Archive for ‘“Britishness”’

  |  
August 15, 2012

Divine Signs: Lumping and Splitting

Sulis: One of a whole pantheon of British gods.

Recently, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research into the ancestral gods of the British Isles. I’ve often thought it odd that as one of the key nations in the revival movement, we should show such a limited interest in our own gods. The reverence of Irish, Welsh, Greek and Norse gods is somewhat commonplace, but English gods (of which there are many) get a surprisingly small amount of attention. I personally suspect this is due to a lack of accessible information about them, directed at a popular audience. I think this is a real shame, and I hope it will change.

So far, I’ve been concentrating on R.G. Collingwood’s Roman Inscriptions of Britain, and have found a huge number of local gods, about which we know a little and can guess quite a bit more via the interpretio romana. As I’m dealing with a-lot of the source material the founding members of Druidry, Wicca and other modern paths may have directly or indirectly drawn upon, I can also see where a lot of their ideas came from.

Take the Lord of Wicca, for example. His dual role as the sacred king, doomed to die to make the crops fertile, and the wild hunter-shaman of the wintery woods, is a straight-up combination of Freyr and another, less known god; Nodens. Nodens, also known as Nodons, Nodonts, Nudens, is a god associated with hunting, dogs, healing and fishing. He had a major cult centre at Lydney in Gloucestershire, but (as I have been discovering) was worshipped across Britain, although frequently in the form of his alternate in the interpretio – Mars. Mars-Nodens seems to be one of the most popular gods in Roman Britain, up there with Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the Dea Matronae – the Mother Goddesses. I’ve found inscriptions devoted to him across the length and breadth of the country. His explicit association with Mars is one connection, but another suggestive link to other gods is the linguistic similarity of his name to the figures of Nuada (in Ireland) and Llud (Wales). In these persons, the theme of losing a hand (but it being restored at some later date) appears, which also indicates a further connection – to the Germanic God Tiw or Tyr, who was also associated with Mars.

Now, does this mean that a single divinity – with many different names – was worshipped across Europe? That seems to be the conclusion drawn by previous writers. The God’s powers of regeneration, his association with wildness, fertility, just violence and sacrifice all spring from this densely woven fabric of associations. But to me, I think lumping all these very different beings together is a bit dodgy. In Rome, Mars was more associated with warfare than healing – that association is a decidedly Celtic viewpoint. Similarly, Tyr is a god of justice rather than a healer. Unlike Nuada, he never regains the hand he sacrifices to the forces of chaos. Explaining away these differences does a disservice to their plurality of these different beings, and I think neglects their clear differences as characters.

I think the root of the “lumping” school lies with a desire to create analogues to the Christian divinity. This tendency can be most clearly seen in Goddess Spirituality, which denies the existence of a nasty, patriarchal God (boo), and affirms the existence of a loving, matristic Goddess (yay!) In my view, though legitimate engagements with the sacred, these views simply aren’t supported by the source material, which if anything suggests a huge number of local gods, similar to that seen in many polytheistic countries. Each tribe would have its own collection of divinities, embedded in their own history, culture and landscape.

That isn’t to say there are no lines of continuity though. Clearly, there is something shared cross-culturally under all this Nodens-Mars-Tyr business. Ultimately, I think the key theme is “necessity”. Across pre-Christian Europe, there seems to have been a spiritual concern with the issue of what to do in a tight spot, and that concern manifested in different ways in different contexts. In Norse culture, that manifested with a warrior sacrificing his sword-hand for the good of All, and therefore gaining a sense of justice and authority over the thing and the laws it gave. In Roman Britain, that same need presented as a hunter king, who rewarded those who propitiated him with a good catch and a healing hand. Just like the trickster figures of Native American spiritualities, European gods are variations on a theme. To me, it seems what is shared is not a single god with many masks, but rather a common archetype – a divine equivalent of a star-sign. Nodens, Mars and Tyr are like cousins; sharing a basic energy, but manifesting it in different, locally specific ways.

Posted in "Britishness", History, Paganism | 2 Comments »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
June 6, 2012

Jubileeway: Thoughts after a weekend of Pageantry

This Tuesday sees the last of many celebrations, marking our monarch’s 60th year on the throne. Reams of bunting, mountains of barbequed meat, oceans of pimms and enough cake to sink a royal yacht have been devoured in honour of Queen Liz – and a merry time was had by all.

Except on Twitter and Facebook, where legions of those I follow have expressed their overwrought frustration about the entire affair. Plenty of people I know have avoided built-up areas because of the doubtlessly thronging crowds; still more have kept their televisions switched off in order to avoid the BBC’s shambolic and obsessive commentary of the whole thing.

 

My mum and dad have been away for most of the weekend – going out to a jubilee party on Sunday and a beacon-lighting ceremony last night. I couldn’t attend the former because I had a friend staying over, nor the latter because I had two blogs to write. But whenever they’ve been in, my mum and to a lesser extent my dad have spent a good couple of hours watching the celebrations in London.

