Dr Angela Puca: Hello, Symposiasts. I’m Dr Angela Puca, religious studies PhD, and as you know, this is your online resource for the academic study of magic, esotericism, paganism, Shamanism, and all things occult, including the Celts and the Celtic that we will discuss today. But before we dive in with our interview and our special guest, I’d like to remind you that Angela’s Symposium is a crowdfunded project, so if you have the means and want to help this project going, I would really appreciate it if you’d consider supporting my work with a one-time donation, by joining memberships, my Inner Symposium on Patreon. That’s a fantastic community, so I also recommend it for that, and you will find all the links in the info box and in a pinned comment afterwards. Even though I know that YouTube, at the moment, is going to remove the clickable links from the comments, so rely probably on my bio more from the end of August onwards. But yeah, as for now, you will find the links in the info box and also subscribe to my newsletter. You will find a link in the bio; it should be the first one that appears. That’s the way you can be part of my community regardless of what social media platforms do and in utter disregard of all the censorship and all the things you can say or cannot say. So please, join my tribe and sign up for my newsletter, and thank you, Andrew, for moderating the chat. Well, now it’s time to bring our special guests on. Dr Amy Hale, thank you so much for being here with us. How are you today?

Dr Amy Hale: Thank you so much for inviting me to be here, and hello to everyone in the Symposium today. It’s a beautiful day here in Atlanta, Georgia, and I hope it’s beautiful where everybody else is too.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, I think the first time I came across you was at the American Academy of Religion because I think you were sharing the pagan studies unit at the American Academy of Religion. Is that correct? I think it was during the pandemic.

Dr Amy Hale: That is correct. I was the co-chair of the Pagan studies unit for a number of years, and now I’m still technically on the steering committee, and I think for a couple more years yet, but yes, I did do that.

Dr Angela Puca: So, would you mind telling us something about yourself and what it is that you do that you are working on? And obviously, thank you so much for being on the show.

Dr Amy Hale: This is great, and it’s good to meet with you and with everybody on your Symposium team. So I’m Dr Amy Hale; I have a PhD in folklore and mythology from UCLA, which is a cool degree, but unfortunately, you cannot get one at UCLA anymore. I am currently what is known as an independent researcher, so although I do have an affiliation coming up that I can’t share yet, I am unaffiliated. I did my doctoral work on Cornwall and contemporary Celtic identities in Cornwall back in the late 90s. I kind of was comparing and contrasting Cornish ethnonationalism and identity, kind of Cornish identity politics, and Cornish identity with people who were coming into Cornwall mostly for spiritual reasons. So you know, kind of spiritual Celticism. This is kind of comparing and contrasting the history of those two in Cornwall. And I’ve been interested in and working around Cornwall and Cornishness since the mid-90s.

During that time, I became interested in a surrealist who made an occultist, a female occultist, who made her home in Cornwall for 40 years called Ithell Colquhoun, so I worked on her material for 20 years, and in 2020 I did a biography of her called Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, just as the interest in Magic and art and women was kind of starting to take off. So I’ve written extensively on Colquhoun. I’ve got a couple of other projects that I’m working on related to Colquhoun right now. I was also the editor of a wonderful volume called Women in Western Esotericism that was out in 2022 with Paul Grave. But right now, I do a lot of work on art. I do a lot of writing on art, I do a lot of gallery work and commissions in addition to writing books on magic and art and women in Cornwall, in various combinations, as I like to say.

Dr Angela Puca: That’s very interesting, and people should really follow your Instagram and your work. You will also find all the links and contact details in the info box. So the first question, let’s crack on, and what do you think are or are the biggest misconceptions about the Celts and the Celtic culture? Because it’s something that is quite a hot topic among pagans. It seems like pagans tend to gravitate a lot towards Celtic spirituality and Celtic paganism. So what do you think are the biggest misconceptions about the Celts and the Celtic?

Dr Amy Hale: Well, you know, I can kind of share some of what happened in my own experience there in terms of understanding and unpacking what Celtic means because when I was a teenager back in the 80s, I loved all things Celtic, and we didn’t really have a lot of the, you know, material, a lot of the popular books on Celticism and Celtic magic that you can find today. But what there were, were a lot of reprints of people who were, you know, reprinting kind of cheap 19th-century folklore about the Celts, about Arthurian Legend, and this idea of this kind of mystical Celtic culture that went all the way in the back and was, you know, there from time immemorial. And this idea that, you know, of course, I was also really into at the time, The Mists of Avalon, which was a really, really important book for a lot of people in the 80s, but it also had this particular; it was drawing on a lot of particularly popular ideas about the Celts and, you know, romantic ideas about Celtic religion and Celtic spirituality.

And so when I went to college, I wanted to find out what the roots of the Celts were because I had this feeling that they came from the dawn of time and that there was clearly some really important magic that was there if you could only find what the roots of the Celts were. I kind of went on this journey of trying to study that, and when I was an undergraduate, I started really looking at the archaeological history in particular and also some of the politics and history surrounding how the term “Celtic” was used. And I realized, and it was this moment of crisis for me, I realized that the story that we had been told about the Celts being this coherent monolithic culture that was in some way consistent across Europe back into the Bronze Age that it was not true; in fact it was diverse, it was fragmented, and in fact, there was some kind of disagreement about how the term Celtic could even be used accurately historically. Does it refer to a family of languages? Does it refer to distinctive material culture or some sort of blending of them? I think there’s a lot of what we see today that is branded as Celtic magic or Celtic spirituality that is drawing from much older conceptions of what Celtic means, drawing on again 19th-century folklore texts that might have been ideologically driven in one way or another. The idea that we know what the Celts did, what they believed, what they practised, we really don’t know, and so there’s a lot of creative invention that comes into a lot of these books, which are sometimes frequently not using the best, most up-to-date understanding of how the term “Celtic” is used in various historical contexts. But I just want to make it really clear that material and those conversations among scholars are really not easily accessible, or not—sorry—not acceptable; they’re not accessible to most people.

