Celtic Spirituality and Global Marketing

Most of us are drawn to the Celtic world by items offered on the marketplace such as haunting music, images of green unspoiled landscapes, replicas of ancient stone monuments, and clothing intricately adorned with mesmerizing knotwork. There are good reasons why we feel such things attractive: we in the United States live in a large-scale, dense, anonymous, urbanized society, and many people feel deprived of the sense of place and community and sacredness that their ancestors once enjoyed.

While Celtic consumer items are easily produced, marketed, and consumed, how representative are they of actual Celtic culture? And what misrepresentations have resulted from the long-standing disempowerment of real Celtic communities, stereotypes, created by enemies, that have fed into popular understandings of who the Celts are supposed to be?

It is ironic that the United States, a nation into which many different immigrant groups have poured, should be so insular and unaware of the cultures from which its many peoples originated. New immigrants are eager to remold themselves into the image of successful, model Americans, and most families lose connection with their ancestral languages and cultures within two generations. Of course, at the same time, globalization and industrialization have caused tremendous change around the world throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, folk traditions – music, dance, calendar customs, nature celebrations, and so on – have only managed to survive in the fringes least affected by the homogenizing forces of Empire and Industry, despite having been part of rural society from time immemorial. Somehow many people have come to believe that traditions such as step-dancing, bagpipe music, nature 'worship', keening, and so on, are uniquely Celtic despite the fact that they could have been found throughout Medieval Europe. Indeed, it is interesting to note that early immigrant peoples to North America such as the English, Dutch, Germans, French, and Spanish carried many of these traditions with them to North America before they were stamped out in Europe.

While the term 'Celtic' is useful to describe the general characteristics of the indigenous peoples of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Man, Cornwall, and Brittany, it must be remembered that they have been developing as separate cultures for many, many centuries. While many common features can be detected through the lens of language and literature, they deserve to be seen as distinct and independent societies, not just one 'Celtic people'. They have very different literatures, music traditions, self-perceptions, and historical experiences. But the factor that distinguishes them from their neighbors and that makes their individual cultural matrices cohesive is language. It is a complex argument, but in my new book A Handbook of the Scottish Gaelic World. I demonstrate how language connects with the traditional worldview, value system, cosmology, music, and oral tradition of the Scottish Highlanders. Similar arguments can be made for other peoples.

One of the difficulties with being a minority culture is that it is hard to correct the misrepresentations which are created by the dominant culture, which has greater prestige, more authority, and better means of communicating its ideas. As a result, minority cultures often find themselves the subject of inaccurate stereotypes. Sometimes the false image of the Other is created in order for a people to prove to themselves that they are superior to it, and other times it represents a lost purity still retained by a more 'primitive' people. Whatever the agenda that causes such manipulations of facts, it is no excuse for ignoring what can be learned from thorough and objective research.

These are issues that inform the new book The Quest for Celtic Christianity by Donald Meek (Edinburgh: The Handsel Press, 2000). Although Professor Meek is specifically dealing with this new brand of Christianity, most of the same arguments could be applied to varieties of Celtic neo-Paganism. Most branches of Christianity have seen congregation sizes shrink during the last century, and they are responding to this by making their church experience more appealing. Some of them are borrowing or adapting symbols, texts, or rituals from other faiths or places. It is in this way that numerous groups are trying to invoke 'Celtic Spirituality' or 'Celtic Christianity' in their religious communities.

Meek shows in detail, however, that the truth is usually lost in the Celtic mist. The book works on two chronological fronts, revealing the realities of the Christianity that the leaders of the church actually practiced and exposing the creation of the mythical Celts, especially in the nineteenth century, which is the source of so many modern misconceptions.

He points out a number of ways in which the false image of the Celts is created and sold to the credulous. By constant recourse to images and wooly concepts, the marketeers can be highly imaginative in their definition of 'Celtic.' By ignoring the history of the development of Christianity, they forget the bigger picture and ascribe undeserved virtues to the Celts. By selective and dubious use of English translations they avoid contact with primary texts in Celtic languages. Since most of these new 'sects' flourish in far-away lands, such as the United States, they avoid direct contact with real Celts and Celtic communities.

Actually, the earliest abuse of the myth of Celtic Christianity was during the Reformation, when churches wanted to find precedents for their break with the Catholic Church in Rome. This ancient predecessor, they wanted to claim, kept itself 'pure' while Rome became corrupt and degenerate. Unfortunately for the myths, which still persist to the present day among many Protestants, early Christianity everywhere adapted to secular life in some degree. There was no united and independent 'Church' in Celtic lands, nor did the church in Celtic countries differ in crucial matters of doctrine from the rest.

Just as many people are mistaking as 'Celtic' many of the common features of pre-industrial Europe, so too are people attributing an unmerited uniqueness to the so-called Celtic Church and to Celtic saints. These features of 'Celts' and 'Celtic Christianity,' such as visions and psychic phenomena, can be found in the stories of Saint's Lives through Christendom as well as throughout the folk traditions of rural Europe. And just like the British Isles, Christianity as practiced at the popular level all around Europe (and the world, for that matter) was a mixture of orthodoxy and pre-Christian practices.

