Reapproaching the Pagan Celtic Past – Anti-Nativism, Asterisk Reality and the Late-Antiquity Paradigm

Abstract

Until relatively recently, many Irish scholars operated with a comfortable, even complacent, assumption that a measure of understanding of pre-Christian belief systems could be recovered from texts written by Christians in the early middle ages.1 This assumption has been overtaken, especially since the early 1990s, by what we might describe as a ‘paradigm shift’. We all know the basic story. A simmering debate over Christian or pre-Christian origins for certain early Irish texts went on during the third and into the fourth quarter of the twentieth century, coming to a head in the 1980s. Before that, default assumptions of primal origins for distinctively Irish institutions or religious motifs had been mostly unchallenged. The ‘anti-nativist’ critique challenged these assumptions on the basis that Irish texts were exclusively of Christian authorship and hence their contents could only be safely assumed to be a past mediated—even created—in terms of a Christian vision. The critique thus was partly about the limits of studying the world ‘outside the text’, paralleling, though not explicitly sourced in, wider post-modern debates about textuality. A by-product was a tendency to implicate all recoverable elements of the Celtic past as representations sourced in Judeo-Christian culture. This presents issues for the study of Celtic religion in particular. It is customary for historians of religion to open their papers by stating their position with respect to belief in a particular faith (and the ferocity of the antinativist debate might seem to rival some religious conflicts!). I have spent most of my career teaching interpretation of Christian texts in the context of church history. In this I have accepted the position that it is reasonable to assume that any evidence recovered from a text of monastic authorship is potentially ‘Christian’ in origin or through mediation (the ‘anti-nativist’ position). This has been a heuristic position, as I feel anti-nativism to be in philosophical terms scarcely a defensible position. The following is not an apologia, nor a personal road to Damascus (or perhaps Drunemeton), but a personal reflection on why the ‘anti-nativist’ school of thought emerged. The paradigm-shift which brought about ‘anti-nativism’ has had undoubted benefits for encouraging critical perspectives on the reading of Celtic

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