CELTS, DRUIDS and the INVENTION of TRADITION James
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CELTS, DRUIDS AND THE INVENTION OF TRADITION James R. Lewis For the last ten or twenty years, ‘Celticity’ has been increasingly pro- moted as an antidote both to the stresses of contemporary life and to the dominant interests of the United Kingdom’s cultural establishment. It combines a romantic attachment to a perceived Celtic heritage with a fascination for mysticism and animist spirituality that are taken to form its essential adjunct. It is linked to reinvigorated nationalist movements, to the ecological movement, which shares a similar empathy for the spirits of nature, and also to the rise of ‘New Age’ neo-paganism. In short, it appeals to all those people who feel the strains of modern civilization, and who seek, however impractically, to recover the benefi ts of the world before civilization. In the [British] Isles, the world before civilization was the world of the ancient Celts (Davies 1999, 95). Celtic neo-paganism is one of numerous contemporary movements that have rushed into the vacuum left by the decline in Christian practice. It has no fi xed form. Some of its adherents endeavour to follow the old ‘Druid Way’. They do not seem to mind whether their supposedly druidi- cal doings are spurious or authentic (Ibid., p. 98). Despite the relative dearth of source material on the religion of the ancient Celts, for the past several centuries there has been a tremen- dous outpouring of popular publications and antiquarian scholarship on traditional Celtic spirituality. Aspects of this romantic Celticism are roughly comparable to the romantic fascination with American Indians in North America. In fact, nineteenth-century folklorists often explicitly compared Celtic cultures to Native Americans; the ancient Celts were, in a very real sense, “the ‘noble savages’ of Europe” (Magliocco 2004, pp. 218–19). The lack of authoritative information on Celtic religion gave writers of various persuasions free reign to construct ancient religions out of their imaginations. Such romanticized writings, as one might anticipate, have only served to make the pre-Christian Celts more attractive. One consequence of this romantic Celticism was that, as early as the eight- eenth century, people began founding “Druid orders,” based, initially, on contemporaneous secret societies, and, later, on esoteric initiatory groups. 480 james r. lewis Though the present Celtic revival is in some ways comparable to prior periods of “Celtomania,” the current mass appeal of Celtism and the intensive commercialization of all things Celtic (Bowman 1994) dwarfs prior phases of the revival. For example, “New Age Celtomania” has produced “Celtic tarot, Celtic shamanism, Celtic sex magic and even Celtic tea bag folding” (Haywood 2004, p. 212). Marion Bowman observes, “whereas Celts have in the past captured the imagination of antiquarians, Romantics, popular folklorists, artists, poets and minority interest groups, the present phenomenon is signifi cantly more varied and broadly based” (Bowman 2000, p. 69). Contemporary Celtic Neopaganism is only one facet of this larger phenomenon. An aspect of the present revival that sets it apart from its predecessors is the extent to which Celtophiles are appropriating Celtic identities and, as part of this appropriation, engaging in religious practices perceived to be Celtic. Bowman has referred to the many ethnically non-Celtic individuals who embrace Celtic or quasi-Celtic identities as “Cardiac Celts,” people who “feel in their hearts that they are Celts. For cardiac Celts, spiritual nationality is a matter of elective affi nity” (Bowman 1995, p. 246). As a way of squaring this embrace of Celtic identity with some sense of historical appropriateness, one neo-Druid leader interviewed by Bowman expressed the opinion that “ultimately everyone in Britain is of Celtic descent.” However, even this is not necessarily relevant because, this leader went on to claim, “Celtic describes culture not ethnicity [so] anyone can ‘tap into’ Celticity.” Though academic purists may dismiss the current popular interest in Celtic spirituality as completely inauthentic, it is nevertheless a major social and cultural phenomenon. Thus, independently of the issue of whether or not it is true to ancient Celtic culture, contemporary neo-Celtism is worthy of serious inquiry (Bowman 2000, pp. 69–70). The fascination with all things Celtic goes a long way toward explain- ing why contemporary Pagans often identify themselves as Druids or as Celtic Pagans. However, when modern Paganism fi rst emerged out of the creative activities of Gerald Gardner and his associates in mid twentieth-century Britain, “the key fi gure was not the Druid but the witch” (Hutton 2003, p. 242). In fact, it was not until the latter decades of the twentieth century that distinctly Neo-Pagan forms of Druidism began to emerge. What makes the choice of “Witch” over “Druid” really curious is that Gardner had been an active member of the Ancient Druid Order, “the most active and prominent group of practitioners of mystical Druidry in the country” (Hutton 1999, p. 224). .