by Bo Williams

1) There is a general lack of a sense of scale and historical breadth (present readers excepted, of course).

A lot of neo-Druidic interest in history and literature is very narrow. At worst, many druids are interested in the literatures of medieval Wales and Ireland (priceless world treasures) only for what they might tell us about the pre-Christian religion of the Celts. ('Not much' is the short answer, as I'll discuss below.) This strikes me as a shame. The literatures and cultures are so very interesting in and of themselves that it's sad to get stuck with an erratic, Peter Berresford Ellis view of them and not explore more deeply and with greater sensitivity. I dislike the strip-mining of the past, with semi-understood elements of medieval texts being used to cobble together neo-druidic rituals.

2) The ogham alphabet was not a druidic tree-calendar.

The Old Irish word properly refers to an native Irish alphabet of strokes or notches designed to be incised on stone, and probably wood, attested as inscriptions from the 5th to the 6th centuries in Ireland, and perhaps also from the late 4th. The origin of the letters has been much-debated: the current scholarly consensus is that the distribution of the letters in the system is derives from the classification of letters found in Latin grammarians of the 1st-4th centuries AD, and thus is an imitation of Latin literacy, as indeed is the custom of inscribing stone monuments. The inscriptions, usually border markers or grave memorials, occur in a broad band across southern Ireland and areas of Irish settlement in southern Wales, always in the Irish language. The writing of other Celtic languages in ogham is completely ahistorical, with the exception of occasional examples of Pictish use of the script. The name was related by the medieval Irish themselves to Ogma, one of the champions of the Tuatha Dé Danann or Irish gods, who was supposed to have devised the alphabet.

Due to the eccentric theories of the poet Robert Graves in The White Goddess (1948), it is common among druids to regard the script as a mystical or occult ‘tree alphabet’, because a minority of the letters are named after trees. The tree-link is probably a red-herring: Damian McManus showed in A Guide to Ogam (Maynooth, 1991), pp. 35-43, that most of the names are not, in fact, trees, and never have been. Further, the idea that the alphabet is a tree-calendar, in which each tree/letter corresponds to a lunar month, has developed, and even spawned a kind of ersatz Celtic astrology, in which the ‘tree-months’ are imagined as resembling the signs of the zodiac. All these are modern concepts. There is also nothing to link the script to the pre-Christian druids of Ireland, though it is not unlikely that as the pagan educated class they were familiar with it around the time of conversion. In all, the concept of ogham as a sacred, druidic alphabet and calendar is deeply-entrenched among modern pagans and almost entirely fictitious. 

3) The poet Taliesin was not 'the last Celtic shaman'. Likewise, the Book of Taliesin is not a repository of ancient druidical wisdom.

I could beat my head against the wall until little bits of blood and tissue went flying but still this idea wouldn't sink in. (Pagan readers, restore my faith in humanity and please prove me wrong.) See page on Taliesin for a longer article of mine explaining this in detail.

4) The bloody texts haven't been bloody 'bowdlerised' by Christian monks.

This view is trotted out almost everywhere, and is my No 1 druidical bromide. One is supposed to imagine, I suppose, a story-teller or druid reciting some tale about the gods or the Otherworld, c. 700AD, whilst a scowling man in a musty old habit with a tonsure and a quill pen scribbles it down. Every so often, our monk hears some overly sexual or 'Pagan' detail, and says to himself: 'Oh, goodness me, no! We can't be having that!' and alters the story to something more suitable. You might as well give the monk a black cape and a big twirly moustache, and have him tie the poor druid to some train-tracks.

In short, this view is way, way out of date. It can only be maintained if one remains in total ignorance of the last 70+ years of work on these texts, and shuts one's eyes to the whole nature of early medieval Irish literary culture.

This requires a brief history of 20th century work in the field of early medieval Irish writing. The old-fashioned view was that the Irish myths and sagas represented written versions of immemorial pagan oral tales, somewhat altered, and that they were a good quarrying ground for reconstructions of pre-Christian Irish religion and culture. (Comparative mythology and so on was very 'in' during the first part of the last century.) According to this view, the scribes who produced the ancestors of our extant texts were recording more-or-less dodgy versions of the pre-Christian tales of their ancestors.

