Myths and Revisionists

[aberwyn]

No, not a new role-playing game . . . Over in her journal Madame La Marquise was discussing certain unpleasantnesses with fans at cons who believe in various myths about "the ancient Celts", particularly that modern paganism goes straight back to their beliefs and that the women were equal to men. To this rich stew we can add one I often hear in California, that the Gauls were somehow ecology-minded because they "lived among the forests". (Somehow I don't think slash-and-burn land clearance qualifies as ecological action.) Anyone who knows me knows my rant against this kind of thing, even though I don't have the sound academic credentials of La Marquise. So I will spare you a repetition. :-)

However, I thought I would expand one point here rather than cluttering up her LJ.


It's this question of "the original sources", which some Celtic-blather types expound upon without knowing either Latin or classical Greek. They are referring to various passages in ancient texts such as Diodorus Siculus or Caesar that discuss what these authors knew about the Gauls. My point is simply that these "original sources" don't say what the True Celtic Believers think they do. The TCB's have taken a few sentences out of context and expanded them mightily, throwing caution to the winds.

First off, though, we have to consider what "original" means. We have no original sources for Gaulish culture. An original source would mean a document written in Gaulish by a Gaul. None exist. Not one scrap, though we can surmise that at one time, some did. The druids apparently did not believe in writing down their most sacred beliefs, but plenty of other Gauls could read and write. There are places in Livy, who really did try to find sources for his histories, that imply he saw documents of this type, just for one example.

Be that as it may, everything we know about the Gauls comes from their trading partners, the Greeks, or their enemies, the Romans, that is, from outside observers, whose own cultural biases must be taken into account when we consider what they say, esp. about women. Graeco-roman attitudes toward women ranges from outright misogyny to benign condescension to, occasionally, in the works of writers like Euripedes or Ovid, a recognition of common humanity. Your average Greek wine merchant, discussing his trip to the lands of the Keltoi with a scholar, is going to view any little liberty given to females as a novelty or even as something shocking. His observations in no way reflect female equality.

Which brings up another point: the surviving texts preserve third-hand knowledge, by and large, stories and lore accumulated from travelers, merchants, soldiers, etc, as well as the occasional observation by the writer of Gauls travelling in Graeco-Roman territories. They were put together by some Greek writers to help merchants who were off to the territories, as it were, to trade wine for slaves, and then later re-worked by scholars like Diodorus and Strabo for their compendia of lore and history.

Julius Caesar, in his Commentaries on the Gaulish Wars, is an exception. BUT -- he has a very large agenda as a military commander and a politician. His famous Book 6, purporting to discuss Gaulish culture at some length, is most likely a translation, uncredited, of an earier Greek source, just bunged in, as classical writers were fond of doing, without attribution. Among details of Druids burning people alive it tells of elk who have no knees and thus can't lie down . . . which doesn't inspire me with scholarly confidence.

So beware those who tell you that the ancient sources "prove" all kinds of things they don't! There was no Celtic Golden Age! The myth persists because, I suspect, those who are raised upon and rebelling against the Abrahamic religions feel the need of an Eden, a paradise lost.

Comments

[branna.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming the original post is locked as I can't seem to find it...which is a shame because now I'm vastly curious about the discussion.

When I took a course from John Koch in college, he used to harp on many of these same points, especially the unreliable nature of the Greek and Roman sources, which reported on Gaulish culture through the lense of their own cultural biases and assumptions. He also frequently lamented the fact that we have no true idea of the underlying pagan cosmology of any of the Celtic cultures, because those who repeated the myth cycles and eventually recorded them were inclined to graft Christian cosmology onto them to give them legitimacy.

It was a salutary antidote to my early reading on the subject :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

John Koch is a good thing: we never met, but I've read some of his work and you couldn't ask for a better teacher on this kind of material. (I'm a product of his British equivalent, prof. David Dumville.)
Nice to meet you, btw! I locked that discussion because of a lurking worry that the person whom I was talking about would find it and be hurt. But if people are interested, I can unlock it.
Kari

[branna.livejournal.com]

It's a pleasure to meet you too! I've been catching your comments in this journal for a while, but I suppose we've never been properly "introduced" before.

I'd love to be able to follow the discussion. Assuming enough other folks aren't, though, the other option would be for us to friend each other, which I'd be delighted to do :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Done!

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

There really are a lot of garbage-y books on the loose about "Celtic" matters. Nora Lore Goodrich comes to mind instantly. :-)

[edanam.livejournal.com]

And LLewellyn publications in general. :-)

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

Yep. Although they have done a few facsimile reprints of material about Dr. John Dee that are valuable. And occasionally they'll bring out something else worth looking at. But mostly, how right you are!

[branna.livejournal.com]

On the other point---I think the need to create a mythological Golden Age out of nearly whole cloth is not limited to Celtic recontructionism (or whatever it's properly called). I'd argue it's the same thing that informs a lot of Tolkien's writing, actually, and he wasn't rebelling against the Abrahamic religions in any way shape or form.

I think it's just that whatever someone's biases are, and whatever their issues with modern culture are, too, there's a desire to legitimize both the biases and grievances. The whole Golden Age business is just one way of doing it.

