Saint Patrick Banishes the Serpents.

This new version of our patron saint is, I hope, far removed from the awful, pious, Romanised bishop version we have had to live with since Victorian times and later ‘Holy Picture’ Irish mass card iconography.

Having spent some time researching the origin of this green-cloaked, shamrocked, Roman Catholic Bishop style image we all associate with Saint Patrick I think I have found the source -none other than the famous American engravers Currier and Ives.

Snakes and Symbols

There were never, ever, any native species of snake for Saint Patrick to drive out in the first place, which mystifies a lot of people.
What no one seems to realize is that this snake story directly refers to the time Patrick (Patricius was his correct name) took on the power of ancient druidic tradition and religion at great personal risk with his extremely tolerant version of Christian teaching.
Into this new Christian belief system, he stirred his love of druidic learning, absorbed it all into this new religion, a religion that spread like wildfire -once he had the king on his side.

Without exception, all of our ancient gods and goddesses, good and evil, became absorbed into the pantheon of real Christian saints for this new religion and these same older god-saints and goddesses-saints were all worshipped over the next 1,500 years until the 1960s when the good but unwise Pope John the 23rd allowed the Roman church to get rid of them altogether.

Ireland went overnight from being a sanctuary of ancient beliefs mixed with new religious traditions accommodated by the Catholic Church to a rather more austere, homophobic, misogynistic and even more authoritarian organization struggling to keep pace with a changing new and unfamiliar world where everything was questioned and a new young vibrant Ireland was beginning to emerge.

Meanwhile our quota of vestal virgins, sun-worshippers, tribal gods and fertility goddesses slowly but surely faced extinction.

Over the next hundred years, for instance, all the old fertility goddesses known as ‘Sheela-na-Gigs’ were removed from our churches and church marker stones and eventually made their way to the cellars of our National Museum where they are stored to this day, away from prying eyes.

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More about Sheela-na-Gigs below.

Where the ancient Irish Celtic church allowed such images to encourage reproduction, the new anglicized Irish Catholic Church frowned upon such sculptures and effigys as profane, not sacred, as they had been for over 1,500 years.

It’s hard to recover from such losses.

Why we even have a beautiful male saint with eight breasts who could feed a whole multitude. Can’t think of a single real modern saint who can even come close to such a high achiever. No wonder the church is in deep trouble, they don’t make them like that anymore.

Overnight, in a tsunami of religious self-righteousness, we lost at least 365 saints, mostly old and much-loved gods and goddesses and the like and were left with just two mortal, live ones:
Saint Patrick the snake driver of legend and the heroic Saint Laurence O’Toole, a real live bishop of Dublin who stood up to the invading Norman foreigners back in the day and was actually canonized.

We must remember that ancient Irish deities like the fertility goddesses were christianised by our patron saint and metamorphoisied, like Anu, the fertility goddess, into the more christian Saint Anne.
Ireland has so many Saint Anne’s wells that today are still regarded by the locals as sacred healing wells.
I even visit one in Tara from time to time.

The real or surreal Saint Patrick obviously never drove a single snake from Ireland.

As I mentioned we have no native snake species in the Emerald Isle then or now, nor were we ever host to a serpent of any kind if you exclude the occasional visitor like the famous Lough Ness type Lough Corrib monster.
The snakes are simply symbolic of the flag or banner of the Milesians invaders brought to ancient Ireland after the expulsion of the ‘foreigners’ from Egypt after the heresy of Athenaken.

This flag, with its symbol derived from the snake and rod imagery of their military ally Aron, general of the army who supported Moses (the real biblical one) was given to these early crypto-Irish (Gael Glas) and was eventually to become the symbol of the Irish druids and their religion.

Thus it was that our patron saint, the ever wise and wily Patricius, once himself a slave in Ireland who grew to love the inhabitants and their multi-idolatrous ways, adapted Christianity to his own ends and incorporated it and all the so-called ‘Pagan’ old gods and goddesses into his own new and energetic pantheon of the gods of Irish Christianity.

Patricius, an unstoppable force had faced down and absorbed a beautiful ancient religion into his own and this combination of the old and the new was to spread right across the mainland of Britain and indeed, all of Europe while their enlightened teachings saved the known world from the shadows of the Dark Ages and even gave rise, it could be argued, to the later Enlightenment.

Now that’s how you spread a real religion and did it work for a thousand years and more right up to the present day.

For me, it still survives in the manners and customs of Irish churchgoers and newer believers, from my friends in HerStory Ireland to the mystics, shamans, poets, writers, artists, musicians, archaeologists, academics and even churchmen who keep our ancient traditions alive today.