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PULTIBUS SCOTTORUM PRAEGRAVATUS
A Brief Survey of Celtic Civilization
Kit Kat Club Columbus, Ohio
January 16, 1979
John M, Buchanan

Mr, Chadeayne, members of Kit Kat and guests; at least weekly, for the past
two decades I have been in the business of speaking to groups of people, One cannot
do that much speaking without coming to some conclusion about the expectations of
those who have listened patiently to all those words, and the responsibilities of
the one who prepares and speaks them, I have found helpful, for the sake of both
humility and perspective, several lines out of Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers:

"There is, perhaps, no greater hardship on mankind in
civilized and free countries, than the necessity of
listening to sermons, No one but a preaching clergyman
has, in these realms, the power of compelling an
audience to sit silently, and be tormented,"

Trollope, of course, was only partially correct, In these realms, members
of Kit Kat Club, with regularity compel one another to sit silently and be tormented,
In any event, it is something of a wonder to me that you should want to go through
with this, I was not comforted, frankly, by a conversation I had with a clergyman
member of Kit Kat who no longer lives in the community, shortly after I was received
into membership, I told him of my anxiety over the fact that sometime in the future
I would have to stand up and say something, He, in turn, revealed his own anxiety
years ago ~ and that marvelous moment in the Card Room, on the night of his fresh-
man paper, when he overheard a fellow member, recently arrived, lament the fact that
the evening would be spent listening to some damn preacher,

I shall try not to preach, although my children have observed on occasion,
that whenever I warm to any topic, even the suggestion that they might wash their
hands before coming to the dinner table, it always comes out sounding like a sermon:
introduction, three points and conclusion,

My intent is to introduce to you some fascinating characters I have come to
know in the past six months, Their impact on Western Civilization, I have concluded,
was immense; although I confess that this conclusion is new for me, I knew very
little about them before I prepared this paper, They are the Celts - or Kelts -;
the Druids, Bards,Brehons, Chieftaing,Warriors, Scholars, Poets, Monks and Abbots
of Celtic Civilisation,

My interest and imagination were stimulated, initially, five years ago, when,
with wife and five children I spent the summer as the pastor of the Parish Kirk in
a Highland Villase, near the Northwest coast of Scotland, Kinlochleven was the name
of the place, a village of 1200 between Glen Coe and Fort William, It was a good
experience, I fell in love with things Scottish and came home avare that my under-
standing of British history was woefully inadequate, I hadn't the foggiest notion
of where the clans came from, or who inhabited the land originally. To make matters
worse I discovered that there is a gap in the literature available to the semi-
serious student of history. One must settle for comic-book caliber tourist material,
or very serious history which tells, frankly, more than I wanted to know, In any
event, my interest removed to the periphery of my life until this summer, when
again with wife and five children, I went back, This time to Moffat, Dumfriesshire,
Border county, Robert Burns country, sheep country, Broad (Braed) Scots, Once

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again we fell in love,. I was the minister of St. Andrews Parish Kirk, Church of
Scotland: we lived in a 19th century manse with thirteen foot ceilings and a coal
fireplace in each room,. I stood in their pulpit, visited in their homes, conducted
several funerals and baptized a wee girl, We enjoyed the very special privilege of
helping with sheep "clippin", walked in the hills, enjoyed lamb chops and salmon,
whiskey by the glass - unpolluted by water and ice, room temperature lager, sherry
in the late afternoon and the richest cream in the world. Four desserts was stan~
dard fare, spooned into a bowk: a trifle,. tart, a mousse, always strawberries and
the inevitable pitcher of cream, At the board of a distinguished barrister, former
sheriff, I was told - by him - to pour it ons.that there is no food that doesn*t
taste better with a wee bit of cream,

More important, we were touched deeply by something we experienced in the
life of a small Scottish town: a sense of deep pride in nation and history: a sense
of caring for one another; a graciousness and a respect for traditions, institutions
and people that was altogether new for us - and altogether refreshing, We had for-
gotten how good that felt, But that is another story - perhaps even another paper,

Two incidents brought my interest in the Celts to the surface, We took a
day off and drove to Carlisle, England to see Hadrian's Wall, and spent several hours
at Vindolanda - an excavated Roman settlement, Impressive - stirring: a multitude of
artifacts to examine and an entire compound unearthed - through which one can walk
musing about the simple but devastating reality that people walked in and out of
these buildings nearly two thousand years ago, But I confess, in the middle of the
experience my mind began to wander - to the people north of the wall, Who were they?
What were they like? What was there about them that inspired the Romans to such
prodigious efforts simply to keep them out? I came home that night, impressed with
Rome, but even more impressed with the people who attacked the wall, broke through
it, and eventually swallowed it into their own history as the legions retired to the
bosom of their crumbling empire, The Celts!

