Brigit, more authentically Brighid, is a Celtic Triple Goddess associated with Fire, Dawn, and Poetry. Among other things, she's also the Celtic Artemis, which I'll explore today.

There is still a widespread attitude that there is a kernel of "Christian authenticity" to Brigit, that she's not "all Goddess". A lot of this is down to the strong personality of austerity and kindness to the poor and to downtrodden people; traits romantically associated with Christianity.

It's my contention that this is an authentic aspect of the Triple Goddess Brighid, and that the best way to understand this is to compare to the Goddesses Artemis and Diana, respectively of Greece and Rome.

Some people won't like this, because it means a beloved heroic woman was not a historically real person; I get that, I'm sorry. I hope you can forgive me, in exchange for some documentation around probably Ireland's most feminist deity.

If you know anyone who likes Womens' Rights, Sororal Relationships, Midwifery, and the Abolition of Slavery, forward this one on.

NB: I refer to the Saint as "Brigit" and the Goddess as "Brighid". No "Patterns" section this issue - Brighid needs the extra space, and I oblige.

Focus Time

I gave a whole issue to Íta, (The Mórrígan), and I still needed to sacrifice a lot of detail. I have more freedom with Brighid, because some of her aspects appear multiple times among the saints. And thank goodness, because there's a lot to tell! Compared to the Mórrígan she was really gutted in her mythological appearances, but her Saints preserve a lot.

So, I'll give an overview of how I model Brighid's triplicity, but then I'll focus on the aspect I think will be least-obvious elsewhere: her Artemis aspect.

Triplicity in Comparison

It's often assumed that Triple Deities are essentially just one god with three faces. That's sometimes true (maybe), but not always. Some have very rich individual lives for their aspects, like The Mórrígan's Macha, Badb, and Anann. Brighid seems to be similar: rather than expecting her to align with one deity from elsewhere, I think we should expect her to align with several.

We can say, thanks to Issue #2, that Mórrígan's aspects can be compared (loosely) to Greek Goddesses Hera, Athena, Demeter (& others). In the same way, we can make a comparison from Brighid to (at least) Greek Eos, Hestia, and Artemis.

Usually it's a recipe for disappointment to make direct comparisons to Greek or Roman figures from Celtic - comparisons to Germanic, Ossetian, and Hindu deities can be clearer (1). There are parallels for Brighid in other mythologies, but in this issue I'll focus on Greco-Roman because A) they're well-known to a Christianised audience, and B) I have no room for more.

Brighid's Six Triple Aspects

Eos - The Dawn Goddess
Brigit is born at a threshold, at Dawn, during the "Dawn Festival", Imbolc. As explored below, her birth-time contrasts her with a Night-born brother. In the previous issue, we saw her in a Chariot with a putative Sun-Fire God, Máedóc, who shares the festival of Imbolc with her. She hangs her clothes on sunbeams. Her Father is the Father-Sky deity of the Tuatha Dé (among other things). Brighid in the Leabhar Gabhála is married to a fairly clear Sun-God, Bres/Breas, and her brother Aengus is a Horse-Twin type deity.

For all these reasons, it's hard to refute Brighid as being The Dawn Goddess "H₂éwsōs", one of the most confidently reconstructed Proto-Indo-European gods. Based on this reconstruction, you can explain her family, her marriage, her generosity, bountifulness and productivity, her ownership of superlative animals, etc.

Lining her up directly with Eos, she also has a beloved son who dies tragically in a war-myth that somehow involves the Smith God, although his role in the story is entirely different.

I speculate that this explains Brigit's tricksy expanding cloak, also - the spreading light of dawn breaking over the landscape, or the same spread of the shade of dusk. Eos also has a rad robe, but it doesn't have a comparable myth that I'm aware of.

Eos (and maybe "H₂éwsōs") has many lovers, even being cursed by Aphrodite to fall in love over and over. Obviously this isn't very visible with Saint-ified Brigit - and if it ever did apply, it probably only did to one aspect of hers. But even Brigit seems to have had her fun - her bed-sharing arrangement with Darlughdach, for example, or the suggestive links with other characters like Conláed (below). That's even ignoring the "Suryā's Bridal" motif I explore below, which (if valid at all) could have "belonged" to another aspect.

