Celtic Studies and Druidry

by Mark Williams

 

Von Igelfeld looked out of the window. Little droplets of rain coursed across the glass and made the countryside quiver. He had been thinking of how landscape shapes a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish…

- The Two-and-a-Half Pillars of Wisdom, Alexander McCall Smith

 

In my daily life, I negotiate a tricky balance. On the one hand, I am a Druid priest, jointly running a Grove and honouring my Gods and Ancestors. On the other, I'm a PhD student in Medieval Celtic, and as part of that I teach Middle Welsh, Old and Middle Irish, and Celtic Mythology. These two things might seem to go well together, and sometimes they do; often though there is a kind of low-grade background grumble like grinding gears. In this article, I want to explore why that should be, and to look at how my practise of polytheistic Pagan Druidry has been affected by my 'day job'. I talk here about three areas: language, mythology, and contemporary literature in the Celtic tongues, and dart between Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

I should state here that for me personally, Druidry signifies something Celtic, in the technical sense of 'to do with the peoples who speak or historically spoke Celtic languages.' I don't really understand how it could be otherwise, I the same way that some vegetarians just can't understand how people can justify eating meat. It simply doesn't make sense to me. I realise this can be debated, and very validly, but for me personally, 'Druid = Celtic' is a core assumption.

My introduction to matters Celtic came, like many others, from the books of John and Caitlín Matthews. I started reading their work after the Wicca that I had found in my early teens was starting to sit ill with what I was learning of history and mythology; I didn't like the ersatz eclecticism and the lack of historical consciousness. (As Camille Paglia said when Madonna called Kabbala 'older than religion' - 'Sigh. Doesn't she ever read books?') I liked Caitlín Matthews' poetic phrasing and appreciated the fact that she and her husband were quoting from actual Celtic and Arthurian sources. They wrote an exquisite piece on the poet David Jones for Kathleen Raine's Temenos Academy Review, which deserved high praise. The sense of being located within a single Celtic cultural web was enfolding, rather than calling on Lugh at Lammas, Persephone at the Autumn Equinox, Kali at Samhain, and so on, mingling cultures dissonantly.

When I was seventeen, I read Ronald Hutton's The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy. His chapter on the Celts, 'The People of the Mist', is an elegant summary of what can and cannot be known about the religion of the ancient Celts, emphasising the ambiguity of the medieval sources, and alerting many Pagans that these same sources were available in good well-edited versions which could be purchased and read. He also made it clear that the interpretations of the sources, or the interpretations of interpretations, by Pagans had varied from the speculative to the downright barmy, and were now totally at variance with the last seventy-five years of scholarly thinking. Hutton carefully laid no blame on Pagans themselves, noting that much Pagan writing on Celtic matters was based on the out-dated scholarship of the 19th century, which had been cheaply reprinted and was widely available. (I remember being fifteen and lying on a burial mound in Cornwall entranced by Lewis Spence's 'The Mysteries of Britain', with its Barddas-style accounts of the rites of the Druids and the initiatory religion of Ceridwen. It's a load of old bilge, alas.) And so I resolved to read for myself some of this 'new' scholarship, often over 60 years old, but then as now largely unknown to Pagans.

