What religon/spiritual movement do you identify with?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Episcopalian or Anglican.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Pagan. I very loosely follow celtic revivalism (mostly just samhain, shamanism.. kinda pedestrian I have to admit)

That's actually good in my opinion. You don't want to get too deeply in Celtic revivalism. It's notoriously the  most anti-intellectual, anti-scholarly of all the pagan movements I've heard.

I had a somewhat cursory, looking back quite campy interest in Celtic revivalism when I was younger. It resists, sometimes with considerable force, most actual scholarship about Celtic paganism (for instance, in its insistence that Druids did not practice human sacrifice, when it is fairly clear from the archaeological record that this varied according to time and place and there were in fact many Druidic cultures that were fairly bloodthirsty and particularly obsessed with severed heads). I still have a lot of that cultural interest, though; there are some very Celtic, pre-Synod of Whitby aspects to the way I (try to) practice Anglicanism.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Pagan. I very loosely follow celtic revivalism (mostly just samhain, shamanism.. kinda pedestrian I have to admit)

That's actually good in my opinion. You don't want to get too deeply in Celtic revivalism. It's notoriously the  most anti-intellectual, anti-scholarly of all the pagan movements I've heard.

I had a somewhat cursory, looking back quite campy interest in Celtic revivalism when I was younger. It resists, sometimes with considerable force, most actual scholarship about Celtic paganism (for instance, in its insistence that Druids did not practice human sacrifice, when it is fairly clear from the archaeological record that this varied according to time and place and there were in fact many Druidic cultures that were fairly bloodthirsty and particularly obsessed with severed heads). I still have a lot of that cultural interest, though; there are some very Celtic, pre-Synod of Whitby aspects to the way I (try to) practice Anglicanism.

I was referring specifically to pop-schlock writers like Peter Ellis who believe that the ancient Celts were matriarchal, didn't believe in violence, etc. Also despite all the romanticism surrounding the early pre-Whitby Celtic church scholars of the past thirty years now see that the early system was extremely corrupt, and that the culdee monks were often little more than puppets of the Irish/British royalty.

Oh, I know that too. Pretty much all of the early-to-mid-medieval churches were corrupt (the culdee monks left the shilling for the royalty after Whitby to fall, within the span of a couple of centuries, into the days of the Pornocracy, though that obviously wasn't as bad for them as it was for Italy). I just for the most part prefer the Celtic Rite (and Sarum Rite) prayers over the Rome Rite ones. (It seems like I might prefer the liturgy too if it weren't so hard to reconstruct that most people in the churches have given up.)

Of course the best things that pre-Conquest Insular Christianity ever produced,  the Venerable Bede and the Book of Kells, were in the first few generations post-Whitby, so perhaps Whitby isn't so much a good actual cutoff date as it is a good synecdoche or shorthand for 'preferring Insular to Continental prayers and maybe liturgy' in my case.

The opening up of Insular Christianity did of course have some benefits for the Continent, notably the service of Alcuin.

So, generally, I'm not any sort of dyed-in-the-wool reconstructionist about this, I just prefer to incorporate the older forms into my worship.

To be fair, most modern paganism is susceptible to pop-schlock by virtue of its nature as a religion. Agreed that it is particularly bad with Celtic reconstructionism.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I thought it was more C10-C11, but C12 makes sense from what I have seen. My knowledge of the history involved is pretty good from about St Patrick to the Carlovingian Renaissance, then drops off before picking up again in the High to Late Middle Ages (my area is actually Japanese history, which I switched to from medieval Insular history in my second year of college). Thanks.

And of course the reason why it's worse with Celtic paganism than other forms of paganism is a mix of Celtic paganism being based entirely on this "etheral" image of the Celts and the lack of written documents from the pre-Christian Celtic world.

Clearly. No Asatru person thinks of the Vikings as 'ethereal', and there is a metric sh**t-ton of written material from the Greeks and Romans.