First, St. Brigid, as "Mary of the Gaels," is a Marian figure in Celtic Christianity.
Second, Sophia, as the divine feminine figure that co-creates, suffuses, and guides the natural world, from solstices to animals to the medicinal properties of roots, is a Christian vision of what many pagans appeal to when they speak of a "nature goddess."
So, to summarize:
Brigid ---> Mary
Sophia ---> Divine Feminine in Nature
But this doesn't connect St. Brigid to the divine feminine in nature. To bring Brigid into a conversation about the divine feminine we need to connect Mary to Sophia. That's the goal of this post.
Perhaps a good place to start is with cosmic visions of Mary. In Marian iconography you'll often see Mary depicted crowned and standing upon a crescent moon. The vision comes from Revelation 12:
A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.
This is the celestial Mary. Mary Queen of Heaven. Now, this celestial Mary isn't described in Revelation as Sophia, but this more cosmic vision of Mary starts to push the Marian imagination beyond the human Mary. To be sure, we're pushing the Protestant imagination too far, but these associations are coming from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. So, to follow this argument, you're going to have to play in that metaphysical sandbox. Of course, you don't have to agree with any of the Marian theology, but if you want to see the shape of the argument you'll have to adopt the priors as a practice of sympathetic understanding.
So, if we adopt a more cosmic view of Mary, is there a connection between Mary-as-cosmic-principle and the vision of Sophia in the Old Testament? A few connections can be made.
To start, both Mary and Sophia function as mediators between God and creation. God creates the world through Sophia. And God is born into the world through Mary, the Mother of God. Both Mary and Sophia function as bridges between God and creation. Christ comes to us through feminine mediation. Cosmically, the Logos is mediated through Sophia. And the Incarnated Jesus is born as the son of Mary. What Sophia is to creation, Mary is to the Incarnation.
Next, both Mary and Sophia are set apart from the created order. Sophia was the first of God's creation and works alongside God as co-maker and co-creator. Mary is not described as pre-existing creation, but she is set apart from creation in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. That is to say, Mary is the only created being who was not touched by sin. Again, while the correspondence is not exact, both Sophia and Mary are creatures who are uniquely set apart from the rest of creation.
Mary and Sophia are also described in similar ways. In Proverbs, Sophia is described as "a reflection of eternal light." Mary, in Revelation, is described as being "clothed with the sun."
Lastly and most importantly, both Mary and Sophia express the divine feminine.
All these allusive correspondences have caused some theologians to make a connection between Mary and Sophia. Sophia is the divine feminine aspect of God's creative work, and Mary is the perfect realization and embodiment of that aspect of creation. We might put it this way: Mary is the incarnation of Sophia, the divine feminine made visible in a human person.
For example, Teilhard de Chardin wrote a poem in 1918 entitled "The Eternal Feminine" where he connects the Old Testament vision of Sophia with the Virgin Mary. Here's a sampling from the start of the poem:
When the world was born, I came into being. Before the centuries were made, I issued from the hand of God — half formed, yet destined to grow in beauty from age to age, the handmaid of his work...
I am the beauty running through the world, to make it associate in ordered groups: the ideal held up before the world to make it ascend.
I am the essential Feminine.
In the beginning I was no more than a mist, rising and falling: I lay hidden beneath affinities that were as yet hardly conscious, beneath a loose and tenuous polarity.
And yet I was already in existence.
In the stirring of the layers of the cosmic substance, whose nascent folds contain the promise of worlds beyond number, the first traces of my countenance could be read. Like a soul, still dormant but essential, I bestirred the original mass, almost without form, which hastened into my field of attraction; and I instilled even into the atoms, into the fathomless depths of the infinitesimal, a vague but obstinate yearning to emerge from the solitude of their nothingness and to hold fast to something outside themselves.
I was the bond that thus held together the foundations of the universe.
For every monad, be it never so humble, provided it is in very truth a centre of activity, obeys in its movement an embryo of love for me:
The universal Feminine.
You can see all the imagery being pulled from Proverbs 8 and Wisdom 6-7. In the middle of the poem de Chardin describes how humanity can come to misuse nature--the divine feminine--or falsely worship it:
For a long time man, lacking the skill to distinguish between the mirage and the truth, has not known whether he should fear me or worship me.
He loved me for the magic of my charm and my sovereign power; he feared me as a force alien to himself, and for the bewildering riddle I presented.
I was at once his strength and his weakness — his hope and his trial. It was in relation to me that the good were divided from the wicked.
Indeed, had Christ not come, man might well have placed me for ever in the camp of evil.Humanity, therefore, has to approach nature and the divine feminine in a chaste and holy manner. Because of this, the divine feminine declares in the poem: "Henceforth my name is Virginity." And yet, in the very next line: "The Virgin is still woman and mother: in that we may read the sign of the new age." We can see here the poem building a bridge between the divine feminine of Proverbs and Wisdom with the Virgin Mary. This connection comes into full view toward the end of the poem where Sophia finally discloses her identity,
Lying between God and the earth, as a zone of mutual attraction, I draw them both together in a passionate union.Russian sophiological theologians, like Sergius Bulgakov, also make connections between Sophia and Mary.
— until the meeting takes place in me, in which the generation and plenitude of Christ are consummated throughout the centuries...
I am Mary the Virgin, mother of all human kind.