 

Now, I’m not an ardent republican. I have quite a lot of respect for the Queen as an individual, so I think the degree of violent bile certain anti-monarchists tend to vomit in her direction – wishing her dead, that sort of thing – is just horrible. Personally, I feel that when the real power-brokers in our society – large corporations and the big political parties – do great evil on a daily basis; it seems rather odd to get more annoyed about a little appendix of a power-structure like the royal family. There are far bigger fish to fry.

 

But I’ve nonetheless found the jubilee celebrations irritating. For me, the main thing is not who is being celebrated, but what – sure, it’s about Britishness, but what vision of Britishness has the jubilee been used to express? What values flow from it, and underpin it? And where might those values take us as a society?

It’s pretty clear that what’s being invoked with all the funny hats and partying in the rain is the sort of obstinate zeitgeist that characterized the Britain throughout and between the two World Wars – a blitz spirit of pulling together as one nation in the face of adversity. The sheer amount of wanky emoting about how everyone was doing so very well at partying despite the recession and despite the rain was being eagerly pumped straight from the rhetoric of a 1940s public service announcement. Of course, nobody seemed to feel that equating standing out in the wet for a couple of hours and or buying some (reduced in price, numerous in quantity) foodstuffs, to an entire nation fighting for its life, to be poor taste.

 

Despite Wilfrid Owen’s dire warning about the attitude of dulce et decorum est, pro patriae mori in the First War, the British sense of national pride never quite broke under the weight of mass mortality and destruction of the two wars; instead, the heat of battle reforged the tattered remnants of our 1900s swagger into a sort of quieter dignity; gone was the Empire, in its place was a Commonwealth, with a mawkishly nostalgic former colonizer at its heart. Nostalgic not for the glory days of the Raj and British hegemony though, but for a “Finest Hour” that happened immediately afterwards. Instead of believing, as the rest of Europe does, that the Wars were a terrifying part of a collective history that must never repeated, we Brits seem obsessed with them; or at least, who we were whilst under their influence. We still talk of those dark days reverently, even fondly, and have been busily elevating them to the position of a national foundation myth for the past eighty years. It seemed to me that a wartime, Edwardian tone stalked behind the jubilee celebrations; which, combined with the constant obsessing over what Britishness is, Euroscepticism, the continued popularity of Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs, stands as grim testament to our collective sense of awe at our grandparents and great grandparents who fought for us – a sense of awe that sits at the heart of how we think about our national identity.

 

All this is completely understandable, of course. It is only natural that after the transformative experience of two world wars and losing an empire, that Britain should become a very different nation. The nation it has become doesn’t represent what I most love about this place – the magic and the fire and the rustic mysteries of the Isle of the Mighty – but instead this sort of pseudish ironic mashup of the 1950s, the 1890s and the present. But I also note with concern how easily this hero-worship has been used by those in power to silence dissent and to demonize rebellion. Legitimate protest and popular revolt, such profound mainstays of British folk culture since Boudicca, have become almost blasphemous, held up against the sterling example of our (genuinely) brave boys and girls who went off to fight and die without complaint. The spiritual (and sometimes physical) descendants of the very over-privileged dolts who sent our young men to die by the thousands at Ypres and Passiondale are now elevated as the respectable voice of necessity. And yes, they still send our brave soldiers to die in foreign fields – just look at Iraq. While those of us who cry foul at the injustice of it all are decried by those same elites as weasley malcontents. The social justice campaigner is the new “conchie”.

Of course, they will be those who say that the jubilee isn’t about these sort of divisions. But that’s precisely the problem – such events as the jubilee are fully part of the spectacular pageantry of statecraft; serving the explicit purpose of masking the differences between the many echelons of British society, merging us into a single political body – with the head of that body being the Head of State herself. Bathed in the reflected glow of Her Majesty – as we saw during the service of celebration at St Pauls – are the rich and powerful. And the City of London Corporation; the very organization which was instrumental in clearing St Pauls of Occupy; hosted a sumptuous reception after the service. At a time where we more than ever need to hold the wealthy and priviledged to account, we’re being encouraged to wave the flag and proclaim our solidarity, regardless of income. This is as a perversion of the genuine heroism of our forebears; a cunning confidence trick, that makes a mockery of what they stood for.

Posted in "Britishness", Daily Life, Social Anthropology | 2 Comments »

Tags: , , , , , ,
March 14, 2012

Free Radicals: On the true spirit of the English

There’ll always be an England – but is this what it should look like?

Patriotism is a dirty word these days. For all the diverse bluster of our politicians and right-wing journalists, nationalism exists in only two, rather flawed modes: the bland, teary-eyed flag waving of Britishness; inclusive to all and tied more to narrow political values of citizenship and democracy than any broader cultural vision, and the backward, small-town, conservative xenophobia of Englishness. Denuded of its once imperial pretentions, Britishness has become something of a civic duty – a demonstration of a willingness to participate in public life – and little more. Englishness, in most cases, seems to be merely an ideological deployment of Stuff White People Like (British Chapter), combined with a nastier element; a performance of the fears some have about how that might change in a global world. What’s worse, is that the two are frequently confused, Britishness being used to refer to Englishness being used to refer to Britishness… to almost infinite regress.

