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Trick or Treat: A Celtic Lament
You may think that what I have to say about my Celtic forbears and Halloween is unduly critical. Ancestry.com DNA says I am over 80 percent Irish and 14 percent Scottish. I assume those missing percentage points (and some of what is now classified as Irish) are from miscellaneous invading Eurotrash, probably mostly Vikings and Normans. In any event, I believe my critical disposition to be a clearly heritable trait. My favorite T-shirt carries these inspirational words from W.B. Yeats:
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
Anyway, we’re off:
Celtic peoples had a near-exclusive lease on most of Europe for almost 2,000 years. They produced no major roads or cities or significant architecture. Rather than become an empire or nation-state, they remained a stubbornly tribal people. At a high-water mark 2,400 years ago, a Celtic people (Gauls) sacked Rome. However, over the following four centuries, Rome went on to become a powerful unified political entity while the Celts chose not to change. Beginning with Caesar and ending with the British, apparently it never occurred to the Celts that a tribal culture would invariably lose to nation-state invaders and that they should adapt and evolve accordingly.
Eighteen centuries after Caesar, one of my ancestors and his kin were among the highlanders in the left-wing of the Jacobite army that collapsed at Culloden. They were fighting as members of a clan/tribe against a professional army from a nation-state as if this time the whole tribal people versus nation-state thing would somehow work out.
A painful truth is that the political and cultural history of the Celtic world is more like that of the Lakota, Apache, or Australian aborigines than that of Persians or Greeks. The stubborn attachment to political structures, myths, and modes of life that don’t really work in the face of more modern forces have left a pervasive (even if largely unconscious) sense of loss and displacement that strangely lasted across generations.
Celtic languages persist only on the edges of western Europe and Celtic culture is mostly a matter for archaeologists and cultural historians to uncover; present traces are often so ephemeral. Little of that old Celtic world has survived into the modern world — except Halloween and it is oddly embarrassing that it has.
Halloween is based on the notion that the spirits of your dead kin and acquaintances will be even more obnoxious in death than they were in life and, therefore, must be appeased or they will maliciously interfere with ordinary affairs and outcomes. So, on (at least) one day of the year in the pagan Celtic world, the dead get to possess the living, to be heard and appeased (particularly the recently departed). Screaming, demonic noises, unfortunate sartorial choices, and generally scary behavior were the norms. (Pity the unsuspecting tourist just up from Ephesus or Capua.)
Ironically, this pagan idiocy was largely preserved by Christian authorities as part of the too-clever-by-half conversion strategy of coopting pagan festivals and symbols. Examples of this approach include assigning saints to intercessional roles formerly occupied by various Roman gods. A major tactical decision was to celebrate Christmas around the time of the winter solstice. The Christmas tree, for example, is from Celtic and pre-Celtic myth about the dying son-lover of the earth mother goddess bleeding into the roots of an evergreen in the dead of winter which then suddenly sprouts colorful fruits of all kinds to symbolize the rebirth to come in the spring.
It was a marketing tour de force to somehow incorporate that bizarre colorful pagan tree into Christian life as a symbol of the season of celebration of Christ’s birth. (Don Draper could not hold a candle to the Church’s earliest missionaries.)
In that same vein, the newly growing Church also made a tactical decision that those stubborn Celts could keep their beloved but patently stupid autumn ancestor ghost festival if (a) it was renamed All Souls Day, (b) toned down, and (c) followed by a holy day of mandatory attendance at Holy Mass— All Saints Day. So, All Hallows Eve, with its attachment to scary, spooky, ghostly stuff was incorporated into the liturgical calendar and thus, ultimately, into the wider Christian world.
The older and crankier I get, the more mixed feelings I have about Halloween. On the one hand, it seems like the equivalent of a minstrel show or blackface musical number in which the worst of Celtic pagan culture is preserved as an insulting caricature which vaguely mocks rather than appeases the ancestors. On the other hand, my grandkids like it and no one in my family has the slightest interest in my pontifications about pagan Celtic cultural arcana, so I make no serious attempt to spoil it for them. Also, I am the sire of a highly gifted pumpkin carver who is beginning an artistic family Halloween tradition with his own sons.
So have fun this Halloween. Let your ancestors scream and be appeased because they will likely again have much to dislike about how the world that they left you will change in the coming year.
