Today, let's meet one of the fiercer deities of Ireland, and the god of (among more positive traits!) plague and mass-misfortune: Fiacha.

Every religion based on gods has to deal with the relationship of mankind to the gods. That includes the covenant of the Gods to bless mankind in some way, but also their tendency to punish the behaviours that displease them. If there are a lot of people to be punished, then it'll be a mass punishment. Sometimes, the head-god will do the mass-punishments themselves. Other times, it's delegated to a particularly fierce and dangerous god.

If you know anyone who'd like to learn a little about Ireland's meanest god, forward them this email!

The Raven, the Harbinger

In this issue, we meet Saint Íta, The Mórrígan, the ambiguous and compelling Goddess that governs war, prophesy, motherhood, and perhaps water and cosmic illusion.

The Mórrígan's aspects have fewer direct representations among the Saints. Motherhood in Christianity is the domain of Mary, after all. I'd love to deal with the Mórrígna (her aspects) separately throughout the year, as I am hoping to do with Brighid, but so far Íta is the only clear Mórrígan-saint I've found. So I'm stuck kind of doing them all at once.

It's Issue #2, and already likely to be one of the longest of the year. Believe me when I say, I've re-drafted this email many times and edited it down. There is a lot that I've left unshared, a lot of cross-identification and evidence that I've omitted. At this early stage of the Newsletter, I still feel that I need to justify my identifications carefully, whereas over time I'm hoping I can lean on prior work more and more, and keep things more brief.

That said, I tried this email by a friend and she said it wasn't too much.. so I re-added a little detail then. I'll be going over many of Íta's connected saints later in the year and she'll get even more detail by proxy: Íta as the Mórrígan is easily one of the most important saints of all, in my opinion.

I planned to take it slow for my first entry, because the others this month are all quite big characters (See 'Coming Up' at the end!). So, I selected Saint Fáelán, or 'Childhood Lugh', and then immediately regretted my decision. He was deeper than I estimated - Whoops!

I also committed to making my newsletters very short - well, I'm already drafting issue #2 and finding it quite impossible. Sorry for misleading you. I'll still aim to keep the issues focused on cross-identification of Saints and Gods, and leave the deep-dives on the Gods per-se for another format, at least until I can afford to upgrade the newsletter and add a tagging system for readers to filter their subscriptions by. In the meantime, if there is interest I could publish a separate 'Dossier' containing deeper detail on popular Saint/Deities, maybe.

I'm also going to try and include some fringe detail I hadn't initially planned to, but I think it'll help a lot:

1. I'd like to try and include some suggestions about names and places that may connect to the Saint/God.
2. If there's any good reading material I'll try to include it in a Bibliography.
3. I'll include a little segment dealing with general patterns in Celtic Comparativism that might help you explore the way that I do.

Applying Modern Comparative Mythology to Celtic Mythology

Using the toolset of Comparative Mythology, there has been some fantastic progress in recent years towards re-identifying the gods of Ireland, Wales, and France - and often, what we can then learn from these re-identifications can unveil more about more distantly-related religions such as the Greek, Norse, and Hindu religions, and more.

Applying this same toolset to a seemingly unrelated genre of Irish medieval writing, I've found a fascinating trove of authentic stories that directly come from the original native Irish religion. Just as with Saint Brigit and her original identity the Goddess Brighid, other saints of Early Christian Ireland were also gods in disguise. In fact, with only a few exceptions, it appears that perhaps the entire Irish Christian Hagioraphical tradition was in fact stolen directly from the native Irish religion. Yes, very much including the Hagiographical and Folkloric identities of the other two best-known Irish Saints, Colmcille and Patrick. Most Irish saints don't even appear to have a kernel of non-Irish religious identity.

What Use are the Saints?