A second incident was equally stimulating. With the three oldest of our
children we drove to Stranraer, boarded a ferry, sailed to Larne, Northern Ireland,
rented a car, drove the breadth of Ulster into Donegal, Republic of Ireland, up
through wild, beautiful Lonely, coastal country: Letterkenny, Creeslough, to the
Kearney farm, where my wife*s grandparents began married life and where her cousins
still live: forty acres of potatoes: five adults, none married, peat ~ or turf the
only fuel, running cold water from a single spigot, four cows and some chickens
living in a barn underneath the bedrooms, We spent two days there and it was like
walking into another world, a Leon Uris novel, or at least another time altogether,
Who are these people? Where did they come from? Why are they still here doing what
they have done for a thousand years? The Celts, The same people we had come to know
in Scotland,but here, in Ireland, in purer, even more authentic and unspoiled form,
We spent the whole evening trying to make conversation, and were reduced finally to
conducting an interview, prying out of them information they would never reveal
without urgins,

In the months since I have tried to find answers to the questions our
experience posed, It has been a fascinating and rewarding journey,

Who were the Celts? Linguists say it may be either Celt or Kelt, The
Greeks called them Keltoi, Germans - Kelten, the French softened it to Celtes
(le celt) and one linguist observes that "Irish leave their Keltic homeland and

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root like Krazy for the Boston Celtics," (National Geographic, May 1977). A broad
definition of the Celta is “a sroup of related tribes Linked by Language, religion
and culture, that gave rise to the first civilization north of the Alps," (Ibid,
p.585),At the height of theft dominance, around the third century B,C,, Celtic
culture prevailed from Spain to the Black Sea, and from Che North Sea to the
Mediterranean,

They heft behind their names for the rivers beside which they lived - Celtic
names: Danube, Rhine, Seine, Thames, Shannon, Modern cities stand on the sites of
Celtic settlements and bear their namesi London, Geneva, Strasbourg, Bonn, Vienna,
Budapest, Belgrade, Ankara,

Twenty thousand Celts - whom the Romans were calling Gauls, crossed the
Hellespont - an area thereafter imown as Galatia, In 440 B,C, Herodotus reports the
presence of Celis in the Upper Danube, Plato reports that they are a nation
addicted to drunkenness, Aristotle records their reckless indifference to danger,
Gauls sacked Rome in 387 B,C, and then settled down outside the city and stirred up
trouble for several centurtes.

Celtic troops were hired as mercenaries in the Peloponnesian Wars and
Alexander the Great was interviewed by a delegation of Celtic chieftains from the
Adriatic Coast in 335 B.C, Alexander wanted to know the source of their legendary
ferocity, He asked them what they feared: the reply: "No man - only that the sky
might fall on their heads,"

What were they like? National Geographic did a lengthy study in 1977 and
wrote:

"They introduced to North Eurepe the use of iron, lLron for

tools and weapons, And in seven centuries of cultured dominance
they created Europe's first major industrial revolution, its
first common market, its first international court of arbitration.
Celts introduced soap to the Greeks and Romans, invented chain
armour, were first to shoe horses,.,,They set our standard four
foot eight and one-half railroad guage with the span of their
chariots; pioneered the iron plowshare, the rotary flour mill,

a wheeled hatvester two millenia before Cyrus McCormick,"

The Celtic warrior was universally respected and feared in the ancient
world, Theologically they believed there was no difference between life and death,
not a bad idea to have your army endorse, Their appearance reflected their
ferocity, A Celtic warrior bieached and starched his hair, often fought stark
naked except for bracelets and collar. They looked big and were big, Archeologists
have discovered a 6'5" skeleton of a warrior and it is a matter of record that
Celtic warriors vere fined for getting fat,

Having seen them in action the Greek geographer Strabo wrote: “The whole
race is madly fond of war, They cut off the heads of their enemies and attach them
ta the saddles of their horses,!' It was not uncommon for two warriors to fight to
the death over the choice haunch of roast pig at a victory feast,

And their women? I hope profoundly that Bella Abzug or my wife and
daughters, for that matter, never discover what I am about to read to you, Roman
historian, Ammianus Marcelinus - "A Gallic woman, fighting beside her man, is a

