Diary - Brighid, Lady of the Stars

Sun: leo (fixed fire), 6:35 AM - 8:11 PM
Moon: waning gibbous, taurus (fixed earth)
Earth: cool and bright this morning, though the air is thick with mist lying low in the grassy valleys of the park

A reader of my website asked me to elaborate on my relationship with Brighid as a stellar goddess. This is what I wrote in response:

S--,

That is a great question - in both senses of the word! It's a really good one, and it's also a really BIG one! :) I'll do my best to answer it briefly here, and I also have an "about the gods" post coming up in my 30 Days of Druidry meme where I'll probably touch on it a bit more.

My relationship with Brighid is very mutable and seems to always be in flux, but one thing that has remained consistent is my connection with her "darker" aspect. Lady Gregory described the goddess as having a face that was one half fair and beautiful, and one half dark and ugly. Up until then, I'd only ever read about her "light" aspect, her connection with fertility and inspiration and the sacred fire in all its various manifestations. When I read that line by Lady Gregory, though, suddenly something "clicked" for me, and Brighid as a goddess became suddenly much more complex and compelling to me. This relationship between light and dark mingling and rubbing up against one another creates that liminal space that is so much associated with Brighid - especially the saint, who was born at dawn on the threshold of the doorway, a daughter of a Druid chief and a Christian slave who grew up to become the most powerful saint in Ireland, even more than St. Patrick, as well as the first and only female bishop (so the legends go).

The goddess, too, has these liminal light-and-dark aspects in her lore. As one of the Tuatha dé Danann, she was a goddess of light, order and civilization. Yet in the wake of the war between the Tuatha dé and the Fomorians, she marries Bres, King of the Fomorians (and half-Tuatha dé himself) in an attempt to make peace and forge an alliance between the warring sides. Together, they have a son, who is later killed in battle as a result of a betrayal, and Brighid wails for him in grief - the first keening that was ever heard in Ireland. So here you have these deep connections between light and dark, joy and sorrow, peace and war, in the mythology surrounding her, and over and over she occupies a liminal position or place between the two. I think this is what Lady Gregory meant by saying her face was half light and half dark. As for the saint, it was said that St. Brighid was amazingly beautiful, but she was committed to becoming a nun with the church and did not want to marry, so to avoid a suitor she gouged out one of her eyes in order to make herself ugly, so that her face became literally half beautiful and half grotesque (afterwards, she restored her own eye in an act of miraculous healing). I think this story from the saint, as well as some of the lore surrounding Brighid as a goddess, shows her willingness to "go dark" when a higher purpose calls for it. It reminds me of a poem by Wendell Berry:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

So all of that is the basis of my view of Brighid in the lore, which you probably already mostly knew already! My personal relationship with her, beginning with that realization of her darker aspect, has consistently included an understanding of her as sometimes swinging between these light and dark sides. My first most powerful direct experience of her presence was during a time when I was traveling, feeling ungrounded and lonely and cut off - I was sitting in a hotel room alone at night watching the rain fall steadily in an unfamiliar city, and I saw the lights of the city reflected in the water and had an overwhelming sense of her presence as this vast, deep awareness that was so.... big that she passed over me like I was a speck of dust caught up on the hem of her mantle. She wasn't just "represented" by the light in the water, she was the light in the water, and so in that way she was absolutely everywhere, she was a natural force that was utterly enduring and changeable, no matter what came and went she would be there in some form or another.

For a while, then, my relationship with her involved the more common light-focused aspects of sacred fire and solar energies. I began keeping her flame with a Brighidine Cill and working with her creative energies as poet. But I was rarely able to connect with her other two traditional roles - the healer, and the smith. Then late last fall, I was in conversation with some others in the Cill about her various aspects, and someone brought up the work of smithcraft and the forge as a place of creation and transformation. I forget exactly how it happened, but through the conversation and the "lobbing of lightbulbs" back and forth, we began to collectively come to an understanding of Brighid as a kind of primordial creatrix figure.

