Celtic Religion & Spirituality
The inaccurate views of Celtic religion and spirituality are the result of orthodox dogma, and the influences of monotheistic religion. The misconceptions are further exasperated by the lack of concrete images or pictures left by the Celts. Maintaining an oral culture, the Celts communicated and preserved their divine and magical religion and spiritual imagery, through poetic imagery in verse, song, or declamation and story-telling (Stewart, 1990). This established why the Druides/ess were trained for twenty plus years and the reverence the Celtic people had for them. The entire range of Celtic traditions emanates patterns of harmony and unity, holding a vision of sanctity of life and land, unified and harmonized together (Stewart, 1990).
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The Celtic culture of religion and spirituality functioned a midst several gods and goddesses, which varied from place to place, had no formalized doctrine, and stretched across distant lands. These issues were not problems for the Celtic people due to their beliefs of the sanctity of the land. Stewart and Green emphasize the importance of understanding the concept of ‘locality’ in which specific deities may occur only in relationship to a hill, spring, town, or cave. The deep level of imagery is what the Celts shared in common, without being a formalized religion (Stewart, 1990). Celts are therefore grouped together based on their unity of language and myth, world-view and religious practices.
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Celtic religion and spirituality held the land itself as a living sacred entity. The Celts made no intellectual separation between ‘religion’ and ‘living’: “all life, all acts, all relationships were essentially religious…” (Stewart, 1990,p.89). For the Celts the entire landscape or environment was alive, believing in the power of certain key locations within the land; scared groves or shrines were places of special power. The land was most often represented by a goddess (Stewart, 1990). They treated life itself as a ceremony, seeing their gods and goddesses in the natural world, with a continual presence embedded in all things (Celtic Spirituality/Culture, n.d.). Contrary, to popularized stereotypes surrounding Celtic religion, they were not animal and tree worshipers. They held reverence for all that enabled them to have life, including the sun, water, trees, animals, women etc. For the Celts death was a natural part of life, as the seasons were, and that one’s soul was never gone, it remained and returned in another form, continuing to be part of the circle of life and the universe. Beyond this world there was a Land of Eternal Youth where sickness and death would be no more. Celts did not separate themselves from their spirit all that is and was, are interrelated (Condren, 1989).