Description
What is Imbolc?
It is the first of eight special holidays in the pagan calendar, or Wheel of the Year.
Imbolc was an important day in the Celtic calendar. As winter stores of food began to be used up, Imbolc rituals were performed to ensure sufficient food supplies until the harvest six months later.
Imbolc was a feast of purification for the farmers, and the name oímelc (“ewe’s milk”) is likely in reference to the beginning of the lambing season, when ewes came into milk. The central ritual of Imbolc was the lighting of fires to celebrate the increasing power of the Sun over the coming months.
Imbolc is also the holy day of Brigid (also known as Bride, Brigit, Brid), the goddess of fire, healing and fertility. Brighid is the ancient Celtic Goddess of fire. She is a warrioress and protectress, a healer, a guardian of children, the patroness of poets, craftsman and priests. So loved was Brighid by the peoples of Ireland that when Patrick’s Christianity came to the island, Brighid’s Fire could not be doused. And so, Saint Brigid was born.
In ancient times, a perpetual flame burned at Brighid’s shrine in Kildare, Ireland, tended by 19 virgin priestesses. This perpetual flame continued to burn in the Christian era, and is now tended by 19 nuns of Saint Brigid’s monestary, though it was finally doused by the reformation of the church in the thirteenth century. The perpetual flame of Brighid’s Fire was symbolically relit in 1993 by the Brigidine Sisters of Solas Bhride, a restoration of an ancient order of Brigidine nuns originally founded in 1807.
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