Celtic Magic: A Practitioner’s Guide

That is probably a title that will get you thinking of shops in Glastonbury hawking New Age remedies and Celtic-themed Tarot cards. However, Celtic Magic is anything but that. There are suggestions for actual spells that you could perform, but they are taken from actual historical records and are therefore very weird indeed, and often a bit disgusting.

For a snakebite: Take a live chicken (preferably a cock) and pluck the feathers from its anus. Hold its anus to the wound. Hold it there until the chicken has died. Repeat as necessary until all the poison has been drawn out.

I promise you that if you do that Jo Hall will never speak to you again.

So no, this is not something that you get out for ceremonies under the full moon. It is scholarship. Dr Brigid Ehrmantraut is a lecturer in history at St Andews with a bunch of degrees from Cambridge and Princeton. She knows her stuff. And luckily for us she has chosen to share her expert knowledge in a highly accessible and entertaining form.

Celtic Magic is divided into two main sections: one on the ancient world, and one on mediaeval magical practices as evidenced from the Celtic nations. Ehrmantraut is at pains to point out that there is little evidence for any direct survival of religious practices from the first period to the second. Furthermore, the second period is deeply influenced, not just by Christianity, but by the whole of the Classical world.

Both sections provide useful guides to understanding (and where necessary debunking) ideas about how Celtic peoples understood the world, and how they attempted to use magical practices to manipulate it. Ehrmantraut is at the forefront of current research into the mediaeval Celtic world so she’s well worth reading. She has also written quite a bit on Classical Reception in Mediaeval Ireland, which is a fascinating subject.

There is also a short section titled Afterlives which deals with people such as James Macpherson and Iolo Morganwg who forged ancient Celtic documents as part of their campaigns to restore the glories of the Celtic past and put us on a similar footing to the Greeks and Romans.

I should note that Thames & Hudson have done a bang-up job with this book. It has a beautiful, embossed cover utilising themes from the Gundestrup Cauldon. It contains many illustrations from 19th century artists re-imagining the Celtic and Classical worlds, all done in a tasteful greenish monochrome to match the emerald green of the cover. There’s an Evelyn de Morgan painting of Medea in it that I particularly love. And the book is traditionally bound with proper stitching, something you almost never see these days.

So yeah, this book was catnip for me, and might be for you too.

Title: Celtic Magic: A Practitioner's Guide
By: Brigid Ehrmantraut
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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