Forget pinches and pots of gold — did you know ol' Paddy actually opened a portal to Purgatory to troll the pagans? Yeah, the story of St. Patrick is way more bonkers than you probably realized.
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00:00So, you think you know everything there is to know about St. Patty, do you?
00:04Did you know old Patty actually opened a portal to Purgatory to troll the pagans?
00:08Oh, and that he was about as authentically Irish as me accent?
00:13Let's get into it.
00:15There's three things you know about Ireland's St. Patrick that are full of blarney, but
00:19let's get to that in a minute.
00:21While it's certainly true he really existed back in the 5th century, most of the things
00:24we know about him were made up to make him seem cooler than he ever was in real life.
00:29And to be fair, it worked.
00:31But the truth is that the only things we know for sure about the dude come from two of his
00:35own works, the Epistola, or Letter, and the Confessio, which is basically Patty's autobiography.
00:41So about those three things that we believe about St. Patrick that aren't true?
00:45Well, first off, St. Patrick wasn't Irish.
00:48Oh, and also, number two, his real name wasn't even Patrick.
00:52His name was Mewin Suket, and he was the son of a Christian deacon in Roman Britain who
00:57was kidnapped by Irish pirates at age 16.
01:00He spent six years in slavery herding sheep.
01:03Eventually he got a letter, or had a vision, or heard a mysterious voice, telling him to
01:08escape and where to find a ship home.
01:10That ship was 200 miles away, but somehow Mewin got there and made it home to Britain.
01:15The third thing?
01:16Well, we're going to save that part for later.
01:19We'll have to explain the snakes and the fox-turning thing.
01:21Wait till you hear the fox part.
01:24According to the Confessio, at one point St. Patrick and the sailors who brought him home
01:28were starving to death.
01:29That is, until Patrick prayed and God sent them enough pigs for a two-day feast.
01:34After that, Patrick devoted his life to God, until he once again got a letter, or had a
01:38vision, or some combo of the two.
01:40Then he heard a voice coming out of this letter that said,
01:44"'Holy boy, please return to us.
01:46We need you.'"
01:47Since Patrick had had good luck the last time he listened to a vision or read the letter,
01:51he sailed back to the Emerald Isle, but this time as a missionary rather than a slave.
01:56Not everyone was happy to see him, though.
01:58Much of the rest of the Confessio is about Patrick, now a bishop, being on trial for
02:02mysterious reasons that he never really discloses.
02:06But while he never, um, confessios to any crimes, he does mention returning gifts given
02:12to him by rich ladies, not charging for thousands of baptisms and ordinations, and paying for
02:17a bunch of gifts he gave to kings and judges.
02:19It all sounds a bit bribey, but who knows?
02:22He's building churches and paying chieftains so that members of their tribes can join his
02:26order and become ordained.
02:28He's using church money to buy slaves.
02:31The whole thing does kind of point to money trouble, maybe using his job as a bishop to
02:35get that paper, as some do.
02:37But that's it.
02:38Besides a little more detail about dealing with chiefs and converting Christians, that's
02:42where the facts about St. Pat end, and the legend begins.
02:46The first major addendum to the legend of St. Patrick came from a 7th-century monk and
02:50historian named Muirchew Mockew Macdany, and no, that name's not made up.
02:56He wrote a work called the Vita Sancti Patrici, or The Life of St. Patrick.
03:00The work credits Patrick with converting all of Ireland to Christianity through various
03:04miraculous means.
03:06In truth, Christianity probably came to Ireland via traders and slaves from Roman Britain,
03:11like Patrick himself.
03:12In fact, there were so many Christians in Ireland by Patrick's time that the pope sent
03:16a bishop named Palladius to tend to them all in 431 A.D.
03:21Some scholars believe that many of the traditions that attached themselves to St. Patrick were
03:25originally about Palladius, but Muirchew and other hagiographers — those are people who
03:29write about the lives of saints — wanted to build St. Patrick into a national hero
03:33in order to unify Irish Christians.
03:35And Muirchew did a great job, throwing Palladius under the bus and turning Patrick into a mass-converting,
03:42druid-stomping wizard for Christ.
03:45One of the first things Muirchew does to beef up St. Patrick's resume is to give him an
03:49angel for a BFF.
