St. Patrick, Snakes and Genocide Part 1
Debunking the Myth of "All Snakes Day"
Disclaimer: This essay is not intended to disparage or demean any belief system or religious practice, but rather to criticize and debunk pseudohistorical myths.
Part 1 of 3: Debunking the Myth
Every year around St. Patrick’s Day, a select group of people, mostly on social media, dust off their annual hot take: they attempt to rebrand the holiday as “All Snakes Day” and accuse St. Patrick of committing a “genocide” against indigenous Celtic pagans. And every year this claim drives me up a wall, as it is nothing more than pseudohistorical claptrap. Not only is this meme not based in fact, it actively harms efforts to understand history, silences real historical traumas, and undermines genuine efforts at cultural reclamation among the Irish diaspora.
The myth has been around for a long time but first gained traction and popularity in certain (largely online) neopagan and new age circles in the 2000s, becoming popular in the 2010s. It stems largely from the most famous legend about St. Patrick banishing snakes from Ireland. Proponents of the trope say that the “snakes” is a term for pagans and druids, or claim that the snake was a sacred symbol of the Druids. They allege that St. Patrick led a campaign of violence and bloodshed to destroy an indigenous pagan religion. They claim that druids and pagans were massacred, persecuted, and forced to convert at the point of a sword, often drawing parallels to the European colonization of the Americas. Needless to say, not one word of this narrative is true. It is totally rooted in misrepresentations of history, willful ignorance, baseless assertions, and even some outright lies.
Most people do not have much understanding of ancient and medieval Irish history. Popular perceptions are rooted heavily in myths, legends, and no small amount of romanticized fiction, especially from the Victorian era. This lack of understanding is compounded by the fact that before the arrival of Christianity, Irish society relied on oral tradition and did not keep written records, making it more challenging for historians and archaeologists to create a clear historical narrative that the public could easily digest. This lack of historical knowledge creates fertile ground for the rise of pseudohistory, especially when it aligns with ideological or religious motivations.
When it comes to the Christianization of Ireland and St. Patrick, most people only know the traditional narrative: that St. Patrick had been enslaved in Ireland in his youth and escaped. He brought Christianity to Ireland, peacefully converted the Irish, and taught them about the Trinity using the Shamrock. Druids challenged him to various tests and challenges to prove whose God was more powerful, and he banished the snakes. That's the simple storybook narrative I remember from when I was a kid, and that’s the narrative most people know. It's simplistic and full of inaccuracies, derived in large part from legend written centuries later, and doesn’t show the complexities of Ireland’s Christianization. The “genocide” narrative, in contrast, attempts to invert this narrative into a story of the villainous St. Patrick persecuting pagans and destroying their culture, but is just as, if not even more, simplistic and designed to validate present-day grievances and antagonisms. But the actual history is far more complex.
Perhaps the biggest inaccuracy of both narratives is that they portray the Christianization of Ireland as this singular event carried out by a single man. In reality, it was a gradual process that took several hundred years. When Ireland’s first bishop, Pallidus (not St. Patrick), arrived from Sub-Roman Britain in 431 CE, there were already Christians in Ireland, with whom Pallidus was tasked with ministering to. Christianity likely arrived in Ireland in the 4th century, or even earlier, through interactions with Roman and Sub-Roman Britain. This included traders crossing the Irish Sea, and slaves captured by Irish raiders. St. Patrick himself would later be captured and enslaved by such raiders in his youth. By the time St. Patrick arrived in Ireland, Christianity was firmly established in Ireland and spread further by St. Patrick. However, the old pagan religion continued to be practiced in parts of Ireland for some time, only gradually losing influence. It was practiced only by a small minority as late as the 7th century, and by the 8th century, it was no longer practiced as a religion. Rather than a violent, rapid shift in Irish society, Christianization was a gradual process of social transition.
This process also brought about significant changes in Irish society, not the least of which was the introduction of written language and written records (with much of what we know about pre-Christian beliefs in Ireland coming from the records kept by Christian monasteries). Ancient Ireland relied on oral tradition, with the Druids even considering it profane to write down their beliefs, and only communicated their beliefs from mentor to pupil to maintain the secrecy of their practices. The arrival of Christianity, and its strong tradition of recordkeeping, led to the creation of the first writing systems and written records in Ireland. This included the development of the Ogham script, also known as the Irish tree alphabet. While its origins are shrouded in mystery, the oldest surviving examples of its use in Ireland coincided with the first Christian settlements in Ireland. Evidence also suggests that the creator of the script was familiar with Latin writing and grammar, leading many scholars to theorize that it was developed by early Irish Christians. Written records had a particularly profound effect on Irish society through the codification of the ancient Irish Brehon laws, which previously had been an oral legal system. Tradition says that it was St. Patrick himself who oversaw this process and transcribed the Brehon laws himself, reconciling the discrepancies between the versions of the different clans, and the contradictions with Christian teaching and practice (although the veracity of tales of his involvement are disputed, and often considered legendary.)