On the other hand, too few are willing to acknowledge aspects of saints or of the church which are not so appealing in modern times. The stories of saints' lives emphasize their asceticism, their ability to destroy enemies through curses and violence, their preoccupation with sin, and their uncompromising war against paganism.

It is no surprise that Professor Meek makes comparisons with Native America, whose spiritual traditions have been misrepresented, commercialized, and sold by spiritual opportunists. Native communities seldom profit from this business, and instead see outsiders take control of their traditions and proclaim themselves to be more authentic than actual spiritual leaders. Unlike many Native Americans, however, too few qualified Celtic scholars have attempted to present the historical and cultural realities to the general public such as Professor Meek does in this book.

The ideology of consumerism pervades our lives in American society, including our perception of religion. Several books have appeared lately analyzing our development of a 'spiritual marketplace.' What do people look for when shopping, and how do sellers market their products? There is a heavy emphasis on style and visual appearance, on the way that something makes us feel, and on immediate satisfaction. Consumerism is of course predicated upon individualism, the belief that everyone should be free to choose and do what feels good and brings personal satisfaction, regardless of the precedent of tradition or the norms of society. Being innovative or iconoclastic, even irreverent, is a high achievement in the cult of individualism.

There are very significant consequences to the marketplace system of spirituality and culture. Commercialization of religion works by cultural asset stripping, by boiling down a complex belief system into a set of images, an inventory of gods, and a canon of pithy gnomic texts. Anyone who has delved seriously into a foreign religion, however, realizes that it is not so easy to separate the secular from the sacred, the gods from the natural environment and the process of socialization that produces a person's worldview, or the gnomic wisdom from the cultural experience that is embedded in language and literature.

As Native Americans whose beliefs have been exploited by the spiritual marketplace understand only too well, consumer society is very good at appropriation. Not only did Imperialism –the gestation stage of the modern consumer society – appropriate their lands, it attempted to invalidate their identity and way of life. The obvious irony is that those beliefs and cultural artifacts that the European invaders once tried to destroy now enjoy a large popular demand. Self-appointed gurus market themselves as shamans and spiritual leaders by donning images that dominate the popular imagination.

The appropriation of tradition takes control out of the hands of the communities to whom it should belong and allows the marketplace to decide what is authentic, what is profitable, and what is doomed for extinction. And so it is little wonder that many Native Americans have had enough of it, and don't want to lose their ancestral traditions to the marketplace. They would rather keep control of what is meaningful to them, and invite others in as they see fit. And who can blame them?

In the end, the only one who profits from consumerism is the market itself. It eventually leaves us feeling empty, hungry, isolated, and confused. We need real human communities, not virtual communities. We need to address the underlying causes of spiritual impoverishment and ecological devastation, to see that they come from one and the same ailment, that they are directly related to the emergence of consumerism and that there is no product that can magically cure us.

While accurate and detailed scholarship is available about native culture and religion, whether Native American, Celtic, or other, it seems that people have a great capacity for believing what they want to believe and in what they think will benefit them personally. Indeed, if it weren't for this capacity, people would probably destroy the modern economic and political institutions that oppress humankind and nature alike.

If it turns out that people don't want to know the truth about other societies and cultures, that they would rather see them broken down into caricatures and symbols to be consumed and manipulated according to market forces, then there is not much hope for minority cultures, let alone for the true freedom of the human mind and spirit. I would prefer to believe in the possibility that it is a matter of social justice that minority cultures be heard to express themselves in their own terms, and not merely according to what more powerful and prestigious nations want to hear. The right of such cultures to be heard is far greater, in my opinion, than the right of others to appropriate the trappings of foreign cultures for their own consumption.

Capitalism in fact seems to be failing terribly in producing contentment in those societies that have embraced it the most. Robert Lane, a retired Yale Professor and the author of The Loss of Happiness in Market Economies, notes that people in such countries have become less capable of dealing with everyday problems because they endure "a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations, of easy-to-reach neighbors, of encircling, inclusive memberships, and of solid family life." And let us remember that our government is aggressively advertising the supposed benefits of our way of life to people all over the world, and making it increasingly difficult for them to maintain their own cultures, communities, economies, languages, and spiritual practices, all in the name of supposed 'development.'

The Celtic peoples are real people living in the real world. Like many other minority societies, they struggle against poverty, political disempowerment, the extermination of their languages and cultures, and the social ills that accompany low self-esteem. They do not lie around in darkened rooms all day long with stones on their bellies waiting for mystical experiences. I have come to know many people in the Scottish Highlands who, in the course of their lifetime, have witnessed the near extinction of their mother tongue, who remember when it was spoken in an almost continuous arc from the Outer Hebrides to Perthshire, the very center of Scotland. While I demonstrate in my latest book that Gaelic culture, like any other indigenous tradition, is a complex and beautiful human construction, it is a fragile system that is under tremendous pressure.

One of the few places in North America in which a genuine Celtic community survived until recently is Cape Breton, in the Maritimes of Canada. Musicians still flock for what might still be gleaned from the old people, but from the internal standards of the community it seems that the context and more subtle nuances of the style are lost on the culture vultures. One of the old-timers recently noted about popular young fiddlers playing in Cape Breton, "There's a lot of notes being played, but not much music."

One might similarly say about the spiritual marketplace, "There's a lot of spirituality going around, but not much left that is sacred."