Newsgroups: alt.magick
From: shaman@cix.compulink.co.uk (Leo Smith)
Subject: == No Subject ==              
Reply-To: shaman@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 22:03:04 +0000

I have noticed a bit of noise about Celts recently: As it happens I
attended an archaeolofical conference on the Celtic civilizations
last Saturday, and came out with a resanoably good idea of what a
Celt actually is /was.

I thouhght it might be of interest.

Celts is the name given to a culture rather than a race. Celts varied
from curly hair brown hair through red hair etc. They occupied
central and Northern Europe including the Briotish Isles in the
Pre-roman period, gradually being pushed further north and westwards
by the Mediterranean peoples (especially the Romans) and the Nordic
and Saxon peoples (later).

They were a non-urban people - they lived on small holdings, and kept
animals, grew crops and hunted. A typical Celtic house probably
looked like a thatched log cabin surrounded by a stockade. They
didn't trade much, but metals - especially bronze and iron - were
rare and precious, and were probably traded.

Women seemed to often be of high status in burial sites - there are a
lot of women buried with full honours. There are also some examples
of bodies well over six foot tall, which suggests that either heght
was highly regarded, or that it was not uncommon.

Druids were the means by which the culture probably gained its
coherence: they would have been the remains of the shamanic hunting
religions, adapted to the rural lifetstyle. They would have been the
repository of tribal knowledge, and probably wandered from settlement
to settlement passing on news and information.

There was not much written down at that time at all - so most info
comes adulterated. Caesar and the Romans mention the Celts, as do one
or two other sources. Mediaeval writers wrote down some of the
remaining legends - e.g. of Taliesin, and the Irish Kings (I fell
asleep in this lecture) but much of what was written was probably
corrupted by the politics and social climate of the day. I gained the
impression that the current attitude to legends in archaeological
circles is that they tell you more about when they were actually
written down than the times they purportedly describe. Like
shakespewares historical plays really :-)

The Celtic remnants live on in  our culture today from the Irish, and
the Scots (who are Irish who discovered boats and ran away to
scotland :-)) and the Welsh, plus a few areas in Brittany etc. All
the 'tribes of Britain' - e.g the Iceni and the Britanni would be
classed as Celts.

Probably the whole flavour of Celtic civilization lives on in such
diverse things as fairy stories, the 'heroic myths' (You know: Conan
the Barbarian etc), the 'village wise women' etc. The change that
came to Northern Europe in the Dark Ages was really the fragmentation
of a culture, and the rise of Roman style civilization  - the
organisation of peoples into larger groups, the spread of
Christianity, the spread of trade, and the use of writing and the
rational mind.

You know: All the stuff we now have to deal with :-) Civilization
from the Roman Civis= a city. Organisation.

I hope that was peripherally interesting. This is deductions from the
archaeological record (such as it is) plus a bit of biased
speculation on my part. The intersting thing to me is how we hark
back constantly to the Celtic themes in things like Robin Hood, King
Arthur, Wicca, etc. Qabbalistic magic as such is definitely NOT part
of this tradition - it is definitely part of the Roman and middle
Eastern culture.

Strangely enough, I find more parallels with Celtic worldviews and
Taoism than the Judaeo Christian. Perhaps both are the remnants of a
vast Bronze age culture that stretched across Asia and Europe from
China to the United Kingdom and Ireland - a culture that worshipped
the Horse as we now worship the Motor Car - and for similar reasons
:-) Pure speculation.