Bog Myrtle & Peat

You don’t just go to a museum and find what you want. That would be impossible. Instead, you’re forever distracted by better and more interesting tangents. 

Following a thread on the Celts, I went to see the famous genius loci statuette at the Tully House Museum in Carlisle. Genii locorum are equivalent to household gods – the spirit of a place and an expression of the hearth and belonging. Romans and Celts put a similar emphasis on homeplaces, but since Roman religion was based upon an extensive and varied pantheon of gods and goddesses, there was no need for local tribes to abandon their faith when the Romans arrived. They just made a few small changes to the gods they already had; where Celtic and Roman deities appeared to do similar things, it was easy to blend them together.

The statuette in Carlisle is one of several similar artefacts found around northern England and southern Scotland which show how native Celtic consciousness was blurred and intermingled with Roman religion – but it’s interesting that Romans placed a specific value on gods as human-shaped beings. Much of their worship was focussed around offerings to humanised figurines – but in many cases, there was no existing precedent for Celtic gods to look like anything at all. Perhaps they could be the shape of sunlight on a distant hill, or the movement of birds across the shore. For all we know, a truly Celtic genius loci might have been a place itself – an abstract sense of belonging which could not be reduced into a symbol or a badge.

As time went by, the Celts began to sublimate their beliefs into the form of Roman-style figurines. It’s why the famous statue of the Celtic goddess Brigantia which was discovered in Dumfriesshire actually looks like a statue of Minerva. It’s not Minerva – but having seen Romans worshipping a statue of that goddess, Celtic people borrowed the ritual and stuck the name of their own god on top of it. It wasn’t a surrender to new religion – it was just a new approach to the same old gods.

Celtic craftsmen also seemed to realise that the Romans would pay good money for religious carvings and ornaments – but only if they were produced in a Roman style. They increasingly tried to imitate Roman fashions; Celtic design slowly converged on the standards set by the conquerors, not because Celtic work was being deliberately suppressed, but because Roman aesthetics were more lucrative and sought-after. It suits modern commentators to believe that Celticism was thrashed out of native Britons against their will – the reality is more like a natural progression towards the money in a society where binary ideas of “Roman” and “Celtic” soon became pretty muddy.

But even before I had found Carlisle’s particularly endearing genius loci statuette, my eye was drawn away to a case containing two carved stone heads. They were unearthed in the same valley in east Suffolk, and one is a Roman head, believed to represent a man called Ludicrus Spurius (which is an excellent name). He has the realistic makings of a human face; a crisply rendered nose, frowning eyebrows and a tightly curled beard. As a piece of sculpture, he’s a bit clunky and artless. He falls short of the classical imperial standard, but perhaps that’s a consequence of the fact that Britain was a cultural outlier in the empire. The important thing is that he’s “of a style” – and significantly, he looks ill-tempered, exasperated and neatly fastidious – a classic Roman.

The other carved shape is simply called “Celtic head”. It’s a long, narrow face with an extremely pointed chin and the slot of a mouth in the midst of speaking. The eyes are inordinately huge and bulging; almond-shaped and pecked with the point of a pupil. Beneath stylised waves of granite hair, this face is far more distracted and fey than its roman counterpart. It’s almost unreadably vague; more symbolic than literal. It seems likely that this is no individual person – it’s an expression of “people”.

It’s easy to get lost in the eyes of that Celtic figure. It’s a strange and haunting expression, but much of that first-point-of-contact allure is just the excitement of novelty. When it’s compared to the predictably realistic classical figure, there’s no comparison. The Roman head is dumbly, pragmatically literal. It’s doing what it says on the tin, and don’t we all know that tin back to front?

Despite the fact that I was born and brought up in Scotland, I find Celtic art hauntingly strange and unfamiliar. And it’s odd to realise that on my first point of contact with these two statues, one looked “normal” and the other was “weird”. Stranger still to find that the style I naturally aligned with is actually a foreign import. It reinforces a sense that my western worldview is utterly rooted in classical orthodoxy – to a point at which my own “native” style looks weird. That little display case represents a fork in the road; the point at which one aesthetic began to completely override another. 

Roman art would go on to become the dominant point of cultural reference for the entire western world – the lens through which all western experience was viewed. By comparison, Celtic art was marginalised to a limited cultural vocabulary which only retained the power to refer to itself. It’s not so much about lines scratched into a stone; it’s an indication of a complete worldview that was almost completely eradicated – what we used to be, overwritten by what we are. As a thought experiment, there is endless value in the work of unpicking time; urgently peeking around the conquerors to catch a glimpse of the conquered, wondering if we still have something in common.