I have argued in Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry (1) that yes, there is a real world, but no, it does not open itself to our complete comprehension. We are always half-in, half-out of its meanings, fumbling toward the real but never quite gripping it. This weird middle place – a mesh of physical and conceptual terrains – is the domain of the meaning-makers. The poets, the oracles, the interpreters of signs have historically been quite happy to hide their operations behind opulent rituals or clever distractions. But does it have to be this way? My lyrical work has long been an effort to demystify poetics and language, to free these communicative events from the dictates of esoteric schools and elite fraternities who still treat language as a proprietary ritual.
Naming, after all, has long been the preserve of priestly classes: the magi, the monks, the keepers of alphabets and incantations. In many religious orders, “the Word” is not just a tool but a cosmological foundation – articulation itself becomes sacrament. And once you take this seriously, it becomes impossible not to notice how incantations, chants, spells, prophetic mutterings and other religious-poetic forms lean heavily on the idea of language as conduit to hidden truths. This is the vatic, the mantic, the magical dimension of poesis, the belief that words do not merely describe the world but summon, shape, or invoke it.
Modern linguistics attempts to scrub all this clean. Structuralists, post-structuralists, cognitive scientists, psycholinguists; they all gather with laboratory-grade detachment to “demystify” language production. This is good in theory. But if you ignore the presence of mystery altogether, you’re not demystifying anything. You’re merely tucking your priestly robes into your slacks and hoping nobody notices the ancient hems. Many materialist linguists strike me as devout priestly magi decked out in secular boardroom drag. Here’s one of the many unspoken secrets of our supposedly rational institutions: even empirical research often rests on vast scaffolds of speculation. Each irrefutable graph serves as an article of faith – it’s an ‘educated guess’ berobed as a principle.
This is why it is difficult to determine how many theoretical schools are engaged in re-mystifying the archive of human knowledge – although some hide in plain sight. Even Tim Morton, spear-heading investigations into the ecological implications of object-oriented ontology, is overt about (eco)gnostic leanings.
Consider the accelerationists (2): the former CCRU crowd who hallucinated Deleuze and Guattari into a cybernetic fever dream, pushing symbolism to liturgical extremes. Their rapid decoupling of meaning from symbol, in pursuit of some machinic singularity, often sounds to me not unlike kabbalistic numerology or ecstatic glossolalia. It is not insignificant that many modern tech-titans are devotees of Nick Land. Listen to the quasi-prophetic ramblings of Peter Thiel or Marc Andreessen as they speak of merging symbolic and material terrains; you will hear the cadences of a neo-cult, not a scientific proposal. Meanwhile, various deciples of the structuralists continue to worship The Corpus Linguistic with devotional intensity. ‘and the Word was God,’ they seem to say – and seemingly never notice they are mimicking devotees of Thoth, Hermes or even John 1:1 .Once again, the priests return, this time wearing the unbuttoned casuals of liberal intelligentsia.
In contrast, I often return to etymology, a much subtler way of demystifying meaning. Not by banishing mystery, but by acknowledging its layers. English gives the game away easily: most of our “proper” vocabulary is padded with Greek and Latin. The professional-managerial classes (PMC) learn just enough of these roots to keep the bloated machinery of liberal institutions functioning. Autobiography: self-life-writing. Philosophy: love-of-wisdom. Nothing mystical, only inherited structure.
When we apply the same etymological pressure to Kernewek, interesting stories surface. Pysk, the Kernewek word for “fish,” appears to descend from Latin piscis. This aligns with what Celtic linguists tell us: the Brythonic languages had more prolonged contact with Roman, Norman, and Saxon cultures than their Goidelic cousins. History leaves fingerprints on phonemes.
Or – and here’s a mischievous alternative – it suggests that one of the more “colourful” characters in the history of Kernewek revivalism simply inserted Latin or Greek terms (along with Welsh and Breton borrowings) to fill lexical gaps. The line between linguistic evolution and linguistic invention is not always tidy.
On page 76 of my thesis, I discuss Linguist Professor Price’s uncompromising position: Cornish is dead, he insists, and modern “revivals” are “partially invented” (Price, 1984: 134). He writes:
“The Old Celtic speech of Cornwall died out two centuries ago. It is still dead, and will evermore remain so… The present century has seen the propagation by a small band of enthusiasts of a type of language that is partially derived from the old Celtic speech of Cornwall, but it is also partially invented… I shall reserve the term Cornish for the genuine language and refer to the modern pseudo-Cornish as Cornic.”
I do have issues with Price’s framing. As I wrote:
“What is involved in inventing a language? What is a pseudo-language? What does a ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’ Kernewek sound like? I remain confused by the extent to which Price uses terms such as authentic, genuine, and pseudo in relation to Kernewek.” (Verran, 2025: 76)
Whether or not one accepts Price’s verdict, the point stands: Kernewek should be preserved and spoken as a breathing archive of our past, not re-engineered as an esoteric tool of ethnonationalism. We know too well what can happen when fringe political movements revive ancient languages to manufacture legitimacy. And it doesn’t surprise me that Celtic circles frequently attract a plethora of esoteric characters: Zionists, Catholic Religious Orders, Rosicrucians, Masons, New-Age Druids, Shamans or Wiccans – all projecting mystical significance onto minority languages. Why this conviction that certain tongues contain secret indigenous wisdom? Romantic nationalism, folklore, and the Arcadian fantasy of an unbroken Celtic lineage have all fed this impulse.
The more I learn about figures like Iolo Morganwg or Robert Morton Nance – who seem to have consciously cultivated a priestly order of Celtic mystics modelled on Julius Caesar’s accounts of ancient Britons – the more frustrated I become. We don’t need to live inside the art projects of eccentric artists or poets – and yes, that includes me! Trust me, we definitely shouldn’t live inside anything I create.
As a poet, I enjoy bending language into unorthodox shapes. I fabricate littoral places inside my verse, places that shimmer and sometimes misbehave. But I do not belong to the mystery schools of modern priestly classes, who still seem intent on fabricating material realities for entire populations to inhabit according to the whims of neo-feudal aristocrats or digital landlords.
For me, the mystery is not something to eradicate but something to remain in dialogue with. I continue to wrestle with the languages I have inherited. I am consciously rejecting past myths or Arthurian tropes all too often associated with Celtic languages. Through lyrical poetry, I keep listening – probing the metaphysical uncertainties that Kernewek, in all its contested life and afterlife, continues to stir.
As always, my a’th kar!
All References Available From Verran, 2025:
(1) Verran, T. (2025) Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry. Thesis. University of Plymouth. Available at: https://doi.org/10.24382/nv45-pk79
(2) Monoskop.org. (2017). Cybernetic Culture Research Unit – Monoskop. [online] Available at: https://monoskop.org/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Unit.