Language

The first thing I learned was that most Pagan use of terms derived from Celtic languages, and their interpretation of the texts in which such terms occur, is in general pretty awful. In a sense this isn't surprising. As noted above, a lot of Pagan writers rely on secondary scholarship which itself often depends on books from the 19th century, when our knowledge of Celtic linguistics was rather less advanced. But by all the Gods, there are some howlers. If we return to John and Caitlín Matthews, for example (and this is constructive criticism of their work rather than of themselves personally); their versions of the Taliesin poems in Taliesin: The Last Celtic Shaman are dodgy at best. At points of difficulty, it looks like they've just looked up words in a Modern Welsh dictionary and strung them together into an English sentence, usually 'paganising' them in the process. The blurb on the book describes John as 'a preeminent Celtic scholar', and Caitlín as 'a fellow Celtic scholar.' This is a somewhat disingenuous claim, which I suspect the likes of Rachel Bromwich, Fergus Kelly, Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Kim McCone, John Carey, Patrick Ford, Proinseas Ní Chatháin, Tomas O Cathasaigh, David Dumville, Marged Haycock, Dafydd Johnston and Thomas Charles-Edwards might be a bit surprised to hear. Unfortunately, John and Caitlín are not, in the strict sense, Celtic scholars at all, because they use sources in an ahistorical fashion to serve a spiritual agenda, and can't or don't make arguments that are rooted in the knotty depths of the Welsh and Irish texts. Neither can they really be described as being 'popular' writers on the Celts like Frank Delaney, because they're always pushing this pagan/spiritual ideology, from which their entire interest in the Celtic peoples stems. So they give a misleading view of the medieval Celtic world because they simply leave out anything that doesn't fit. So you hear very little from them about the incredibly weird Early Irish Apocrypha, or the highly formal verse of the Welsh Poets of the Princes, or the luminously beautiful word-music of Dafydd ap Gwilym, or the Irish Annals, or the Irish or Welsh Laws, or the way the languages changed over time, or the vast genre of Saints' Lives…

Their lack of technical skills is not their fault. I don't think that either of them studied Celtic formally, and a lot of the requisite techniques are taught essentially orally. If you miss out on that, it's not always easy to learn those skills - such as textual criticism, Celtic philology and manuscript reading - from books, even for a pair of highly intelligent and sensitive self-taught writers. It also puzzles me that they don't seem to be using the available scholarly sources. The introduction to John's Taliesin refers to the scholar Marged Haycock, who has worked on the Book of Taliesin material in enormous depth. But then the rest of the book is written as though she never drew breath! Are we allowed to suggest that this might be because her meticulously researched and convincing scholarly conclusions don't fit very well with John and Caitlín's mystico-pagan view of Taliesin? If you want to know more about this issue, a further and very fair discussion of the Matthews' Taliesin can be found here:

http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_matthews_taliesinshaman.html

So, the first thing I learnt was that almost no Pagan translation or analysis of a Celtic word could be trusted for accuracy, and I'm afraid I think that that still holds. Part of the problem with this I think is a kind of paradoxical Pagan over-respect for the languages, a feeling that Welsh and Irish can't or shouldn't be analysed. My own attitude can be expressed by analogy; if you love cars, you'll want to take one apart and see how it works under the bonnet. If you're fascinated by the Welsh language and its literature and history, save up, go on a language course and learn to read and speak it a bit. But be aware that what seems romantic and inherently 'spiritual' to us Pagans is the home-turf of hundreds of scholars and learned people, who know it like the back of their hands. They will be most often interested in it for linguistic, literary, or historical reasons, rather than looking at texts for spiritual sustenance.

I learnt to have deep respect for academic philologists who laboured during the 19th century to make these languages understandable. Old Irish, for example, is one of the most difficult European languages, with a grammar of such baroque complexity that it takes literally years to be able to read it swiftly. It's also really quite different from Modern Irish and it took several great German scholars to chart this wild territory, through painstaking work with transcribed manuscripts and card-files. Every time you pick up Gantz's Early Irish Myths and Sagas, which is probably the most easily available English translation of some Old Irish tales, you are in the debt of these noble scholars, who toiled for decades to establish the grammatical ground rules of the language. Thanks to them, we can date texts and produce readable, scholarly editions. Also, we now understand in great detail how the Goidelic and Brittonic languages changed over time, yielding the modern Celtic languages. Sometimes I smile when I hear people using the names Lugh, Oengus and Boand, knowing that those are the Old Irish versions of the names, a stage of the language which came into existence between the 6th and the 10th century, after Christianisation. Philology shows us that the 'Primitive' Irish names would have been *Lugos, *Oinogustos, and *Bouvinda. Roll them on your tongue. They were the ancient gods' real names. By saying their names you are calling them.

One of my personal high horses is that landscape and language are intertwined. If people found an ancient gold torc sticking out of the ground, they'd take it home and reverently touch it, knowing that it was a profound link to the Ancestors, their blood and grief and desire. And yet words are just as much artefacts, living links with those same Ancestors. The twisting syllabic patterns of poetry are no different from the twisted wires of that torc. They are a gift, an ancestral bequest.

