I saw a post about this but it was written by a fucking "radfem" FART, and I don't want to give that POS the time of day. So I'm going to make my own.

Generative AI does NOT please the gods. If you make one of those devotional digital offerings and you use AI to do it, you're spitting in the face of the gods. They do not accept it.

Generative AI steals from actual artists (and I'm saying this as a devotee to a god of thieves), it scrapes protected data from all corners of the web. It permanently damages the connections in the brain for recall, creativity, and cognitive processing. And it poisons and harms the very earth we are supposed to honour.

It doesn't matter if the art you create yourself is "good" by some sort of scholarly pseudo-objective standard or not. It is good simply for the fact that you made it yourself out of the love and honour of the gods. It could be a stick figure with stickers all around it, but the fact that YOU made it - not prompted some AI slop - means that it is worthy in the eyes of the gods as a good offering.

Celtic Reconstructionism (CR) is a polytheistic, animistic religious movement grounded in pre-Christian Celtic sources. If this is your first time here, start with the basics and then the history.

For readers coming from Wicca or eclectic neo-paganism, the structural differences are significant. CR is working from a different theology, not just a different set of deity names.

Polytheism: The Gods Are Real and Distinct

Where much of Wicca and eclectic neo-paganism works within a soft polytheist framework ("all gods are one god" and "all goddesses are one goddess"), CR holds that the gods are genuinely distinct.1

CR is a form of hard polytheism, specifically grounded in the polytheist traditions of the Celtic nations (Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Scotland, and Wales). The gods are individual beings with distinct personalities, histories, and domains, not aspects of a universal deity or archetypes of the collective unconscious.

The Jungian framing popular in some pagan circles (gods as psychological archetypes, projections of the collective unconscious rather than external beings) is also not a CR position. The exact metaphysical nature of that existence isn't dogmatically defined; the movement doesn't require practitioners to hold identical positions on what, precisely, a deity is. What it does require is engaging with them as distinct individuals rather than as symbols.

CR is also animist. The land, rivers, trees, and other natural features have spiritual presence. Specific hills, rivers, and wells are named in the Irish sources as home to specific spirits or deities: the Boyne to Bóann, the Shannon to Sionann. Scholar Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, writing in Celtic Gods and Heroes, observed that the Irish medieval mythographers described the ancient gods as prehistoric tribes who "still dwell there invisibly present, side by side with the human inhabitants."2

The Maiden/Mother/Crone Problem

If you've spent time in any pagan space, you've encountered the triple goddess: Maiden, Mother, Crone. It's ubiquitous in contemporary paganism.

The framework comes from Robert Graves's The White Goddess, published in 1948. Graves was a poet and mythographer, not a scholar of Celtic religion. The Maiden/Mother/Crone model imposes a specific meaning (female divine power organized around reproductive lifecycle stages) that the Irish and other Celtic sources don't support.

Celtic goddesses do appear in triple form, but these are functional groupings, not age-based progressions. Brigit appears in the sources as three sisters: one of poetry, one of healing, one of smithcraft. Sjoestedt says the triple Brigit is "adored by poets, smiths and leeches," three domains of skill, not three life stages. The Morrígan similarly appears as a triple figure whose aspects relate to battle, fate, and sovereignty. Sjoestedt identifies the trio as the Badb, the Morrígan, and Nemain (or Macha, depending on the source), figures differentiated by how they manifest on the battlefield and in relation to fate, not by age or fertility status.2

Graves's model ties female divine power to the reproductive cycle in a way the actual sources don't. A goddess in Irish tradition is categorized by what she does and where she holds power: her domain and function, not her age or life stage.

Three Realms: Land, Sea, and Sky

CR's cosmology, its understanding of how the universe is structured, is built around three realms, not the four elements or four directions familiar from other pagan traditions.