03:51In the Confessio, Pat talks about a man named Victoricus who brought him the letter telling
03:55him to return to Ireland.
03:57But Muirchew thought the story needed punching up, and recast Victoricus as both the angel
04:02sent by God to tell Patrick his ship had come in, then reappeared to tell him,
04:06"...the sons and daughters of the Wood of Folkloot are calling you."
04:10Apparently, this means, go to Ireland.
04:12Then, to make it a three-peat, Muirchew's new and improved Victoricus appears to Patrick
04:17as a burning bush to cement Pat's reputation as the Irish Moses.
04:22The rest of Muirchew's vita relates all sorts of miracles and hideous magical murders performed
04:27by St. Patrick.
04:28But if you were thinking, sure, he telekinetically smashed a man's head into paste and destroyed
04:33an army by summoning an earthquake, but there's no way he turned a man into a fox, well,
04:38think again.
04:39According to Muirchew, there was a king named Coroticus, who liked to murder Christians.
04:44Patrick sent the guy a sternly-worded letter saying, you know, come on, dude, cut it out.
04:50Surprisingly, Coroticus did not cut it out.
04:52In fact, he made fun of Patrick's request.
04:55So Patrick asked God to do something about this uncouth fellow.
04:58Well, while at Coroticus' next public appearance, some guy recited a poem about how the king
05:03was bad and should feel bad about being bad, and everyone started chanting, the king sucks,
05:08like it was the WWE.
05:10This ticked off the king so much that he turned into a fox and ran away.
05:15Problem solved, right?
05:18When you think of St. Patrick, if you do, you might think he drove the snakes out of
05:22Ireland, followed by something about a shamrock.
05:25In the name of the Lord!
05:32Problem is, there haven't been any snakes in Ireland since before the last Ice Age,
05:36so that actually didn't happen.
05:38Now, some of you may have heard that the snakes were a metaphor for the druids, as Patrick
05:42is credited with driving paganism out of Ireland, and snakes are symbols of wisdom and healing
05:47to druids.
05:48Paganism?
05:49Yes!
05:50Instead of praying to God, pagans pray to things like twigs!
05:54Look, sometimes a snake is just a snake, man.
05:57The idea that the snakes were a metaphor is super recent.
06:01The addition of this story to Patrick's life is pretty late, and as we've already discussed,
06:06Patrick's role in Christianizing Ireland has been pretty exaggerated.
06:09Plus, Mirchu is totally cool with talking about Patrick killing a druid.
06:13Now, as the shamrock story goes, Patrick used the common three-leaf clover to explain the
06:18Holy Trinity to the pagan Irish.
06:20Oh, great shamrock!
06:23You are powerful!
06:24No, no, no, no, no, no.
06:26This is simply a metaphor.
06:28The same way that the clover is one thing with three separate elements, God is three
06:32in one, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
06:34But the earliest written account of Patrick using the shamrock to explain the Trinity
06:37doesn't pop up until 1726.
06:40That's like 1,300 years after Patrick died.
06:43The story was most likely a convenient way to connect Patrick and the shamrock, both
06:47of which had become national symbols of Ireland by the 18th century.
06:51National branding at work.
06:53Everyone knows if you don't wear green on St. Paddy's, you get pinched.
07:00The next time someone pinches you for not wearing green on St. Patrick's Day, pinch
07:05them back and tell them St. Patrick's color should be blue, not green.
07:09And mention the fox story, because that's just amazing.
07:12Anyway, although Ireland is known for its lovely rolling green hills, blue was the quintessential
07:17Irish color for most of the country's history.
07:19St. Patrick himself used to be shown wearing blue, as was Fláthás Éireann, the ancient
07:24female personification of the island.
07:26Blue became a patriotic color for the Irish, and St. Patrick's blue in particular was worn
07:30by the Chivalric Order of St. Patrick in the 1700s.
07:34Traces of blue can still be seen in Irish Guards uniforms.
07:37By the modern era, St. Patrick's blue had been largely forgotten, and green was heavily
07:41incorporated into popular St. Patrick's Day celebrations, particularly in the U.S.
07:47The idea that the color green is the first line of defense against leprechauns, for example,
07:50is a fairly unknown, albeit charming, Irish-American myth.
