We’ve been using this tagline – cloth is culture – for a few years now. I’m going to start periodically featuring examples of what I mean by this: ways that cloth is integral to how humans “do” culture, particularly in a modern setting. – allie
While we in the U.S. now mark Groundhog’s Day as a way to look forward to spring, our Celtic ancestors celebrated Brighid, the goddess of hearth, healing, and spring, at the beginning of what is now February.
Through centuries of syncretism, Brighid became convoluted with St. Brigid, and the fire festival at the cross-quarter day between winter and spring became her feast day. But as with many living traditions, the very old ways are still practiced, and there’s no snobbery about which way is authentic…
Brat bhride is the Irish for Brigid’s symbolic cloak, a piece of cloth left outside overnight on the eve of her feast day, Imbolc, for her to bless as she visits each house. It’s then infused with powers of healing and protection throughout the coming year.
Tonja Reichley says it better:
Brighid’s cloak. It is tradition to set out a blue cloth at the beginning of the fire festival of Imbolc […]. On these first nights of the season of Imbolc, Brighid breathes her healing breath on these clothes, blessing them for the year ahead to be used for healing, protection, ritual. Use any blue natural fiber cloth and set it over a tree or bush or anything outside to receive her breath.
Ancestral magic
A friend recently sent me a textile belonging to her ancestor with the request to remake it into a wearable accessory. She and her family do not necessarily share my Irish heritage, and by no means did I myself grow up steeped in a rich yearly cycle of Irish traditions and old rituals. But the practice of brat bhride is easily accessible, and the perfect medicine for this friend’s complicated relationship with her relative. So I left the piece of cloth outside for Brigid’s healing breezes, and will later craft it into a unique accessory for her to wear.
She could have easily let this cloth item go into the global churn of the secondhand textile trade. But she chose to keep it, for her own unique and complex reasons which she need not explain or validate to anyone. The cloth is priceless to her, whereas its market value is negligible.
I told her, “I’m putting my ancestors to work for your ancestors,” offering the service of our traditional healing to her and her lineage. Whether she believes in it or not, or whether I can empirically prove that it is effective, is entirely moot.
Cloth is a gift. Cloth is relationship. Cloth is culture.
To learn more about this Irish tradition, I highly recommend this podcast episode produced at University College Dublin.