People burning alive in a giant humanoid structure is the most iconic image in Brigid Ehrmantraut’s small-format hardback. Many more gorgeous, green-tinted illustrations embellish this factually fascinating objet d’art.
The gods-appeasing, reputedly Celtic tradition of mass human sacrifice in man-shaped wicker cages qualifies, according to the book’s definition, as magic: ritual intended to influence the course of events or the natural world, usually involving occult or secret knowledge.
The wicker man goes back to Julius Caesar’s propaganda campaign against those “barbaric” Celtic peoples and their druid leaders who had the misfortune to live in Gaul during Roman colonisation during the first century. But Caesar, Ehrmantraut tells us, cites no eyewitness source for his wicker man. Thus, we can’t reliably know whether the wicker man was an actual Celtic magical practice.
Given that much of what has come down to us as Celtic magic – including peaceful practices such as deity devotion – has been filtered through Greco-Roman lenses, Ehrmantraut demonstrates how her book is as much about what Celtic magic is not (in a reliably source-proven sense) as what it is.
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Archaeological evidence for Celtic magic is relatively scant. Aside from ancient Greco-Roman texts, our other main source for the perceived magical beliefs and practices of Celtic-language speaking peoples is medieval literature, and the artistic and political movements – such as our own Gaelic Revival – that drew from this magnificent, but also highly imaginative, body of work.
With the expectations set up by Celtic Magic’s subtitle, I was disappointed by the sparse pile of provably Celtic magical practices – mainly votive offerings, curses, protection spells and medical charms – that we are left with when we take away everything that can’t be archaeologically demonstrated as “magic”.
It’s a misnomer to label this title “a practitioner’s guide”. The suggestions for using evidence from the Celtic past for magical practice today feel facetious and glib. I can sense the author’s apologetic embarrassment about them. In piggybacking off the rising demand for genuine, practitioner-penned how-to books on magic, Celtic Magic tries to do something it cannot: be rigorously factual about its subject, while appealing to modern readers who desire to connect, through magic-based personal gnosis, to the mystery of the Celtic spirit world. Which, by its nature, evades rationalist reductionism.
