Revision(ism) Notes #1: Saint Patrick

Saint Patrick, as we all know, is the patron saint of shamrocks, leprechauns, binge-drinking and the colour green; today, being the traditional day of his celebration, I shall be engaging in my favorite pastime: Ruining Other People's Fun.

Specifically, on the sacred cow barbecue today is this constantly-repeated bit of pagan revisionism:

So, let's begin with a quick recap of the generally-known story of St. Patrick: He was born in the 5th century AD in Roman Britain, the son of a local politician and scion of an early Christian family - though not particularly pious himself. At the age of sixteen, he was captured by a group of Irish pirates, who brought him to Ireland where he was enslaved for six years. After six years, he escaped his masters, supposedly on the instruction of a divine voice from above, and returned to Britain. There, he continued to study Christianity, and eventually became ordained as a priest. He then returned to Ireland, where he founded numerous churches and baptized thousands of Irish people, including numerous members of various noble families.

This isn't particularly relevant,
I just like snakes in hats, okay?

There are a number of legends associated with Patrick - the two most frequently repeated ones are his use of the shamrock as an illustrative metaphor for the Holy Trinity, and that he banished all snakes from Ireland. It is this latter legend which frequently gets brought up in arguments over the so-called "pagan genocide" of the period.

Let's make it clear - the account of Patrick chasing snakes into the sea should not be interpreted literally - though it may well have been at various times. Indeed, the general consensus is that Ireland never had any snakes in the first place, due to being geographically isolated since the last Ice Age, when it was too cold for snakes in any case. 

Assuming a symbolic interpretation of the snakes thus seems like a reasonable assumption. Snakes, after all, have a long and convoluted symbolic history; in the context of Christianity, they are most frequently interpreted as symbols of sin, temptation, and all kinds of malevolence. The standard interpretation is, therefore, that Patrick's driving of the snakes from Ireland symbolically represents the overthrow of the pre-Christian paganism that existed before his coming. This particular interpretation has in recent years developed a great deal of traction within various pagan communities - it taps into a sense of persecution and heroic resistance to colonial aggression which elevates the struggles of a community towards acceptance to the level of myth. Which would, given the embarrassingly white nature of most modern pagan groups, be perhaps a little bit problematic if the original injustice didn't happen.

Which, err, it didn't. At least, not in the apocalyptic way that it is sometimes presented.

There seem to be an unusual amount of
snakes in Santa hats on the internet

The legend of Patrick's expulsion of the snakes seems to be traceable back to Muirchú moccu Machtheni's "Vita sancti Patricii", written some two hundred years after Patrick's time; this text depicts Patrick as something of a warrior-saint, deposing kings and battling druids, overthrowing pagan idols and miraculous feats inspiring mass conversion. These accounts - which often contradict the accounts of Patrick himself in his few surviving writings - have a lot in common with the legends of Christian saints found in the conversion of the Roman Empire, as described in Ramsey McMullen's "Christianizing the Roman Empire". It should be noted that the "Snakes = Druids" interpretation emerges almost entirely from this period; in "Blood and Misltetoe", Ronald Hutton remarks that the lack of references to the Druids with
in Patrick's own writings, compared to the later heroic myths of the saint's life, suggest that these violent confrontations were given a greater degree of prominence - or invented wholesale - for the purposes of political hagiography. much later.

An interesting example is that of Crom Cruach, a pre-Christian Irish god that St. Patrick is said to have destroyed the cult thereof. Crom is said to have been a solar-fertility god who demanded propitiation with human sacrifice to guarantee a good harvest. The tale of Patrick's destruction of the cult originates from the "Vita tripartita Sancti Patricii", a late 9th century text written partly in Irish and partly in Latin; Patrick is said to have struck down the idol of Crom Cruach and cursed the "demon" that appeared from within the idol. Other later texts repeat the tale in various forms, speaking of Patrick smashing the golden statue with a sledgehammer. And yet, this tale seems to reflect earlier tales of the god Lugh battling with, and being victorious over Crom Cruach, thus securing the harvest for the year, as outlined in Maire MacNeill's "The Festival of Lughnasa". One could see this as evidence of "Interpretatio Christiana", the syncretic equivocation of pagan archetypes and symbols with Christian ones, much in the same fashion that the Roman state paganism incorporated the gods and legends of the lands conquered by the Empire.

I may have a problem (CN: contains snakes)

So, what exactly did happen during the Christian conversion of Ireland? Well, for a start, the tale of Patrick being the first Christian missionary to the island is deeply inaccurate - records from the time of Pope Celestine speak of Palladius being sent as a bishop to minister to Christians in Ireland in 430, likely to stamp out the heresy of Pelagianism. Palladius is often erroneously conflated with St. Patrick, which becomes a source of great confusion, especially given the difficulty in dating Patrick's life or mission. There is a school of thought that suggests that there may have been a deliberate attempt to downplay the role of Palladius in the Christianisation of Ireland by the followers of Patrick, though this is difficult to prove either way with any certainty. In any case, it seems reasonable to assume that Christianity had already reached Ireland before Patrick's missionary efforts, due to the numerous connections between Ireland and Romanised Britain.

One of the major difficulties here is in the fact that the vast majority of writings on pre-Christian Ireland come from much later sources, inevitably written by Christian monks and burdened with a rather predictable set of biases and dubious scholarship. However, what can be seen is a combination of a "top-down" conversion strategy, in which local kings would tend towards having their sons baptised, but not converting themselves; and a gradual increase in the political and economic influence of the monasteries, which became practically akin to local warlords in their own right. Over generations, the trend seems to have been towards assimilation and gradual conversion - albeit with remnants of the pre-Christian religion being syncretised and preserved in the cultural memory as a kind of folklore.

"The doctrine of original sssin isss clearly Manichaeisssm"

One final thought on the snakes. It is worth noting the frequency with which the Pelagian heresy is described with the metaphors of serpents, as in Rhigyfarch's "Life of St. David", written in the 11th century. Could the tale of St. Patrick's expulsion of the snakes be, perhaps, a reference to Palladius' original mission in Ireland?