The Celts: Uncovering the Mythic and Historic Origins of Western Culture

by Jean Markale

While historians have tended to accord the Celts a place of minor significance in comparison to the Romans, The Celts firmly aligns the Celtic peoples as the primary European precedent to the Greco-Roman hegemony, restoring this culture to its true importance in the development of European civilization. An expert in Celtic studies, Markale regards myth as a branch of history, and explores mythological material to reveal the culture that gave rise to it. The alternative historical vision that emerges is both convincing and exciting.

• One of the most comprehensive treatments of Celtic civilization ever written.

• A cornerstone of Western civilization and the major source of its social, political, and literary values, Celtic civilization occupied the whole of Western Europe for more than a millennium.

• Unlike the Middle Eastern forerunners of the Greco-Roman world, Celtic civilization is still alive today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Mythology, European History, Research, Reference, Irish Literature

320 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1993

About the author

Jean Markale is the pen name of Jean Bertrand, a French writer, poet, radio show host, lecturer, and retired Paris high school French teacher.

He has published numerous books about Celtic civilisation and the Arthurian cycle. His particular specialties are the place of women in the Celtic world and the Grail cycle.

His many works have dealt with subjects as varied as summations of various myths, the relationships of same with occult subjects like the Templars, Cathars, the Rennes le Château mystery, Atlantis, the megalith building civilisations, druidism and so on, up to and including a biography of Saint Columba.

While Markale presents himself as being very widely read on the subjects about which he writes, he is nonetheless surrounded by controversy regarding the value of his work. Critics allege that his 'creative' use of scholarship and his tendency to make great leaps in reasoning cause those following the more normative (and hence more conservative) mode of scholars to balk. As well as this, his interest in subjects that his critics consider questionable, including various branches of the occult, have gained him at least as many opponents as supporters. His already weakened reputation was further tarnished in 1989, when he became involved in a plagiarism case, when he published under his own name a serious and well-documented guide to the oddities and antiquities of Brittany, the text of which had already been published twenty years before by a different writer through the very same publisher.
Also a source of controversy is his repeated use of the concept of "collective unconscious" as an explanatory tool. This concept was introduced by Carl Jung, but in modern psychology it's rejected by the vast majority of psychologists.

Reviews

[Jeane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. I feel like I learned so much more about the ancient Celtic and Gaulish peoples of Western Europe and how they contributed to modern society. I loved learning how the Celts were fearsome warriors due to their lack of fear of death, because death is only a stepping stone to the next life. There were a few things that bothered me, specifically how the author tries to assume that Morgan Le Fay of Arthurian legend is the same being as The Morrigan. The author repeats this several times, almost as if he is assuming that there was only one person in history with a certain name and any other mention of a similar name had to be the same person. Regardless of that, I really did enjoy reading this informative book and learning more about the Celts than I did before. I have a few more of Jean Markale's books and I cannot wait to give them a read.

[Mark Matzeder · Rating 3 out of 5]

A long fascination with both mythology and all things Celtic drew me to this title.
Originally written in French by eccentric scholar Jean Bertrand under the 'Markale' nom de plume, this work begins from the premise Celtic origins are shrouded beneath prehistory, bursting out of Jutland into Roman annals knowing only phantasmic fables of their cultural origins.
Markale sketches what we know of Celtic expansion across northern Europe, skirting Germans and Gauls before finding a home in the British Isles. He cites contemporary accounts of Classical writers, acknowledging their obvious bias.
He is more interested in reconstructing Celtic mythology--the metaphors which shaped their culture--through fragments of their art & literature. He also makes much of linguistic similarities and etymologies to advance his idea that metaphor overrides history in the Celtic mind.
Some of Markale's arguments smack of 'History Channel history'--where casual connections become causal and possibilities morph into assumptions--which is why the metaphoric, mythological aspects of the work were more compelling to me.
Markale makes a great deal of linguistic connections between Britons and Bretons, between Gaels and Gauls, arguments that are dense and beyond my level of familiarity with the topic.
It was Markale's deconstruction of common mythological elements in the various Quest Cycles which fired my imagination. The Arthurian cycles are the most famous, but Markale finds in the stories of Taliesin, Tristan, and Cuchulain a common propensity to find Mythic victory in Historic defeat while carrying the banner of Lost Causes.

[Stephen Simpson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Any book that tries to talk about Celtic history, especially areas like“how they lived” and “what they thought”, is either going to be brief or is going to have to make some leaps, inferences, and assumptions. Such is the case here.

