dolgemátki: Today is Saint Patrick's Day!

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.

V.V.F.

dolgemátki: Today is Saint Patrick's Day!

462 notes