Confusions aside, I have less beef with the new vision of Britishness. All states have their theatrics of belonging, and the government at Westminster is no different. At least it is an open, inclusive vision of citizenship – a hell of a lot better than the restrictive, crypto-Metropolitanism that Britishness used to be; under whose auspices Welsh, Irish, Scottish and regional cultures were almost stamped out. A more pressing concern for me is the state of Englishness. Regardless of whether it is the middle class vision lampooned by Jam and Jerusalem or the more working class mixture of football and fame; both have an unnerving tendency towards a fear of “others” – foreigners, outsiders or dissenters – that betrays an ignorance of history. After all, the Cross of St George is the symbol of a Middle-Eastern Saint, adopted after the Crusades. Tea is imported from India. Jam started off in France. Looking to Christianity, St George and football to give us our sense of Englishness always seemed odd to me – all these tropes are world-covering in scope, and yet are frequently paraded about by bigots who tout them as symbols of the essence of one specific nation.

Of course, all this goes to show a basic truth that anthropologists have understood for decades – that all nations are imagined communities. Created on the basis of common destinies cooked up by intellectuals, artists and others with a platform and an agenda, pretty much any human community of any size is intentionally forged by some historical figure or other. Englishness is the way it is not because of any natural facts of blood and soil, but because persons or persons unknown decreed it so.

Norwegian nationalism was made by painters, writers and musicians

Some nations, such as Norway, arose as concepts more or less directly from the Romantic movement. 19th century Norwegian intellectuals and artists such as Asbjørnsen, Lindemen and Grieg set about recording the folk practices of their newly-born country (it had been a Danish province for some 400 years), and forged from both these records and their own genius something of a collective soul for the Norwegian people. Of course, England also had its own Romantic movement, but it seems to not have had anything like the same kind of impact on the nationalism that eventually took shape here. England was very much eclipsed by Britain as a favoured concept early on, and so it was eventually Britannia, not Ing, who prevailed as the favoured Genius Populi. With modernity’s vicious destruction of folk culture in the early half of the 20th century, the only ethnic identity people could turn back to once Britishness shed its ethnic associations was what they remained passionate about – sport, Christianity and popular culture.

As a result, the nostalgia of present day wannabe nation-builders is invested in the 50s (when Britishness involved a rolling-out of English culture, before the race-riots of the 60s), not pre-Industrial times as with other nationalisms. And given the short period of time between then and now, this supposed “happier time” is only too easy to pick holes in. 1950s Britain was oppressive, inane in its disrespect for the past and faith in the future, racist, sexist, homophobic, and imperialistic. It had yet to challenge the many grotesqueries of capitalism. So a collective imaginary rooted in such an era is bound to be negatively contaminated with such attitudes.

The Children of Robin Hood?

But within this rather sorry state of affairs, there lies an opportunity. With the hideousness of nationalism so closely bound-up with an obviously false essentialism and an oppressive cultural outlook, we have the chance to do away with it, and replace it with something more in tune with contemporary values. The same ingredients the early romantics of Norway used to produce a sense of collective culture – folkways – have in England been left mercifully untainted by the bad old days of ethnocentric nationalism. What’s more, during the 60s and 90s especially, English people have drawn on these traditions to support the various protest movements and rebellions of the 20th century. I see it as no coincidence that the Battle of Beanfield occurred just when Richard Carpenter’s mystical Robin of Sherwood was being broadcast on British television – they are both manifestations of the deeply spiritual and profoundly rebellious spirit of the English people.

To me, English folk culture is the missing ingredient in creating the right kind of English ethnicity for a pluralist society. It is local, it is assertive, it is historically (and mythically) rooted, and yet it isn’t intolerant or oppressive. In fact, it can easily be interpreted as quite the opposite. Whether we think of Wat Tyler or Robin Hood, The Levellers or The Travellers, there is a long and proud tradition of ordinary English people fighting for freedom and equality – precisely the things that identity politics and now the Occupy movement are demanding. Folk culture has, and can provide a symbolic language to articulate this. This freedom-loving nature of course isn’t unique to the English, nor are the English “essentially” about freedom. The rise of Elgar-fuelled nationalist pomp is proof against that kind of naïveté. But given how all cultures are made, not born, surely we can re-make English culture out of these radical historical ingredients, and put it to work in leading the English to a better destiny? Perhaps now is the time we should see ourselves, as one of my favourite musicians Damh the Bard puts it, as the sons and daughters of Robin Hood.

Posted in "Britishness", Paganism, Social Anthropology | 7 Comments »

Tags: , , , , , , ,
  |  
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 766 other followers