What’s in a Name? Colonial Dynamics in Spiritual Practice
Originally published in PanGaia 46, pp. 23-24.
In the quiet aftermath of the Make Poverty History march, a small group gathered for a ritual on Edinburgh’s grassy Bruntsfield Links. The idea was for local Pagans to introduce foreigners to Scotland’s deities, and ask for their support in upcoming G8 events.
While we were waiting to get started, I chatted with a few local women I knew. One of them told some history of the place we were sitting, describing the ancient settlement that was now buried under the world’s oldest golf course. I love hearing these little tidbits – with the curiosity of a dedicated immigrant, I have been eager to learn as much as I can about Scotland since I first arrived in 2000. That afternoon, I was excited about the prospect of a ritual to welcome fellow foreigners to my adopted home.
When one of the organizers began to describe the ritual they’d planned, he mentioned the deities they’d be invoking: Brighid and Kay-lee-uck. Did he mean the Cailleach? Cailleach is not a proper name; in Gaelic, it means Old Woman and is pronounced Ky-uch, with the back-of-the-throat phlegmy sound that makes Gaelic sound so much like Hebrew. The Cailleach is the Crone aspect of the Triple Goddess, and not one to be invoked lightly. I imagined she would not take kindly to a mispronunciation of her name, and I bristled with irritation.
At first, it seemed petty, to be annoyed by a mistake with one word. But it wasn’t the mispronunciation that angered me, it was the circumstances and politics beneath it. Scotland isn’t the mystical Pagan utopia I once fantasized about, but neither is it a spiritual wasteland whose traditions were wiped away with the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th Centuries. Beneath the bagpipes-and-tartan tourist veneer, an indigenous Scottish spirituality still lives, and its roots run deep. New Year’s celebrations still contain traditions hundreds of years old, ancient deities mingle with Christian saints, and the Celtic holidays are still marked by joyous festivals in the capital city. Traditional dance, music, and storytelling sessions – ceilidhs (kay-lees) – thrive throughout Scotland, and the Scottish Storytelling Centre offers classes in both understanding and telling the ancient tales. Courses to learn the Gaelic language are more and more common, and countless hours of Gaelic programming can be found on Scottish TV and radio. Particularly since devolution in 1997, Scotland has proudly shared its cultural heritage with locals and visitors alike.
As such, the Cailleach is not a character residing in an obscure spiritual backwater; she is very much alive and very much central to modern traditions in Scotland, Pagan and Christian alike. Using an Anglicized version of her name reveals deeply rooted patterns of English colonialism similar to white Americans’ casual use of Native American spiritual traditions. In both cases, indigenous practices are appropriated without regard to historical oppression or modern political struggles. In both cases, members of the colonizing class learn about native spiritualities from books, rather than seeking opportunities to learn from living traditions. In Scotland, you don’t have to look very far. Even the police operation around Gleneagles Hotel derived its name from Scottish folklore – ‘Operation Sorbus,’ after rowan berries which ‘ward off evil spirits’ (Guardian newspaper, July 4, 2005: ‘Security Tight on the Eve of G-8 Summit’).
Even for someone with an obvious English accent, to live in Scotland and somehow miss details like the proper usage of the Cailleach’s name (or the proper pronunciation of a chosen Gaelic name) requires not just ignorance, but a deliberate blindness to everyday representations of Scottish culture. Anyone with a passing interest in Scottish spiritual traditions could easily hear about the Cailleach in one afternoon of watching Gaelic television, one glance at a newspaper article on holiday-time folklore, one ceilidh night at a pub, one conversation with an old-timer… Opportunities abound to tap into the living traditions of this place and learn to honor them.
Insisting on books as cultural ‘authorities’ rather than honoring living tradition-bearers spotlights a common pattern of colonizers everywhere: to take oppressors’ word over the word of indigenous people, even where tradition and folklore are concerned. This pattern manifests in anthropology, spirituality, and even activism, where the vast majority of literature is written by members of dominant groups. The underlying assumption is that living traditions no longer exist, or that they are somehow less ‘pure’ than the material in books.
Living traditions can never be ‘pure.’ Like good friendships and healthy ecosystems, they are messy and full of contradictions, in a state of dynamic equilibrium. Static ‘purity’ can come only at the price of cultural genocide, once traditions have been confined to history books. For a colonizer, that is where they belong. For a colonizer, history books are naturally the answer to nostalgia for ‘the old ways.’ By poaching traditions from the pages of books, a member of the colonizing class can avoid facing both his ancestors’ actions and the survivors’ grandchildren. Consulting books is much safer than consulting real people, and the power relationship is much closer to one a colonizer has grown accustomed to: books can be easily dismissed or selectively read. Real people can’t always be silenced when their memories become uncomfortable.
This is not to say that this particular Englishman had any conscious sense of himself as a member of the colonizing class. The manifestations of history in our individual worldviews are much subtler than that. It’s likely that it simply never occurred to him to venture down to a local pub on ceilidh night, or to take a class about Scottish folklore. After all, another side of Scottish spiritual history is oppressively Calvinist, giving us a legacy of witch burnings and the famously intolerant King James. The spiritual landscape of Scotland is a bit schizophrenic in that way, but that’s part of what makes it so vibrant.
One lesson of this place is to challenge the authority of the history books. Where traditions truly are extinct or scattered beyond recognition, our revivals and re-interpretations can give them new vitality. But where a living practice persists, misguided anachronisms from books are at best pale imitations of what once was. More often, they reinforce the colonial structures that subjugated indigenous traditions in the first place. For those of us who are dedicated to a spiritual path that mingles with the politics of liberation, such reinforcement cannot be acceptable, and we must examine the histories and power relations of our own practices.
In the end, a Scottish woman corrected the Englishman’s pronunciation, and the ritual went smoothly. By putting aside learned patterns of colonial domination, we can open our hearts to receive the wisdom of living tradition-bearers. By choosing to embrace the real world in all its painful contradictions, rather than the sterilized, static realms of history books, we can all become healers in our spiritual homelands.