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match for a whole troop of foreigners. Steely eyed... .she swells her neck, gnashes
her teeth, flexes her huge white biceps, and rains walleps and kicks as though from
the twisted cords of a catapult.” (Op, cit, National Geographic),

The fascinating counterpart to the Celtic warrior, and the other side to the
Celtie character, however, is revealed in the mystical figure of the Druid, Druids
prevent us from describing Celts as barbarians, DBruids were a priestly caste through-
out Celtic civilization, One authority deseribes them as forecasters of the future
who fixed the time for great enterprises, the educators of young nobility, the con-
servers of tradition and a kind of world court which did, in fact, meet yearly to
settle disputes between tribes,

Professor John T. McNeill, University of Chicago, describes the Druidic
order, to which men were admitted after twelve years of arduous study - in tradi-
tional lore, wisdom, poetry and music. They did not write, unfortunately - perhaps
one of the greatest of tragedies, Thera is not a single authentic sentence of
Druidie derivation in existence, They were religious functionaries, political ad-
visors, teachers, keepers of tradition, They were, I conclude, that which gave
Celtic civilization its flavor and immense vitality,

In Britain and Ireland the Druids were never suppressed by the Romans - a
fact which is immensely important in the centuries to come, The power of the Druids
ended with the coming of Christianity - but there is no doubt that one of the most
potent foreca in Irish and Scottish history - the monastery ~ was, in fact, the
Druidic tradition living on. In Ireland, in addition to Druids, there were orders
of Bards and Brehons, legal scholars, which existed well into the Christian era,

The vital and creative enersy of the Celtic people is apparent in their art,
Curlously, art was not a peripheral activity for these ferocious people. Rather it
seems to have been central to life, “imparting both surface decoration and super-
natural power to scabbard, brooch and bracelet." (National Geographic, p.603},
Celtic art is described by one scholar as “exuberant, sinuous and abstract, remin-
iseent of Mattise and Pieccasso", (Miklus Szabo, National Geographic}, The Irish
monk in the Middle Ages, decorating the perimeters of his manuscript with elaborate
and colorful symbols ~ was reflecting his Celtic past,

They nevar managed to create a cohesive empire, Julius Caesar sneered at
their inability, frankly, to get their act together, and ultimately they disappeared
from the pages of history, The story of the end of Celtic dominance is the most
poignant I discovered in my research, Julius Caesar, ambitious young Proconsul o€
Gaul, became alaxmed when a Gallic tribe in what is now Svitcerland began to migrate
west, After pursuing and massacring that tribe he proceeded to pacify ali of Gaul,
In the process he leveled eight hundred towns and killed, by his own count, one
million, one hundred ninety-two thousand men, women and children, The climax came
at Alesia, France, 52 B,C,, in one of history's greatest battles: Caesar surrounded
eighty thousand Gauls under Vercingetorix and built an oval fortification nine and
one-half miles around to keep them in, When some Gauls slipped away another ring
Was constructed fourteen miles around to keep the reinforcements out, A quarter of
a million Gelts took the bait, attacked the circular Roman trap and were utterly
defeated, Vercingetorix emerged alone from the gates of Alesia, "tall, proud, re-
splendent in silver and enameled armour on horseback, Riding down the hill he made
a ritual sunwise circle around the dias where Caesar waited, Dismounting, he fluns
down his weapons and sat in silent submission at the feet of his conquerer.,,

Caesar sent him to Rome chained like a wild animal; six years later dragged him from

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his ceil and had him strangled," (National Geographic); . Celtic culture and civili-
zation faded quickly thereafter in Northern Europe, ,

But not so in Scotland and Ireland, and therein is a vital difference,
Hadrian's Wail, built in 130 4,D, and another wall, of dirt, named for Antonlous
Pius ~ constructed in the 4140's A,D,, stretched across the midsection of Britain, .
The Northern wail proved indefensible and for a time the Romans held their position
along the stone fortifications which we visited, There were several incursions by
the Celts - or Picts, as the Romans knew them. But ultimately the legions withdrew,
the cultures met and intermingled and Roman influence was simply swallowed up,

What ended Celtic or Gaelic dominance in Ireland centurics later, was a
combination of Crottwell's scorched earth policy, the resettling of rural Gaels in
cities, the Ulster plantation and the potato farming, In Scotland Gaelic culture
was dealt a fatal blew when the Highlanders lost at Culloden i 1745, and Clan, Kilt
and Pipe were outlawed and the glens cleared of people to make space for sheep,

“You take the High read and I'll take the Low road and I'11

be in Scotland afore ye" - is a Celtic lament: two Highlanders,
in an English prison after Charles Edward Stuart's disaster:

the “low road" means death; it's the only way back to Scotland -
"But me and my true love will never, never meet, on the bonnie
banks of Loch Lomond,"

One historian said "The biceest moment in Irish history is that the Romans
never got here, We remained Celtic, We kept our peculiar patterns of society and
customs, our Celtic approach to life,'' (National Geographic) ,.