Mythology

The second thing which I learnt from studying Celtic was that an interest in Mythology is rather out of fashion; not because it's not regarded as perfectly legitimate, but because barring the discovery of new evidence, conclusions must always be highly speculative. Thus it's difficult not to end up building great edifices of speculation upon wobbly foundations of surmise. The emphasis in studies of ancient Celtic religion is currently on material culture - lake deposits, sculpture, archaeology - and not on using medieval texts to attempt to reconstruct pre-Christian beliefs. Awareness has grown of how ferociously complex these texts are, and the wide variety of cultural agendas that are embodied in them, relevant to the time when they were written. To put it another way, we no longer try to look through medieval tales to glimpse the Paganism beyond; now we look firmly at the texts in their early medieval Christian context, an approach which has yielded fascinating results.

A good example of this is John Carey's article 'Myth and Mythography in Cath Maige Tuired', which appeared in Studia Celtica 24/25. He notes that this text, 'The Second Battle of Moytura', has usually been read as the Irish reflex of an Indo-European myth about a war between the Gods and the Giants, or Anti-Gods, which appears in Greek, Hindu and Norse versions. But he points out that the text is absolutely useless if you try to reconstruct the archaic myth from it, and goes on to ask, 'What did this text mean to its audience in the time when it was composed'? (The 11th century.) By setting the text in its contemporary context, he reveals it as a complex political parable about the erosion of native values under the pressure of Viking raids, and the threat of inter-marriage between natives and invaders leading to cultural dilution. His argument is subtle, alert to linguistic clues and nuance, and very convincing. It also tells us far more about Irish culture than trying to use a medieval text to reconstruct an ancient myth, with scant guarantee of getting it right.

So, I learnt that it is far more fruitful to interpret 'Celtic mythology' as a product of the medieval period than of the pagan period. The story-tellers have worked hard to make traditional material relevant to their audiences. They had no interest in preserving Pagan mythology for the sake of it; not because they found it threatening, but because it simply wasn't relevant or interesting to them. They are obsessed with the idea of the antiquity of their culture, but are continually reworking ancient elements to make new narratives that would be resonant for their audiences. I loathe the Pagan attitude of 'Oh, those wicked, wicked monks! How could they dare to alter the ancient stories of the Goddess's Sacred Earth-Body through their vicious patriarchal conditioning!!!' It was their ancestral culture to do what they liked with. Current research indicates that secular learning (the craft of poets and storytellers) fused very early and completely with ecclesiastical learning, creating a mandarin class of litterateurs. It is these people who gave us the sagas, some of which we now select and dub 'Irish Mythology.' They fashioned 'a culture that would be wholly Irish and wholly Christian' as Kim McCone put it.

Incidentally, this latter scholar also pointed out something about the story of Lugh which Druids might find vexing. You recall Lugh knocks Balor's eye out after being made leader of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Irish Gods? McCone pointed out that the narrative of this event in CMT corresponds point-for-point with the story of David and Goliath. The story, which has inspired all sorts of Pagan young sun-god/old sun-god rituals, may have been lifted wholesale from the Old Testament, the writers knowing nothing about Lugh but his name. Why do this? McCone points out that the Tuatha Dé Danann are often called just the 'Tuatha Dé' in the sagas, and that this phrase (literally 'the peoples of god') is one of the normal Old Irish names for the People of Israel. Thus they writers of the sagas seem to be boldly visualising the pagan past of Ireland as their 'Old Testament', awaiting fulfilment in Christianity, with the mission of St Patrick to Ireland daringly paralleled to Christ's incarnation and the career of the prophet Elijah. They're reworking ancient elements far more knowingly and cleverly than was once thought, and are good at making actually Biblical themes 'look' pre-Christian. Another reason why you're on a sticky wicket when you try turning them into Druid ritual.

