Subj : ARTICLE: Pick ’n’_mix_Celts_[ 2_of_2] To : All From : ceri@twmba.net Date : Sun Nov 21 2004 09:31 am From: Ceri ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- >.... Continued from last post The mainstream Churches, Catholic and Protestant, on both sides of the water, have embraced Celtic "heritage", however dimly understood, with equal enthusiasm and often for similar reasons. It sounds vaguely anti-colonial - always a good thing. For them, too, it means anything positive, liberated, a tad "alternative", or just plain wholesome. Going to churches in Gaelic-speaking Scotland, or in Welsh Wales, I rarely found much sign of a particular interest in herbal healing, Mother Nature, feminism, or "alternative" sexual lifestyles. But this is what the modern, manufactured, Celtic revivalists have insisted on. A ceaseless flow of books spreads the idea that "the Celts" - usually taken as a homogenised lump - once professed a superior brand of Christianity that conveniently anticipated modern Western society's relaxed attitudes to sex and its interest in alternative medicine, wildlife, conservation, gender equality, and so on. The Celtic churches, so this narrative runs, were in touch with nature, proto-feminist and anti-hierarchical. One book that I picked up on my journey, called the /Celtic Alternative/, which was fairly typical of a whole genre, suggested the Celtic Church had more in common with Buddhism than, say, institutional Catholicism. A "church without martyrs", it was at peace with nature, feminist and concerned with "celebrating life" - not death. A similar book, /Celtic Heart/, said the "old Celt understood the sanctity of life and the sacred interconnectedness of everything". A third book, /Celtic Sexuality/, advanced a bolder claim - that in the Celtic world, women "dispensed favours as they saw fit", adding: "Men and women were not ashamed of the urges of their bodies and recognised them as natural, pleasurable and even religious." Wandering around Iona, now a pilgrimage centre for modern Celtic wannabees, I wondered how much the celebration of "urges" and "sacred interconnectedness" would actually have meant to the sixth-century missionaries who founded the monastery there. Probably neither the spiritual values nor the character traits now so widely assumed to be Celtic would have struck much of a chord. There is no real evidence that those old evangelists were any more touchy-feely, herb-friendly, animal-loving, or easygoing about sex than the Anglo-Saxons who replaced them in much of Britain. We cannot know, of course. Those saints and their world were long gone even when the Normans arrived, which is why those flinty Norman bishops so casually prettified the legends of their Celtic predecessors, attributing any amount of fabulous detail to their lives in the hope that it would add value and prestige to their cathedrals or abbeys. If the Celts were out of reach, even then, how much more so now, when the non-anglophone, non-anglicised cultures on these islands (not including recent immigrants) have shrunk to a porous Gaeltacht in the west of Ireland, a clutch of islands in north-west Scotland and a patchwork of lands in Wales that are increasingly disconnected from one another physically and shot through with wads of English second-home owners? All one can say with certainty is that in the nineteenth century, before the non-English-speaking cultures of Britain and Ireland crumbled, the people of those lands tended with a certain uniformity to opt for the most doctrinally rigid, most austere and sexually unliberated brand of Christianity that was available. What traditional Irish Catholicism, the Calvinism of the Highlands and the Calvinist Methodism of Wales shared, at least until recently, was a set of values that would have most modern Celtic revivalists shuddering, namely a keen interest in theological nitpicking, spiritual severity, and a fairly hard and unforgiving attitude towards the flesh. It was the English, with their cut-and-paste national creed, who first cornered the market in "touchy-feely" religion - Anglicanism being not much more than what Elizabeth I felt comfortable doing, seeing or hearing in her chapel. It was the Celts, the real Celts, who have always provided the hard, uncomfortable ideological edges in British or Irish religion, and the Anglo-Saxons who have added the fudge. It might sound like the words of a spoilsport, but there is no need to brave Highland gales - or Gaels - searching for the home of the values that most of the Celtic revivalists have long attributed to the Celts. Their real home is right here, in England. /Marcus Tanner's/ The Last of the Celts/ is published by Yale University Press. (C) The Tablet Publishing Company --- * Origin: TransNet Gateway 2.11+ 1111 (3:640/1010) .