________ Faculty of Communication Studies 2nd year st 1 semester __________________________________________________________

BRITISH CULTURAL LANDMARKS 1 TEXT ANTHOLOGY Junior Lecturer MA Ph.D. under completion Liliana Anton ________________________________________________________________________ Content 1. Possible definitions of culture 1.1. Overview on cultural studies / 1 1.2. Different perspectives on culture / 2 1.2.1 Culture and Anthropology/ 2 1.2.2. Culture and Sociology/ 2 1.2.3. Culture and mass media/ 3 2. British culture and identity 2.1. Britishness, identity, nationality / 3 2.2. British identity in change / 5 2.2. British mass media and cultural studies / 6 3. The Celtic heritage in the UK 3.1. Historical overview on the Celtic history / 8 3.2. Celtic mythology / 8 3.3. Celtic religion the druids / 10

4. Revision Plan Key concepts Bibliography

Foreword This unit presents a conceptual framework on the British culture taking into account a variety of definitions of the term. During history, culture has been defined as a set of values closely connected with other fields, such as arts and the social, political and administrative systems of a nation. This unit gives a perspective on the process of influencing each other and on the cultural impact of these on the mentality of a nation. It is structured into three parts and it focuses on the theoretical background of the above-mentioned topic. In the process of putting theory into practice the students benefit of certain guidelines in terms of critical thinking. The obligatory requirement for students is for them to be at the intermediate or advanced level in English so they have the ability to write essays on the given topics in this unit.

Objectives After reading this unit, the students will be able to: be aware of the variety of definitions of culture as an interdisciplinary understood concept, taking into account other domains of interest, such as: Anthropology, History, Mass media have a general perspective on the British and Celtic culture as based on historical data acknowledge the term Britishness as an awareness of British identity from a multicultural perspective understand the process of Celtic influence on British and European culture have notions on the restricted impact of cultural studies on mass media exemplify various contexts in which culture influences mass media develop abilities in critical thinking be able to write essays on specific topics

1.1 Overview on cultural studies Culture has been represented in history mainly by the arts. But the study of the artistic movements, such as those during the Middle Ages or Renaissance, is not enough to support a background in having a clear perspective on culture. At the end of the 20th century, culture as a concept can be defined from a variety of angles. Very generous in form and shape, culture is at the same time a system of traditions, the language of a nation and its art expression, in music, sculpture, literature, architecture, etc. Culture is evolving progressively with the mentality of a nation. It might be perceived as a complex of multiple cultural layers during the history of a nation. On the European continent, before and after AD, each important historical event is related with a dramatic change, a shift or a cultural influence of a nation to another. The expansion of the Roman Empire and the invasion of the Germanic tribes on the European continent at the beginning of our era had a dramatic impact on the Celtic tribes, on their survival and their culture, as they

had been withdrawing towards the northern territories. Nonetheless, up to a certain extent, their symbolism, mythology and arts are still present nowadays in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Angles, the representatives of a small Germanic tribe, who settled in England, gave their name to a nation that represents one of the most powerful countries in the world. In the 19th century, the British Empire was spread on 40% of the worldwide territories. The economic power supported one of the famous cultural movements in the world. The Victorian era is not only an expression of the imposed formalism in social communication but a change in architecture, music, literature and fashion. In order for us to understand a cultural message we should firstly be aware of a clear set of causes deep rooted in the social, economical, political and administrative areas. 1.2. Different perspectives on culture 1.2.1 Culture and Anthropology Culture could be defined etymologically as originating from the Latin word colere, which means to inhabit, cultivate or protect. In anthropological terms, culture is a background for studying the way of life of a group of people or a nation in its evolution during history. In 1871 the anthropologist Edwin Tylor defined it thus: Culture or civilization...is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. This definition takes European culture as the prototype for all other cultures. It suggests that primitive cultures have to undergo a developmental process in order to be as civilized as European culture. Such evolutionary schemes were later abandoned; anthropologists now treat culture as a neutral term used to describe a system of ideas, values and behaviours. For a considerable period early this century, British social anthropologists contrasted culture with society. In their aspirations for a social scientific approach, culture was regarded as an arbitrary and vague term while society was used to refer to functional roles, structures and organizations. For American cultural anthropologists, however, culture was treated as synonymous with society. 1.2.1 Culture and Sociology