Hestia - Goddess of the Hearth
Similarly, we have Brighid as a goddess of the forge, and one of her Saintly hypostases, Gobnait (Feb 11th!), is a forge-saint too. Indeed, many of the other crafts engaged in by Brigit & Gobnait either rely on fire, or relate to fire. Beer-brewing needs smoke for malts and boiling a mash. Beekeeping uses smoke and produces candles.

When "smooring", or banking, a fire overnight, a number of "smooring" prayers or charms are attested to help the coals survive the night, and it seems they all in some way invoke Brigit.

Like Vesta, Brigit was associated with an all-female fire-cult at Kildare. In fact, in comparison to Greek Hestia and Roman Vesta, Brighid is even more a fire-god. She hangs out with Áed, and if she's also Lassair then she might even be the usually-male Fire-God, sometimes.

The Goddess of Love
Brigit makes appearances in several Saints' Lives that hint at close, possibly consort, relationships. We'll get to other cases in future issues, but recall to begin with how she turns up in Máedóc's chariot - as putative Sun-Fire-god and Dawn goddess, who're frequently consorts in other religions. Máedóc's "bed" is later "challenged" by Moling, AKA Aengus mac Óc, which I speculated to be a rendering of J.Dolan's "Suryā's Bridal" motif. This is a motif where many male suitors compete for the affections of one supreme-lover Sun Princess. She usually settles down with the Moon-Immortality god, the other male deities finding their own partners (often seemingly hypostases of the same Goddess).

Dolan identified the main "Suryā's Bridal" sequence in Irish myth as being the story of Midir and Étaín. He also noted that Ogma (the Irish Bard or "Gandharva" god) is married to an "Etan" - like "Étaín", as if a missing story contained this missing step. I would further read Cúchulainn's (Warrior god) affair with Fand, wife of Manannán (Fire God), as representing part of this same pattern.

If Brigit, in her Saintly escapades with Máedóc, Brendan, and Moling, seems to be duplicating some of the romantic connections of Étaín/Fand, that might hint at Étaín/Fand being part of an aspect of Brighid.

The Greek Parallels would agree. Take the three goddesses Ariadne, Aphrodite, and Persephone; there were Greek and Roman sources that considered them to share some identity already (Ariadne as an epithet of Aphrodite, Ariadne also viewed as a form of Proserpina AKA Persephone).

If we take their consorts, they seem to cover all the "Suryā's Bridal" male protagonists, if we take Hades to be equivalent to Dionysus (not a controversial view), and if we read Theseus and Pirithous as epic duplicates of the Dioscuroi Horse-Twin gods (not a widely held view).

We see Ariadne going between Moon-God Dionysus and Horse-Twin Theseus. We see Persephone's marriage to Hades being challenged by Theseus and Pirithous (with an outcome that resembles the fates of the Dioscuroi, with one in Hades and the other free). We see the wife of the fire-god (Aphrodite) cheating with the Warrior Deity Ares (who I read as "Warrior Horse Twin").

These patterns play out in Midir & Étaín and in Cúchulainn & Fand and also in some of the more coded events of the Hagiographies of the respective saints for these god-types.

If Brighid and Étaín/Fand are sharing some of this Suryā sequence, then just as we can seemingly partially identify Aphrodite/Ariadne/Persephone, we might also partially identify Étaín/Fand/Brighid. But Brighid being a Triple Deity, it's actually easier to just say that Étaín/Fand, the Love Goddesses, might be an aspect of Brighid.

N.B., that Étaín is clearly not only a love goddess - her story, her consort, and her alternate epithet "Bé Find", all suggest another role as a goddess of the Afterlife - possibly in partnership to Midir as a Moon-Immortality god who, as Brendan the Navigator, pioneers a path to the blessed afterlife.

Hecate: Goddess of the Limneal, Magic
It's already widely speculated, based on folkloric tradition, that The Cailleach ("The Wizened Woman") is an aged or wintertime aspect of Brighid herself. From my point of view, the Cailleach (and her possible Folkloric form, the "Bean Feasa") resembles a Celtic form of the same idea as Hecate - the occult guide who accompanies people on journeys to liminal places.

Brighid is a poetry-goddess too, though the attestations are not very clear on what that actually meant. Regardless, to have poetic ability, in Celtic myth, is essentially equivalent to being magical. Poetry is not a unique trait of Brighid's, being also an attribute of a variety of other gods, but our attestations suggest she was a noteworthy poetry deity.

