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dolgemátki: Today is Saint Patrick's Day!

jethroq:

fyeahhistorymajorheraldicbeast:

Here are some facts about the man behind everyone’s favorite corrupted feast day:

  • He might have been two people
  • One of those people was Welsh
  • The other was possibly French (or, well, Gaulish)
  • That one pretty much did jack on his mission
  • There had been Christianity in Ireland before either French dude or Welsh dude due to contact with Britain and other semi-Christianized outposts of the Roman empire. Give credit where credit is due (not to him)

Okay, it’s Monday night now, but I should probably comment on the whole snake-allegory thing. I’ve been reading and enjoying your tumblr a lot today, so I hate to hit you with an “um, actually” post! But I know this is the kind of subject you care a lot about, so I’ll just go ahead.

It’s not an allegory. That is an offhand suggestion from an important-but-problematic book called The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, written in 1911. This idea subsequently became popularized in the 1970s by an enthusiastic-but-misinformed Isaac Bonewitz, modern druid. (It’s worth remembering that he promoted the “Doctrine of Druidic Fallibility,” which states that anyone, even the Archdruid, can make mistakes.)

The “snake driving” episode - likely borrowed from a story about St. Hilare - is not found in Patrick’s autobiographies. It does appear in biographies written hundreds of years after his death, whose contents tend to be quite mythical and action-packed. (Read: ahistorical.) Furthermore, these texts contain numerous stories of St. Patrick having fatal conflicts with druids, so there’s no good reason why they would suddenly need a metaphor in order to explain the conversion - which, in light of the actual evidence, was not a violent takeover. More information can be found here and here.

Given that snakes are not native to Ireland, I don’t know why people find it so easy to believe that druids in that country would have used the snake as a religious symbol, or as a signifier of their office. If anything, there’s much more evidence to suggest that they would have used birds as a self-identifying symbol, if they had any such iconography.

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  11. jethroq reblogged this from fyeahhistorymajorheraldicbeast and added:
    Huh, go figure…
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  20. shiedel reblogged this from liz-of-all-ladybirds and added:
    liz watch this:http://www.hulu.com/watch/340224/30-rock-st-patricks-day
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