Elsewhere Rome suppressed the focal point of Caltic culture - the Druids, ,
But not in Britain, I never found out why but it was a very happy oversight. When
Christianity came to Ireland as the bearer of Latin culture, it too, stopped short
of eliminating Druidic influence, And the resultant Irish church was never altogether
comfortable with Rome, Again, Professor McNeill: "Changes that were made in the
continent and the tightening solidarity with Rome were not reflected in Britain,
Instead, insular Celtic customs became endeared by inveterate use, Toward Rome there
Wag no antagonism, but respect without obedience," (The Celtic Churches, p,29ff),

Thus in Ireland, and Later in Scotland, there is a long history of simple
stubborn refusal to be Roman, The conflicts are countless: matters of hair style
for monks, who can ordain whom, the proper way te chant the Psalms, Eventually time
would erode it, but for a thousand years Irish and Scottish Christianity remained
cool toward the emergence of Rome,

In the meantime Celtic culture in Ireland, now Christian in name, gave birth
to a truly astonishing, and, I chink, significant phenomenon ~ Ivish Monasticism,
Thousands upon thousands of Irish young men and women entered monasteries, The same
thing was happening to a lesser de:ree in Scotland, England, Wales, Important British
churchmen were not Bishops or ecclesiastical politicians - but abbots,

Beyond the obvious significance for later church history, what I found
terribly interesting about the phenomenon was its obvious Celtic character and its
reflection of these earlier heroes ~ the Druids, As indicated earlier, Druidic
culture was never stamped out in Izeland, Its religious content yielded to
Christianity, but Bards and Brehons continued to function, Many of the great Trish

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monastic leaders actually studied under Druids, for instance, And Columba, who led
the missionary movement to Scotland, defended the Guild of Bards in what appears to
have been a political convention in Derry.

In the old Druidic schools a twelve year course of study earned the degree
of Ollam, So, in British monasteries the arts continued to flourish, Monks not
only studied scripture, prayed and sang Psalms, they also wrote poetry, cultivated
their unique style of calligraphy and composed music,

Monks worked very hard, farming, fishing and herding and were, in most
instances, self-sufficient communities, Listen to Professor McNeill on the subject:

“Many came in childhood and grew up in the stimulating
atmosphere of an institution where men in earnest were
alvays at work with hand and brain or engaged in acts
of prayer or holy song. The growing Lads may have suffered
from the meagerness of the diet, the lack of play and the
pressures of school tasks, but we see no evidence of
recalcitrance,,,In some monasteries only one meal a day was
eaten and sleep was broken by nightly office, That the
vivacious Celts in large numbers subjected themselves to
these inconveniences remains something of a wonder, It is
a lesson in the possibilities of human nature under the
impulse of devotion." (op.cit, p.82).

A typical Celtic monastery contained small huts in a circle and several
functional buildings including barn, chapel and "scriptorium'', Here the manuscripts
were copied and made into codices ~ and here - the idea of writing as an art form
and not merely a method of preserving words flourished, No effort was spared in
making a revered text a thing of beauty to the eye: pages were decorated with
brilliant colors, elaborate eallisvaphy, symbols and pictures of mythic animals,
Pagan Celtic art was preserved - intact ~ by the monastery, Much of the work was
destroyed or stolen by the Norse invaders after 800 A,D,., but some, fortunately,
remain, The Book of Kelis is perhaps the best known to students of art, Produced
around 800 it is an exquisitely decorated 912" book, which one art scholar calls
the chief treasure of the Western World, It is on display at Trinity College, Dublin,

In addition to decorative calligraphy the monks refined the art of stone
carving, A favorite monastery activity was to prepare one's own prave stone, More
than thirty authentic Celtic Crosses still stand in Ireland, One of the oldest in
Scotland is in a Church at Ruthwell - twenty feet high, with elaborate carving in
each of the panels - dated around the end of the seventh century.

