> From: Patrick Nugent [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
>
> Thanks to Karen Jolly for in interesting and helpful reply to FAbrizio's
> question. Along those lines, I'd wonder whether Robert Markus's model in
> "The End of Ancient Christianity" might provide some help in the
> Anglo-Saxon context. Markus argues that Christians drew the boundaries of
> the sacred much more widely, and construed a great number of practices as
> religious when their forebears simply saw them as the way things had
> always
> been done, with no particular religious commitment involved.
>
This suggests that following the native religion was a matter of
choice. In fact, the evidence for classical observers of the Celts is that
the latter brought religious observances into every activity from hunting to
criminal execution to sowing the seed each spring. Hunting did not take
place without the appropriate deities being placated (as also seen among NA
peoples), criminals were sacrificed to the deity who had been offended by
the crime, and both land and seed were blessed before sowing took place.
Ostracization meant exclusion from the community rituals which established
each person's status; to be excluded was to be considered someone who no
longer belonged to the community, to be the ultimate outsider. To offend the
deities by not observing the proper rituals was to invite disaster on
oneself.
> By swallowing
> the sacred into the secular, Christians were able to identify a broad
> range of practices as "pagan", because they were not explicitly Christian,
> and then regulate and suppress them.
>
I would say that the indigenous religious beliefs of the Celts so
permeated their lives that the Christian monks had to create two
spheres--secular and religious--to distinguish the portion that would be
Christianized from what could continue without being changed. In the
process, they required a change in religious commitment--from pre-Christian
deities to Trinity. If such a change were not necessary, there would not
have been a need for the rededication of wells, etc. to Christian saints
instead of pre-Christian deities. And, at least among Celtic peoples, the
social structures were so valued that the diocesan system of organizartion
was abandoned for the monastic tuatha which were based on the native Irish
kin-group structures. Only in the late eleventh century did the suppression
begin.
Francine Nicholson
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