A solar-themed Goddess being associated with Witchcraft or Lunar/Otherworldy escapades would not be very unusual - note Aphrodite's overlaps with Ariadne and Persephone, and Persephone with fellow "Luna" goddesses Hecate and Artemis. The Norse goddess who looks most like Brighid is Freyja, and she is the goddess of Seiðr - a generally female-aspected form of magic resembling "Witchcraft". Freyja is also an afterlife goddess, like Persephone, ruling over Fólkvangr, where half the battle-slain go.

Artemisian goddesses are associated with the marginalised, and with women - if Brighid were a magical deity, then her magic would seem likely to tend towards the magic of the margins. And that's essentially what Witchcraft is, I think?

That's More than Three..
I think we're simply missing an understanding of how the traits of these parallels are divided among three aspects. A Fire-Goddess could be also a Solar Goddess, if Fire = Sun; and the Sun at night may transit the afterlife. A goddess of birth, love, plenty, and fertility could also have domain over the antithesis of these things. The goddess of charity, liberation, women, and the wilds can also be the poet-magician and the guide on dangerous journeys.

However - just as ancient Greek poets/priests never went out of their way to conflate their goddesses, the Irish poets/priests likely didn't either. Some of these godly domains may have comprised Brighid's aspects; others may have been related deities that only look logically like a part of Brighid in hindsight. The idea of the Cailleach and Brighid, for example, might be just a modern interpretation informed by comparative material the ancient Celts didn't have. And in any case, under a Monist or NonDual scheme it's tacitly understood that the gods are each "masks" worn by a common impersonal essence anyway; it's not problematic if the borders appear arbitrary, it's expected.

Enough about Brighid's triplicity; I promised you an exploration of Brighid as the Celtic Artemis/Diana. Let's start at the beginning, then - how were Artemis and Brigit born?

The Artemis Birth Scene

Sometimes, a thing is staring you in the face. Saint Brigit, like Artemis, is born to a mother who's hounded from place to place by a higher-status wife. She's born alongside a (probable) brother. And at her own birth, she immediately plays a crucial care-role around the birth of her brother.

Is it perfect? No. Artemis is explicitly Lunar, and her brother Apollo is explicitly Solar. According to Servius, the times of their births aligned with these roles; Artemis born at night, and Apollo in the day.

I also keep saying "brother" of the boy that's born the same night as Brigit - but in the Lives, he's just an unnamed Prince. However, her birth circumstances look suspicious: Dubhthach repeatedly will not part from Brigit's mother Broicsech, and is looking forward to his prophesied daughter..until suddenly she's shell-gamed through two unnamed people "far away". Dubhthach's wife Brechtnat is prophesied to have a Son that will need "ennobling" from Brigit, a plot detail that's left unresolved. Then, an unnamed King and Queen attend a party the night Brigit is born, and bear a Son (with his own prophesy that's never resolved, in the Codex Salmanticensis) who immediately depends upon Brigit to resolve his ill-fated birth.

The story makes much more sense when we remove the seeming shell-game characters: the King and Queen being none other than Dubhthach and his wife Brechtnat Blaithbec. Her mother Broicsech may have been sold to a local Druid, possibly Maithgen. Indeed, Maithgen might make perfect sense, given that this is the name of a known Tuatha Dé character, and given Dolan's proposition that the similarly named Welsh Math fab Mathonwy is the "Impeller of the Sun" god. The Druid raises Brigit, the Dawn-Goddess - or perhaps, 'impels'.

The idea of her being born to a slave may have been added later to an original Hagiography that simply had her as a daughter of Dubhthach, but Daithí Ó'hÓgáin speculated (Ó'hÓgáin, 2006: p53 "Brighid") that it was likely that the lower-status birth was the original, re-added into the Christian version according to pre-existing oral tradition. The doubled "prophesied boys" may have been garbled during their re-addition from one original; a prophesied brother.

At any rate, Brigit and her brother's birth-orders look reversed relative to Artemis/Apollo - he's born at night and she at daybreak. Indeed, the version told in the Codex Salmanticensis has a prophet saying that the times of their births will be appropriate to their natures; just as Servius said of Artemis and Apollo. It's already very clear that Brigit is a Solar goddess. So is this saying that her brother is a Lunar god? I think so. Does this mean our "Celtic Apollo" (Fionn) is the Moon God? I think not. Read on.

