From: Ceri 
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MM All,

An interesting approach. I have to admit sympathising with the author 
(even if it seems it's supporting a new book) even if I don't totally 
agree with the approach.

AFAIC there's nothing sadder than practitioners of a 
revival/reconstructed faith ... well acting like those
""real" Celts" 
mentioned who completely failed to understand any of the 
histo-socio-anachronistic issues. Their attitude reminds me of that 
supposed US Senator who believed the bible had been written in English - 
anyone cringing yet???

To all intents & purposes it's beginning to look like more & more like 
the Celts co-habited with other cultures - almost by the Ozzie 
definition of "Multicultural". Which of course meant facing the same 
issues as we find here. For example, a Brissie "Greek Festival" would be 
different from a Melbourne "Greek Festival" (for a variety of reasons 
I'm not doing to do into rite now). But this it to stress that as there 
are local variations/traditions that are just as "Greek" as the next 
community - historically there would have been local 
variations/traditions that were just as "celtic/keltic/whatever"...

Remember what has been lost is not recoverable - there's been centuries 
of offended dignities of political powerful people who (within their 
historical milieu) were proud of destroying anything connected to the 
enemy. We're essentially in a situation fairly similar to what the 
"Stolen Generation" face - only "our" culture has been
lost for many 
more generations so lack the immediate tragedy of loosing the cultural 
relevance within in living memory (in SOME areas of Australia). OK I 
admit my path (searching for my pre-christian ethnic roots) so I'll 
admit bias here - BUT there is a lot we can grok looking at the 'modern' 
indigenous cultural issues..

What I'm ranting about is that we are recreating the past with our own 
contemporary attitudes & adaption (& "YES" some of those cultural 
attitudes originate from a mainstream spirituality). the sooner we 
recognise this the sooner we (as a spirituality) will stop looking like 
hopeless dweebs. This reminds me of a joke/rant piece (same thing) back 
in the 80's suggesting some pagans felt they had to support the IRA 
'cause it was Irish "god dam it" 


 Rai

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http://www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi-bin/recommend.cgi?title=Pick%20%92n%92%20mix%20Celts 


20/11/2004


     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".




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