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Author Topic: Which Celtic Tradition?  (Read 13160 times)

Finn

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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #45 on: January 04, 2012, 10:06:33 pm »
Quote from: AlisonLeighLilly;37499
Maybe it's my own streak of stubbornness - but I'm not keen on religions that emphasize external authority over personal relationship. I much prefer spiritual traditions that emphasize the difficult but necessary work of balancing and, when possible, reconciling the two.


Heh. I also prefer not being told how I'm supposed to feel about someone because a book tells me they love me. I mean, if they sent me a card or called me occasionally, that would be a different story... ;)


Quote
One consequence of the CR approach, for instance, is that while it tends to emphasize a "hard polytheism" that views the gods as real, distinct beings - it also undermines the CR practitioner's ability to engage authentically with them in the present, since he or she is expected to ignore or at least distrust any insight about or experience of them that contradicts the external authority of current academic scholarship. To me, that seems a bit like trying to be friends with someone while constantly comparing what they say and do against their high school report cards and SAT scores. Sure, that kind of information can give you insight into who they were and who they've become (and it provides an "objective," standardized measure that I guess would be helpful in catching a perpetrator of identity theft), but it seems an odd way to try to cultivate a relationship in the here and now.


 
*snerk*  Now I'm thinking about how I can get my hands on my friends' SAT scores... :p

In all seriousness, I will say that I think this idea, particularly the bolded bit, is a misconception about CR -- I think in part because a lot of people tend to be very careful and very quiet about what they do in personal practice. I trust quite a few people, if not anyone who identifies as a CR, would say they have an authentic relationship with their deities, and I believe them.

Where Celtics recons speak up and get loud is about methodology in figuring out what they practice, at least, in my experience lurking on various email lists.


Quote
And what's especially weird to me is that the ancient Celts did not even have a concept of "objective scholarly research" - so the very attitude that such research should take precedence over "UPG" is pretty much by definition not part of the worldview of ancient Celtic tradition.


Bolded mine.

No, they didn't have "objective scholarly research"... but they had druids. Who knew their traditions; who spent years learning their stories; who knew their family lines and kings' histories. Who knew everything without having to write it down.

... and who generally were the ones who spoke to the gods, and so, the ones to trust when it came down to knowing what they wanted. And who had a community of other druids to check each other:

Scene: somewhere in pre-Christian Ireland
DRUID A: Hey guys, I think the Morrighan would like us to give her the title of "Fluff Bun" because she told me she just adores bunnies.
DRUID B, C, and D: ... have you been drinking, A?
DRUID A: Of course I have, but I'm serious, guys!
DRUID B: She likes bunnies... TO EAT.
DRUID C: She's the Raven Goddess, dude. In every story. We've ever told.
DRUID D: She would KILL us if we started calling her "Fluff Bun."
End Scene

Er. Even without that travesty of theater, you get my point, right? :p

I am too much a mystic to not believe that individual ancient Celts had mystic relationships with their gods, but I tend to think that when it came down to it, they generally participated in the community rituals, traditions, and practices as established by the druids. And that was their "objective research" to ground themselves in.
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Fireof9

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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #46 on: January 05, 2012, 02:32:16 am »
Quote from: Finn;37587
No, they didn't have "objective scholarly research"... but they had druids. Who knew their traditions; who spent years learning their stories; who knew their family lines and kings' histories. Who knew everything without having to write it down.

... and who generally were the ones who spoke to the gods, and so, the ones to trust when it came down to knowing what they wanted. And who had a community of other druids to check each other:

Scene: somewhere in pre-Christian Ireland
DRUID A: Hey guys, I think the Morrighan would like us to give her the title of "Fluff Bun" because she told me she just adores bunnies.
DRUID B, C, and D: ... have you been drinking, A?
DRUID A: Of course I have, but I'm serious, guys!
DRUID B: She likes bunnies... TO EAT.
DRUID C: She's the Raven Goddess, dude. In every story. We've ever told.
DRUID D: She would KILL us if we started calling her "Fluff Bun."
End Scene

Er. Even without that travesty of theater, you get my point, right? :p

I am too much a mystic to not believe that individual ancient Celts had mystic relationships with their gods, but I tend to think that when it came down to it, they generally participated in the community rituals, traditions, and practices as established by the druids. And that was their "objective research" to ground themselves in.