Despite the switcheroo, Brigit still somehow pulls off Artemis' role as a "Midwife" to her own brother. In most versions of their joint birth myth, he is stillborn, and she is brought to him upon her own birth, to revive him. She's there for his first breath, even though he was born first.

Who's Her Brother, If Not Apollo?

If "born with a brother who is her celestial antithesis, and to whom she is midwife" is viewed as key in Artemis' birth myth, then who is Brigit's brother? There is no indication at all that it could be Fionn (~the Irish Apollo) - we've already explored how his birth works. It's someone else - a known brother of Brighid's.

J.Dolan of Taliesin's Map has previously identified the motif of a premature or traumatic birth as belonging to the "Moon-Immortality" God; in Greek myth this is Dionysus, in Hindu it's Chyavana (seemingly an incarnation of Soma). Dolan has demonstrated through extensive parallels that the Celtic Moon-Immortality deities are Welsh Arawn and Gaelic Midir. But, we lack birth-myths for both of them.

Midir has several Saint-Identities that really build out his character: Mél, Mobhí, and Brendan the Navigator. Their own Lives corroborate their cameos in Brigit's life (2). Brendan's life in particular indicates a close sibling relationship; she being the Holy, Solar-Aspected sister of Brendan, "Bríg" (further evidence that Brigit was born alongside him, not a mere stranger). The overlaps seem to also include a consort-relationship, as hinted above.

However, my suspicion is that Brendan/Midir is born with one aspect of Brighid, but woos and marries another; Irish myth does try to avoid outright godly incest. I suspect that the Dawn/Fire/Artemisian deity is his sister, and that he consorts romantically with another aspect, perhaps Étaín. Though, the Moon-Immortality god is often pretty polyamorous, it's possible Étaín is not Brighid after all, and he simply dates both.

Dolan was uncertain on Midir as being the Moon God or the Afterlife God, but the shared birth myth and the Afterlife-Quest of Brendan seem to suggest that he was indeed seen in this way, in turn suggesting that Étaín (AKA Bé Find, or "White Woman") is probably indeed the afterlife Goddess paralleling Persephone. However, that doesn't mean he was unambiguously "The Moon" - it seems most Proto-Indo-European religions were at least a little flakey on who exactly was the Sun or Moon, or viewed it as a very fluid role, so it could easily have been a contextual thing.

Liberator of Slaves

It's not as obvious with Artemis as with Roman Diana (or seemingly very similar deities like Feronia), but this cluster of goddesses have an association not only with Women but with the marginalised, and with liberation from slavery. Slaves could claim sanctuary at the temples of these goddesses - it is even claimed by ancient writers that one of her temples customarily had, as high priest, a former slave.

In addition to being an unusually charitable saint, Brigit is very much a liberator of Slaves. And we need to put this in context: as Blindboy Boatclub's award-winning 2024 documentary "Land of Slaves and Scholars" helped to communicate, Early Christian institutions in Ireland were very comfortable with owning and forcing labour from slaves. People may read Brigit freeing slaves as merely a Christian thing, but the Early Irish Christian religion didn't seem to have a big problem with Slavery. It doesn't come up in many other Hagiographies: Brigit is a conspicuous liberator of Slaves.

The Midwife, and The Irish Actaeon

There are two particular myths in Brigit's own story that strike me as being very distinctly Artemisian, besides her birth.

One is quickly told; she's supposedly the Midwife of Jesus Christ. This sort of anachronism is totally fine, don't worry. Anyway, her role as midwife, is very aligned with Artemis. Íta gets to hold and nurse Jesus, as she's a Mother-Goddess. Moling gets to hug and protect him because he's the God of Youth. But Brigit is the midwife, the master of the limneal time of birth (and, if she's Étaín, perhaps at the end, too).

The other myth is actually quite distinct to Artemis and Brigit. Artemis has a widely known myth where a guy called Actaeon comes across her bathing, and as he flees, she sets his hounds on him and he is devoured by them. There are many variations on this myth: some have him transformed into a deer, others have the transgression as something more substantial than "wrong place, wrong time". In any case, it's a classic Artemis myth.

Brigit, for her part, becomes a close associate of another bishop named "Conláed", who she invites to be her equal in the management of Kildare. This is the Goddess of independent femininity, asking a man to join her in running a place. To me, that strongly suggests a consort relationship. At any rate, she gives away some of their saintly equipment to the poor, and he sets out for Rome to get more stuff. Brigit is displeased at his leaving: she declares that he will "neither arrive, nor return" - and Conláed goes on to be devoured by wolves along the way.