Then a new wave of scholarship broke, led by James Carney but followed by scholars such as Donnchadh Ó Corráin and Kim McCone, among many distinguished others. Their approach reconsidered the very nature of early Irish culture, revisioning the societal matrix in which these tales took shape. Essentially, they have argued that the native poetic class, the filid, were in no sense druids après la lettre*, but were instead part of a single, complex, synthesised culture with Christianity at its heart. According to this view, a fusion between native and ecclesiastical learning took place early, in the 7th century or so. Literacy – inseparable from ecclesiastical, scriptural learning – rapidly became a prerequisite for the filid. It seems we are wrong to imagine a kind of ‘two cultures’ situation, with the native poets continuing with their orally-transmitted and essentially pre-Christian tales, whilst the monasteries educated their inhabitants in scriptural exegesis and a variant of the standard syllabus of late antiquity. Rather, they overlapped a great deal, and the native culture was pressed into the service of the Church. 

Unusually for medieval Europe, there was a high opinion of the vernacular; though compositions we have start out in the early period as mainly Latin, as time goes on they become mainly Irish. Indeed in a text called ‘The Scholar’s Primer’ originally from around 700 but added to over the centuries, we find an extraordinary origin legend for the Irish language. In this story, after human language is confused at the Tower of Babel, a man called Fénius takes all the best bits from the various new tongues and creates a constructed language out of them – namely Irish. This bizarre legend places Irish not only as effectively superior to the sacred languages of Hebrew, Greek and Latin, but makes Irish a re-creation of the perfect language spoken before Babel, and thus in Paradise. It’s a very bold move.

So. We now think that the filid and the ecclesiastical scholars are on the same, literate educational continuum. It's perfectly possible that they were often, in human terms, relations: of two noble brothers, one might go into the Church, and one might become a professional poet. Both would have shared knowledge of scripture, Latin, and Christianity. Both shared in the creation of a wonderfully complex pseudohistory for Ireland (inspired in part by Eusebius), in which the pagan past of Ireland could be imagined as 'their' Old Testament, with the arrival of Patrick parallelling the career of Elijah, or, more daringly, the advent of Christ.

It’s absolutely clear that the ecclesiastically educated – the literate mandarin class of the monastic townships – valued their native culture highly. But not like a modern anthropologist might do – rather they aimed and succeeded in absorbing the pre-Christian past into the Christian present, by, for example, remodelling once-mythic tales on Biblical patterns. A favourite topos was to have pagan figures from the ancient past miraculously live on to encounter Christian saints or historical personages, which authenticates and finds a valued place for their stories under the new dispensation. So St Patrick encounters Cú Chulainn, the poet Senchán encounters Fergus Mac Roich. 

Early Irish churchmen weren't just guiltily scribbling down some pagan tales, but were consciously engaged in the project of creating a national literature, intrinsically tied up with the acquisition of Christianity. The Christian religion had brought to Ireland not only writing (ogam apart), but specifically Latin writing and Latin literature. The Irish took to Latin like the proverbial ducks to water, and many early Irish Churchmen were accomplished stylists in the language. (Columbanus, for example). So recent scholarship has emphasised that the whole idea of creating written, prose literature is an idea that came with Christianity and was deeply bound up with it. (There were of course oral poets before the conversion.) The tales that survive from early medieval Ireland need to be read in this context - as drawing on ancient material, but cleverly crafting it with great artistry to produce something new and relevant to contemporary educated literati and pseudohistorians, both secular and of the Church. They don't have Christian 'accretions', which can be sloughed off by the determined neo-pagan: the texts are fundamentally products of an unusually self-conscious and creative early medieval Christian culture.

It will be apparent that modern druids don't like this idea much; the whole project of reconstructing pre-Christian Irish religion depends on old, outdated scholarship, and the tiresome, prissy tendency to demonise 'the Christian monks' who composed these texts. It's thanks to them that we have these wonderful tales at all, and it would be nice if druids would read them contextually for what they actually are, rather than for what they would like them to be. If you are interested in these issues, one of my colleagues has a very useful reading list here.

5) The Irish voyage tales are a Christian genre, and not a 'Celtic Book of the Dead'.

