A Strange Celtic Interlude.

Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery,, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing & anything similar...Gal 5:19/20

I read Galatians with a very particular mindset because Galatia in central Anatolia was the home of immigrant Celts & even in Paul's day displayed many Celtic features. Just reading that list of sins gives me the Celtic picture of a very particular people, a people whose women stood a foot or more taller than their Roman compatriots & weighed 50 to 100 pounds heavier with more muscle density & who boasted openly to the empress Julia Augusta that, "we fulfill the necessity of nature much better than Roman women do, for we have intercourse openly with the best, while you are abused secretly by the least." If you know your history that's a pretty fair statement.

I read Galatians with a complete sub~text that starts with The Tain. The Tain Bo Cuailnge, usually translated as the Cattle Raid of Cooley, is one of the best known of the Ancient Irish epics whose imagery & wording still contains vestiges of the oral tradition from which it came & internal evidence that gives a very clear picture of the culture & mindset of a long vanished people.

See scripture doesn't drop into a cultural vacuum. When Paul wrote to the Galatians he was writing to a people with a mindset similar to that of The Tain & in many ways that mindset is very similar to our own.

The Tain begins with a lady, a queen in fact. Her name was Medb & she had a husband named Ailill. I know; the names are a bit of a problem but together Medb & Ailill ruled Connaught in style. Now the interesting thing when you study the Celts, even dull things like Celtic law, is that unlike the Romans the Celts treated women with equality. They could be educated in the arts just like a man. They could be trained as warriors. They could own property, initiate divorce & rule. Think Bouddicca. They held a great deal of worldly power, especially if they belonged to the upper classes as Medb did.

Now there is a whole subtext to this story because women were seen as aspects of the land they ruled & portrayed as goddesses but I don't want to get in to all that as it gets pretty graphic, the Irish not being the least shy about bodily functions. Instead I will stick with Mebd being a semi~mythical queen who was probably based in some respects on a real woman. She ruled a warrior society which is to say a society where courage in battle, self~glorification, drunkenness, carousing & promiscuity were rife & seen as normal. People were quick to take insult, quick to anger & they held grudges.

The first time I came upon the Tain I read with my jaw hanging because here are Medb & Ailill, married to each other for years, having this marriage squabble about who brought what to the marriage & who is richer than whom. It goes on & on, as these things do, but in the end Medb has to concede Ailill is richer than she is because he owns the bull Finnbhennach. This is a stinger because Finnbhennach was born into Medb's herd but scorning to be owned by a woman transferred himself into Ailill's herd. Pride rears its ugly head even higher & Medb decides to even the marital scorecard by obtaining the Brown Bull of Cuilange. The only problem is the brown bull is owned by someone else. Daire, of Ulster.

Medb raises her army & heads into Ulster to carry off Donn Cuailgne, the brown bull. They are thwarted for some time by the Ulster hero, Cuchulainn, [whole cycle of stories about him too] who systematically works his way through Medb's army by issuing single combat challenges. There is so much pointless bloodshed but from a warrior society's viewpoint I guess the idea was to get their young men to emulate Cuchulainn. I just get bemused by it all. Anyway Medb manages to carry of Donn Cuailnge & carts him home where he promptly takes on Finnbhennach & the two bulls gore each other to death. A completely pointless exercise to my mind with no winners at all. Mind you the Celts are notorious for taking on lost causes.

They took on one at Galatia too, allowing themselves to be seduced by the judaizers, allowing law to supersede grace, seeing the freedom of the Spirit as an excuse for licentiousness. Being Celts they would have taken it to extremes. No half measures here. Paul knows it. It is in chapter 5 we find the beautiful list of the fruits of the spirit: 9 attributes against which there is no law. Several centuries later this same ethnic group are producing beautiful gospels like the Book of Kells, setting of on solitary evangelical missions to the unreached peoples of Europe, including the hardest & most vicious of all & the hardest to reach, the Saxons, & preserving through the darkest of times all the wisdom & accumulated knowledge of the times.