Druid, Shaman, Priest: Metaphors of Celtic Paganism

By Leslie Ellen Jones. Enfield Lock: Hisarlik, 1999. 249 pp. 25 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 1-8743-1227-3

This book is a welcome study of the pagan elements of Celtic culture, especially as many recent books on Celtic studies fall into two rather limited categories. The first is made up of those books by academic Celticists which have largely focused on the Christian themes and content of Celtic literature; the second is made up of those books by non-scholars who seek to reconstruct a pagan Celtic religion by cobbling together dated translations and interpretations of the literary and archaeological evidence. An example of the first category is John Carey's punctiliously researched and carefully presented King of Mysteries: Early Irish Religious Writings (Four Courts Press, 1999). Examples of the second category are rife; they are the sorts of books that most often appear in Celtic Studies sections of large, general booksellers. They are written, in large part, by neo-pagans for neo-pagans and for the general public, which means a lot more people read them than the more scholarly works.

There are, however, a few books on Celtic mythology that focus on the pagan elements of the literature and yet succeed in being scholarly and balanced at the same time. One of these books is Ronald Hutton's The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy (Blackwell, 1991) and another is Jones's Druid, Shaman, Priest. Jones, who studied with both P. K. Ford and J. F. Nagy, deals with the interesting pagan material in an academic and approachable manner. She wears her learning lightly, but in her breezily titled chapters, such as chapter 1, "Who Were the Celts and What Were They Up To?" she guides the reader through the relevant literary and archaeological evidence and distinguishes the parameters of current scholarly opinion. Her substantive and entertaining synopsis of classical references to Druids should serve both as an introduction to laymen and a useful refresher for Celticists. Her presentation reveals that the fluid representations of Druidry are the result of changes within Celtic cultures and of changing concerns on the part of the various classical authors. In this chapter, as elsewhere in the book, Jones links representations in classical and Celtic literature, and employs sources, both classical and Celtic, which are not commonly cited.

Jones does not pretend that everything Celtic is pagan and in her second chapter, "Saints and Druids," she does a reasonable job of weighing the pagan and Christian elements in a number of important texts. Her method, as when she simply gives both possible readings in the rosc/rhetoric controversy, is open-minded rather than polemical, and her attempt to indicate the pagan substratum of many markedly Christian texts is successful. She does, however, sometimes take as givens claims that she should explain in greater detail--for example, that Saint Anne owes her popularity in Celtic culture to her assimilation with a pagan goddess.

Her chapters on shamans and priests, and her final chapter, "Druids in a Postmodern World," are each, by and large, examples of good humour and good scholarship. The central argument of these chapters, and in effect of the book, is that shamanism is evident in many medieval Irish and Welsh tales. This is a tricky argument to make, of course, and she will not convince all readers that central Asian shamanism is relevant to medieval Celtic literature. Jones refines her shamanistic readings by arguing that the hero-kings of Celtic literature, rather than the Druids, are the ones who undergo shamanistic initiation. She rationalises her use of shamanistic evidence by discussing the tales in terms of the "deep past, recent past, and narrative present" and thereby neatly avoids the pagan vs. Christian dichotomy. The shamanistic elements she sees as being relics of the "deep past"--a past so deep that it may even pre-date the people's "Celticity." The recent past refers to Celtic expansion, the early days of specialisation and school learning, and the narrative present is the Christian present. This is a refreshing angle from which to examine the texts and it allows the reader to understand the horsewhipping of Cu Chulainn by the beautiful and scantily clad women in Serglige Con Culaind as referring to shamanistic initiation, a warrior's nightmare, and Christian penance/demonic punishment (the sadomasochistic overtones of the episode are also pretty obvious).

Jones, who has a reputation among Celticists as the expert in bad films with Celtic themes, spreads her wings in the final chapter and makes an especially strong case for taking seriously the not-very-serious pagan and pop-Celtic material. She points out that "Pagans are as a general rule, voracious readers; their book buying habits place them in the top 20% of the US population in literacy" (p. 191). Celtic scholars have a responsibility to engage with this audience, to deal with Celtic Paganism, and with popular texts and film as well as medieval manuscripts and scholarly editions.