 
And this is what gets me all the time. Recon is largely a guessing game because they did not write any of it down. Said druids had a whole lot more to work with than we do, as they had all those traditions and stories to memorize and work with. We have hints here and there and the rest is guess work. It can be educated guess work, and I applaud the people that devote so much time into trying to figure it out, but at the end of the day it is still a big guessing game.

I often think we just need to start the whole thing over and figure it out for ourselves for our times.
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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #47 on: January 05, 2012, 11:07:23 am »
Quote from: AlisonLeighLilly;37499

I guess that's where I start to feel uncomfortable with CR. My understanding is that folks in CR approach Celtic Reconstructionism as first and foremost based upon academic/scholarly work, turning to UPG only to "fill in the gaps" that scholarship can't.

 
This is one of the basic approaches of reconstructionism, and why a fair number of actually informed, more neopagan-oriented folks basically say that recons have dead religion.

I think there are a couple of points for it.  First of all, that stuff can in theory be available to everyone (footnote follows); depending on divine inspiration seriously privileges those people who happen to have a god-phone.  Secondly, there is an ideal to be had in figuring out what the ancients did and trying to do something comparable.

(Footnote: Though of course it actually isn't.  The "this is religion as homework!" ideal doesn't do a whole lot for people who aren't interested in being their own bloody academic department.  I know several people who were in theory interested in reconstructionist religion but who were not personally up to doing all the damn research themselves; when they didn't find a group that could present and teach them well, they drifted away.)

There is also a specific problem with UPG: it is individual.  The (in an ideal world) peer-corroborated nature of anthropological research means that there is a sound shared basis upon which one can build praxis.  (Even if later research overturns it; the board's ancestor Chavi described herself as being a fam-trad Celt where the reconstructionist stuff was based on theories that were in part later refuted, but since the stuff worked for her family and for the Powers, they continued to run with it.)  If one's happy being solitary and building something that may not have terribly much in common with "co-religionists", that's one thing, but a lot of people actually want a religious community, which requires something that can be shared.  What that is doesn't actually matter all that much, but it needs to exist.

The schism between academia and mysticism in reconstruction is a real one, and honestly a lot of recons are kind of smug assholes about not doing any of that frou-frou UPG shit.  CR, though, is one of the most mysticism-friendly of them, as far as I can tell, basically because there is so little available to work with.
as the water grinds the stone
we rise and fall
as our ashes turn to dust
we shine like stars    - Covenant, "Bullet"

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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #48 on: January 05, 2012, 11:26:43 am »
Quote from: SunflowerP;37560
Whereas what I've been continually reminded of is the objections Catja has raised to certain tendencies in reconstructionist paganism of all cultural stripes (the first two links are to two of Catja's comments in a thread in the A&H SIG, which also has some excellent comments on the issue from other folks; the third is to the beginning of a thread started specifically to discuss the issue more broadly).  The contentiousness about UPG, I'd say, is just one effect/symptom; what's dogmatic is the tendency to elevate Scholarship-the-platonic-ideal while eliding how scholarship-the-practice actually works.  Even when not accompanied by (or done for the purpose of) religious oneupmanship, it colors the culture of reconstructionist methodology.

(I'll emphasize - in hopes of deflecting the shitstorm that so often follows on any mention of this - that this is not a condemnation, on either my part or Catja's, of reconstructionism, but rather pointing out the methodology's failure mode [everything has a failure mode; identifying it is a necessary prerequisite to avoiding it].  There are many, many individual reconstructionists who don't fall into this tendency, and for whom I have a great deal of respect - you're one of them, Seren.)

Sunflower

 
I'm a little :o about all the nice things people are saying here! I feel honoured as much as I feel like I'm awkwardly shuffling my feet and not quite sure what to say :p But thanks for all the kind words, everyone. I really appreciate it. And - most of all - likewise.

Don't worry, I don't take any of the criticisms or the negative opinions or even the condemnation that some might articulate about reconstructionism personally. I think there are many valid points raised in the links you provided there, and even if I disagree with some of it, it seems a bit pointless to get het up about any of it. It can be a delicate subject, I know, but if there is to be a constructive discussion about it then people should try to look at things objectively. Every religion should be open to scrutiny and criticism, from the inside or the outside; it doesn't make our beliefs any less valid.

