Thursday, August 25, 2011

A Thought About Scientific History

The concept of objectivity which underlies the division between historian and myth-maker is undemonstrable. . . . By trying too hard to be objective, scientific, and truthful, we are allowing the real to escape us.

--Jean Markale

(I have posted this, I hasten to explain, to provoke thinking about history rather than to denounce careful textual analysis. Markale was a French scholar of the ancient Celtic world and a nut who managed to combine doctrinaire Marxism with new age mysticism. I do not recommend his books to anyone not already well informed about Celtic myth and history. But if you have the background to understand what about his arguments is well-supported and what is not, I do recommend him. Reading him has greatly changed my appreciation of the Celtic world and indeed of all ancient thought. I think Markale understood better what the druids were all about than any fundamentally rational person could, because he shared their faith in a world of the spirit and their belief that real understanding is not something that can be written down in prose. I find the archaeological details of sacred sites and the analysis of Irish law codes very interesting, but when you have documented everything for which we have solid evidence you are still missing a huge amount of ancient Celtic culture. (And any other culture.) I assign Caesar's little discourse on Gaulish culture to my students, but I don't think Caesar understood the druids very well, either. The ancient Celts were obviously deeply religious people who saw the world much in terms of eternal patterns. Since they did not write down their theology in simple terms, we can only access it by reading their literary texts and trying to get a feel for what sort of world-view might be behind them. Like Markale, I doubt that this approach can ever by "objective" or "scientific" in that way that dating charters can be, but without it or something like it we just miss what life used to be like.)

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