Dowsing for Divinity

Numerous Pagan authors have made the point that Welsh, Irish, and Scottish culture is being appropriated, packaged, and resold as “Celtic spirituality”, among them Mhara Starling, Morgan Daimler, Lora O’Brien, and Scott Richardson-Read. The biggest problem with such appropriation (as with the theft and repackaging of other Indigenous cultures) is that it makes it harder for people to access the real thing, and erases the people who are maintaining the living, breathing version of the real thing, because of the fake versions being peddled.

I was prompted to write this after viewing this excellent video responding to a “new age shaman” type person who is trying to start a new “bardic” tradition. While it was prompted by a specific Facebook post from a specific person, what Gwilym Morus-Baird has to say in this video illustrates a wider problem – the attempt to blend a lot of different cultures together, erase their origins, and create a “perennial tradition“.

The video carefully explains why appropriating and overwriting Welsh spirituality is a problem. Instead of going to the original sources, the living, breathing, still extant and flourishing tradition of Welsh language and culture, the appropriator is going to secondary translated sources, imposing meaning on them, and mixing in concepts from other spiritual systems which may not even be compatible.

At the end of the video, Gwilym asked English speakers to try to persuade Shivam O’Brien that he’s wrong. I suspect it is a waste of time trying to persuade the guy he’s talking about. But others who might be tempted to do the same sort of thing might listen.

In addition to the excellent points that Gwilym made in the video:

• Shivam O’Brien, and other appropriators, are trying to flatten all spirituality into a single unified thing.
• By bringing in Tibetan and Indian and Indigenous cultures, he is culturally appropriating them, as well as Welsh culture.
• Shivam O’Brien, and other appropriators, are also trying to flatten Welsh and Irish into a single “pan-Celtic” tradition which never existed. Welsh is Brythonic and Irish is Goidelic.
• Shivam O’Brien’s comment that Welsh culture is “dying” reminds me of the typical coloniser trope of “the dying Celt” — the Romans made a statue of the dying Gaul; the British documented Indigenous cultures in the belief that they were dying out — not because they were actively trying to eradicate them and their culture (which they also did to the Welsh), but because they were dying out “naturally” because of encountering the “superior” western culture (massive eye-roll). This is known as the Vanishing Indian trope.

When I was a kid, I mixed multiple colours of plasticine (similar to Play-doh) together. At first it made a fascinating swirl of colours. But soon it became a disappointing brown colour. This is what happens when people blend spiritual traditions together indiscriminately.

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