself to helping the poor, healing the sick, tending her cattle and performing the occasional miracle.
In an age when women normally held no power, Brigid was an exception. Her abbey, where monks and nuns lived in parallel but did not mix, became a center of Irish Christianity. Cogitosus describes seventh-century Kildare as a “vast metropolitan city” thanks to the church, and although archaeology indicates this must be a generous exaggeration, there is no doubt the church drew many pilgrims and much revenue, securing political clout. Brigid’s rich tomb flanked the altar with those of her male bishop, the former hermit Conleth, and female successor as abbess, Darlughdach. A perpetual flame burned for centuries under the careful watch of powerful abbesses.
Kildare became a political force. Its patrons were the kings of Leinster, who kept part of their treasury there and had relatives in high ranks within the monastery. Early Irish law appears to recognize the abbess of Kildare as able to “turn back the streams of war,” indicating the abbey’s possible role as an arbiter between warring parties. Kildare also became renowned as a center of literacy and scribal production. The church’s male wing appears to dissipate by the 10th century, but this likely made its abbesses even more powerful, to the point where bishops in 1152 reaffirmed male episcopal authority.
Brigid was so important she became known as “Muire na nGael,” the Virgin Mary of the Irish, and was, as the historian Elva Johnston puts it, “patron of the poor.” Johnston is a professor of late antiquity and early medieval Irish history at University College Dublin. She reads old and middle Irish as well as Latin, and part of her job is to scour seventh-century texts, when the first records attesting to Brigid are found.
“She’s the very first Irish person that Irish people write about,” says Johnston. “Once writing is introduced and people begin to write narrative texts, it’s not Patrick they write about to begin with, it’s actually Brigid.”
Central to her charm was her championing of everyday people. Other saints, including the more famous Patrick, aligned themselves with the elite. Despite the power her church would later hold, Brigid was antiestablishment. In the “First Life,” she tells a king’s wife, “The sons of kings are the sons of serpents and blood except for a few elected by God, but the children of ordinary people are children of God.”
Johnston’s favorite example concerns a fox. In this “First Life” tale, a man accidentally kills the king’s pet fox and is sentenced to death. Brigid, overcome with pity, has a wild fox take its place and perform tricks for the king. The king is satisfied, and the prisoner is released. But Brigid, also concerned for the fox, lets it flee. Justice is served; only the king is left unhappy.
Even the earliest narratives had competing views of her legacy. The oldest surviving texts, written about a century after her death, agree on her charity and empathy. But Cogitosus tempers her criticism of the elite and omits her travels. In the “First Life,” more raw and detailed, she journeys through Connaught, Munster and Leinster at a time when travel was an indication of great status.
Texts also describe a gradual transition from pagan beliefs to Christianity, during which pagans and Christians lived side by side, often charitably. This is a contrast to the confrontational dichotomy portrayed in stories of Patrick and later saints, and likely more historically accurate.
She was an Irish saint for the Irish, and they loved her for it. The cult of Brigid spread across Europe, with relics held in Portugal and Bruges and landmarks named for her appearing from Italy and Germany to London’s Fleet Street, where a church erected in her honor is anglicized as St. Bride’s (in fact, anything with Brid or Bride in the name is likely to be named after Brigid). The abbesses who succeeded her were the most powerful women in Ireland for centuries after her death, controlling the wealth and reputation of the abbey Brigid left behind.
But in the early 17th century, about a century after Martin Luther’s split with Rome, Catholicism across Europe was about to get streamlined. The German theologian’s challenges to the church had split Western Christianity into Catholic and Protestant denominations.
One aspect of the divide was the role of saints. While Luther supported direct communication between individuals and God, the Catholic Church stressed the importance of saints in fostering a relationship with the divine. This revived interest in hagiography in the early 17th century and prompted a reexamination of what was true, what wasn’t, and what mattered — to the church.
