Posts Tagged ‘La Tene’

Given that St. Patrick’s Day is technically a Catholic holiday, one strongly associated with the casting out of the pagan culture of Ireland; it might seem a little anti-magick. And perhaps for the past four centuries that St. Patrick’s Day was celebrated there has been a certain stigma to it among pagan and wiccan sub- cultures. But over the past few decades a marvelous transition has occurred and St. Patrick’s Day is no longer just a celebration of the late 4th century missionary it was created to honor, it is a celebration of Irish culture. And my-oh-my, Irish culture has A LOT to celebrate.

In a certain sense, one can say that Celtic culture is one of the oldest continuing in the world today, often with many of its symbols and superstitions still intact. Established by the late fourth millenium BCE in Ireland, Celtic culture actually originated in the mountains between Europe and Asia, spreading out westward across the land. For once upon a time, “Celtic” culture was not just limited to the British Isles, but swept across much of Northern Europe in various forms like the Hallstatt (8th-6th c BCE) and La Tene (450 BCE-1st c. BCE) cultures. The Celts, tied together by linguistic similarities and an ancestral homeland in the Indo-European mountain steppes, dominated western Europe for a little over a millennia before cultural interaction with Mediterranean cultures, particularly the Romans, transformed their way of life significantly. As one of the farthest western bastions of Celtic culture, one left reasonably undisturbed by the Romans until the early Christian period of St. Patrick, Ireland represents a metaphorical bank vault of less disturbed facets of ancient Celtic culture, and especially its magick and lore. Even once Ireland had adopted Christianity, it tucked away much of its myth ~ hiding it among Christian stories or saints and relegating it to its own realm of well-believed superstition.
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