Normally, there are three ways to find out about the past: somebody told you; you read about it; or a person dug it up, brought it to the museum, and received an expert opinion.
There is, however, a fourth way, perhaps not as widely recognised for its worth though often more valuable: folklore. For one thing, this doesn't pass through the very close mesh of censorship, as imposed by Authority on the Authorised Version of History, usually written, rewritten (or "revised") by the conqueror or the neo-colonists.
The word "folklore" is about 150 years old. The Irish words, seanchas and bealoideas, are much older. An apt illustration of what I mean is the mythology of Ireland, what the people believed.
The official view, that of the dominant Irish class, reaching us through manuscripts, and learned books by Celtic and Latin scholars, is permeated by Christianity. But the ordinary people did not matter politically so no great attempt was made to sterilise their minds, and they continue here as elsewhere to carry a great body of tradition. Often, this stretches back to the Neolithic.
Thus, analysis of the folklore gives us a picture of beliefs radically different from the approved version of the Churchists. We are helped in that analysis by the comparative method, for, thanks to the basic unity of man, the human mind is the same everywhere.
Such analyses may illuminate archaeology also, as in Gertrude Rachel Levy's The Gate of Horn. In O Cathain's Brigit the theory is tested and proved impeccably: nowhere else have we so complete a portrait of this aspect of the Great Mother, Mother Goddess, Holy Woman, Spring Goddess, call her what you will.
O Cathain writes: "As is by and large the case with its sister festival, Lunasa, the early literature is silent regarding the manner in which the festival of Brigit was actually conducted. Consequently, in striving to conceive a picture of it, we are forced to depend heavily on the documentation provided in the folklore record. Fortunately the source proves capable of elucidating the nature of the festival in an amazing variety of ways."
Brigit, the saint (451 or 452525) is almost impossible to pick out of the folklore because of the powerful image of the goddess, in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, in the glowing tapestry of the mind covering some 3,000 years.
The goddess reaches history in the story of a Celtic people, the Brigantes, who would appear to have originated in what today we call Switzerland, where the name, Bregenz, commemorates them.
In the Iberian Peninsula they founded Brigantium (now La coruna); in Britain, Eboracum (now York); and in Ireland settled in south Leinster and Donegal.
The goddess of the Brigantes would seem to have been taken over from a pre-Indo-European people but early enough was stitched into the Irish Celtic panorama as a trinity of sisters, daughters of the Dagda, according to Cormac Mac Cuillenain, in the 9th century.
The word Brigit would seem to be related linguistically to English "bright", Lollans "bricht". This was one of the main attributes of goddess and saint, blazing in folklore like the Kildare eternal fire circling the convent.
My criticisms of the book are few: I would have preferred a larger typeface, better proof-reading, orthodox paragraphing (and what about Gobnait?). However, such points cannot take from an outstanding achievement and an entertaining as well as scholarly work.
Prof O Cathain, inter alia, is dean of the faculty of Celtic studies at UCD, and took over from Bo Almqvist in the folklore department.
Deasun Breathnach is the author of Chugat an Puca
