Coverage of this year’s Spiral Dance in California, with goddess masks by Lauren Raine.

Read more at Broomstick Chronicles.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3,Part 4, Part 5

Everything that we thought we knew about Celtic culture is probably wrong.

But there is still language, right? If “Celtic” is not a genetic code, and it’s not a spirituality, at least there are Celtic languages: Gaulish, Cornish, British-leading-to-Welsh, Irish and Scots Gaelic, right?

Yes, but who was speaking them? Maybe only a minority, not the whole population of the British Isles before the Roman invasion or, following that, before the Anglo-Saxon invasions. Maybe there was no “genocide.”

Read this article by the British anthropologist Stephen Oppenheimer and prepare to have your preconceptions exploded.

Some excerpts:

The orthodox view of the origins of the Celts turns out to be an archaeological myth left over from the 19th century. Over the past 200 years, a myth has grown up of the Celts as a vast, culturally sophisticated but warlike people from central Europe, north of the Alps and the Danube, who invaded most of Europe, including the British Isles, during the iron age, around 300 BC.

. . . . But who were those Ancient Britons left in England to be slaughtered when the legions left? The idea that the Celts were eradicated—culturally, linguistically and genetically—by invading Angles and Saxons derives from the idea of a previously uniformly Celtic English landscape. But the presence in Roman England of some Celtic personal and place-names doesn’t mean that all ancient Britons were Celts or Celtic-speaking.

There is so much more. I could end up excerpting the whole article. One more:

A picture thus emerges of the dark-ages invasions of England and northeastern Britain as less like replacements than minority elite additions, akin to earlier and larger Neolithic intrusions from the same places. There were battles for dominance between chieftains, all of Germanic origin, each invader sharing much culturally with their newly conquered indigenous subjects.

And they were cheeseheads.

A leading anthopology blogger comments favorably.

So, realistically, Americans who fancy themselves “Celts” should be heading for Elko, Nevada, for the big Basque festival

But wait, there is more!

Tags: Celts, Celtic spirituality

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

While they wanted to present Wicca as the indigenous religion of Britain, the founders of contemporary Witchcraft were not so much caught up in the “Celtic” mythos. Some, in fact, favored the Saxon.

By the 1970s, however, “cardiac Celts” were everywhere. Writers such as John Sharkey formulated a magickal Celtic mythos: his book Celtic Mysteries was at the top of my first coven’s reading list. It had all the pieces of “Celtic” special-ness, including “Celtic Christianity” but also a great deal about the Triple Goddess, whose explication owes more to the genius of Robert Graves than to any Iron Age Celtic poem.

Needless to say, my fellow Witches and I were reading Graves’ The White Goddess along with Celtic Mysteries. Since Sharkey’s ideas of Celtic Paganism were largely derived from Graves, correlating the two was easy.

All “Celtic Paganism” owes a huge debt to Graves, since before he came along, the only Celtic Pagans getting any attention were the Druids, and there was no Goddess religion there!

Tags: Celts, Celtic spirituality

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

There is no gene for “Celtic,” and, as we have seen (if you followed the links), “Celtic culture” is largely an invention of the late 18th and 19th centuries–created by the English and/or of Welsh, Irish, and other tradition-inventors who went to London to make the culture scene.

Those might include James Macpherson, creator of the allegedly ancient Scottish “Ossian” poems in the 1760s, and Edward “Iolo Morganwg” Williams, creator of allegedly ancient Welsh literature and key figure in the Druidic revial. (See also “fakelore”.)

Williams’ “Druidic” planes of existence–Annwn, Abred, Ceugant,and Gwynfyd–made it into Robert Cochrane’s Witchcraft tradition, oddly enough.

Then you have the translators and “improvers” of ancient literature, such as Lady Charlotte Guest, who produced the version of the Mabinogion that most people know. Evangeline Walton’s novelized version was on my first coven’s reading list, and it was treated like holy scripture.

In 1890s Ireland, the Anglo-Irish poet William Yeats and his unrequited love, Maude Gonne, stoked themselves on translated Iron Age epic poems and even tried creating a magickal order based on “Celtic” themes as against the more Kabbalistic Golden Dawn, of which Yeats was a member.

By the 1920s, the Irish writer James Joyce would refer to the whole anti-modern and backward-looking “Celtic Twilight” literary renaissance as the “cultic twalette.” Maude Gonne, of course, “took it to the streets” in the build-up to the 1916 Easter Rising and never went back to “Celtic” ceremonial magic.

Tags: Celts, Celtic spirituality

But if you are reading this blog, you probably know enough to try the Emperor Julian trivia quiz.

I got 13 out of 15, but as the quiz’s author writes, “The early Byzantine emperors showed a woeful lack of originality in names.”

OK, one endorsement on the crowded Colorado ballot: Amendment 44.

It would decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, putting Colorado into much the same legal territory as Alaska.

Cannabis is not really part of my life, but I don’t care to see headlines like this one from Texas: Dead Dog, $5K in Damage, Guns, and Grenades . . . and Two Joints.

I will vote for 44, then, not because I’m a big pot smoker but because I am sick of the excesses of the War on (some) Drugs. Voting yes seems to be the only way to register an opinion, since politicians are generally scared to be branded “pro-drug,” regardless of their private feelings.

My department chair (that’s how we say it in Academia to avoid the sexism of “chairman,” even though it makes him sound like an ornate piece of furniture) recently invited me to speak to one of his classes.

To establish my credentials, he handed a copy of my book Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America around the seminar table.

Because I teach English rather than history of religion, not too many people had known about it. I did thank him in the preface for his support of my unconventional scholarship, however. But I had to chuckle too, because some of these students are my students this semester too.

I don’t exactly wear my pentagram on my sleeve at the university. I am what I am (and they ought to give the department some kind of diversity points benefit for having me), but I don’t advertise.

Consider, for instance, my student C____, with whom I worked closely on an important project over the summer, one that might further her career. She’s bright and willing to do far more than the minimum work required. She is also more or less of a fundamentalist Christian. It would not surprise me if she thinks that the universe was created in six 24-hour days. But I liked having her in class all the same.

If she knew I was in the Craft, would it spoil the professor-student relationship? All she would have to do is Google me, but students are generally incurious about their professors’ lives, I think.

Meanwhile, another student who was working on an interview-based article in a magazine-writing class told me that if her first interviewee did not work out, she could interview “a friend who was Pagan.”

“Let’s stick with Plan A,” I said.

And, meanwhile, a department colleague asked me if Her Hidden Children was for sale in the university bookstore.

Duh! I had completely forgotten about the display shelves of books by faculty members.

So I printed out the page from AltaMira Press’s online catalog and took it to the bookstore manager.

Today she emailed me: It’s back-ordered until December.

I should be glad, since that seems to indicate that it is selling. Hope so.