In Old Irish:

Nem: sky (niv) Talam: land (TAH-lum) Muir: sea (mwir)

Swearing by sky, land, and sea was a standard way of invoking the whole of existence, the complete structure of the world, not three symbolic categories. Erynn Rowan Laurie describes this directly in A Circle of Stones: "It is upon this division, rather than the traditional western four elements of earth, air, fire and water, that the ancient Celts based their concept of the universe. Oaths were sworn by land, sea and sky. All things lived within the circle."3

The four-element, four-direction ritual framework in Western neopaganism descends from ceremonial magic, specifically the Hermetic tradition as transmitted through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late nineteenth century.

Connecting the three realms, in Laurie's framework, is fire. Specifically imbas (IM-us), the fire of poetic inspiration. Fire is the presence of the gods and the link between humanity and the divine.3 The imbas tradition in Irish mythology names a specific form of inspired vision sought by poets and seers. It involves altered states and deliberate withdrawal from the mundane world, and it gives the cosmological concept direct ritual application.

The three realms give CR practitioners a working map of who they are in relationship with: the gods, the spirits of the land (including the Aos Sí), and the ancestors. These aren't rigid categories. A deity like Manannán straddles sea and Otherworld; the Tuatha Dé Danann, after their retreat into the sídhe, became the spirits of the land they once ruled. The realms orient the practitioner, not constrain the beings.

The three-part structure operates alongside a second, fivefold layer of sacred geography. Ireland was traditionally divided into five provinces (Connacht, Ulster, Leinster, Munster, and Meath at the centre), each carrying not just a directional orientation but a conceptual quality: learning in the west, battle in the north, prosperity in the east, music in the south, and kingship at the centre.4 Archaeologist J. P. Mallory describes this system as a "cultural cosmology, a way of partitioning the world" rather than a straightforward political map. The provincial capitals (Rathcroghan, Navan Fort, Knockaulin, Cashel, Tara) functioned as ceremonial centres whose Iron Age origins predate the medieval literary accounts by centuries.4 The three realms and the five provinces aren't competing frameworks; one structures the cosmos vertically, the other structures the land horizontally, with Tara at the sacred centre.

The Otherworld

The Irish Otherworld, An Saol Eile ("the other world/life"), is not an afterlife in the Christian sense. It's a parallel realm that coexists with the mortal world, accessible at certain places and times. It appears under multiple names in the sources: Tír na nÓg (Land of the Young), Mag Mell (Plain of Delight), Tech Duinn (the House of Donn, where the dead gather), Tír fo Thuinn (Land Under the Sea). These aren't synonyms for a single unified realm; they name different regions of an unseen geography.3

The Otherworld coexists with the mortal world, accessible at certain thresholds rather than located at a remove from it. Access points to these other realms include the sídhe mounds, caves, lakes, and the western sea. Liminal times, especially Samhain and Bealtaine, thin the boundary between worlds.

In the Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of Invasions), the Tuatha Dé Danann don't leave Ireland after their defeat by the Milesians. They withdraw into it, retreating into the sídhe mounds, the hills, and the rivers. This is why the Aos Sí (the fairy folk) and the gods are related concepts in Irish tradition: the gods became the spirits of the land. Sjoestedt describes the Irish mythographers presenting the ancient gods as beings who still dwell invisibly present beside the human inhabitants.3

The relationship between the dead and the Otherworld is complex in the sources, and CR doesn't flatten it. Irish cosmology offers no single unified afterlife, and CR doesn't impose one.

Ritual Structure: What CR Practice Actually Looks Like

Circle-casting and quarter-calling framework comes from late nineteenth-century ceremonial magic, specifically the Golden Dawn tradition, and was absorbed into Wicca through Gerald Gardner's development of that religion in the 1940s and 1950s.

CR ritual centers on prayer, offering, and hospitality. Daily devotional practice is weighted more heavily than periodic elaborate ritual. In practice, this usually means a home altar: a cloth, a candle, images or symbols of the deity or ancestors being honored, a bowl for offerings, kept and tended regularly.

Offerings are simple: milk, ale, mead, hazelnuts, wine, apples, oats, butter, pork. All are well-attested in the mythology and folklore as preferred by gods and spirits.3 Nothing needs to be sourced from a specialty shop. Regular, modest practice carries more weight than an elaborate occasional ritual that rarely happens.

