_, "honour,"
"renown") suggests her high functions. But her popularity is seen in the
continuation of her personality and cult in those of S. Brigit, at whose
shrine in Kildare a sacred fire, which must not be breathed on, or
approached by a male, was watched daily by nineteen nuns in turn, and on
the twentieth day by the saint herself.[225] Similar sacred fires were
kept up in other monasteries,[226] and they point to the old cult of a
goddess of fire, the nuns being successors of a virgin priesthood like
the vestals, priestesses of Vesta. As has been seen, the goddesses
Belisama and Sul, probably goddesses of fire, resembled Brigit in
this.[227] But Brigit, like Vesta, was at once a goddess of fire and of
fertility, as her connection with Candlemas and certain ritual survivals
also suggest. In the Hebrides on S. Bride's day (Candlemas-eve) women
dressed a sheaf of oats in female clothes and set it with a club in a
basket called "Briid's bed." Then they called, "Briid is come, Briid is
welcome." Or a bed was made of corn and hay with candles burning beside
it, and Bride was invited to come as her bed was ready. If the mark of
the club was seen in the ashes, this was an omen of a good harvest and a
prosperous year.[228] It is also noteworthy that if cattle cropped the
grass near S. Brigit's shrine, next day it was as luxuriant as ever.

Brigit, or goddesses with similar functions, was regarded by the Celts
as an early teacher of civilisation, inspirer of the artistic, poetic,
and mechanical faculties, as well as a goddess of fire and fertility. As
such she far excelled her sons, gods of knowledge. She must have
originated in the period when the Celts worshipped goddesses rather than
gods, and when knowledge--leechcraft, agriculture, inspiration--were
women's rather than men's. She had a female priesthood, and men were
perhaps excluded from her cult, as the tabued shrine at Kildare
suggests. Perhaps her fire was fed from sacred oak wood, for many
shrines of S. Brigit were built under oaks, doubtless displacing pagan
shrines of the goddess.[229] As a goddess, Brigit is more prominent than
Danu, also a goddess of fertility, even though Danu is mother of the
gods.

Other goddesses remembered in tradition are Cleena and Vera, celebrated
in fairy and witch lore, the former perhaps akin to a river-goddess
Clota, the Clutoida (a fountain-nymph) of the continental Celts; the
latter, under her alternative name Dirra, perhaps a f