Heritage and Foundations

by Alain de Benoist

  It was not. But in the second century of our era, Carthage became the most important Christian community in Africa. Tertullian lived there, as did Saint Augustine’s friend, Aurelius. There were no less than thirty-two councils. Today, on the site where the king, Saint Louis, died in the year 1270, a cathedral stands.

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  Carthage ou Rome?, a study by Jean-Paul Brisson.138 Fayard, 437 pages.

  Celtic Civilisation

  ‘If the excellence of the races had to be appreciated by the purity of their blood and the inviolability of their character, no one, it must be admitted, could dispute the nobility of the vestiges of the Celtic race that still remain’. Such is the opinion of Ernest Renan.

  These ‘vestiges of the Celtic race’ have continued to inspire researchers. Jean-Jacques Hatt, curator of the museum of archaeology at Strasbourg, published a study entitled Celtes et Gallo-Romains.139 The young archaeologist Guy Rachet published studies on La Gaule celtique and La Gaule romaine.140 The journal Nouvelle Ecole consecrated two special editions to Celtic civilisation. Jacques Harmand (lecturer at the faculty of literature at Clermont-Ferrand), in collaboration with Fernand Nathan, also published a work on Les Celtes.141 The Bretonian Surrealist Jean Markale, forty-three years of age, professor of literature in Paris, author of Celtes et civilisation celtique (Payot, 1969), has made primary source texts available to the French public via books such as L’épopée celtique d’Irland and L’épopée celtique de Bretagne.142 He gives strongly contested interpretations, but the texts have not been translated since Arbois de Jubainville (L’épopée celtique en Irlande, 1892) and Georges Dottin (L’épopée irlandaise, 1925).143

  Natives of Bohemia and Thuringia

  For the Ancients, the Celts were men who came from the cold. ‘Those who exist beyond Iberia’, writes Aristotle, ‘live in a climate so cold that the donkey cannot survive there’.

  Of the inhabitants of Gaul, the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus (fourth century CE) says that they form ‘a people called Celts, from the name of a beloved king, or Galatae, from the name of the mother of this same king. From this name, the Greeks have made that of the Gauls or Gaulish’.144

  It is around −2,200 that the first Indo-European tribes, bearers of Corded Ware and the battle axe, make their appearance in the east of France. They introduce the wheel and the horse.

  Around −1,500 (Middle Bronze I), we see the multiplication of funerary tumuli dedicated to the first ancestors of the Proto-Celts.

  Eventually, around −1,250, the great Celtic migrations cover Belgium, Holland, England, France, Switzerland, and Spain. This dispersion is probably linked to the extension of the civilisation known as the ‘Urnfield culture’ into central Europe, or even to the natural catastrophes, of which the legend of Atlantis and of the Ville d’Ys, engulfed by floods, perhaps preserve the memory.

  Speaking of the population of Gaul, Ammianus Marcellinus actually mentions ‘people from the regions across the Rhine driven from their homeland, whether by the vicissitudes of war, a permanent state of these countries, or by the inundation of the stormy sea’.145

  ‘It is possible’, writes Rachet, ‘that here we have the echo of certain coastal inundations of the Bronze Age, like those of the German shores of the North Sea, and those that caused the neighbouring settlements of the island of Heligoland to be engulfed, which had undoubtedly been the cause of the migrations of people from these regions who had escaped the cataclysm’.

  The cradle of the Celts properly speaking situates itself between Bavaria and Lusatia, more specifically in Bohemia-Thuringia.

  In the eyes of the Ancients, Germania was little more than a subdivision of the Celtic realm.

  ‘Compared to the Celts’, writes Strabo, ‘the Germans offer a few small differences. They are, for example, more savage morally, greater in size, and blonder. In all other respects they resemble each other strongly, and the same traits are found among them, and the same way of life. This is what made the Romans give them the name that they carry, for they recognise them as the brothers of the Celts and so have called them Germani, a word which, in their language, designates brothers born from a same father or from a same mother’.146

  In regards to the Celtic epoch, specialists distinguish, two great periods corresponding to two particularly important sites: Halstatt, in Austria, from 900 BCE, and La Tène, in Switzerland, from −600.

