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Celtism is a nineteenth-century ideological movement, not exclusive to Galicia, but that the Galician movement use as a justification for the Galician “differential fact”. The Celtic is going to be the nucleus from which Galicia, in the nationalist conception, is cut off as a fragmentary national reality (“different place”), and disconnected, even confronted, with the rest of Spain. A nationalist disconnection with respect to the history of Spain that has become normalized, in much of the historiography, and for which the "History of Galicia" has actually become a history of Galicianism (the history of Galicia between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries - the so-called "dark centuries" - lacks interest for this historiography, it is as if it did not exist).
It was in the book Historia de Galicia, by Verea y Aguiar, published in 1838, where Celtism appears for the first time as a basis for claiming the Galician “differential fact”. This is how its author warns in the initial dedication, addressed to the rectory and cloister of the University of Santiago, stating that his book isThe Celtic imprint on Galicia is such that the place name itself is due, according to Verea and Aguiar, to said influence:"the result of my work in the vindication of the historical rights of respectable Galicia."“Galicia was a people, so radically Celtic, that its expressive name [sic] from that antiquity could not yet be erased; and therefore a participant in those prerogatives that make the Celtic nation great ”
(Historia de Galicia, p. 15, Ferrol, 1838).
Alfredo Brañas, in his capital work El Regionalismo, is also going to claim a “Celticism” that, challenging the Pezrón school (which identifies Gauls and Celts, with France being its cradle), defends the peninsular, traditional origin of the Celts from Spain. Masdeu, Larramendi, Sabau belong to this school, as well as, Brañas, Verea and Aguiar, Vicetto and Murguía specify:“After reading Verea and Aguiar, Martínez Padín, Murguía, Huerta, Vicetto, and in general all historians Galicians […] does not admit discussion that already in those remote ages the regionalist sentiment was beating in the hearts of Galicians, the germ of the vigorous and lush patriotic spirit that today animates and reconstitutes us, despite our miseries and weaknesses ”
(Alfredo Brañas, El Regionalismo, ed. La Voz de Galicia, 1981, pp. 224-225).
However, it will be mainly from the hand of, precisely, Vicetto and Murguía (from the “cova céltica”, in which they met in La Coruña), in their corresponding Histories of Galicia, how the myth of Celtism will acquire racialist overtones supremacists in relation to the rest of Spain, representing Pondal, in this sense, the complete vindictive apotheosis of Celtism to the point of considering Galicia (thus in the current regional anthem, with lyrics taken from the Queixume dos Pinos de Pondal) as a Celtic gray , as the "nation of Breogán", disconnected from origin from the rest of Spain and belonging, racially, to the group of "Celtic nations" of the "Atlantic" area of diffusion (according to Risco's later conception).
Cova céltica meeting
A myth that has been valid then, and continues to be valid, to justify the fundamental fragmentary premise of Galicianism: the Galicians are the "Nazón descended from Breogán", being thus any other influence (Iberian, Semitic, etc.) will be seen as exogenous, even hostile, especially if it comes from "la meseta", since Galicia is fully identified with the Celtic nation.
Breogán, on the other hand, is a legendary figure (that medieval evemerism wanted to make real), coming from the book Lebor Gabála (Book of Invasions) belonging to the Irish mythological cycle -from there they take it, sifted by Macpherson, Murguía and Pondal- , and in which the various waves of emigration that are occupying, in illo tempore, the island of Ireland are narrated. The book by H. D'Arbois de Jubainville, The Irish mythological cycle and Celtic mythology (ed. Vision books, 1986), continues to be a mandatory reference as an analysis of the Book of Invasions and its interpretation from medieval evemerism.
