Mother of Sorrows (Part 2): Brighde

I named my second daughter Cecilia Amaris Brighde because Amaris means “given by God” and Brighde (pronounced Breed-ah) is the Gaelic spelling of Brigid, for St. Brigid of Ireland, who has always been a special saint to me. St. Brigid is one of the patron saints of Ireland (with St. Patrick), and is patroness of midwives, newborn babies, cattle, and dairymaids. Born in 451 AD, St. Brigid performed many miracles and works of charity and eventually founded a church and convent in Kildare, Ireland. There, she and nineteen of her nuns tended a sacred flame that represented the light of Christianity brought to the world.

It is further believed that St. Brigid of Ireland was named for Brigid, the Celtic goddess who was the embodiment of fire, the daughter of the god of earth and the goddess of fertility. As goddess of fire, the sacred fires of Brigid burned, making her the goddess of the forge, the hearth, and inspiration. She was additionally the patroness of the healing arts, fertility, poetry, music, prophecy, agriculture, and smithcraft. Brigid was also associated with the sacred cow and its life-giving milk, as well as the oak tree. When St. Brigid established her church at Kildare, she built it under an oak tree that was dedicated to the goddess Brigid. The word Kildare, Gaelic cill dara, means church of the oak tree. There, St. Brigid continued to tend the sacred fires that burned to the goddess Brigid, although now she tended them for the purposes of Christianity.

When I was 20, I studied abroad in Ireland and became fascinated with the mythical confluence of the goddess and the saint, Brigid. At the time, I was also studying the triple-aspected goddess of the Celts, an all-powerful goddess that manifested in the three stages that define womanhood, namely: maiden, mother, and crone. The maiden aspect of the goddess reveals itself in the unripe promise of the female body, the budding beauty of springtime, the fragile purity of the untouched virgin girl who shows all the potential of becoming fruitful in her femininity. The mother aspect of the goddess reveals herself in the summertime ripening of her pregnancy and in the autumnal harvest of the new life manifested in her newborn child. She is bountiful, beautiful, fruitful, and the embodiment of the fullness of womanhood, in its blood-red connection to life at its most elemental core. Finally, the crone aspect of the triple goddess reveals herself as the gradual and inevitable decline of fruitfulness, the advent of menopause, the cessation of bleeding, and the wintry onset of age-induced infertility. The crone is associated with the mystical knowledge of death, since she now becomes keeper of the knowledge of the end of life, rather than the embodiment and passage of its beginning.

Personally, I have always associated the goddess Brigid with the mother aspect of the triple goddess. Brigid, goddess of flame and fertility, is ripe and abundant with life and is moreover connected with blood, fire, and the color red. The triple goddess is the archetype of womanhood, from its beginning to its withered end. She is the embodiment of the earthly story that, if permitted, is played out in every woman’s body and has been from the beginning of time. Her body echoes the timeless story of the seasons, witnessed in endless repetition in the natural world surrounding us. She is perpetual change in her journey to become the passageway to life; she begins as a locked gate that evolves into the open and abundant garden, which eventually and inevitably closes, the passageway no longer leading to life and light, but to death and renewal.

A salient focus here is that the triple goddess is the means by which both life and death are mediated in this reality. Her body is the elementary substance used to create new life–her blood the nourishing drink by which the fetus grows and develops. And it is precisely because of this profoundly deep connection to life that she becomes mediator of death–of the passageway to life beyond life. Once the bleeding that indicates fertility ceases–once she goes through menopause–she becomes more ethereal in nature, as though she has one foot in this reality and one foot in the reality to come after death. Because she contained life within her and gave of herself to bring it into being, she now possesses secret knowledge into the afterlife.

The triple goddess brings us into close contemplation of the sheer wonder of the female body. When born, a baby girl contains within her ovaries all of the eggs she will ever produce in her lifetime. This means that when I was pregnant with both Lizzy and Cecilia, I carried not only my daughters, but also my potential grandchildren within my body. In this, we see the unfolded mystery of mother within mother, life within life, echoing and reverberating ceaselessly through the generations. As women, we can little understand the mystery and wonder inherent in our bodies. We did not create them; we simply live by their rules, and play out the stories written into our marrow in the timeless abyss before creation.

So, are we helpless to this? Victims? Or are we agents in this biological imperative and spiritual mission which we have so unconsciously inherited? My instinct is to answer both since we cannot control the laws which govern the physical plane anymore than we can control the fact that we all must die in the end; however, it does seem that we have choices along the way, choices whose variations can extend at times into the countless millions.

But one thing is clear: motherhood brings us closer to death. There is little in this world that is able to bring about such profound and reverberating joy as the birth of a child. And there is little in this world that can bring about such perpetual and devastating sorrow as the death of a child.

As mothers, the natural course of life is supposed to carry us through becoming grandparents (and ideally, great-grandparents), and this course takes the path of virginity, motherhood, and age-induced infertility. Our experiences as mothers give us the wisdom to become the ethereal crone, who is herself a type of oracle of death. But what happens when death comes in at the peak of the motherhood experience, far before the crone has begun to emerge? What happens when the unthinkable happens– when we lose the child who was herself supposed to walk through life as maiden, mother, and crone?

Presumably, what happens is that the mother and the crone conflate in the mother’s body, and the mother becomes not just a symbol of the richness and renewal of continuing life, but a brimming and bleeding vessel in which impossible sorrow and indescribable joy live side by side, in which life and death are constantly warring for supremacy, and in which the woman herself is traversing the unknown realms of how to mother both the dead and the living.