Elsewhere in Great Britain,the Monastic movement was flourishing, although
mot quite as dramatically as in Ireland, David, Patron Saint of Vales, was known as
a strict disciplinarian: nicknamed "Aquaticus", he strictly required total abstinence
from alcohol, But asceticism was moderate in British monasteries, In Ireland
celibacy was not required: in fact of the three monastic orders ~ the least holy was
the most ascetic, and the only one which required celibacy, The Celtic character was
capable of great sacrifice - but not, it seems, for the sake of sacrifice.

A collection of sayings - of a beloved Welsh Abbot in the sixth century -
shows the mind and sensitivity of the movement, Cadoc was his name and I discovered
these perfectly beautiful lines:

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‘No man is the son of knowledge if he is not also

the son of poetry.

No man loves poetry without loving the light,

Nox the Light without loving the truth,

Nor the truth without loving justice,

Nor justice without Loving God,

No man is pious who is not cheerful,

Love is heaven, hate is hell,

Conscience is the eye of God in the soul of man." (op, cit, p30).

Light - truth ~ justice - God,I read in that, the beginnings of political
radicalism which vould take nine hundred years to blossom fully, Because they were
datached from the comfortable church/state tete-a-tete which maintained throughout
Christendom - British monks could take pot shots at the politicians, Gildas, from
Bannockburn, Scotland, sixth century, began a long and noble Seottish tradition with
this broadside, .,

“ings hath Britain, but they are tyrants;
judges she hath, but they are impious;
priests hath Britain but they are unperceiving;
pastors so~called, but they are wolves about
to slay souls," (McNeill, op.,cit. p.42),

The immense Celtie energies which had found a home in the monasteries, would
hold out for centuries against the political supremacy of the Church of Rome, But
more importantly, those energies vould motivate monks by the thousands to leave the
monastery and sail across the Irish sea - and then the Channel as missionaries, The
effect was like a gentle leaven in the midst of the chaos, brutality and harshness
known as the Dark Ages, My conclusion is that their impact was profound, if mostly
unheralded, in what was later to become modern Western Civilization,

One story remains, Three thousand years before Christ, primitive flint users
came to Kintyre, Scotland from North Ireland, The Romans called them Picts, In the
fifth century A.D, Northern Irishmen settled again in what is now Argyli and called
it the Kingdom of Dalriada, They vere not really raiders, although a corruption of fhe
Irish word for ratder is how the would be known - henceforth ~ Scots, One of them,
Columba, born in North East Donegal ~ 521, would become a legendary hero in
Scottish history,

As a young man in Ireland, Columba studied bardic lore, became an accomplished
Latin scholar and in his mid-thirties, like so many of his contemporaries, entered a
monastery, From the beginning his career was punctuated with creativity and
ambition, A dispute with his mentor, Finnian, was the impetus which propelled
Columba into the stage of history, In his spare time Columba had made a copy of
Finnian's private volume of Jevoma's Gospels and Psalms, Finnian was furious: and’
appealed to the King of Tara in Meath for justice, The King decided in Finnian's
favor and commanded Columba to turn over the manuscript, Columba refused and what
began as a petty argument over the ownership of a book quickly erupted in a war, This
time Columba was banished from Ireland under orders to convert as many men a5 were
killed in the dispute over the copied manuscript,

And so this highly trained, strong and pious monk set sail from Derry with
twelve followers to find an island for a new monastery, On May 12, 563, the little
party landed on Iona, a two thousand acre, nearly uninhabited island off the Mull

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in the Inner Hebrides, Iona was to become a most important spot in the history and
hearts of Scotsmen thereafter,

From Iona teams of missionaries traveled to Dalriada - or Argyll ~ to
convert the Picts, and on across Scotland to the continent, Columba's reputation
and influence increased: he became the friend of royalty: the first consecration
of a Scottish King happened on Iona in 574 and this'island boars the remains of many
of Scotland's later kings, The Abbey, now reconstructed, still stands and still
welcomes the traveler, or penitent, or person of any faith who simply wishes time
to be alone,

As is the case with other larrer than life heroes, some of the Columba
stories stretch the imagination, He was said to have healing power and control over
the weather, One of the stories, however, has contemporary appeal, On a journey to
visit King Brude of the Picts in 554, Columba and a party of monks made their way
up the Great Glen headed for Inverness, On their way they witnessed on the River
Ness the recovery of the corpse of a man mangled by a water beast, Columba, the
story goes, nevertheless, sent a monk swimming across the river to recover a boat,
while he held the raging beast at bay with the sign of the cross, Adherents of the
Loch Ness monster are convinced that this story, at least, is true,