Dr Angela Puca: I’m sure some people may also find that unacceptable.

Dr Amy Hale: Yeah, that was a Freudian slip. Because it’s true that a lot of people would also not find them acceptable, but they’re not readily accessible to a lot of people for probable reasons that you’ve discussed, you know, the difficulty of academia making material public and accessible. So many of these conversations about how we historically understand the word “Celtic” and the complexities there, people don’t know where to go. I think it’s certainly better now, but it’s still not easy, so you know, I don’t blame anybody for getting a bunch of bad information because, you know, when I was 16, I had a bunch of bad information, and frankly, the bad information is really sexy. It’s really interesting, it’s really deeply, deeply compelling, it tells a very deeply compelling story, so I think that’s one of the places that I would start. In terms of misconceptions, that Celtic is monolithic, that we know or that we understand a lot about what would be considered ancient practices.

Also, a thing that I would want to stress to people, maybe before even going into the variations of how the term “Celtic” is used, is that a lot of what people look at as Celtic myth is medieval stories that were written down in a Christian context, and sometimes we can do the work and say, “Well, maybe those were deities, maybe that hints at practice,” but we don’t know for sure because we don’t have written records of what was happening in pre-Christian Celtic areas. We don’t know for sure, so I think that there’s a lot of guesswork that happens, and I think there are a lot of people who look at that medieval material and want to project backwards in this way where they seem very certain about it, but in fact, we don’t know. Like we don’t know who a lot of those figures are; we don’t know how, if they were deities, how they would have been worshipped, and so I caution people when they’re looking at that material to understand the historical context in which those were originally written and then the contexts later on in which Celtic mythology and Celtic medieval tales were written about, particularly in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, absolutely. And what about the Celts, since people in the chat like Ray are bringing that up?

Dr Amy Hale: So, what about the term “Celtic”?

Dr Angela Puca: I was thinking about the Celtic people, the Celts.

Dr Amy Hale: So, in a modern sense, we—the Celts—and I’ve seen that somebody else had said something about the Gauls and the Gaulish, so you know, the degree to which those terms are interchangeable, you know, those are, there are a lot of what we consider Celtic tribal names. The contemporary Celts, the modern Celts, are considered to be in Scotland, Ireland, Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, and Galicia, and then, of course, there are a number of people on the European continent who feel or express they’ve got some sort of Celtic identity, maybe based in language, maybe based in material culture, maybe based in a whole bunch of other things. Those are considered the modern Celtic nations, and the term “Celtic” as an ethnonym is actually, in many ways, a very modern term. You know, back in the day, the degree to which people in the Iron Age would have been calling themselves Celts in any unified sense, we know the term came from the Greek “keltoi,” which was a term of othering at the time to some degree or another, and a lot of these terms have, and certainly, today, have this sense of othering kind of within it. So people didn’t really, weren’t universally calling themselves Celts, really until we start getting the explorations into Celtic language and language studies in the 17th century, mostly 17th and early 18th century.

This is when people were trying to classify everything; you know, kind of early, earliest sciences were emerging, where everyone was trying to put things in boxes and create family trees, and so the earliest linguistic studies everything in boxes and create family trees and so the earliest linguistic studies were of Celtic languages to kind of help to create this category of Celtic. And so today, Scholars, like strict scholars in Celtic studies, will say that Celt and Celtic only refer to a family of languages, but the problem is, when that term was kind of initiated to describe this linguistic group, it had connotations of race and culture as well so it wasn’t just that a person might have spoken Irish or Welsh, it was that they also maybe had certain racial characteristics because that was language and understanding that was common at the time. So there were these entire categories where today we disambiguate those terms; we understand that just because you speak a particular language doesn’t mean you have any kind of cultural inheritance or behavioural proclivities. But as the term Celtic developed, certain things were associated with being Celtic, and many of those come out of it, which is really important in a colonial context. Because all of those areas that I had mentioned were colonized, they were colonized by the English, by the French, by other people, and so you get this ethnonym which is essentially modern that is describing these conditions of disparity, of colonialism and the way that Celts were characterized, and you certainly see this really strongly in the 19th century, tended to be as people who couldn’t take care of themselves because they were always portrayed in a lot of ethnographic writing as a little bit backward and spiritual, closer to the earth, closer to nature.

A lot of these concepts were also very, at the time, feminized. So you kind of have these peoples who were being described this way often as a justification for colonial activity, “well they can’t take care of themselves so somebody’s got to step in and and and you know kind of help them to rule their own countries.” But from this, you end up getting these characteristics that get associated with Celtic peoples, and this is why when you talk about Celtic ethnic identity historically, you are always talking about the development of ideas of spiritual concepts, particularly in Britain and the places that were colonized by Britain early such as you know obviously Ireland and Wales. These concepts grow together historically as we’re understanding the modern use of the term Celtic because these peoples, who spoke these particular languages, were seen to have particular spiritual capabilities, and those end up being developed, and we end up getting this idea of Celtic spirituality – a distinctive frequently nativist Celtic spirituality that develops out of the use of that term. I know that’s kind of complicated. Did that make sense?

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, absolutely. I was thinking that it actually reminds me of a pattern that I’ve seen with other types of traditions as well, like, for instance, with the Native Americans. So they start to be seen as, you know, the backwardly savage, not civilized, and then end up being seen as the epitome of spirituality because they are somewhat closer to nature. So I find it interesting how you see this pattern quite frequently. So while you were explaining this very interesting facet, I was just going through my mind, it’s like, “Oh, I can’t see this pattern happening with other traditions as well.” So it’s kind of interesting. I mean, why do people that are initially seen as backwardly and uncivilized, and how do they move from being heroes of spiritual awakening and spirituality? Yeah.

Dr Amy Hale: So you’re asking like, why does that happen?

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah.

Dr Amy Hale: Well, I think that a lot of it happens in the particular distinction between that which is considered rational and that which is considered irrational.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, so it’s a glorification of the irrational in a way.

