“The Celts, Nature and the Goddess” By Rev. Kim D. Wilson Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Poconos March 17, 2019

Back in the late 80s, I was a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Lehigh Valley. We had an interim minister, the Rev. Beverly Bumbaugh. She and her husband, Rev. David Bumbaugh, taught a course on ancient Goddesses. [show 2 goddess slides] Most early religions around the world were polytheistic, with gods and goddesses all intimately connected with the earth and the sky, and its seasons and other natural cycles.

I got a glimpse of an ancient world in which women were held in special regard because of their ability to create new life. The ancient religions in Europe had very close ties to Nature, which they saw as feminine, with its cycles of birth and growth, decay and death. The Goddess represented those cycles.

In our modern culture, it’s not always easy to imagine a life truly immersed in Nature, where gratitude naturally arises because of Nature’s gifts, and a life completely dependent upon Nature and vulnerable to Nature’s extremes. In the ancient world, different beings were responsible for everything in the human realm. In the ancient Celtic culture, which I’m going to be talking more about in a few minutes, everything in nature was interwoven with their lives. They recognized that the entire world was ensouled. There were gods and goddesses of every aspect of the natural world which underpinned everything in their daily lives.

We might wonder what happened to all those religions, with their gods and goddesses. And the answer, of course, is complicated, and there is a lot we don’t know and may never know. One thing that we can observe is that whenever two cultures come together, their respective religious beliefs undergo some kind of transformation.

In the case of the ancient Israelites, when they conquered the Canaanites in the second millennium BCE, they warned their people not to give any credence to the Canaanite goddess, Asherah. You can read some of these warnings in the Hebrew Bible.

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Some scholars of ancient near eastern religion think that before the second millennium BCE, Asherah or another goddess may have been the consort of Yahweh, the Israelites’ god. But by the time of the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible, they were adamant about purging their religion of any worship of the goddess, or of any other god.

There are other places in the Hebrew Bible that reveal a shift toward the patriarchal and a devaluing of the female. The creation story in Genesis began to be re-interpreted by some early feminist theologians in the 1970s as a discrediting of the feminine, casting former symbols of the feminine sacred in a negative light: the Tree of Life and its Fruit, the Mother of All the Living, and the Sacred Snake.

One theory of the shift away from goddess worship is that writing and reading brought about profound changes in religion and gender relations. Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Hebrews and other cultures had learned to record laws, stories, and other important information through writing. Leonard Schlain, who has written on the subject says, “One pernicious effect of literacy has gone largely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writing of any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them, women’s power in the culture.”

Apparently, becoming literate literally changes the brain’s wiring. While everyone has features of both, Schlain defines the feminine outlook as a “holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world” and the masculine as a “linear, sequential, reductionist” one characterized by abstract thinking. Schlain apparently makes a well-researched, compelling case in his book, which I have ordered. So I’ll have to get back to you with the details.

Another change that was involved in ushering in the era of patriarchy is the move from a hunter-gatherer, subsistence culture, toward agricultural societies with the cultivation of crops. Once there was a need to store food, acquiring and controlling resources became more important. Men were good at this. Whoever had more land, more buildings and food had more power. With more power concentrated among men came the desire to acquire and control more property and material goods, which created wealth, and thus different classes. And once

2 greed sets in, we all know how that goes… Woman then had less power, and important men would want to worship important gods, and not female deities.

I’ve been reading a book called, Goddess and God in the new World, by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, two early feminist theologians who managed to bring new voices into the male-only world of theology. Both were in the graduate theological studies program at Yale University in the early 70s. Carol and Judith were the only women in the program, and it could be a lonely place. Once, Judith Plaskow commented to a male classmate that she was having trouble making sense of some theologian’s work, and the young man said, “Don’t worry your little head about it,” as he actually patted her on the head.

Carol Christ writes, “In both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, God is imagined to have a body and to feel, to love and to suffer,” as humans do. Yet Christian theology had separated the divine from the body and from the world, from Nature, and placed it remotely in the sky, in some other dimension. God became transcendent and no longer immanent in the world.

