Cornish Celtic Deities

[Nymree]

Dydh da all, I’m posting on here to see if I can find anyone else who has experience in this area.

I’ve been trying to find out if there are any pagan deities native to Cornwall. Having Googled and university library searched and Google Scholared my heart out, I can only conclude that this is a fool’s errand. I have one book here, Between the Realms: Cornish Myth and Magic by Cheryl Straffon, which has a section on Cornish gods and goddesses. This mostly puts it plain that Cornwall just doesn’t have a native literary tradition like the Welsh Mabinogion, that relates any glimmers of a pre-Christian mythology. However, the author does try to relate bits of Cornish lore to non-Cornish deities like Brigid, Lugh, Sul from other neighbouring cultures, making links through things like place names and hagiographies of saints. The main problem with this, is that a lot of the writing isn’t well referenced and some of the references aren’t massively academic – which only becomes a problem because it’s hard to verify where all this is coming from.

I’ve been trying to reconstruct/invent a Celtic paganism relevant to my home in Cornwall. The background behind much of this search has been a bit of a spiritual crisis, where I’ve had to completely rearrange my path of choice and move away from a religious future I’d been quite invested in. I was following Druidry, but one or two things didn’t quite work out how I’d hoped in the end. My philosophy is still greatly inspired by Emma Restall Orr’s writings and the general ideas and practices of Modern Druidry, such as veneration of ancestors, the Earth, Sea, Sky structure etc. I’m looking for ways I can honour the moon, sun, stars, waters, I think I’m looking for a pantheon of gods and goddesses that I can then structure my spiritual life around. My long-term goal was to seek out a specific deity to worship (if they'd have me, of course), structuring that into my generally Druidic practice along with a Cornish Wheel of the Year. But there just doesn’t seem to be a Cornish pantheon to turn to. I’m hesitant to lean into other Celtic cultures for fear of cultural appropriation issues, though I’m sure a respectful interaction is possible in this context. I think it’s also very difficult to find any writing on Cornish Neopaganism that has a Druidry focus, as a lot of the pagan authors (Cheryl Straffon and Gemma Gary are examples) have more of a focus on traditional witchcraft.

Moreover, I think Straffon’s method of translating other Celtic and British deities into Cornwall, ignoring the thin references, could be problematic by alienating deities from their cultural origins. For example, her writing seems to suggest that the Cailleach is eponymous with Danu and is a possible distant original for ‘all the crone women who appear in the Cornish tales and legends’ – this makes a lot of equivalencies, and I’m not sure if there’s anything to back them up, though there may well be (I'm talking from a surface experience with all of these deities, so I haven't got much to go on).

I’m not necessarily looking for a reconstructionist pathway here. I just don’t want to accidentally disrespect other Celtic cultures by overstepping, borrowing, or making an equivalency that isn’t supported by evidence. At this point, I think I’m just a bit exhausted by all the reading I’ve been doing, trying to connect the dots that only seem to be related by the thinnest thread.

Thanks for reading my rant. Any advice - or a spa day - most welcome.

[Haptalaon]

Dydh da all, I’m posting on here to see if I can find anyone else who has experience in this area.

Some thoughts:

1. Do you think the word "appropriation" is useful & appropriate for this? I'm not sure.

What we're talking about here is primarily cultures which don't have a continued unbroken lineage from the past, and which aren't (really) associated with a living ethnic culture.

The Mabinogion is "Welsh", but it's not quite the same as - say - Lukumi being Cuban, or {this particular spiritual cluster} being associated with {that particular indigenous tribe}. I think appropriation matters on a level that's above gesture politics; so, vodou isn't *really* about being Black, or being Haitian, in terms of which box you'd tick on a census.

Instead, it's...is someone sincere and embedded in an authentic culture vs did someone find an orisha on wikipedia and think they look cool and now they do Orisha Crystal Wicca? It's about the consequences of appropriation, which again are more than the symbolic, but about the original culture being overwritten by outsiders who only have a surface-level appreciation of what they think it represents.

In short, although the intra-UK politics of nationality are...a lot more complex than I realised than before I moved to Wales...I don't think they're a good fit for the debates around appropriation. The Mabinogion is half-forgotten, no one has more than a surface-level appreciation of what it might mean; it's not attached to a living spiritual culture in quite the same way. I don't think there's anywhere near as much at stake in British folklore as there is in, say, Native American or African Diaspora folklore.

(Attachment to this belief: ~40%, I've only just drunk my morning's coffee. I'm open to challenges and disagreements on this)

The intent isn't to be critical for no purpose 

More that, it seems like the fear of appropriation is holding you back from doing things, and it might be useful to think about whether this is an effective term to be thinking about.

1.b

"alienating deities from their cultural origins."