Ireland was under the dominion of the English crown, which was Protestant. But the majority of Irish people were and are Catholic, and over time they began to see Catholicism as central to Irish identity. As national symbols, Ireland’s three patron saints came under close scrutiny. (Alongside Patrick and Brigid was Colmcille, believed to be born in County Donegal in 521, some 60 years after Saint Patrick died.) Their biographies were about to get a heavy edit.
“Patrick, Brigid and Colmcille get re-hauled because they’re important not just for sanctity, but for ideas of nationhood and collective identity,” says John McCafferty, a professor of history at University College Dublin and chair of the Irish Manuscripts Commission. “So Brigid gets caught up in that momentum of patriotism, of nationhood, of Catholicism, all melding into one idea.”
Several biographical points did not sit well. For starters, there was a double monastery of men and women, led by a man and woman of equal standing. There were a slew of miracles involving ducks, goats, pigs, sheep and other animals, which were likely to be criticized by Protestants. And finally, Brigid wandered the country and dealt with kings, wholly unholy behavior for a nun.
The Catholic Church in the 1620s and 1630s was “confident but brittle” and Brigid was “embarrassingly bucolic,” notes McCafferty, who specializes in the history of Ireland’s church from the 16th century to the 18th. Scholars assumed she’d be an easy target for Protestant criticism. They dropped miracles involving animals and removed references to place so Brigid appeared as a cloistered nun. And that pesky miracle where Brigid touched the belly of a nun to vanish a fetus and undo a pregnancy? It was already dropped from her official bio.
Much writing took place on continental Europe, where exiled Irish Catholics founded monastic centers. One prominent hagiographer was the Franciscan monk Robert Rochford of County Meath. When nuns commissioned him to compile a history of Ireland’s patron saints, Rochford wrote in simple English so his work could be read by preachers and the faithful alike.
To fit 17th-century views of a virtuous nun, Rochford emphasized Brigid’s servile status at birth, her purity in childhood and “miracles of plenty,” which demonstrated great charity and hospitality. He downgraded Kildare’s status from ornate double monastery to convent oratory. Then he made significant cuts to protect the saint from Protestant critiques.
“It is a facelift more than censorship,” says McCafferty. “In the case of Brigid, he’s thinking: ‘She’s a nun. She’s an abbess. What do nuns and abbesses look like in my day? They don’t move around. They stay put.’ He strips away a lot of her mobility, and he turns her into the kind of enclosed nun that the nuns he wrote for would have been. He remakes her into an image that people would recognize.”
Similarly, Rochford dropped Patrick’s more fanciful miracles, like a flying stone chariot, and inflated Patrick’s ties with Rome to emphasize Catholic credentials. “But Patrick,” notes McCafferty, “is a fifth-century saint, he’s neither Catholic nor Protestant, he’s just a Christian.”
Other cuts include Brigid’s vision of a billy goat in the Communion chalice (following its theft by a clergyman) and a scene where Brigid, Patrick and their followers fall into a three-day trance of preaching. This was particularly problematic because women saints could advise male clergy but were not considered suited to preaching themselves.
Little by little, Brigid was remade into a model nun-saint of sanctity and decorum. And this became her image for centuries.
The first reference to a goddess named Brigid doesn’t appear until the ninth century, about 200 years after the first texts about Brigid and 300 years after Christianity replaced paganism in Ireland. Even then, she is only mentioned in passing for many centuries.
Goddess Brigid was popularized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne penned a book about Celtic mythology. Gonne wanted to bolster a pan-Irish identity in the struggle against English colonization and adopted the fire goddess figure as a nonsectarian symbol.
In most aspects, the saint and the goddess were indistinguishable. The story goes that a pagan goddess named Brig or Brigid, was, like the saint, associated with fire and water, poetry and fertility. She had two sisters by the same name, a healer and a smith. Like the saint, the goddess was connected with holy wells and animal husbandry and, in one telling, reared on milk from a sacred cow. It is said that the goddess was so popular her traditions got absorbed by the Catholic Church, who wove her myths into a make-believe saint.
