THIS WEEKEND WE gather to enjoy the second occurrence of a new annual tradition — the St Brigid’s Day bank holiday. While the more long-established public holidays have acquired associations over time (the Leaving Cert and the June bank holiday, Cheltenham and St Patrick’s Day, the now obsolete rush on the bank holidays on Holy Thursday) it is unclear how the long weekend at the beginning of February will express itself in practical terms. Will it be the semi-official end to dry January?
A popular detail in the Brigid story is how the life of the saint overlaps and mingles with the tale of an ancient Irish goddess of the same name. It’s unlikely that 21st-century Ireland would have selected a straightforwardly religious feast day as a new public holiday, so this duality — the pagan Brigit co-existing with the Christian Brigid — is not just a quirky footnote but a central part of the figure’s appeal.
Brigid/Brigit keeps everyone happy. And this double life has contributed to a fascinating detail: for a brief moment, she was the only saint in space.
In 1979, the Pioneer spacecraft entered the orbit of Venus and captured images of the planet’s surface, revealing many features for the first time. Ten years earlier, the first words uttered by a human on the moon were “a small step for man…” and in the following years, the need for this moment to be so pointedly gendered was questioned.
Mindful of such concerns and bearing in mind the gender imbalance in the naming of planetary topography to date, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), declared that all newly-discovered geographical features on the one planet named after a female figure would be named after women from world mythologies.
This was later amended to include a number of women from history — Helen Keller, Marlene Dietrich, Marie Stopes and Irish writer Jane Wilde, to name but a few. There were some ground rules, however — there were to be no figures from current major religions, no war leaders and no national figures who could be seen as divisive. Hence, no presidents, generals, modern-day monarchs… and no saints.
Rather than agonising separately over every crater, cavity and bump on the landscape, the IAU pick themes for the names of certain types of features on each planet. For example, the moons of Uranus are named after Shakespeare characters, large craters on Mars are named after scientists and science fiction authors.
On Venus, chasmas are named after moon and hunting goddesses, dorsas (ridges) are named after sun or sky goddesses and valleys are called after the names for the planet in different languages. And tholi (individually, a tholus: a hill or mountain with a round or domed top) are named after goddesses of wisdom, peace and healing. It was in this category that, in 1985, Brigit was added to the solar system and the Brigit Tholus was named.
Since 1985, Brigit has been joined on Venus by Eriu, the Morrigan (a war goddess in the Táin), Sinann and Liban (river and water deities respectively). In 1997 six Irish mythological figures were added: Clidna, Badb Aife, Medb, Etain and Ruad and in 2000 Jane Wilde (Oscar’s mother but a poet of note in her own right) was included.
Recent scholarship has poured cold water on the idea that the Catholic Church pilfered a groovy, feminist, pagan girlboss goddess and rebranded her as a cross nun. While Saint Brigid is a well-documented seventh century historical figure who challenges some of our preconceptions of what christianity in Ireland in the time was like (inasmuch as she appeared to have bishop status), our total understanding of the goddess Brigit hinges on two short remarks in texts dealing with unrelated topics (Elva Johnson from UCD’s History Department has just written a brilliant paper on this if you’d like to know more). Perhaps this is why the IAU have quietly given Brigit Thomas “the Pluto treatment” and dropped the name in 2007.
Even though the name may no longer be official, the idea that this crafty Kildare woman briefly outwitted a lab full of rocket scientists and got a saint in space is surely a story worth including with all the other Brigid myths and legends. And the tholus has not been renamed yet: just as some people will never stop saying Prince Charles or TV3, I think we can continue to use this name until we’re stopped.
So this weekend, one way you can mark the holiday (if the weather permits) is to step outside at dusk and view the planet Venus (it can be seen with the naked eye), knowing that Brigit is up there with all her sisters.
Darach Ó Séaghdha runs @theirishfor Twitter account and the @motherfocloir podcast.
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