This is mere Matthewsisme, as Harold Bloom might say. The relationships between the early Irish wonder-voyages are tricky to sort out, but huge progress has been made. In essence, we have a body of tales from the 8th/9th/10th centuries, which tell of voyages to the Otherworld, conceived of as magical islands over the sea to the west of Ireland.** Analysing their mutual influences requires high-level scholarly skills, and sheds a great deal of light on the development of early medieval Irish literary ambitions for the vernacular. With their dream-like elisions of logic and blurring of the boundaries between simile and metaphor, they are easily some of the most fascinating stories in an altogether fascinating corpus. Many of the episodes curiously anticipate Surrealism with their exploration of unconscious dream imagery. In particular, inconsequentiality is mingled freely with the very dangerous, with no way of telling which might be which. For example, in The Voyage of the Úa Corra, a monster rises from the surface of a lake, leaving each of the voyagers terrified that it will attack him in particular (a nervy, dream-like subjectivity again); but instead, it sinks below the lake’s surface again, as if following some entirely inscrutable imperative and logic of its own. In The Voyage of Máel Dúin's Boat, the mariners come across a giant herdsman, who is unfazed by their appearance; despite the fact that they frighten his charges, he reacts only with mild peevishness, giving the whole episode a mystifyingly inconsequential air. In contrast, in the famous episode on the ‘Island of the Fiery Cat’, the animal is deceptively innocent-looking:

Dollotar isa tech ba moam díb 7 ní rabe nech and acht cat beg baí forsin lár oca chluichiu for ceithrib uaitnib lecdaib. No linged di cach uaitni for araile.

…

‘In dúinne forácbad in so?’ ol Máel Dúin frisin cat. Dosnchachae talmaidiu 7 gabais cluiche arisi.

…

Asbert in tres comaltae Maíle Dúin: ‘In bérsa lium munce dinaib muncaib si?’ ‘Náthó’, ol Máel Dúin, ‘ní cen chomét atá a tech.’ Dobert lais araí sin co rrici lár ind liss. Dolluid in cat ina diaid 7 leblaing trít amal saigit tentidi 7 loiscithi comba luaithred. Luid arisi co ndessid for uaitni. 

(They went into the house which was the largest of them, and there was nobody there - except for a small cat which was in the middle, playing upon four stone pillars. It was leaping from each pillar to the other.

‘Has this been left for us?’ said Máel Dúin to the cat. It looked at him suddenly, and went back to playing.

One of Máel Dúin’s three fosterbrothers said: ‘Shall I take with me a necklace from among these necklaces?’ ‘No!’ said Máel Dúin. ‘The house is not without a guardian.’ Nevertheless the fosterbrother took it as far as the middle of the enclosure. The cat went after them, and shot through him like a fiery arrow, and burnt him up so that he became ashes. The cat went back to sit on a pillar.)

Here, the cat kills curiosity. The sinister atmosphere is conveyed by several brilliant touches. First, the island has buildings but is deserted, with the unsettling perspective and eerie vacancy of a De Chirico painting. Second, the only inhabitant is a seemingly domesticated animal, all the less threatening for being ‘small’, but which is unsettlingly self-absorbed in its inexplicably repetitive ‘play’. The detail that when Máel Dúin speaks to the cat it looks at him is masterful, because it suggests a degree of cool intelligence in the animal – if it is an animal – and a weird mechanical purpose to its game. Indeed, we are left with the impression that the cat has hopped from one pillar to the other in the empty hall for all eternity and will continue to do so for ever. However, there is a development here, because as the journey proceeds, Máel Dúin learns a caution that is surely related to his eventual forbearance in avenging his father’s death. Bemused blundering leads to unpleasant deaths, as the foster-brothers learn upon their unfortunate fellow’s incineration. Floundering in uncertainty, in a world whose semiotic order has become unreadable, Máel Dúin learns forbearance and a spirit of careful experiment because the effects of carelessness might vary from the merely surreal to the fatal.

One of the main problems with these texts is that the boundaries of the genre - known as immrama, 'rowings-about', and pronounced 'IMM-ruvver' - are extremely porous. Almost every example is in some way odd or exceptional. Suffice it to say, it's not clear that the genre has important roots in pre-Christian Irish beliefs at all. Indeed, one of the most important early tales that contributed towards the genesis of the genre, Echtrae Chonnlai, has been convincingly interpreted as in part, a Christian allegory. That magical woman from the land of the ever-living sinless people, with their wonderful, victorious king? She's Ecclesia, i.e. the Church, not 'the Goddess'. (I accept this view, which is Kim McCone's, and find it convincing. Others don't.) 

