Festivals
The Scottish Mod and Irish Fleadh Cheoil (and Gaelic Céilidh) are seen as an equivalent to the Breton Fest Noz, Cornish Troyl and Welsh Eisteddfod.
The birthdays of the most important Celtic Saints of Celtic Christianity for each Celtic nation have become the focus for festivals, feasts and marches: Ireland – Saint Patrick's Day, Wales – Saint David's Day, Scotland – Saint Andrew's Day, Cornwall – Saint Piran's Day, Isle of Man – St Maughold's Feast Day and Brittany – Fete de la St-Yves and Grand Pardon of Sainte-Anne-d'Auray Pilgrimage.
Attitudes and customs associated with the routine of the year's work, religious beliefs and practices survived the coming of Christianity in the conservative rural areas of much of the Celtic countries. All over these lands there were sacred places which had earned their status in pre-Christian times and which had only been gingerly adopted by the Christian church and given a garnish of Christian names or dedications, hills, stones, and especially wells which can still be seen festooned with rags in observance of an old ritual.
Certain days in the year were marked as festivals, and time was counted forward and backwards from them without reference to the ordinary calendar. In her fine study of the festival of the beginning of harvest, in Irish Lughnasa, Máire MacNeill has demonstrated the continuity between the myth known from the early Middle Ages and the customs which survive to our own day. Lughnasa, called Calan Awst in Welsh, is a summer feast and was dedicated to the god Lug. Of great interest is the use in the Coligny calendar of the word Saman, a word that is still in use in Gaelic refer to Hallowe'en (evening of the saints), an important day and night and feast among the Celts (in Welsh it is called Calan Gaeaf). In Gaelic folklore, it was considered a particularly dangerous time, when magical spirits wandered through the land, particularly at nightfall. The other important feast days that also continued to be celebrated under Christian guise, but often with a pagan spirit were Imbolc (Gŵyl Fair y Canhwyllau in Welsh), the start of lambing, now the feast day of St Brigit and Beltane, the spring feast, now May Day (Calan Mai in Welsh).
In their pilgrimages the people combined the celebration of a holy place and a holy day. Pilgrimages are still an important feature of country life, particularly in Ireland, Brittany and Galicia. The most impressive pilgrimages include Croagh Patrick on the west coast of Ireland on the last Sunday in July (the beginning of harvest) and Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. The inspiration for famous Celtic singer and harpist Loreena McKennitt's million-selling CD The Mask and the Mirror came in part from a visit to Galicia and in particular Santiago de Compostela. Some of her songs are about Celtic feast days such as All Souls Night about Samhain on The Visit CD which featured in the erotic thriller film Jade starring David Caruso and "Huron Beltane Fire Dance" on the Parallel Dreams CD.
Read more about this topic: Celts (modern)
Famous quotes containing the word festivals:
“Why wont they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, cant they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping—rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year’s and Easter and Christmas—But, goodness, why need they do it?”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“This is certainly not the place for a discourse about what festivals are for. Discussions on this theme were plentiful during that phase of preparation and on the whole were fruitless. My experience is that discussion is fruitless. What sets forth and demonstrates is the sight of events in action, is living through these events and understanding them.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)