"See, we used to worship God as a mother" - Sinead O'Connor

Today is St. Patrick's Day, March 17th, and being a woman warrior Celt of Irish and Scottish ancestry, I wanted to take this opportunity to clarify the legend of St. Patrick slaying dragons and driving the snakes out of Ireland.  There never were any snakes in Ireland, so this story is a metaphor for the conversion of the pagan priests and Druids, and the death of the goddess, the feminine.  The Celts of Europe and Ireland used this serpent imagery and kundalini energy to empower the land and the people.  By cutting off the power of the Druids, of whom many were women, the active participation of women as priestesses was eliminated.

Early Ireland was a matrifocal society.  Women had power over their own bodies, over birthing, the skills of medicine and midwifery, smithing, dyeing, and weaving.  Life was centered around the mother or the mother's family.  The paternity of a child was often not known, nor did it matter, because every child belonged to his or her mother's family.  To the indigenous Celts, the divine feminine is a wisdom bestowing goddess.  The great Irish war hero Cuchulain learns both fighting techniques and the inner wisdom of a warrior-in-balance from Scathach, a goddess on the Isle of Skye.  A number of poet-seers in the Irish and Scottish traditions experienced and related to the goddess Brighid as the patron of poetry and fire.  She acted as a muse for those poets who endured sensory deprivation, often seeking their quickening verses alone in the darkness of caves.

In today's modern Western world, we still are not connected to the feminine as divine. This imbalance enables governments to turn a blind eye to the destruction of the planet. The same can be said regarding our bodies. The environmental crisis is not a crisis of the environment; it is a human self-esteem problem. If we don't truly value ourselves, our bodies, each other, all of life, we will continue to take our low self-esteem, our self-hate, and create discord in the very thing that sustains us. To truly remember the preciousness of life, the warrior (the masculine qualities within both men and women) must surrender to the Goddess (the feminine energies within men, women, and the land).