Cultural differences are reflected in current distinctions between subculture associated with divergent values, appearance and behaviour of groups that identify themselves in contradiction to the wider or dominant society. On the other hand, counter-culture describes those who defy majority norms and values; and personal culture to describe how an individual makes use of and relates to his/her cultural environment. Two important sociological phenomena have been noticed lately. The first is the interpenetration (especially in the West) of such phenomenological views of culture-that is, that it comprises the whole experience of everyday life-with the old critical notion that it was inherently to do with the arts, and with high arts at that. The second is the extraordinary way in which Western mass culture (with all its ephemeral and transitory

output: television, advertising, fashion, pastimes, social activities) has colonized the entire world far more successfully than the earlier high culture of the imperialist West. 1.2.3. Culture and mass media Mass communications, mass-production of artefacts and global marketing have begun to impose the cultural agenda of the entire world. Until recently the mass culture which emerges from such developments has been despised as somehow inferior to the high arts which alone embody the notion of cultural excellence. This attitude is justified by the fact that in any society, culture is absorbed by a socialization process, and the mass media occupy a central and powerful role in that process, as the output of the media may only reflect the culture of the dominant group who control it or consume it. This would replace the cultural values of many individuals who do not subscribe to the dominant view. This phenomenon withdraws a negative effect as it led to the erosion and obliteration of minority attitudes and the habits of mind of minority groups throughout the world. Culture could be what is lived and this is expressed by a set of norms and values generally accepted. As a set of value-judgements about beliefs and ways of life, particularly in the areas of social behaviour and intellectual activity, it is a particularly human phenomenon, and can never be objective. It is an example of the hierarchical, categorizing impulse which is such a characteristic feature of the human mind and also of our tendency of defining ourselves and others, and by defining, excluding. In ancient Greece, Greek-speakers proclaimed that they were cultured compared to barbarians (whose speech sounded like bar-bar); it is not recorded what barbarians thought of Greeks. In other areas, at one time or another, to be cultured has involved being a member of the Japanese Imperial household, following Islam, being a middle-European intellectual, not being a Westerner, preferring Beethoven to the Beatles, studying Arts rather than Sciences, rejecting all artefacts (physical or intellectual) created by white, European males, observing particular rules of social etiquette or, in each case, being or doing just the opposite. Questions of evaluation 1. What is culture in anthropological terms? 2. What is the impact that mass media have on cultural standards at present? Task: Write a definition of culture that you consider relevant in no more than 200 words. 2. British culture and identity 2.1. Britishness, identity, nationality The modern concept of Britishness is defined as being a set of characteristic features of the British People in cultural and national terms. The understanding of a system of values implies to acknowledge mentality. Consequently, it is needed a plan, a strategy of learning this culture, mentality, behavior, history, tradition, arts, administration, politics, religion, myths and symbols. None of these should be neglected while studying a foreign culture. They influence each other and could be considered parts of a patchwork. Culture represents the customs, beliefs, art, music and all the other representations of a particular group of people or a nation. On the other hand, the culture of a nation is closely connected with the social, political,