Dr Amy Hale: Oh, absolutely, and you know, we see a lot of this really emerging obviously with the rise of the Romantic Movement and with romantic nationalism where a lot of these categories end up being reified as something which has substance in a very essentialist way. We can also look at how women were considered more spiritual beings. You know, women are more spiritual; therefore, they can channel more easily, you know, they’re dreamier, they’re closer to nature. All of these categories have this kind of binary opposition to them, so you get all of these colonized groups in kind of a lump that ends up being treated the same way and given the same virtues. And a lot of it has to do with discourses of rationality and irrationality.

So there are some groups that have it, and you know, it’s cool for them to be on top of the pile, right? Like your white Anglo-Saxon man who gets to do the ruling because they clearly have the rationality. And it kind of sounds like almost a lot of that is baked into the assumptions of how power structures work today. I mean, we know that, but if you look particularly at the writings of Matthew Arnold, who wrote “On Celtic Literatures” in the 19th century, he was a British scholar who was really credited with popularizing and valorizing the Celts, as you know, kind of the literary genius of the Welsh and the Irish. But if you read Matthew Arnold on Celtic literature, the weird kind of awful explicit racist stuff in there about the Celtic mind and the Anglo-Saxon mind, it’s shocking because normally, we don’t talk about things in terms like that today. But if we’re really wanting to understand the roots of how Celtic peoples get seen in the way that they do, seeing that kind of writing and how it emerged as people from particularly the English centre, were understanding these areas as colonized areas and as areas that were socially and culturally inferior, I think it puts the term “Celtic” in a very different context. And that’s kind of the root of my own approach to it when you know, I see the term Celtic primarily as something which comes out of a past having to do with colonization. I see it as a social justice term now. I see it as basically something that the biggest shared experience of Celtic peoples is not so much in their, you know, this idea of a spiritualized past; it’s really in a shared condition of structural inequality.

Dr Angela Puca: Can you elaborate more on the latter part of the structure and politics?

Dr Amy Hale: Sure. All of the areas considered among the modern Celtic Nations today were subject to colonization. The people who spoke Celtic languages and who still speak them today were considered to be of a lower class. The languages themselves were, I don’t know, the word I’m looking for; they were they attempted to eradicate them, which is why we have Celtic language revivals today because those areas were eradicated in terms of local language use. So these areas also tended to be poorer. They were not areas with a lot of economic development, and these features still exist in Celtic-speaking areas today. You know, my field site Cornwall has consistently been one of the poorest regions of Europe ever since mining declined in the 19th century. Used to be very wealthy and a very wealthy part of Britain. Cornwall today has not been well served in terms of economic development because people tend to see Cornwall as part of this romantic Celtic periphery, that you know, it’s really beautiful; maybe it’s okay if we keep it a little bit backward; maybe not develop it in the way that we can because it ends up being a tourist playground for rich people rather than a place that has any kind of sustained development in it, which is another thing that you tend to see in Celtic areas.

The economic development pattern in many of those areas, not all, it’s very spotty, but it has kind of suffered from a sense of romantic… I don’t know; it’s more that they’re seen as areas that are filled more with romantic beauty and authentic culture rather than places filled with modern contemporary people who want to live modern contemporary lives. And that’s from the view from the centre rather than what is typically called the Celtic periphery. So yeah, I’m interested in terms of looking at it as a social justice term in terms of economic development and what are the things that really connect the Celtic peoples together today. And it’s not so much that they have a similar culture because each Celtic Nation is very different. They’ve had different histories; they have different cultures, different traditions, different values. And so there’s a lot of diversity in the Celtic world. You know, I think there’s also this tendency to try to, especially when looking at the medieval literature, to try to have these kinds of overarching pantheons and overarching Celtic themes, but you know, each Celtic Nation, each Celtic people is different, and even within Celtic areas, there are distinctions. And I think it’s important to remember that there’s this variety in this diversity, but one thing that absolutely links them is a history of colonization.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, absolutely, and Andrew was saying where there is a lack of historical evidence, there is a need to mythologize, which is very useful and necessary.

Dr Amy Hale: Well, yeah, I think that it depends on what you mean by useful and necessary. I think it’s useful and necessary in the sense that mythologizing in that way can certainly be a way to bring people together and inspire people. But when the mythologizing supplants the historical truths, I think we may want to reconsider how that is done. And I think the question is, what is the context for the mythologization?

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, and I guess it also depends on whether the mythologization is meant to supplant history or whether it’s meant to be a mythology. So I think the problem only arises when mythology is presented as history. Whereas when mythology is presented as mythology, then I think that it is something that’s quite poetic and can be a way of meaning-making for people.

Dr Amy Hale: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you want to look at, and this is just completely, you know, sort of jumping to another topic, yet not totally unrelated, but if you want to look at the way that a lot of pagans today, or you know, particularly Wiccans or eclectic Wiccans, might look at what they would consider being an origin myth, and how you would talk about that in inspirational terms while still trying to understand the actual histories of those traditions, and how they developed particularly in the 20th century, I think that there are things that can suitably inspire in an imaginal way. But again, when it supplants our actual understanding of history and what we need to know about history in order to get people where they want to be in terms of self-determination because I think that’s something else that’s really important in looking at how Celtic peoples see themselves today, self-determination is really important, and you know, if we’re clouding that in any way by mythologizing efforts, then maybe it’s not as helpful.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, it can become a problem. So to summarize, then, what do we really know about the Celts and the Celtic spirituality? If anything, you said there’s, well, we know that there’s a lack of historical evidence, but I want to know, based on your research, is there anything conclusive, historically speaking, about what the Celts were doing and what Celtic people were practising in terms of their religion and spirituality?

Dr Amy Hale: So it’s really interesting the way that you phrase that, and it’s not an uncommon phrasing of that.

Dr Angela Puca: I know it’s monolithic, and wanted to raise that. Yeah, that’s why I phrased my question in that way. Is it the way people would phrase it probably?