I think one of the big, important differences between CR and other reconstructionist religions out there is that we have far less to go on that's concrete in terms of ritual and practice. This means our approach to reconstructionism has to be somewhat different to that of other recon religions, so in some respects it makes it difficult to compare us to reconstructionism as a whole (other reconstructionists would probably disapprove of what we're doing and question how it can be reconstructionism at all, for one; we apply the methodology, but are not necessarily as literalist as those Hellenic Reconstructionists that were mentioned). It makes it very confusing from the outside, because what applies to one reconstructionist religion doesn't necessarily apply to others.

Within CR, we have to mine through a lot of imperfect sources and see what we can find, and piece things together bit by bit. Our rituals end up being thoroughly modern, but based on our understanding of how rituals might have been constructed back then, and all in all we have to be far more comfortable with UPG than other reconstructionist religions might be (perhaps...). Complicating all of this is the fact that there are many different approaches within the umbrella of CR - different cultures, different focuses (druids, filidh, warrior, 'hearthy' etc). It takes a lot of work and some might wonder why, but I'd say...well. It takes all sorts, doesn't it? A lot of what reconstructionism has done has filtered down into other paganisms in one way or another, so at least we're doing contributing something positive!

Within the Gaelic subsets of CR, many of us also emphasise looking to the living cultures to inform what we do, and that is something that I don't think other recon religions tend to do at all (or are able to, perhaps is a better way to put it). The folklore, the living traditions - these can't be said to be pagan in origin, but we could argue that they are part of a thread that reaches back to pre-Christianity, given the conservative nature of the cultures. For those of us who are aiming to build a family/household-oriented practice, rather than a druidical one, these are the kind of things we can do, and they form the primary focus of our daily practice. Like Finn says, not many CR folks talk about the practical aspects so there's often the misconception that the methodology can stifle our experience and practice. This is not the case; we just approach it on different terms than non-recons might, and because it's UPG it's largely considered to be personal in nature; private, or at least not widely-shared and accepted as gospel within wider practice. That doesn't mean it's not discussed or a taboo subject, however. There are occasions when CRs have reached SPG - things that particular deities like as offerings for example, and that's the kind of thing that lets us know that we're getting somewhere, I think. But whether it's UPG or SPG being discussed it's made clear that it's just that.  

There are definitely negative aspects within CR, and like I said, the criticisms that Catja brought up in those links you posted make good points. I got involved in CR when there were a lot of growing pains, and a lot of contentiousness amongst each of the factions that developed and grew. There was a lot of talk about this and that, but very little discussion of what people were actually doing, and very little encouragement to keep on doing and evolving. A certain few folks posted regularly and assumed an air of authority, and when all the bickering started it was very difficult to get a word in that seemed to add to the discussion because sometimes it devolved into handwaving about who had the most obscure academic source to prove their point (generalising widely, with perhaps a little bit of hyperbole there). To a beginner and an outsider, I found it difficult to imagine how to go about practicing CR, and that's partly why I decided to do it myself and share what I found, with my friends who were doing the same to one extent or another. I always kept coming back to CR, so I figured, well. If no one can tell me, I might as well do it myself.

In the early days of my involvement, the arguing and the politics etc eventually saw some of the different factions break off into different groups, or even leave CR altogether. Those who retreated into their own groups carried on doing their own thing, but with less public engagement and involvement (with a few exceptions, of course). I think it's fair to say that this was at least partly because they were as tired of the constant arguing and the negative reputation it brought CR as a whole, as much anyone else was. It was clear that if any progress was going to be made, then it wasn't going to be progress that applied to the whole of CR; as a result, what many of us are doing now is very much part of a certain niche within CR, really, and for the most part I'd say things are still being done more quietly.