and the administrative system in a particular historical period. At the same time, each historical event withdraws changes in the ethnic structure of a group of people. For instance, in the late 1960s, the set of postmodern characteristics included fragmentation, disruption, carnivalisation, a disruptive and dettached attitude of the individual towards the society he lives in. It is the postmodern man the one who stands for loneliness in search of his identity. The individual is de-constructed and re-invented in his social approaches. The English are a mingling of Celts, Romans, Germanic Angles and Saxons, Nordic Jutes, Vikings and Norman French, and that only takes you to 1500. So no one is purely English In Englishness and National Culture, Nation and the present writer, Antony Easthope, former Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Manchester University, confessed about his identity by relating it with the modern idea of nation, autobiography and plural national identity: My father was English but my mother was Irish, born in Tralee, Go. Kerry. To escape the bombing in 1943 I was taken to Ireland. One of my earliest memories is being hunted down the street by a gang of kids chanting 'ProddyWoddy Good God' (this was how I learned that I was a Protestant). In Ireland I was mocked for my English accent; a year later back in England for my Irish accent. At university when I read Jean-Paul Sartre saying that identity was a role we each impersonate I embraced it as simple common sense. My own positioning, secure neither within Englishness nor Irishness, helps me put nation at an appropriate critical distance, though it would be a mistake to go on from there to think one could write as though one stood securely outside nation. And in a study which aims to show that Englishness is carried and reproduced by a specific form of discourse, the question of chosen stylistic is one of some delicacy. Would it be possible to construct the whole argument in a hightheoretical or Althusserian' style? Or should I aim for a kind of sci-fi cyberspeak as though the text were generated by a desiring machine? In fact, I have found it impossible to escape the very modes I identify as English -including some particular binary oppositions, a certain kind of colloquialism together with 'empiricist' irony. In hoping for accessibility this study risks complicity with the very discourse it would criticise. Derrida has words of comfort for those in this situation. 'The movements of deconstruction', he writes, 'do not destroy structures from the outside'; it is not possible to work 'except by inhabiting those structures' but the aim must be to inhabit them 'in a certain way'; because of course 'one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it' (1976, p. 24). This is reassuring but it should alert one to effects of signification which can so easily slip past, in particular tone. My purpose is to exhibit national identity as a discursive effect and so as part of culture, not nature. At this point it is usual to run up once more against the idea that compared with historical institutions, for example, language and discourse are temporary, fragile and evanescent, like a sentence from yesterday's newspaper. That may be true at the level of content. But at its deeper levels, in the way things are said and written, in its formal operations, discourse is as solid as a rock, substantial, massively resistant to change, so that if it is transformed, huge areas of historical experience are transformed along with it. Jacques Lacan proposes that 'the slightest alteration in the relation between man (sic) and the signifier...changes the whole course of history (le cours de son histoire, "the course of his history") by modifying the moorings that anchor his being' (1977a, p. 171). In this respect (and drawing on another register) it may be appropriate to think of discourse as what Wittgenstein has in mind when he writes of a language as 'a form of life' (1968, para. 19). There are times temporal moments, say, such as great national events when a nation does appear unified and homogeneous as a national culture. These times only

mask its actual heterogeneity. The English are a mingling of Celts, Romans, Germanic Angles and Saxons, Nordic Jutes, Vikings and Norman French, and that only takes you to 1500. So no one is purely English, not even the Queen ('That dreadful German woman', as a snobbish colleague once described her to me). Cultural and regional difference is pervasive, and Raymond Williams is consistent with his adherence to local and particular loyalties when he argues: All the varied people who have lived on this island are in a substantial physical sense still here. What is, from time to time, projected as an 'island race' is in reality a long process of successive components and repressions but also of succession, supersession and relative integrations. (1983, pp. 193-4) This is well said; in its culture every nation, including England, is hybridic and heterogeneous. In nation the state is not at one, and each is inherently distanced from the other. Yet national desire is defined in its thirst for unity. It is in this historically determined effect of lack and seeming plenitude that we may find some of the causes for the shattering intensity of national desire. Questions of evaluation 1. How could Britishness be defined as a term based on ethnical background? 2. Is Britishness related to culture, history or national identity? Task: Comment the following statement: In its culture every nation, including England, is hybridic and heterogeneous. Note: Your opinions might be based on historical and analytical data. The form and the content of your text should be taken into account. Follow a definite structure of ideas with a logical coherence. The length of your text should be of one page (approx. 3000 characters) 2.2. British identity in change Historically, English daily life and customs were markedly different in urban and rural areas. Much of English literature and popular culture has explored the tension between town and country. Today, even though the English are among the world's most cosmopolitan and well-traveled people, ties to the rural past remain strong. Urbanites, for example, commonly retire to villages and country cottages, and even the smallest urban dwelling is likely to have a garden. Another divide, though one that is fast disappearing, is the rigid class system that long made it difficult for nonaristocratic individuals to rise to positions of prominence in commerce, government, and education. Significant changes have accompanied the decline of the class system, which also had reinforced distinctions between town and country and between the less affluent north of England and the country's wealthy south. For example, whereas in decades past English radio was renowned for its proper language, the country's airwaves now carry accents from every corner of the country and its former empire, and the wealthy are likely to enjoy the same elements of popular culture as the less advantaged. Many holidays in England, such as Christmas, are celebrated throughout the world, though the traditional English Christmas is less a commercial event than an opportunity for singing and feasting. Remembrance Day (November 11) honours British soldiers who died in World War I. Other remembrances are unique to England and are nearly inexplicable to outsiders. For example, Guy Fawkes Night (November 5) commemorates a Roman Catholic conspiracy to blow up the Houses

