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Saint Patrick — Description

Haigh toppa de mornin’ to all ye lads, lassies, and leaths! I swear I'll only do enough phonetic spelling of a bad Irish accent to make my born-in-Belfast step-grandfather roll in his cairn. Miss you Granda, I wish I had more memories with you.
Today be Saint Patrick's Day! It's the holiday everyone only vaguely remembers as the green one where we all get piss drunk as God intended. I figured ya know what sure, I can discover the true meaning of Saint Patrick's Day, I mean when else will I be presented with this opportunity? Despite being irrevocably synonymous with the culture and history of Ireland as popular culture understands it today, like any self-respecting Irish stereotype, Patrick wasn't actually Irish at all. By the words of his own Confessio, he was a Briton and a Roman citizen, two things which were swiftly becoming oxymorons as the Empire abandoned the island to invaders. Patrick, Magonus Succetus Patricius Cothirthiacus to his mother, was born around 387 CE, and claimed to hail from a town called Bannavem Taburniae, which… frustratingly does not appear on any known map of Roman Britain. Patrick's beef with King Coroticus of Dumbarton upon his return from the Emerald Isle would suggest that it must've been somewhere in the Kingdom of Strathclyde, today part of Scotland's undercarriage, but that's about the only context clue Patrick thought to pass down to us, and it's not very helpful. It must've been close to the shoreline, at the very least, because at the age of sixteen, Patrick was stolen away from his home, dragged across the Irish Sea to a land of facetious faeries and carrion birds.
It was Irish sea raiders from Dál Riata (whose borders at the time were roughly equivalent to today's County Antrim) who bound Patrick in irons and sold him as a slave to a guy named Milchu. I couldn't find any primary sources on Milchu, all history remembers him as is some dude who evidently owned slaves, so fuck Milchu actually, he sounds like someone who should be forgotten. Patrick was put to work in the Braid Valley, round Slemish hill, shepherding his first flock, for six grueling years. His confession isn't shy about how much this period of his life was arduous and traumatizing for him. He thought he deserved it, is the saddest part. See, his father Calpornius was a deacon, but Patrick by his own admission had never been so much a believer as that. He was mostly just a privileged kid with little in the way of a Latin education and even less in his agenda of career prospects. Separated so far from everything else he knew though, the one thing Patrick had left of his home was his father's faith. Prayer kept him sane on those often boggy and frigid fields, and, perhaps appropriately, it was his devotion that ultimately saved him.
According to the way Patrick tells the story, after six years of hard unpaid labor, he dreamed one night of a voice announcing that his freedom was at hand. “Look,” it directed sweetly “your ship is ready”. The accompanying visual was not a location Patrick recognized, in fact it was some 200 miles away, but I mean taking literally any chance is better than spending another nanosecond as a slave. Following his mental map, Patrick snuck away from his enslaver's household in the dead of night and trudged the whole way to his destination. There he found a ship in port which, at the very least, he believed to be the one from his dream, and more importantly let him aboard. The captain initially had misgivings about letting some weird sweaty homeless guy onto their barge, but his crew took pity on Patrick and convinced the captain to let the Christian prove his harmlessness. Patrick nodded his head excitedly and stayed as quiet and out of the way as possible. For three days they sailed the Irish Sea, and then for twenty-eight more they went wandering aimlessly through an old growth thicket. Food ran out, morale shortly thereafter, and Patrick was mostly useless. The least he could do, the captain asked, was to pray to his god to send some sustenance their way if he's as cool as Patrick kept insisting. Patrick obliged, clasped his hands together, and suddenly there emerged from the woods a herd of pigs so fat and numerous that the crew and their dogs both were able to stuff their empty bellies full. They gave an offering of honey to the Christians’ god for sparing some mercy even for a band of lowly pagans, and Patrick had finally earned their friendship.
