While researching my PhD thesis, Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry (2025), I spent considerable time visiting Celtic language communities and Celtic nationalist meetings across Britain. I went expecting to find what I’d romanticised: the last strongholds of living tradition, people gathering in draughty village halls to keep the old words breathing. What I found instead puzzled me deeply, and has since forced me to rethink my entire understanding of Celtic nationalisms and their revival.
Many of these gatherings were as I had imagined and were in village halls, but at some of these gatherings, I kept meeting members of esoteric orders, like Zionists and Mormons. They sat among Kernewek learners and Celtic nationalists, and I found myself asking the obvious question: what on earth are you doing here?
The answer is stranger than I expected.
The Hebrew Connection:
The links with Zionism emerge from something specific: the revival of the ancient Hebrew language. For many language activists, Hebrew stands as the great success story – a language of liturgy returned to public places. Israeli groups provided practical advice and strategies for growing the Welsh language during the latter half of the 20th century.
Beneath this practical solidarity lurked something more theological. For certain strands of Zionist thought, particularly those influenced by figures like Abraham Isaac Kook, the return to the Land and the revival of Hebrew were not merely nationalist projects but messianic events. So, if the revival of Hebrew carried political and theological significance for funders of the state of Israel, what of the revival of Welsh or Cornish? Is there some hidden financial or theological motive?
A Landscape of Secrets:
The truth is that the United Kingdom has long been a factory for esoteric orders that shape the political world from the shadows. We manufacture them the way Switzerland manufactures cuckoo clocks. To ignore this fact is to misunderstand our history. The history of the UK is littered with secret fraternities of posh boys performing rituals and rites. As ridiculous as they might seem to the uninitiated outsider – these people seem to believe whatever it is they are doing. Aleister Crowley alone spawned an evolving line of Thelemic sex cults, with their “Do what thou wilt” and elaborate initiations for posh boys and poets. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Typhonian Order – each has promised hidden knowledge to privileged devotees, and many of their practices still reverberate through respectable contemporary societies.
Then there are the British Israelites, who emerged properly in the 19th century with the claim that the British people are literally descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. John Wilson’s Our Israelitish Origin (1840) gave the movement its founding text, and by the 1880s, Anglo-Israel associations had sprouted across Britain. These were not fringe eccentrics in any simple sense – they included clergy, peers, and at their peak claimed millions of sympathisers throughout the former colonies. It’s no surprise that ideas from the British Israelites heavily influenced the Mormon church in the United States.
And yes – the modern Zionist movement itself, in its current ethno-nationalist political form, emerged from late 19th-century Europe. These aren’t just eccentric social clubs; the reason the US Empire has evolved into a crusading force obsessed with prophecy and rapture, or the state of Israel has become an ethno-supremacist state is because of weird fringe ideas that have gestated right here in the UK. The quirks of many of these cults tap into the same soil of romantic nationalism, biblical prophecy, and the conviction that ancient peoples could be reassembled in the present.
What Do They Want?
The ultimate goals of these secret esoteric societies remain, by design, hidden. We live in what I call a state of partial revelation – we glimpse fragments, but never the full machinery. Theosophists spoke of a coming World Teacher. Crowley announced the Aeon of Horus. British Israelites anticipated the restoration of the Davidic throne through the British monarchy. According to researcher of the occult Tracy Twyman, some secret societies have sought out a mythical ‘twilight language’ which conveys secret knowledge – this might explain an interest in old languages like Hebrew, Welsh, or even Cornish. The more I look into the work of figures like Edward Williams (also known as ‘Iolo Morganwg’) or Robert Morton Nance, the more I become sceptical of their motives or methods. Whatever their goals, scattered through all of the secret societies runs a thread of sectarianism, of chosen peoples, and of elect nations.
What becomes clear, viewed from ground level, is that such groups consistently function against the interests of the uninitiated – which means the common people. They work to create division – to balkanise not only territories but imaginations. The English Mistery of the 1930s, with its mystical feudalism and its “kins” of racially pure Englishmen, sought to roll back democracy and reinstate aristocratic rule. Rolf Gardiner, one of its leaders, wrote explicitly in German journals about reviving long-lost Germanic traditions in the English social order. These are not harmless antiquarians – they are architects of division, fear and paranoia.
Demystifying the Mystery:
Mesotopian logic demands a demystification of meaning-making. Not the crude demystification that pretends mystery doesn’t exist – we can never fully know the real world, and any claim to total knowledge is itself a power move. Rather, an honest demystification that names what is not known, that refuses the priestly gesture of hiding operations behind ritual.
Celtic languages do not belong to esoteric orders. They do not belong to neo-feudal aristocrats or digital landlords or prophets of racial destiny. They belong to the communities that speak them, learn them, dream in them – communities of ordinary people trying to hold onto something precious. The mystifiers would turn these languages into keys to hidden kingdoms. I say: let these languages remain what they are – words for sea and rock and magpie, for love and loss and the hope of conveying something meaningful or, dare I say, beautiful.
As always, my a’th kar.
I discuss this blog in more detail in the video:
References:
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