Reciprocity is the underlying concept. Offerings are expressions of ongoing relationship, not transactions. Flaithiúlacht (FLAH-hyoo-lacht), meaning hospitality, is both a social virtue and a ritual one in Irish tradition. Laurie puts it plainly: "In the Celtic world, hospitality is a sacred duty."3

Ethics: Where CR Draws Its Moral Framework

CR ethics come from Celtic primary sources, not the Wiccan Rede. The primary texts for Irish CR are the Triads of Ireland (Tríada Éireann), a medieval collection of wisdom sayings covering kingship, personal conduct, and social obligation; the Instructions of Cormac Mac Airt (Tecosca Cormaic), advice attributed to the legendary king on truth-telling and right behavior; and Brehon law (Fénechas, "law of the freemen"), the pre-Norman Irish legal system, restorative rather than punitive and focused on compensation and the repair of social harm.5

Three concepts from these sources appear throughout CR practice:

Fír (feer): truth, meaning not simply honesty but alignment between words and reality at a structural level. Oath-breaking and false witness were among the most serious violations in Irish tradition. The concept runs through law, mythology, and the ethics of kingship: a king who spoke falsehood was believed to cause physical harm to the land itself.

Enech (EN-akh): literally "face," meaning honor or social standing. Your enech is your reputation as maintained through right action, damaged by lying, cowardice, or failure to meet your obligations. The related legal concept, lóg n-enech (logue n-EN-akh), is the "honor price," a person's assessed social value under Brehon law, which determined the scale of compensation owed when they were wronged. In early Irish law, enech and "face" were the same word; to shame someone was to make them red in the face, synonymous with an offense against their honor.6

Flaithiúlacht: hospitality, introduced above as a ritual virtue and equally an ethical obligation. The CR FAQ describes CR ethics as a "virtue theoretic ethical system," meaning positive guidelines for behavior rather than a list of prohibitions.1 Hospitality is one of those positive obligations.

All three concepts are embedded in a specific historical and cultural context, developed within a society that treated the social and spiritual worlds as continuous with each other. A CR practitioner engaging with them is engaging with a real historical ethical system.

Related Reading

CR sits inside a wider ecosystem of Celtic tradition. These pieces offer practical entry points into the Irish practices and folk beliefs that surround the theology:

The Evil Eye in Irish Folklore: how folk belief in the evil eye operated alongside formal religion, and the folk cures that responded to it.

Bealtaine: Irish May Day Traditions: one of the liminal thresholds named above, with the seasonal observances that grew around it.

St. Brigid's Day Crosses: the continuity between Brigit as pre-Christian goddess and Brigid as saint, expressed through a surviving folk practice.

How to Read Ogham Divination: the Irish tree alphabet as a ritual and divinatory system that fits the CR framework.

Irish New Year Folk Magic: Lá Coille: seasonal folk observance drawn from Irish sources.

The New Moon in Irish Folklore: how lunar observances entered Irish folk practice.

The next article in this series will cover the gods themselves: who the Tuatha Dé Danann are, what the sources actually say about them, and how CR practitioners relate to specific deities today.

CR FAQ ↩︎ ↩︎

Celtic Gods and Heroes by Marie-Louise Sjoestedt ↩︎ ↩︎

A Circle of Stones: Journeys and Meditations for Modern Celts by Erynn Rowan Laurie ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

The Origins of the Irish by J. P. Mallory ↩︎ ↩︎

Wikipedia: Early Irish Law ↩︎

There are so many people “godspousing” the same deities, I honestly think it’s just infatuation and novelty with a bit of main character syndrome and/or lack of human interaction thrown into the mix. (Could it also be TikTok/short form influence, hmm?) Tbh I think claiming “godspouse” is disrespectful to deities period. We are not the same entities.

Gods y'all are boring, sad, little middle schoolers 😂

I hurt my own feelings so much worse on a daily basis, you gotta work a lot harder than this silly goosery to upset me. Especially considering you're too cowardly to even show your actual face when you're trying to bully someone, anon.

