The word “Celt” first appears in English in 1706, but it referred then usually to the people of ancient Gaul (modern France), says the OED. There are some earlier uses of “Celtic,” again referring to the Gauls, from the late 17th century.

“Celts” begame fashionable as Noble Savages after Scotland, in particular, was no longer seen by the English as a military threat. “Bonnie Prince Charlie’s” attempt to be king of England died at Culloden Moor in 1746, after a promising beginning.

Something similar happened in Ireland after the 1798 uprising was put down, I would suggest. Noble savages are most “noble” after they have been defeated.

King George IV and then Queen Victoria elevated Scottish tartans into high fashion. The linking of specific tartans to clans was a Victorian-era invention.

By the 1870s a Celtic Magazine was being published in Britain, and the whole Romantic association of Celticity with poetic melancholy and an allegedly Pagan-tinged form of Christianity was well underway.

Tags: Celts, Celtic spirituality

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

Aussie Dave notes a parade of the Undead in Wellington, New Zealand.

The internal link seems to be dead, but here is his take on it.

And here I thought it was something special to have a Day of the Dead parade.

Studying the program book from the upcoming American Academy of Religion–Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting, I came across this description of a joint session session between the Europe and the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity Group, the Manichaean Studies Seminar, and the Religion in Roman Egypt Consultation:

This joint session addresses how, in the conditions of general tolerance that prevailed from Constantine to Theodosius, religious groups adapted from their prior established or illicit status to a free market of open competition and adopted various strategies of attracting or retaining adherents.

Two thoughts: Does this sound familiar? And, second, sometimes it’s too bad that the mushrooming size of the joint annual meeting means that the two bodies will no longer meet together after 2007. Although the SBL has a biblical focus, some very interesting work on late Classical Paganism does slip in.

Jason Pitzl-Waters adds more on Paganism in the YouTube era. He wonders, “More importantly, will modern Paganism change to become more ‘video friendly’?”

Take, for instance, the videos posted by the publicity-hungry Corellian Nativist Tradition. There you may see CNT leader Don Lewis dressed like a small-town insurance agent. His sport coat alone would drive someone to agnosticism.

It’s the horrible cultural pressure of American Protestantism. No one feels like they can be religious in public without putting on an ugly necktie and an unctuous, phony-sincere voice.

Next, pews and hymnbooks for Samhain. Shudder.

Given a choice, I would take dressing up like one’s [imagined] ancestors. Here are some Russian Pagans of the “Circle of Pagan Tradition” doing just that.

UPDATE: Browsing NeoWayland’s blog, I see that the Corellians have had some sort of leadership meltdown. It looks as though the “largest and fastest growing Wiccan Tradition in the world” now has two official home pages. What was that about Protestants?

I had a long and not terribly encouraging talk with my editor at Rowman & Littlefield last week about a book project involving SF/fantasy and Paganism.

Then I walked to another building on campus, where students from the English Club were selling used books and baked goods. A copy of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Forest House (1993), the prequel to Mists of Avalon, more or less jumped out at me, and for fifty cents I bought it.

Bradley said it was partly based on Bellini’s opera woad.

Imagine: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single Druid in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

Have I changed so much since I was rather caught up in Mists? Should I blame the alleged ghost-writing by Diana Paxson? (Warning: lugubrious music on link.)

The book’s allegedly Pagan religion is awfully Protestant. People go around saying things like, “Goddess forgive my sin.”

Tag: MAron Zimmer Bradley

It’s not just contemporary Pagans who are vexed by that problem. Journalist Ron Dreher of the Crunchy Con[servative] blog tries to respond to a political conservative’s criticism, the critic being columnist Maggie Gallagher.

And then his commenters arrive in flocks.

And the argument goes around and around, sounding very much like Wiccans and reconstructionist Pagans arguing, only with different religious language.

And then a real Pagan does arrive in the comments. Someone tries to refute him by quoting G.K. Chesterton, as though the definition of “pagan” had not matured over the last hundred years. Is that the best they can do?

Yes, a sort of philosophical/literary paganism was in vogue in Chesterton’s time–the next issue of The Pomegranate will have an excellent article on that era. But it is not exactly what we are talking about now.

Pagan instructional videos have actually been around since the late 1980s. Now it is the YouTube era, as Druid Ian Corrigan demonstrates. (Not counting clips from Charmed, of course.)

If you understand Dutch, here is some news coverage. There is an English translation in the sidebar.

Tags: Paganism, Druidry

Wicca reaches India, reports The Telegraph of Calcutta. It’s just a “study group” now, the paper says. (Sure!) There is a Web site, of course, which suggests that the organizers have been Wiccan for some years, in fact.

A month after bisarjan, a western pagan cult worshipping the Mother Goddess looks set to rise from oblivion in the city.

The Wiccan Brigade, to be launched some time in mid-November by Ipsita Roy Chakraverti, will be a platform for those interested in studying wicca and using the branch of knowledge to holistic effect.

Some years ago, when I learned that Wiccan groups were starting in Brazil, I was surprised, because I thought that Brazil already had plenty of magical religion. “Too ‘Christian’ for them,” reported my priestess friend whom a Brazilian group had brought in to speak to them.

But for these Indians, is Wicca more Western and somehow suitable for educated people yet still compatible with Hindu culture? We shall find out.

Tags: Wicca, India, Paganism

From “The Heroic Nerd,” a review essay by Luc Sante in The New York Review of Books, discussing works by and about H.P. Lovecraft:

He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list. He evidently took pleasure in his fears, at least those on the creepy-crawly end of the spectrum, and although he really did suffer from his fear of cold, for example, this did not prevent him from exploiting that fear in a couple of stories, one of them (“At the Mountains of Madness”) his best.

H/T: 3 Quarks Daily.