Brown Magic, and the Reclamation of the Celtic Heritage

 

I must speak to a large and too often forgotten group. I want to talk about Latin practitioners. And by this I mean not Mexican, or Latino/Latinex, but a much broader family, the children of the Mediterranean and of Iberia, the people of modern Spain, Basque country and Portugal and Italy in especial and their own children who have spread in so many ways into the Americas, who are mixed with Indian and Black blood as, in the Mediterranean they were mixed for thousands of years. I am always excited to connect with you brothers and sisters who are mysteriarchs, devotees, priests and priestesses, occultists, many of you who even identify not simply as witches, but Wiccans, Traditional witches and Druids. Even Celtic Catholics. Knowing you does not only cause me pleasure because we are all brown together. You are rekindling an ancient fire and this is so important, especially in the Celtic traditions because they have been dominated by white people and celebrated as white, and there is a problem here.

The reason I love the brown witch and the Latin druid is that white people under the double dose of a northern Catholicism which breaks off knowledge of the deeper past and a Protestantism which does it even more, are so much slower to come to what magic is, and yet attempt to lead us in it. The next reason, and really for me the most important, is because the forms of magic many practice in the west, Wicca, Druidry, Traditional, claim to have a Celtic origin, and this claim also sees Celtic people as being Irish, and being centered in the British Isles, being…. Well, yes, white. And this is nonsense. If we are to recapture any true sense of these paths and the meaning of Celtic practices, we have to look again at what Celtic means.

We know that aside from Celtic being a religious culture (like Judaism)  it was a linguistic culture (as opposed to a racial culture,). Some cultures are religious and racial (Jews for the most part) and some are largely religious and cultural, though not necessarily racial (Arabs) But Celts were and are bound by language, practice and to some extent a very broad religion.  While some Celts in modern Belgium and northern France were Germanic, and these were the Celts who crossed over into the eastern part of modern England, this is not the majority of Celtic people. What is more, the people of Britain were not even called Celts, but Britons.

What we now know for sure is what the legends told us, that even with the Irish, those most Celtic of Celts, their original home was the coast of Iberia (Spain and Portugal), and one only have to look at a Black Irishman and a Portuguese to see the resemblance. In the 1800s, when people used Celt as a slur, they were careful to delineate Spaniards and Italians, as well as their new descendants in Central and South America as Celtic, and this should be remembered when we are reforming these Celt Traditions and seeing what it really means to be Wiccan, Oldcraft, Druid. What is more, we are now remembering the links between Celt Iberian and African cultures, for if the Irish came from Spain, where did the Spanish come from?  We know one place they came from was North African through Carthage and its empire—which also settled in Italy and Sicily, and that Carthage was established originally by Phoenicians. For a moment let’s even think of the likelihood that the ancient Etruscan must have had some link to these Celtic people. Let’s think of how the Celts made their home in northern Italy, in northern Greece and even in Turkey. Let’s remember that the Galatians Saint Paul writes too, who lived in the heart of modern Turkey, were also Celts, and that Celts seem to have made it as far as China.

But back to Carthage. By tradition the founder of Carthage was Queen Alyssa who was—get this—the aunt of Queen Jezebel, King Ahab’s Phoenician Queen. Going down and down the Celtic spiral is going to bring us back to the biblical spiral as well, and the memory of Asherahmand Astarte of the Mother and the true Father as well. This brown path, which is not exclusive, but inclusive, is our Celtic heritage.