Publishers note: Goddamnit I asked for an article on Cults!
Celts
What is it about the Celts?
Theres something so indefatigable, so romantically inclined that it’s a hairbreadth that separates us from them. From the lofty heights of the sublime to the devastating reality of the fall.
We all feel for the Celtishness inside. Who amongst them, the Joyces, the Dylan Thomas’s who taught us how to feel, and then questioned the very feelings themselves. Wasn’t it Boadicea, who astride her chariot took fury back upon those Romans who dared to ‘veni vidi vici’, and wasn’t it Vercingetorix the gallant Gaul, all clad in woad, (or some other Gaulish substance that may have been a little bit like woad) who stood resolute before the phalanxes, robotic, and perfunctory as they wore his warriors down.
To be Celtic is to place such passion, such warmth, such nurturing of the human soul above the mere practicalities, the orchestrated foregone conclusions of certainty. And yet it is to court failure, heroic, all encompassing, as a badge of honour, worn through overuse into self fulfilling parody.
Is Clive Palmer a Celt? If a football team were to enshrine the Celtic spirit it would naturally be North Melbourne, whose recent losses, five of them between 1 and 5 points, are demonstration enough. The Celtic spirit lives on in Myki, the East West Tunnel, North South Pipeline, and the desalination plant, all of them imbued with fatalistic inevitable Celtic spirit. That spirit of endurance, naysayers would suggest, obstinate to the inevitability of certainty.
NEVER let it be forgot, it was Celts who held the line in the Crimea, as the Highlanders stood firm and were squashed beneath the Russian steamroller, Celts who held the defile at Rorke’s Drift, and Celts again, who rallied that last time before the oblivion of Cumberland’s volleys at Culloden. And amidst the dust and squalor of Coopers Creek, the Burke and Wills expedition fizzled to a withering finale under the “leadership” of another Celt.
They are the engineers, the poets and the future thinkers. Was it not a Celt clad in armour, who stood alone against the Establishment at Glenrowan?. And as armour and all came crashing down from the romantic to the modern in the annals of Australia. So lets celebrate the Celt and Celticism whilst the spirt of all that it entails rises above the determinist diminution of the soul we associate with the measured, the certain, the factual and the inevitable. Let us celebrate one more time the triumphalism of celtic spirit above the winnowing, demeaning effluvia of Business Managers, Masters of Business Administration, the sycophants, the lock jawed acolytes, and the testicle bound satraps that adorn our political and cultural systems, and celebrate just this once, the Celtishness within us…. lest the others shackle us in a Naplan derived bondage. The unstoppable, unweanable urge to follow our spiritual path and embrace life in all its incarnate mystery so that we may be freed from the manacles of certainty, the demeaning exigencies of mortality, and the nagging premonition of a dull and fleeting existence.
We thank the Celts for this.
Phaudrig Macguire, reader Celtic Mythology, Universality College Dublin.