In fact, the reverse is true. There is ample evidence Brigid was a real woman, albeit one with a folkloric flourish to her biography, and no evidence people worshipped such a goddess in Ireland in or before her time.
“It’s one line in an encyclopedic text that is interested in the pre-Christian past,” says Johnston about this first existing reference. “That’s it. That’s all we have. On the other hand, we have tens of thousands of words on Brigid the saint. In my opinion, there wasn’t a belief in a goddess. What’s happened is the biography of Brigid-the-saint is used as the biography of Brigid-the-goddess. So it becomes a circular thing.”
The distinction between pagan and Christian beliefs was blurred by folk traditions incorporated into Brigid’s feast day on Feb. 1, which coincides with the pagan celebration of the beginning of spring, or Imbolc. Many interpret the feast day’s popular and earthy traditions, such as the weaving of St. Brigid’s four-point cross from straw or rushes, as evidence of her pagan origins.
Eventually, saint and goddess became so conflated that people questioned whether Brigid existed at all. In 1969, Pope Paul VI dropped St. Brigid of Kildare from the Roman Catholic calendar, citing a lack of evidence for her existence.
Sexist hogwash, says Dr. Johnston, along with many of her historian peers. “There are three really important saints from the early period [in Ireland]. Two are men, Colmcille and Patrick, and the only one whose historicity and reality is doubted is a woman. I find that enormously problematic,” she says. “Nobody in the seventh century — nobody — doubts that Brigid exists.”
Although the two earliest extant sources for Brigid date from after her death, there is more historical information about Brigid than anyone else from this period. Two written fifth-century sources survive for Patrick, but we know far less about him and his daily life. Patrick’s biography mentions no dates and only one place name, says Johnston. “You’re left to guess and try to put it together. But nobody doubts his existence.”
Additionally, biographies of Brigid include several aspects scholars would not likely invent, like her undistinguished family line or the fact that a female founded one of Ireland’s strongest institutions. Furthermore, it is well documented that relics of Brigid and her female successor and “soul friend” Darlugdach (her former student who shared her bed) were worshipped at Kildare by the year 700.
There is no doubt the abbess lived. But in a country reeling from revelations of abuse by the Catholic Church, the pagan goddess now holds greater appeal.
Despite being dropped from the official canon, the saint remained deeply popular. But in the 21st century, as people grew disillusioned following revelations of the widespread abuses, a love of the goddess reemerged. People still identified with the figure of Brigid but rejected her association with Catholicism.
The campaign for Brigid’s feast day to become a national holiday focused on the duality of Brigid-the-goddess and Brigid-the-saint, a figure fitting for post-Catholic Ireland. Stories of Brigid’s bond with her “soul friend” Darlugdach made her popular in an Ireland that voted to legalize gay marriage in 2015, while the anecdote of her “undoing” a pregnancy was used by campaigners for abortion rights in the run-up to the 2018 referendum that legalized abortion in Ireland.
Following the establishment of St. Brigid’s Day as a national holiday in 2023, the advent of February now sees Irish social media flooded with stories about the saint’s miracles and antiestablishment values as well as her alleged goddess status. But in recent years, the lore of the goddess has overtaken the history behind the real woman, to the point where many of Johnston’s students grow up believing Brigid was a pagan fire goddess and the fifth-century nun is pure fiction.
Melanie Lynch was among those ambivalent about the saint. As head of the HerStory initiative, she worked with historians to bring great Irish women out of historical obscurity. But the idea of a new national holiday named for a saint gave her hesitation. She was sensitive to the fact that many in Ireland had lost faith in the Catholic Church, particularly following investigations, many ongoing, into abuse at church-run institutes like industrial schools for “neglected children” and mother-and-baby homes, where unwed women were sent to deliver babies and an estimated 9,000 children died between 1922 and 1998.
