When I blogged the recent local Celtic music festival, I promised more on the tangled web of Celticity. This foggy, rainy, sleeting night seems a perfect time to begin.

Take the assertion of Stephen Oppenheimer, an anthropologist who has published on the ancient populations of the British Isles:

“Celt” is now a term that sceptics consider so corruped in the archaeological and popular literature that it is worthless.

In music, however, “Celtic” is a genre. Compare “Country and Western,” which requires performers and listeners to be neither rural nor residents of the North American West in order to enjoy it.

Be glad you have the music, because in genetic, cultural, linguistic and perhaps even religious terms, “Celtic” means nothing in particular.

As Marion Bowman said in her important 1993 article, “”Reinventing the Celts” (Religion 23 (1993): 147-156), “Celtic sells.” She later gave us the wonderful term “cardiac Celt,” for someone who knows in their heart that they are “Celtic,” in other words, “less tainted [by modernity] . . . repositories of a spirituality that has elsewhere been lost.”

Not just Pagans but some Christians have reinvented themselves as cardiac Celts as well.

Tags: Celts, Celtic spirituality