In Ireland and pre-Roman Britain, there was a trinity of goddesses named Brigantia, or Brigid, "the Exalted One". Alwyn and Brinley Rees, in Celtic Heritage (1961), say Brigid "is described as 'a poetess...a goddess whom poets worshipped', and her two sisters, both of the same name as herself, women of healing and of smith-work respectively, are also described as goddesses." When the Romans encountered her in Britain, they equated her with their Minerva, for both goddesses bestow sovereignty, wisdom, inspiration, and skill in craft. A goddess-trinity may remind some of the three Fates of Greek mythology, or Norse mythology's three Norns; Brigid, as we shall see, is also concerned with destiny.

As goddess of poetry, Brigid is implicitly associated with Celtic shamanism -- the Irish and Welsh made a direct connection between poets and shamans. Song is magic: the word "enchant" includes a root word meaning "to sing", and in early Irish culture the word for poet, filid, also meant prophet. In nearly all the shamnic cultures, the shaman in trance receives incantations that are appropriate to sing for various purposes. The Reeses tell us, "early Irish poets...wore cloaks of bird-feathers as do the shamans of Siberia, when, through ritual and trance, they conduct their audiences on journeys to another world." T.G.E. Powell, in The Celts (1958), describes an Irish druidic divination method called tarbfeis, or "bull-dream", where a druid gorges on raw bull's flesh and falls into a trance while incantations are recited over him; in trance he sees the future High King of Ireland.

The same trances that brought prophetic vision to the Celtic druids brought poetry to their bards: in a windowless house with one door in each long side, bards lay under a bull-hide in utter darkness, waiting to receive the visions that inspired their poetry. As Homer began his Iliad, "Sing, Goddess, of the fury of Achilles," so the Celtic bards might have invoked Brigid, goddess of poetry, at the beginning of the poem or story that would indeed entrance their audiences.

Brigid is also a fire-goddess, as shown by the perpetual fire kept burning at her temple, Kildara ("the Church of the Oak", in the east of Ireland, the province of Leinster), even after it had become a convent and her vestals became nuns. She is the goddess of the Irish hearth, as Hestia was for the Greeks. Shamanic mastery over fire is demonstrated in many cultures. Tibetan Tantric monks
sit in the snow and dry wet towels flung over their naked bodies. Siberian shamans are said to swallow burning coals and touch white-hot iron without harm.

The forge's fire, too, is Brigid's, for she is the goddess of the magical art of smithcraft. A Siberian Yakut proverb says, "Smiths and shamans are from the same nest," and one initiating Yakut deity or spirit, K'daai Masquin, initiates famous shamans by tempering their souls as he tempers iron. Brigid shows that smithcraft and shamanism also go together in Celtic culture.

In the Arthurian tales, the sword that symbolises Arthur's kingship is forged by women in Avalon, "The Isle of Apples". Brigid also had a magical apple orchard, according to a Gaelic folk song which may preserve some of Brigid's original myth, to which bees came from all four quarters to take its' richness back to the ordinary world. Because the idea of female blacksmiths is sufficiently unusual, there might be a connection between Brigid and the forgers of Excalibur.

Brigid is a shamanic trickster and shape-shifter as well. In two old legends, sovereignty was bestowed on Irish kings by a hideous hag who guarded a well; only the rightful king-to-be could bring himself to embrace and kiss her, whereupon she transformed herself into a beautiful woman and gave him to drink of the well. The king-to-be asks, "Who are you?"

Since Brigid is the guardian of many wells in Britain and Ireland, we might expect her to answer, "Brigid", but instead she replies, "My name is Sovereignty." But remember, the Romans renamed Brigid after their own bestower of sovereignty, suggesting that while this aspect of Brigid may not have survived in direct form after Roman times, it was familiar enough during them.

Note also, that the sword of Arthur's sovereignty, Excalibur, came to him out of a lake. The Lady of the Lake is a shadow of the goddess Sovereignty, the mother of kings and heroes, and she is indeed both hideous ("evil") and beautiful ("good"), both a manipulative enchantress and a giver of good things, in true ambiguous Trickster fashion.