It's worth noting that Wolves are generally not presented as attackers of humans in Irish myth. For wolves to devour Conláed is really an unusual event - maybe as much so as Actaeon being devoured by his own hounds. And in both cases, the curse is inflicted upon leaving an angry Goddess.

What She's Not

Leper-healing and Leprosy-Infliction is fairly common among the Saints, and Brigit doesn't do a lot of diseasing-to-death, so I feel there's not enough to say that Brigit, like Artemis, had "arrows of plague or death in childbirth" that she loosed on the world.

Likewise her overall aspect doesn't suggest a "Female Fionn", unless she had a whole other side that aligned her with Muirne or Sadb. If it was ever there, I'm not seeing the signs of it, yet. Artemis is so tied to Apollo, it's possible she adopted those traits from him. Brighid, meanwhile, seems closer to Midir, so perhaps we ought to expect thematic flow between them, instead.

I do see some possibility of a Brighid connection to deer (another classic Artemisian trait), though not in Brigit's own case. If we include the likes of Gobnait as a "Brighid" saint (and I do) - she is guided to her destination in West Cork by magical deer, for example. Unfortunately, deer are another of those symbols in hagiographies that are so ubiquitous that it's not always clear whether they were original to a deity. I think Gobnait's were. But many other deer-appearances around Brighid's saints are harder to call.

Wrap-Up

Kildare is obviously the heart of Brighid worship, but Brighid was also associated with holy wells throughout Ireland (3). You shouldn't have to travel far in Ireland to find somewhere associated with Brighid, although many were reconsecrated in the mid-20th Century to Mary instead.

Brigit's name, of course, has a long history of being given to kids and was one of the stereotyped names associated racially with Irish people during the massive Emigration during famine-times alongside names like "Paddy" and "Mick".

Variations on the name include "Bríd" and "Bridey". The name "Brighid" would be pronounced something like "Bree-id" in English orthography - a distinct dipthong missing in the shorter "Bríd" form.

One of her other possible names, Étaín, has been enjoying renewed use, often said or spelled more like "Édaín". Gobnait is nearly out of use entirely, and I've never met a Fand or a Lassair. Maybe they deserve a comeback.

Footnotes

1. This is probably down to the rich history of syncretism in the Mediterranian religions - it's been great for their diversity and colourfulness, but does make it a little harder to line things up neatly against others (Worth it).
2. Saint Mobhí seems not to appear in Brigit's Lives under his own name. However, Mobhí's whole thing is that he's born "table faced", but he gets cured of being "table faced" while studying under David in Wales. In one account deriving from perhaps a lost Life of Mobhí, he cures himself, maybe. In one of Máedóc's lives, he cures a man of having a face "As Flat as a Board" while studying under David in Wales. And in one of Brigit's Lives we also meet a "table-faced man" that she cures - possibly Mobhí.
3. I have my own suspicions, according to Dolan's findings on the seemingly related name "Breoghan", that "Brighid" may have had more cosmic origins in Celtic Religion and that her worship at Sacred Trees situated over Sacred Water might have been linked to this cosmic role.

Bibliography

• On the Life of St. Brigit, translated by Whitley Stokes (1877), originally published in Three Middle-Irish Homilies on the Lives of Saints Patrick, Brigit and Columba.
• Bethu Brigte. Donnchadh Ó hAodha (1978) (tr), Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
• Amelie Rowan, (2020) "Brighid, A Celtic Artemis?", available at: https://earthspirals.com/brighid-a-celtic-artemis/
• Ó'hÓgáin, Daithi (2006) "The Lore of Ireland"

Coming Up

6th Feb: Mél of Ardagh, bearing a small part of Midir's mythology, or possibly a forerunner god to Midir's Moon-Immortality role.

11th Feb: Gobnait of Baile Mhuirne, Cork - an Irish Hearth-and-Fire Goddess who is rather obviously a more local hypostasis of Brigid in her "Hestia" aspect. But also: Bees!

15th Feb: Saint Berach, a Fintan Saint with a key role in the Childhood of Lugh.

Followed by a breather until March! This is a lot of work, and I have other commitments. Please do share the work so far - it's motivating to see my work being enjoyed by others.