Scottish Christianity, and Scottish nationalism for a thousand years, would
be influenced by Columba and his Iona community, The Scots, it seemed, would argue
with Rore about anything. The date of Easter, for instance, the appropriate style of
monastic tonsure, the mechanics of baptism and ordination, The real issue, as it
ever was and ever would be, however, was that of stubborn Celtic autonomy, In 626
Pope Honorius wrote to "the nation of the Scots reminding them that they were few in
number and at the ends of the earth and ought not to claim a wisdom above that of
all the churches of the world," (iicNeil1l, p.109), He should have saved his breath,

Thus the story ends, I have found it to be immensely interesting, It has
been provocative, in suggesting vays to understand the Scottish Reformation with its
virulent anti-Romanism, and the decp and profound Scottish antipathy toward things
English, The fact that John Knox couid be at once s0 gently pious and violently
intolerant is not excused but perhaps explained by a little Celtic History, The
fact that Highland Scot Presbyterians still think the Protestant Reformation is
under attack, is not excused, but perhaps explained a bit by the centuries of
Celtic History,

And Northern Ireland? No one seems to understand it, nor to have any
solutions to the Troubles, But I conclude that Celtic History provides, at least,
a "feel" for what is happening in that unhappy country, A Footnote on the subject:
while we were in Scotland an incident occurred in London which was probably not
covered in the American Press, ‘Several Northern Irish radicals sneaked into the
House of Commons and at the most appropriate moment threw sacks of horse manure fram
the gallery onto the debating ministers, A typically Celtic gesture, I thoughe,
which at least required no interpretation as to its meaning,

The Celtic character Lives on in customs, which are experiencing a
ranaissauce in Cornwall, Wales, Ixcland and Scotland; in Celtic superstitions
which never really died, and in attitudes,

Listen to an Irish Celt speak autobiographically:

- O-

"leive still considered drunk with words, We Love to
elagcerate, to boast, to show off, much as did the

ancient Celts, No Enc lish understatement for us, Our

turn of phrase, sense of humor, attitude to law and

oder are quite different, We won't wait at a red

light if no car is coming, Weill cross ~ something an
Englishman rarely does; a German never," (National Geographic),

it may be stretching too hard for socially redeeming conclusions and it may
simply be the preacher in me, but perhaps Celtic History holds a vit of a clue
about coping with the future. There are some, but not very many, scholars who arc
optimistic about the future, I was reading one of the more pessimistic in the
quiet of St. Andvew's manse this summer, who both depressed and fascinated me,
Robert Heilbroner in "An Inquiry Into the Human Prospect'', suggests that our survival
as a race depends on an end to the*Enlirchrenment thinking, which has been dominant for
several centuries, Heilbroner's positions are deBatable ~ but interesting, The ideas
which have made Western Civilization great are the very ideas which have brought us
to the edge of extinction - individual freedom, industrialization and technology,
urbanization, The only seciety capable of survival in the future, according to this
gloomy prognosticator, will be static, frugal, authoritative, and broken into small
units, Heilbroner wrote, "Mythic man, despised by the Enlightenment, is our only
hope," (See Reaping the Whirlwind, Langdon Gilkey, p.79ff),

I hope, profoundly, that Hcilbroner is wrong, But if he is not, I have made
a start, in Learning a bit about those prototype mythic man - the Gélts,

And now the title, Pultibus Scotterum Praegravatus: it is from St, Jerome,
ene of the early church fathers, in the introduction to a commentary he wrote on the
Book of Jeremiah, He was arguing with and refuting the theology of that great
British heretic, Pelapius, He dismissed him with ~ "pultibus scottorum praegravatus”,
which translates "stuffed with the porridge of the Scots",

When Y stumbled on to that quote I knew I had a title for my Kit Kat Paper,
Having done the work and had my say, it occurs to me that objective men might find
Jerome's words terribly appropriate: that having heard far more than you ever wanted
to know about the Celts, you may feel “stuffed with Scottish porridge’,

In any event, thank you for the privilege of delivering this paper,
Bivliocraphy

Prebble, John ~ The Lien in the North, One Thousand Years of
Scottish History, Penguin, London, L971

McNeill, John T, - The Celtic Churches, A History, A.D, 200 to 1200,
University of Chicage Press, 1974

The Celts, Europe's Founders, National Geographic, Vol, 151, No. 5,
May, 1977