The Celtic spirituality
Celtic spirituality has some distinguishing features, one of them is its diversity: it combines polytheistic and monotheistic features, earthy rituals and transcendental mysticism.
The appearance of Celtic spirituality is dated back to first mythological mentions. Second feature of Celtic spirituality is its natural character, ties with earth. The Celtic spirituality is contained in sky, earth, sun, and sea in all nature. Celts believed in sanctity of nature and tried to take care of it. The third thing is mystical and relational directivity. Celtic diversity comes more from experience than from theological dogmas. Celts are looking for the religious origins in their hearts and souls, they dont accept philosophical substantiation of the belief.
Celts see the necessity of collaboration between people and the earth, people and the spirits of nature and the Holy Spirit that is the head of all living creatures and is beyond all names. Celts believe in existence of many gods and angels and image them as living beings, not just abstract creations. According to the Celtic understanding of the world, these divine beings can communicate with people in their own mystical way.
Another interesting thing about the Celts is their love to poetry, beauty and creativity. Celtic diversity, which combines mysticism, love of nature and comes from the relational spirituality, is in natural harmony with beauty and poetry. The development of Celtic culture is the way of unique, rich culture. Every religious and philosophical doctrine can find familiar features just to itself but the understanding of Celtic culture needs neutrality and objective sensation. Celtic culture can be compared with a magnificent tree with a lot of branches. These branches got their further development and now have become common values.
The pre-Christian world was the world of Celts, who worshiped nature. To the Celtic outlook, the land was the main goddess, the rivers were her helpers and they enriched the earth. Celts used to live in forests, where they were close to the nature and could learn the language of trees and wisdom of animals. With the appearance of Christianity ancient Celts didnt disturb their close ties with nature, they connected their love to nature with the main principles of Christianity. Celtic monks lived in deep forests and wrote their religious works for the gifts of nature. The most important thing was to understand the divine origin of all things and gods existence in nature. Celts saw life as a constantly changing circulation of life and death. Everything moved in a spiral and natures observation gave a possibility to find mechanism of development of the world. Nowadays we have practically completely lost the awareness of spiral development and i's difficult to gain an understanding of the world.
Life of Celts is an integration of spirit, community and nature, and these concepts were a single whole and couldnt exist separately that can be scarcely imagined in our modern society. The returning to these Celtic dogmas can help us understand who we are.
Celtic Christians strongly believed in Holy Trinity. By the Celtic outlook the world is created by the main god who surrounds the entire world with his two arms of love: the left arm is the spirit and the right one is Christ. Christ is the supreme example of human life. Being close to the Christ means the understanding and getting of supreme and eternal love and wisdom. Early Celtic Christians didnt go to church they preferred worshipping in small communities and sharing their food, money, work with the representatives of this small group. They saw Christ in their neighbour and shared everything with him.
Celts had a lot of traditions and cults that were directly connected with nature, animals and different gods and spirits. Every family had special rites aimed to protect all the members of the family from evil spirits. Feasts and banquets were one of the components of ritual including special food and atmosphere. During a feast a minstrel usually sang songs about deeds of famous warriors. After the minstrels songs his listeners began to boast of their own brave deeds. As they all had drunk too much, they began quarreling and fighting and even some men could be killed. Early Celtic spirituality is characterised by animal divinity. Even now we can find statues of horses, bears, birds created by the Celts. Only later with the influence of Mediterranean culture it took anthropomorphic element. Not all animals were thought sacred and this explains specific sensitive attitude to horses and cattle.
Celtic hierarchy of Gods combined Christianity and Greek religion and at the same time developed its own peculiarities. Cernunnos is the god that is responsible for money and grain and is correlated with variety of both domestic and wild animals. There are also such Celtic gods as Jupiter Taranis, Sulis Minerva, Lenus Mars, Rosmerta, Mercury, Epona and other. Celts were polytheistic, so believed in many gods. They thought gods to be inhabitants of the thickest and darkest parts of the forest. Such plants as mistletoe and oak-tree were considered sacred. There is a big group of historians that think that the Celts were headed by a class of priests called Druids. Stonehenge was the temple of Druids. Druids way of worshiping was rather cruel and proposed sacrifices of human beings to get gods pardon. The Druids put the men in huge baskets and burned them in the presence of people. But this historical opinion isnt still improved or disapproved.
So, to sum up, Celtic spirituality is characterised by love of nature, art and poetry; relationship between saints and gods; respect for Mary and the importance of Liturgy; union of secular and sacred; the power of abbots; monasteries; ancient calendar system for celebrating Easter; closeness between natural and supernatural; importance of family and kinship. Celtic historical motherland is Ireland and territories around it. The isolation of Ireland didnt allow spreading Roman authority on it. Monasteries were the places of holly atmosphere and looked just like big tribal villages inhabited by all people: monks, slaves, freemen, usual men and women and priesthood. These people used to be representatives from the one clan of relatives. Some monasteries were situated in isolated places and others were just the crossroads of main towns.
Celts also made invaluable deposit in the development and making of the educational system. They took part in the spreading of the literacy among Ireland and other Celtic lands and reservation of dogmas of learning during dark ages.