of Parliament in 1605, and Saint Georges 's Day (April 23) honours England's patron saintthough the holiday is barely celebrated at all in England, in marked contrast to the celebrations in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland for their respective patron saints. Indeed, the lack of official celebration for Saint George contributes to the ambiguity of Englishness and whether it can now be distinguished from Britishness. The monarch's official birthday is also observed nationally and commemorated in the summer by a military parade called Trooping the Colour, which has been celebrated since the 18th century. English cuisine has traditionally been based on beef, lamb, pork, chicken, and fish, all cooked with the minimum of embellishment and generally served with potatoes and one other vegetableor, in the case of fish (most commonly cod or haddock) deep-fried in batter and served with deep-fried potato slices (chips). Fish and chips, traditionally wrapped in old newspapers to keep warm on the journey home, has long been one of England's most popular carryout dishes. By convention, at least for middle-income households, the main family meal of the week was the Sunday joint, when a substantial piece of beef, lamb, or pork was roasted in the oven during the morning and served around midday. In the 1950s and '60s, however, these traditions started to change. Immigrants from India and Hong Kong arrived with their own distinctive cuisine, and Indian and Chinese restaurants became a familiar sight in every part of England. By the 1980s, American-style fast-food restaurants dotted the landscape, and the rapid postWorld War II growth of holiday travel to Europe, particularly to France, Spain, Greece, and Italy, exposed the English to new foods, flavours, and ingredients, many of which found their way into a new generation of recipe books that filled the shelves of the typical English kitchen. Questions of evaluation 1. Define the oppositions: urban vs. rural; class-ridden vs. multicultural society 2. Which are the most important celebrations in the UK at present? 2.3. British mass media and cultural studies According to James Curran, it is generally accepted nowadays that cultural studies have been influencing the approaches of media studies and the contemporary understanding of culture as well. Concepts such as subculture, high culture or low culture could be defined on a sociological base as being closely related to different strata of society. These are the results or final forms of expressing various mentalities, lifestyle and cultural frameworks. The academic study of mass media has increased lately the critical understanding and cultural studies have also profoundly influenced contemporary understandings of culture. In 1960, the 'cultural' section of the British national press was largely confined to arts reviews (books, theatre, classical music and art exhibitions). This reflected the traditional notion of a fixed hierarchy of cultural value, with High Culture of transcendent value at the peak, and 'trivial' forms of popular culture at the bottom. This traditional view was challenged by cultural studies, which showed that understandings of cultural value changed over time, were strongly influenced by self-serving struggles for prestige and status, and were distorted by geography and unequal dispositions of power. A second strand of work, concerned with cultural consumption, showed that cultural judgements were also linked to symbolic forms of protest and to the expression of social identity, and were strongly influenced by class and educational background. This body of iconoclastic

