[:en]Thoughts on the Genealogy of Brighid[:]

I have been told that speaking the Genealogy of Brighid in the original Scottish Gaelic is a decent way of worshipping her. I will not do this however. Don’t get me wrong; I know it is a time-honored and traditional prayer and I would honor it respectfully if someone else said it, but I cannot say it with sincerity, and I would rather not be insincere in matters of faith.

The thing with genealogy in Ireland is that the Celtic chieftains derived their authority from deities or heroic humans that they claimed descent from, so the church couldn’t totally rewrite their ancestry without causing political chaos. On the other hand, they also felt the need to have everyone somehow descended from Noah. So they basically scrambled everyone’s genealogy. This is one reason why Irish mythology makes no sense.

We can’t know who the human woman who because Saint Brigid was really related to, but I’m sure she was more related to the Fae than to anyone in the Old Testament.

My sources say that it is disrespectful to rewrite or ‘Paganize’ old Gaelic verses. I beg to differ. The Genealogy and other verses are taken from the Carmina Gadelica as recorded by Alexander Carmichael. Carmichael wrote the Gadelica in 1900, so it’s hardly ancient. Even if he didn’t embellish it (which he did) it would only be a recording of lore as it was presented to him at that time. Traditional yes, but not necessarily centuries old or universal. Furthermore, it was probably  a variation of a pagan prayer to begin with. After all, Brigid the goddess was honored long before Brigid the Saint was ever born.

I resist the notion that the text of any written material is infallible or sacred – though they may speak of sacred things – and Carmichael’s writing is only 122 years old. Saint Brigid is said to have lived from roughly 420-525 AD. That’s over 13 centuries earlier – plenty of time for a traditional oral prayer to have gone through multiple renditions before reaching Carmichael’s ears. If he  hadn’t written it down and frozen it in time, the prayer would likely have seen newer variations since. That’s how folklore works. It’s a living thing.