Alt-Christianity Is the New Celtic Christianity

A return to the Wild of God

In case you haven’t heard, my newest book Mythologies of the Wild of God, is now available from Angelico Press.

The Grail Moon

Have you been paying attention to the Grail Moon? The Grail Moon is the cycle that begins with the new moon just prior to Easter (and since Easter always falls just after the first full moon following the Vernal Equinox, that means the Grail Moon begins two weeks before Easter). Over these two weeks, we see the moon fill with light until at its fullness it presages the resurrection: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

Rudolf Steiner makes quite a bit of the connection of the moon to the mystery of Easter and speaks of it in terms that can only be described as a poetic metaphysics:

“And let us remember that in the Parsifal saga it is emphasised that on every Good Friday, and thus during the Easter festival, the Host descends from Heaven into the Grail and is renewed; it sinks into the Grail like a rejuvenating nourishment—at the Easter festival, when Parsifal is again directed towards the Grail by the hermit; at the Easter festival, whose significance for the Grail has also been brought nearer to mankind again through Wagner’s Parsifal.”

The decent of the Host on Good Friday in Parsifal, according to Steiner, is figured in the position of the moon at this time of the liturgical and planetary year:

“Because the moon reflects the sun’s rays and in this way brings into being the gold-gleaming vessel, it appears to us as the bearer of the Sun-spirit, for the Sun-spirit appears within the moon’s vessel in the form of the wafer-like disc.”

That is, at this time of the year, the entire cosmos figures the Eucharist.

Excerpts from the film version of Parsifal by Hans Jurgen von Syberberg. It is one of the wildest films I’ve ever seen.

The Celtic Church

Since St. Patrick’s Day approaches, I cannot help but return to one of my touchpoints, The Celtic Church. Sophiology, indeed, bears many resonances with Celtic Christianity in that both are intimately aware of the synergy between the invisible and visible worlds, the supernature and nature, with Sophia as the metaxu connecting both. As a result, we find ourselves in a realm of spirituality that participates in both rationality and intuition, in the material and the spiritual, in waking consciousness and in that of dreams and visions. Sophiology and the Celtic Church, then, comprise a “Church of the Between,” a Church of the Metaxu. In the words of St. Patrick,

“Our God is the God of all men, the God of heaven and earth, of sea and river, of sun and moon and stars, of the lofty mountain and the lowly valleys, the God above heaven and in heaven and under heaven; he has his dwelling round heaven and earth and sea and all that in them is. He inspires all, he quickens all, he dominates all, he sustains all. He lights the light of the sun; he furnishes the light of the light; he has made springs in the dry land and has set stars to minister to the greater lights.”

As with some Native American tribes (as my beloved friend Matthew Milliner explains in his very fine book The Everlasting People), some argue that the pre-Christian Celts already had intimations and intuitions of Christ—even the experience of him—prior to the arrival of Christian missionaries. As the sixth century Welsh bard Taliesin described it,

“Christ, the Word from the beginning, was from the beginning our Teacher, and we never lost his teaching. Christianity was in Asia a new thing; but there was never a time when the Druids of Britain held not to its doctrines.”

That’s a bold claim.

Writing in the ninth century, the Irish monk John Scotus Eriugena upholds precisely this intuition: “In all human beings, indeed to put it simply, in the created universe as a whole, the Word is the true light that subsists now and always has, because it never ceases to subsist in all things” (Homily on the Prologue to Saint John’s Gospel [trans. Christopher Bamford]). This is Sophiology in its purist form.

The ancient Celtic churches held to a different iteration of Christianity than that of their Mediterranean counterparts. Unlike those under the yoke of Rome in more politically and geographically hostile—and mostly urban—contexts, Christians in the British Isles—entirely rural at first—were blessed with a psychological conditioning more conducive to finding the sophiological between in an atmosphere of burgeoning greenness and life—of fish and birds, of rivers and wind, of angels and stars. As the nineteenth-century poet and Anglican priest Robert Hawker writes,

They rear’d their lodges in the wilderness,
Or built them cells beside the shadowy sea,
And there they dwelt with angels, like a dream.
So they unroll’d the Volume of the Book
And fill’d the fields of the Evangelist
With thoughts as sweet as flowers.