Dr Amy Hale: The thing that’s interesting about it is that when people talk about Celtic spirituality, or what did the Celts do, it automatically situates that term in the past, in a pre-Christian context. So the idea that the Celts were perhaps most authentically ancient, pre-Christian, it’s like, well, you know, so what is Celtic spirituality? A lot of people in Cornwall and Wales would say, well, we’re Methodists, or we’re Anglican, or in Ireland, we’re Catholic, or actually in Cornwall could also be, we’re Buddhist, or we’re pagan. So there’s this situating of the term “Celtic” in this kind of weird, romantic, pre-Christian miasma that we don’t know anything about again. But I think it’s also important to ask to what degree is that relevant to the contemporary spiritualities of people who identify as Celts today, and just keep in mind when we’re looking at that, and we’re asking questions about supposed continuity and ideas of authenticity, where do we historically locate the Celts? And most people want to locate them in this pre-Christian age in the past.

Dr Angela Puca: As early as they possibly can.

Dr Amy Hale: That’s why, right, and a lot of our ideas about that, and about what the Druids did, actually came out of early Anglicans and Unitarians in the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries, [cough] excuse me, who was writing about Druids, kind of in this way, trying to mirror their own time and politics and ideas about spirituality where either the Druids were the super goodies or the super baddies or the proto-patriarchs. Yeah, that’s kind of one of my favourites, was the ancient Druids; they were actually just Christians without the Christ because they didn’t really know about Christ yet until he came to Britain, and then the Druids, you know, that’s how they end up being the Patriarchs. So they’re all these really, you know, the Druids are this great kind of foil for whatever is happening historically, [cough] excuse me. But what do we know about what they actually did? Not much. We can say that they probably, pretty certainly, did divination through sacrifice, mostly probably through animal sacrifice. They probably did a lot of entrail readings; we know that. We can also probably suppose with some level of certainty that they had oracular traditions. That, and certainly we know this to be the case in the medieval period in Wales particularly, but also in Ireland, that satire, that poetry, ideas of sacred speech, in particular, were seen as oracular, and that they were very important, and they continued to be important for some time. These are things that we can probably safely assume. We can probably also safely assume that they had deities, that they had localized deities. We don’t know what the nature of them necessarily is. We don’t know if there was a big pantheon. Or, more than likely, they were localized or maybe a combination of both, as we find elsewhere, as in Greece and Rome.

So, these are things that are probably pretty decent guesses. They probably had ideas of ritual deposits, so people would throw their stuff into lakes, bogs, and streams. We can probably assume that from that, they believed that — and this is something that I heard an archaeologist talk about recently that I think was really cool — they may very well have believed that their most precious items had some sort of animistic force to them, or that they related to them as beings in their own right. So, these are just some bits and pieces of things that we can look at. And I’m really careful when I talk about the medieval literature and trying to, you know, drop ritual or practice out of it because I think that it’s so many hundreds of years later and in such a different context that I feel really uncomfortable in making some of those generalizations. But I think there are some things that we can say, yeah, probably these are some things. I think knowing that the poetic tradition was so important, and knowing how important words were, and putting words together in the right way and the power that they had; we know this from certainly the medieval traditions in Ireland and Wales. But you know, what happened in Cornwall? What happened in Brittany, where we don’t have quite the amount of medieval literature that we do in these areas? What happened in Scotland? What happened in the parts of England where they spoke Celtic languages until relatively late? We don’t necessarily know; we don’t really know, so there’s, again, a lot of guesswork that goes into it.

Dr Angela Puca: “Yeah, and also I think I was also thinking that asking what is Celtic spirituality, and what did the Celts do, is also assuming that it is one monolithic population or one monolithic culture, and as we said earlier, that’s not the case. And that’s one of the misconceptions about Celtic people and chaotic spirituality, that it is not something monolithic.”

Dr Amy Hale: “Yeah, it’s, you know, I like to give this analogy that if I speak French, that would not make me French. I would be an American who spoke French.”

Dr Angela Puca: “Like I’m not English, for instance, you have an example right here.”

Dr Amy Hale: “Right, and if just because somebody in Mexico speaks Spanish, that does not mean that they are from Spain. So, you know, but we tend to forget that. We don’t tend to think about the realities of the way that language and material culture move. So, like, if you look at, say, the La Tène culture, which is one of the earliest — like La Tène and Hallstatt are kind of known as being the earliest, kind of identifiable Celtic forms of material culture and design, you can look at how those spread. And I’m not up on the archaeology there; for a while, it was being thought that those were elite cultures, that you know, elite cultural forms that moved through, and people want to make these huge generalizations about what it means to have something that has that design. People really want, ‘Oh well, you know, there’s kind of proto-knot work in there, so that knot work must be deities or a special language.’ I’m like, ‘or no, no, no, if I’m in China, and I find a Coke can, what exactly does that mean?’ We can say a lot of things about what that can mean, but we can also say there’s a lot of stuff that it doesn’t mean. And I like to take the approach that just because a thing is in a place, and just because there are a whole bunch of things maybe in that place, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s got any particular spiritual significance to it. It might, but it also might not. So yeah, sometimes I see the wildest things, like the whole idea where people are, and I’ve seen this quite a bit, where people are trying to turn Celtic knotwork into this crazy magical language, and it’s just, you know, and attribute deities to it. I’m like, ‘Well, that’s super interesting, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that. That’s cool if that’s a thing that works for you. I’m just saying know that there’s probably not any historical evidence that that was a thing.'”

Dr Angela Puca: “Yeah, that’s something that I often tell my audience as well because I think that academic scholarship proves over and over, especially in the realm of paganism, but more generally probably, the things that people believe to be historical are not actually historical. I recently made a video and a lecture for my patrons on Robert Graves and the concepts of the triple goddess, and that’s also something that a lot of people in the Pagan Community or magic practitioners are not really aware that it is a very modern, yeah, construct, and it’s not historical. So I think that it’s important also to highlight, and it is something that I do over and over with my audience, that and the same goes for perennialism, which is very popular among practitioners, the idea that you know everything, all the differences in cultures have you know, underlie one truth that is independent of the history and independent of the culture. This is something that a lot of practitioners believe, and a lot of pagans also believe, and if it works for you in your spiritual practice, you know, I could say any, I really cannot say anything about it. I mean, if it works for you, works for you, spirituality and religion are about meaning-making, and I think that it’s part of your path.