research made it impossible to think about culture in the simplifying, canonical terms that had seemed axiomatic to schoolteachers of English and newspaper editors only half a century ago. In Britain and elsewhere, its effect was to encourage an enormous expansion in the range of cultural experience that was fell to be worthy of being subjected to critical scrutiny in the media. It was not so much journalism studies as cultural studies that changed the face of journalism. The academic study of the media has certainly proved to be enormously popular and it really took off during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Thus, while in Britain, media and cultural studies were only first introduced as undergraduate degree subjects in the 1970s and 1980s, by 2004 they were both taught at most British universities. The subjects' expansion in the UK broadly coincided with their diffusion throughout much of Europe, Latin America, Africa, Australasia and Asia. The British academics have established a new intellectual space in which different disciplines have been brought together to shed light on a new subject. This generated a range of new insights and perspectives, some of which have subsequently been reexported to the parent disciplines from which media and cultural studies themselves originally derived. Consequently, it should be considered the influence of cultural studies on the recent development of history, anthropology and sociology. Media and cultural studies tending to become somewhat inured in the academic area. This has encouraged a narrowing of focus in an increasingly self-referential, repetitive form. However, work in the field now seems to be breaking out into a variety of new specialist areas and this is encouraging researchers to re-engage with a broader range of literatures and debates. This process is prompting current research to address new questions in relation to a wide range, of issues such as transnationalism, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, communications technology, the sociology of new social movements, global political economy, the new 'e-economy', area studies, and cultural history. Media and cultural studies have thus been illuminating, popular and academically influential. Cultural studies has introduced valuable insights into the pleasures of media consumption and how these connect in rich and varied ways to the personal lives of audiences, but having exposed the limitations of traditional cultural critiques, it has sometimes proved reticent about how we should conceptualise 'cultural value' in more useful ways. In recent years, a new wave of cultural studies research has seemed to confound earlier fears that we are moving towards ever greater, global homogeneity. This work has offered reassuring evidence of multidirectional flows of global communication, the humbling of global media giants and their need for local media partnerships, and above all the power and resilience of local audiences and the rich resources they draw upon in making diverse sense of globally distributed media products. More reassurance in relation to simplistic theories of media power has come from revisionist feminism. Fundamentalist claims that women were straightforwardly indoctrinated by the media into acceptance of a subordinate position were confounded by research highlighting the subversive ambiguity, liberating aspects or increasing diversity of media representations of women. The claim of some pioneer feminist analysts to speak on behalf of women was rebuffed by revisionists pointing to differences of experience and preference among women most especially in the writings of those involved in second-wave feminism, who felt compelled to address the complications of how 'outmoded' that approach could appeal to a younger generation of women (cf. Brunsdon

I991 and McRobbie 1999), Nonetheless, important questions remain about how best to make sense of media 'post feminism' at a time when inequalities of pay, life chances, power and domestic responsibilities between men and women persist. For this reason, it is perhaps now worth returning to some of die original questions of feminist analysis as to how the media represent, and influence, the gender order. Questions of evaluation 1. What is the impact of cultural studies in Britain nowadays? 2. How could High culture be defined? 3. Which are the main characteristics of revisionist feminism? Task: Give arguments in favour of cultural studies and their impact on media studies at the academic level. 3. Celtic culture 3.1. Historical overview on the Celtic history Celts are defined as being an important group of Celtic-speaking proto-historic peoples of central and western Europe and the British Isles. They probably originated in the Urnfield and Hallstatt cultures of the Bronze Age. From the 5nd century BC they were associated with La Tne style, which became widespread in central-western Europe and in Britain. The Celts were organized into aristocratic chiefdoms. They were known as fierce fighters and fine horsemen. They invaded the Classical world, settled in Cisalpine Gaul, sacked Rome in 390 BC, raided Greece, crossed the Hellespont in 278 BC and settled in Galatia in central Anatolia. The Celts worshipped gods they associated with specific localities, such as springs and groves, and had a priestly class known as the druids. From 225 BC Rome gradually extended control over Celtic territories in northern Italy, Spain and Provence (by the later 2nd century BC). At the same time the Celts in central Europe were being conquered by the Germans. In 58-52 BC Julius Caesar subdued the Celtic groups in Gaul; Britain followed from AD 43. By the 2nd century AD only the Celts in Ireland and the Scottish highlands remained free. Celtic culture means any form of art, preserved up to nowadays through folklore, transmitted from one generation to another in the context of an oral culture. Part of the Celtic culture, mythology seems to play an impressive role. As Mircea Eliade defines it, the myth is a story that was told in immemorial times. In these terms, mythology is that part that differs from religion and practices in using a large amount of figures and symbols that are partially used in rituals. Celtic folklore has plenty of fairy tales and abounds in symbolism. It is a magical world in-between real and imaginary. 3.2. Celtic mythology Ashe points out in Magic and Secret Lore that in Celtic mythology the concept of Otherworld (Underworld) is of special importance. This is the place from which Britons' Welsh descendants called Annwfn came. Fairies (Elves, Pixies, Goblins) are different in their looks, from spellbinding beauty to repulsive ugliness and in their size also. They had their own language. Many lived inside hollow hills, portals of entry to their Otherworld. This had its own space and time. Humans could be lured into it. The Scottish poet Thomas the Rhymer dwelt underground