Published in Group Writing
Any books you’d recommend? I’m purely an American invention, but about a third Irish from my Mother’s side. I don’t have much sense of the history though.
My grandfather’s last name was Taylor, which doesn’t sound especially Irish. Grandmother’s maiden name is FitzGibbon. I know there was a McKenna on my Grandfather’s side, who apparently took the wrap for his son after the younger McKenna killed his brother-in-law for selling the dowry. His son came to Canada – so this is one piece of how I ended up in the New World. Thank goodness for that idiot in-law.
I hope you do and I hope people like you continue to come and seek out the people who are dismayed by the political and media class. There’s plenty of us who aren’t buying into Brave New Ireland.
To get back to the topic, I’ve always had a fondness for our pagan past but I don’t like Halloween much. At least lighting fires and banging a few drums on a hill might have some connection to our ancestors but zombie walks?
Celebrating Halloween as seen on American TV has become a big thing now just as our traditional celebrations have declined. So children will go ‘trick or treating’ now, but they won’t go on the ‘wren’ on St Stephen’s Day. Bonfires are lit on Halloween, but only in rural places will you find a bonfire on St John’s night.
The Medieval Warming Period.
Latest cooling period before current was about 1650-1850, the Little Ice Age.
My Stewarts got here a few centuries earlier. I don’t have all the info handy, but my ggg-grandfather Rev. Samuel Stewart was born in North Carolina and moved west, having a son in central Illinois in about the 1850’s and eventually dying in Missouri.
The Scotch-Irish were people who couldn’t decide which side of the Irish Sea they wanted to be on. The Scots were an Irish tribe who went across to what became known as Scotland because of them. The Scotch-Irish were Scottish Presbyterians who were shipped back across to Ireland in the Ulster Plantations to make Ireland more Protestant and likely to be compliant to the Protestant kings. Then many of them migrated to the Waxhaws in the Carolinas, such as the Jacksons who spawned our seventh President.
“Historically, it was widely observed throughout Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man.” So, one of the right islands.
Samuel: “Hmm. Wasn’t that a relative cooling period? I’m pretty sure the rise of Rome and the Renaissance were supposedly during warming periods.”
Estimates of when the Medieval Warming period began vary between 800 AD to 950 AD.
The first known Viking attack on Irish Soil , the attack on the Monastery at Lindisfarne by the Vikings was in 793 AD. The first Norman raids along the coast of France also were around 790. The first mention of Kievan Rus (Vikings) attacking in the Slavic lands around Ukraine was 859 AD. The Vikings were colonizing Greenland by 950 AD. It is thought that during the Medieval Warming Period citrus was growing in Scandinavia – it was that warm. So it would seem that the growth of Viking coincided with the beginning of a Warming Period.
Fitz is the Norman French version of “fils de” meaning son of, sort of like Mc and Mac among the Scots. And Gibbon is a small ape. 🤔
The Medieval Warming Period began as the Viking era ended. Vikings were in England & Ireland roughly 800-1000. By the time Cnute died, warming was underway.
Every dog has his day.
A good place to start:
And the book:
Superbly written. A great piece.
Someone got his Irish up.
We have two opportunities still open for this month. Yes, the days are past, but we like to try to fill out the dance card, so you have a no-pressure opportunity!
I have not yet rolled out bears or outhouses as part of October’s theme: “Trick or Treat!” Do your part to keep it that way! Treat yourself and your friends to a post, nothing tricky about it. Our schedule and sign-up sheet awaits.
November’s theme is “Service.”
A gem of a post, Old Bathos. I especially enjoyed the WB Yeats quote, which I somehow missed despite years of reading his works.
You say:
Celtic languages persist only on the edges of western Europe and Celtic culture is mostly a matter for archaeologists and cultural historians to uncover; present traces are often so ephemeral. Little of that old Celtic world has survived into the modern world — except Halloween and it is oddly embarrassing that it has.
I read in this book written by some linguistic scholar that at one point in the 600’s or so, only a mere 700 people in one small clan of folk in England spoke the language from which our English language can be traced.
It is often hard to know what traits peculiar to a single small set of people end up holding great influence over the rest of the world for the rest of all time.
That fact offers me some hope, whenever I feel surrounded by those who believe that the rest of American history will be dominated by the Commies on the Left.