It has been a while since I chose Brigantia as the subject of my second research project, to tell the truth I'm a few months behind so I cannot now remember what caused me to choose her. However over the absent months she has stayed in my mind and, having gone back to the notes I made, I now feel ready to reveal what I have learned about her. I think I shall start off by quoting An t-Athair Sean O'Quinn,
“It is an exercise in futility to try and separate the historical Christian Brighid from the Goddess since clearly the two are so interwoven.” 1
The same is true of the Goddesses Brigantia and Brighid if indeed they are entirely separate entities in the first place and not simply the same Goddess with two names. The latter may well be the case as most of the hits I get when researching Brigantia on-line are from lists of alternative names for Brighid but there are a few mentions of Brigantia on her own. She is documented as being the tutelary Goddess of the Brigantes tribe of Northern England and there is some speculation that various rivers throughout Britain are named after her, for example the rivers Braint and Brent although Professor Ronald Hutton suggests this may be a coincidence. 2
Brigantia is associated with water on inscriptions found at Brampton, Cumberland and Irthington in Yorkshire where she is called deae Nymphae Brigantiae meaning the Nymph Goddess Brigantiae, the plural of Brigantia suggesting she was worshipped as a multiplicity, a further link with Brighid perhaps. In Northumberland Brigantia is linked with Jupiter, the only time she is documented as having a consort. It is thought that her original consort was a warrior sky god of some sort and a part of me wonders if it was Taranis, purely because of the coincidence of my choosing the pair as research subjects! 3
There are a few correlations between Brigantia, Victoria and Minerva in their aspects of Goddesses of war, as in the picture above of the Birrens Altar, Brigantia has been depicted wearing similar attire to Minerva, in this picture she is shown holding a spear and a globe, symbols associated with victory, she is also invoked in Greetland as Victoria. In the carving she is also shown wearing a crown similar in style to battlements indicating that her worshippers may have viewed her as a protector of their territory, this in turn suggests she may have had Mother Goddess aspects during times of peace. It has also been suggested that Brigantia has healing aspects, possibly due to her association with water, leading the Romans to equate her with Minerva.
So as you can see there are many mysteries about Brigantia, I feel that she is a very similar Goddess to Brighid, if not Brighid by another name! I wont go into the many attributes of Brighid here as they have been covered by numerous people already but I get the feeling that to a certain extent they could be applied to Brigantia as well. I do plan to meditate on her and see if that helps clarify things for me.
1: http://brighid.org.uk/goddess.html [Image kindly borrowed from this site]
2: The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, Ronald Hutton, Blackwell, 2000
3: http://www.celtnet.org.uk/gods_b/brigantia.html
4: http://www.celtnet.org.uk/gods_b/brigantia.html
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