with an Elf Queen for what he thought was only a few days, but was actually several years. They also could be mischievous, as they were apt to steal away children for breeding purposes. When angry they might use magical powers to inflict disease. Their special colour was green, and wearing green was an invitation. The fairies had kings and queens. The oldest name given to their ruler is Gwyn ap Nudd. Gwyn was an immortal and overlord of Annwfn. When Christianity was making its way, the sterner clerics denounced all fairies as demons. Celtic fairy lore probably had its origin in Iron-Age period. The fairies may have begun specifically as a pre-iron layer of population, who lingered in out-of-the-way places and was seldom seen, yet disquietingly known to exist. If so, the world of the fairies became a composite, drawing in other folklore ghost stories relating to the barrows, stories of nature-spirits, myths of the old gods. Among Celtic Britons, official Christianity was perhaps more successful against the fairies than against the gods, with their capacity for survival in disguise. Nevertheless, an ambivalent fairy lore went on, not only with the Welsh but in due course with the English. In the Middle Ages, while the clergy of a stabler Romanised Christianity hardened towards paganism and magic in their human flock, there was not much clerical concern over the fairies. Church bells and crucifixes could more or less tame them. They had been put in their place and were no longer influential. Chaucer's Wife of Bath notes this opinion and makes fun of it at the beginning of her Tale. The fairies are said to have abandoned their stronghold, Craig-y-Ddinas, because of the local Methodists. The decline leading to such characters as Tinker-Bell begins with another Shakespeare allusion, the Mab passage in Romeo and Juliet, and is set firmly on course in Michael Drayton's poem Nymphidia. Fairy-folk are an amalgam, as is proved by the variety of types. That is also true in Ireland, where they are more notorious. The Irish record is clearer, and confirms the role of traditions about an earlier people. The Irish fairies were the sida, later sidhe, pronounced 'shee'. The word sid meant an enchanted mound-dwelling, and the sida had homes in tumuli such as New Grange. Sid as a proper noun denoted the Otherworld, the Irish version of Annwfn. This was associated also with the Tuatha De Danann, or Danaans, the glorious people who were Erin's last occupants before the 'Milesian' ancestors of the present Gaels. When the latter arrived they took over the surface of the island, and the Tuatha De Danann 'went into hills and fairy regions', mingling with the sida, whom they dominated. Christianity could not extinguish them, but it kept them on what it considered a proper level, with a consequent blended fairy-folk comprising several varieties and a Danaan aristocracy. The king of the Tuatha De Danann was Nuadu. He is the Irish equivalent of Nudd, Gwyn's father, and, like him, is an embodiment of the Celtic god whom the Britons called Nodons. When the Tuatha De Danann fought their forerunners the Fir Bolg, Nuadu lost a hand in batde. It was replaced by a silver one, so that he became Nuadu Airgetlam, Nuadu of the Silver Hand. Later he had to contend with the sinister Fomorians as they inflicted various disasters. Their chief was Balor, who had an evil eye. To defeat them Nuadu temporarily resigned power to Lug, a hero of rare versatility and resource. Lug overwhelmed the Fomorians with magic. Balor, however, had slain Nuadu in the battle. It was after this that the Milesians occupied Ireland and the Tuatha De Danann faded into the Otherworld and the realm of fairie. While all this supports the belief that pre-Celts went into fairy lore in Britain too, they seem to have been more fully assimilated. Nothing survives about invasions, conflicts, or mergers.The fairies slip through its net. They are quite distinct from the giants, and there is no sign of a connection with some stray branch of the Trojans. Even if the Welshman was right about their speaking the Trojan language, they must have picked it up from Brutus's settlers. With the Britons' far-off god in his western Elysium, it is Ireland again that sheds light.

