New Age nonsense on Celtic spirituality

[Perun]

http://www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi-bin/r...i/tablet-00954

Pick ’n’ mix Celts


Marcus Tanner




The term 'Celtic' is banded about as never before. But this sentimental version of the ancient culture has little to do with the austere people whose history and spirituality has been re-interpreted to suit our century

Journeying around the west coast of Britain in search of what remained of its vanishing Celtic cultures, I came across a leaflet in Skye advertising a Gaelic-language church service. It caught my imagination because it was going to be held in the open air, and at a site where it was thought Maolrubha, one of the Celtic saints, had landed to evangelise this part of the Highlands.




Imagination rapidly taking flight, I hoped my English voice would be drowned out by a chorus of real, live Celts, for whom this language, culture and spiritual tradition were a reality. Instead, I found almost everyone there was just like me. They were outsiders, clutching at something that had vanished - chasing ghosts. As none of us really knew the language we were singing in, or truly understood the rhythm of this service, it had a painful air to it and at the end I fled, disappointed.




From Ireland to Iona and Brittany, the Celtic lands are full of puzzled pilgrims, searching for something that died ages ago, or perhaps never existed. At a music festival in Nova Scotia (called Celtic Colours, naturally) I found myself in an audience of mainly US Americans who invariably rooted for the cheesiest, most manufactured, "Celtic" sound on offer. A pair sitting next to me at one event introduced themselves as "real" Celts. They squirmed, bored, through the most traditional Gaelic songs, but gazed with rapt attention as an Irish woman belted out a saccharine confection in English about "holding Ireland in my hand". At the end of this production-line ballad, I longed to stand up and say that surely a festival like this had not been founded to promote such commercialised piffle. Thank God I didn't, for I would certainly have been alone; the audience had loved it, and the pair from the US swivelled round to me and exclaimed: "That's real Celtic" (or, as they put it, "seltic") music for you!"




As I found out at every step of the journey, Celtic revivals owed little to the living cultures that we call Celtic. The revivalists have rarely been that interested in what the Welsh, the Manx, the Cornish, the Bretons, or the Irish or Scottish Gaels, think or want. The revivals were dominated from the first by outsiders, for whom an adopted Celtic identity was an antidote to what they saw as the deficiencies in their own societies. It was their needs and desires that counted.




The bishops of the Norman Conquest, as many historians have pointed out, were early Celtic revivalists of a sort, trumpeting the claims of the Celtic saints who founded their sees many centuries before, publicising their shrines and patronising writings about their alleged miracles. But those same devotees of dead, miracle-working Celts tended often to crush the life out of the Celts they ruled over.




This distinction between idealised Celts, inhabiting the past, and the contemporary variety has remained fairly constant. Matthew Arnold, in his celebrated lectures on the Celts in the 1860s, probably did more to awaken English interest in this subject than any other public figure. But while Arnold exalted Celtic over Anglo-Saxon culture, praising a spirit of genius "with sentiment as its basis, with love of beauty, charm and spirituality as its excellence", he looked forward to the destruction of the surviving Celtic cultures of his own time. For example, Arnold disapproved strongly of the delay "by a single hour" of the anglicisation of Wales, even if he did confess to "a moment's distress to one's imagination when one hears that the last Cornish peasant who spoke the old tongue of Cornwall is dead".




"The sooner the Welsh language has disappeared", this great promoter of Celticism declared, "the better."




Arnold's Celts were an imaginary force - conjured forth as a race of sensuous poets, music-makers and dreamers of dreams, to act as a counterweight to what he considered the loathsome philistinism of the triumphant English middle class, then unmistakably grabbing the reins of power from the landed aristocracy.




The connection that Arnold made, which he borrowed from contemporary French writers (then hymning the Bretons in much the same way), has proved very enduring. I recognised Arnold's dim imprint in the blurb for a CD called "Celtic Journeys" that I picked up in the Isle of Man. The Celts, I learned from the back cover - unlike the rest of us - had "real values, real ideas and real emotions". They were "spiritual, proud, courageous . . . born artists, visionaries, warriors".




