St. Patrick myth-busting, from snakes to pagan nipples

Fine day for a pilgrimage: Walkers take on the annual summer climb up Croagh Patrick. (Clodagh Kilcoyne/Getty Images Europe/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

For many around the world, St. Patrick’s Day is a celebration of green beer, fiddle music, and the best holiday after Halloween for wearing a silly hat and throwing up in the street.

For me, though, as a child growing up in the Northern Irish town of Downpatrick, the saint’s traditional burial place, it was a pious affair of Mass in the morning, wearing an Aran-knit jumper and a wilting badge of shamrock, then a day off school.

So who then was the real St. Patrick, whose legacy contains such multitudes?

In the 1,600 years since this Christian missionary and bishop made his mark in Ireland, the cult and mythology surrounding him has overtaken the man himself.

To mark St. Patrick’s Day, here are a few surprising things you might not know about him.

1. He wasn’t Irish

Patrick was born into a Christian family in Britain in the late fourth century, when the Roman Empire was in decline and had become vulnerable to raids from beyond its borders.

His comfortable life as a deacon’s son was disrupted at the age of 16 when he was captured and enslaved by Irish raiders, spending the next years as a shepherd on a remote, often freezing hillside.

Remarkably for the fifth century, he left two written accounts from his life, but “he’s not very great with specifics,” says historian Fin Dwyer, host of “The Irish History Podcast and Transatlantic: An Irish American History Podcast.”

“He does mention place names, but obviously they’ve changed.”

Some argue he was a slave on Slemish Mountain in the northern county of Antrim, others say Killala Bay in the western county of Mayo.

“These things are important to historians,” says Dwyer, but “no one’s ever going to definitely prove this.”

2. He escaped slavery, then came back

In his early 20s, Patrick fled his captors and made it back to his family in Britain, but soon he was hankering to get back to Ireland and spread the Christian message.

“For some unknown reason, he decided to punish himself all over again and come back,” says Duane Fitzsimons, a tour guide in my home town of Downpatrick, on the Lecale peninsula. The area has many sites closely associated with Patrick’s life and is home to the Saint Patrick Centre, the world’s only permanent exhibition to Ireland’s patron saint.

He is also, we discover at the end of our interview, my second-cousin-once-removed, because sometimes the cliché about all Irish people knowing each other turns out to be true.

“He lands somewhere on the northern shore of Lecale” and is discovered by Dichu, the brother of one of the local kings, says Fitzsimons.

“It’s an odd thing, because they seem to put a lot of trust into Patrick, and back then, these kings would have been the figurehead of their society” and they took a big risk by backing him.

“If anything failed within their societies, say if the crops failed for a year or a sudden illness took the livestock, their heads were the ultimate price for this,” he adds.

Patrick was given a barn for shelter in the village of Saul outside Downpatrick. That became the site of his first church and still attracts pilgrims today.

3. He didn’t convert Ireland to Christianity single-handedly

“It’s not a story of ‘one man comes and converts an island that was then divided into dozens of kingdoms.’ It would have been physically impossible,” says Dwyer.

While Patrick wasn’t the first Christian missionary in Ireland (that was Palladius in the early fifth century), he was the most successful.

The Dál Riata, in Ireland’s northeast “were the premier kingship within Ireland,” and those were the leaders Patrick schmoozed, as well as going on to do decades of preaching and missionary work throughout the country.

“I think the key to that is this idea of his enslavement, where he would have learned our language and our customs and how to pass himself with those who are higher up in society,” says Fitzsimons.

He also notes that he’s seen a growing number of erroneous claims on TikTok that druids were massacred in the process of bringing Christianity to Ireland, but this is “a total nonsense.”

Fitzsimons says, “If Patrick had come in and caused the death of people, there’s no way that he would have been left to live, and there’s no way we would talk about him in the favorable way that we do today.”

4. He wrote a celebrity autobiography

“He’s the only person, at the time, really, in Ireland that we do know wrote things down, and they are surviving in some form today,” says Dwyer.

Toward the end of his life, Patrick wrote a short memoir, “The Confession of St. Patrick,” which was a retort against his detractors and a defence of his mission in Ireland.

As a big-shot figure in the church, “He has so many people taking chips at him for certain things that he’s done,” says Fitzsimons. “They’re questioning where his money’s come from.”

