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“B” is for the Goddess Brigit and for Saint Brighid.

This is my first post for the “Pagan Blog Project” and if you’d like to participate or read more about “The Pagan Blog Project” you can read up about it here or just click on the image below or on my sidebar.

I’m going to be talking about how I met and devoloped my relationship with the Goddess Brigit (hard ‘g’) and the Saint Brighid. (I’ll refer from now on to the goddess form of Brigit with this spelling and the saint as Brighid) although there are many variations on her name and origins.) There are so many good books out there about her history and lore that I won’t go into much detail here with all of her similarities and differences and her connection to the pagan day of Imbolc (pronounced Imm-olig) and Candlemas.

My mother was a witch and I was fortunate enough to have her wisdom passed down to me, especially learning about multi-cultural pantheons. When I was twenty, I told my mother I wanted to get married and have a large family. She joked and said that I better marry a Catholic (who are sometimes known to have large families.) What’s even funnier is that no one in my family is Catholic. On my mother’s side, I have Norwegian/German ancestry (of the Lutheran religion) and on my father’s side are the Hungarian Jew’s

So, no sign of traditional Catholicism. My mother told me first about the goddess Brigid, who traditionally originated in Eire as well as the other Celtic Isles. One of the traits known to the goddess and saint was her being a patroness of unmarried women, hence the name “Bride” connected to her.

My mother said that the goddess Brigit was so popular to the Celts that when Christianity came along to over rule the pagan path, that the Catholics knew that unless they kept Brigit there would be a turning away from their religion as well as revolts from the peopel who worshiped the Goddess Brigit.

So Brigit slowly metamorphised into the Saint Brighid and everyone was happy, more or less. The pagans of the time kept worshipping the goddess and the Catholics had a new, errrrr…less pagan form of Brigid. Saint Brighid has many stories and lore about her and if you read enough about her, you can see the many connections she has to the Goddess Brigid.

One day, my mother brought home a Catholic Statue of Saint Brighid (Unfortunately she’s packed away somewhere or else I would post a photo of her) and gave me a novena that I had to perform for fourteen days at the same time asking for her help to find the perfect husband for me.

I had never performed any type of spell before and so was intrigued to see if it would work. My mother always told me “be careful what you wish for, Wendy, because it might just become true, so be clear in your intentions.” Very simply and with great naivety, I asked the goddess and saint, for the perfect man for me to marry who came from a large family. I left out him needing to be Catholic, because I figured, I’d be lucky in just finding the right man.

Every night at six o’clock p.m. I would be sure to come and pray to her while I repeated the novena and held the image in my mind of getting married to a man I loved. No male showed up in those fourteen days that I would even consider even as a boyfriend, much less a husband, until the very last day of my novena. I was at the local 7-11 store and I walked out and there he was in all his bad boy glory. A surfer in a rundown Volkswagen Beetle with his sun bleached hair and a smile that was as deadly as a sharks.

It was instant lust for both of us. Being to shy to do anything I just got in my car and left. I was looking out my rear view window and there he was following me in his car. So, I pulled over, rolled my window down and the sparks between us were fierce. He just very bluntly told me, that he wanted to go out with me and asked me for my phone number. I still wasn’t even thinking about the spell/prayer to Brigid until we went out for a few times and he told me he came from a family of six boys and you guessed it was a “reformed Catholic” which made me laugh.

I won’t go into the details of our courtship as that’s a whole other topic, but basically this was my first spell and it worked.  After a year, we got married (way too young) and we discussed having many children. The marriage lasted less than five years, but the lesson was learned that when performing any type of magick, be VERY careful and specific in what you ask for.

I know better to ask the Brigit/Brighid than to help me find a husband, so instead I ask her for blessings upon my writing (she was also known as a patron goddess for poets, smiths, and healers and of course brides) and I dedicate my hearth as she was also known to be a goddess connected to the element of fire. Brigit’s day is now known as”Candlemas” also known or “Candle Mass” and is the day when the pagan and  Catholic faith ask for the blessings of the candles to light them through the cold of Winter

Brigit and Brighid has never turned her back on me and continues to enlighten me and keep the well of inspiration burning within.

Have any of you performed a spell/prayer to a goddess or god and have it work out, or maybe not work out? Do you believe in the saying “be careful of what you wish for?”

(A great book to read about Brigit/Brighid is “Candlemas: Feast of Flames (Holiday Series)” by Amber K & Azrael Aryynn K.

A fun link to read about the name and a little big about the Goddess is here: http://bewitchingnames.blogspot.com/2011/02/bridget.html

and check out this blog for some more info about Celtic deities: http://www.applewarrior.com/celticworld/celticdeities/

Image credits (http://pinterest.com/psolomon17/irish-ancestry-celtic-and-green/)

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