# Meeting Brigid It started in May 2022 with dreams of fire. Not great conflagrations, or forest fires, or even hearth fires. There was just fire. It burned from no root I could see, and so it consumed nothing. The flames warmed the cold and illuminated the great darkness that stretched off in every direction. In each dream, I sat close and wondered from where it came. This wasn’t the first spirit I encountered. Something about this fire drew me in more powerfully than I had experienced before. In time, the dreams changed until one night; I was joined by a beautiful woman whose hair was the color of the flame and who smiled with its warmth. She didn’t speak to me, and I didn’t speak to her. We just sat in the embrace of the glow as she tended the fire. When I awoke, I thought I knew who it was, and with fear, I spoke her name, “Brigid.” As I spoke her name out loud, the warmth I remembered from my dream flooded through me. I couldn’t move. I’d encountered other spirits before, but something about this encounter felt different. It stirred deeper within my soul than I expected. I bowed my head, and said, “What do you want, sister?” Then I sat in meditation for a while. No immediate answer came, so I thanked her and continued with my day. Over the next week, I sat with her in my dreams and listened to the crackling hum of the fire. I know now that the flame was the light of basic goodness within me, the peace, compassion, and wisdom contained in the holy sparks within me. At the time, I was struggling with anxiety and depression, twin serpents that afflict me periodically throughout my life. Brigid tended the flame with me because I neglected it more than I realized. I didn’t know why she came or if I had done something to attract her attention, since I had done nothing consciously. All I can think is that I was reading A Message of Hope from the Angels by Lorna Byrne and reciting all the prayers to the angels she recommended in the book. Perhaps my angel guardian called on her for assistance, but I did not know. One night, the dream changed. I was in a dark forest and heard the ringing chime of metal striking metal. I followed the sound and saw Brigid standing at a forge where she once tended a campfire. She hammered some metal on an anvil and occasionally reheated the metal in the forge. I don’t know what she was making, and I didn’t ask. I simply watched her work. Before I woke up, I saw myself shuffling a deck of cards and pulling one with the first Station of the Cosmic Christ on it, “In the beginning was the Word,” as a six pointed spiral of light emerging from the darkness. Throughout the day, I couldn’t stop thinking about the image. I didn’t consider myself an artist as in a person who makes images like this. I had made a deck based on the Stations of the Cosmic Christ before, but the imagery was very simple. I wondered if I could make the image and downloaded a card template and tried to recreate the image from my dream. To my surprise, the picture came together quickly in a style I’ve never worked in before. I thanked Brigid and tried to make the next station. This process continued from card to card, each flowing easily in a way that such art never has for me. As a result of this, I believed I should offer thanks to Brigid and ordered an icon and two different statues, one for my altar and one for my desk. Once I finished the Stations of the Cosmic Christ, I didn’t have an idea what to do next. The answer came to me in a dream that night. I sat at a table in a crude hut built around the forge with a dirt floor. The walls were a creamy white stained with orange light and brown/black shadows cast on them from the forge fire. Brigid sat across the honey oak topped table shuffling a deck of cards. One by one, she pulled a card and set it on the table in front of her. The first sixteen cards were the Stations of the Cosmic Christ, but the rest were themed according to the Four Paths of [[What is Creation Spirituality|Creation Spirituality]]. I wish I could say I remembered every image and theme, but I didn’t. When I woke up, I remembered the four types of face cards and the themes for the ten numbered cards that followed. Loading a spread sheet, I was able to pull some of the information from a correspondence table I already made for prayer weaving and ritual work. The subject of other cards came to me quickly and I filled in the chart. This was the deck I needed to make for me as a replacement for my old one, so I continued working on it. In little over a month and a half, I made all seventy-two cards, well technically seventy-three because I was asked to make a variant of one card by someone I showed it to. I have never created so much art in such a short period of time, and I have never been so proud of the work. Through this process, I also developed a deep and abiding relationship with Brigid, who I now see as one of my maggids, or wise teachers. # Context ## The Three Rays Over the years, I’ve studied the mystics of many faiths, primarily Christian and Jewish, but also Buddhist, Hindu, Hermetic, and Celtic/Druidic. I spend my teens studying Catholic and Orthodox mystics and practicing in accordance to the three paths of the esoteric tradition in the ways also known as the three rays, the green ray, the orange ray, and the purple ray: “The Green Ray consists of the nature contacts in the broadest sense, and encapsulates most mythopoeic formulations relating to nature and to the Earth, including Elemental and Faery traditions. The Orange Ray describes the study of symbolism and its manipulation in ceremonial or visualized forms, frequently in terms of the Tree of Life of the Qabalah. The Purple Ray denotes religious mysticism, a direct approach to the spirit, and the devotional way usually expressed in the West in Christian terms (Gareth Knight, Dion Fortune and the Three-fold Way).” Or in other words: ### The Green Ray The Green Ray is our experience and practice of and in Nature corresponding to the path on the Tree of Life from Malkuth (the kingdom) to Netzach (Victory), which is on the Pillar of Mercy or Energy. This is the path of empathy where we encounter the spirits of land and