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Originally Posted by Perun
Going to churches in Gaelic-speaking Scotland, or in Welsh Wales, I rarely found much sign of a particular interest in herbal healing, Mother Nature, feminism, or "alternative" sexual lifestyles. But this is what the modern, manufactured, Celtic revivalists have insisted on. A ceaseless flow of books spreads the idea that "the Celts" - usually taken as a homogenised lump - once professed a superior brand of Christianity that conveniently anticipated modern Western society's relaxed attitudes to sex and its interest in alternative medicine, wildlife, conservation, gender equality, and so on. The Celtic churches, so this narrative runs, were in touch with nature, proto-feminist and anti-hierarchical.
One book that I picked up on my journey, called the Celtic Alternative, which was fairly typical of a whole genre, suggested the Celtic Church had more in common with Buddhism than, say, institutional Catholicism. A "church without martyrs", it was at peace with nature, feminist and concerned with "celebrating life" - not death. A similar book, Celtic Heart, said the "old Celt understood the sanctity of life and the sacred interconnectedness of everything". A third book, Celtic Sexuality, advanced a bolder claim - that in the Celtic world, women "dispensed favours as they saw fit", adding: "Men and women were not ashamed of the urges of their bodies and recognised them as natural, pleasurable and even religious."
Wandering around Iona, now a pilgrimage centre for modern Celtic wannabees, I wondered how much the celebration of "urges" and "sacred interconnectedness" would actually have meant to the sixth-century missionaries who founded the monastery there. Probably neither the spiritual values nor the character traits now so widely assumed to be Celtic would have struck much of a chord.
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