It’s time to settle back into our celebratory year and get ready for Imbolc, for Brigid’s day. I’m going to post some ideas for how-tos, some Facebook Live videos, and some personal and group rituals. I’m starting today with a paper I wrote for the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology Conference. It’s called The Hem of Her Cloak.

The Hem of Her Cloak: How Modern Brigid Worship Spread into the Southern Highlands of Appalachia

By H. Byron Ballard

Here in the western mountains of North Carolina, on the buckle of the Bible Belt, we are building a Goddess temple.  With our wide and joyful feet,  we will dance it into being in that intoxicating mixture of straw and sand and Southern red clay that is called “cob.” It will sport a living roof and a stone foundation laid by the local Masonic order. There will be gardens, a bread oven in the yard and composting toilets, because we are practical folk.

We understand that what we are doing is quite impossible, like the flight of a bumblebee. And yet, as our industrious fat friends do, we are finding ways to fly. How is this possible–in Flannery O’Connor’s “Christ-haunted landscape” of rural South? Perhaps we cling to the hem of Brigid’s cloak, for she is so present in this place, brought by her Scots-Irish lovers and their mothers and grandmothers.

Let me weave you a story, if I may.

In the ancient mountains of western North Carolina, in the southern highlands of Appalachia, many of us come from hardy–and poor–Scots-Irish stock and we can succumb to the old cultural maladies of too much drink and too much temper. We can be stubborn and isolationist, but we can also be generous and welcoming.

We are a paradox, to be sure.

Many of us cling to the old harsh tenets of a Christianity that is proudly exclusive and no-nonsense: a religion that mourns births and rejoices at funerals. These spiritual practices range from simple foot washing to speaking angelic languages to dancing with venomous snakes.  Within that framework is often found the cultural practices of an earlier and wilder people. The physical and spiritual healing techniques of our Celtic forebears blended with Cherokee herbalism to create a unique commingled spirituality, honored still in the remote fastnesses of rural counties. This wise-woman tradition is old folk magic  practiced within the framework of this old-time mountain religion.

We approach life with this patchwork coat around us–our Celtic and Native cultural practices–which include the strangled grief of traditional mountain music–and this strong claim of spiritual rightness.

Those of us who practice the earlier forms of Celtic spirituality examine the effects and meaning of the Gaelic diasporas. It is fitting that we turn away from the tribal people in our own land, though their folkways and deep roots are appealing, and dig into the cultural history that we’ve nearly forgotten.

We look Eastward, to the lands from which our immigrant Ancestors came. We break out the fiddles, we frequent Highland games, we stand in ragged circles under a sickle of a moon. We absorb the collections of Carmichael and we study the lore, and try to make sense of what was there before there was Catholic and Protestant, before there were Druids–when we lived in tribes of our own and were part of clans bound by kinship, by blood.  Our nomad spirits look for different sorts of deities, our eyes glance away from the man on the cross and his stern desert father.

We lean on our kinfolk, including our Ancestors, and we look for different expressions of the Divine.  In my neck of the woods, we have turned, in several instances to Brigid.

Who is she and who was she and how has she found such an outpouring of honor in this land far from the green fields of Ireland? We’ll dive into that clear water and see what is to be seen beneath the surface of this sacred well of memory and lost desire.

The legends and tales spun round Ireland’s Number Two Saint are numerous, charming, sometimes bizarre. How could it be otherwise?  The older legends were adopted whole-cloth when she transitioned into a Christian holy woman and daughter of a Druid  from her older guise as Goddess of water, creativity, smith craft, beer, dairy products, midwifery, fire, oats, brooms, honey, poetry and healing.

As a saint, she is remembered for her healing and spiritual leadership. One of the first convents in Ireland is attributed to her: a monastic center with women on one side and men on the other, led by the Saint herself. She acquired the land for the monastic center, however, as only a Goddess would, but we’ll look at that story a little farther into our weaving.