nature, the fae, and what could be called the natural intelligences. This is the path of Natural Mysticism. ### The Purple Ray The Purple Ray is our experience and practice corresponding to the path on the Tree of Life from Malkuth to Yesod (Foundation), which is on the Middle Pillar of Mildness or Aspiration. This is the path of devotional and religious mysticism where we interact and call upon the spirits and saints of our faith. ### The Orange Ray The Orange Ray is our experience and practice of Ceremonial, Magical, and Meditational work corresponding to the path on the Tree of Life from Malkuth to Hod (Splendor), which is on the Pillar of Severity or Form. This is the disciplined and discipled mysticism where we work with the energies of the cosmos through symbolism and action. ## My Work Through my practice and work under the orange and purple rays, I have interacted with many spirits and energies. Some have joined me on the path as teachers and guides. The work of Dion Fortune and Gareth Knight have inspired a lot of my work as I strove to uncover a path within the Christian and Creation Spirituality Traditions I can live and share with integrity. They inspired much of my early spirituality and practice and their works continue to guide me to this day. ## What are Spirits Matthew Fox in The Physics of Angels says, “Insofar as we see angels as organized holarchically, perhaps we can see them as associated with angel fields. Angels themselves could be thought of as a particulate manifestation of the activity of these fields, just as photons are a particulate way of thinking about the activity, the energy, carried in electromagnetic fields (The Physics of Angels, loc 607).” This is essentially how Hermeticism sees angels, spirits, and souls. Like God, the angels and other spirits are not beings (individuated entities that are limited, bound, and definable). They are manifestations of the particular energy field to which we assign certain names and qualities. Rabbi Rami Shapiro says, “Look closely enough, and every ‘thing’ dissolves into happening. Look even closer, and every happening dissolves into Happening. This Happening is God. Jews call this happening YHVH, from the Hebrew verb meaning “to be.” God is a verb, and so-called things are in fact gerunds (Rami Shapiro. Holy Rascals, p. 44).” Brigid is such a field, a gerund for caring for domesticated animals, healing, protecting, smithing, poetry writing, and wisdom seeking and holding. ## Brigid in my dream She is encountered in the green ray in the care and concern we have for our pets and livestock. Under the purple ray, we meet her tending to the sick and injured, standing up for others, creating, crafting, writing and reciting poetry, singing, and studying. We encounter her in the orange ray when we tend sacred fires, seek wisdom in ritual and meditation, pray and prayer weave for ourselves and others and use poetry in our rites. We may or may not be conscious of our interactions with her, but her field is there all the same. When I think back to the time the dreams started, it was the night I prayed to the angel of protection for help. Whether this angel summoned her or if she answered my prayer, I do not and cannot know. The more I think about it the more I realize I was interacting with her field the whole time without knowing. I had been seeking wisdom not long before this to write my personal leadership plan for a previous class. I sought protection and inspiration to find a way to implement it. I was recovering from an illness and dealing with anxiety and depression with the consolation of my cats and dog to keep me motivated and moving. In hindsight, I should not have been surprised that she came, but we rarely remember the little things as we live through the events. ## Christopagan awakening This experience challenged me on many levels. The biggest issue I had was that so many asked me if I was a Christo-pagan or even a Christian Witch. In fact, not long before this started, I made a video called, Am I a Christo-pagan where I rejected the label because I didn’t see how it fit to me other than the basic definition of a Christian who practices an earth-based religion. If that is the only qualification, then yes, I am, but the term pagan didn’t fit me. Now, I encountered Brigid, and questioned myself over whether this was St Brigid of Kildare or the Celtic goddess Brigid. If it was the goddess, would that mean that I am a pagan? Did I speak too soon? Would it even matter if I could tease out the difference between the two if there even was one to find? In haste, I read books about Brigid and books I hadn’t read before about Celtic Spirituality. ## Celtic Sprituality I had always practiced a more Celtic breed of Christianity, and read a lot over the years on the subject and incorporated many Celtic practices and ways of thinking into my practice and work. The more I read about Brigid, the more I realized that any attempt to divide the goddess from the saint was pointless. Even if there was a historical Brigid of Kildare, her story was so intertwined with the legends of the goddess that one cannot be separated from the other. One book helped me more than any other, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul by John Philip Newell, not only repeated the refrain I read many times before, that the Celts saw their Druidic past as their own Old Testament of a faith that continued into Christianity. Something about the way he phrased everything resonated within me as it never had before. ## Druidry I studied Druidry when I was younger, but had not adopted it as a formal path. In my personal leadership plan, I said that I wanted to start an Order of Re’im (Hebrew for seers) based on the more shamanic spirituality I had developed over the years to share this path with others. Newell’s book helped me to see that I acted in the tradition of the Culdees, the friends or spouses of God that continued the Druidic tradition into Christianity. In fact, I have considered whether my path might be better called that of the way of the fáith (pronounced fah-th, Irish for prophet, seer, philosopher), often Anglicized as Ovate because of my Celtic