Sheelah Speaks, Patrick Listens

A Word From St. Patrick’s Wife in Time for Sheelah's Day on March 18

Pillow talk.

At the end of the day, when new lovers or longtime partners lie down together, they can speak in hushed tones about the things that cannot be discussed freely over the dining room table. 

In the shelter of darkness, in the temple that is a shared bed, it just might be possible for a couple to speak to one another as they truly are, before the persona, beneath the armor, beyond the day-to-day responsibilities.

It’s a time when intimacy is almost easy. It’s easier to be all kinds of naked when you pause on the shared shores between waking and sleep.

In Irish mythology, the pillow talk scene takes place at the start of the Táin Bó Cuailgne, when Queen Medb and King Aillil get to discussing who brought the most and who benefited the most from their union. This little chat is rather an outlier in that it happened to start an epic war, but it goes to show the power of conversation.

For the first episode of season five of KnotWork Storytelling, I was inspired by the way that these liminal words have a way of changing everything. Or, at least clarifying something.

What might happen if Saint Patrick could take off his towering bishop’s hat and come naked to bed? What if he remembered he was a man, not the patriarch of the Irish church?

That is, if Patrick was married, of course.

The Patrick We Think We Know

The history books will give you a version of Patrick’s history that goes something like this:

Maewyn Succat, the man who was later known as Patrick was born around 387 AD, probably born in what is now Wales, or maybe Scotland, or maybe Brittany. Just definitely someplace where the Romans ruled.

And then was abducted by pirates and spent six years in Ireland, a shepherd and a slave before escaped back home and joined the priesthood. In a dream, he was directed to return to the island to convert the people who had once held him captive. 

He went on to baptize his way across Ireland and is connected specifically to Armagh, where he built his first church, and Croagh Patrick in Mayo, where he was said to have spent forty days of fasting.

In these historical accounts there’s no mention of what, during the 18th and 19th century, would be simply accepted and taken for granted in some places, particularly amongst the Irish diaspora: Patrick had a wife, and her name was Sheelah.

It’s no wonder Patrick was remembered as a celibate lone wolf.  The Synods of Saint Patrick¹ are quite explicit when it comes to what’s forbidden: everything. (Everything, including something I just had the opportunity to Google: femoral fornication. It’s obvious enough once you think of it, I suppose, but only if you’re a 7th century Christian patriarch.)

But then, Saint Patrick was long gone when those religious rulebooks were written², so it may just be another case of historical revisionism.

A sin of omission, as my Sheelah would say, to leave her out of the story.

In 2017, a lecturer at University College Cork named Shane Lehane made something of a stir when he was interviewed for an Irish Times article and revealed Patrick’s secret past wtih his secret wife.

Many other news outlets picked it up because it’s some tasty, tasty click bait (I got you to open this message, too, right?). Lehane returned to the idea in 2019 in another IT piece of his own a couple years later, both to clarify some things (to name this idea as folklore, not as history), and also to invite us all to keep Sheelah in our consciousness.

Essentially, the story goes that March 18 was devoted to Sheelah in order to keep the party going after the big saint’s day on March 17. Folks weren’t keen to return to the long Lenten abstention, and they had no philosophical or spiritual quarrel with Patrick having a wife.  

The lived truth of the people of the past becomes the folklore we study (and the viral news stories) today.

Clearly, there’s something in our contemporary culture that makes us more than amenable to the idea that the man who brought the Christian god to Ireland needed, to paraphrase Tori Amos, a woman to look after him.

I love the idea of Patrick having a wife. It feels right in my bones and in my heart that her name was Sheelah and that her holiday should be paired with his. I adore this concept so much that writing a story from Sheelah’s perspective was effortless, and I just released it on KnotWork Storytelling today.

To imagine that the concept of the divine union that sustained the land and its people, as with the Sovereignty goddess and the king, as with Bóinn and Dagda, to imagine that this was still part of early Irish Christianity, and part of the patron saint’s own experience… that resonates at the soul level.

We long to see our modern human desires reflected in the old stories. There’s hope that we might heal the traumas of today when we know there once was another way.

We’ve seen the ravages of forced celibacy, the culture of abuse and secrecy and dysfunction that it perpetuates. If there is any hope of reclaiming an institution like the Catholic Church (though I am not sure I’d advocate for that), then it would have to involve the dismantling of the most clearly toxic and outdated aspects of the institution.

Did Patrick have a wife? The magical double consciousness that allows history to be real and folklore to be a vital source of wisdom invites me to say I’m not sure, but I am also completely certain he did.

And this is what she has to say…

1. Bitel, Lisa. “Sex, Sin, and Celibacy in Early Christian Ireland.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, vol. 7, 1987, pp. 65–95. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20557185

2. Freeman, Philip, 'The First Synod of Saint Patrick', The World of Saint Patrick (New York, 2014; online edn, Oxford Academic, 19 June 2014), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199372584.003.0003,