Has anyone here ever been overwhelmed with the degree to which our society has departed from the cultural context of early Celtic religion? Ever since the Reformation western society has increasingly relegated the religious perspective, faith-issues, what-have-you to the immaterial — both literally and figuratively; faith is a personal choice and even more than having little actual bearing on the patterns of our work and social politics, our religious beliefs — according to post-Reformation thought — should be excluded from public life. Religious belief is absolutely private according to post-Reformation common sense.

Now I know that you could easily argue against this, pointing out how every faith has at some level a social element, but what I am talking about is an indelible and constitutive link between a social body and the religion that it holds, specifically in looking back at the Celtic world. The sovereignty goddess alone stands as a representative of how holistic Celtic religion was. In her you have both the political body, the natural world and — of course — religion. Religion was written on the landscape in the same way that the social body was written on the landscape. The early Irish statement 'tongu na-tongat mo thuath'; 'I swear by that by which my people swear' is, I believe, very indicative of both the awareness in that early culture of how relative the religious experience was, but also how closely bound together people and religion were as well.

Ok, so where does this leave us who fragment our landscape and our lives between work, home and play arenas (that latter refers to entertainment). Even our television is completely fragmented, with commercials interrupting the narrative every so often. I am sure we’ve all experienced a real story, told in high style, so is anyone else weirded out by the sheer degree to which modern society differs from early Celtic? How exactly do we go about reconstruction early Celtic religion without reconstructing to some degree early Celtic society?