I guess one way to think about it is that her aspect as a solar deity kind of "withdrew" into a far distance and her darker aspect once again asserted itself. "To know the dark, go dark" - associations with the dark heat of the forge, with its noise and steam and sweat and dull ember glow, out of which springs suddenly the spark of light as the hammer strikes the metal on the anvil.... all these were images we came to understand were an aspect of her connection with the stars, those far distant suns that were only pinpricks of light, but that stemmed from a "big bang" in the primordial past, the same that gave birth to our own sun. The metaphor of "fire in the water" has some deep connections in the Celtic worldview with the basic stuff of creation and creativity - and this was not only reflected in the creative process of poetry (the spark of inspiration in the "watery" realm of emotions), but also the hot springs of healing and the blacksmith's process of tempering metal using both fire and water to achieve the sharpest edge. The stars themselves are like sparks of light in the vast ocean of night. They are inconceivably far away, and yet their light reaches us steadily, so reliably that they have shaped our understanding of the very structure of the universe (through both astrology and modern astronomy) and have been used for centuries as guides for sailors navigating on the sea with no stable landmark to follow. In this way, stars are themselves in a kind of liminal space and they draw us into that space as well when we gaze on them. Unlike the moon (which can sometimes seem so big that it's almost right on top of you!), the stars on a moonless night seem to exert their own kind of gravity. I've spent nights star-gazing on top of Mount Cadillac, the tallest mountain on the eastern seaboard, and more than once have felt that giddy vertigo of suddenly feeling the earth as a tiny speck of dust in the vastness of space, a speck too small to hold me down. Because the stars are so far away, and yet so present to us through their endless, self-giving light, they seem to pull us into this place suspended between intimacy and mystery.

So when I talk about Brighid's "stellar" aspect, this is a little bit of what I mean. I see Brighid primarily as a celestial deity - a Shining One, a being of the heavens, of sky and space. As a celestial deity, her "light" aspect is expressed through her role as a solar goddess, a goddess of the sun and the fires here on earth that we have the most connection and relationship with. But she is also a stellar goddess in her "dark" aspect, in which the light itself retreats into the surrounding darkness and becomes hardly more than the pinpricks of the stars, yet still with all the same power and mystery about it. In both senses, she has this liminal quality to her, and there is often overlap. (As a goddess of the dawn, she strides between night and day, with not only the rising sun but also the "morning star" of Venus as companions!)

So I hope that answers your question at least a little bit. :) This is still a relationship that I'm exploring, and like I said, it swings between light and dark for me quite a bit. Over the winter, her stellar aspect was especially strong for me, whereas in spring and early summer her solar/fire aspect was much more powerful and present to me. Now I seem to be in a place of balance in my relationship with her (and this is partly due, I think, to my evolving relationship with Manannan, Son of the Sea).... So, we'll see. :)

--Ali

Diary - Flamekeeping

Days of Note: Flamekeeping starts at sundown, Full Claim Song Moon

Sun: leo (fixed fire), 6:28 AM - 8:22 PM
Moon: *full moon, aquarius (fixed air)
Earth: perfect day of nearly cloudless clear skies and gentle sunlight, a relief from the heat and humidity of recent weeks, almost a hint of the autumn weather to come next month and later


At around 4:30 PM this afternoon, Jeff ended work early to go for an extended walk through the woods. The last couple days have been blissfully gorgeous weather, the sunlight golden and the air gentle and cool, lightened from the heat and humidity that have been weighing it down so much in recent weeks. Unfortunately, pain in my legs due to stress (and possibly low vitamins) have kept me sleepless for about three or four nights running now, and this morning I was overwhelmed with worries about the wedding next month and was awake at 5 AM sobbing and angry, so the day began roughly and I was still feeling utterly drained and unfocused even by the afternoon.