  The Celtic Empire

  Situated near Lake Neuchâtel, La Tène is an ancient Celtic encampment which had undoubtedly served as a tollgate. Jewels, weapons, and harnesses have been found. It is during this second period that the Celtic empire was formed. Around −600, the Celts of La Tène set out towards the south and the west. They repelled the Illyrians towards the lower Danube, invaded Thrace, Macedonia, Anatolia, and northern Italy. They founded the city of Singidunum (today Belgrade) and plundered Delphi with 150,000 men. In 381, they took Rome and the Capitol. Their empire soon extended over immense territories. But due to lack of organisation, its existence was brief.

  ‘When their waves of expansion are described by the Mediterranean people’, remarks Harmand, ‘we notice that it only took the Celts a decade at most to travel over half of Europe, or to pass from the Danube to Egypt’.

  All over we find the trace of the ‘Gaels’ (Celts): in the Gallic countries, in Gaul, in Spanish Galicia, in Russian Galicia, in Gallic Turkey, among the Galatae, but also (via the alteration of Gal- into Wal-: Wales, the ‘Country of Wales’) in Wallonia, in Walachia, etc.

  To the east and to the west, the Celts clashed with the Iberians and the Ligurians, who retreated before them. We know only a few things about these people. Their lineage, notably, is not substantiated. Among the Iberians, we have sometimes seen the Proto-Indo-Europeans, sometimes the descendants of the Berberids, who occupied the western coasts from England to north Africa. According to other researchers, they were Indo-Europeans from the coasts of the Black Sea who would emigrate to Spain before passing into Gaul. The origin of the Ligurians, small farmers with round skulls, is no less uncertain.

  In Gaul, the period of La Tène is initially situated in the second Iron Age, from around 475 to the pax romana. It first appeared in Champagne (‘Marnian’ civilisation), then in Burgundy, the region of Paris, and in Britany.

  The personality of the ‘continental’ Celts quickly asserts itself. Under their influence, Gaul is transformed. The indigenous population submits. The marshlands are dried up. The Celts proceeded to clear and exploit the tremendous Hercynian Forest, which had remained virgin for centuries. They made remarkable developments in the utilisation of iron for agricultural equipment.

  The countryside is rich in minerals. Gold flows in abundance. Iron mines multiply. Gaul situates itself at the crossroads of the great commercial thoroughfares of Antiquity: the Amber Road, which connected the North Sea and Schleswig; and the Tin Route, which connects the Cassiterides (the Isles of Scilly, at the southwest tip of the Cornish peninsula) to the Mediterranean basin.

  Their livestock includes poultry, sheep, cattle, and above all pigs, an animal that is never put under cover, which according to Strabo, grants them such a vigour that even the wolves refrain from attacking them!

  The Hammer God, the Goddess of Horses

  J. -A. Mauduit, a seventy-year-old specialist in prehistoric art, and author of a study on L’épopée des Celtes,147 sees in the Celt ‘someone who is unstable in the process of settlement, rather than a nomad’.

  He adds: ‘Contrary to the Mediterranean man of the city, the Celt was a man of the country, in direct contact with the forces that originated him. His religion was a religion of the earth’.

  It was also one of the sky. But a sky strongly connected to the earth. The principle god of the Gaulish pantheon, Teutates, is of the same class as the national divinity. His name comes from tuah, ‘tribe’, and tatis, an ancient form of Gaulish tad, ‘father’. One could almost translate it as ‘(little) father of the people’!

  Fi
guring among the other Celtic gods are Esus, Lugh, Dagda, Taranis, a thunder god carrying the solar wheel, Brigid (Saint Brigitte in the Christian tradition), Epona, goddess of horses and harvests, etc.

  Sucellus, god of the mallet (closely related to Thor, the ‘hammer god’ of the ancient Germans and, without doubt, of Perkunas, the Balto-Slavic lightning god) seems to have played a special role, as numerous survivals suggest.

  ‘In Britany, even to the last century’, signals Mauduit, ‘the tradition persists of the “hammer of good death”. This was a heavy mallet whose only purpose was to abate painful agonies. The most senior of the village elders, after having informed the moribund person, raised the hammer above his head and pretended to smash his skull; the dying person then gave up their last sigh. We also know that the death of a pope is determined by striking him on the forehead with a mallet; only after this is the formula pronounced: “The pope is dead”’.