Incase anyone wants some good songs for worship. Wardruna is the obvious asatru worship band and for goo reason

Tyr has really good music, if you like metal.

Also recommend (for more traditional folk-type music... Like throat signing and hurdy-gurdy stuff.) forndom, heilung, and danheim and vali

Metal/rock there's the obvious choice of Amon Amarth, but also many others.

I personally also like ensiferum, turisas, lumsk, and fintroll. (Tyr and Amon Amarth are my faves though.)

Granted there's also like Heimdall (band) who sound great but I have yet to uh... Background check them.

For related stuff (Celtic, drinking songs, Suomenusko/Sami, etc)

Eluveite, Korpiklaani, Unleash the Archers, Alestorm, and Tuatha De Dannan.

If you've spent any time in Celtic pagan spaces, you've probably noticed that "Celtic" covers a lot of ground. Wicca with Irish or Welsh deities, to any number of organizations that claim the title Druid or Neo-Druid. It can be hard to tell what pre-Christian Celtic people actually practiced when so many of these groups claim ancient heritage without presenting much to back it up. Celtic Reconstructionism emerged in the early 1990s to disentangle truth from fiction, using historical scholarship, archaeology, medieval literature, and living folklore rather than modern invention to build its practice.

This is the first article in a series on Celtic Reconstructionism. Later articles cover the theology, the calendar, the primary sources, and how CR intersects with folk practices. This article will cover the foundation: what CR is, how it differs from Wicca and neo-paganism broadly, and where to start if you want to practice.

What Celtic Reconstructionism Actually Is

Celtic Reconstructionism (CR) is a polytheistic, animistic religious movement. It was formally named in 1992, emerging from a network of practitioners in the 1980s who were frustrated with what "Celtic" paganism actually looked like in practice: standard Wiccan ritual structure with Irish deity names dropped in.

The foundational text is the CR FAQ (formally titled Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism: An Introduction) authored collectively by Kathryn Price NicDhàna, Erynn Rowan Laurie, C. Lee Vermeers, and Kym Lambert ní Dhoireann. Published online around 2006 it defines CR as "an effort to reconstruct, within a modern Celtic cultural context, the aspects of ancient Celtic religions that were lost or subsumed by Christianity." The full text is free at paganachd.com, and a print edition is on Bookshop.org.

CR covers multiple Celtic cultures: Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Gaulish. This series focuses on Irish and Gaelic CR.

The Core Methodology

CR is as much a methodology as it is a religion. The practice works outward from primary sources. Medieval Irish manuscripts, Brehon law, mythology, the academic scholarship that interprets those sources, and living folklore (the Dúchas archive, folk customs gathered from living communities) fills in texture and continuity. Personal spiritual experience is accepted, but it gets labeled as such and can't override established lore.

The informal CR motto is "Show me." Claims require evidence and reasoned argument. Which is intentionally higher bar than you'll find in most contemporary pagan traditions.

CR is not purely academic, though. The CR FAQ is explicit that "both scholarship and experiential, ecstatic spirituality are necessary on the CR path." Practices like imbas (poetic inspiration) and aisling (vision or prophetic dream) exist alongside the research, not in opposition to it.

How CR Differs from Wicca and Neo-Paganism

Theology. CR is genuinely polytheistic. The gods are distinct, historically attested individuals with specific mythological histories. The Lord-and-Lady framework common in Wicca (often traced to Dion Fortune's principle that "all Goddesses are one Goddess") is not a part of Celtic traditions.

The Maiden/Mother/Crone framework, frequently applied to Celtic goddesses, is also not Celtic. It originated in Robert Graves's 1948 book The White Goddess and was created by him, it is not a historically accurate way to categorize deities (unless they are quite modern). Celtic goddesses are categorized by function, not age or reproductive status. Some are triple (Brigid and The Morrígan being the most common examples), but they are not young-mature-old progressions.

