Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity

Marion Gibson, Shelley Trower, Garry Tregidga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415628686
• eBook ISBN: 9781136165757
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity explores how the mythical and mystical past informs national imaginations. Building on notions of invented tradition and myths of the nation, it looks at the power of narrative and fiction to shape identity, with particular reference to the British and Celtic contexts. The authors consider how aspects of the past are reinterpreted or reimagined in a variety of ways to give coherence to desired national groupings, or groups aspiring to nationhood and its 'defence'.

The coverage is unusually broad in its historical sweep, dealing with work from prehistory to the contemporary, with a particular emphasis on the period from the eighteenth century to the present. The subject matter includes notions of ancient deities, Druids, Celticity, the archaeological remains of pagan religions, traditional folk tales, racial and religious myths and ethnic politics, and the different types of returns and hauntings that can recycle these ideas in culture.

Innovative and interdisciplinary, the scholarship in Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity is mainly literary but also geographical and historical and draws on religious studies, politics and the social sciences. Thus the collection offers a stimulatingly broad number of new viewpoints on a matter of great topical relevance: national identity and the politicization of its myths.

PART I
Prehistory and paganism

1
DRUIDS IN MODERN BRITISH
FICTION

The unacceptable face of Celticism

Ronald Hutton

One of the basic rules of Celticism is that Celts are cute: in most contexts of recent Western culture, things labelled ‘Celtic’ have a positive resonance, signifying mystery, magic, romance, and exciting and empowering encounters with a heavily spiritualised Otherworld. The great enduring exceptions to this rule have been the Celts to whom mainstream British culture has traditionally thought itself most familiar: the Druids, the most important spiritual figures in ancient Celtic culture. This anomaly is not by any means an inevitable result of the source material for them, consisting of Greek and Roman authors, almost all of whom were relying on data that was at least second-hand and generally out of date, and of Irish literature written centuries after the disappearance of the pagan world. The images that these texts provide are contrasting: some represent Druids as barbarous and ignorant priests, given to murderous rites, but others portray them as wise, learned, patriotic and pious. We have absolutely no means of telling which of these images, if any, are correct (Kendrick 1927, Chadwick 1966, Piggott 1968, Berresford Ellis 1994, Green 1997, Hutton 2007).

Figures which are at once so vivid and so insubstantial are excellent subjects for imaginative writing. The modern British have written poetry about Druids since the early sixteenth century, stage plays since the early seventeenth, and novels since the early nineteenth. These works have now been relatively well surveyed, at least in outline, as far as the early twentieth century (Owen 1962, Hutton 2009). By contrast, the role of Druids in British fiction published since 1950 has been almost completely neglected (Hutton 2007: 39–40, 120–24). This is a shame, because an examination of that role in novels, stage plays and screenplays promises to reveal many of the fears, hopes and divisions of recent British society, much as the analyses of it in earlier periods have done the same for the social and cultural movements of those times. Such an enterprise should be the more interesting in that during the past six decades Druids have featured as prominently in the British imagination as they did in the Georgian and Victorian eras, when they were major players in it, and much more than in the period of the World Wars and the years between them. It is also highly significant, as will be shown, that the portrayals concerned both buck the trend of associating Celticity with romantic and alluring images, and are sharply divided along national lines.

Druids appeared in the work of two of the most celebrated authors of British historical fiction to emerge in the 1950s, Rosemary Sutcliff and Henry Treece. Both wrote some of their most popular books about Roman Britain and its aftermath, and both approached the theme in a similar contemporary context: the dismantling of Britain's own colonial empire. This was accompanied by an increasing recognition by the British of their loss of status as a world power, and a fear of the necessary adjustments to be made as a result. Both authors identified strongly with the Romans, much as their Victorian predecessors had done, as a force for civilisation, rationalism and stability. Both also retained another characteristic of Victorian fiction, a deeply ambivalent attitude to the native British. On the one hand the latter are admired in these books for their pride, courage, flamboyance and passionate love of freedom; on the other, they are deplored for their savagery, unruliness and superstition. What firmly tips the balance of sympathy against the natives in the stories is their superstitious, oppressive and bloodthirsty Druidic religion. Sutcliff's Druids are malign and withdrawn figures, who dominate the spiritual life of their people while remaining detached from them, being instantly recognisable by their black robes: ‘their influence lay heavy on the duns and villages, but nobody spoke of them, any more than they spoke of their gods and the prowling ghosts of their forefathers’ (Sutcliff 1954: 158–9). To Treece, they are ‘white-robed wolves who annually carried away the first-born or mutilated the cattle with golden knives to bring rain’ (Treece 1952: 65 and 1958).