Female converts, for example, were known to shower the superstar preacher with gifts of gold, but he denied keeping them.

“When they would throw some of their ornaments on the altar, I would give them back to them,” he wrote. “They were hurt at me that I would do this.”

5. He refused to suck nipples

In 2003, an Iron Age bog body now known as Old Croghan Man was discovered in County Offaly and is now on display in the National Museum of Ireland.

The man, believed to have been a high-status individual, had been killed by ritual sacrifice, which included the removal of his nipples.

In pre-Christian Ireland, sucking breasts was a way of showing subjugation to a king and the cutting out of Old Croghan Man’s nipples is, historians believe, an indication that he had been thus stripped of his claims to kingship.

In his “Confessio,” Patrick provides further evidence for this practice in a story he tells of his initial escape from enslavement. He found a boat sailing to Britain, but the captain refused to let him board.

Patrick retreated to his lodgings to pray. “That day, I refused to suck their breasts, because of my reverence for God,” he wrote. “They were pagans, and I hoped they might come to faith in Jesus Christ. This is how I got to go with them, and we set sail right away.”

6. He never banished any snakes

Ireland, famously, doesn’t have any snakes, toads or moles, as these animals never made it across the land bridge before Ireland broke off from mainland Europe at the end of the last Ice Age.

As for how Patrick became associated with them, Fitzsimons explains, one theory is that when the Vikings came to Ireland at the end of the eighth century, they heard tales of this venerated figure Padraig (the Irish form of Patrick).

Padraig sounds similar to the Old Norse words “pad rekr,” meaning “toad expeller” and, as toads and indeed snakes were absent from the country, it could possibly be that the two became conflated.

Then, of course, there’s the simpler version: that snakes were a Biblical symbol of evil, and Patrick drove this out through the introduction of Christianity.

The snake association first entered written records in the 12th century, when a monk called Jocelyn of Barrow-in-Furness was commissioned to do so by the Norman knight John De Courcy.

The work of recording the legends may have taken place at Inch Abbey, a Cistercian monastery outside Downpatrick which, incidentally, was a filming location in “Game of Thrones.”

And by further coincidence, Conleth Hill, the actor who plays Varys in “Game of Thrones,” is yet another cousin of both Fitzsimons and myself. When you’re Irish, it really is a small world.

7. His remains were lost for a while, then repackaged in a three-for-one all-star grave

If there was one thing people loved in the Middle Ages, it was some holy bones.

It’s not known when Patrick died, but the traditional date of his death is March 17, 461 CE, and the cult around him, and his eventual veneration as a saint, took off in the centuries following.

When Ireland was struck by Viking raids in the late eighth century onwards, the reputed remains of Patrick, and of the later Christian saints Brigid and Colmcille, were sent north to the Dál Riata for protection.

They were so well concealed by a local abbot that they in fact went missing. That is, until they were conveniently rediscovered by John De Courcy in the 12th century, who had them reinterred at Down Cathedral in Downpatrick.

There the grave still is, of Ireland’s three patron saints, under a granite slab added at the start of the 20th century to stop pilgrims stealing soil from the site.

Dwyer says he wouldn’t put his money on the holy bones being real: “It’s important to remember, this is a time where everyone wants relics of saints, from Jerusalem to Dublin.”

As a Downpatrick woman, however, I say sometimes the collective belief is what matters.

8. From mountains to monasteries to holy wells, there’s a little bit of Patrick all across Ireland

In 2023, Downpatrick and its surrounding area was recognized by UNESCO as the Mourne Gullion Strangford Geopark.

The remarkable Mourne Mountains are the park’s centrepiece but, says Fitzsimons, geoparks are “not just geology, it’s people and the landscape and their heritage and their celebration of how that they mark their heritage. So St. Patrick’s a big key part of that.”

Saint Patrick’s Way, a new 82-mile (131 km) camino-style walking trail leading west from Downpatrick to County Armagh is part of this flourishing celebration of that history.

While the north of Ireland has “more anchor spots” related to St. Patrick, says Dwyer, there are sites the length and breadth of the island associated with the saint, from modest holy wells to the majestic Croagh Patrick, a “holy mountain” in County Mayo.

“He’s always been reflecting changing Irish identity, in terms of how we associate with him,” says Dwyer. “He’s an avatar, in many ways, for what it is to be Irish, and that constantly changes.”