The problem starts when people want to claim that what works for them spiritually and religiously is the truth and a historical fact, and this runs into many problems both in terms of the, you know, becoming delusional about what is what actually happened, but also politically, because I feel that when people want to claim that what works for them, for their religiosity and their spirituality, is the truth, is the historical fact, then it becomes the truth in a metaphysical and in a physical sense, where those who do not follow that are in the wrong and need to be converted, or you know, they’re also worst-case scenarios with you know, with that, following that logic. So I think that it’s important to maintain a difference, and it’s not necessary that what works for you and what you believe is backed by history, but it’s important that you, that you acknowledge the difference to acknowledge the fact that if you have a vision, and Athena appears to you and says ‘I and Isis are one,’ and that works for you, and then you start using that in your altar, and your rituals, and it works for your spiritual path, that’s fantastic, but that doesn’t go on and claim that Isis and Athena are the same deity, because that is not historically correct. So I think the problem really only starts when people tend to conflate things, and a part of it, I think, is because people want validation, and it’s a seek for validation. But that is something that I think the community of practitioners should work on that validation is not something that should be sought after that way by manipulating history.

Dr Amy Hale: Yeah, I was actually gonna bring this up. That, and this kind of moves into one reason why we’re seeing, maybe, another uptick in interest in Celtic things. First of all, this idea of legitimation and also authority. Like when you’re Pagan or involved in magical religions or magical practice, the idea of authority and legitimacy is very much, I think, wrapped up for people in “are they doing it right? Do they have the right to do it? And is it going to work?” So for a lot of people, this idea of lineage, either within a group or just the idea of cultural lineage, something that makes them feel like they have support in their practice, is an important question to ask. So it’s okay. So where do you see the authority in your practice coming from? Is the authority coming from the idea that Celts 2000 years ago did this, and so that makes it okay? Or is it that the authority comes from your own experience or from being able to build on something? Or does the authority come from whoever the perhaps founder of your particular path is? And this ends up getting wrapped up in these ideas of how do we if we’re asking questions about what is the authority and power behind somebody’s practice, then this idea of looking at supposed Celtic continuity can really be challenging for people if, for them, the power and authority is in that form of continuity.

And I think for a lot of people today, certainly in the United States where there are concerns and issues about appropriation and who gets to do what, that for a lot of white people in the United States who may have family backgrounds in areas that are Celtic, it feels to them safe. I think it feels like it’s an appropriate thing they can be doing because they feel, “Well, at least I’m on safe grounds with doing this thing that maybe my family might have had some roots in.” But then we can start asking uncomfortable questions about appropriation there too. Just because my family was from Scotland at some point in its past, I’m not Scottish, I’m American. I don’t have the lived experience of somebody who is in Scotland. So on what grounds do I get to claim that as something that is authentically mine? And I think that’s a real question to ask. And for people who are interested in matters of Celtic spirituality, I always ask them to engage with contemporary peoples who are living there, understand modern history, understand the modern struggles and challenges that people in those areas are facing, and understand that you may not have a right to that material in the way that you think that you do, which a lot of people, that’s painful for them to hear, because then they don’t know where to go, right?

Dr Angela Puca: I find that this is something that is specific to America. In my view, I find that Americans and North Americans tend to have this idea that their DNA is their culture, and I find it interesting, but yeah, because I don’t see how you can equate DNA with culture. Culture, by definition, is something that you live and breathe.

Dr Amy Hale: And people don’t know that. Over here, and I think in a lot of places, people don’t know that. People are still using an old model.

Dr Angela Puca: 19th century.

Dr Amy Hale: That culture is carried in our blood. They still use that…

Dr Angela Puca: This is very dangerous and was used by certain politicians that didn’t do very nice things in history.

Dr Amy Hale: No, it’s absolutely true, but it’s a very popular notion. I wrote this rant essay that I’ve never published anywhere, but maybe I will release it at some point. But it was about a commercial over here for one of those genealogy companies, and I don’t know if those are getting popular over in Britain, but it was one of these genealogy companies, and they had this, it was for Father’s Day, and they were trying to sell this genealogy package for Father’s Day. And there was this image of a dad who’s a really good dancer and one who was a really good storyteller, and the ad said, “Wow, is he a really good storyteller because he came from South America?” And I was like, “Whoa, okay, now that’s a problem.” And we’re still selling that model, and people love it. People really find meaning in that, even though folklore and anthropologists know that’s not how culture works. Culture works in all these other ways, it’s transmitted, but people really want to believe that this stuff is part of their genetic inheritance. And I feel like it’s on us as anthropologists and folklorists to publicly engage with these ideas and say, “No, no, it’s that’s not right, and it’s a problem.”

Dr Angela Puca: In what ways do you think that it’s problematic?

Dr Amy Hale: Well, I think it’s problematic because, well, first of all, as we were saying, it doesn’t work that way. Culture is something that is always alive; it’s always transmitted, and it is always changing. Do you get it from your family? Yes, but you also get it from everything that’s around you. And I think it essentializes culture in an exclusionary and not helpful way. And as you were alluding to, politicians who try to play that card of essentialist culture, that level, that kind of exclusion, tends to take people down a “Blood and Soil” road that I don’t want to go down.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, I agree, but as I said, I find that this is a view that is particularly prevalent in, in my experience, it’s particularly apparent in the U.S. and in North America. So, I wonder if it is because it’s a new country, and people feel like they don’t have roots there and because the people that were there were people that have been colonized. So, I wonder whether there is a sense of reconnecting with your heritage and not seeing yourself just as, you know, somebody in somebody’s land. So, in a way, I can see that also in a positive way in that sense, but at the same time, it’s still important, I think, to acknowledge that culture is not in your genes.

