Goddess and Saint, or...

How to journey with St. Brighid in a Goddess context

 

Everybody who journeys and works with Brighid, knows how Goddess and Saint almost seem interwoven and difficult to differentiate. I personally believe and work from the assumption that the stories of Brighid as Goddess have worked through into the stories that have been written down about Brighid as Saint. However as explained in my book ‘Brighid Unravelled’, it often needs some awareness, connection and experience to see the proverbial ‘Goddess Forest’ for the ‘Christian Trees’.

 

Talking to one of the international teachers of the Brighde-Brigantia teachings*, it became clear to me that although this awareness, connection and experience is taught in the training, when people start this journey with Brighid, the Goddess and Saint connection is difficult and sometimes jarring.

In our conversation we explored how Saint Brighid, when she was alive, was just a woman. A very special woman, but a normal woman, nonetheless, who lived in a time that the earliest form of Christianity was introduced to Ireland. This new faith intermingled with the Celtic traditions and became an early form of Celtic Christianity. A form of Christianity that is not at all as we know Christianity to be like from early Medieval times.

 

We know of this woman Brighid, who embraced this new faith (which was very much a message of love) through the many stories that have been written down over the centuries and have found when compiling and writing ‘Brighid Unravelled’. Looking at that timeline, we noticed that over the centuries more and more magical powers have been given to her, akin of those of a Goddess.

At one point this Celtic magic, or maybe better, ancient skill and knowledge, became classified as Christian miracles and gathered more moralising ideology. Saint Brigid was then finally canonised on 1st February 1225 by Pope Honorius III, so about 700 years after the woman Brighid died. This day is now, of course, her feast day, and a national feast day in Ireland from 2024.

 

All this is quite a lot to think about every time a person, new to the story of Brighid, reads ‘Saint Brighid’ and wonders why there is so much Christianity in a Goddess training.
 

We therefore agreed that, as long as this background is mentioned at the start of the training, it would be OK to call Saint Brighid ‘the woman Brighid’ in the training materials. Or, going back to the Irish roots of her: ‘An bhean Brighid’, meaning the woman or lady Brighid. So then the title of this piece would be:

Bandia agus Bhean

 

Marion Brigantia
November 2025

 

*) The Brighde-Brigantia is being taught in the UK, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Spain