The most likely candidate for the earliest of the fully-fledged voyage-tales is in Latin, the Nauigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, orVoyage of the Boat of St Brendan the Abbot. (David Dumville puts its composition in the last decades of the 8th century.) It is utterly obviously a Christian story, an allegory of the monastic life, with the voyage being a metaphor for earthly existence, not one's post-mortem journey to the Otherworld. By undertaking the journey, the mariners undergo a purification and also receive warnings, both literal and symbolic, of the pains of Hell; they also anticipate the joys of Heaven. As it's in Latin, it's clearly designed for an audience of churchmen. The other voyage-tales, which are later and in Irish, redeploy this idea (the voyage as allegory of the religious life) for a secular, aristocratic audience. They are designed both to entertain and provoke wonder, but also to make an audience of noblemen (and women) think about the state of their souls viz a viz Heaven and Hell. For example, in The Voyage of Máel Dúin's Boat, the hero Máel Dúin’s journey gives him the Christian humility not to abrogate God’s vengeance to himself and kill his father’s murderers, which was its original purpose. The voyages are spiritually edifying to the visionary or voyager and to his community. 

The Irish voyage-tales as spiritual allegories are thus Christian through and through, and this is, to be blunt, pretty obvious if you actually read them. (As one can, here).

Alternatively, you could do what Caitlín Matthews did, totally ignore history, and decide that these wonderful stories are a kind of Celtic equivalent of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Then you do some (very attractive) cards, and flog the whole thing to credulous druids for a tenner.

6) It is far from clear that there was any such things as 'druidic astrology', and if there was, we know nothing whatsoever about it.

Amongst the Classical sources, there are indeed passages which support the idea that Gaulish druids studied the stars. Julius Caesar in the 1st century BC and Pomponius Mela a century or so later mention a kind of astronomy as part of druidism, in similar language. I quote both passages here:

Multa praeterea de sideribus atque eorum motu, de mundi ac terrarum magnitudine, de rerum natura, de deorum immortalium vi ac potestate disputant et iuventuti tradunt. 

(They also hold long discussions about the heavenly bodies and their movements, the size of the universe and of the earth, the physical constitution of the world, and the power and properties of the gods; and they instruct the young men in these subjects.)

Habent tamen et facundiam suam magistrosque sapientiae druidas. Hi terrae mundique magnitudinem et formam, motus coeli ac siderum, et quid dii velint scire profitentur. 

(They have their own kind of eloquence however, and teachers of wisdom called druids. These profess to know the size and shape of the world, the movements of the heavens and of the stars, and the will of the gods.)

These passages may be historically accurate; Caesar in particular had a pressing need to understand where power lay in Gaulish society. On the other hand, both Caesar and Strabo may have drawn on the lost testimony of Posidonius here, and thus it is not certain that either was writing from personal experience. In both passages the ascription of sophisticated natural philosophy to the druids may represent a projection of familiar Pythagoreanism onto a barbarian caste whose customs were largely unknown. 

There is no other evidence that the druids had a zodiac or divined from the heavenly bodies. None at all. (The episode in the First Life of St. Brigit in which Brigit's druid foster-father studies the stars is clearly alluding to the Magi of Matthew's Gospel - a druid is magus in Hiberno-Latin.)

So basically when you buy Helena Patterson's The Handbook of Celtic Astrology, or anything of its ilk, you know you've been sold a pup.

* To coin a phrase.

** The Otherworld over the sea may not be a pre-Christian idea. The very distinguished Celtic scholar John Carey has discussed the transmarine Otherworld’s place or absence of it in pre-Christian Irish tradition at length, in his article ‘The Location of the Otherworld in Irish Tradition’, in J. M. Wooding, (ed.), The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature: And Anthology of Criticism (Dublin, 2000). There he suggests that the topos is not a native motif, and that the oldest material suggests an otherworld to be found under lakes or the sea, or inside the hollow hills, with the paradisial island conception of the Otherworld forming a later, purely literary development.