While St. Patrick is one of the most widely-known figures in Irish history, he was
not actually of Irish lineage. St. Patrick was born to wealthy British Celtic parents in the
late fourth century. When he was sixteen, the young Patrick was captured by a group of
Irish raiders attacking his family’s estate. He was forced into slavery in Ireland and made
to work as a shepherd. Today, historical and archaeological evidence offers us a glimpse
of the Ireland that Patrick would have known.
Pre-Christian Ireland was populated by the ancient Celts (pronounced with a hard
“C”), a tribal people who once ranged across much of Western, Central, and Southeast
Europe. Through conquest by the Romans and other peoples the Celts lost most of the
territory they had controlled. The ancient Celts were a warlike people who lived
primarily by pastoralism and farming. Cattle were so important to the ancient Celts that a
person’s worth was measured by how many cattle he or she owned. They practiced
cattle-raiding, wore lavish personal ornamentation, produced intricate decorative art, and
developed a rich tradition of poetry, storytelling, mythology, and oral history.
Before the coming of Christianity, the ancient Celts of Ireland practiced a naturebased
religion and worshipped many gods and goddesses, with different tribes showing
preferences for different deities. Because of religious taboos on writing, most knowledge
was passed down by word of mouth, so much information about the beliefs of the preChristian
Celts has been lost. We do know that erudite druids formed the priestly class of
the ancient Celtic people. In addition to officiating at rituals, they acted as physicians,
lawyers, judges, and keepers of the oral traditions, or historians. They may have studied
for as long as twenty years to memorize the myths, histories, and incantations verbatim.
Patrick would bring the spiritual hegemony of the druids in Ireland to an end.
After more than six years of slavery,
Patrick reportedly dreamt that the voice of
God was instructing him to leave Ireland. He escaped soon thereafter, walking nearly
two hundred miles to the Irish coast, from
where he sailed to Britain. Back in his
homeland, Patrick is supposed to have
received another revelation from God, this
time in the form of an angel telling him to
return to Ireland as a missionary. He spent
over fifteen further years in Britain studying
to become a priest and then returned to the
land of his captivity. Once again in Ireland,
he ministered to the fledgling Christian
population already there and converted many
more of the Irish to Christianity.
In his twenty-nine years as a
missionary in Ireland, Patrick is said to have
baptized 120,000 people and founded three
hundred churches. Popular myths tell of St.
Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland, but, in fact, Ireland had no snakes. The legends about Patrick removing snakes are probably
symbolic references to his efforts to end the pagan practices of the Irish people, since
certain Christians equated paganism with devilry and Satan is associated with snakes in
the Judeo-Christian tradition. The connection between St. Patrick and the shamrock
probably has a more historical basis. Three-sectioned shamrock leaves may have been
particularly important to the pagan Celts before Patrick’s coming since the druids
considered three to be a magical number. Patrick used this symbol with which the
ancient Irish were likely already familiar to explain the Christian concept of the Trinity
and to represent the cross of Jesus.
Modern Ireland’s overwhelmingly Christian population is in large part the legacy
of St. Patrick.