Even though her hagiographies place her in the 5^th century of the Common Era, there is also a story of young Brigid going into the barn to milk the cow and being whisked back in time, where she acted as midwife to the Blessed Virgin, bringing into the world her sacred son.  One assumes she wiped her hands after swaddling the baby and returned to her own barn to finish the milking.

Immigrants came into my corner of the Appalachians from the north of Ireland in the 1700s, my own forebear on that side arrived in 1832–before An Gorta Mor–before the Great Hunger that poured the wealth of Ireland into the wide reaches of the world. These dour Protestants would have flinched to think they were opening a doorway into the southern mountains, a doorway through which would step–in the 21^st century–a Catholic Saint who is also a Pagan Goddess.

For Brigid belongs as much to us as to our sisters in Kildare Town. She is the perfect Goddess for mountain folk. She’s resilient, She has a stout working knowledge of many disparate things. She is a yarb (herb) woman and a cove-doctor,  knowing all the herbal remedies for all the mountain ills. She is fire and water, and the broken fresh earth of a hillside spring.

One of the first Bridey sign in the hill country was the formation of Jill Yarnall’s Brigid coven. Yarnall–a good Methodist girl from coal country–was a woman with similar deep and tangled mountain roots as my own, with a similar love for Irish Brigid.  The group was formed “to honor a goddess that many in the group could relate to from personal heritage…in most covens, the idea of “goddess” is fuzzy at the least or each woman comes to the circle with their own image of the goddess, at the best.” Yarnall wanted a single focus for the corporate ceremonies of the group and to tap into what she called “the gestalt of the awakening of Brigit in order to give that some power.”

More years ago than I can remember, I read an article in a national Pagan magazine about a Pagan woman who traveled to Ireland and met with a Catholic sister who was a devotee of  St. Brigid.  This chanced-upon story set me on a strange ramble: I set my sites on Ireland soon after, where I picked up a dented car in the port town of Dun Laoire and headed south to the home of Brigid, sleepy Kildare Town. In the original Gaeilge it is Cill Dara, the Church of the Oak and it sets on a swath of land called the Curragh, a five thousand acre plain that serves as home to the Irish National Stud, where the thunder of heavy hooves is a regular occurrence, in the fields where those enormous Irish Thoroughbreds graze.

We stayed in the same housing development as Sister Mary and her sister Sister Rita and we walked down to their little house on the off-chance of meeting them.  It was the beginning of a decades-long friendship between a Wiccan priestess and an Irish nun. 

The experience of Kildare and Brigid and the inspiration of the re-lighting of an eternal flame was compelling and loaded with symbolism and import.  I returned to the mountains, thoughtful about the spiritual nature of that ancestral place and how it jibed with my own land there in the southern highlands of Appalachia. Smelling vaguely of sheep poop and turf fires, I returned bearing a tiny bottle of water from Brigid’s Well and candles lit and smoored at Her eternal flame.

That led me, in turn, to make my dedication to Brigid and to set the first and last part of  that commitment in a land my ancestors left almost two centuries ago. And that veneration for a Goddess-turned-Saint brought me to a local spring and ruined springhouse made of stones, which those of us who love Her have dedicated to Her. We dress the spring with flowers and candles in Her honor, remembering also the land spirits and the Ancestors in the woods around it.

She is, all in all, a thoroughly magical and exemplary being, who may have ridden westward with older Ancestors in the vast Proto-Indo-European migrations, and into the far corners of rural Appalachia.  What followed was a pivotal event, a portal that opened on the next pathway. 

