“Trace What It Means To Be Celtic”

In their book Pop Pagans: Paganism and Popular Music, Donna Weston and Andy Bennett use the term “cardiac Celts . . . people who feel in their heart that they are Celtic.”

They are not the only ones who use it — but I wonder if this new British Museum exhibit will name-check Marion Bowman, who teaches religious studies at The Open University, the scholar who first employed the term in an  essay  included in the book, Paganism Today ((Marion Bowman, Cardiac Celts: Images of the Celts in Contemporary British Paganism,” iPaganism Today, ed. Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman (London: Thorsons, 1995), 242–51.))

I still look at “Celtic” as identifying a language group — to be Welsh, for instance, is an ethnicity, but “Celtic” is not. That term covers too much time and space to mean anything useful as an ethnic tag. Nevertheless, since the late 18th century, there have been many attempts to use it that way, and I suspect that this exhibit — which I will probably never see — will examine them.

Maybe I can get the published catalog, if there is one.

Notice how drumming is always the aural cue for “barbarians.”

One thought on ““Trace What It Means To Be Celtic”

  1. My Celtic ancestors departed their Celtic homelands and found new and different places to live for lots of good reasons, among them the assurance that folks like me, their descendants, would not have to go through what they did in those Celtic homelands.

    So that folks like me would not end up so Celtic, I guess…

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