My favourite example of this kind of thing is also from McCone. In the early text 'Connlae's Adventure', Echtrae Chondlaí, a mysterious otherworldly woman comes and lures the King's son, Connlae, away to a deathless paradise, against the wishes of Connlae's father and despite the spells of his Druids. This has usually been read as reflecting ancient Irish beliefs about the otherworld and its goddess. (Cue many a Druid funeral rite.) In McCone's edition, he pointed out that the woman's language is highly reminiscent of contemporary texts personifying the Church. And suddenly it all falls into place: the woman is the Church (often personified as female in medieval and later culture), her realm is reigned over by an undying, all-powerful king (God), no one gets old or ill or dies there, nor commits any kind of sin there (Heaven). The clincher is that the Druids want quite anxiously to stop Connlae going with the woman, whereas if this was a 'Pagan' story, surely they would have no objection. There may well have been Pagan tales about otherworldly realms presided over by a goddess, but this, the earliest such story we have, shows Christian imagery so cleverly dressed-up and integrated that we cannot separate the Pagan material out. The woman also makes a clever pun on the phrase 'the people of the Shee', áes síde are called this because 'már síde i taam' which can mean either 'because we are in a great hollow hill', i.e. 'we are the ancient gods', or equally, 'because we exist in great peace', i.e. we are people who enjoy 'the peace that passeth understanding', in Heaven. The story emerges as an allegory for the Church's fight for the hearts and minds of aristocratic Irish youth in the century or so after Christianity came to Ireland - and so exactly the reverse of how it is normally taken by modern Druids. This type of thing happens all the time in studying Celtic, and it's exactly the kind of thing the Matthewses never tell you about.

Modern Writing in the Celtic Languages

The third and final thing which I learned from Celtic Studies was to respect the cultural integrity of the individual speech-communities. I think it's easy for modern Pagans to feel like we own these ancient tales, whether they are Welsh or Irish or Scottish Gaelic, and to feel that we are giving them true life by putting them back into the context of Pagan practice. But there are still people for whom these stories are directly part of their linguistic and literary tradition, still living, unbroken. Who is respecting the Ancestors more, the modern poet who writes a poem about Blodeuwedd in their native Welsh, or the Druid who honours her as a goddess, which she certainly wasn't? It's tricky, and brings up potentially painful issues of cultural imperialism. But I want to draw attention here to the kinds of writing that are being produced by contemporary speakers of the Celtic languages which Druids might find valuable, as many writers are making creative use of the same ancient stories as we Druids.

Scottish Gaelic and Irish are the two most threatened of the Celtic languages, but the 20th century has seen some exquisitely powerful poetry being produced in both languages. In Irish, Nuala Ní Dhómhnaill's poetry, easily available in bilingual editions, sensitively blends a strong female voice with fragments of ancient myth, bound together with wit and tender lyricism. My own personal favourite is Cathal Ó Searcaigh, who blends Irish myth with a sense of the sacredness of landscape, all rendered with touches of sensuous bisexual eroticism. In his wonderful poem Cor Úr/ A Fresh Dimension we read:

Is this a lover or the Spirit of the Place? It's never clear, and the metaphors of the poem allow both interpretations. Both Cathal and Nuala's voices are at once modern and ancient, with one foot in the urban world and one in the ancient, threatened tradition of Irish story and poetry, which continues unbroken in them.

In Scottish Gaelic, the greatest, but by no means the only, poet of the 20th century was the towering Sorley Maclean. His is a stunning voice, of Yeatsian stature. He wrote of the impact of world politics upon the individual conscience, and the profoundly local 'taste of Gaelic', the ancestral tradition. He brought the entire world into Gaelic, and deserves to be seen as one of the greatest poets of the last hundred years. His output is impossible to summarise, and I will confine myself to a fragment of one poem. In Hallaig, he contemplates the return to nature of the homes of people driven out in the Clearances, trees colonising broken-roofed houses, roads greening with moss. With an eerie, tragic delicacy, he imagines these trees as being the exiled people themselves, returning transformed to the homes from which they were driven. Their very spirits have gone into their land, but the poet finds little comfort in that, rage and heartbreak seething behind the poem's uncanniness:

This is painful poetry to read, as you realise the unhealable pain of language-loss, under the pressure of English-government sponsored attempts to stamp it out. It is an immense, unappeasable sorrow.

