Why Brigid Had to Be in This Story

When I began writing Memory of the Blood Moon, I knew I wasn’t just writing a story about magic. I was writing about inheritance. About the things we carry—sometimes unknowingly—from the past into the present. About power that doesn’t disappear…even when the world changes around it.

And that’s what led me to Brigid.

Brigid (or Brigit, Brighid—her name shifts depending on the telling) is one of the most enduring figures in Celtic mythology. She is often called “the Exalted One,” and she belongs to the Tuatha Dé Danann—the mythic race of gods and goddesses in early Pagan traditions of the British isles.  But what makes her so compelling isn’t just what she represents. It’s how she exists.

The Triple Goddess

One of the most fascinating aspects of Brigid is that she is often understood as a triple goddess—not in the later “maiden, mother, crone” sense people sometimes assume, but as a threefold expression of power.

Early Celtic sources, like Cormac’s Glossary, describe her as one goddess with three aspects (or sisters):

• Brigid the poet
• Brigid the healer
• Brigid the smith

Rather than being separate individuals, these are often interpreted as three facets of the same divine force—a concept that appears frequently in Celtic belief, where divinity is expressed in triads.

And all three aspects are bound by a single unifying element:

Fire.

• The fire of inspiration (poetry, insight, prophecy)
• The fire of life (birth, renewal, transformation)
• The fire of the forge (creativity, craftsmanship, power) 

This idea—that one force can exist in multiple forms simultaneously—was something I kept coming back to while writing.

Because it raises a question I love exploring in fiction:

What if power isn’t singular? What if it changes shape depending on who carries it?

Brigid and the Forge

Of all her aspects, the one that struck me most deeply—and the one that shaped Memory of the Blood Moon in a very specific way—is Brigid as patron of smithcraft. 

In early texts, she is explicitly linked to metalwork—so much so that one of her aspects is literally described as “Brigid the smith.” 

And this isn’t just symbolic.

In the ancient world, smiths weren’t simply craftsmen. They were seen as keepers of transformation—people who could take something raw, buried in the earth, and turn it into something powerful, precise, and enduring...be it a tool, a weapon, or simply a beautiful piece of jewelry. 

Fire. Pressure. Skill. Vision. Creation through change. Brigid presides over that process. She is not just the flame in the forge—she is the reason the forge exists.

And for me, that mattered—because Mira Garvie is a jeweler. 

She works with metal, shaping it, coaxing something beautiful out of what was once unformed. She understands, in a very tactile way, what it means to transform raw material into something that carries meaning. So bringing Brigid into her story was not just a mythological choice. It was a thematic one.

It was also, in many ways, an accident.

When I decided to give the Garvie women a matrilineal magic tradition, I wasn’t thinking about Brigid. I was simply following a thread that felt right for the story. But in the way that certain things have a habit of finding me when I’m writing, I found myself one day searching something as simple as “Celtic goddesses.”

The internet returned a long list of names. And I stopped at one.

Brigid.

There was nothing remarkable about the listing itself—just her name and a link. But something about it caught my attention. I clicked. And within moments, I knew.

Brigid was the patron of metalsmiths.

I didn’t need to read any further. In that instant, the connection was too precise, too aligned to ignore. It felt less like research and more like recognition—as though the story had been waiting for me to catch up to it.

Brigid had found me.

And from that moment forward, she wrote herself into the story.

Why Brigid

When you bring mythology into a story, you’re making a choice.

You’re deciding what kind of power exists in your world. What kind of history lingers beneath the surface. What kind of forces shape your characters—whether they understand them or not.

Brigid gave me a way to explore all of that at once.

A goddess of fire—but not destruction.
A creator. A healer. A smith.
A figure who exists in threes, in layers, in transformation.

And a presence that refuses to vanish—even when the world tries to rename her.

As Memory of the Blood Moon moves toward its May 2026 release, I’ll be sharing more about the mythology and history woven into the story.

But for now, this is where it begins:

Some fires don’t go out.

They change form.

And sometimes…they’re waiting for the right hands to carry them.

—Rebecca