It must also be stated that this process did not see the old religious beliefs “destroyed,” as the genocide narrative would have you believe. The old pagan beliefs persisted and syncretized with Christianity. By the 9th century, nearly 400 years after St. Patrick, it was no longer being practiced as a religion, the beliefs persisted as folk beliefs. Others were integrated into Christian practice. Famously, the festival of Samhain became All Saints’ Day, and eventually Halloween. Saint Brigid is believed to be a syncretized version of the goddess of the same name, and her feast day coincides with the festival of Imbolc. Even the Druids, who had been the religious elites in pre-Christian Ireland, persisted as folk magicians and sorcerers. They even retained a position within Irish society and the Brehon laws for several centuries, although their role was greatly reduced, and many Druids would go on to join the Christian Clergy. Perhaps most notably, the old pre-Christian beliefs lived on through the belief in fairies, the Aos Sí, which are a major theme in Irish folklore. Belief in fairies was so widespread in Ireland throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, that historians often credit this belief as inoculating Gaelic Ireland from the witchcraft hysteria of the early modern period (although such trials did take place in areas under English rule). Even today, some people observe customs related to the fairies, commonly referred to as Creideamh Sí, or the fairy faith, with some farmers refusing to plow parts of their fields or entire planned motorways being rerouted to avoid disturbing fairy forts. Even if it ceased to be religious practice, these beliefs were far from destroyed, as those celebrating “All Snakes Day” would tell you. Instead, they live on as a rich and beautiful part of Irish culture.
All of this brings us back to the core of this narrative: the legend of St. Patrick and the snakes. Proponents of the myth insist that snakes must be a metaphor for Pagans and Druids, as snakes are associated with evil in the Bible, and they allege that the snake was a sacred symbol for the Druids (although this claim has no actual historical basis). Despite these claims, this legend is just that, a legend. It is not an account of events, or even an allusion to events, that took place. Rather, it was a legend created centuries after St. Patrick’s death, and wouldn’t have been meant metaphorically when it was first written.
The story likely originates with Jocelyn of Furness, a 12th-century English hagiographer who wrote books on the lives of Saint Kentigern, Saint Waltheof, Saint Helen of Constantinople, and, of course, St. Patrick. Medieval hagiographies, or accounts of the lives of saints, are replete with tales of all sorts of miracles but were considered legendary accounts, even by the most devout believers, and today. Reading them, even Jesus Christ himself would say to “cool it with all the miracles”. Jocelyn’s accounts of St. Patrick are no exception. In The Life of Patrick, Jocelyn claimed St. Patrick raised at least 33 people from the dead, fought monsters, transformed himself into a deer, and performed other miracles. Snakes have never been present in Ireland, but in Jocelyn’s narrative, Ireland suffered under “a swarm of poisonous creatures”, until they were banished by Patrick. The absence of snakes, and other dangerous animals, in Ireland is thus used by Jocelyn to serve as proof of this miracle. Very clearly, the legend is meant to be taken literally by believers, not to serve as some kind of metaphor. But even at the time, it was considered by many to be a legendary account not rooted in fact. As the 13th-century priest and historian, Gerald of Wales, wrote, “Some indulge in the pleasant conjecture that Saint Patrick and other saints of the land purged the island of all harmful animals. But it is more probable that from the earliest times and long before the foundation of the faith, the island was naturally without these as well as other things.” It also ought to be noted that the ability to miraculously command, summon, banish, or control wild animals is a common miracle attributed to various saints in the Middle Ages, not only Patrick. The tales of St. Columba, an Irish saint who spread Christianity in Scotland, talk of him banishing wild boar and causing a river monster to be forever exiled to the bottom of a river after killing a young boy. The legends of Saint Brendan the Navigator, my patron saint and namesake, tell of him using his prayer to summon a whale and even allowing him to hold mass on the whale’s back while on their voyage. Saint Francis of Assisi is said to have been able to tame wolves through prayer. Even the account of banishing snakes has a precedent in a 6th-century hagiography of St. Hilary of Poitiers, who was said to have banished snakes from the Island of Gallinara. In later centuries, the story became obscured and increasingly took on metaphorical interpretations. I had always been taught that snakes represented sin and pagan beliefs (and for the longest time I believed that), but when we critically examine the legends, we find the tale fits squarely within a trend in medieval literature, not as a metaphor, let alone as evidence of a so-called “pagan genocide.”
It also makes little sense to imply such a metaphorical interpretation when the other legends of St. Patrick are examined. The Druids are a regular feature in many legends, and many of the most famous tales feature St. Patrick and his followers being challenged to all sorts of life-or-death tests of faith with the Druids to prove which God was more powerful, like standing in a burning hut or walking off a cliff. If there was a genocide and brutal massacres of Druids and pagans, why would these tales be so explicit and yet suddenly turn to metaphor and allegory? This is especially mind-boggling when one considers that actual instances of forced conversion and conquest of non-Christians in the Middle Ages were not buried in metaphor, but openly celebrated in the records of the time.
Moreover, there is a practical problem with the narrative that Ireland was converted through violence, namely, who carried out this violence? The Roman Empire never tried to invade Ireland, and all Roman troops had been withdrawn from Britain around this time. This left Britain open to Pictish incursions from Scotland, Irish slave raids, and, eventually, the Saxon conquest of England. There also was no power in Ireland capable of forcibly converting the population. Proto-Historic and early Medieval Ireland was a deeply divided, clan-based society, and would remain divided for much of its history, with only a small sense of political unity emerging during the Viking age.
This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the falsehoods and misunderstanding that underlie this myth, and thankfully many great articles have been written, including many by neopagan writers and scholars, that debunk many of those myths, some of which I have linked to throughout this article. There are even more claims and variations of this myth I could have gone into, but I believe I have made the point. The idea of St. Patrick leading some sort of genocidal purge of Irish Paganism is a complete fabrication. The Christianization of Ireland was a complex, gradual process that took centuries, not a bloody reign of terror. Pre-Christian beliefs and practices were not “destroyed” by Christianization, they syncretized and lived on as a rich part of Ireland’s cultural inheritance. The legends of St. Patrick “banishing snakes” were not a metaphor, but a miraculous story in the tradition of medieval hagiographies. The entire narrative behind “All Snakes Day” is nothing more than pseudohistory.
In Part 2, I will be exploring the groups that advocate this myth and why it persists.