Cosmology. Where Wicca uses the four classical elements and four cardinal directions from Western ceremonial magic, CR works with a three-part cosmology: Land, Sea, and Sky. In Irish, talam (land), muir (sea), nem (sky). Erynn Rowan Laurie, one of CR's founding voices, describes the triple spiral as the symbol of this structure: "Oaths were sworn by land, sea and sky. All things lived within the circle." (A Circle of Stones, 2012)

Ritual structure. CR doesn't cast circles or use ritual knives to direct spirits. The CR FAQ explains why: these practices "come from late 19th century Ceremonial Magic," and "cold iron is offensive to the Aos Sí" in Celtic lore. Prayer, offering, and hospitality are the primary modes of engaging with the divine. Daily devotional practice, maintaining altars, making offerings, morning and evening prayers, takes precedence over periodic elaborate ritual.

Calendar. CR observes four Gaelic seasonal festivals: Samhain, Imbolc, Bealtaine, and Lughnasadh. The eight-spoked Wheel of the Year, which adds the solstices and equinoxes as named sabbats, is a Wiccan development. The names Ostara, Litha, and Mabon were coined by Wiccan author Aidan Kelly in 1974 and have no Celtic basis.

Ethics. CR doesn't follow the Wiccan Rede. Ethical principles come from Celtic sources: the Triads of Ireland, the Instructions of Cormac Mac Airt, the Gaulish ideal that "the people should worship the Gods, do no evil, and exercise courage." Honor price (lóg n-enech), truth-telling, and hospitality form the ethical core.

Five Misconceptions Worth Clearing Up

"You need Celtic ancestry." No. To quote the CR FAQ once again: "There is no ethnic or cultural requirement for anyone to practice CR — we do not believe that 'blood' has any bearing in spirituality." CR is explicitly anti-racist. Cultural engagement (learning the language, history, and traditions) matters much more than DNA.

"There was one unified Celtic religion." Over 200 Celtic deity names survive in the historical record, most tied to specific tribes or places, most appearing in only one region's sources. The Dagda is Irish. Epona is Gaulish. Cernunnos appears in Roman-era sculpture with no surviving mythological text explaining who he is. What looks like a unified tradition is a cluster of related but distinct cultures spread across a large geographic range and several centuries. CR takes that specificity seriously, which is part of why it resists treating "Celtic" as a monolithic identity.

"CR is just Celtic Wicca." Wicca is a mid-twentieth century religion developed by Gerald Gardner, with a duotheistic framework, a ritual calendar built around polarity, and ceremonial magic infrastructure. CR draws from pre-Christian Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Gaulish sources and is explicitly polytheistic. The two traditions make different claims about different things.

"If you can't read Old Irish/Welsh, you can't really do CR." Primary sources matter, but you don't need to be a medievalist to engage with them. Good English translations of the Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and the Mabinogion exist and are accessible. Just do your due diligence to make sure you have good translations.

"CR people are hostile gatekeepers." Well... this reputation exists for a reason, but the actual position in the community is this: incorrect information gets challenged, ignorance gets welcomed. There's a difference. Practitioners will expect you to do your own research. Arrive with questions rather than expecting to receive doctrine, and you'll probably be fine.

Am I a Celtic Reconstructionist?

I engage seriously with CR scholarship. It's foundational for how I approach Irish folk magic practice. But I don't practice CR as a religion.

Erynn Rowan Laurie, in the preface to A Circle of Stones, says:

We cannot go back in time to ask the ancient Celts how they practiced their religions, meditated, or traveled into the Otherworlds. Their religious traditions did not survive intact into this century, much as we might desire to learn their secrets. Because of this, what is presented here can only be a partial reconstruction and an extrapolation based on best guesses and existing source material.

CR is a serious methodology for working with what's left. What you do with it, strict reconstruction, folk-informed practice, or somewhere in between, is your call. This series is here to give you enough grounding to figure out where you land.

Where to Start

The CR FAQ The foundational document of the movement, and the best single introduction to what CR actually is and isn't. The full text is free at paganachd.com.

Celtic Gods and Heroes — Marie-Louise Sjoestedt A French linguist writing about Celtic mythology without forcing it into a Classical framework. The CR FAQ recommends it as a first read because it shows you how Celtic deities function. Under 150 pages.