The Celtic identity we often imagine today—complete with Druids, misty highlands, and unified spiritual traditions—was largely reconstructed during the Celtic Revival, especially in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

 

By Driù Peers,

 

Sr. Gryphon, Dharma heir of Rev. Yeshe Tungpa Perks in Celtic Buddhism, has recently published her new book, Drinking While Playing with Matches—the Idiot Servant’s Chela.

I am looking forward to reading it. Perhaps a good time to write a little about the idea and word Celtic, quite apart from its profound teamwork with Buddhism.

‘Celtic’ was never a single unified culture. Modern narratives project unity backwards onto a complex past. Much of what people imagine as Celtic identity emerged much later through romanticism, nationalism, revival movements etc. In other words, over time, diverse cultures became compressed into simplified archetypes.

What I’m suggesting here is that perhaps we can better allow them to remain complex, rather than flattening all into one, even as we use the term ‘Celtic’ for convenience. This is a more animistic and non-religious approach to our our tradition.

It is often an overlooked truth, that the idea of a monolithic Celtic culture be largely a modern-day construct, shaped by 18th and 19th century romanticism, nationalism, and revivalist movements rather than historical reality.

In antiquity, the peoples we now call ‘Celtic’ were not a unified empire or civilization. They were a loose collection of tribes and communities spread across Europe—from Iberia to Anatolia—linked more by linguistic similarities (the Celtic language family) and some shared artistic motifs, notably pottery, than by a single political identity, religion, or centralized culture. Each group had its own customs, gods, social structures, and relationships with the land.

The Celtic identity we often imagine today—complete with Druids, misty highlands, and unified spiritual traditions—was largely reconstructed during the Celtic Revival, especially in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

Writers, poets, and scholars like the Brothers Grimm, Lady Gregory, and W.B. Yeats helped shape a mythos that served emerging national identities, often blending folklore, Christian influences, and ancient myths into a cohesive (but historically inaccurate) narrative.

My suggestion to “allow it to remain complex” is not only historically accurate but also deeply aligned with what many scholars and even some contemporary Celtic practitioners are advocating: a de-romanticized, localized, and animistic engagement with the past. Rather than flattening diverse peoples into a single archetype, we can honour the plurality of their experiences, world-views, and ecological relationships.

This approach resonates with animism—not just as a spiritual practice, but as a way of knowing: seeing the world as full of distinct, sentient beings and histories, each with their own voice. It invites us to listen to the specific landscapes, languages, and traditions of each region—whether it’s the Gauls of France, the Lepontii of the Alps, or the Goidelic speakers of Ireland—without forcing them into a single mould.

We call it Celtic as if it were a single river, when in truth it was a vast archipelago of voices, each island singing its own song to the same sea.

The unity we feel is a mirror, not a monument. It was forged in the hearths of the 19th century, by poets who yearned for a tribe and scholars who sought a flag, compressing the chaotic, vibrant dust of history into a neat, golden archetype. We smoothed the jagged edges of the Gauls and the Boii and the Goidels until they fit the shape of our own longing.

But let us lay down that heavy cloak. Let the past breathe again in its wild, untamed plurality. To honour the Celts is not to find a single face in the fog, but to hear the thousand different winds that once moved through the oak and the mist.

This is a more animistic way: to see the spirit less in a unified symbol, but more in the specific, local heartbeat of the land itself. To let the Druid of the Seine speak a different tongue than the Bard of the Shannon.

To let the complexity remain, a garden of many wild flowers, rather than a single, cultivated rose.

 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

Link to the book:

Drinking While Playing with Matches

Did you like this post? You may also like:

What’s So Different About Celtic Buddhism?

Do Not Try to Become a Buddha by Myozan Ian Kilroy {Book Review}

 

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