That seems to be changing now, though; the CR group on Facebook has become very active and seems to have largely replaced the Yahoo groups of old (though they're still going). Most people within CR will always seek a community, and when it's a healthy community, or communities, that's a great thing. What I'm seeing in the new groups that are emerging and becoming more public and popular once again is that there are still many of the old problems surfacing. There are strong opinions and strong personalities at play, and old politics lurking. That impacts on the community, and the image of the community in a wider context. Some of the groups are actively trying to rise above it (and succeeding), others get mired in it. Either way, I think all recons are aware that all of those negatives will often detract from the fact that some of us, at the least, are actually doing something that is as spiritually fulfilling and valid as anyone else's practice. Most of us aren't more concerned about being slave to the sources; they are a significant part of our practice, as a starting point, for sure, but ultimately it's the doing that makes us what we are, not the reading.

Fireof9

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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #49 on: January 05, 2012, 01:27:34 pm »
Quote from: Fireof9;37628
And this is what gets me all the time. Recon is largely a guessing game because they did not write any of it down. Said druids had a whole lot more to work with than we do, as they had all those traditions and stories to memorize and work with. We have hints here and there and the rest is guess work. It can be educated guess work, and I applaud the people that devote so much time into trying to figure it out, but at the end of the day it is still a big guessing game.

I often think we just need to start the whole thing over and figure it out for ourselves for our times.

 
For the record, I was not discouraging CR with this post or trying to say anything negative about it.
Its just a frustrating endevour due to the lack of information and the fact that much of the information available is so often either very old and written by people that attacked the Celtic nations, or it is as I said educated guesswork.
Really?  So, hey, want to go fishing?  I\'ve got a telescope, and it\'s going to be a dark night, so we should see the fish really well.
...what, I\'m not talking about fishing?  That\'s stargazing?  It\'s all doing-stuff, so it\'s the same thing, right?
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AlisonLeighLilly

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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #50 on: January 05, 2012, 03:37:34 pm »
Quote from: Seren;37530
The thing that occurs to me is, it's because we're a young religion that we must emphasise the scholarly/academic side so much. We're still figuring out how to do things on a practical level, still figuring out how our communities work and fit together, and our starting point is "how did they do it?" It's a huge question, and there isn't ever going to be one answer, but the side-effect at the moment is that while we're figuring stuff out it's the nitpicking and the comparing that stands out. On the other hand, since I don't think CR will ever be liturgically or even ritually prescriptive or standardised, maybe there will always be at least a wee bit of nitpicking. To say the least :p

Perhaps, though, once we become more established and have more to offer in the way or ritual and liturgy then the emphasis will change from what many see as a very dry, academic path mired in the methodology, to something that is more on a par with other reconstructionist religions that are more established. Living traditions. I would hope so, anyway!

What you also seem to be talking about in your post is the view that CR has a very dogmatic approach towards scholarship that stifles practice and experience. That would only be the case, I think, if we didn't have any room to accommodate UPG; but UPG is integral to CR, just like any other religion. Ultimately it has to inform our practices as well as our experiences - it's not like we can ever know for sure what they did, anyway. The difference is, we aim to root our UPG within our specific aims and principles, rather than a more generalised 'because I want to.' From our point of view, we are trying to build a spiritual practice that is at least in some way rooted in the pre-Christian religion of a particular culture and its historical survivals etc. What we are going to end up with is still thoroughly modern, and to many it might seem that we are simply slaves to academics. Then again, conversely, I think for many CR it is inevitable that those who are thoroughly eclectic or primarily intuitive in terms of the way they inform the practices they term Celtic, are pretty much anathema to us. So yes, the chasm of misunderstanding goes both ways, because in the end it all seems to work for each of us...

 
Seren,

Thanks for your response! I was hoping someone with more "insider insight" would jump into the conversation. :) A lot of what you say makes sense and helps to put my impression of CR as an outsider to the community into some perspective. I think perhaps it's the lack of books written by CRs about what CRs "actually do," as you point out, that can sometimes leave those of us not immediately part of that community with the impression that a lot of CR is all talk and little actual living practice. (There's no reason why CR has to prove itself or make its practices available to people outside of the community, of course! I'm just saying that I wonder if that's one of the places where the confusion arises.)

I'm also interested in what the general principles for the CR approach are, exactly, and if there's somewhere where these are actually outlined and explored in detail. In the CR FAQ there are references here and there (usually when answering questions about who does or does not count as CR) to a community with a shared set of principles.... but I haven't been able to find a place where those principles are actually explained and clarified. You yourself mention how Rua's book

Quote from: Seren;37530
doesn't represent CR, and at times represents concepts and ideas that are antithetical to it.


