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Flamekeeping

Nineteen of us, one each night, for nineteen nights. On the twentieth night nobody tends the flame, because that night it is Brighid's own. Then the cycle begins again. This is the oldest continuous practice we have, and anyone may ask to join it.

Where the practice comes from

Gerald of Wales visited Kildare in the 1180s and wrote down what he saw: a perpetual fire, surrounded by a hedge that no man might cross, tended by nineteen nuns in turn. On the twentieth night, the last nun placed the wood by the fire and said, "Brigid, guard your fire; this is your night," and in the morning the fire was found still burning and the wood used up. Whether the fire had already been burning in the goddess's name before the saint, as many believe, we cannot prove. We find we do not need to. Fifteen hundred years is quite old enough.

The fire was extinguished during the Reformation. In 1993 the Brigidine Sisters relit it in Kildare, and in the same decade pagan flamekeeping cells began forming around the world, so that Brighid's fire is now tended on every continent by people of several faiths who mostly do not know each other and are all, on their appointed nights, doing the same thing.

How our cell works

• There are nineteen keepers. Each has a numbered shift, one through nineteen, and keeps the flame on that night of every twenty-day cycle.
• A shift runs from sunset to sunset. You light your flame at dusk, tend it through the evening and, if you can, the night, and let it go out, or extinguish it with thanks, at the next dusk.
• The twentieth night is Brighid's. No one lights anything. We leave the hearth to her.
• The flame is any flame. A candle, an oil lamp, a fire in the grate, and for those who cannot have an open flame, an electric candle lit with intention. It is the keeping that matters, not the combustion.
• Our cycle began at Imbolc. The calendar of shifts is sent to keepers each quarter.

What you do on your shift

As much or as little as you like, but something. The minimum is this: at dusk, light your flame and say her name. Sit with it for a while. Before you sleep, or at the next dusk, thank her and let it go. Between those two moments, keepers do all sorts of things:

• Write, since she is the poets' goddess. Many keepers have a flamekeeping notebook that nobody else ever sees.
• Work healing for anyone who has asked, with the brat Bríde if they have one.
• Make something with their hands: bread, a mended shirt, a drawing.
• Simply sit, and watch the flame, and let the evening be quiet. One of us wrote about what that is like.

Whatever you do, you do it knowing that eighteen other people are doing it on the other eighteen nights, and that somewhere, right now, someone is keeping a flame for her. That knowledge is most of the practice.

Joining the cell

When a shift falls vacant, it is offered first to Hearthkeepers and then to anyone who asks. You do not need to be a member of the Hearth, or Wiccan, or pagan at all; we have had Christian keepers and we would welcome more. You need to be able to keep your night reliably for at least a year, and to tell us in good time if you cannot. If all nineteen shifts are full, we keep a list of people who would like to serve as deputies, standing in when a keeper is ill or travelling. Write to us and say "flamekeeping" in the subject line.