Subj : ARTICLE: Pick ’n’_mix_Celts_[ 1_of_2] To : All From : ceri@twmba.net Date : Sun Nov 21 2004 09:31 am From: Ceri ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- MM All, An interesting approach. I have to admit sympathising with the author (even if it seems it's supporting a new book) even if I don't totally agree with the approach. AFAIC there's nothing sadder than practitioners of a revival/reconstructed faith ... well acting like those ""real" Celts" mentioned who completely failed to understand any of the histo-socio-anachronistic issues. Their attitude reminds me of that supposed US Senator who believed the bible had been written in English - anyone cringing yet??? To all intents & purposes it's beginning to look like more & more like the Celts co-habited with other cultures - almost by the Ozzie definition of "Multicultural". Which of course meant facing the same issues as we find here. For example, a Brissie "Greek Festival" would be different from a Melbourne "Greek Festival" (for a variety of reasons I'm not doing to do into rite now). But this it to stress that as there are local variations/traditions that are just as "Greek" as the next community - historically there would have been local variations/traditions that were just as "celtic/keltic/whatever"... Remember what has been lost is not recoverable - there's been centuries of offended dignities of political powerful people who (within their historical milieu) were proud of destroying anything connected to the enemy. We're essentially in a situation fairly similar to what the "Stolen Generation" face - only "our" culture has been lost for many more generations so lack the immediate tragedy of loosing the cultural relevance within in living memory (in SOME areas of Australia). OK I admit my path (searching for my pre-christian ethnic roots) so I'll admit bias here - BUT there is a lot we can grok looking at the 'modern' indigenous cultural issues.. What I'm ranting about is that we are recreating the past with our own contemporary attitudes & adaption (& "YES" some of those cultural attitudes originate from a mainstream spirituality). the sooner we recognise this the sooner we (as a spirituality) will stop looking like hopeless dweebs. This reminds me of a joke/rant piece (same thing) back in the 80's suggesting some pagans felt they had to support the IRA 'cause it was Irish "god dam it" Rai ====================================== http://www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi-bin/recommend.cgi?title=Pick%20%92n%92%20mix%20Celts 20/11/2004 Pick 'n' mix Celts Marcus Tanner The term 'Celtic' is banded about as never before. But this sentimental version of the ancient culture has little to do with the austere people whose history and spirituality has been re-interpreted to suit our century Journeying around the west coast of Britain in search of what remained of its vanishing Celtic cultures, I came across a leaflet in Skye advertising a Gaelic-language church service. It caught my imagination because it was going to be held in the open air, and at a site where it was thought Maolrubha, one of the Celtic saints, had landed to evangelise this part of the Highlands. Imagination rapidly taking flight, I hoped my English voice would be drowned out by a chorus of real, live Celts, for whom this language, culture and spiritual tradition were a reality. Instead, I found almost everyone there was just like me. They were outsiders, clutching at something that had vanished - chasing ghosts. As none of us really knew the language we were singing in, or truly understood the rhythm of this service, it had a painful air to it and at the end I fled, disappointed. From Ireland to Iona and Brittany, the Celtic lands are full of puzzled pilgrims, searching for something that died ages ago, or perhaps never existed. At a music festival in Nova Scotia (called Celtic Colours, naturally) I found myself in an audience of mainly US Americans who invariably rooted for the cheesiest, most manufactured, "Celtic" sound on offer. A pair sitting next to me at one event introduced themselves as "real" Celts. They squirmed, bored, through the most traditional Gaelic songs, but gazed with rapt attention as an Irish woman belted out a saccharine confection in English about "holding Ireland in my hand". At the end of this production-line ballad, I longed to stand up and say that surely a festival like this had not been founded to promote such commercialised piffle. Thank God I didn't, for I would certainly have been alone; the audience had loved it, and the pair from the US swivelled round to me and exclaimed: "That's /real/ Celtic" (or, as they put it, "seltic") music for you!" As I found out at every step of the journey, Celtic revivals owed little to the living cultures that we call Celtic. The revivalists have rarely been that interested in what the Welsh, the Manx, the Cornish, the Bretons, or the Irish or Scottish Gaels, think or want. The revivals were dominated from the first by outsiders, for whom an adopted Celtic identity was an antidote to what they saw as the deficiencies in their own societies. It was their needs and desires that counted. The bishops of the Norman Conquest, as many historians have pointed out, were early Celtic revivalists of a sort, trumpeting the claims of the Celtic saints who founded their sees many centuries before, publicising their shrines and patronising writings about their alleged miracles. But those same devotees of dead, miracle-working Celts tended often to crush the life out of the Celts they ruled over. This distinction between idealised Celts, inhabiting the past, and the contemporary variety has remained fairly constant. Matthew Arnold, in his celebrated lectures on the Celts in the 1860s, probably did more to awaken English interest in this subject than any other public figure. But while Arnold exalted Celtic over Anglo-Saxon culture, praising a spirit of genius "with sentiment as its basis, with love of beauty, charm and spirituality as its excellence", he looked forward to the destruction of the surviving Celtic cultures of his own time. For example, Arnold disapproved strongly of the delay "by a single hour" of the anglicisation of Wales, even if he did confess to "a moment's distress to one's imagination when one hears that the last Cornish peasant who spoke the old tongue of Cornwall is dead". "The sooner the Welsh language has disappeared", this great promoter of Celticism declared, "the better." Arnold's Celts were an imaginary force - conjured forth as a race of sensuous poets, music-makers and dreamers of dreams, to act as a counterweight to what he considered the loathsome philistinism of the triumphant English middle class, then unmistakably grabbing the reins of power from the landed aristocracy. The connection that Arnold made, which he borrowed from contemporary French writers (then hymning the Bretons in much the same way), has proved very enduring. I recognised Arnold's dim imprint in the blurb for a CD called "Celtic Journeys" that I picked up in the Isle of Man. The Celts, I learned from the back cover - unlike the rest of us - had "real values, real ideas and real emotions". They were "spiritual, proud, courageous . . . born artists, visionaries, warriors". The idea that being Celtic is little more than a state of mind, or a set of vague character traits, explains why the Celtic label is so enduringly popular. It can be very loosely acquired and worn, but it sets the bearer apart from the common herd of oppressive, hung-up, white folk - for to be Celtic is to be a victim of colonialism, too. Celticness, as any visitor to the country spots immediately, is especially entrenched in Ireland, where it has become a kind of national profession - a substitute for the fact that most people there no longer have a separate language by which to distinguish themselves from the old English colonisers next door. This is indeed the self-proclaimed Celtic mecca, where the term Celtic is applied indiscriminately to virtually every department of life, from spirituality to politics, jewellery, music, sticky liqueurs and even the economy - the boom of the 1990s having been inevitably baptised the "Celtic tiger". --- * Origin: TransNet Gateway 2.11+ 1111 (3:640/1010) .