heritage. I never would have considered that if this experience hadn’t happened. ## Blessings I received from this Encounter The greatest blessing I have received from my encounter with Brigid is how it drove me to reconnect to my heritage and to weave together so many parts of my life into a tapestry of faith I can call home. Through making the oracle card set she inspired, I expressed my faith, spirituality, and mysticism in a unitive way for the first time. This deck is my metamodernist catechism explaining how I believe, what I have faith in, the practices that give me life, and the mythos that underpins it all. Before this, I feared I was what St Benedict called a gyrovague. “Always wanderers and never settled, they are slaves to their own pleasures and the snares of gluttony and in every respect worse than the Sarabites (Rule of St Benedict, Chapter 1).” Instead, I am one of the peregrini. “These peregrini, as they were also known, viewed their wanderings, or peregrinations, as a process of seeking their place of “resurrection”—they were searching for their path of new beginnings (J. Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul, p. 84).” Over a decade ago, I started referring to my religious home as the abbey, and adopted a number of monastic metaphors to understand what my faith looked like. I even wrote a draft of a book called, Catholicism for the Solitary Practitioner as a play on Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner, which was a manifesto that broke Wicca out of the structured hermetic style order that it was at the time. ## Transitioning to a Metamodern Faith The primary blessing I received from this experience of Brigid was that it moved me from the modernist religion I grew up in and the postmodern spirituality I had adopted through Creation Spirituality into a metamodernist faith that has finally given me a proper sense of meaning. “At its broadest contours, the metamodern view can be considered a kind of higher-order synthesis that includes and transcends both the modernist thesis about rationality and science and the postmodern antithetical critique. In addition, metamodernists tend to view the current state of our knowledge to be overly chaotic and fragmented and advocate for a more integrated pluralism that allows for positive, constructive work on what some have called a ‘post-postmodern grand meta-narrative (Gregg Henriques Ph.D., What Is Metamodernism?).’” I have always struggled with the post-modern fear of forcing my beliefs on others and the constant sense of walking on eggshells that its understanding of diversity and multiculturalism gave me. In a world where having and proclaiming ones sincerely and deeply held beliefs is conflated with hegemonic colonialism and an attempt to control or dominate over others, it is difficult to have convictions and impossible to build community. “At its core, metamodernism is about ambiguity, reconstruction, dialogue, collaboration, and creative paradox. It’s about allowing yourself to be many different people at once. It’s about speaking through the work of everyone who you are sampling from in order to amplify their voice. It’s about being a curator with a unique creative vision(Anne-Laure Le Cunff, An introduction to metamodernism: the cultural philosophy of the digital age).” Brigid taught me how to do this with my faith, my spirituality, and my religion. I can know and say that I have not found THE TRUTH, because such a thing cannot be expressed in words if such a thing even exists. I haven’t even found my truth, because I am a process, a happening that is impermanent and always changing. What I have found is a way of truth seeking that works for me and might work for others. She helped me to see that insight is more than the weaving together the ideas, experiences, and beliefs of the self and others and is about folding the various metals and alloying them together in the forge. Each metal is still present in the alloy but they are melded together into a new whole. For decades, I tried to write my growing understandings into a book, for my own use and possibly to share with others. Without Brigid’s intervention into my life and inspiration, I would not have realized that these ideas needed to be expressed through images and the words describing them are only a pale shadow of the idea itself and that idea is the pale shadow of the truth it is trying to express. These are themes that have to be meditated upon and not understood or known. Through the rubric of an oracle card, I am forced to not only ask what this theme means to me now, but potentially what is its inverse when a card is pulled upside-down. The day I wrote this I pulled the fifth card on the Path of Silence or Via Negativa inverted. All of the fives are related to the fifth sephirah on the Tree of Life which is Geburah (Strength) or Din (Judgement). The fives are dangerous cards because Geburah represents the power of discipline and is seen as the source of evil, called the Sitra Achra (the other side). Evil is thus seen as control or discipline bent to negative or abusive ends. The discipline we practice of on the Via Negative is Kenosis, or the art of emptying. So what is the inverse of Kenosis? This card pull started a conversation with my husband who said what I was thinking. The inverse is not necessarily the opposite, so he said, “Its openness. Being the cup capable of receiving rather than the cup that is being poured out.” This deepening of understanding and this moment of wisdom would not have been possible without Brigid’s inspiration and guidance to make this deck. In the same way Hermeticism sees the Tarot as the Book of Thoth that offers meditation and insight into Hermetic Philosophy and how it connects to life, these cards do the same thing for me for my experience of Creation Spirituality and the life I live within it. As this relationship continues to develop and grow, I am continuing to produce art in a way that I never have before, most recently the teaching icons of Pelagius and Sarah’s Circle. It woke me up to a new phase of my life and has awakened new talents and skills in me that I will continue to develop going forward.