The Celtic Tradition

The Celts were never a single people or a race. They were a family of related languages and ways of life that spread across Iron Age Europe, from Galatia in modern Turkey to Galicia in Spain, and that survive today in the six Celtic nations: Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. Their druids wrote nothing down. What we know of their spiritual world comes from archaeology, from hostile Roman observers, from a magnificent medieval literature written by Christian monks, and from a folk tradition that was still being collected from living memory in the twentieth century.

The Otherworld

The great distinguishing feature of Celtic spirituality is the nearness of the Otherworld. It is not a heaven above the clouds or a hell beneath. It is here, alongside, a turn of the head away. In Irish it is Tír na nÓg, the Land of Youth; Mag Mell, the Plain of Delight; Tír fo Thuinn, the Land under the Wave. In Welsh it is Annwn, the deep place, whose king Arawn swaps places with the mortal Pwyll for a year in the first branch of the Mabinogi. Its people are the Tuatha Dé Danann, the old gods, who after their defeat by the Gaels went to live inside the hills and became the aos sí, the people of the mounds.

You reach it through the mounds, through wells and lakes, across the western sea, through a bank of mist, or simply by stepping off the path on one of the two nights of the year when the doors stand open. Time runs differently there. Oisín spends three years in Tír na nÓg and returns to find three centuries gone. The Otherworld is beautiful, dangerous and generous, and nearly every Celtic tale is about someone going there and coming back changed.

Land, Sea and Sky

Where shamanic cultures worldwide tend to see Three Worlds stacked on a vertical axis, the Celtic sources speak of three realms that meet at every shoreline: the land, the sea and the sky. In the Táin the Ulstermen swear that they will hold their ground “unless the sky fall on us, or the earth open under us, or the sea rise over us.” Gaulish warriors told Alexander the Great they feared nothing but that the sky might fall. The three realms are a cosmology, an oath and a map at once, and the place where they meet, the strand at dawn, is the thinnest place of all.

A further Irish teaching, the early text known as The Cauldron of Poesy, describes three cauldrons within the person: the Cauldron of Warming in the belly, present from birth; the Cauldron of Motion in the heart, turned upright by great joy or sorrow; and the Cauldron of Wisdom in the head, filled only in the few. It is one of the most explicitly inner-world documents to survive from any early European culture.

Druids, Seers and Poets

Caesar describes the druids of Gaul as judges, teachers, philosophers and priests who trained for up to twenty years and taught the immortality and transmigration of the soul. Pliny gives us the picture that has stuck, the druid in white cutting mistletoe from the oak with a golden sickle. We have no druidic text at all, and much of what passes for druid lore today is eighteenth-century invention. But the Irish sources preserve something arguably more interesting: the filidh, the seer-poets, who outlived the druids by centuries and whose training and methods are described in detail.

The file (plural filidh) was more than a poet. He or she was a keeper of genealogy, law and history, a satirist whose words could raise blisters, and a seer. Three methods of seership are named: imbas forosnai, the “great knowledge that illuminates,” in which the poet chewed raw flesh, chanted over the palms, and slept in darkness to receive a vision; teinm laída, the “chewing of the pith,” a kind of illumination by chanting; and díchetal do chennaib, extempore incantation. The king-choosing ritual of the tarbfeis, the bull-sleep, in which a seer ate of a slaughtered bull and slept wrapped in its hide while four druids chanted truth over him, is a trance incubation that would be recognised in Siberia or the Andes.

Shapeshifters and Voyagers

The tales are full of motifs that any student of shamanism will recognise. Tuan mac Cairill, the sole survivor of the first settlement of Ireland, lives on through the ages as a stag, a boar, a hawk and a salmon before he is caught, eaten and reborn as a man who remembers everything. The boy Gwion Bach tastes three drops from Ceridwen’s cauldron, flees her as hare, fish and bird, is swallowed as a grain of wheat and reborn as the poet Taliesin, who then sings “I have been in many shapes.” Fionn burns his thumb on the Salmon of Knowledge and gains wisdom by putting it in his mouth. Cú Chulainn’s battle-frenzy, the ríastrad, turns his body inside out. The mad king Suibhne, cursed at the battle of Mag Rath, grows feathers and lives in the treetops, composing some of the finest nature poetry in Irish.

Then there are the voyages. The immrama, the rowing-about tales, send Bran and Máel Dúin and Brendan west across the sea from island to island, each a station of the Otherworld. The echtrai, the adventures, send heroes like Nera and Cormac into the mounds. Both genres read like journey narratives: a departure from the ordinary, a crossing of a threshold, encounters with helpers and tests, a return with a gift. They are among the earliest journey literature in any European vernacular.

The Sacred in Nature

Trees

Every tribe had its bile, its sacred tree, and Ireland remembered five great ones. The oak (dair) was the tree of the druids and of Brigid’s Kildare, Cill Dara, the church of the oak. The hazel (coll) was the tree of wisdom whose nuts fed the salmon. The rowan (caorthann) protected against enchantment. The yew (iúr) stood for death and endurance, the hawthorn (sceach) for the fairy door, the apple (úll) for the Otherworld itself. The Ogham alphabet, carved on standing stones from the fourth century, was explained by later scholars with tree names for its letters, and remains the written face of this arboreal faith.

Wells and Waters

Ireland alone has some three thousand holy wells. The goddess Boánn walked against the sun around the Well of Segais and its waters rose up and became the river Boyne. Nine hazels grow over the well at the source of all rivers and the salmon in it are wise. Later the wells took the names of saints and the people kept visiting, walking the rounds sunwise, drinking, tying cloths, leaving coins. Lakes, rivers and bogs received swords, cauldrons and gold for a thousand years; the Otherworld was under the water.

Animals

The salmon of wisdom, the stag of the wild hunt and of the antlered god Cernunnos on the Gundestrup cauldron, the boar of valour and of the Otherworld feast, the crane whose skin made Manannán’s bag of treasures, the raven and crow of the Morrígan, the swan into which lovers turn, the hare the witch becomes, the horse of Epona and Rhiannon and Macha, the wolf and the bear whose name the Welsh gave to Arthur. Each is a doorway, and in a journey each may be a guide.

The Powers

The Living Folk Tradition

The druids died out, the filidh lost their patrons, and the old religion became first the saints’ religion and then folklore. But folklore is where a people keeps what matters. In the Hebrides, Alexander Carmichael collected the Carmina Gadelica, hundreds of Gaelic prayers and charms for kindling the fire, milking the cow, smooring the hearth and blessing the journey, in which Brigid and Columba and the elements stand side by side. In Ireland the bean feasa, the wise woman, and the fairy doctor set bones, lifted curses and negotiated with the sí. The fairy faith, documented by Evans-Wentz in 1911 and by the Irish Folklore Commission from 1935, held that the people of the mounds took the young and the beautiful and left changelings in their place, that certain trees and forts must not be touched, and that the dead walked on Samhain night. Keening women, the mná caointe, sang the dead across. Pattern days at the wells drew whole parishes.

This is the tradition at its most shamanic, because it is practical: not a theology but a body of techniques for living safely beside the Otherworld. It is also the tradition that was still alive when the modern revival began, and the one from which a Celtic shamanic practice most honestly draws.