These pioneering young women, Christ and Plaskow, persevered. They were united in their belief that theology was not all intellectual and abstract, as they were being taught at Yale, but that a holistic theology needed to be one that is embodied and experienced in the world.

Carol Christ later traveled to Greece to study ancient goddess worship in the Minoan culture. She began to reject Christianity as too disempowering of women. She began to embrace a concept of the goddess for herself. After much reflection and writing, which have opened the eyes of many thousands of women, and men, she has come to define the Goddess as, “the intelligent embodied love that is in all being.” During the early days of feminism and conscious-raising, Christ recognized that an understanding of the goddess, the sacred feminine, could help contemporary women reclaim their wholeness, and this is the work she has been engaged in since then.

In today’s Celtic Christian cultures, there are still remnants of earlier goddesses and gods, and their world and religion have retained deep ties with the natural world. [show slide of triple goddess]

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The poet, philosopher and Catholic scholar John O’Donohue wrote:

All through Celtic poetry you find the color, power, and intensity of nature. How beautifully it recognizes the wind, the flowers, the breaking of the waves on the land. Celtic spirituality hallows the moon and adores the life force of the sun. Many of the ancient Celtic gods were close to the sources of fertility and belonging. Since the Celts were a nature people, the world of nature was both a presence and a companion. Nature nourished them; it was here that they felt their deepest belonging and affinity. Celtic nature poetry is suffused with this warmth, wonder, and belonging.

He offers as an example one of the oldest known Celtic prayers:

I arise today Through the strength of heaven, light of sun, Radiance of moon, Splendor of fire, Speed of lightning, Swiftness of wind, Depth of sea, Stability of earth, Firmness of rock.

The Celtic culture at one time influenced most of Europe [show map slide].

Through various wars and take-overs of land, the Celts now occupy only the areas of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany and maybe a few other places.

The Irish Celts were never taken over by foreign powers, which may be why they’ve been able to retain their strong culture. We’re told that Christianity came to Ireland by way of St. Patrick, which isn’t entirely true. He wasn’t the first Christian to come to Ireland. But Patrick was apparently more successful than his predecessors.

Excerpt, adapted, from Philip Freeman, author of a book on the life of St. Patrick:

The historical Patrick was a spoiled and rebellious young Roman citizen living a life of luxury in fifth-century Britain when he was kidnapped from his

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family’s estate as a teenager and sold into slavery across the sea in Ireland. For six years he endured brutal conditions as he watched over his master’s sheep on a lonely mountain in a strange land. He went to Ireland an atheist, but there heard what he believed was the voice of God.

One day he escaped and found passage back to Britain on a ship of pirates. His family welcomed back their long-lost son and assumed he would take up his life of privilege, but Patrick heard a different call. [He spent fifteen years studying to become a priest.] He then returned to Ireland to bring a new way of life to a people who had once enslaved him. He faced opposition, threats of violence, and criticism from church officials, [who did not approve of his methods.]

[Patrick respected the traditions and ways of the people, and encouraged them to adopt a form of Christianity that did not discourage their veneration of nature, and did not expect them to completely give up their existing religious practices and beliefs. ] From somewhere deep inside him, he found the compassion and forgiveness to work among a people who had brought nothing but pain to his life.

Later on, Christian authorities tried to stamp out pagan worship and practices, but they were not entirely successful. And at least one goddess morphed into a saint. [show slide of goddess/saint Brigid]

The Celtic Goddess Brigid and the Catholic Saint Brigid probably represent the same mythological being. The transformation from goddess to saint allowed Brigid to survive the Christianizing of the Celtic world. [fiery Brigid slide]

Excerpt, adapted, from an Article, on the Celtic Goddess Brigid:

Brigid is one of the most venerated deities in the Pagan Irish pantheon. The name Brigid means exalted one, while her ancient Gaelic name, Breo- Saighead (Broy Sag-ed), means fiery power or fiery arrow. She embodies the element of fire. According to the Irish story, when Brigid was born, she had flames shooting out from her head, and through them, she was united with the cosmos. [triple Brigid slide]

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Worshippers sometimes call Brigid the “Triple Goddess” for her fires of the hearth, inspiration, and the forge. She also has ties to water and to the earth itself. So many people also call her the Goddess of the Well, and Mother Earth. Wells are sacred because they stem from the womb of the earth.

