I have a hard time grokking the significant reality that pre-Christian Celtic religions were explicitly local, rooted religions. Reconciling the relationship between, say, local tribes, kingship, and sovereignty (which I think are extremely important to a Celtic point of view) with my reality today is a daunting task, especially when my sense of “tribe” extends, literally, across continents, and my sense of “local” exists not in the presence of the land or people around me, or even in how I respond to the land and people around me, but simply in proximity.
As a child of the Internet and the global community, “local” has lost most of its meaning to me, even as I participate in movements like localvore diets and live in season with my diet. And I’m not sure it’s so much a symptom of “being young and American” so much as it is a sign that my place simply isn’t within the bounds of society, no matter how wide and far the boundaries reach. Though I’m not unusual in that I’ve lived between two places for years and have recently found myself in a completely different place again, I feel that I am unusual in that I have no desire to settle anywhere. Even my friends who are committed to a single, swinging lifestyle like mine are rooted: in the cities they attended college in, in the jobs they’ve found.
I can’t grok rooting a life somewhere because my life is with me and nowhere else. And that’s more than a little disturbing for me as someone trying to build an authentic expression of Celtic reality. Because… that’s a big piece of that reality.
The thing is, I do grasp the “outsider” realities of the filidh and the geilt; the shaman, the hermit. More than grasp: I understand them far more than I do the relationship between kingship and fertility. I certainly grok them more than most of the rules and expectations of society today. They are separate, apart, and move between several realities on behalf of all realities; their work lies in the fact that they are not a part of the tribe. And paradoxically, they are supported in that work by the tribe. They are needed to do that work. The community recognizes the presence of the Unknown and the need to, if not understand, at least respect it.
Is there a place for the Celtic “outsider” today–who occupies a sacred space set apart for them by the larger community? Has the concept of locality that I grew up with grown to be too large for such a space, or has society grown too afraid of the Unknown and those who are “outside” their reality to support those relationships? Is there still a need for those people to occupy the fringes at the edge of the known and the Unknown today? What’s more, is that where I really belong?