Dr Amy Hale: You know, I think maybe if we had different ways of being okay with and looking at our relation to culture, and transmission, and hybridity, and change, that maybe we would feel a little bit less angsty about this idea that we have no heritage because it’s, I mean, it’s not, it’s certainly not true, and it’s we’re not that new a country, we’ve been around for, you know, good, we’ve had— I mean, there have been people on this continent forever, and, you know, it’s again, it’s what is it? What does it mean by “we’re a new country” in terms of the political experiment, or a few hundred years old, and, you know, white colonial settlers did terrible, terrible things that we do have to reckon with, and that we, some of us anyway, are working at reckoning with. But I think if we maybe tried to look at, I mean, in the States, like you’ve got ideas of regional culture which I think are a lot more accessible for people, so, you know, I’m from the Midwest, I’m from the South, I’m from the Northeast, I’m from New England. I think those are aspects of culture in the U.S. that are very, very tangible, rather than, you know, this idea of national culture, or ideas of heritage, where people tend to feel lost and unrooted, and I wish that we could do something to change that narrative so that people were not feeling that way because I don’t think that really great impulses come from that, and I wish that we could find some sort of healing around that for people.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, I can totally see that, but going back to the topic so that we don’t —

Dr Amy Hale: Yes, we’ve kind of flown off the Celtic track here.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, but I, it’s a topic that interests me as well, so I kind of have to refrain myself going on that rabbit hole because I would have so many things to say on that, probably for another episode.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, but I, it’s a topic that interests me as well, so I kind of have to refrain myself going on that rabbit hole because I would have so many things to say on that, probably for another episode.

Dr Amy Hale: Well, I just want to kind of break in and say it’s difficult because all the stuff that we’ve just been talking about is part of the context in which we understand the term, in which popular understandings of things that are Celtic arise, both politically and spiritually, so the questions that we’ve just been talking about—people go to Celtic for their answers, and they create things that are Celtic from those questions, so it’s not like it’s not relevant, it’s just the stuff we’re talking about is kind of the soup in which Celtic and issues of celticity often sits.

Dr Angela Puca: And what do you think Celtic spirituality became so popular among pagans and magic practitioners? You mentioned already that it is linked to colonialism and is linked to seeing the Celtic people, first of all, as a monolith, and they are not because it’s more of a linguistic family, and the people were actually pretty different from each other, and we don’t know much about what they were actually doing, and the fact that they’ve become associated with the idea of being nature-worshipping, linked to nature, and particularly having this particular proclivity, is linked to the fact to the binary, the dichotomy between rational and irrational, so they were being seen as the irrational people, and then there was a romanticization of that thing. Okay, they are rational, but they are the haven where we should go to reconnect with nature because we have lost that, so there’s this interesting dichotomy where the people that had the most power, they would see themselves as the rational people, but at the same time, there was the itch, you know, to scratch towards the rational, the spiritual, and when they had to go there, they would go to the people that were being seen as irrational. Now, now that we have clarified that, and as I mentioned earlier, I think that this has happened, and it’s probably a pattern that happens with a few different cultures that have been colonized, and then they become the pinnacle of spirituality because of the dichotomy that creates, but I was wondering why celticism particularly has become so popular among pagans. Why do you think that is?

Dr Amy Hale: Well, first, I’d like to congratulate you on an excellent summary of my argument. Well done!

Dr Angela Puca: Oh, thank you.

Dr Amy Hale: I think that the idea of Celtic spirituality and how it kind of gets into contemporary paganism, in my opinion, is very tied up with a lot of the counter-cultural, nativist spirituality that you start getting in Britain in the late 19th century. So I mean the Druids, of course, were kind of much earlier than that, kind of seen as this really wonderful Proto-like, all British way of—how do I describe this? There’s, like, back in the 18th century, the Druids were kind of the great unifiers of British history, and they were the Celtic substrate that tied everybody together. And one is more Celtic than a druid in a stone circle, and those are things that, you know, all British people can relate to because we’re all Britain’s at heart, right? So that means that we all have a Celtic inheritance. So the Druid was kind of emblematic of these ideas about ancient British Celtic spirituality that, you know, all these things were kind of projected onto the Druid in the early modern period anyway. But so that was there; that was, you know, very much floating around the antiquarian and folklore sphere, but then in the 19th century, in particular, you know, if we’re talking about [cough] excuse me, the developments of contemporary paganism, you start getting this nativist pushback on Theosophy in particular, and you get people like Lewis Spence who’s, I think, one of the founders of the SNP, a really, really interesting character. I feel like not enough has been written about Lewis Spence, but Lewis Spence wrote this whole tract about the Druids as being this—why are we doing all of this other Indian stuff? Why are we doing all this? This is not native British stuff. The Druids, this is what we need to go back to.

And drawing on things, you know, drawing on the text of Iolo Morganwg and Edward Williams, who was very, very important in the Welsh language movement, one of the founders of the Gorsedd, and drawing on some of those texts, which were forged—let’s say forged isn’t the right word—creative. I like to think that Iolo Morganwg’s material was creative but really inspired contemporary Druidry. So, and people didn’t know that he was kind of, you know, embellishing his ideas of ancient druidic ritual, you know. He kind of gave a number of texts that people could run with. So folks like Louis Spence and others were like, “What, you know, why aren’t we using this stuff? Why aren’t we doing these native things instead, drawn from ancient Celtic traditions?” And then, as you start getting into the 20th century, as you start getting into the Counter Culture, and gosh, it’s kind of want to hop back into 19th-century folklore where people were also trying to project things onto King Arthur and trying to create this idea of an ancient Celtic Pantheon. And again, doing all of this reading into Celtic mythology. So, during this period, we’re kind of getting like all of the ways in which, in the 1960s and 70s, pagans, British pagans, and American pagans are actually able to draw on these sources for things that they can use in trying to rebuild a paganism that they believe is actually ancient and Celtic.