After many years, Patrick's odyssey finally brought him home into the arms of his loving parents, over the moon to have their son long lost returned at last. For his part, Patrick decided he'd thank the god who'd gotten him this far by finally shaping up and reading some books. Patrick studied church law under Germanus in Auxerre in Gaul, where in 432 Steve beamed into his brain another vision. In this nighttime tumble, some guy named Victoricus noticed that Patrick was a nerd who likes to read, and so handed him a scroll of his own to occupy his eyeballs, a scroll titled “The Voice of the Irish”, which contained the lamentations of every soul yearning to be free of paganism in Ireland. It's always a bizarro fun house mirror experience reading about these Pagan-to-Christian conversion stories when I myself am an incident of the reverse. I find monotheism to be irreconcilably befuddling, but I guess it's Ireland's business if they want to transition.
Except they sure didn't seem to be as eager as Patrick's dream had convinced them they were. Pope Celestine sent Patrick, now a bishop, to Ireland because of his dream, and totally not because the last guy Palladius got run out of town with pointy sticks and the church desperately pulled for a replacement. So far as I can gather, Patrick really doesn't seem to have wanted the job. Ireland is a troubled, dangerous isle that doesn't take kindly to people from the other island coming over to tell them what to do. He was a slave there for Christ's sake, why would he want to go back? Back he went though, this assignment was his duty and his duty was important to him. Boarding a ship, his first dock was at Wicklow, but the Druids there chased him off with pointy sticks. He found friendlier folk amidst the rocky islands near Skerries, resupplying his mission for the rest of his real destination: Slemish. He'd come back round to pay the bounty his former master sent out for his capture, because if you're gonna be stuck in Ireland for the foreseeable future it's probably safer to not have a guy running around with a legal argument for owning you that he can flash to the cops. Hilariously, when Milchu heard that Patrick had come back threatening to forgive him of his sins, he fuckin set himself on fire rather than even talk to his former slave. What a loser.
Patrick's ship had docked back at the village of Saul, where he'd receive his first base camp to operate a monastery out of. It started as a barn gifted to him by a chieftain named Dichu who, unable to kill Patrick because Steve clenched his swordarm stiff whenever he tried to, decided that God was in fact real apparently and maybe he shouldn't shoot the messenger. Dichu was nobody though, in the grand scheme of things. If Patrick wanted to fulfill his mission as the man who would convert an entire island, he needed the ear of a king, and kings were crowned at Tara. The king in question was a man named Lóegaire, busy making arrangements for the Beltane festival. To Patrick though, it was the Eve of Easter, and on the Hill of Slane he ignited a bonfire to announce the resurrection of the Nailed God for all to see. It was an insult to the authority of the king and his gods, plain and directed. Lóegaire's Druids warned their king to take action, for they prophesied that if this fire was not extinguished here and now, then the inferno shall engulf the whole of Ireland for the rest of time. No matter how many spell slots they expended though, no man was able to lay a finger on Patrick or his fire. Patrick then used the Force to bash Archdruid Lochru's skull against the rocks like he's Darth fuckin Vader stepping fresh off his TIE Advanced x1. Lóegaire submitted to baptism, presumably scared out of his wits.
How Christian Lóegaire was in his soul is debatable, but it was enough for Patrick's purposes. Fine Patrick, the king's court huffed, teach us about this Christian witchcraft, we're listening okay? Patrick then plucked a three-leafed shamrock from the grass in an attempt to explain the Trinity to these people, which I'm sure left everyone even more confused and frustrated about this new religion than they already were. Now given royal permission to spread the Gospel as he pleased throughout the rest of Ireland, Patrick proceeded to Focluth and Killala in Connacht, where he'd spend seven years converting impressionable young women, propping up cathedrals, and destroying people's idols, dick move. Apparently Patrick had reoccurring beef with some obscure deity named Crom Cruach, though it should be noted that this particular legend didn't crop up until at least the 12th century, specifically via a medieval text called the Book of Leinster. The monstrous Crom Cruach is basically a Christian parody of what they thought an Irish pagan god would be like, rather than something anyone actually believed in. There is not a chance in Helheim I'm diverting this already splotchy story into a tangent about the academic agony that is Celtic Reconstructionism though.
