I will post a more detailed “About Me” entry soon, but for now I just want to briefly talk about how I came to become a “Celtic Reconstructionist.” To thank the author responsible.

It was about two months ago. Maybe three. I was in a book store. A major corporate chain. I never thought that I would find anything truly magical in a store run by a “mega-corporation.” Those kind of books just don’t sell right?!

Enter: The Age of Misrule, by Mark Chadborne. It was fiction and it looked vaguely fascinating. It had an ancient antlered-forest-god-like creature on the cover blending into an equally ancient grove of trees. Even then, I was drawn to it. I did not know much of anything when it came to paganism, or the Celtic world, but I knew that this book had something to do with both. Even as I picked it up I thought it would surely be a book for New-Age, Wicca types and “people that wear black nail polish.” I picked it up anyway. As soon I read the back cover I knew that this was one of those books that I had always wanted to read, but had been unaware that I wanted to read. (You’ll either get that -or you won’t).

I fear I will not do justice to the book, but must press on… The central premise of Chadborne’s book is that the world we live in is a boarded-up, painted-over version of an ancient, forgotten world. A world where humans once coexisted with gods and monsters. Where humans communed with spirits in Nature. Where witches not only existed, but were loved as much as they were feared. A world where the “Gods” were as flawed and any of us. A world where the Earth itself was the source of all “magic.” Seemingly overnight, the veil that separates what the ancient Celts called “Otherworld” and our own world is torn down. Creatures from across the centuries come spilling over into our existence. Gods, Demons, Faeries, Dragons and more. Order crumbles. Technology is obsolete. Eventually the five protagonist save the day by defeating the worst of the gods. However they do not banish all of these new creatures and make everything like it was before they came. They simply make it so that mankind is guaranteed a place in this new, wonderful, frightening, and magikal world. Which it turns out, is how our world used to be.

(Entertainment value aside) its all well and good to just read fiction like this, but if you delve a little deeper into the names and places in Chadborne’s book you might be shocked to learn that there are almost no made-up characters or places. In fact, other than the modern characters (who I like think could be you or I) nearly all of the places, events, gods, demons, and myths that are mentioned are taken directly from existing records. Its fiction. Its history. Its religion. Its mythology. Its. entertainment. And it is truth.

As soon as I started reading it I was intrigued. I felt Chadborne was doing something different. Something special. He was showing me a glimpse of the old Celtic world. The world of my ancestors. As a person of Scottish descent, an anthropology student, a student of all things religion, a lover of history… the book quite simply sang to me. In my 31 years I have studied anything and everything that had to do with spirituality. I have studied the major religions. I studied a bit of Voodoo, Aleister Crowley, Native American religions, Witchcraft, Shamanism, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, the Deists, and on and on. I have looked everywhere for my place.

Of all of the systems and beliefs I studied the one that made the greatest impact on me thus far was Buddhism. I still never thought of myself as “a Buddhist” though. Buddha taught me a great deal. More than anything: how to treat other beings. But the one thing that was always missing, the one thing that made me sad, somewhere in my subconscious, was that there was no set belief system that sang to me on a fundamentally personal level. Nothing had ever reached out and touched me on the shoulder and said: “This belongs to you.”

I was simply unaware that the pre-Christian Celtic people were as spiritually attuned to Nature as I have always fancied myself to be. Mark Chadborne’s book, fiction though it was, informed me otherwise. I cannot say that the book presents an all-encompassing set of beliefs. I cannot even say it points you in one particular direction. It should not be taken literally, but at the same time it should not be discounted as simple fiction. What it said to me was simply:

“This is the place to start. This might be what you’ve been looking for.”

Twenty minutes on the “interwebs” later, typing in things like: Druids; Faeries; and Forest gods, I stumbled across Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism… and the rest is history.