As Christianity spread throughout the Celtic lands, many properties of the older religions were Christianized rather than eliminated. Because Brigid was an integral part of the lives of Celts, the solution was to create a version of her that would fit into the Catholic religion. Hence, a new story emerged:

St. Brigid of Kildare was “born” around 450 AD to a Pagan family. Her family converted to Christianity with the help of St. Patrick, an equally important saint in Ireland. The Lord inspired Brigid as a young girl and her generosity and compassion reflected her unusual virtue.

The king recognized her holiness and gave her a plot of land where she built a church under an oak tree. It was called Kill-dara (cill dara) meaning church of the oak tree (the area is now called Kildare). Seven girls soon followed her to Kill-dara and they started a convent at the tree. This is one of the ways Brigid sanctified the Pagan with the Christian: The oak was sacred to the druids, and in the inner sanctuary of the Church was a perpetual flame, another religious symbol of the druid faith, as well as the Christian. Gerald of Wales (13th century) noted that the fire was perpetually maintained by 20 nuns of her community. Gerald noted also that the fire was surrounded by a circle of bushes, which no man was allowed to enter.

February 1st is the Celtic festival day of Imbolc, which included worship of the goddess Brigid. And the annual Saint Brigid Feast Day takes place the same day. As part of the festivities, the Irish make Saint Brigid’s crosses of rushes or reeds and put them in houses for protection and luck. The form of these crosses, one of Brigid’s most important symbols, looks very much like the motif which ancient proto-Germanic people used as a symbol of life, fortune, and blessings.

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Pagan roots still exist today at many Irish wells that Christians had dedicated to St. Brigid. Those wells were originally connected with the goddess Brigid. The most significant wells are those that exist near a large tree, as there is deep and ancient reverence for sacred trees and wells.

The Irish annual pilgrimage to many of Brigid’s wells falls on the first Sunday in August. This day is a pre-Christian holiday called Lughnasadh (loog-NA-sad), after the god Lugh. Lughnasadh is one of the four seasonal holidays of the ancient Celts, and celebrations abound in honor of Lugh and the fall harvest.

The powerful Brigid still endures so strongly that it is now impossible to tell where the goddess ends and the saint begins.

Whether Brigid or another female image, what meanings might an image of the Goddess, the sacred feminine, have for us today? To me, the Goddess represents wholeness within oneself. For women, especially, it can be a powerful symbol of legitimacy, of mattering, of belonging. Embracing the sacred feminine, for a woman, can mean finding her full place in the world. The Goddess can help men, too, detach from the unhelpful teachings of patriarchy. For everyone, it can mean a return to embracing all of life, to a deeper recognition of the beauty of Nature and a reverence for the earth.

Imaging the sacred as feminine –and it doesn’t have to be to the exclusion of male images, but the feminine as sacred even has the power to move people of all genders, in our patriarchal society toward one in which all people and all of life matter, one in which we resolve our differences not by war, but by setting aside our deadly weapons and listening to one another with open hearts. A world in which reverence for life is our paramount value.

I close with these words by Carolyn McDade:

“I often wonder what it would be like if we dared to love this life –

7 the fragile and the vulnerable, the endangered, daring to be humble before the magnitude of our beginnings, daring to lean our species into a stubborn and pliant wonder, until reverence shines in all that we do – until we live an economics of reverence, a theology of reverence, a politics of reverence – until it permeates education, development, and health care, homes and relationships, arts and agriculture – a reverence for life, for planetary, social, and personal wholeness.

This is our purpose now. May we do it well, with thoroughness and love.”

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