It is worth remembering though that that there WAS no “Celtic Pantheon”, and no Pan-Celtic gods. There are certain ones that seem to crop up across the different cultures and across time (the Cailleach in the Goidelic cultures of Scotland and Ireland, for example, or the Lúgh/Lugos reflexes, or Bríghid/Brigantia etc), but these were different iterations of gods that probably varied from place to place and time to time (indeed some, like Bríghid, even later became Celtic Christian Saints, as is well known).
It is highly likely that there were MANY local gods and spirits associated with local landscape features and Clan Spirits that were by no means Pan Celtic, and for which we have almost no evidence, as so much of it would have been contingent and fleeting, inscriptions on wood and paper, on items now lost, etc.
EDITED TO ADD: when I said paper, I meant vellum or similar, and of course these are almost non existent because the Celts refused to write anything down!
Why would they do this? They were not pre literate. We know that they could write Latin and Greek, and their own language using those alphabets if needed. So why not write?
In exploring these questions with Master’s students this past year, we thought the following : if you write it down, the temptation is to forget it, as we well know these days. How many people remember a phone number now, let alone twenty or thirty off by heart as was common a generation ago? If the information is written down in physical form, it can be forgotten, but also lost (such as by a library burning down) or even stolen by one’s enemies. No, they preferred that each Bard be the bearer of all of the culture’s stories, that each fully trained Druid (which was said to take 20 years) be a walking library, from whom the whole knowledge of the culture could be reconstituted.. Not only that, but as the knowledge was encoded in poetry and symbol, even under torture that knowledge would not be of use to the enemy.
Each Culture Bearer, just like she who bore a coal from the fire when the tribe would travel in the far off days of the Wandering, could set afire from that spark the Hearthfire of a New Founding. As long as one Druid remained, the Culture would never die.
And yet it did die, didn’t it?
Well. The Druids officially died out. But in fact many who would have been Druid simply became monks and nuns under the new dispensation. And THEY were the ones who decided finally to write the stories. The Brehons, the Judges, survived. The Filí, the Poets, survived. The Law and the Lore survived, encoded in stories and traditions, in the names of places and the tales of Invasions and Wars, the Lineages of Kings. The tales of the fleeing of the Old Order, the old gods, into the Mounds. We have lost much, and have evidence for little, but the glowing coal of the culture was carried forward, never forgotten.
Our Library of Alexandria never burned, for it was a Fire in Our Hearts.
Our Pagan Temples were never torn apart, for they were the Standing Rock in the Forest, they were the Holy Well, the Mountain Lake, the Cave of the Cat, the Alignment of the Monoliths;
THEY WERE THE SEA, THE LAND, THE SKY.
YOU CANNOT TAKE THESE AWAY FROM US : or, they could not then.
But now they TRY.
We say : no.
We say : Come and Take It.
We say : You can take our Land, but you can never take …
You know the Rest.
We are the Rest, the Remainder, the Afterthought, the Ember.
In bastard Latin they wrote their own History, and wrote it into the History that the Church had written for Herself. Not The Greatest Story Ever Told, no. A justification for Conquest, Slaughter, Enslavement, Empire : a Hymnbook of Oppression, of Order, of Law, of Hierarchs, Archons, Patriarchs : a History as Nightmare, from which we are trying to wake up. But the stories that they wrote, winding in and out between the Great Men of History, the Tales of Conquests and Subjugations; they have kindled a Fire in the Heart, they have Kindled a Fire in the Head.
Those Druidical Brothers and Sisters in their Monasteries, Abbeys, and Hermitages on the Edge of Forever, looking in to the Western Ocean where lay our Promised Land … They wrote Marginalia to History, and it was strange, and funnier, and more beautiful than anything that they were instructed to include in those Great Dead Tomes of the Law.
There is still a fire in our heart, carried forward across years and oceans and vast marches of Time.
We are the People who Remember.
We are waking from a Dream in which the World was Ending, to a Dream of the World to Come.
Those who, today, gently blow on this ember, who carefully feed kindling to this tiny fire, are those who will carry the torch forward, and who will light the beacon fires to tell us to come home. From the Hill of Uisneach to Carlton Hill, at the Dark of the Year, at Bealtaine…
From the Eternal Flame at Cill Dara, to the Eyrie of the Cailleach Bhéara, to the Cave of the Cat and the single slanting ray of Sunreturn that pierces the Long Dark and hits the Keystone.
Renew. Rewild. Return. Rebel. Revolt.
Re-enchant.
It is coming back you know.
We’re coming Home.
Light the Beacons.
We’re coming Home.
MARK DEVLIN
Born in Australia to Irish parents, Mark Devlin spent most of his childhood in Ireland, with occasional spells in the United States. As a child, he was obsessed with fantasy literature and roleplaying games, but kicked the habit in his mid-teens, when he realised that sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and being a Dungeon Master, were mutually exclusive. He would still read The Earthsea Trilogy at least once a year, but he didn’t talk about it. After studying English and Philosophy at University College Cork, he became a secondary school teacher in an all-girls Catholic school and started a theatre company. When his nerves couldn’t take it anymore, he applied for a position as a lecteur in English literature at Université de Paris-Nouvelle Athènes. One thing led to another, and he ended up getting sucked in by academia again. Initial enthusiasm gave way to diffidence and procrastination, and he defended his very pedestrian thesis in 2015, after spending five years researching irrelevant and esoteric topics in the dark corners of the internet and furtively reading RPG forums, and one year desperately typing the thing that he ended up calling his dissertation.
Eventually, he gave up pretending and started writing a fantasy novel. He very much enjoys hiking and camping, and communing with Nature. He lives in Montmartre with his wife and two children. He works as a Guide and Translator.
