In his book, The Mysteries of Britain Lewis Spence writes of the Celt or Kelt;
The Mystery of Keltic thought has been the despair of generations of philosophers and aesthetes. The debate concerning it has been scarcely less amazing in its vehemence then that other allied controversy on the origin of the Keltic race. Renan and Arnold manifestly wrestled with it much in the same primitive manner as the astrologers of Chaldea strove with the science of the stars.
But an abyss so profound is scarcely to be plumbed by the discernment of the polite essayist, or measured by the logical processes of the student of comparitive religion. It is a task for the prophet or seer, for a Blake or Brahan seer.

To the man who has no magic in his blood the cavern of keltic profundity is for ever sealed. He who approaches it must, I feel, not alone be of the ancient stock of the first culture bringers of this island, but he must also have heard since childhood the deep and repeated call of ancestral voices urging him to the task of the exploration of the mysteries of his people.
The Kelts, that race of artists, poets and aristocrats, appear originally to have formed themselves into a nation in the region betwixt France and Hungary, in all likelihood in the South German plain between Switzerland and Bohemia, and probably developed slowly as a nation from a race known as the 'Urn-Field People', a bronze age folk.

In the course of generations they became welded into a nation, and as such they were known to the Greeks at least 500 years before our era, their country being spoken of by Hellenic writers as Keltíca. They introduced the iron civilisation of La Téne into Gaul and Britain and in doing so mingled with the races of older occupancy, losing some of their racial characteristics in the process perhaps. But their cultural and aesthetic outlook, their peculiar philosophy, they did not lose, notwithstanding that this must have been powerfully affected by the beliefs and customs of the peoples with whom they intermixed, so that even today, although the name Kelt is rather confusedly applied to mixed races of almost wholly different physical appearance, to Welsh, Irish, Scots and Bretons alike, there still remains among these dissimilar types a mental habitude and a similarity of opinion and outlook which reveal the previous existence of a common philosophy and a common tradition.

The Kelt, tall or short, long or round skulled, dark, fair or rufous, is nevertheless scarcely to be mistaken so far as his mental qualities are concerned. He was labelled by the older school of anthropologists, by Broca, and others as 'Sanguinebilious', and one can see no good reason to doubt or discard the psychological diagnosis.
He reveals himselfnormally as a man frequently gloomy and irritable, prone to the sudden illumination of enthusiasm, a man of prolonged silences, suddenly garrulous, dreamy, but passing from repose to violent but usually short lived action. Conservative and superstitious, fatalist, fearless, he is all these things. Yet he is as various individually as the men of other races, in some cases highly emotional, in others strangely passive.

In all probability the general type of man we now call the Kelt displays the several psychological facets of the various races with whom his primal stock originally mingled, and, according to the law of miscegenation these assume a different form with each individual, as he throws back to Iberian, Teutonic or other ancestors. But desite the intermixture, the ancient leaven of Kelticism triumphs and the peculiar genius of the ancient race --Strng because so ancient and so perfectly moulded in the matrix ofits origin--shines with an almost superhuman radiance through the veils of alien character or idiosyncracy which in some cases even seem at first sight to have obliterated it. One must often wait long and patiently to behold the illumination. But, someday under stress of passion or triumph or sorrow it will manifest itself in such a way that it cannot be mistaken, in the sad, low, characteristic laugh, the gloomy and ominous scowl, in a quick exasperation and fierce resentment which will surprise or amuse men of slower blood, or in the proud and haughty scorn to which the finer and more purely-bred scions of this race of Europe's aristocrats are so disconcertingly prone. What is this mysticalsecret of the Kelt, Poet, prophet, warrior, aristocrat amongst aristocrats? It is the memory, the soul recollectionof a former moral and intellectual pre-eminence which he has not lost, for its gifts remain within him, but the arcanum of which he cannot discover. He is like a man with a chest of treasure who has lost the key. In this repository lie the books of the secrets of Britain, those most ancient and mysterious volumes cantaining the lore of the civilizing race of this island in its pristine days. The secrets it holds are of inestimable spiritual concern and importance to the people of a land still overwhelmingly Keltic in thought and character. That Britain, to which the whole world looks for guidance in science and political thought, which governs almost one quarter of the globe, which has achieved triumphs unparralleled in the fields of scholarship, invention and government, whose light burns above those of all nations, should yet not be able to boast a native mysticism of her own, but be compelled to borrow from Eastern sources to supply this deficiency, is humiliating indeed. It is not that this native mystical tradition does not exist. It lies almost undisturbed in the cavern of Keltic past, whence it is still possible to regain it for the behoof of our race. The first task before us in seeking to recover the secret of the Keltic Grail is, naturally, to review briefly the material, documentary and otherwise, which may help us to a just understanding of the mystical literature of the British Kelt. It is from this and from the relics of early British faith and philosophy as envinced in popular rites of immemorial tradition that we hope to glean the broken sherds of the vessel of British mysticism and to piece them into a recovered and restored whole.

From this understanding and knowledge we can glean a new understanding of what it is that calls us home, assuming of course that we have heard the ancestral call since our early days. To be born a Celt is a gift, to hear the call of our heritage, our Keltic ancestry is a vocation, to follow that call though it may change one's whole way of being, living and existing, is a way of life, the way of the Kelt, the masters of a green culture.

In: The Druid Grove of Maelwys