CELTIC CULTURE
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992I 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 height 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 organization 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.
You might also like:
Sepharial - Cosmic SymbolismJoseph Jacobs - Celtic Fairy Tales
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