BORVO

Borvo, Bormo, or Bormanus was a Gaulish god associated with hot springs. The name means “bubbling or boiling spring water.” Although connected with healing, Borvo appears by himself, not usually linked with Apollo. This implies that his was an exclusively Celtic cult: one that was not taken up by the Romans.

Worship of Borvo was common in the Rhone and Loire valleys, Provence, the Alps, and Galicia. He had major cult sites at Bourbonne-les-Bains and Aix-les-Bains

And sometimes had a female consort called Bormana; she even appears by herself at the healing spring of St. Vulbas.

Borvo’s female consort was Damona, “The Divine Cow.”

BRIGHID

In around AD 900, Brighid was said to be expert in poetry, divination, and prophecy, and was worshiped by the filidh, an elite class of poets (see People: Learning). She was the daughter of the Daghda and had two sisters also called Brighid, one associated with healing and one with the smith’s craft. So there were three goddesses called Brighid, which is an interesting example of triplism, or the rule of three.

Ironically, Brighid has survived in the shape of her namesake, the Christian St. Brighid. Lady Gregory, in her Gods and Fighting Men, proposes that the name “Brighid” meant “Fiery Arrow.”

The historical element in St. Brighid is slight, so it is likely that the “Christian saint” is a disguised transformation of the Celtic goddess. Her cult was legitimized by the prefix “Saint”—the Church could scarcely object to the veneration of a saint. St. Brighid’s feast day is February 1, which is the major pre-Christian Celtic festival of Imbolg, the spring festival.

St. Brighid was born at sunrise neither within nor without a house and she hangs her wet cloak on the rays of the sun to dry. The house in which she stays appears to be ablaze. She and 19 of her nuns take turns in looking after a sacred flame that burns perpetually; it is protected by a hedge through which no male may pass. This legend brings the saint close to the Celtic goddess Sulis. According to Solinus, writing in the third century AD, the sanctuary of Minerva (known by the Celtic name Sulis) also contained a perpetual fire.

No clear boundary can be drawn between the life of the Christian saint and the Celtic goddess. The mortal St. Brighid is supposed to have lived in the fifth century

AD.

It is very likely that St. Brighid’s great monastery of Kildare was originally a pagan sanctuary. There are stories that in the remote past a community of Druidesses lived there and that they were responsible for maintaining the sacred fire that burned there; by virtue of their duty they were known as the Daughters of Fire.

Gerald of Wales mentioned this, stressing the Christian connections of the place, though without disguising its evident paganism. This is the sacred fire surrounded by the hedge that no man was allowed to pass through.

Other Christian monastic sites probably occupied pre-Christian foundations in a similar way. The holy well that bears St. Brighid’s name at Liscannor in County Clare may have had an earlier existence as another pre-Christian sacred spring.

Brigantia, “Exalted One”, who was the protectress of the Brigantes tribe, is likely to have been another transformation of Sulis-Brighid.