The Keltic Cult
The Keltic Cult
by John Bede.
Kelticism is today like it always has been. By never being politic except exceptionally, since all politics always ended bad, since man in his vanity never got it through that all power is evil by its latent paranoia and self-destructive corruption, since already the ancient Greeks realized all power only to be hubris and downright unnatural, it has never retreated but only expanded; and I dare propound the thesis that it still dominates all English- and French-speaking countries. Even the Venetians, who founded the first modern republic, which became the longest living ever, were originally Kelts. Even in Spain and Portugal, and not just in the Basque province, the Keltic legacy goes on, like in the Alpine countries, the Netherlands and far down into the Balkans. The Kelts never surface, though, except where they are obvious, like in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany, which is the secret of its survival and very existence: it has always been invisible and worked underground.
The Kelts never had political leaders but were guided by the Druids, who simply were the bearers of Knowledge, of nature and culture, of history and tradition, of the soul and the universe. Their everlasting memorial is Stonehenge, which is like a universal laboratory, a combined altar and astronomic observatory, planetarium and landmark of cult and worship, of the same functional and metaphysical importance as the great pyramids of Egypt and the temples of Central America from the same period. The Druids did not rule but merely acted as counsellors, but their words carried weight, since they were venerated as holy, since they held the only real power, which is knowledge, especially of the soul and nature. Their religion therefore was a universal and pantheistic nature cult with no gods, where the divine element was life itself, which was the object of worship, especially in its toughest and most lasting forms, therefore above all the trees and especially the oaken tree. It was consequently humble in character and not in the least dogmatic or self-imposing. It was quite simply natural and lived basically only on the natural piety and feeling of universal unity inspired by all free life in living nature. Therefore it could also like a chamelion steal into and absorb any other religious or philosophic form. It was the only religion that could adapt itself to any other religion.
My mission during the last years, when I have been so quiet and inactive in The Free Thinker and on Internet, has been trying to add to the stabilization of peace in Northern Ireland in its passage from chronic self-destructive political violence to reconciliation, compromise and co-operation, and I claim this to be the right course for the whole world. We don’t need violence. We don’t need ambitious power. We don’t need nationalism, egoism and greed. What humanity first of all needs is to make peace with nature, which he has caused and continues to cause irrepairable damage, which now obviously imports the possibility of her revenge with eventual disasters ruining the planet as a consequence. All people must co-operate to manage the crisis and survive, and then it will not do to have war and violence and self-imdulgent autocracies. The Druids concentrated on the right management of knowledge from the past and the economy of the present to keep nature and history in balance as continuously, smoothly and harmoniously as possible. There are still so called druids, but during the centuries they appeared in various other forms, such as the philosophers of antiquity, the saints of the middle ages, the humanists of the renaissance, the philosophers of the enlightenment, and so on. Their primary task is to administer wisdom and carry on the tree of knowledge, that is the vital knowledge of man’s accountability in life and the universe. And thus they are the very teachers that humanity always needs and always will need, and who always will be where needed.
John Bede, summer 2008.