Due in part to my own experiences in Ireland and to a Brigidine coven located in AVL, my community held a public ritual in honor of the season.  We didn’t say it was Pagan  or Wiccan but billed it simply as a celebration of Brigid of Ireland, the Gold-Red Woman.  We adopted many of the traditional Irish parts of Brigid devotion and our congregation included Pagans and Goddess-worshippers, Catholic and Protestant Christians and sundry folk of Irish extraction.  One of the traditional parts of this celebration consists of pouring milk over a statue of Brigid.  We invited the congregation to do that–to honor the Woman and the spring and to be mindful of what they wanted to harvest in the new cycle.  It took a long time, because those fifty people were hungry for time spent in that energy.  They murmured prayers, they cried, they touched the statue and left some of their own pain and anxiety with this ancient symbol of healing and purification. There was fire and water and song and smoke. We prayed our prayers in patchy Gaeilge and tied clouties–those odd prayer flags–to a branch, and planted the branch near the old spring, where the request would be anchored to the place of healing and keep it before the eyes of the spirit of the waters. 

The founding of The Mother Grove Goddess Temple in 2009 brought all these strings of love and history into a green and hallowed place. The temple brings together a broad cross-section of stakeholders that includes clergy and lay leaders, artists and designers, gardeners and herbalists. 

Our vision is a sanctuary where people of all faith traditionsmay safely celebrate the Divine Feminine, a natural outgrowth of a thriving Earth Religions community that must make do with ceremonies, rituals and rites of passage held in public parks and rented halls.  We are planning an environmentally-sensitive building that incorporates the latest green technology while fulfilling the requirements of the building codes for houses of worship. It will be sited on land that includes xeriscaping, solar energy and water catchment systems, as well as outdoor gathering and worship space.

We are richly blessed with a growing pool of talented and passionate creators, willing to share their own talents with their community through this project.  Annelinda Metzner created a concert in August 2009 titled “In the Mother Grove” that began with a procession of drummers and temple dancers and a powerful invocation of Astarte. The assembled audience participated in an ecstatic ritual that brought them to tears, reminding them of the thing they did not remember—that the Goddess (however one names that divine energy) has been worshipped by women for more generations than we know.  And She will be worshipped long after we are dust.

Mother Grove is not dedicated solely to Brigid, but in many ways she has laid the foundation for its building. The healing of community, the fire of poetry, the craft of dancing water, straw and sand into a wall as strong as stone—she brings these skills to the people. She grounds  us in our vision, giving us the gift of far-seeing. And yet she is ever practical, as a good country woman should be.

I returned to Kildare a few years later in 2003 and stood in the ruins of the old fire Temple and made my dedication.  I stood with two of my sister-priestesses and my young daughter and said some simple words. And I felt the presence of scores of women around me, stretching out to the horizon–women who had stood here or in other temples and said the words of promise and praise and love, who made a commitment to something larger and deeper than themselves. 

It has remained with me over the course of these long years–a promise of service that has grown into a community of people who are raising a Goddess temple in the oldest mountains in the world, on the buckle of the Bible-belt. We are like those fat bumblebees in the summer–we do the impossible (as we are often told)–our wings aren’t strong enough, our bodies not built for flight.  And yet…and yet…we fly.

For Brigid belongs to Her Celtic people in America, too. Jill Yarnall told a lovely story that is tied to the older legend of the founding of the monastic center at Cill Dara. When Brigid-as-saint went to the King to ask for a piece of land, he laughingly told Her he’d give Her all the land Her cloak could cover. And so Brigid Wonder-worker twirled Her cloak from Her shoulders–like a matador–and it covered acre after acre of the vast Curragh. There was land enough to build Her double monastery, and more for gardens. The King was flummoxed but accepted that he had given his word.

That is where the traditional story ends but Yarnall added this grace note:

As Brigid put Her warm cloak back on, She tossed the edge over Her shoulder. And that edge floated on the wind all the way to America, where it landed in the Appalachian Mountains. Thus she gave her green cloak a deep blue hem.

Even then, She claimed us and we are Hers. Warts, bad tempers and all. We see Her as a great blessing–whether we see Her as Goddess or saint or another Irishwoman who has the knack with herbs and knows Her own mind. The wild and rugged tapestry that is the legacy of Brigid in these old mountains continues to beguile and to comfort us.

As you ramble these mountains and explore Her ways, may it be so for you, as well.