For all the (female) saints
So that women from these islands might remember who we are
This post is apparently too long to appear in full in an email (apologies!) so please do click on the title to read the whole thing on Substack.
What do women do in such times? There’s a lot of masculine energy in the West today. All the bros, fresh from their chest-beating bro-volution. There’s Zuckerberg, saying there’s actually too much feminine energy in the world, all cosied up with Elon and his cartel of loonies to make sure America’s never going to feel that way again. Back in the summer, the British National Police Chiefs’ Council warned that online influencers like Andrew Tate are radicalising boys into extreme misogyny in a way that is ‘quite terrifying’. I could go on, but you all know. Whatever your politics and perspectives, it’s beginning to feel as if women are being pushed back towards our dark ages AGAIN.
I’m not much interested, personally, in being an activist for political change. It’s not where my talents lie. Not that I don’t think it’s important – obviously, it is. It’s just that I’ve always been passionate about what we can do to resist the patriarchy (please, after all this, don’t try to tell me there isn’t one) in our everyday lives. I’m more interested in questions like what it means to be alive. What it means to be a woman, and alive. How to change lives, one life at a time. That’s what all my work is about, at the heart of it.
It’s no good declaring out of a vague sense of personal conviction that women are very fine. Or that once you heard an old story about how one of them was very feisty – maybe Japanese, or was it Yoruba? – surely it doesn’t really matter – and so you’ve taken it for your own. If you’re coming to the fight, you have to come to the fight armed – and armed with home-grown weapons. You have to understand the nature of the war, and the nature of the territory on which the war will be fought. It’s your territory, right? So then you have to understand the nature of the battle you’re fighting right now and, as the men say (and I’m married to one of those men) you have to prepare the battle-space. You have to have the tools – the craft, the insight, the learning – with which to protect yourself. You have to have conviction, and a vision of what victory actually looks like. That’s where our native stories come in. The stories that belong to us now, and always did. And that is precisely where I come in.
All of this is exactly why, as you all will (hopefully!) know, I’ve been writing about remembering, reclaiming and reimagining women’s stories for over two decades now. During all this time I’ve especially been focused on all the ways in which our native stories – predominantly stories from British and Irish myth and folklore, but also the wider European tradition – can inspire women to understand who we once were, and to believe in who we might again become. That was the precise premise of If Women Rose Rooted in 2016 – and much more of that, in the context of a beautiful new edition of the book, which will be released in time for next week’s monthly newsletter.1
In 2023 I created a couple of posts here in what was intended to be a series about some of the remarkable women in British (mostly English) myth and legend who I hadn’t previously included in any of my books (there are so many remarkable women!) but then got a bit sidetracked into older women’s stories from throughout Europe, during the writing and publication of my book Wise Women. There are plenty of feisty, homegrown British and Irish older women in that book too, but if ever there was a right time to pick up the wider threads again, it’s now. We need the tools and the inspirations more than ever. (And if you’d like to revisit those earlier posts, along with links to my books and a selection of my externally published articles, lectures and podcasts about women in our native myth and folklore, just check out the page below, here at The Art of Enchantment.)
So this week, I’m turning away from malignant male Tricksters and the like, to draw your attention to a couple of benign and beautiful women – women right out of our own rich native history in these islands – who changed the world for the better and filled it with love, rather than hate.
Women in Christian ‘wonder tales’
During my Master’s degree in Celtic Studies, one of my fields of inquiry was Celtic – or perhaps more correctly, ‘Insular Celtic’ (i.e. British and Irish) – Christianity and early Christian female saints. And it so happens that two of the saints I studied – my two favourite Irish female saints – are honoured in February.
Why would a mostly-non-Christian-but-not-entirely-not-Christian love a pair of Christian saints, and think their stories worth sharing with an audience of predominantly (probably) non-Christians? Well, for so many reasons. I love them because each of their stories in some way reflects the longstanding pre-Christian traditions and worldviews which were still very prevalent during their lifetimes, and especially their closeness to and reverence for the natural world and the Otherworld that’s entangled with it. We’re talking about the fifth and sixth centuries, so Christianity’s concerted conversion efforts were new and still on the rise in Ireland, and it hadn’t even remotely begun to wipe out the old ways yet. One of the ways in which the particular form of Christianity that developed in Ireland clearly distinguishes itself from most of the forms that developed elsewhere is the persistence of strong pagan elements in early Christian texts, and the respect of the Christian scribes who wrote them for (some of) the old traditions. Why that should be the case is a whole long essay in itself (which I’ll write sometime this year, because it’s genuinely fascinating – in one prominent text, even St Patrick instructs his followers to respect the old pagan stories) but for now, just trust me that it’s so. And that in these stories, as a consequence, we get the best of both worlds.
I also love these stories because, whatever their religious beliefs and practices, these were properly kick-arse women (or kick-ass, if you’re of a North American persuasion). Yes, they were wonderfully pious and all that malarkey, but as we’ll see in the sections below, they also had adventurous souls and fighting spirits. Driving off a band of cattle raiders, wielding your bees as a weapon? All in a day’s work for St Gobnait. And then there’s the beer-swilling St Brigid, turning lepers’ bathwater into a plentiful supply of the finest ale. (Sláinte. I think?) These are stories of actual women – of our very own ancestors – and they belong to all of us who have ties to these islands, and I believe there’s something for everyone in them, whatever your beliefs. Their stories go beyond beliefs and labels and all the other bullshit we use to tie ourselves up in knots or to excuse ourselves from engaging. They tell us something about how women from our native traditions were perceived at the time, and how they were honoured; it’s important for us, I think, to know something about that. And it’s very possible to learn something from it.
So the saints I’m writing about today are indeed St Gobnait, often known as the patron saint of bees and beekeepers, and St Brigid, who’s rather more famous and probably needs little introduction. I’m going to spend a little more time on Brigid, partly because there’s such a lot of interesting material on her, but also because I’m tired of reading poorly researched, inaccurate and highly selective articles here by Christian mostly-men who seem intent on trying to argue that there was no such thing as a goddess called Brigid who preceded the saint, and also that there was never any intrusion of pagan ideas into Christian texts in early Ireland.2 Unlike pretty much all of these people, I studied these subjects intensely at postgraduate level for three full years, at a respected university that specialises in them. And I can tell you very clearly that there is evidence of a goddess called Brigid who preceded the saint, and there was a great deal of intrusion of pagan ideas into Christian texts in early Ireland. So, even if you’re not yourself a Christian, there’s a huge amount that can be learned from them.
Before we get properly started, just a quick note on how we know what we know about these early saints. Their stories were written down, often long after their deaths, in texts known as hagiographies, or the Lives of Saints. Hagiographies weren’t what we might think of today as a proper biography. They often had the primary role of furthering a cult that had developed around the burial place or relics of a particular saint, and offering documentary ‘proof’ of their sanctity. These hagiographies, as fictionalised constructions whose purpose was more political and doctrinal than genuinely historical, probably only rarely reflected the detailed reality of their subjects’ lives. Nevertheless, they tell us a great deal about beliefs, about the culture prevailing at the time – and above all, about longings. And they’re usually incredibly beautiful and – certainly in the case of early saints like Gobnait and Brigid – decidedly magical. If ever you wanted to read a collection of Christian wonder tales with gloriously fierce heroines, these early hagiographies would be the place to begin.
