Before the time of Bríd the saint there was Bríd the pagan goddess, and at times our ancestors got them confused. As well as founding the great church of Cill Dara (Kildare) that rivalled Armagh, Bríd was believed in Scots Gaelic tradition to have been the daughter of poor parents who worked in the inn at Bethlehem, where she assisted at the birth of Christ and became his foster-mother, muime Íosa. He was often affectionately known as ‘dalta Bhríde’, foster-child of St Brigid. As a result she was invoked by expectant mothers. Her feast day is said to mark the birth of spring: Lá `le Bríde breith an earraigh. Raven, rook and mallard are said to prepare for nesting now:

Nead ar Bhríd; ubh ar Inid; éan ar Cháisc;
Mura bhfuil ag an fhiach, beidh an bás aige.

A nest at St Brigid; an egg at Shrove; a chick at Easter;
if the raven does not have them he will have death

Sochraid was a ‘retinue’ or ‘body of friends’, but is now kept to describe a funeral procession.

Our pagan ancestors believed that the winter half of the year began at Samhain, but that the summer and winter halves did not quite meet. The result was that the alltar or otherworld was open for a time so that the dead could come out or the living go into the sidh (where the sí lived: the fairies, not little men and women, but people of power and malevolence, grace and beauty, capable of doing damage with their tricks). The feasts of All Saints and All Souls were created to Christianise a superstition—which has never quite died out.

A PRAYER FROM IRISH TRADITION

Life can be difficult for any of us at times. There are moments in the life of all of us when we feel the need to call out for help, for support, for someone to be with us on the journey. In a prayer poem written by one of those being transported from Tyrone to Connacht in the seventeenth century, a galaxy is called upon.

THE ASSUMPTION OF OUR LADY

Known in Irish as Lá Fhéile Mhuire Mór san Fhómhar “the great feast day of Mary in autumn’, or ‘at harvest-time’, (more accurately perhaps), this day has been for a long time one of the great feasts of the Irish year. In an agricultural society especially its name was redolent of a year’s work brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Because it was a church but not a bank holiday, it became a great day for farm people to go shopping, and it was the day when many mothers set out to get children outfitted for the new school year.

Devotion to Mary goes back a long way in Irish history. Witness, a poem written about the year 700 by Blathmhac son of Congus (in Irish originally):

Come to me, loving Mary, that I may weep with you, my very dear one.

Alas that your Son should go to the cross, he who was a great diadem, a beautiful hero.