{"id":740,"date":"2006-10-18T03:16:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-18T03:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=740"},"modified":"2006-10-18T03:16:00","modified_gmt":"2006-10-18T03:16:00","slug":"whos-a-celt-now-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=740","title":{"rendered":"Who’s a Celt now?-1"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Take the assertion of Stephen Oppenheimer<\/a>, an anthropologist who has published on the ancient populations of the British Isles:<\/p>\n

“Celt” is now a term that sceptics consider so corruped in the archaeological and popular literature that it is worthless.<\/em><\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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

As Marion Bowman<\/a> said in her important 1993 article, “”Reinventing the Celts” (Religion<\/em> 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.”<\/p>\n

Not just Pagans<\/a> but some Christians have reinvented themselves as cardiac Celts as well.<\/p>\n

More to come<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n

Tags: Celts<\/a>, Celtic spirituality<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-bW","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":743,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=743","url_meta":{"origin":740,"position":0},"title":"Who’s a Celt now? – 3","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 20, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Celtic Spirituality\" as religious outbidding.During the recent Spanish Peaks Celtic Music Festival, St. Benedict Episcopal Church in La Veta, Colorado, took out a small ad in the program for their Celtic Spirituality weekend.Yes, before the contemporary Pagan movement was underway, various Anglicans were pushing \"Celtic spirituality\" as a way to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":741,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=741","url_meta":{"origin":740,"position":1},"title":"Who’s a Celt now? – 2","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 18, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":751,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=751","url_meta":{"origin":740,"position":2},"title":"Who’s a Celt now ? – 5","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 29, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4While 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\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":750,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=750","url_meta":{"origin":740,"position":3},"title":"Who’s a Celt now? – 4","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 28, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Part 1, Part 2, Part 3There 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\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":752,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=752","url_meta":{"origin":740,"position":4},"title":"Who’s a Celt now? – 6","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 29, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Part 1, Part 2, Part 3,Part 4, Part 5Everything 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,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":998,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=998","url_meta":{"origin":740,"position":5},"title":"DNA, the Celts, and Roman Britain","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 23, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I have started reading Stephen Oppenheimer's The Origins of the British, which I referenced earlier in my series of \"Who's a Celt Now?\" posts.From a genetic analysis -- his main tool -- buttressed by linguistic studies and ancient written sources, he appears to be making these points:The people of Ireland,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"archaeology\"","block_context":{"text":"archaeology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=archaeology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=chascli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1845294823","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}