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 form of a goddess of Gaul, Dirona.[230] Aine, one of the great fairy-queens of Ireland, has her seat at Knockainy in Limerick, where rites connected with her former cult are still performed for fertility on Midsummer eve.  If they were neglected she and her troops performed them, according to local legend.[231] She is thus an old goddess of fertility, whose cult, even at a festival in which gods were latterly more prominent, is still remembered.  She is also associated with the waters as a water-nymph captured for a time as a fairy-bride by the Earl of Desmond.[232] But older legends connect her with the sid.  She was daughter of Eogabal, king of the sid of Knockainy, the grass on which was annually destroyed at Samhain by his people, because it had been taken from them, its rightful owners.  Oilill Olomm and Ferchus resolved to watch the sid on Samhain-eve.  They saw Eogabal and Aine emerge from it.  Ferchus killed Eogabal, and Oilill tried to outrage Aine, who bit the flesh from his ear.  Hence his name of “Bare Ear."[233] In this legend we see how earlier gods of fertility come to be regarded as hostile to growth.  Another story tells of the love of Aillen, Eogabal’s son, for Manannan’s wife and that of Aine for Manannan.  Aine offered her favours to the god if he would give his wife to her brother, and “the complicated bit of romance,” as S. Patrick calls it, was thus arranged.[234]