I haven't read the book, so it might be hard to answer this question: but I wonder if you'd be able to actually say what those concepts or ideas are that are antithetical to CR? Is it the methodology he uses, or the conclusions he comes to, or both?

The Fomorian issue is a good one of what I was talking about when I said that some of the criticisms seem to be theological rather than historical in nature. My own academic background is in comparative religious studies, and I've done field work that involved observation and interviews with people in various religious communities, as well as primary and secondary source research of historical traditions (for instance, I worked as a research assistant for a time with a professor studying the propagandist literature produced in Germany during the Protestant Reformation). In my experience in the field of comparative religious studies (and this may be different from the more historical/archeological approach), it is notoriously difficult to extrapolate theological concepts from cultural artifacts alone. Your review of Rua's book (thanks for the link!) goes into a bit more detail about why you think some of his conclusions are wrong and what evidence he doesn't take into account that you think he should have.... but it still seems to me that the question about whether or not the Fomorians are "evil"/adversarial or not is a theological question, and not something that can be definitively settled purely through academic examination of the remaining historical evidence. It may be that there were different opinions and approaches to that question even among the ancient Celts themselves. There is very often a distinction between the "official" view of a tradition's clergy or educated class, for instance, and that of the lay or working class, and in both cases some or even most of the evidence for these differences may be lost to time, with perhaps only the preserved "official" version or the wide-spread lay version surviving, or enough of both surviving as to leave us with only a vague and seemingly contradictory view. Sometimes the very same cultural artifacts (like sacred texts, ritual objects, designated sacred temples or spaces, etc.) were interpreted in vastly different ways by different members of the same religious community. And this makes drawing conclusions about the specific theologies of religious communities that are no longer accessible or able to speak for themselves often extremely difficult.

I'm inclined to agree with the idea that viewing the Fomorians as "evil" is a simplified and probably inaccurate view.... but that's in part because of my own contemporary liberal tendencies towards inclusivity and tolerance (you could even accuse me of being a bit P.C.) that makes the concept of "evil" in general distasteful and not very creditable to me. I'm completely willing to admit that I have no way of definitively proving if my ancestors held that same view, and they very well may not have. It is possible, after all, that even without taking all of the evidence into account, Rua may have inadvertently come to the correct conclusion. My impression is that the legacy of modern historical research is actually full of that kind of thing happening, while historians with very sound methodology can still end up with the conclusions that were in retrospect wrong or biased in some way.

Which again brings me back to the question of what exactly are the shared principles or approaches that CR uses? I've read through the CR FAQ and nothing there is all that different from the approach that I take - but clearly, I find my own balance of scholarly research, community feedback and personal interpretive and experiential engagement. (I am definitely not just haphazardly throwing together whatever bits and pieces I happen to like, which seems to be CR's biggest beef with non-reconstructionist folks.) To what extent, in your experience, does the CR criticism of non-CR approaches depend more on the conclusions that are reached than on the actual method of reaching them? I'm not so much saying that CR seems restrictive - but that it seems selective in a very specific way. And I'm interested in what actually guides or informs that specific way of being selective.

(One example, for instance, is the very idea that the starting point is the question, "how did they [our ancestors] do it?" Why is that the starting point? What assumptions about the the concept of authenticity itself underlie the belief that ancient cultural traditions are more authentic than modern ones, or that academic scholarship is more authentic than UPG? You have to start somewhere, sure, but I'm really curious about the reasons for starting there in particular. My guess is that trying to thoroughly answer that question will give more insight into the more subtle, less conscious ways in which CRs balance methodology, UPG and community-identity.)

Again, sorry this is so long! Thanks for indulging me with all my questions! :)

--Ali

AlisonLeighLilly

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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #51 on: January 05, 2012, 03:39:32 pm »
Quote from: SunflowerP;37560
Whereas what I've been continually reminded of is the objections Catja has raised to certain tendencies in reconstructionist paganism of all cultural stripes (the first two links are to two of Catja's comments in a thread in the A&H SIG, which also has some excellent comments on the issue from other folks; the third is to the beginning of a thread started specifically to discuss the issue more broadly).  The contentiousness about UPG, I'd say, is just one effect/symptom; what's dogmatic is the tendency to elevate Scholarship-the-platonic-ideal while eliding how scholarship-the-practice actually works.  Even when not accompanied by (or done for the purpose of) religious oneupmanship, it colors the culture of reconstructionist methodology.

