Happy Marmot Appreciation Day; I Mean Imbolc, I Mean Saint Brigid's Day

Ah, syncreticism, without which we might as well all be Protestants. Julius Caesar conflated the triple goddess of the Celts as related to Minerva, which was dandy for religious tolerance but a pain in the butt for for historians because, following the custom of interpretatio romana, he described the Celtic pantheon to the folks back home using their Roman names. The original names are lost to the vagaries of oral tradition. Roman Catholics followed his cue and turned the Irish goddess Bride into the "Mary of the Celts" Saint Bride or Brigit or Bridget, midwife to Mary the Mother of Jesus.
The ewes start lactating, almost ready for the lambs, not that I'm one to be so up close and personal with sheep. Bridget features a cow, "our second mother" in her iconography, and some traditions hold that Brigid herself was wet nurse to the infant god. There's a lot of milk and fecundity and swollen bellies running around this holiday-- the name Ibolc itself means "In the Belly". Psychologically I suppose this is the part of the winter when we're waiting for something to happen, pregnant with change maybe, and waiting for the weather to break.

This plump little figure is from one of Saint Bridget's wells in Ireland. And the plump little fellow peeking out of his burrow represents my favorite part of the holiday, because what other day do we honor my favorite Mammalian order, the Rodentia?



The Celts had a rhyme they recited about a serpent coming out of his hole this day as a predictor of the coming Spring. That custom must have been brought over to America on the same boat as the carved turnip Jack O'Lantern, and mixed in with the animal the Algonquins called weeauchok. There's a paradox involved in the Chuck's prediction that I've never understood-- if the sun shines, and he sees his shadow today, that means more winter, not less?-- but it is the nature of the mystic quest and the way of the groundhog shaman to learn to live with paradox.

The prize for guttsiest groundhogs I know goes to a band of chucks who moved into a Michigan peace officer's back yard. Being a bear of very little brain, he decided to get rid of the woodchucks by setting charges of dynamite in and around their holes, inserting blasting caps and standing back to blast the critters out like Yosemite Sam.

Sad to say, it was an amateur installation-- by the trooper's brother-in-law-- and the dynamite failed to go off when they turned the crank. Didn't go off when they shot at it with pistols, either. Now instead of one groundhog family, there's a colony of woodchucks living in an overgrown mound more than 10 feet across, lined with explosive. The cop is afraid to go anywhere near the dynamite, which only becomes more volatile as its components separate, and he carefully mows around it. The chucks now live in a bramble and grass covered fortress, protected by the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction.

LIMBO LOWER NOW

Niels Bohr finally told Einstein "stop telling God what to do", and the government of the Church of Rome is thinking about letting God do what he wants with the souls of unbaptized children. This would make Christian doctrine at least as merciful as some Aboriginal clans who believe the souls of miscarried or stillborn children are transmigrated as koala bears.

Closing down the Limbo of Children is a good thing, but so was the theory's original intent. The Limbo of Children was built in the human imagination by people like Peter Abelard in an attempt to mitigate the cruelty of medieval Christianity. It was a time of absolutes, and the construction of Limbo eased human suffering for mothers and fathers who thought their lost lambs were burning in Hell because they hadn't been baptized.

Limbo is an easy target for the goyim to make fun of, but I have a sentimental attachment for the Limbo of the Fathers, the supposed home of the virtuous pagans who were born, lived and died before the time of Christ. They rest "in Abraham's bosom", with the possible exceptions of Shakespeare's Falstaff and myself, who will sleep in Arthur's.

That first generation of Christians had a problem, as if the Romans weren't enough. If knowledge of Christ was a ticket to Heaven, what about their beloved grandparents, dead these many years, who wouldn't know a Christian from Adam? If you love your grandma, you wouldn't want to see her roasting in Hell with Nero...? The "Virtuous Pagans" teaching solved this psychological problem, and reconciled Heaven with the pagans' Elysian Fields. Imagine the day care, with babies swaddled by Aristotle, toddlers dawdled on the knees of Odysseus-- it would resemble the school of Chiron the Centaur, who taught the Greek heroes on Mount Pelion.

(The Harrowing of Hell, the story of Jesus rescuing the Virtuous Souls of antiquity from the maw of Death, is a later medieval construct that would make a smashing film. If Titian kept painting, I imagine there must be a "Rescue of Spartacus by Christ", which shows the trained warrior and the carpenter comparing scars.)

The Roman Catholic Church, which takes more time to turn around than an ocean liner (just ask Francis of Assisi or John XXIII) is not so much a medieval institution as a cautionary example of the perils of success. That Roman fortress, full of climbers, corruption, and holier-than-thou politicians, has almost no relationship to the human problems of the parish priest. The pedophile scandal shows (again!) how easy it is to hide in a bureaucracy. Still, I suspect that the Vatican's study of theology-- and I'm speaking as a believer-- is not entirely a wasted effort. Theology has been an attempt by the human mind to negotiate our understanding of the unreadable Universe we find ourselves in, and if humans look silly trying to parse the meaning of a disaster or whether God worries about our sex lives, whaddya gonna do? There are some howlers in old Psychology and Physics textbooks as well.