07:55A further bit of evidence that Patrick didn't wipe out all the Irish pagans in his lifetime
07:59is that pagan arguments against Christianity were still widespread in Ireland 1,000 years
08:03after Patrick's death.
08:05But perhaps the best-known argument during the 5th century came in the form of a series
08:09of debates between St. Patrick and pagan warrior Oisin.
08:12Oisin was the son of one of the greatest warriors of Irish myth, Finn MacCool.
08:17Oisin managed to outlive the rest of Finn's warriors by marrying a fairy princess who
08:20took him to the land of the young.
08:22When he finds out that what he thought was a few months there turned out to be 200 years,
08:26he returns to Ireland, during Patrick's time, to find things have much changed.
08:31Instead of the warrior clans he's used to, he found priests, monks, and churches everywhere.
08:36Patrick's the only person in Ireland who recognizes the once-great Celtic warrior, and the two
08:40engage in a lengthy series of debates over the value of a pagan life versus a Christian
08:45one.
08:46Oisin argues that Christians are small-minded, intolerant, and mean-spirited, while Patrick
08:50condemns the violence of Oisin's way of life and extols the greatness of God.
08:54The way he does this is by spouting bigotry and fire-and-brimstone dogma, inspiring Oisin
08:59to call him Patrick of the Closed Mine.
09:01And he's not wrong.
09:03On the balance, Patrick — and, by extension, Christianity — come off looking pretty bad.
09:09According to 13th-century legend, at one point in his mission to Ireland, St. Patrick despaired
09:13that he might never get through to the crazy pagans, and begged God to send him a sign
09:17that he was doing the right thing.
09:19God told him to draw a giant circle in the dirt with his staff, and when he did, a literal
09:24hellmouth opened within the circle.
09:26And by hellmouth, we mean a gate to purgatory, the afterlife's waiting room where people
09:30cleanse themselves of sin.
09:32From this almost-literal hellhole, one could hear the wailing of sinners, and Patrick used
09:37the sight to prove the existence of the Christian afterlife.
09:40Stories of medieval heroes trying to enter this portal and survive are fairly common.
09:44What the hell?
09:46Your eyes should have been ripped out hours ago.
09:47I know, I know.
09:48I was able to chew my legs off by myself, but I can't get my teeth around my eyes.
09:53Here's the thing, though.
09:54The place, Patrick's Hellmouth, is totally real, and you can get there.
09:59Not like casually, the way you might get to, say, Disneyland, but annual pilgrimages to
10:03the monastic compound built over the gate to the afterlife continue to this day.
10:08It's on an island in the middle of a lake called Loch Der.
10:11The pilgrimage requires visitors to walk barefoot in contemplation in what's known to be one
10:15of the hardest pilgrimages in the Christian world.
10:18But is the Hellmouth part real?
10:19Well, you'll have to make the trip to find out.
10:22Okay, so that third thing?
10:24Well, if you've been following along, you've probably guessed.
10:28St. Patrick is technically not a saint, because he was never canonized.
10:32Well, this is sort of true.
10:34It's a little unfair, because the process of canonization changed a great deal in the
10:38High Middle Ages.
10:40In the 12th century, Pope Alexander III made up a new rule that saints had to be approved
10:44by Rome — no exceptions.
10:46The process evolved over time, but it eventually came to involve an investigation into the
10:50holiness of the person in question, along with evidence that they performed miracles.
10:55There's one loophole.
10:56A pope can simply declare that an ancient saint is a saint via extraordinary canonization.
11:03St. Patrick was referred to as a saint long before these rules came down, but for some
11:06reason he never got the official nod from any pope — ergo, not really a saint.
11:12You can certainly make the case that this is nothing more than hair-splitting.
11:15Hundreds of people became saints before the 12th century, and they're still treated as
11:18saints today.
11:19Furthermore, as noted by one horrified author from the Ancient Order of Hibernians, St.
11:24Patrick's relics were formally interred at a monastery under the watchful eyes of a cardinal
11:29shortly after the rule change.
11:31This ritual was often used to identify a saintly person before a more formal process
11:35was developed, and the presence of the cardinal was effectively a form of consent from Rome.
11:40But as far as getting the nod from the Vatican, Patrick's still waiting.