This, then, is a Christianity that discovered Christ organically.

Of course, history is tumid with examples of ecclesiastical and moralistic busybodies whose only reason for existence, apparently, is to make sure no one’s having and too much fun or enjoying the blessing of God’s grace without a sufficient measure of misery. Self-disgust is always an added bonus! This was the case with the Calvinist killjoys in early modern England who outlawed both May poles and Christmas—not to mention cakes and ale. And it was also the case in the Celtic British Isles. Robert Graves (always interesting, always blunt) explains in his customary manner:

“One can sympathize with the [Celtic] poets, in so far as their predecessors had accepted Christ without compulsion and had reserved the right to interpret Christianity in the light of their literary tradition, without interference…. The first Christian missionaries had conducted themselves with scrupulous courtesy towards the devotees of the pagan Sun-cult, with whom they had much mystical doctrine in common…. In Ireland, when St. Columcille founded his church at Derry he was ‘so loth to fell certain sacred trees that he turned his oratory to face north rather than east’—north, towards Caer Arianhod. And when he was in Scotland, he declared that ‘though he feared Death and Hell, the sound an an axe in the grove of Derry frightened him still more.’ But the age of toleration did not last long, once the iconoclasts were politically strong enough to begin their righteous work, the axes arose and fell on every sacred hill.”

God save us from zealous converts.

It is difficult to properly articulate the loss that Christianity as a whole experienced as a result of the neutering of Celtic Christianity. Such an impoverishment. As one of my household saints, H.J. Massingham says, “If the British Church had survived, it is possible that the fissure between Christianity and nature, widening through the centuries, would not have cracked the unity of Western man’s attitude toward the Universe.” But the British/Celtic Church didn’t survive, and the unity hath been destroyed ever since.

Yet it persists in pockets.

I see it persisting, for example, in the religious intuitions of my friends Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw. I deeply appreciate their sincerity in approaching Eastern Orthodoxy as a way to retrieve a liturgically beautiful, theophantically attentive spirituality in the British Isles. I see this in Paul’s current project of writing about “50 Holy Wells” on his Substack (though I’m starting to be glad he didn’t find a hundred!). And while I don’t think the Eastern approach is ultimately useful or practical in the West (and I say this as an estranged Eastern Rite Catholic) celebrating Easter out of synch with the rest of one’s neighbors is rather a buzzkill and encourages the taint of “specialness” (a kind or Orientalism) that infects so much Orthodox discourse among the newly converted (and, to be clear, I DO NOT see Paul or Martin participating in that at all).

I also see it in the synergy—which I have always recognized—between certain neopagans and Christianity. As I’ve mentioned repeatedly in my books and essays, those attracted to neopaganism, to me anyway, indicate a hankering for the kind of ecologically and mystically embodied Christianity that the Celtic Church possessed—and which is to be found absolutely nowhere in the current Christian denominational landscape. Nevertheless, the neopagans give me hope. They would, I am sure, have no problem joining me in this ancient Irish prayer:

Son of the Dawn
Son of the clouds
Son of the stars
Son of the elements
Son of the heavens
Son of the Moon
Son of the Sun.

For my family, this Alt-Christianity, as I have mentioned before, led us to house church—first out of necessity when all the churches were closed indefinitely four years ago, and then by preference. And that would have been unthinkable had I not been so deeply washed in Sophiology before then. For it was through Sophiology that by intuition I discovered spiritual and temporal realities much in harmony with the ancient Celtic Church and the organic discovery of Christ by Native Americans.

Such a Christian expression, as should be expected, can certainly bring one into conflict with the protectors of the Christian establishment and orthodoxy. I’ve had plenty of push-back already—from friends and enemies alike. And I know that many would take the axe to our sacred trees—and even set me on a pyre—did cultural conditions allow. But here I stand.

Nevertheless, I do think the times call for an Alt-Christianity, in the spirit of the ancient Celtic Church and the Native Americans. In fact, they call to us from the past: “Return, my children. Return to the Wild of God.”

Some Celtic Christian vibes.