St Patrick was a British man, was captured while in Wales, and brought to Ireland as a slave. After escaping, he returned home, joined the Church, went back to Ireland, became a bishop, died, became the patron saint of Ireland, and now has a Feast Day that is celebrated worldwide by mostly non-Irish people with copious amounts of green beer. Oh, and somewhere in there supposedly banished the snakes from Ireland.
One of the few specific facts I remember from my university ecology classes casts some doubt on St Paddy's holy deeds... Snakes were absent from Ireland long before good ol' Patrick got there in the 5th AD.
More likely, the most recent Ice Age was to blame. When the glaciers expanded and covered Ireland and the UK, snakes and other reptiles (and pretty much everything else) retreated to warmer places in Europe. When the glaciers retreated, most animals and plants recolonized, but the snakes never returned. Didn't make it before the sea cut off the island. Britain was re-colonized due to a land bridge, but Ireland stayed blissfully snake-free.
(This is the same reason that England has far fewer wildflower species than mainland Europe.)
Fun fact about shamrocks: the three leaves of the shamrock symbolize the Holy Trinity and was apparently used by St Patrick to teach the Irish doctrine.
National Geographic does a much better job of explaining this than I can. And probably better researched than me trying to recall what my professors told me. In all likelihood, "driving the snakes from Ireland" was an allegory, as snakes are representative of evil (and paganism) in Christian symbolism.
And this is my favorite...
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