The Irish goddess Brigit seems to have been so much beloved that the Early Church could not bring itself to cut her off from the people and she became St Bridget of Ireland.

Lady Gregory, in Gods and Fighting Men, says of her (p.2):

Brigit... was a woman of poetry, and poets worshipped her, for her sway was very great and very noble. And she was a woman of healing along with that, and a woman of smith's work, and it was she first made the whistle for calling one to another through the night. And the one side of her face was ugly, but the other side was very comely. And the meaning of her name was Breo-saighit, a fiery arrow.

Various sources of the fairy beliefs have been suggested among the theories of fairy origins, and with good reason. They have been called the dead, or traditions of primitive men or nature spirits, but there seems little doubt that in Ireland at least some of them were descendants of this early Pantheon.