  Saint Patrick and Ossian

  The principal festivals are four in number. Imbolc, the first of February, has survived in Candlemas. Beltane, the first of May, corresponds to the famous ‘Walpurgis Night’ once celebrated in Germany and all of central Europe. The first of August is Lughnasadh, festival of the god Lugh, which in the era of Augustus was confounded with that of the emperor and would become the great ‘national’ festival of Romanised Gaul. Finally, Samhain, the first of November, the day where the dead irrupt into the world of the living, obviously corresponds to All Saints’ Day, the Eve of the Dead.

  Contrary to what is often believed, druidism only appears in the sixth or fifth century BCE, under foreign influences.

  ‘It is a fact’, notes Guy Rachet, ‘that the druids are unknown to the Celtic communities of central Europe and the Orient. However, in the time of Caesar they are fully established in Gaul, which became their domain, along with the south of England. It seems therefore that they are the heirs of a very old sacerdotal caste, which the Celts would have known when they arrived in Great Britain.’

  ‘More precisely’, he adds, ‘why wouldn’t they be the heirs of the Hyperboreans of which Diodorus speaks, who inhabited a large island facing the Celtic Sea (which can only be England) and who regarded themselves as the priests of the Hyperborean Apollo who they celebrated each day by hymns and chants in a circular temple adorned with rich offerings? This temple seems to be none other than the megalithic monument of Stonehenge’.

  As throughout Europe, paganism and Christianity clashed fiercely with one another in ancient Celtic culture. The Irish love to recall the legendary dialogue waged between Ossian and St. Patrick. Ossian lamented the adventures of ancient times, the hunts, the sound of the horn, the old kings. ‘If they were still here’, he said to Patrick, ‘you would not roam the countryside with your chanting flock’. And further: ‘Hear my account: although my memory weakens and worry gnaws at my being, I want to continue to sing of the deeds of the past and to live the ancient glory. Now I am old. My life freezes over and all my joys disappear. My hand cannot hold the sword, nor my arm the spear. Among the clerics my sadness endures a final hour, and the psalms now replace the victory songs’.

  Renan writes: ‘I do not know a more curious spectacle than this revolt of the masculine sense of heroism against the feminine sentiment that reached the brink of fullness in the new cult. Indeed, what exasperates the old representatives of Celtic society is the exclusive triumph of the peaceable spirit of men dressed in linen and singing psalms, whose voice was sorrowful, who preach fasting and no longer know the heroes’. (Essais de morale et de critique).148

  The last pagan king of Ireland was Loegaire. Patrick was never able to convert him. He wanted to be buried standing up, fully armed. But Arthur, having relinquished his divinity, ended by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Ossian concluded his days in a cloister. Merlin himself submitted to the arguments of Columbanus.

  The Celts would have their revenge. Christianity had influenced their myths. They would influence its myths. From here arises the long struggle of Britany’s churches against Roman claims related by Augustin Thierry. From here arises Scotus Eriugena, Duns Scotus, and the intellectual radiance of the Irish monasteries.

  Gaelic and Brythonic

  The Celtic languages represent the westernmost branch of the Indo-European languages. They include the Gaelic languages or ‘Q-Celtic’ (which preserves the ‘q’, or the Indo-European kwe-, as in Latin equus, ‘horse’) and the Brythonic languages or ‘P-Celtic’ (which transform the kwe into ‘p’, as in Greek hippos or Irish epos, which also mean ‘horse’).

  In the first group we find Irish, Scottish, and Manx (spoken in the Isle of Man). The language of the Celtiberians, who we only know by very short and obscure inscriptions, is also placed here. The second group includes Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, as well as the language of the ancient Picts and ‘ancient continental Celtic’, commonly called Gallic, even though it has been spoken well beyond the limits of historic Gaul.

  Continental Celtic very quickly disappeared from Central Europe, and then (under the influence of Latin) from Gaul and Galatia. Traces, which are less numerous than one would think, are nevertheless discovered in France, notably in the toponomy.

  Other languages have survived. Some are revived today under the influence of political and cultural tendencies towards preserving roots. Whereas French had been instituted as an obligatory language seven years after the annexation of Britany (1532), the Breton language is still used daily by 750,000 people, 25,000 of which are monolingual.

