Imbolc, a new Dawn
The darkest hour is just before the dawn Thomas Fuller
[…]Bride put her finger in the river On the Feast Day of Bride And away went the hatching mother of the cold, And she bathed her palms in the river On the Feast Day of Patrick And away went the conception mother of the cold,[…] Carmina Gadelica, Alexander Carmichael
For Atlantic Celts as for many ancients, every day began on evening eve. Year began on Samhain [ˈsaʊ.wɪn] at the beginning of the darkest months in the year, in November. Before birthing to the light, child has to grow in the night of the womb.
Imbolc [ˈɪmbɒlk] means in Irish in the belly. This feast traditionally set on the eve of the first of February announces Spring.
The most common legend about Brigid is the one about her cloak. Brigid asks for land from the King of Leinster, one of the 4 provinces of the island grouped around the central one, Tara. She tells the King that the place where she stood, was the perfect location for a convent. It was near a forest where members could gather wood for the fire and pick berries. A nearby lake could provide water and the land was fertile.
The king mocked her and refused to grant her any land. Brigid prayed and asked God to soften the king’s heart. Then she smiled at the king and said, “Will you give me as much land as my cloak will cover?” The king thought she was joking and gave her his consent.
She then asked four of her sisters to take the mantle and rather than lay it flat on the grass, each one turned to a different cardinal point and began to run very fast, the mantle widening in all directions. Soon the mantle covered many acres of land.
“Oh Brigid,” cried the frightened king, “what do you intend to do?” “I am, or rather my mantle is, about to cover your whole kingdom to punish you for your wickedness to the poor.” “Call off your maidens. I will give you a decent piece of land.”
The saint was persuaded and if the king kept the purse strings tight in the future, she would only have to call his mantle to mind.
Although the coloring of this text is Christian, let’s not stop there. The text has been given the colour of the new ideology to pass the censorship. In reality, the copyist monks who relate this anecdote tell us a lot about the goddess Brigid.
Her mantle covers the earth, it is infinite and if Brigid had not commanded her companions to stop, it could have enveloped the whole earth. It is more than a cloak, it is not a simple fabric, it is an energetic weave of intersecting threads that restores the link with the earth. This weave connects all the inhabitants of the territory, all living beings. Everyone feels part of a whole, of a community woven of connivance, recognition, ways of life, codes, culture and manners. It shows the king that the land is not limited or divided, and domains are nothing but a convention. Here Brigid, magnanimous, shows her power since she accepts his proposal and submits her own power to the limits proposed by the king, not to submit to the king but to balance the forces. She does not use her power to abuse but just to get what is due to her. Her power is used to bring the king to his senses. This gives us an idea of the power of these beings, they expect us to act, they do not abuse our free will. It is more important for the king to change his point of view than to deceive him and then take everything. Beings that act in the invisible invite us to actions, show us their power but do not interfere with our free will.I t also invites us to inhabit our power. The Spirit is infinite and it slips into a form like a garment. This form is a frame but not a limit. We often confuse the frame with the limit. Brigid invites us to come out of the jar of ready-made thinking.
She is the being who guides us in the fabric of the living, the goddess of thresholds that takes us beyond the visible and certainties. Boudicca, the Celtic Queen of Iceni, used divination, releasing a hare, one of Brigid symbol, to interpret the direction in which it ran and later defeating the Romans. The hare is the bridge between worlds like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Everything in her is paradoxical, goddess of fire but of fountains too, she embodies the Earth without being goddess of the Earth. She reconnects the communities inside countries. A country is a local unity made of natural landscape, ground relief, animal trails, houses and roads, animal shelters. All life weaving through the land.
Sound is primordial, those sounds we have lost in an abstract language shaped by clerks. We are handicapped by a language that has cut itself off from the earth to embrace high levels of abstraction but has lost contact with reality, a language where concept takes precedence over sensation, it is now difficult to find the magical sounds, the vibration that set the worlds in motion. The Goddess Brigid gives us back the contact with the country, the landscape. She reinvigorates us in our role as peasants, as parts of the landscape, that were one with the landscape, in this land before machines, before the individual cut off from other forms of life, before the cut off from the past, from ancestors and the land, before the written word.
We are handicapped, we have been cut off from our roots and languages and we are foreigners everywhere. Today political powers tried to make us believe that we are individuals, but we are each of us, so singular, and our communities are here to embrace diversity. We are mostly connected to our ancestors and to the landcape in which we live. To find Brigid is to find this contact again, to find contact with the Here, with the landscape in which I walk every day when I take my dog for a walk or when I walk in the forest. The Goddess Brigid is not the Goddess of the Earth, she is the Earth.
I leave my house, on my right the old oak tree inhabited by chickadees, on my left the elder tree embraces the fig tree and the ash tree. I know these three ash trees by heart when I go up to the entrance gate, this old oak tree that sows as much as it can with the little ones around it, that helps them to grow, that encourages them. And these two hazelnut trees that guard the entrance. Then the path is lined with imposing lime trees, the first of which shelters a luminous entity, then other lime trees and cedars where my brothers the crows live, which warn all the fauna in the vicinity when a human or a predator passes by. I know the multicoloured woodpeckers, the jays in the oak, the chickadees, the snake and its pattern on the body, the squirrel, then the trees shelling out to the bottom of the valley, where the blackbird has made its home in the bush at the entrance to the path. On the right I have the hawthorn loaded in this autumn with dark red fruits that I pick to let them macerate in the cider vinegar. Sometimes I cross the donkey and the two mares that my neighbour puts to pasture just below the house. In the valley, the hamlet with its primary school and its pelote Basque fronton then the woods with its small river, welcome me. They welcome me because they are gifted with conscience, and even there I am only close to the surface.There I stand in my vision and I look at the forest, the immense forest of my memory.
Our personalities are fragmented, our attention scattered, in our present lives we are only scratching the surface of our possibilities, our talents, our multiple facets. Life guides us to privilege this aspect of ourselves, this talent to the detriment of the forest that inhabits us.
To reconnect with Brigid is to rediscover this continent, this forest beyond the edge, to reweave the threads that connect us with conscious life and Consciousness, to rediscover complicity with this nature where we come from, to return home. We enter into a concrete mysticism made of sensations and tactile contacts, of sensuality and magic words.
Ancient Atlantic Celts did not disconnect senses and spirit. Their spirituality is embodied. In February, in the northern hemisphere, the Sun is pale and fragile like a child, he is on the point of radiate. Their cosmogony was very sophisticated because they used a luni-solar calendar where goddesses were equal to gods, women to men. They incorporated the matriarchal cults that preceded them. Goddess Brigit was here before the Milesians, before the Gaels. She was a queen of the Sidhe, the otherworld where the Tuatha de Danaan withdrew.
Our times are about to live an Imbolc in the years to come, reconnecting with Nature, with our countries where we have to recreate communities to cooperate and redicover the pact between human and all life forms, a new dawn.