The idea that being Celtic is little more than a state of mind, or a set of vague character traits, explains why the Celtic label is so enduringly popular. It can be very loosely acquired and worn, but it sets the bearer apart from the common herd of oppressive, hung-up, white folk - for to be Celtic is to be a victim of colonialism, too.
Celticness, as any visitor to the country spots immediately, is especially entrenched in Ireland, where it has become a kind of national profession - a substitute for the fact that most people there no longer have a separate language by which to distinguish themselves from the old English colonisers next door.




This is indeed the self-proclaimed Celtic mecca, where the term Celtic is applied indiscriminately to virtually every department of life, from spirituality to politics, jewellery, music, sticky liqueurs and even the economy - the boom of the 1990s having been inevitably baptised the "Celtic tiger".
The mainstream Churches, Catholic and Protestant, on both sides of the water, have embraced Celtic "heritage", however dimly understood, with equal enthusiasm and often for similar reasons. It sounds vaguely anti-colonial - always a good thing. For them, too, it means anything positive, liberated, a tad "alternative", or just plain wholesome.




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.




There is no real evidence that those old evangelists were any more touchy-feely, herb-friendly, animal-loving, or easygoing about sex than the Anglo-Saxons who replaced them in much of Britain. We cannot know, of course. Those saints and their world were long gone even when the Normans arrived, which is why those flinty Norman bishops so casually prettified the legends of their Celtic predecessors, attributing any amount of fabulous detail to their lives in the hope that it would add value and prestige to their cathedrals or abbeys.



If the Celts were out of reach, even then, how much more so now, when the non-anglophone, non-anglicised cultures on these islands (not including recent immigrants) have shrunk to a porous Gaeltacht in the west of Ireland, a clutch of islands in north-west Scotland and a patchwork of lands in Wales that are increasingly disconnected from one another physically and shot through with wads of English second-home owners?




All one can say with certainty is that in the nineteenth century, before the non-English-speaking cultures of Britain and Ireland crumbled, the people of those lands tended with a certain uniformity to opt for the most doctrinally rigid, most austere and sexually unliberated brand of Christianity that was available.




What traditional Irish Catholicism, the Calvinism of the Highlands and the Calvinist Methodism of Wales shared, at least until recently, was a set of values that would have most modern Celtic revivalists shuddering, namely a keen interest in theological nitpicking, spiritual severity, and a fairly hard and unforgiving attitude towards the flesh.




It was the English, with their cut-and-paste national creed, who first cornered the market in "touchy-feely" religion - Anglicanism being not much more than what Elizabeth I felt comfortable doing, seeing or hearing in her chapel. It was the Celts, the real Celts, who have always provided the hard, uncomfortable ideological edges in British or Irish religion, and the Anglo-Saxons who have added the fudge. It might sound like the words of a spoilsport, but there is no need to brave Highland gales - or Gaels - searching for the home of the values that most of the Celtic revivalists have long attributed to the Celts. Their real home is right here, in England.

Marcus Tanner's The Last of the Celts is published by Yale University Press.

[Milesian]

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.

Yes, thank you God for saying said this. It really can't be said enough.
No offense to the Neo-Pagans and co. but really it would be appreciated if the New Age movement could find someone else's culture to hi-jack. It's just ever so slightly insulting.

[Gil]

Oh man! This means I don't get to dress up in my new "Complete Druid Out-Wear" when I visit Ireland!?

Well, it's not only the celtic cultures that are getting "raped" by new agers and similar trends, whatever religion/cult/belief you might say is more naturalistic than modern belief gets ganged up in that mix they call "Neo-Paganism". I'm not anti-paganism, but sometimes it just sounds like people who simply couldn't stand up to Christian morals and took the easy way out.

[Milesian]

Originally Posted by Manji

Oh man! This means I don't get to dress up in my new "Complete Druid Out-Wear" when I visit Ireland!?

No, if you do you will undergo the traditional Celtic pagan triple-fold ritual killing and buried in a peat bog for archaelogists to find you 2000 years hence

Well, it's not only the celtic cultures that are getting "raped" by new agers and similar trends, whatever religion/cult/belief you might say is more naturalistic than modern belief gets ganged up in that mix they call "Neo-Paganism".

True.

I'm not anti-paganism, but sometimes it just sounds like people who simply couldn't stand up to Christian morals and took the easy way out.

My sentiments exactly