Our walk seemed to help that a great deal. We went for a very long walk through Frick Park, down the Upper Riverview Trail, then the Falls Ravine Trail, then left up what I think is called Biddle Trail that passes underneath Forbes and comes out at the far northern end of the park. We went all this way, then turned and followed the wide road that wound down again into the cemetery. Just as we were entering the cemetery - towards the back end, where huge fields of military graves marked with small, sun- and rain-faded flags and sometimes flowers meet up with the edge of the woods - we were stopped in our tracks by four, and then five young bucks moving cautiously out of the underbrush of the wood and into the open fields among the graves to graze in the shade of a large oak tree. They were only twenty or thirty yards from us, and we approached cautiously and sat down in the grass by the side of the road to watch. We must have sat there for a good half-hour as they grazed, every once in a while looking up at us with curiosity, sometimes one or two of them even approaching a bit closer, as though they were trying to figure us out. Jeff and I sat there quietly watching them, trying not to move too much. I thought of how the people in those graves, their bodies were decomposing and going back into the soil, and that soil nourished the grasses that now these deer were feeding on - and the deer so young, five young bucks moving together, there antlers still growing and soft with the sensitive velvet full of blood vessels and nerve endings that make them too fragile and delicate the spar with just yet. There must be something poetic in that.... but it was enough to sit there and watch, and to feel myself making eye contact with those graceful golden animals in the later afternoon sun as they gazed back at me.

Eventually, one of them came close enough that he must have gotten a whiff of our human smell, because suddenly he snorted and stalked back away a bit. The others perked up their ears and all gazed directly at us for a few minutes. Then the same buck snorted again, and then a third time, and haphazardly all five danced off together farther back away from the path and towards the woods again. Not in a rush, but just moving on. One turned back and came towards us several yards again in evident curiosity, but the buck who'd snorted came up behind him as though to watch or warn, and after both of them gazing at us for a minute longer to see if we would follow, both turned back and bounded after the others.

After that, we stood up again and walked on through the rest of the huge cemetery, where it felt so peaceful and empty and quiet. I guess not many people come through there - it's not like it's a park or anything, really, though it backs up to the park. I always imagined cemeteries to be gloomy and sad, but this one was peaceful and lovely, all the graves tended to, families grouped together and occasionally some large monument or beautiful statue or column among the scattered trees. We headed to dinner, then home again, at which point I started my Flamekeeping shift right around sundown.

Though I was still feeling tired (or maybe because I was feeling tired), I decided to do a full circle casting to open and close my ritual tonight. I declared peace to the four directions, then wove the circle with the three elements, then afterwards invited in the energies of the four elements and directions. I spoke the Bond of Druids or Gorsedd prayer, and then did a Three Realms working to connect to the energies of sea, sky and land. By this time, I felt deeply grounded and awake to the current running through me, and I directed that energy into my small pitcher of water, which I charged and then poured as a libation into the blue star fire bowl with the small gold floating candle in it (already lit), marking the center of the rite and opening the gateway. When I parted my hands during the last verse of the prayer to open the gateway, I could feel them buzzing with energy, and from then on during the ritual I felt this deep-pitched ringing or humming in my ears and a profound sense of presence that I haven't often felt in ritual recently. After opening the gateway, I sang my Lady of Star Fire chant as an invitation to Brighid, then hummed the other traditional folk song to her that I know (though I forget the name and can't pronounce the words in Irish Gaelic) while lighting the main Flamekeeping candle and charging up my Brighid's Cross pendant to wear.

After that, I sat in silent prayer for a while, thanking Brighid for her presence in my life and simply sitting with my gratitude. I let her know that I was stressed about the wedding, but so utterly grateful to her for her role in bringing Jeff and I together. I thanked her for all the blessings she's bestowed on me and promised to heed her lessons and do my best to work in her service, even during times when I felt cut off from her. This whole time while in prayer, I felt so close to her, as though surrounded by her embrace or protected all around by her mantle. Finally, I ended my prayers and used my Shadowscape Tarot deck to draw three cards in response to the question, "What lessons do you have for me that I might serve you better?" The cards I drew were, from left to right: Four of Cups, Six of Pentacles, Ace of Swords. (I have some initial impressions on what they might mean, but I want to ponder them more and write a bit about them tomorrow.) To end my ritual, I performed my peace meditation using the Druid Prayer for Peace, and then thanked the four directions and elements, un-wove the circle and ended the rite.

Tomorrow I plan to do some wedding related work along with Jeff - mostly, finishing writing the ceremony, weaving the handfasting cord and then blessing the cord and rings. I'll probably want to do a full ritual with cast circle for that process. I'm hoping I'll get a sounder sleep tonight, especially after such a long walk today. But right now it's getting late, so I'll wrap this up.