I liked Markale’s review of a lot of the Roman sources, noting the political incentives to “exaggerate” where and when it suited them. I also liked how he mined legends like Arthur, Taliesin, and so on to show commonalities.

My biggest complaint is mostly that the author made a lot of conjectures that he didn’t really identify as such (“this is speculative, but here’s my evidence/reasoning …).

Also there were numerous digressions and some went far afield - there’s a paragraph that literally starts with “Whatever the mythical aspects of Juno’s geese, we do know that the Gauls’ attack on the Capitol failed”; highlighting how far afield he would go to try to make various points or connections.

A decent read for people who want to read more on the Celts, but not a good intro/basic work.

[Karen Floyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Markale reminds us that we need to look closely at ancient sources, mostly Roman in this case, and not just automatically accept what they have written as completely factual. All sources write from their own bias and worldview, and to justify their actions. The Romans wanted to show that their actions in conquering and slaughtering the Celts were justified because of the Celts' barbarism and rampant human sacrifice. So it is quite likely that their version of Celtic culture was exaggerated, to say the least. The Romans were just as bloody and barbarous in their treatment of the people they conquered as they accused the Celts of being. Rebellions by native peoples who, naturally, wanted to retain sovereignty over and possession of their own lands, were carried out on a massive scale and with vindictive ferocity. The Romans, remember, were those supposedly civilized people who went to the coliseum to watch wild animals and gladiators kill human beings, for entertainment. They were also the civilized people who invented that hideous form of torture and execution known as crucifixion.
I have perhaps belabored my point, and I can't help remembering the scene in the movie Life of Brian, where one of the Jewish conspirators rhetorically asks his fellows, "What have the Romans ever done for us?" And another replies "roads, viaducts," etc.
Except for what remains of their fortifications, recovered artifacts, and more recently, the ability to find the traces of buildings in the soil, we really don't, can't, know much about the ancient Celts because theirs was a deliberately oral society. They refused to write down their histories, their spirituality and religion, their view of life, their medical knowledge. Instead their druid candidates spent years learning and memorizing these things, a tremendous feat that leaves me awestruck, but a guarantee that if the druid class was completely slaughtered, which the Romans did, all of that knowledge would be lost, and only their conquerors would be left to tell their story.

[Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

A long and difficult book, The Celts: Uncovering the Mythic and Historic Origins of Western Culture is a comprehensive argument for the Celtic underpinnings of European civilization before and after the Romans, whose influence Markale downplays. Recent scholarship in archaeology has revealed that the Dark Ages were really not so dark but the events of those centuries are not written anywhere. This is one of the problems with Markale's title thesis, the Celts were a people with an oral tradition and did not record much so a great deal is presumed and assumed. Also, Americans in particular, unless they're really familiar with European history, may not recognize tribes such as the Cymri, the Fomore and the Tuatha de Danaan although they may recognize the Gauls, the Gaels, the Angles and the Saxons.

Markale draws a great deal from documents written hundreds of years after the described events and much of this information is new to me so I cannot address the accuracy of the sources. And she does point out the similarities between language, myths, worship and place names that bolster her argument. Nevertheless, long lists of Welsh and Breton rulers with the same names become confusing and tedious and add little to our understanding.

It is clear a tremendous amount of research went into this project but because of its age, it was first published in 1976, and the background in European history required to sort through the tribal histories, I do not recommend it.

[Cynthia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Markale's thesis is that Western culture has deeper roots in Celtic mythology and history than in the ancient Greco-Roman world. The author compares and contrasts Celtic stories, poems, and songs containing similar central imagery, then attempts to make symbolic connections to primal experience. Markale also cites Sanskrit roots of English language words and relates these to migration patterns of the Celts from Europe to Asia and back again.

I enjoyed the chapters I read but haven't yet finished the book due to more pressing life priorities.

[Nishi Serrano · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always love a book about history in someone else's point of view. Markale has recieved some bad reviews for his telling of the Celtic history, but I really came away with a sense of understanding and knowledge of their myths, and the spreading of their myths, and I continue to use his book as a reference to some of my own writing.

[Dickie]

A very interesting read but difficult to manage with so many names that I had no idea how to pronounce. This book was a long time coming to the US but worth the wait.

[Shelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author tends to go off on tangents, but the book does have a lot of information.

[Peter · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is unreadable.