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean that only rebels against Abraham and Co. created Golden Ages -- just that those who have renounced same are sometimes caught in the mental structures they grew up with. It's a very hard thing to recognize, our own unconscious structures and biases.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

I guess the thing about Celtic cultures is that they weren't. To the Dobunni, the Brigantes were possibly as foreign as the Romans: there was no such thing as a pan-Celtic nation, just a bunch of tribes who all happened to live in one island. Let's face it, my uncle was referred to as a foreigner when he moved from Carmarthen to the Valleys, all of 50 miles up the road, in the 1950s.

I've been reading AFTER THE ICE, which is a fascinating account of life just after the Ice Age (can't remember the author) and the ecological soundness of many early people - just wasn't. They were really bad at managing things like waste disposal (we know from their middens) and they frequently overfarmed the land to the point of exhaustion and moved to somewhere else. I always feel there's more than a touch of the Rousseau's patronising 'noble savage' about the retro-eco view.

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

A technologically-primitive culture lacks the ability to do severe and rapid harm to the environment the way one with advanced technology often will. As a result, the changes they DO cause may well be gradual enough to escape their notice, or small enough in scale to be dismissed as inconsequential. Even as late as the beginning of the 20th century, the idea that we could somehow put enough trash into the water to endanger something as vast as the OCEAN was laughable to many (most?) people. There's little opportunity for an understanding of man's effect on nature to arise in a culture for whom nature is a vast and monolithic unknown which dwarfs anything humans might do.

I strongly suspect that to a pre-Celt (or anyone else of that era), the idea that NATURE needs protecting from US would be absurd. All of their experience would indicate that the the reverse was instead the case.

As it turns out, they'd have been wrong, but it took us a couple thousand years to notice.

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

As la marquise says below, what you said!

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

The only really valid modern use of the word "Celtic" is for a branch of the Indo-European language family, though one could make a decent case for using it to describe an art style.

Even Caesar takes care to say that of the three parts of continental Gaul he's discussing, each differs from the others in various ways, languages, institutions, by which he probably mean political arrangements, and laws. Only in one part of the whole do the inhabitants call themselves "Galli." This evidence, which there's little reason to doubt, is the reason I don't put a lot of faith in the various online sites that claim to have reconstructed -the- Gaulish languge. There were at least 3 major dialects involved, and the surviving bits of inscriptions from the region of the Belgae show some Germanic loanwords.

Tacitus is another source of the Noble Savage business. In his "Germania" he writes admiringly of their simple, clean, warlike ways. Of course, it's a little hard to figure out just who he's classifying as German, and what German meant back then, and so on -- though the ambiguities haven't stopped a lot of people from building all sorts of ethnic structures upon them.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Yes, what you said.

[lyssabits.livejournal.com]

Euripides and a recognition of common humanity? Really? I'm surprised by that.. That man has written some terribly self-loathing speeches and put them in women's mouths in his plays. Aristophanes wrote a whole play skewering him for being a jerk to women.

While I'll grant you that The Trojan Women is one of the most interesting plays about the Trojan War wherein he seems to lament the fate of the women of the fallen city.. I'm not sure it makes up for Andromache (or Medea either). The two plays are weirdly at odds, since they're both about the captured women but one is relatively kind and the other cruel. I suppose Hecuba will be the tie-breaker, but I haven't read it yet. ;)

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

By -our- standards you're right. But, and here we go on cultural context, Euripides shows in his plays that women are capable of making moral decisions, both rightly and wrongly. This was revolutionary in the Athens of the times, where women were considered incapable of understanding such things as honor and respect for moral law.

To the average Athenian of that era, women were like children. Some were clever children, but their minds were incapable of developing beyond, say, a 12 year old boy's. (In other parts of Greece this attitude was considered extreme.)

So texts like the Antigone present a challenge to this prevailing view.

[lyssabits.livejournal.com]

*coughs* Errr, Antigone was written by Sophocles. ;) That play is totally pro-women and I love it.

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

Yep, you're right! Oops! This is what happens when I write things too fast. :-)

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity - do you think that attitudes and misconceptions about the Celts in this regard are more pronounced than for other early cultures? Or are they just more visible, because stories about the Celts are especially popular? Do we romanticize all of those cultures to a similar magnitude (with some of the myths just failing to catch our fancy as much), or are the Celts getting exceptional treatment?

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

Well, fashions in romanticization change with the time. For some hundreds of years, since Schiller and Lessing, say, Greek culture was heavily mythologized, with all that crap about "the inventors of democracy" and their beautiful art (which they themselves saw as only a step or two above bricklaying.) The misogyny of Rousseau, and his ideas about "educating" women, for one example, stems from this idealization of Athens, the land of the Prick in more ways than one. :-)

The 19th Century British fed their future soldiers and builders of the Empire a lot of Roman myths.

And we know about the Nazis and their fictions about the Aryans.

BTW, there actually is an Indo-European grouping properly called Aryans. They live in the Hindu Kush, are followers of Islam, and tend to have dark hair and eyes. :-)

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

The 19th Century British fed their future soldiers and builders of the Empire a lot of Roman myths.