Diary - Badger Stone

Days of Note: Flamekeeping

Sun: leo (fixed fire), 6:10 AM - 8:43 PM
Moon: waning crescent, taurus (fixed earth)
Earth: hot and gray most of the day, with skies clearing to steamy blue later in the afternoon, at least a bit cooler than the past several days when we've had a heat advisory in effect and stiffing weather

Badger Stone

During my flamekeeping shift this time, I wanted to work more with Badger, especially considering my intuition that Badger has some kind of relationship with Brighid (though I'm not sure exactly what). Another connection that occurred to me last night as I was hillwalking (more on that in a moment) is that Lady Gregory describes the goddess Brighid as having a face which is half fair and beautiful, and half dark and hideous — and though it is not divided down the middle in half, because of the black-and-white strips you could think of Badger, too, as having both a light and a dark face.

So before my shift began last night, I went hillwalking through the woods with the intention of finding a stone for Badger to sit on my altar. I had gotten it into my head at some point that it was vital to find an icon or statue of some kind for Badger to "live in" on my altar, an object I could involve in ritual and give offerings to — and so I'd spent some time over the last week looking online for a suitable item. I found a few ceramic figurines and such, and one or two carved out of wood and painted, but none seemed to suit. Then the idea occurred to me that finding a stone to decorate on my own would be the best idea — I started referring to it as a "Badger Stone" and that just seemed right and fitting. So last night after dinner, about an hour before sunset and the start of my flamekeeping shift, I headed out into the woods to search for a stone, most likely from the cave that overlooks the ravine near the rock outcropping where I like to sit and meditate. I asked Brighid to guide my steps as I went, and I took along my pouch of herbal and seed offerings as well as a small jar of water to pour in libation to the land. I also brought along my iPod; I just downloaded some drumming audio to help with journey work, and one of the songs I found was from an album dedicated to different animal spirits and totems, this song for Badger. I put this song on repeat to listen to while I walked.

The trance state I ended up in was pretty intense, thanks in part to the drumming and in part to the intense heat. Walking through the woods was practically like being in a sweat lodge in any case, especially as I got into the dimmer areas back in the forest aways, and I was dripping sweat and pretty deep in a meditative state while I walked. I had the visceral, powerful experience of being able to "see" the spirits of things around me, faces peering at me from the trees and stones and fallen logs and bits of bramble and underbrush — not my imagination, but like the chaotic natural patterns of texture, light and shadow resolving themselves into very clear faces and shapes that didn't go away even after a second, closer look.

This actually made choosing a stone a bit difficult, because I was hoping to be strolling along waiting for a particular stone to jump out at me... but instead, every single stone I saw seemed to be alive and aware, asserting itself in my presence. Instead of being able to just pick up whatever stone appealed to me, I found myself having to use discernment and actually assess the character or presence of the stones, inquiring which would be amenable to becoming an altar object and "home" for Badger. Some stones just had too much self-presence to be appropriate (including one that seemed to practically beg to be brought back, so much that I almost chose it in the end, but then decided against it). When I made it to the place near the cave, I took a step or two off the path towards the entrance, and almost immediately saw a stone that looked perfect. I bent down and picked it up, then sat in the entrance to the cave for a time holding the stone and asking permission from the stone itself, the land and finally from Badger if this would be an appropriate stone to work with. At one point, Badger seemed to put his paw on top of the stone in my hand and weigh it down slightly so that I felt a warmth and pressure, as though he were trying to bring it closer for examination. Just after this, I noticed a pattern in the texture of the stone itself that seemed to be a face — like that of an old man — peering out at me, and I asked if he was the stone's spirit and, if so, if he was willing to either share his home with Badger or remain in the woods with the other stones. I felt like I couldn't get a clear answer — so I decided I would bring the stone back with me and do some discernment work through meditation during my actual flamekeeping ritual at sunset. So I left a small scattering of offerings at the place where I found the stone, and poured a libation there too (in part hoping to sort of coax the stone's spirit to stay in the woods and take up a new home there), and then I headed home.

