Irish Gods
Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2005 12:20 am
Original post: edparadise
Samhain:
You make a fine point. Ed just about agrees with you, because he sees little reason not to, which is to say that: if there are pagan neoceltic groups out there who take themselves serious enough to have some good standards, than hurrah! Ed has little problem with these sorts, as I'm sure you remember - Ed's an eclectic himself, and hardly cares for religious purism - that's not where he's coming from here.
What is important (besides the quibbles) is this: Ed doesn't believe that anything we reconstruct as a religion ever has much connection because our basic ideas about religion itself have really changed. The "Celts" and us - even the pagan types (maybe especially the pagan types - and that's a whole other thread probably) had and have radically different concepts about what seem like normalized ideas - like "Irish Gods". Although my self-education on the matter is presumably deficient, that is why my own conclusions upon the matter are fairly conservative - that is, I always tend to fall back on purely archeological texts, etc. To be clear: I always side with the boring scholars, rather than other work, although there is clearly value - I'm not singling anyone out...
To be honest - and this is only me - my experience with people's use of "Celtic" gods is that the failure of traditional correspondence is obvious purely through linguistic study of the neoceltic's work. "Celtic" god X is almost always simply a label for concept Y from movement X which derives from cultural moments Z and A which were really reactions to cultural elemtns B and C which are usually fairly recent (some of them within our own lifetimes).
Some of this is quite fair, of course - I mean, imagine the case that there was traditional coherence, then the tradition itself would have been changed and reformed by the very cultural patterns and shifts that have formed the responses that we ourselves are dealing with in our own lives, and therefore in our own religions, pagan or not. But on the other hand, and again this is only me - I don't like dishonesty. I don't like the pretense of tradition when it is not there.
As you say - "inspired". Which is, of course, beautiful, in the end. If we are not inspired to reinvigorate our cultural objects, they will have no life.
So, to sum up: I agree with you some and some more, Samhain. It's just how touchy you get about it sometimes that cracks me up. But I forgot that there may be something of a standing argument between R and you that I was ignoring. Sorry about the quibbles - but I love them.
- Eddy.
Samhain:
You make a fine point. Ed just about agrees with you, because he sees little reason not to, which is to say that: if there are pagan neoceltic groups out there who take themselves serious enough to have some good standards, than hurrah! Ed has little problem with these sorts, as I'm sure you remember - Ed's an eclectic himself, and hardly cares for religious purism - that's not where he's coming from here.
What is important (besides the quibbles) is this: Ed doesn't believe that anything we reconstruct as a religion ever has much connection because our basic ideas about religion itself have really changed. The "Celts" and us - even the pagan types (maybe especially the pagan types - and that's a whole other thread probably) had and have radically different concepts about what seem like normalized ideas - like "Irish Gods". Although my self-education on the matter is presumably deficient, that is why my own conclusions upon the matter are fairly conservative - that is, I always tend to fall back on purely archeological texts, etc. To be clear: I always side with the boring scholars, rather than other work, although there is clearly value - I'm not singling anyone out...
To be honest - and this is only me - my experience with people's use of "Celtic" gods is that the failure of traditional correspondence is obvious purely through linguistic study of the neoceltic's work. "Celtic" god X is almost always simply a label for concept Y from movement X which derives from cultural moments Z and A which were really reactions to cultural elemtns B and C which are usually fairly recent (some of them within our own lifetimes).
Some of this is quite fair, of course - I mean, imagine the case that there was traditional coherence, then the tradition itself would have been changed and reformed by the very cultural patterns and shifts that have formed the responses that we ourselves are dealing with in our own lives, and therefore in our own religions, pagan or not. But on the other hand, and again this is only me - I don't like dishonesty. I don't like the pretense of tradition when it is not there.
As you say - "inspired". Which is, of course, beautiful, in the end. If we are not inspired to reinvigorate our cultural objects, they will have no life.
So, to sum up: I agree with you some and some more, Samhain. It's just how touchy you get about it sometimes that cracks me up. But I forgot that there may be something of a standing argument between R and you that I was ignoring. Sorry about the quibbles - but I love them.
- Eddy.
maith thú