(I'll emphasize - in hopes of deflecting the shitstorm that so often follows on any mention of this - that this is not a condemnation, on either my part or Catja's, of reconstructionism, but rather pointing out the methodology's failure mode [everything has a failure mode; identifying it is a necessary prerequisite to avoiding it].  There are many, many individual reconstructionists who don't fall into this tendency, and for whom I have a great deal of respect - you're one of them, Seren.)

 
Sunflower, Thanks for these links! I've now spent a good hour reading through a bunch of these old threads - with the result that I feel like maybe I'm being a bit redundant. ;) A lot of the points that Catja brings up really hit the nail on the head as far as what I'm trying to get at. I'm not at all a professional scholar like she is, but my experience in academia pretty much jives with her experience: that (a) modern scholarship thrives on "the gaps" which open up new possibilities for exploration and study, (b) a working, living religion will inevitably have to make certain leaps in order to overcome such gaps, and so (c) modern research is not the same process as reconstructing a religion, and you're going to run into contradictions and conflicts if you try to make them the same. Since my academic background is actually in the comparative study of religions, I tend to like to poke at "the gap" represented by point (c) in CR and other Recon communities because the scholar in me is like, "Oooh! Unexamined assumptions that guide the evolution of a unique religious community! Fetch me my research poking stick!" Which I guess can make me seem kind of obnoxious. :-/ But really it's just because I'm really fascinated by those questions and, regardless of what my own spiritual tradition is, I really enjoy finding out what other religious communities do and why.

Seren is taking the brunt of my questions right now, unfortunately, because I tend to bombard the people who will tolerate my questioning with demands that they explain all those other people who won't. ;) But like I said, I hope I'm not being too clumsy or hurtful in my enthusiasm.

--Ali

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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #52 on: January 05, 2012, 03:42:21 pm »
Quote from: Finn;37587
In all seriousness, I will say that I think this idea, particularly the bolded bit, is a misconception about CR -- I think in part because a lot of people tend to be very careful and very quiet about what they do in personal practice. I trust quite a few people, if not anyone who identifies as a CR, would say they have an authentic relationship with their deities, and I believe them.



That may well be, and I definitely didn't mean to imply that CRs don't ever have authentic relationships with deities. I guess I was just saying that, for me personally anyway, it would be a real stumbling block to have to constantly worry about how my relationship with deity measured up against the expectations of the community and the standards of academic research, especially when both of those tend to be moving targets a lot of the time. Perhaps this is actually why CRs tend to be quieter and more careful about sharing their personal practice? And maybe a few folks (like Erynn Rowan Laurie, f'ex) being a bit bolder and willing to share would help mitigate the misconception and even alleviate some of that anxiety? It's a delicate subject, and very personal, though, so....


Quote from: Finn;37587
No, they didn't have "objective scholarly research"... but they had druids. Who knew their traditions; who spent years learning their stories; who knew their family lines and kings' histories. Who knew everything without having to write it down.

... and who generally were the ones who spoke to the gods, and so, the ones to trust when it came down to knowing what they wanted. And who had a community of other druids to check each other.


I think you're probably right about the role that the clergy (in this case, the Druids) played in establishing and maintaining a structured religious tradition in ancient Celtic societies - though, like I mentioned to Seren above, there is almost always also some discrepancies and differences of opinion between a community's educated class and its lay/working class. My point is more that, even with the Druids acting as a class of informed tradition-keepers who built up a collective body of practice and theology (or at least, theology to the extent that they did) - this is still very different from the way modern academics approach historical/scholarly research today. Very different. Sunflower's links to Catja's stuff above says it way better than I could, though, but that's basically my point.

--Ali

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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #53 on: January 05, 2012, 03:47:17 pm »
Quote from: Darkhawk;37653
This is one of the basic approaches of reconstructionism, and why a fair number of actually informed, more neopagan-oriented folks basically say that recons have dead religion.

I think there are a couple of points for it.  First of all, that stuff can in theory be available to everyone (footnote follows); depending on divine inspiration seriously privileges those people who happen to have a god-phone.  Secondly, there is an ideal to be had in figuring out what the ancients did and trying to do something comparable.