“I was reluctant, of course, because you hear the word ‘saint’ and you think, that’s the Catholic Church,” says Lynch. “In Ireland, we’re really going through a reckoning moment … trying to process the trauma of the abuses of the Catholic Church, especially when it relates to women.”
But as she researched, she found Brigid carried a tremendous history of her own, independent of the Catholic Church so far away in Rome. Lynch became one of the great campaigners to have Brigid honored with a new national holiday and her initiative involved hundreds of artists and poets, playwrights and scholars in an effort to raise awareness of Brigid’s historical contributions. “She’s an Irish saint, and I think it’s important to define her as such,” says Lynch.
The government had already planned to add a new national holiday to the calendar, even proposing an Irish-American Thanksgiving. St. Brigid was not on their list. But Lynch, who appreciates Brigid in her roles as both saint and goddess, saw the potential of a figure that could unify through shared values, regardless of spiritual beliefs. “She was very kind, she was an activist, she was someone with huge integrity, an environmentalist [who] campaigned for the rights of the poor. The real deal.”
Views of Brigid always intensified in tumultuous times — during the 12th-century Anglo-Norman invasion, the 16th- and 17th-century Protestant Reformation, and in the second half of the 19th century, when Ireland’s population roughly halved due to starvation in the Great Famine and subsequent waves of emigration under Britain’s crippling colonial policies.
But making Brigid a pagan goddess does a disservice to the real woman, says McCafferty. “It’s like saying Cleopatra didn’t exist, she was just some emulation of Ra. We should actually be paying a lot more attention to what we know about Brigid, who, if I read her correctly, is this very strong woman working in her own society doing things few others could do.”
And anyway, asks Johnston, is being a goddess all that empowering? “My feeling about early Irish society, having spent a lot of time working on it, is that it wasn’t a society to admire,” says Johnston.
Based on ancient stone inscriptions, the idea of equality between men and women, or even between men, was nonexistent. “The idea that there was this hidden feminist dimension before the coming of Christianity is, I think, wishful thinking.”
This makes Brigid’s life all the more impressive. “What gets lost is the biography of the woman who achieves a huge amount in a society set up to discriminate against women. For me, that’s an awful lot more inspiring than a goddess.”
Grassroots celebrations for Brigid have spread across Ireland. In Dublin, they focus on the alleged goddess. There is a campaign to signpost a nine-day St. Brigid Camino, or pilgrimage walk, from her birthplace in County Louth to Kildare, where murals of the cloaked, red-haired abbess are painted in the square between boutique hotels, art shops and cafes. Adjacent is the stone cathedral rebuilt on the site of Brigid’s original church.
The HerStory campaign continues celebrating contemporary women who embody Brigid’s qualities. “People want to believe in magic again,” says Lynch. “Humanity is at this critical crossroads where we’re hurtling towards extinction. We want to believe that anything is possible, we want to escape into stories of miracles and stories of incredible role models like Brigid. The stories people gravitate to reveal so much about where we’re at in Ireland but also globally.”
Just south of Kildare, a spring flows in a sacred grove, where Brigid milked and grazed her cows, as the local beliefs have it. The grove’s trees and bushes are covered with pieces of ribbon and bits of bows, each tied with a prayer, sometimes dipped in the waters of Brigid’s well for good measure.
It is said that when the fabric disintegrates, the prayer is answered. Thin branches sag from the weight of rosaries. An entire sweatshirt was tied around one tree when I visited. A bronze of Brigid — young, determined, her hair braided into a bun — overlooks the well, holding a small flame. There are hundreds of scraps of fabric, each representing a prayer, just as there have been for hundreds of years.
In many ways, as with many figures, Brigid is a cipher representing the values and beliefs of the day. But her recorded history, unlike that of many early saints, is compelling, telling the story of a real woman who established an institution where women held power and influence for centuries, in a society where men were in charge. In doing so, she changed Ireland for the better.
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