When you have a storytelling podcast about Celtic mythology and Irish folklore and March comes around, it’s inevitable: the Saint Patrick’s Day episode.
Seeing as Patrick is as much a folk hero as he is a patron saint of Ireland, let’s establish the basics first:
Patrick’s birth name was Maewyn Succat and he was born in Wales circa 386 CE.
Patrick was abducted and brought to Ireland as a teenager and was enslaved for six years before he escaped home across the Irish Sea.
Against his family’s wishes, Patrick eventually returned to Ireland on an evangelical mission, but he was not the first person to bring Christianity to the Irish. That credit goes to a fellow named Palladius (and “Happy St. Palladius’s Day!” just doesn’t work on a Guinness ad).
Rather than remembering him for driving out snakes and using shamrocks as teaching tools (both associated with the “made up” kind of myths), you might think of him as antislavery crusader or at least as the author of an early Christian slave narrative
Per America Magazine (a Catholic publication), “Saint” Patrick was never canonized and isn’t actually a saint (see reference to “folk hero” above!)
Knowing all this, I admit I have never had an easy relationship with the man. The legend of the man looms taller than the truths, and I always resented the stories that equated Patrick and his proselytizing as inherently “good” and the ways of the pre-Christian Irish to be inherently primitive and bad.
(Though clearly the practice of slavery was inherently bad, and, in light of that part of the story, I do regret being quite so flip about “Saint P.” The role of slavery in Irish history and society is something I’m still working with and explore in greater depth in Mongfind’s stoy in episode 2 of KnotWork Storytelling, The Forgotten Story of Ireland’s Forgotten Goddess-Queen-Witch.)
Saint Patrick Always Seemed Like a Difficult Person to Have Round to Tea
Here’s how I described Saint Peter in my book, The Sovereignty Knot, in a chapter called “On Running Over a Snake”:
You know the one about Saint Patrick driving the serpents out of Ireland, of course. Nice yarn, that one. Thing is, there hadn’t been any snakes on the island since at least the last ice age. Herpetology and geology aside, in the metaphorical realm where this stuff really matters, St. P. was credited with striking the first blow against paganism, bringing the new Christian faith that would all but eliminate the old beliefs that were native to that land. He was there to raise his crozier against Mother Ireland and her people’s serpentine faith that looped round and round with the endless cycles of the seasons. He was there to change history and create the Ireland we know today. He was also there to lay the foundations of a particular kind of patriarchal dominance that would hold the country in thrall for well over 1,500 years.
Saint Patrick and his missionary friends came to Ireland and changed the story that people had been living for millennia. They weren’t the first guys, nor were they the last, to destroy a sacred feminine image and use it for their own purposes.
That book came out in 2020, and while I hold just as tight to my feisty feminism, I seem to have a softened a bit when it comes to Saint Patrick. In fact, I wrote a story for KnotWork Storytelling that more than gives him the benefit of the doubt:
Bishop Patrick of Armagh wasn’t quite called a saint yet, but he surely acted as if he’d already won the title. Though no one would ever call him the life of the party, he was a kind enough man who tended the soul of his people according to the new codes that came down from Rome.
Listen to The Christians and the Pagans: The Unlikely Friendship of Oisín and St Patrick
In episode 8 of KnotWork Storytelling, you’ll hear the tale of a pagan hero named Oisín who left his companions, the warriors of Fianna, and followed a fairy woman named Niamh to her home in Tír Na nÓg, the land of eternal youth.
After three hundred years, Oisín returned to Ireland and found that a man named Saint Patrick had arrived and brought along a faith called Christianity that changed everything.
The story of the relationship between Oisín and Patrick is inspired by Lady Augusta Gregory’s story from her 1904 book, Gods and Fighting Men. Lady Gregory, the famous folklorist of the Celtic Revival drew her inspiration from the tales found in Acallam na Senórach/Tales of the Elders of Ireland, which is a compilation of four different medieval Irish texts.
This story is written by me, Marisa Goudy, and performed by my guest Kevin Michael Murphy. In this retelling, I dare to soften the ending offered by Lady Gregory, focusing instead on the friendship that might have existed despite Oisín and Patrick’s religious differences. Rather than the usual bitter lament about the end of the magical Celtic world, which was part of the yearning inherent in the late 19th/early 20th century movement often called the Celtic Twilight, I invite listeners to consider all the ways that ancient Ireland is still very much alive.
Image: St. Patrick and King Laoghaire from Boston College’s Great Irish Hall, Gasson 100