(Footnote: Though of course it actually isn't.  The "this is religion as homework!" ideal doesn't do a whole lot for people who aren't interested in being their own bloody academic department.  I know several people who were in theory interested in reconstructionist religion but who were not personally up to doing all the damn research themselves; when they didn't find a group that could present and teach them well, they drifted away.)


I think this is a really good point - and that your footnote is also right on track. I think it's also important to remember, when striving to be "scholarly" in one's approach, that actual academics go through 3 - 7+ years of additional training and education above and beyond undergrad in order to be accepted members of the academic community. Much of that additional study is learning the processes (and limits) of the academic community itself. For that reason alone, academic work is not really available to absolutely everyone - there is always going to be a lot of reliance by non-academics (even in, or especially in, Recon) on what academics are able to make available to the general public in ways that can be readily and widely understood, let alone practically applied to reconstructing a religion.

But depending too much on the divine inspiration of those who have a god-phone is a big problem, you're absolutely right. It's the other extreme that you can too easily swing towards. One of the original draws for me about Paganism was that it put a good deal of emphasis on making the tools available to anyone and everyone to kind of "build your own god-phone" (to overstretch the metaphor ;)) - in other words, to give you the tools and practices to help you cultivate a direct relationship with the divine for yourself. I'm of the belief that this is something anyone can do, and that there aren't just chosen individuals who have a better connection to the divine than others.... But it is, like academic work, something that requires a certain degree of training, practice and on-going commitment. For that reason, it doesn't really avoid the same problem as the scholarly approach. There is the same caveat to divine inspiration as there is for academic work - in theory it can be available to anyone, but in practice not everyone will be willing or able to make the necessary commitment.


Quote from: Darkhawk;37653
There is also a specific problem with UPG: it is individual.  The (in an ideal world) peer-corroborated nature of anthropological research means that there is a sound shared basis upon which one can build praxis.  (Even if later research overturns it; the board's ancestor Chavi described herself as being a fam-trad Celt where the reconstructionist stuff was based on theories that were in part later refuted, but since the stuff worked for her family and for the Powers, they continued to run with it.)  If one's happy being solitary and building something that may not have terribly much in common with "co-religionists", that's one thing, but a lot of people actually want a religious community, which requires something that can be shared.  What that is doesn't actually matter all that much, but it needs to exist.

The schism between academia and mysticism in reconstruction is a real one, and honestly a lot of recons are kind of smug assholes about not doing any of that frou-frou UPG shit.  CR, though, is one of the most mysticism-friendly of them, as far as I can tell, basically because there is so little available to work with.

 
This is one reason that I really dislike the term "UPG" and how it's used, and tend to avoid using it myself if I can. I like to refer to a person's "interpretive and experiential engagement" instead. Why? Because there is really no such thing as an entirely individualized, private "UPG." All interpretations and experiences are interpretations or experiences of something - and they are always influenced in one way or another by the socio-cultural contexts of the people having the experience or making the interpretation. That is why it is an interpretive or experiential engagement - a person is engaging with something else, either a deity, a landscape, a human community, a cultural symbol, or some combination of these things or any number of others. An experience or interpretation might be more or less unique to that individual, but it is never entirely and purely solitary.

So the distinction between UPG as private or solitary, and academic/scholarly work as the primary corroborative approach to developing a shared community understanding is, I think, a false one. There are many, many ways in which communities can build a shared spiritual tradition that does not rely on or borrow from the methods and processes of academia. I bristle a bit when Recons/CRs talk about UPG as though it were entirely private and solitary in distinction from the community approach of academic scholarship. To me, this seems to ignore the fact that an individual's interpretive framework of their experiences is always going to be shaped by their membership in one or more communities, and so the way they integrate and understand these moments of personal "gnosis," inspiration or imagination cannot be entirely separated from the cultural or communal contexts they belong to.