  ‘The Breton language’, writes Paul Sérant in La Bretagne et la France,149 has never been spoken in the totality of the Armorican peninsula. But until the tenth century, it was the only language spoken to the east of a line running from Saint-Brieuc to Paimboeuf. Today, its domain includes the totality of the Finistère region, a third of the Côtes-du-Nord region, and half of the Morbihan’.

  The legends of the Celtic people mirror their art: completely interwoven. The stories are full of convolutions; the heroes have complex personalities. Collected by the Irish poets, the filid, and by Christian monks, who censored numerous passages, Irish literature is composed of historic and mythological cycles (the Ulster Cycle, the Fenian Cycle, the Royal Cycles, etc., depicting the ancient gods of Ireland, the Tuatha de Danaan, and legendary heroes like Conchobar and Cuchulainn.

  ‘From the ninth century’, explains Markale, ‘the Irish monks transcribed into Gaelic most of the pagan Celtic legends that had been transmitted to them orally or even by previous manuscripts’. However, ‘the monks have not hesitated to modify what they no longer understood or else what shocked their Christian zeal. We therefore have a profusion of texts, some of which are incomplete or deliberately truncated’.

  The most important character in the Gaelic tradition is a Celtic Hercules figure named Cuchulainn. A mystery hangs over his birth. His father would turn out to be none other than the god Lugh, the pan-Celtic divinity honoured on the first of August who gave his name to the city of Lyon (Lugdunum, ‘the fortress or hill of Lugh’).

  The Great Literary Texts

  Cuchulainn occupies a comparable enough place in the Irish tales to that of Lancelot du Lac in the Brythonic cycle of Round Table romances popularised by Champenois Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century.

  ‘From its appearance around 1155’, writes Joseph Bédier, ‘the prose novel of Lancelot du Lac was considered as the Mirror of all chivalry, as the Sum of all courtesy, as the Romance of romances’.150 The adventures of Merlin, Arthur, Galahad, Gawain, and Guinevere the beloved Lady, of Perceval, and Galehaut have remained justly celebrated. They have been recently republished in three volumes from the edition that Jacques Boulenger published in 1941, which bases itself on the English text in the British Museum, established from the first French Lancelot.

  The old Celtic legends were compiled between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. Works of prose, romantic poetry, bardic literature, great epic gestures, all these masterpieces form an integral part o
f the European patrimony. The Middle Ages has bequeathed ‘the four branches of the Mabinogi’, Welsh texts known by late manuscripts that give a perfect description of ancient Brythonic society. In the ninth century, the Voyage of Saint Brendan (a Latin account containing the voyages of a certain Brendan in search of the Island of Paradise) comes to point where he relays the Voyage of the Celtic hero Bran and his quest for the Land of the Fairies, which is not without parallels to the Argonauts and the Odyssey. Renan will see in this ‘one of the most astonishing creations of the human spirit, and perhaps the most complete expression of the Celtic idea’.

  In 1155, Robert Wace composed the first history of Arthur in French. In the fourteenth century, the works of the Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym (1320–1380) knew an immense success. In the sixteenth century, Breton poetry is no less renowned: Marie de France cites the ‘lay of Laüstic’ (from Breton eostig, ‘nightingale’).

  However, these texts only make their entry very late in the literary anthologies. ‘There was a time’, writes Jean Markale, ‘where Celtic literature was considered non-existent: it would have been inconceivable to claim a comparable position for a Celtic or Germanic work’. It was necessary that the people of the north should be barbaric, only touched late by civilisation. Ex oriente lux. Of the ancient Irish literature, J. -P. Mahaffy says in 1899: ‘Where it is not dumb it is indecent’!

  It is thanks to romanticism that these works, forgotten but transmitted in small cenacles from generation to generation, will be rediscovered. Madame de Staël would undergo the influence of Ossian, as would Napoleon. In the nineteenth century, we will even witness a wave of ‘Celtomania’. Then come the archaeologists, the historians, and the linguists.

  Like the Romans, the Celts ‘thought their history mythically’. In their accounts, as in those of the Germanic sagas, the themes of Greek tragedy are rediscovered: the ethic of honour, a sense of duty, the inexorability of destiny. Many authors have been struck by these analogies.