3.3. Celtic religion - the druids The druids had represented the Celtic priesthood. They were also concerned with education and the law. They emphasized the immortality and transmigration of the soul and participated in the sacrifice of animal and even human victims to the numerous deities of their religion. At the time of the Roman conquest Anglesey was an important centre of the Druids, who were massacred here in 61 ad. The main residence of the dynasty of Gwynedd was at Aberffraw and the island, known as the Mother of Wales, supplied grain for the remainder of Gwynedd. Following the conquest by Edward I Anglesey formed one of the three shires of northwest Wales (1284). Thereafter, organized Druidism disappeared until revived in a modified form in the 19th century. Ashe remarked that Druidism in Britain was the fountainhead of doctrine for a mighty religious order, which flourished in Gaul and Ireland. This was the order of Druids, an elite body with wide-ranging functions. Druids were priests and magicians, seers and poets, judges and doctors. They advised rulers and could exert control over them, even stopping inter-tribal battles. Their order was not a separate priesthood but a kind of caste. Druids had wives and children. Women as well as men could belong, though not with equal status. The dominant male element was recruited from society's highest ranks. Membership conferred exemption from service in war, but was not an easy option. The recruit underwent a novitiate of twenty years, spent in sacred caves and wild forest sanctuaries, learning immense amounts of oral lore, for the Druids committed little or nothing to writing. Much of this lore took the form of verse - charms, riddles, incantations, mythical narratives. Much of it was concerned with cosmology. The druidic world was a flux, kept in motion by the strife of a fire-principle and a water-principle. It could be interpreted, to some extent, by astrology. There was a complex hierarchy of gods, and only the Druids, through contact and communion, knew fully who they were and how to come to terms with them. For human beings, the Druids taught, death was not the end: souls transmigrated to new bodies. Druids officiated at rituals of many kinds, magical and religious, with no sharp distinction. They practiced herbal healing and they dealt with the gods through various forms of sacrifice. One famous ceremony involved mistletoe. When it grew on an oak tree, a rare occurrence, worshippers gathered on the sixth day of the moon, and a Druid in a white robe cut a sprig off the parasite with a golden sickle. He then sacrificed two white bulls and the assembly feasted. To propitiate their gods, the Druids sacrificed human beings as well as animals. This custom incurred the enmity of the Romans, who gradually abolished it as their power spread. The Druids opposed them, in Gaul and later in Britain, but Rome was too strong, the outer world was at last breaking in. As remarked, many have supposed that Stonehenge is a Druid temple. That is why one of its stones, which lies flat, is called the altar stone, having presumably been used for the human sacrifices. But some deny this feature of Druidism as a libel spread by the Romans from political motives, or a decadent practice unknown to the order in its purity. It has been maintained, in fact, that the Druids were outstanding in wisdom and knowledge, that they were custodians of a well-governed society, that they instructed nations outside the Celtic world; even that Druidism had the same antecedents as Christianity, and prepared the way for it in Britain with foreshadowings of its Saviour and Trinity. In spite of a large literature on the Druids, not much is known about them. There are no extant documents in which they speak for themselves. Though a Celtic phenomenon, they seem to have been rooted in a deeper antiquity.