Rather, I think it's more likely that those moments designated as "UPG" just tend to be more deeply influenced by modern culture than by the ancient pre-Christian cultures that the Recons/CRs are striving to reconstruct. When a person has a sudden inspiration about how modern physics and Jungian psychology (both modern, scientifically-grounded theories) might work together to explain a dream they had recently, it's called UPG. When a person has a sudden insight into how the connection between two pieces of archeological evidence help to explain the meaning of some ancient text (which may itself have been a poem or dream recorded by some long-dead priest), it's called research. The difference is in the relative value that the Recon/CR community places on the cultural artifacts and perspectives involved.

That said, I don't have much experience with non-CR Recons, and only a little bit of experience of CR at that. But I totally agree that CRs, IMLE, tend to be the most UPG/mysticism-friendly of the Recon communities.

--Ali

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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #54 on: January 05, 2012, 04:17:28 pm »
Quote from: AlisonLeighLilly;37687



 
Seriously, though, sorry for being such a blabbermouth today! :o

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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #55 on: January 05, 2012, 05:49:05 pm »
Quote from: AlisonLeighLilly;37683
One example, for instance, is the very idea that the starting point is the question, "how did they [our ancestors] do it?" Why is that the starting point? What assumptions about the the concept of authenticity itself underlie the belief that ancient cultural traditions are more authentic than modern ones, or that academic scholarship is more authentic than UPG? You have to start somewhere, sure, but I'm really curious about the reasons for starting there in particular.

 
Generally speaking, for most recons, the answer is "the ancient ways worked at cultivating sound relationship with the world and the Powers; why re-invent the wheel?"  Of course, CR has a particular level of difficulty with that due to the sparseness of the sources.
as the water grinds the stone
we rise and fall
as our ashes turn to dust
we shine like stars    - Covenant, "Bullet"

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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #56 on: January 05, 2012, 06:09:25 pm »
Quote from: AlisonLeighLilly;37688
Seriously, though, sorry for being such a blabbermouth today! :o

 
Holy smokes you gots to have writers cramp ;)

Now I gotta read all of this stuff and my eyes are gonna be like this :eek:
Really?  So, hey, want to go fishing?  I\'ve got a telescope, and it\'s going to be a dark night, so we should see the fish really well.
...what, I\'m not talking about fishing?  That\'s stargazing?  It\'s all doing-stuff, so it\'s the same thing, right?
-HeartShadow
 
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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #57 on: January 05, 2012, 06:46:38 pm »
Quote from: Fireof9;37701
Now I gotta read all of this stuff and my eyes are gonna be like this :eek:

 
In that case, a pair of these might be helpful: :cool:

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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #58 on: January 05, 2012, 06:49:35 pm »
Quote from: Darkhawk;37699
Generally speaking, for most recons, the answer is "the ancient ways worked at cultivating sound relationship with the world and the Powers; why re-invent the wheel?"  Of course, CR has a particular level of difficulty with that due to the sparseness of the sources.

 
Yeah, but that's a non-answer answer. It's like saying, "Why do I want to be awesome? Because being awesome is awesome!"

I'm asking: why do Recons believe the ancients worked at cultivating a sound relationship with the world and gods, and/or why do Recons believe that they succeeded or did better than [insert other modern option here]? I mean, especially since this whole "let's not re-invent the wheel" actually turns out to involve an awful lot of reinvention/reconstruction. ;)

--Ali

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Re: Which Celtic Tradition?
« Reply #59 on: January 05, 2012, 07:10:05 pm »
Quote from: AlisonLeighLilly;37707
I'm asking: why do Recons believe the ancients worked at cultivating a sound relationship with the world and gods, and/or why do Recons believe that they succeeded or did better than [insert other modern option here]? I mean, especially since this whole "let's not re-invent the wheel" actually turns out to involve an awful lot of reinvention/reconstruction. ;)

 
Answer to the first question: because those functional systems existed for centuries, and if they were not functional someone would have fixed them.  We would have no knowledge of these Powers as currently constituted had those practices not been functional; all current knowledge derives from or is in reaction to the corpus collected by original worshippers.

Answer to the second question cannot be made because it is based in false assumptions.  There is no belief that they 'succeeded or did better than this option'; there is 'this is the starting point we are choosing, because we know it was a functional starting point at one time'.  It is not a declaration of smug superiority; it is a declaration of 'this is how we're trying to do it'.
as the water grinds the stone
we rise and fall
as our ashes turn to dust
we shine like stars    - Covenant, "Bullet"

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