So, you’re getting the tools and the ideas from the late 19th century, and so, you know, you’ve got Arthur as solar guide, you’ve got the Druid as the kind of archetypal pre-Christian Celtic priest. And hey, maybe all the figures from the Mabinogi were actually deities, and you know, maybe we should figure out how to work those into practice. And so, you start getting people who want to actually reach back and have a pre-Christian Celtic experience, and so they’re drawing on these often creatively inspired texts from the 19th century to create this and to kind of hop over a lot of Britain’s Christian past. And so there’s, I think, a lot of it comes out of a nativist enterprise and the idea that we’re doing something that is authentically Celtic in Britain, where we have that inheritance. I think that that’s where it comes from.

Obviously, it’s a much more complex story than that because there are a whole bunch of strands of how that happens and how that comes through. But you know, kind of as you alluded to, the relationship between that and particularly ideas of sacred landscape, which is another thing that we don’t maybe have a whole bunch of time to go into, but it’s really foundational to how people received ideas of Celtic spirituality and still, you know, still is. I think that for a lot of British people, for whom that is very much part of their lived experience, it has a different resonance today than it does for particularly American pagans, North American pagans, who are more inspired by ideas of cultural inheritance and heritage. It’s kind of a short version because so many strands come together to create this interest in Celtic paganism and why that happens.

Dr Angela Puca: That’s an interesting take, and I see that happening in Italy as well. The fact that pagans, and some among Pagan communities, there’s… so I would say that, for instance, in the Italian landscape, you have the gateway to paganism was Wicca because Wicca was very eclectic, and especially the Wicca that came to Italy is the one that was developed in the U.S rather than the one that came from Britain, for some reason, which is interesting because Britain is much closer geographically. But the type of paganism that developed in Italy was much more inspired by the American Wicca, and that’s kind of the Gateway for pagans. And then they tend to go into some of them, at least, want to discover the Heritage, their roots, and so you find that in southern Italy, you have Hellenistic reconstructivists, in the Midlands, you have the Roman reconstructivist, and in Northern Italy, you have chaotic spirituality, Celtic festivals, and a lot of things. That’s my best friend, in fact, who lives in Northern Italy, well sort of Midlands bordering Northern Italy, in Tuscany, and he often mentions the Celtic Festival, where it’s kind of an esoteric fair in a way, but it’s called Celtic Festival, and it’s something that is much more prevalent in Northern Italy compared to southern Italy, for instance, or the Midlands.

So yeah, I think that it seems to be the case that in Pagan communities, there is this search for your own Pagan Heritage, like what was here before the Christians, or what was here that was not Christian, that I can reconnect with. So I think that I see that tendency in Italy as well.

Dr Amy Hale: Yeah, I understand that there are a number of people in Northern Italy who feel very much attached to ideas of Celtic history and heritage. So yeah, that’s correct.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, and also, you have the OBOD in Italy, that is also located in the North, and there are other druidic communities in Italy; they are all in the north.

Dr Amy Hale: Right, oh, that’s interesting.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, it seems like, you know, that it’s not like Pagan more generally, like eclectic pagans and eclectic Wiccans tend to see the fascination with Celtic spirituality. But more generally, you know, as something that is, this is going to give me a hint of what connection with nature looks like, and it can help me with that. So similar to the appeal that Native American spirituality now has, perhaps 10 years ago, it was more the Celtic that was having that kind of role, more generally speaking, in the practising communities. But yeah, definitely in Italy, I can see that the north tends to see the Celtic spirituality as something more linked to their heritage.

Dr Amy Hale: I think another facet is publications again, not just from the 19th century but also well into the 20th century, suggesting that the Celts had either a matriarchal system, which is absolutely not true.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, I have a video on that, on the idea of the primordial mother goddess, oh, and how that was created and really sort of helped the development of paganism, but that is not historically true. Sorry, go on.

Dr Amy Hale: No, that’s, it’s hard too, because, I, you know, I think it’s important – I think the divine feminine is a really, really important concept, and it’s kind of like we’re saying, you know, just because we don’t have any evidence for it historically, that particular story, does that mean that there’s not some other sense of truth there that is useful or interesting that we can discover and work with? But the idea that the Celts had a significant divine feminine, or a mother goddess, or were goddess-worshipping in some way, that I think also those texts played a real part in the development of eclectic paganism in particular, as it was intersecting with political feminism, and also, you know, the way that these ideas about the Celts as being nature-worshipping, you know, worshipping in groves – wow, we haven’t even talked about James Frazer, well, let’s not. But you know, the idea that the Celts and Druids were worshipping among the trees, or that maybe they did worship trees, also intersected with the environmental movement in the ’60s and ’70s, both in the US and also in the UK. So it was very fertile, but Celtic spirituality doesn’t just relate to paganism. Particularly in Britain, you’ve got huge intersections with Catholicism and with Anglicanism, particularly High Anglicanism, which may use Saints, may be interested in Saints, may be interested in pilgrimages. Celtic spirituality, you know, in quote marks, in Britain is just as likely to be Christian-flavored as it is Pagan-flavored.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, that’s a good point. I think it tends to be more linked to paganism in Italy, but it makes sense that…

Dr Amy Hale: Yeah, it’s kind of in Britain, it is, and you know, Glastonbury is a great place to look at this phenomenon, and so many others, where you see this kind of intersection of paganism and, you know, kind of Celtic paganism and Celtic spirituality, and the way that those stories and narratives kind of converge and have really fuzzy borders, where you have Christians who are kind of reaching out to this again, this idea of a Celtic cultural substrate in Britain, but also drawing off of a lot of Irish texts, off of early modern Scottish texts, Carmina Gadelica, drawing on those spiritually to actually just include more divine feminine, more reverence for the Earth, more environmental concerns, just bringing these into Christianity, into their Christianity, but using this idea of Celticity in order to drive that, to drive those values, and also specific practices like visiting holy wells, and doing other Saints’ pilgrimages, and yeah, it’s Celtic spirituality. The Christian side is something; it’s another huge phenomenon.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, and for those of the chat, they are talking about Caesar and what Caesar wrote about the Celts; guys, Caesar is not a reliable narrator. Caesar was a politician, and I’m telling you that as an Italian who grew up studying Latin and translating the “De Bello Gallico,” which is the book that you’re referring to from Caesar. Caesar is not a reliable narrator; he was a good politician, he was not a historian, let’s yeah…