Welsh is in a far better sate of repair than either of the two surviving Goidelic tongues, and poetry and literature in Welsh has flourished in the 20th century. One of my favourites is the Welsh Laureate, Gwyneth Lewis. A lovely, sinewy verse of hers adorns the façade of the Millennium Centre in Cardiff, paying homage both to the industrial and bardic histories of Wales: 'CREU GWIR FEL GWYDR O FFWRNAIS AWEN', 'Creating Truth Like Glass from Inspiration's Furnace'.

Her namesake Saunders Lewis is the great figure of 20th century Welsh-language writing, and he single-handedly created Welsh-language drama. I suspect his play Blodeuwedd will be of most interest to Druids. It is a hauntingly beautiful dramatisation of the Lleu-Blodeuwedd section of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, using it in rather the same way that the Greek tragedians used their own myths. The play would make an amazing performance for Druid Camp! It is exquisitely beautiful, the character of Blodeuwedd a compelling tragic heroine, at once utterly inhuman and yet so very human. As an agitated Llew (Lewis's preferred spelling) tells Gwydion:

Conclusion

Celtic Studies will tell you absolutely nothing direct and practical about how to build a personal relationship with nature, and it is that which I regard as the heart of Druidry. You'd be better off buying a book on ornithology or wild flowers than Ifor Williams' great annotated edition of the Mabinogi. But Celtic Studies WILL tell you a great deal about how medieval - and later - people in the Celtic countries felt themselves to be a part of their landscape, imagined it, wove their language into its fabric. That's where its value lies: in that part of our practice which honours the Ancestors.

I've spoken up here for the importance of learning about the Celtic languages. As I've said in several other places, I strongly believe that learning a language and using its words correctly is a kind of offering to the Ancestors in whose mouths those words lived. (Parallel arguments can be made for learning the Germanic languages of Old English and Old Norse, which I would wholeheartedly support.) And studying Celtic has taught me to respect the languages, not just for ancestral reasons but because they are also fascinating in themselves and are the vehicles for several remarkable, living, literary traditions. You're not just honouring the Ancestors, you're honouring the Descendants too. History makes this ambivalent and painful, and you have to face the appalling impact that English and English-speakers have had and continue to have on Celtic speech-communities. (The same is true of the effect of French on Breton.) It's made me tense when it comes to appropriating these traditions for Druid practice. There's a devastating poem in Scottish Gaelic by Catriona Montgomery called Ròdhag, 2000 AD, part of which runs:

As I sipped a cappuccino served from a newly-converted byre on the isle of Mull a few summers back, I worried about this poem. (We might even have drunk Beaujolais on that holiday.) I worry that our rituals might easily be considered just another kind of 'hard pottery', especially when Montgomery writes of 'na guthan cruaidh Sasannach / a' dol an aghaidh na goith', 'the harsh English voices / clashing with the wind.' Are we engaged in just another kind of cultural appropriation? It bears the thinking about.

When I started studying Celtic, it was purely because I was a Druid. But as I've gone deeper, my Druidry has become almost irrelevant; I've come to love the languages and literatures for what they are, rather than what I would like them to be. So I've lost a fantasy about knowing the 'real' forms of myths in order to be able to nerdishly construct 'accurate' Celtic rituals, but I've gained a treasure. The rites of the ancient Druids and their myths might be lost to us, but the cultures and languages and literary traditions of their descendants are still with us (only just, in some cases.) Duly respecting those cultures becomes an ancestral imperative. It becomes an offering of beauty to these sacred, tragic islands, in which landscape and language are woven together into a single thread.

Background

Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Christian Ireland
Paul Russell, An Introduction to the Celtic Languages
Barry Cunliffe, The Celts: a Very Short Introduction
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Pharaoh's Daughter
Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Homecoming/ An Bealach na 'Bhaile
Saunders Lewis, Plays 1: (translated by Thomas Clancy)
Proinsias Mac Cana, The Mabinogi (Writers of Wales series)
Rachel Bromwich (ed.) Dafydd ap Gwylim, A Selection of Poems
Patrick Ford, Ystoria Taliesin
Marcus Tanner, The Last of the Celts

May 2006