While the etymology is disputed, 'Druid' may mean 'oak-knower' and refer to a secret lore of trees. In the last centuries BC the Druids certainly existed as an inter-tribal order, more prominent in Gaul than in Britain. Druids harmonised the solar and lunar years by means of a nineteen-year cycle which was known also in Greece, as the cycle of Meton. Its druidic version is attested by that passage of Hecataeus construed wrongly as referring to Stonehenge, and by an inscribed plate called the Coligny Calendar, found near Bourg-en-Bresse in the French department of Ain. It is Julius Caesar who records that Druidism was systematised among the Britons, and that its advanced colleges were on the island. The historian Tacitus confirms that the order included women, or, at least, that they figured in its magical workings. Druidism's principal known features are two, one being a part of its practice, the other a part of its belief. Druids sacrificed animals, as in the mistletoe ceremony. The charge that they sacrificed humans too appears to be well-founded. This was one reason for Roman hostility to them, as barbarians deserving suppression. Their rituals were performed in wooden shrines and in sanctuaries among the forests, with grotesque carved images of gods. Victims were put to death by several methods. They were stabbed, or shot at with arrows, or plunged headdownwards into tubs full of water, or shut in huge wicker cages in human shape, which were set alight. A point which may be significant is that there is almost no evidence for Celtic archery in hunting or war: it may be thought to follow that the bows and arrows of sacrifice were ritual weapons. As to post-mortem survival, it was unquestionably a major tenet. Yet reincarnation as a doctrine of mainstream Druidism is questionable. A few Irish allusions concern deities and other exceptional beings who live earthly lives. Some Greeks and Romans believed in life after death as a privilege for initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries and kindred cults. In philosophic thought, the only positive idea on the subject had come from Pythagoras, who saw survival in terms of reincarnation. Therefore, some writers on Celtic matters inferred, reincarnation was what the Druids taught. But this was probably a mistake, and not all those who took an interest in Druidism fell into it. The Celtic after-life was another one quite like this, in some Otherworld region, on an island or inside a hill. Conviction was firm that a Celt could borrow money payable in that future existence. Lucan, the Roman epic poet, expounds the topic in the first century AD with unusual insight: You, Druids . .if you sing of certainties, death is the centre of continuous life. Truly the peoples on whom the Pole Star shines are happy in their error, for they are not harassed by the greatest of terrors, the fear of death. This gives the warrior his eagerness to rush upon the steel, a spirit ready to face death, and an indifference to a life, which will return. The Druids were philosopher-statesmen and masters of ancient wisdom. Two aspects can be emphasized about them in a broader perspective. First, they neither imported nor invented a whole new ideological package. Features of Druidism were present among the earlier populations -sacrifice, ritual weaponry, religious awe of fire and water, interest in the calendar, reverence for the number three. But while Druidism was a development rather than a complete novelty, at least one foreign ingredient played a part, at whatever stage it entered the process. This was the shamanic element, and because it laid the foundation of the druidic elite, and in some degree shaped this, it might be thought the most important. Druidism was a late offshoot from an Asian phenomenon on a grandiose scale. It was an offshoot that went its own way, and took on a regional Celtic character, with few obvious traces of the shared ancestry. Yet at least where India is concerned, the

difference is looking less, in the light of comparative studies by Anne Ross; and the septenary maze-spiral, which occurs in the British Isles and in Greece and in India too, may furnish a clue to the diffusion. Questions of evaluation 1. Who were the Celts BC and where did they live in Europe? 2. How could fairies be defined? 3. Which were the main attributes of a druid? Task: Write a short essay on Druids and similar priests in Europe BC (2 pages)

Content of ideas Culture might have a variety of definitions. A number of them relate with Anthropology, Sociology and History. At present, cultural and mass media studies seem to grow in interest and importance in the academic area. British culture is a set of common features and it is closely related to national identity. The Celtic culture, symbolism and mythology represent the foundation of identity and expression especially in Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

Key concepts: culture, Anthropology, British history, mass media and culture, Britishness, identity, Celts, mythology, druids

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