Dr Amy Hale: Yeah, that’s a really good point, and I mean, you know, we’ve got ancient sources and, you know, Posidonius and others that people look to try to find potential nuggets about druidry or what Celts did. And it’s just again, I would say, try to read these things with a critical eye because it’s not necessarily that Caesar was completely false in what he said, but as he said, he’s not a reliable narrator because systematic history wasn’t a thing. You know, even the people who were historians were not writing systematic empirical history.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, I guess like Pliny is much better, for instance, in terms of the way he would do history, but yeah, as you said, as you’re saying, the way we understand history now and systematic history is not something that was really a thing at the time, so…

Dr Amy Hale: It wasn’t, and you know, trying to pull together these threads of what ancient Celts might have done, it’s not like we don’t have any data at all, but we have to ask questions of the data that we have. We have to look at the context in which things were written, and sometimes it’s just kind of, it’s almost like, for me honestly, sometimes it’s just intuition. It’s like, “Well, would that have been true? Why would somebody have said that? Does that seem like that would have been right? Are there other writers who would have independently verified that?” You know…

Dr Angela Puca: They didn’t have peer review at the time; that’s another thing.

Dr Amy Hale: Exactly, exactly. So you know, it’s not like we don’t have anything. The problem is that we don’t have a lot that is completely certain, and we do know that a lot of those sources, as you rightly say, were written by conquerors, by people who probably had their own agendas, maybe were getting things second hand, so you know, it’s one of those things that you go into, and you have to ask good questions about your sources.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, and I see somebody in this chat mentioning Herodotus. Herodotus is also much better than Caesar, definitely, as a historical record, but again, you know, as Amy was saying, I think that it’s important when we look at it, we tend to look at ancient sources as, “Oh, this is an ancient source, it must contain the truth because it’s much nearer to the beginning of time,” but that is a story that you are telling yourself. It’s not really what’s happening, so it’s important to take into account, of course, the historical records and what has been written, but it’s equally important to ask yourself questions about the reliability of those sources, whether they are consistent with other sources, and also whether there was a good historical record or whether it is a political manifesto, or you know, not. You know, I’m not saying that Caesar was writing a political manifesto, but he was known to say things in a certain way because he wanted to appear in a certain way in Rome, so he was mainly a politician. That’s for sure, so I guess if we… sorry, go on.

Dr Amy Hale: Well, I was just gonna say, this underlying sensibility in both paganism and the occult of believing that ancient peoples were closer to the source, or that they were inherently more magical, or that they had technologies that we didn’t have, or that they were more somehow right, that’s not something that I personally understand. And I would just, anybody who really believes that just hang out with yourself, ask yourself why do you believe that. You may have a good answer for yourself, but that’s just something that seems really always seemed bizarre to me. It’s something that comes up all the time when I’m writing about particular figures, and because it’s such a constant belief, and we see it, I think, a lot in the Reconstructionist movement, is this idea that other people somehow knew better. And I know, I just ask you, if that’s something you’re into, just ask yourself why.

Dr Angela Puca: It’s probably the myth of a golden age.

Dr Amy Hale: Yes.

Dr Angela Puca: And always taking something that is other because the mundane is not interesting enough, and the secret is, by definition, the other in a way.

Dr Amy Hale: Yeah, yeah, and I don’t know, I think that is one tendency in paganism that I would like us to more critically explore.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, I, and I invite everybody to do so. Amy, where can people find you if they desire to do so?

Dr Amy Hale: Well, it would be lovely if people wanted to find where I am.

Dr Angela Puca: I encourage them to.

Dr Amy Hale: You can find me everywhere at AmyHale93. By the way, I’m not an active Thelemite, but a long time ago…

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, I was about to ask why 93.

Dr Amy Hale: Yeah, you know, that’s a whole complicated story, but I, you know, at one point, I was more thelemically inclined than I am now. I’ll say that, but 93 still stands for some; there’s some good numerology in there, so I’m sticking with it. Also, it’s just where I am now on the internet, so I’m AmyHale93 on Instagram, at Twitter, formerly known as Twitter. I have a Medium site, which is also AmyHale93, and I have my website, which is amyhale. me. You can find me there, and I’m also amyhale93@Gmail, so if you want, anybody wants to follow me there and continue the conversation, I am happy to do so.

Dr Angela Puca: Yes, absolutely, and you guys find all of these links in the info box, as long as YouTube allows links, clickable links because they’re gonna go soon, apparently. So thank you so much, Amy, thank you for being here; it was a super interesting conversation.

Dr Amy Hale: Oh, thanks so much. I hope I answered everything in a suitable fashion, and thank you so much for inviting me to be on today. I really enjoyed chatting with you, and nice to hear from your audience as well.

Dr Angela Puca: Yes, absolutely; thank you so much, and we will talk more after the show.

Dr Amy Hale: All right, fantastic.

Dr Angela Puca: Thank you all so much for being here on the live stream and watching this afterwards if that is the case. And if you like this episode, don’t forget to SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already, activate the notification bell because YouTube is naughty and won’t always show up and show you my new releases in the feed, so make sure that you have that notification thing on, and you will always be notified, and share this video around, and of course, let me know in the comments what you thought about it. I hope that it wasn’t too disappointing. Unfortunately, it seems like academic knowledge and scholarship tend to highlight that certain narratives and mythologies are indeed narratives and mythologies, but I hope that you do stick around because there’s gonna be a lot of academic fun coming up next. And thank you all for being here, and thank you to Andrew, Edward, and João for moderating the chat.

Bye, all for now.

Dr Amy Hale’s contact details

Website: www.amyhale.me

Twitter: Amyhale93

Instagram: amyhale93