In 440, Patrick's work moved eastwards, first into Ulster, then onto Leinster, and at last to Munster. His primary strategy was to target kings first and foremost, knowing that the chieftains would naturally follow, and would usually plead his case in the form of fat stacks of church gold. He made it a point never to accept gifts in turn from anyone though, being paranoid enough to know that accepting anything from anyone just puts you in a position of debt that can be lorded over your head ad infinitum. He was also constantly harassed by bandits and people who were sick of him breaking their sacred objects, arrested no less than twelve times and sentenced to death at least once. I've read his confession, I get it, the man just never shut the fuck up. It's like look, if by some statistical fluke one of those assholes who sometimes appear in my day-job's parking lot, with a megaphone and a Bible they conspicuously never open, read this blog, my advice is this, honest strongman argument here, Pagan to Christian: public preaching is what drives people away from your religion and forms an adverse stereotype in their mind which you embody every time you're at a pulpit. If you wanna talk theology with someone, just take the time to sit and have lunch with them face to face, one on one, and you may well both come away with an improved understanding of each other's spirituality. Don't make your faith something we have to call security about. That doesn't make our side or yours look good.
The snake story apparently comes from a guy named Jocelin of Furness, who published his version in his biography of Saint Patrick in the 12th century. It's not even much a story so much as it is an entry on a list of bullshit Jocelin just kinda fanfictioned about the guy. Like oh dude you know what'd be totally sick?? What if there's a scene where Patrick aura farms on a mountain holding a cool stick Jesus owned?? It is cool though, I can't deny, the visual of Patrick with an angel as his stand just sorta Gandalf-ing the ground, sucking all the island's snakes to one hillside at once, only to then geas them to turn right back around and drown themselves in the ocean. Now you might be a snide little mean bitch like me and point out that Ireland has actually never had snakes, there's not a single trace of them in the island's fossil record, it's just too miserable and cold for snakes up there. I however would like to offer the argument of yeah, exactly, you're welcome. The visual of some fuckin wizard unearthing an entire fossil record out of the earth just to chuck ‘em into the sea where no one cand find them is a hilarious one to me, if deeply emotionally devastating as a paleontologist.
Patrick died in Saul on March 17th of either 461 or 493. I… I know. Apparently they were arguing about this even in the 9th century. Apparently Saint Brigid made a cameo at his death. During their last prayer together, Patrick received an oddly hostile vision of all the lights going out across Ireland, save for pitiful crags where the fires refused to die. Patrick was… understandably anxious, begging the angel delivering the message for the survival of this light, but the angel assured him that it would not only live on, it would thrive and reclaim the island brighter than ever before. I can only presume Patrick died happy. I hope he did, it's all any of us can ask for. His bones are allegedly interred at Down Cathedral in Downpatrick, and I'm frankly not here to ruin anyone's fun. Apparently he's never been formally canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church, but that's because he was already considered a saint prior to the modern canonization process, so he essentially had the cool kid card already in their eyes. He didn't need to be canonized, what a curious insight. That's why you're probably still celebrating his very Catholic feast day on this very day. Well that and any excuse to down a lager, right?
Design notes, see the problem is trying to make Saint Patrick not look like a druid. That's your first instinct too right? But then you think no he was canceling druids so he wouldn't. He's more like… a cleric yeah? Yeah that'll do, and throw some Celtic knots and shamrocks on there for style cause ya just kinda have to. Yes I'm aware Saint Patrick was said to have lived his life with only the crusty and torn shirt of rags on his back, but my universe is one where everyone has access to the highest fashions regardless of their backgrounds, because that's the world I want to live in goddammit. Anyways I just worked five morning shifts in a row, on my monthly no less, imma go catch up on some lost Zs. Happy Saint Patty's Day u crazy animals.