These images are based firmly on the more hostile writings of the Romans themselves, filtered through nineteenth-century fiction which adopted the Roman standpoint. The archaism of both authors is revealed again by the fact that both set Druid rituals inside megalithic monuments, in Treece's case including Stonehenge, following early Victorian precedent but ignoring almost a century of teaching from archaeologists that such structures had been erected long before Druids appeared. Treece incorporated into his portrait of Druidry accounts of human sacrifice reported by Victorian imperialists from India and Africa, to strengthen the identification of the modern British with the Roman Empire. The equivalent resonance in Sutcliff is to portray Druids as agitators working in secret within the Roman province of Britain, preaching holy war to foment rebellion among superstitious natives who are in actuality better off under the rule of Rome. The comparison with mullahs and imams who resisted the spread of British imperialism is clear, and would have renewed force in the 1950s as semi-religious resistance movements such as the Mau Mau appeared in British colonies. What marks these writers off from their nineteenth-century predecessors is a total lack of interest in Christianity as a redeeming and civilising force; its place in both is taken by a secular rationalism and tolerance, implied as present in Roman culture.

The two authors differed over their attitude to the consequences of the end of Roman rule. Both regarded this as regrettable, a triumph for barbarism, but in her work Sutcliff emphasises the manner in which descendants of the Romans kept aspects of civilisation alive through the ensuing darkness, so that it could flower again in better times. Furthermore, Druids are missing from her portrait of post-Roman times. Treece makes the collapse of empire far more complete, and claims that Druidry has continued to flourish in all its horror beyond the imperial frontier, and persisted as a secret cult inside the province. As Roman power disappears, Treece's Druids can try to regain their old power, led by Merlin, a figure straight out of hostile Georgian and Victorian stereotypes of evil Druidry, with clawed hands, burning eyes and foetid breath (Treece 1956a). Whereas nobody in Sutcliff's fiction wields supernatural power, in that of Treece Druids have the ability to alter their appearance at will, conjure up illusions, heal or blight humans with spells and communicate with animals and trees. He preaches the message that savage and uncanny forces lurk beneath the surface of civilised society and may break free as soon as the people in charge of that society lose the willpower to maintain it: a terrifying implied prophecy of the likely fate of Britain's colonies on independence, and perhaps even of Britain itself.

These themes, of the role of the Romans as a civilising force and the fragility of civilisation itself, survived the dissolution of empire, and manifested regularly in British culture in the late 1960s and 1970s, this time in screenplays and the heritage industry. In 1968 and 1973 they appeared in a pair of ‘B’ movies, the first now largely forgotten, and the second a cult classic. The former was The Viking Queen, which despite the title was a reworking of the story of Boudica's rebellion against Roman rule. It kept the traditional contrast between noble and glamorous but barbaric natives, and ruthless and aggressive but civilised Romans. Once again, the latter are made to seem the more familiar and sympathetic culture, and the balance of sympathy is again tipped by the natives’ addiction to Druidic religion. The sacrifices practised by the latter include both the burning alive of captured Romans in cages, which has some basis in actual Roman texts, and the immolation of helpless young native women, which owes everything to the Victorian imagination. The second and much more famous film was The Wicker Man, which warns of the dreadful consequences of reviving paganism in the present day. Druids are never mentioned in it, but it draws heavily on the imagery associated with them, especially in the shocking final scene in which a Christian policeman is burned alive as a sacrifice to a sun god in a giant wicker effigy. This was taken directly and explicitly from an illustration in a work on Druids published in 1676, and based ultimately on an account by the Roman author Julius Caesar (Sammes 1676: 105; c.f. Caesar VI.13–18). Between the dates of the two films there occurred the opening of the London Dungeon, Britain's main museum of waxwork horrors. One of its exhibits showed a Druid, equipped with the traditional white robe and sickle mentioned as Druidical garb by the Roman author Pliny, about to sacrifice a young woman stretched out naked on an altar.

