But first, a warning

In my last post, I promised that I would delve into specific aspects of Celtic history, society, and lore. But first, I’d like to make a few disclaimers about drawing from recorded history, archeology, and modern interpretations of the past. 

The records of Romans conquerors first mention the Celts in ~400 BCE. When history is recorded by the conqueror, it will always have their motivations embedded in the stories they tell. It would not do well to paint a picture of a generally peaceful or at least reasonable and nature-based society that the Romans decided to conquer. No! They were pagan barbarians who needed to be set on the right path. 

The Romans wrote that the Celtics were brutal barbarians, citing that they sometimes made human sacrifices to please the gods. (For the record… Romans made public executions and kept slaves. They should not sit so pretty on their hollow horses.) Many Celtic beliefs and gods were based in nature, especially around water (lakes and rivers) and trees (especially oaks). Some of their most important gods or spiritual centers are speculated to have been posthumously appropriated into Christian lore: their most sacred sites were selected for churches or abbeys or other places of worship. This was intentional, as attested to by the Christian priests who wrote about this appropriation—a mechanism to make Christianity more familiar and tangible to those who were being persuaded (or forced) to join the Church.

One example is Brigid, who was an allegedly real person who lived in Ireland and helped found an Abbey of nuns. However, Brigid (or Bríg or Bríde or Brigantī) is believed to have been an important Celtic goddess who was a member of the Tuatha Dé Danann (a supernatural race of gods/goddesses). She is thought to represent wisdom, poetry, insight, healing, protection, smithing, the hearth, domesticated animals, and likely much more. (Celtic gods were doing a lot at once, it seems.) 

But can we really know what she represented? 

(More on Brigid in future posts.)

I mention this now, because the nature of the Celts’ spiritual or religious beliefs are unknowable. Not only because they were not recorded (the Celts kept an oral, not written, religion)—and because that which was written about them was mostly through the lens of their colonizers (religious or territorial). What little we may have known has likely been lost in translation over the centuries (millenia, even), during which they have been appropriated, muddled, confused, reframed, and—perhaps most importantly—are now viewed through our modern lenses. This last bit is probably the most problematic.

Our worldview has shifted so profoundly in the last two hundred, five hundred, two thousand years. Can we (and when I say “we,” I especially mean Western cultures; indigenous ways of thinking may in fact be closer to how the Celtics thought about the world)—can we ever break the paradigm of modern thought, which thinks of time as linear, which sees humans as apart from or higher than nature, which thinks of “God” as a singular being and not a mystical life force imbued in every living thing, connecting us all (flowers, rivers, humans, birds, magma, air) to one another? 

A key aspect of pagan belief systems was the way in which it integrated a sacred respect for nature in daily life routines.* In many cultures, animals were infrequently eaten, only slaughtered by priests, and done so with great reverence and ceremony. Springs or wells with fresh water were worshipped, never tainted, and the center of much ceremony. Today, we cram chickens into tiny cages, catch the eggs as they pop out, clean them of their protective casing, transport them to the grocery store, where we have traveled in our large vehicles to purchase them, then take them home, fry them up, and never tell our children what it really is they eat. Then, we freely let our sinks pour clean water down our drains as we get distracted washing the dishes.

We have been so removed from the cycle of nature, the seasons, that I wonder whether such a nature-based belief system can be truly understood by modern humans.

I digress. (Do I?)

Archeology can provide additional context for societies and beliefs, but archeologists are also fallible.** We often view the past through a mystical lens, but ancient people were humans too: practical, safety-oriented, and striving to not only survive, but to thrive. How else would we have advanced to become a species with technology and social norms? For decades, we smiled at cave paintings and thought they were quaint art that celebrated great hunts. But recent historical, natural, and archeological analysis paints them in a newly pragmatic light: symbols etched alongside paintings of ancient cattle, salmon, and other animals may actually represent a lunar calendar which was used to understand seasonal cycles—including mating and birth seasons. For ancient humans to avoid hunting their prey to extinction, it would be important to know when to avoid hunting the antelope so they could repopulate, and to understand when it was safe to hunt them again. 

Alright, that last paragraph may have been a tangent. I’m not talking about Paleolithic people here. But I am trying to prove a point that our ancestors were perhaps not as barbaric or unintelligent as we might sometimes paint them to be. 

So I take everything I read with a grain of salt.

To write this book (Project Misty Folk, you can read more here) I have been diving down rabbit holes in search of the humanity hidden among the scraps of history others have managed to uncover. I pull at their threads, unravel the pieces, make myths real, and stitch them back together in my own strange tapestry.

I hope what comes from all this effort will be a rich world that you can taste, touch, fear, and love. 

*Christian appropriation of Celtic religion broke the circle between nature, humans, and spirituality. I won’t get into it in this blog post, though will probably do a deep dive later, because it’s fascinating. Excellent perspectives I’ve read on this include Sacred Nature and Looking for the Hidden Folk. 

**There was a viral example of archeological failings which I could not find the source of other than some old Tweets and Tumblr posts. So who’s to say if it’s really based on a true story, or if it’s become a myth in its own right, crafted to serve a point? Anyway, it goes something like this: A group of male archeologists uncovered a village where knives/sharp objects were kept in the rafters; they could not fathom any purpose except to suggest the reason was likely religious, spiritual, or superstitious in nature. An alternative answer, when viewed years later by female archeologists, was far simpler: the knives were probably stored in the kitchen and used by women in preparing food. They stored the knives in the rafters to keep them out of reach of children.