Another tricksterish tale surfaces in the "Life of St. Brigid": she gets the land for her shrine and abbey from an avaricious bishop by getting him to swear that she can have as much land as her cloak will cover. Although he thinks he's got the best of the bargain, he doesn't know Brigid is a goddess, whose lore tells that she hung her cloak on the sun's rays to dry. When she threw out her cloak, it spread in glittering billows for acres, and her sacred place was thus preserved. Perhaps Brigid's most clever trick was to transform herself from a goddess into a Christian saint, thus assuring that the very Church opposing Irish paganism would perpetuate her tales and lore.

Ceridwen and Taliesin

Just as Brigid, and a drink from her well, transforms an ordinary man into a king, Ceridwen, and a drink from her cauldron, transforms an ordinary man into a bard.

The story of Ceridwen comes from medieval Wales and is found in Patrick K. Ford's The Mabinogi (1977). Ceridwen, who lives on the shore of Llyn (lake) Tegid, has a son Morfran ("Great Crow"), so hideous in aspect that she knows he will only be able to make his way among nobility if he acquires "the spirit of prophecy" and becomes a "great prognosticator of the world to come."

Therefore, she decides to brew an elixir which will give him great wisdom; she gathers herbs and sets them to brewing for a year and a day, entrusting a boy named Gwion to tend the fire. Gwion, grasping what all the work is about, thinks it a shame that such an ugly fellow should get all the world's wisdom. When the brewing is done, three drops of the distillate spring from the cauldron; Gwion shoves Morfran aside, while his mother sleeps, and the drops fall on him.

Filled with wisdom, Gwion understands (about time, too) that Ceridwen will be enraged when she finds out what he has done. Gwion flees the goddess in many forms, and in as many forms she follows him, through all the realms of this world: air, water, and earth. He becomes a bird, she a hawk; he becomes a salmon, she an otter; he becomes a hare, she a greyhound. He becomes at last a grain of wheat on a threshing floor, and she becomes a black hen and eats him up, only to give birth to him nine months later.

After carrying him in her womb and bringing him to birth, Ceridwen cannot bring herself to kill him, so she sets him adrift in a closed coracle (a hide-covered boat). Eventually, he is retrieved from the coracle after it gets caught up in salmon-fishing weir. He is given the name Taliesin (radiant brow) by his rescuer, and becomes one of the three greatest bards in Wales. Thus is Taliesin thrice-born: once from the cauldron, once from the womb of the Goddess, and once from the coracle.

The story of Ceridwen and Taliesin contains elements of a shamanic initiation. All initiations involve death and rebirth; Gwion/Taliesin does undergo death and birth anew. The devouring of the candidate, as Ceridwen devours Gwion, is also a part of many shamanic initiations, as Eliade points out. In many circumpolar cultures, a great bear, the Master Bear, eats up the candidate and vomits him out again new. Alexandra David-Neel, in Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1932) describes an ordeal in the chöd rite, where the initiate offers his body to be eaten by demons: "Come, angry one, feed on my flesh! Drink my blood!" The shaman must understand death, and take that pathway himself, if he is to guide others along it.

Gwion and Ceridwen's shapeshifting is a common theme in shamanism, too. The shaman must be able to change shape, or to fly, because the Otherworlds lie far distant. Joan Halifax, in Shaman: the Wounded Healer (1982), tells us: "To the heavens, to the well at the end of the world, to the depths of the Underworld, to the bottoms of spirit-filled lakes and seas, around the earth, to the moon and sun, to distant stars and back again does the shaman-bird travel. All the cosmos is accessible when the art of transformation has been mastered." Powell says, "Frenzy, trance, and shapeshifting, all point to some generic connection between the Celtic magician, of whatever name, and the shaman of the Northern Eurasiatic zone."

The bard Gwion/Taliesin's gifts of prophesy and poetry are given by the goddess' elixir; here again, in a Welsh story this time, we see the connection between bards and the shamanic function of prophesy, as well the goddess' bestowal of that prophesy. Ultimately, in the Celtic tradition, the Goddess is always the Initiator.