I've been thinking and meditating a lot on the links between pagan goddessess/gods, land spirits (wights) and christian saints. I know that some saints were actual people in history who have been declared to be saints. I don't really understand that except as a way of honouring people and then associating them with aspects of deity as time goes on. But in some cases no-one seems able to say if or when a saint was an historical person. I think here that a protective spirit of some place began to live more widely in a story and grew in the spirit world because of the prevalence of the story and so became a goddess or god in the pagan world or a saint in the christian world.
I've been thinking about such things since putting the icon painting of Saint Melangell on my last blog entry and trying to understand why I felt that I should do that. After all I'm a witch. I'm led by my meditations, my thoughts, my reading and my discussions with people to conclude that Melangell is a presence in her valley of Pennant in Wales, that she has a life as a hare goddess and as a saint associated with her church in her remote valley, and that none of these are incompatible with each other. Her story lives in me. So she is with me, whether as a saint or a goddess or a protective spirit. She is beyond such words.
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