I am often asked about the meaning of KADGODDEU.ORG. Cad Goddeu, or “the Battle of the Trees”, is a poem attributed to Taliesin, a Welsh bard of the sixth century, whose historical reality is disputed. Taliesin nevertheless enjoyed an extraordinary renown over several centuries.

Many of the texts attributed to the bard Taliesin are the subject of controversy, largely due to the all too famous “rediscoverer” of Celtic culture, Iolo Morganwg. This monument of the culture of the island of Britain inspired Shakespeare’s myth of the advancing forest in Macbeth.

On this site you will find articles and texts written for various organisations since the early 2000s.

As I often like to emphasise, our society was shaped by the encounter between Jerusalem and Athens. One must not, however, forget the third pillar in the construction of our civilisation: Islam, which brought to the West an extraordinary scientific, philosophical and metaphysical corpus.

This “historical breath”, called spirit (ruaḥ רוּחַ or pneuma) by the various spiritual traditions issuing from monotheism, has never ceased to exert its influence upon our societies. It is therefore distressing for anyone possessing a pneumatic perception of the world to observe human beings slaughtering and tearing one another apart in the name of an analysis that is both reductive and strictly literal of the great foundational texts.

Cad Goddeu, a summit of Celtic and Christian esotericism, would require several volumes of hermeneutics merely to begin to apprehend its symbolic, ethical, metaphysical and spiritual dimensions.

In his very curious work The White Goddess, Robert Graves saw in it a symbolic allegory of the end of the religious practices of the ancient Celts. Graves belongs to that category of authors whom one must have read in order, one day, to move beyond them. Credit must nevertheless be given to Graves for having left us a poetic essay grounded in an openly assumed euhemerism. However, his work does not constitute a rigorous or scientific hermeneutical method.

Only an interpretation of foundational texts that makes use of philosophy for the semantic register and symbolism at the methodological level is capable of resolving doctrinal inaccuracies and approximations. These inaccuracies and approximations are very often the source of numerous forms of intolerance and exclusion.

Today, we observe the most insidious and perverse form of such exclusions in the emergence of various identity-based ideologies which, far from aiding the understanding and deciphering of the objective realities of everyday life, imprison their adherents in the deepest obscurantism by reducing diverse traditions to a strictly literal application of textual content.

This situation is all the more regrettable in that such intellectual and practical confinement runs directly counter to all traditional teachings. Reducing anthropological diversity to spiritual particularisms alone amounts to erecting artificial walls within an intrinsically unified humanity.

If the plastic, ritual, mythological and allegorical forms of humanity’s various traditions are indeed plural, insofar as they are above all cultural emanations, they must never be interpreted outside the historical, social and political contexts in which they arose. They must not constitute an obstacle to dialogue between human groups, provided they remain a path of philosophical, ethical and metaphysical deepening, and refrain from any claim to legislate within the temporal sphere.

The triple interpretative framework - ontological for our perception of the multiple states of being, spiritual for historical influence, and ethical at the level of praxis towards our fellow human beings - constitutes a transversal path across all (most often artificial) particularisms.

Faced with the threat of integrisms, which human history has known all too well, we not only have the right but the duty, each according to our own measure and nature, to endeavour to build bridges between different human groups. I shall therefore conclude by citing two statements by John Toland, Irish philosopher and free thinker:

“Sound reason, or the light of common sense, is a catholic, eternal, and universal rule, without which mankind could not subsist in peace and happiness one single hour. It is the solemn compact of all societies upon earth, whether there be, or there be not, any revealed religion among them; it is the only thing admitted by all revelations, how opposite soever they may be to one another in every other respect.”

John Toland, Nazarenus: or, Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity, p. 122.

“Notwithstanding all this, so great is the aversion which diversity of manners generally inspires among men, and more particularly the variety of religious rites or contradictory doctrines, that far from bearing mutual love and rendering good offices to one another, as belonging to the same species, they have the folly to despise and hate one another on account of their civil usages, and the cruelty to persecute and slaughter one another when they come to matters of religion.”

John Toland, Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews, 1707.

Jean-Marc CAVALIER LACHGAR