Look up the derivation of the name of the pagan festival of Imbolc in just about any book and you'll find a reference to the lactation of the ewes. As a Celtic holiday, this is, as anyone who's visited Scotland can surmise, a cause for rejoicing. Lambing season is truly the beginning of the season of plenty. Much depended on the success birth of another generation of sheep to the flock--wool, mutton, trade for goods from other tribes.
Generally, these days, the holiday is associated with the Triple Goddess, Brigit (or Bride or Brighid), possibly the most familiar (or at least widely worshipped) avatar of the eternal triplicity of Maiden/Mother/Crone. Brigit, beyond any other pagan deity, was absorbed virtually intact into the Catholic Church, emerging as St. Brigit, other than St. Patrick, the most-beloved saint in Ireland. Brigit offers guidance and inspiration in the paths of poetry, medicine, the sciences, handicrafts, especially metalworking, and, almost ironically when set against the above, fertiality and motherhood. She is in many ways the personification of the potentiality that is the female. This archetypal fertility, it seems to me is the link to the primal celebration at this season of the coming of a new generation.
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