CONCLUSION

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WHAT IS  IT IN CELTIC  ANCESTRY that calls for reclamation? What vital continuities can nourish and enlighten our lives and those of our children? It is not re-creation or repetition of the past that is needed, but connection, and the kind of wise cherishing that tends both root and flower. It is not form that should be looked to, but rather the distinct living force that fluidly cloaks itself in form, like a knot-work pattern, ever changing. Celticism’s form, for our times, will rightly be unique in its expression; so many strands of continuity have been broken or lost, but in so many small and ordinary ways we still have been handed a legacy.

What are some of this gift’s components? One face of Celtic spirit is kinship consciousness, with many worthy attributes that can be applied to modern lives:

A second face of Celtic spirit is that of equality between women and men, which is part of a general commitment to freedom. A particularly Celtic aspect of sexual equality is that it is not an attempted balance of compartmentalized polarities but is rather a respectful acceptance of individual capacity’s range, and social provisioning for its expression. Also important is consideration of sex as a natural, wholesome activity, and sexual desire as something equally experienced and properly expressed and acted upon by both women and men.

Good relationship between the sexes was crucial to Celts, carrying through in relationship with the land and reflected in the faring of individuals, clans, and tribes. The well-being of women and household harmony were traditionally barometers of general well-being, an awareness dismayingly absent in modern cultures.

A third face of our triadic Celtic spirit is relationship to nature, characterized by attention to a multidimensional, integrated reality, the constant fluid interplay of spirit and form. This nongrasping awareness accepts transformative and supernatural occurrence as part of daily life. Celtic relationship to nature suggests that death need not be feared in an interdependent and interpenetrative universe. The coexistence of an Otherworld interwoven through the mundane natural world persuasively informs Celtic consciousness; spiritual and temporal affairs are co-influential.

Celts love the land. They are ardently engaged with locality, with a sense of place. It is a vigorous relationship, the land not something to be subdued or made servant of—relationship requiring appropriate attitude and conduct, those things that come naturally when there is love.

Archeologists found that the most beautiful and finely crafted Celtic artifacts were those discovered in places of sacred offering. The Celts gave their best to spirit—art, spirit, and land were undivided. The high valuing of beauty in art, music, dance, poetry, and learning that is so characteristic of Celts—where craftspeople, bards, and Druids were honored as much or more than warriors and nobility—is rooted in immanence of spirit.

Awareness of and participation in a complexly interrelated wellbeing is the common denominator in all these faces of Celtic spirit, a continuity available—calling—to be embodied in today’s world. The heart of Celticism is the freedom and wholeness of women and men, humans and nature, spirit and form, individuals and community. Frank Delaney, in The Celts, describes it thus:

At the height of their development the Celts constituted an archetypal European people: tribal, familial, hierarchal, agricultural. They were a brilliant people, of the oral tradition. A superstitious people, who actively sought deeper beliefs. A practical people, but producing penetrating intellectual concepts. Not a political people, although they enjoyed many sophisticated legal structures. They did not achieve or desire a cohesive political nationhood, although their motivation, the unity of the tribe, might have been the perfect political model. Nor were they an imperial people, although they colonized many lands, and in some cases left a dominant cultural imprint forever. . . . They appreciated beauty and eroticism and they wedded the practical to the exquisite. In their art they proceeded from the geometric patterns of the primitive tribe to the abstract expression of their civilisation. They exercised a philosophy which saw truth as a diamond, many-faceted and precious. And thereby they celebrated one quality of life vital to them—personal, spiritual freedom.

Comparisons between Celtic and American Indian traditional ways have been lightly touched upon throughout our look at the Celts, as catalysts for further thought rather than as attempts to present an in-depth study of similarities and differences. Among branches of Celtic peoples themselves are cultural variations not delved into here, such as the territorial emphasis of Irish tuatha in comparison to the more kin-oriented Scottish clans, and so on. Generalizations eventually and inevitably yield to myriad distinctions and controversies of perspective, but for today’s people of Celtic or American Indian ancestry it may be helpful to consider some of the parallels contained within those cultural roots. It is a consideration that can broaden the understanding of resonance felt by many Celtic Americans in relation to Indian spirituality, and clarify or redirect the exploration of Celtic Americans drawn to indigenous outlooks. The journey through Celtic heritage, like journeys through Scotland, is a peregrination of heights and glens, a winding road of many branches under shifting light in which perception yields surety in order to better encompass possibility, a more subtle infiltration of vision.

Homeland is referent to both history and heart. When Rome-born Prince Charlie was advised by the chiefs to go home, he testily replied, “I am home,” an enviable certainty despite the price the clans paid for its assertion. The spirit of Celticism is also a matter of both history and heart—one without the other is of little practical value in terms of evolution or continuity, or even reinvention.

As modern Americans we have neither a comparable rurality nor aristocracy as lenses of consciousness through which to experience or understand pagan religion or the life context of ancient Celts. Much of what we know about Gaelic perspective is seen against a backdrop of Celtic struggle with invasive colonizing forces, and that view is distorted by psychological as well as physical and chronological distance. When I was in Scotland, I tried to pinpoint what it was about Americans that made us so easily identifiable to local people, beyond our accents—and even when we were not being particularly ignorant or pushy. Two observations emerged. One was that Americans are socially conditioned to project self-image, constantly, through clothing, egoistic preoccupation, verbal competitiveness, and other “This is me; aren’t I great?” strategies. Celtic warriors did this too; but it is not a social behavior that belongs in ordinary contexts of interaction.

The second distinguishing feature of Americans is that we walk around—wherever we are—like we own the place. Every Scot I talked to about this nodded and said, “Exactly.” Even humble tourists tend to do this. I attribute it to the fact that the United States has never been invaded (except from the perspective of Native American experience) and, as a nation, has not experienced the suffering of that or other collective disasters, such as famine or cultural proscription. Those things make a difference in your outlook and how you move in the world.

In reconnecting with heritage, whether at home or abroad, knowing your people’s history, the sufferings and shadows as well as the triumphs and joys, informs self-perception in a way that sensitizes you to context. It broadens and deepens perspective so that knowing yourself is not such a “me”-centered affair; it is knowing of relationship. And that is a very Celtic perspective.

Resonance with Celtic heritage is often sought through genealogy, through identifying with aspects of heritage and partisan feelings or subscription to cultural traditions both old and newly created, and through nurturing elements of Celticism that seem worthwhile. The four sections of this book suggest additonal arenas in which resonance can be explored and applied in contemporary life.

But for experience to be more than sentimental affectation or cultural veneer, continuity of spirit needs to flow from deeper wellsprings, resonance’s source. From this comes a direct participation informed not only by heritage but by that which shaped ancestral consciousness. The land we stand on—relationship to place—is always available to those who seek the experience and understanding of land sense. If this orientation lacks its original, indigenous culture and mindset, it still offers an evolution of land-based awareness.

We are not our ancestors, but in Celtic view, our ancestors created us, and they were beings both of flesh and of Otherworld magic; they were light and tree and ocean wave and living stone; they were mystery embraced within desire to be. Whether transcendent or transformative, being finds its path through embodied relationship. History is in the ground, and as long as that terrain is sustained in sacred fertility, integrity, and endurance of beauty, we will have resource for both continuity and creation, essential reflections of spirit.