I think this is the most significant thing to worry about, and yeah. Something is always lost when something is taken out of context: I think it's a good worry to have. It's a problem in paganism/occult more broadly, especially with things like the Kabbalah and the Tree of Life or Native American Spirit Animals, these are unique cultural phenomena which are actually pretty specific to where they come from - not generic woo woo.

I think most of the socio/cultural/racial implications of appropriation are missing in intra-UK spiritual borrowing, but the spiritual aspects are definitely still valid.

A possible counter argument would be that...we know so little about deities and their cultural origins that, can there really be said to be any meaningful cultural origin to decontextualise them from? We have spirits which are only a name, or a name and an animal, or in the Mabinogion, we have things which are probably gods, but who knows really. Are these cultural origins substantial enough for us to be able to violate them...?

It seems to me that someone doing ancient Welsh polytheism is doing as much guesswork and decontextualisation as you would be borrowing bits for Cornwall.

2. The Forgotten Gods

A lot of what you're talking about is...the things that drew me to defining Fencraft as a path, which reveres in part the forgotteness of British gods, the great mystery of their unrecorded names, the ancient divinity in the landscape which we have always called to - but wordlessly.

These "pan-British" or even "pan-northern-Europe" (drawing in Germanic and Scandinavian stuff) mish mashes happen because so much has genuinely been lost, but there's a longing for there to be something there. But it's clearly ahistorical, and anything in period would have been super local.

I don't think there's a way to get around that; either you need to do more hard research about the local area, beyond neo-pagan resources, or become comfortable with pan-Brit deities, or - what I did - which is lean in to the not-knowingness as a form of Mystery spirituality.

3. It feels to me like you're poised and ready to create your own thing, friend

I think you've got a lot of the elements of your tradition wheeling around, and I want to give you a high five to have courage to create and blend them into something new. I'm really looking forward to reading and following up on anything you discover about the lost gods of Cornwall, and my advice would broadly be to look at local history societies and modern archaology as much as possible, and sort of - work towards becoming the person who writes the Cornish Neopagan Polytheist Reconstructionist handbook.

I was writing about this today for my blog, but the inspiration for Tolkien's Middle Earth came from his sadness that we did not have anything like the mythology of the Greeks, and his longing to *create* such a thing (he had a quasi-spiritual belief about God creating man in his own image, and just as God created the world so man was called to be a "sub-creator", and the creation of imaginary worlds could be an act of Catholic reverence.) That's interesting to me, from a "pop culture paganism" perspective: Tolkien was clearly worried that his make-believe worlds with make-believe gods could be in conflict with his spirituality, and found a way to make them a part of his spiritual expression.

So like, I do think there's something characteristic about British traditional polytheism where that lostness and longing is something we have to actively contend with. And it's maybe better to do that openly, rather than try and paper over the gaps.

I hope some or any of that is useful! What you're gesturing towards sounds really exciting, I have to say.

[PerditaPickle]

Any advice - or a spa day - most welcome.

I can only offer my sympathies, unfortunately.  My own Druidry is largely non-theistic (ehh even that's probably not the correct terminology but terminology is a thing I'm struggling with, so...) -- at least for the moment.

I've always been under the impression that there's a fair degree of overlap with Welsh and Cornish histories, Cornwall and South Wales being so close geographically.  But I honestly don't recall where I gained that impression from so can't point you in the direction of any resources.

Boy am I impressed with that response Haptalaon, and some of that really resonates with me - "the forgotteness of British gods, the great mystery of their unrecorded names, the ancient divinity in the landscape which we have always called to - but wordlessly."  The longing, the not-knowingness.

Food for thought, right there.

[Nymree]

I hope some or any of that is useful! What you're gesturing towards sounds really exciting, I have to say.

This is definitely useful, thank you! I actually feel quite energised by what you've written, maybe I'll keep everyone updated with my reading progress and research on a dedicated blog or something. I don't know, an idea I'm playing with at least.

[Haptalaon]

This is definitely useful, thank you! I actually feel quite energised by what you've written, maybe I'll keep everyone updated with my reading progress and research on a dedicated blog or something. I don't know, an idea I'm playing with at least.

Thank you to you both, kind comments very much made my morning <3

I am absolutely psyched to keep up with what you're reading or a blog if you want to write; lost-British-gods being my focus right now. So yes, if you think it would help your process to do updates, that would be cool.

(I've always found that writing-for-others is a great way to solidify ideas for me, if that makes sense, but I've definitely also found that periods off line have been essential to not...put other people's approval at the center of my process...if that makes any sense at all. Which is very hard with the internet sometimes, to be certain you are acting for you rather than being coerced into this self-branding-self-promotion hustle by the way modern websites are. Yeah. Excited for updates, but also, only if you think that's the best way for your process)