This is probably the part where I confess that, despite it all, I still love large portions of Kipling's work, huh? :)

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

Kipling is definitely a difficult writer to dismiss. Some of the poems strike me as god-awful, but then there's KIM and a number of the short stories, which betray just how much he loved India.

Are you familiar with Macauley's LAYS OF ANCIENT ROME? Now there's a grand example of Roman Myth Feeding . . .

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

It's at last as bad for certain sectors of Africa -- particularly the Yoruba, and Africa in general. According to just about everybody wherever you go in Africa there are giots. But griots are specific to a particular African culture and region, period. Nor is there anything that is Pan-African, with one great exception, and that is the veneration for the ancestors.

This has spread into the New World with the almost always wrong ideas about voodoo and what it is, which it almost always isn't. Argh.

The worst now is how people are fusing all that they don't know about the Celts with all they don't know about Africans.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

As you say it's so much more productive to speak of language groups as identifiers than names that change depending on who is using the name -- or that truly non-useful identification calle 'race.'

Love, C.

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

And there's a lot more of Africa than of the supposedly Celtic lands, no matter what Sarah Palin thinks. :-)

[darcyjavanne.livejournal.com]

A librarian's favorite trick question: What is a primary source?

It's astonishing how few answer correctly.

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

I can believe it. What do they answer instead?

[darcyjavanne.livejournal.com]

Scholarly journal articles is the most popular answer.

The incredulity when the librarian says "Wrong" is most amusing.

The missing

[ndgmtlcd.livejournal.com]

I wasn't seriously expecting the adventures of Asterix the Gaul to pop up in this discussion but I'm a bit surprised no one has mentioned the myths surrounding the Cretan gynocracy. Are they limited to intellectuals in France?

Re: The missing

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

No, unfortunately. But at least I've never heard that the Cretans were Celts. :-)

Re: The missing

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

What, you've never come across the Truth, which is that the Cretans and the Celts are all descendants of renegade Atlantean telepathic priestesses escaping the patriarchal science which doomed their great civilisation?

(As I wrote this, I became aware of an uneasy feeling that there are people who believe the above is true. It's certainly not far off beliefs I've heard expressed. However, I live in a town where a sizeable percentage of the population believe themselves to be aliens).

Re: The missing

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

I live in a region (the Bay Area is really almost a unity) where people believe that the Cretans and Celts are the descendants of renegade etc etc just as you describe. Another segment of the population believes in a variety of different aliens, either as ancestors or the Truth about God and Gods.

I remember one cult in Berkeley that combined the two. Their core teaching was that Jehovah and Jesus both came from the planet Mary, where they were the rival sons of a great queen, also called Mary, and that Jesus would re-appear to claim his loyal followers in a spaceship soon.

Re: The missing

[lyssabits.livejournal.com]

Oh Berkeley.. I love Berkeley. ;) So ridiculous, I never run out of things to make fun of my Berkeley-born husband about.

Re: The missing

[jo1967.livejournal.com]

Have to admit, I was reading through all these scholarly comments thinking "Everything I know about Gaul I learned from Asterix and Obelix...".

Certainly, when I'm reading more serious works about Julius Caesar, I tend to mentally picture him as he is drawn by Uderzo. And all Druids look like Getafix...

Re: The missing

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

I love Asterix. I have several volumes of the comix, in fact. Long time ago, I was in the National Library of Wales, and lo! they had an exhibit of Asterix comix, including some in Welsh and some in Breton. I really want to find some in those languages one day.

[judithmb.livejournal.com]

I love this discussion, especially because I am a Wiccan priestess of 35 years and in that time I've heard a lot of bullshit. Early on I even believed a lot of the bullshit.

I just finished reading Donna Gillespie's Light Bearer and Lady of the Light and I'm under the impression that her research is good, both for the Romans and the Germanic tribes. However, I'm curious if anyone here has a differing opinion? There is clearly a third book to be written by Gillespie to finish tying up loose ends, but I'm not able to locate any mention of such on the Internet. Does anyone else know?

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

I'm not Wiccan myself, but my wife is, and I've had a fair bit of exposure to your coreligionists over the years. From my outside perspective, it's seemed to me that especially among some of the youngest, there's a need to justify their religious beliefs by saying they were shared by an ancient culture.

It's ultimately self-frustrating, because we can't at this point know the beliefs of those cultures with any real confidence, and if we could, they'd just be locking themselves into a new style of orthodoxy...which is often as not what they became Wiccan to avoid. The ones who say 'cultures X and Y and what we know of them inspired some of the thoughts that led me to my beliefs, but the beliefs are my own' always strike me as being more mature and grounded in their faith. Not that they need my approval :)

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

I haven't read those yet, Judith.

Figures in religious myths can stand on their own as archetypes, of course, without any need of historical details to make them valid. The problem arises when worshippers can't believe this and demand the historical details.

Consider "Jesus", a Jewish wisdom teacher named Yeshua, (Aramaic version of Yoshua or Joshua), if he existed at all -- and what the early Christians made of him. In fact, there were a large number of different Jesuses created at that time, and some of them still survive to this day, leading to all kinds of arguments among their followers.