Druids (and pagans in general) did no better on British television during the 1970s. In 1978 the time-traveller Doctor Who was made to arrive in modern Cornwall, in a story entitled ‘The Stones of Blood’. There he uncovers and destroys a revived Druidic cult of human sacrifice, inspired by blood-hungry extra-terrestrial beings disguised as megaliths. In the same period, viewers could find ‘The Goodies’, the most popular British comedy team of the later 1970s, making a similarly perilous foray into a Celtic land. This time it is Wales, where they encounter another sect of revived Druids, and have to be rescued at the last minute from being sacrificed by them: the programme cleverly, if with no subtlety, parodied the opening ceremony of the leading modern Welsh cultural institution, the Gorsedd of Bards, which had been developed in the nineteenth century and blended Christian and Druidic elements. Meanwhile, Rosemary Sutcliff was continuing to publish, and to absorb changing cultural mores into her novels, such as feminism and an enhanced sympathy for the victims of colonialism. What she retained was a sense of essential savagery of Druidic religion. In 1977 she brought out a story set in Iron Age Britain which ends with the sacrifice of the hero as a prisoner of war by a neighbouring tribe. The rite is led by a Druid ‘fat like an acorn-fed hog, in the way of the priests.… who lived too richly on the offerings to the gods’ (Sutcliff 1977: 110). The following year she published a novel about Boudica's rebellion, in which she largely reversed her earlier sympathies to portray the Romans as brutal and dishonourable invaders. None the less, the native religion is still atrocious, and when a Roman town is taken, the men and children are slaughtered and the women tortured to death as sacrifices. Their naked bodies are left as offerings ‘like dreadful white fruit hanging from the branches of the dark and ancient trees’ of a sacred grove which owes much to a famous description of one by the Roman poet Lucan (Sutcliff 1978: 116 and c.f. Lucan 3.5.399). For all their follies and crimes, her Romans still seem much more like ‘us’, the native British very much the ‘other’. With their fey, romantic heroism, their intense, nature-based spirituality and their fatal lack of discipline, they embody the Victorian stereotype of the emotional, impractical, artistic Celt.

Indeed, what is striking about all these representations is how traditional they are in general. They fit perfectly into a luxuriant Victorian genre of fictional writing about Druids, in which a defence of Christianity and civilisation is mounted by portraying paganism and barbarism as inevitably associated with crimes against humanity. Just as under Victoria, the exercise licensed creative writers to provide erotic and violent images which could titillate an audience even while the activities concerned were being formally rejected and deplored (Hutton 2007: 107–20). This genre had almost disappeared during the early twentieth century, perhaps because two World Wars supplied a genuine experience of carnage and atrocity that removed much of the appetite for it in fiction. With the return of a society as prosperous and peaceful as that under Victoria, the taste for lubricious historical melodrama seems to have revived. Just as in the 1950s, the appropriation of nineteenth-century motifs included the association of megaliths with Drudical religion, found in all of the films and television programmes mentioned above. Sutcliffwas now better attuned to scholarly opinion, and her Druids no longer frequented megalithic monuments. Instead, she projected onto them the cult of a single goddess, ‘the Great Mother’, which mid-twentieth-century archaeologists had imagined as characterising the Neolithic and which was being appropriated by some contemporary feminists (Hutton 1999: 278–82, 340-–68). The sustained difference from the Victorian works was the absence of a commitment to Christianity as the religion of goodness and civilisation; instead, as in the 1950s, rationalism and science were deployed in its place. As Treece had done before, Sutcliff now credited the native British with innate magical abilities, based on their closeness to the natural world, which were ultimately unavailing when confronted with Roman mechanical skill and common sense.

What is missing in all this work is any sense of a countervailing tradition of sympathy for Druids, drawing on the more admiring ancient and medieval sources, of the kind that had been dominant in eighteenth-century Britain, and were still present in the nineteenth century (Hutton 2009: 86–145, 210–27). This was the more significant, in that the late twentieth century had seen the appearance all over Britain of a recreated paganism, which represented itself as a benign nature-venerating religion surviving from ancient times (Hutton 2009: 348–99; and 1999 passim). Thus far, its presence had mainly served to inspire warnings against the dangers that such a revival represented, delivered by The Wicker Man, Dr Who and The Goodies. In 1976 and 1977, however, Peter Timlott published two books which projected onto the ancient Druids almost all the motifs of the modern resurgence of sympathy for o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity
• Part I Prehistory and paganism
• Part II Gothic, romance and landscape
• Part III Memory, myth and politics
• Index