Breogán statue in Finisterre, La Coruña
A Celtic myth, moreover, whose racial supremacism will mesh (in Galicianism) with the anti-Semitic myth of the Aryan race, seeking with its cultivation that Galicia does not degrade, as Murguía, Pondal, Risco will say openly, letting itself be dragged due to the predominance of lower castes (blacks, Berbers, Semites) typical of other Spanish regions (heavily contaminated by Semitism): par excellence, worthy by its own good sense of better luck, it is destined to serve, with its sanity and peaceful instincts, as a counterweight to the exaggerations and follies of other peoples and other revolted and rebellious races, which are filled with the Semitic blood that circulates through their veins, it seems that they live in civilization in spite of themselves, and that they only yearn to return to their deserts, to the solitude of their tents and to the life of the tribe, which is the only one that suits them, they understand and practice "(Manu el Murguía, in the magazine La Ilustracion Gallega y Asturiana, 1879).
Along the same lines, in case it was not clear enough, Murguía concludes his speech on the Floral Games of Tuy, in 1891, saying that the “Semitic race” must be eradicated from Spain as an obstacle to homologate ourselves with the “European men.":
Murguía"Let us think that it is not for nothing that we have in Galicia the remains of that celestial warrior [Santiago Matamoros], enemy of Muhammad's people. European men, men of Christ, victory is for us. The men of the Koran, the Semites who still wander like shadows through the lands of Spain, only matter because they are a danger or a hindrance. I have said ”
(Risco, Manuel Murguía, Ed. Galaxia, 1976, p. 90).
In any case, undoubtedly, it will be Pondal who takes the Celtic "bardomy" further, proclaiming himself, with as much solemnity as arrogance, the bard of the "Galician nation", and expressing without dissimulation, in multiple places, that racial supremacism of the race Galician in very direct and sincere terms, with a rude and boastful Manichaeism. Thus, in his poem entitled Da Raza (poem 22 of the Novos Poemas collection) he will say the following:
Eduardo Pondal"You are from the Gypsies,
of the rude Iberians,
of the lazy gypsies,
of the people of hell;
[...]
We are from the Celts,
we are Galicians ".
Vicente Risco, from Orense, for his part, already in the first half of the 20th century, will continue in this line of exaltation of the Aryan values of the Celtic race and will insist on the blond element (“loiro”) as a characteristic of the Galician population that , due to its superiority (so it says openly), it resists any type of infiltration by exogenous races (Iberian, Roman):"either because of the best adaptation to the land, or because of the superiority of the race, the fact that neither the infiltration Nor did the Iberian infiltration succeed in destroying the predominance of the Central European blond element in the Galician people. The Galician race continues to be the beautiful Celtic race ”(V. Risco, Teoría nacionalista, pp. 58-59, ed Akal, 1981).
And interpreting Murguía, in a biography that he writes about him and that will be published, significantly, in 1933, Risco will say the following:A superiority that is encrypted, again, in the Aryan character of the Galician race, as proven, says Risco, in the "latest research" (referring to Gobineau), and that Murguía had already read in his "teachers Arianists ”.“but the absolute predominance of the European and Nordic ethnic element in the Galician population has a capital significance for Murguía : it came to represent for him the superiority of the Galician race over all the rest of the Peninsula ”(Risco, Manuel Murguía, p. 29, Galaxia, 1976).
Ultimately, Risco concludes reexposing Murguía, the regeneration of peninsular life will come from the hand of the “sons of Breogán”, precisely because of their Aryan and blond character, being thusHere then, we conclude, and I believe that this selection of texts speaks for itself, the "founding fathers" of Galician nationalism. As such they are known, and recognized, today.“this grounds the superiority of the Galician Race in the Peninsula , since the Suevo-Celtic predominance among us is opposed to the predominance of the brown element of African origin in other regions, especially from the Duero and from the Ebro down ”(Risco, Manuel Murguía, p. 33, Galaxia, 1976).
*** Pedro Insua is a professor of Philosophy and author of the books 'Hermes Católico' and 'Guerra y Paz en el Quijote'
https://www.elespanol.com/opinion/tr...091190_12.html
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