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Alexei Kondratiev (sp? author of The Apple Branch: A Path to Celtic Ritual) posted this today on the Imbas list and I just gotta say, dude. This makes so much more sense to me now.
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This brings back something that keeps appearing over and over in these discussions. There's this notion that "spirituality", "inspiration", etc. are culture-free phenomena -- that individual insights mean exactly the same thing in the context of any tradition. There's this sense that the structure of a culture is something negative and confining that limits the applications of one's insights, rather than realising that it's also what allows us to express those insights in a communicable way.
Of course, a religion is based on faith and praxis, not just an intellectual appreciation of the facts behind its traditions. Christianity isn't dependent for its practice on endless and irresolvable arguments about the historical Jesus: it's based on personal decisions about how one relates to Jesus's teachings and how one will shape one's behaviour to reflect this. However, this requires knowing what Jesus's teachings actually *are* (ie, from the sources where they are found) -- otherwise, one could decide to call "Christian" any number of personal ideas that have no basis in Christian tradition (using the name of Jesus to justify things Jesus never encouraged at all).
In the same vein, the main thrust of Celtic polytheism is one's relationship with the deities, not just the academic arguments about them. However, one has to have a grounding in what is actually known about such polytheism and its practices to be able to make the claim that one is actually following that tradition. Otherwise, it amounts to a purely personal spirituality with some merely cosmetic use of Celtic names or imagery. It may very well turn out to be a perfectly valid spiritual path, but there'd be no reason to relate it to the Celtic world, and thus it would be a misrepresentation to say that it's "Celtic spirituality".
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begin quote:
This brings back something that keeps appearing over and over in these discussions. There's this notion that "spirituality", "inspiration", etc. are culture-free phenomena -- that individual insights mean exactly the same thing in the context of any tradition. There's this sense that the structure of a culture is something negative and confining that limits the applications of one's insights, rather than realising that it's also what allows us to express those insights in a communicable way.
Of course, a religion is based on faith and praxis, not just an intellectual appreciation of the facts behind its traditions. Christianity isn't dependent for its practice on endless and irresolvable arguments about the historical Jesus: it's based on personal decisions about how one relates to Jesus's teachings and how one will shape one's behaviour to reflect this. However, this requires knowing what Jesus's teachings actually *are* (ie, from the sources where they are found) -- otherwise, one could decide to call "Christian" any number of personal ideas that have no basis in Christian tradition (using the name of Jesus to justify things Jesus never encouraged at all).
In the same vein, the main thrust of Celtic polytheism is one's relationship with the deities, not just the academic arguments about them. However, one has to have a grounding in what is actually known about such polytheism and its practices to be able to make the claim that one is actually following that tradition. Otherwise, it amounts to a purely personal spirituality with some merely cosmetic use of Celtic names or imagery. It may very well turn out to be a perfectly valid spiritual path, but there'd be no reason to relate it to the Celtic world, and thus it would be a misrepresentation to say that it's "Celtic spirituality".
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