When I got back home, I drank a ton of water and had some chocolate to help ground me and come out of trance. It did help immensely, though it took longer to get back to a normal state of consciousness than I was anticipating (I even saw the faces in the water rippling within my glass as I drank — how hard it is to eat or drink anything, or even leave offerings, when absolutely everything seems so alive and sentient and bursting with presence!).

About half an hour later, I got everything prepared for my flamekeeping ritual, lit my candles and incense and did my usual routine of prayers and welcome to Brighid as I begun my shift. This time, I also asked her help on this creative project that I was hoping to do during my shift this round. I took a moment to go into the bathroom and scrub down the stone I'd found and cleanse it in a mundane way — and then I came back to the altar and spend time smudging and cleansing it with incense smoke and Awen-breaths, turning it over and over so that the smoke clung and spiraled around it in the candle light. It was quite beautiful! While doing this, I did some light meditation seeking to know if this was a good stone for the work I intended. At one point, as I turned the stone over in my hands, I glimpsed it at an angle I hadn't seen it at before, and there in the dancing shadows made by the candle and the texture of the stone itself was a badger face peering at me! So I took that as the signal that yes, this would be a good stone to use after all.

After cleansing and smudging it, I did a Three Realms Working to connect with the energies of the land, sky and sea and blessed and changed the stone. I finished up my flamekeeping ritual and set the stone on the shelf above my bed next to the still-lit candle that would remain lit all night as part of my shift. (This may not have been a great idea — or perhaps I didn't ground well enough after my ritual work — because I found it difficult to sleep all night and tossed and turned with excess energy.)

This afternoon after Jeff took the kids back to their mom's, I returned to the work. I set up the paints and everything I would need, and I browsed some pictures of badgers online to make sure I knew what I was going for. Then, I put on my iPod again with the Badger drumming song on repeat, and got to work. First I traced an outline of Badger on a sheet of paper in pencil based on some of the images I'd found and the texture and contours of the stone, then I transferred the drawing to the stone itself with a pencil, which I then went over again with a thin black permanent marker. Next, I painted the white layer, followed by the black, and at last the nose and two small brown eyes. In between each coat/color, I allowed the paint to dry while meditating in light trance and smudging the stone further with incense burning nearby. The stone was almost complete — but I'd left the eyes a plain brown, not yet giving them black pupils. At this point, I stopped and made offerings to Badger, slicing off a hunk of chocolate and cracking open a beer to pour (these being pretty much the best food in the house at the moment), also eating a small piece of chocolate and taking a small sip of beer for myself to honor the place within myself where I would make a welcome home for Badger.

I then closed the curtains, turned off the lights and closed my eyes, going into deeper trance to the sound of the drums and seeking to present the stone to Badger for approval before putting on the finishing touch and bringing the stone "alive." I spent about fifteen minutes in trance, during which time I went to the Angel Oak tree, called to Badger and then followed him trundling through woods and field back to his burrow, where he seemed to be gathering himself up and straightening things as though in preparation. After a while of this, Badger turned to me and once again put a damp, heavy paw on my upturned palm where I held the almost-finished stone. This time, when he removed his paw, it left a wet, damp paw mark that seemed to absorb into the stone itself. He seemed to smile and laugh and joke about the "likeness" of the stone — and then we came back together and I danced him for a while in my own body (though I have to admit, Badger seems to expect a sense of rhythm and coordination from me that I don't possess!). After dancing Badger for a short time, I invited him into the stone itself. I put the finishing touches on the stone by giving the eyes dark pupils. I blessed the stone again with three Awen-breaths, and as the incense was just burning down, I headed outside into the backyard to place the plate of offerings amongst the flowers in the garden bed. While outside, I got the feeling that Badger wanted to be "introduced" to the world in his new stone, so I held the stone to each of the four directions with greetings of peace and blessings from the East, South, West and North, as well as the presence of the Three Realms.

Then I headed back inside to write this journal entry. It's about an hour and a half until sundown and the end of my flamekeeping shift, so I may write a follow-up post then (or maybe not). I feel as though I haven't done any divination in a while, so I might do a drawing... or maybe not. We'll see. This work on the Badger Stone feels like it's taken a lot out of me, so I might just rest for the remainder of the evening.

Below is a picture of the completed Badger Stone.