We inherited Tubal Cain from our tradition in England over twenty years ago and have since been doing research on him and how he ended up in a British Witchcraft traditon. We still don't have all the anwers yet, , We can tell you about some of the interesting things we've uncovered.

For one thing, a lot of people make the mistake of assuming that just because a figure is mentioned in the Bible, then it's de facto Semetic. That simply isn't the case. The Jews took many of the stories and legends of the ancient world and adapted them to their own purposes. The flood, for example, shows up in many of the ancient legends of the time, not just the Bible. In fact, a scholar of no less repute than Issac Asimov has suggested that 'Tubal' was a city state on the shore of the Black Sea (in what is now Turkey) and that 'Cain' was a word for blacksmith. Therefore, 'Tubal Cain' would be the blacksmith of Tubal -- not a semetic personage at all, but proto-slavic, from the same region of the Black Sea that the Celts began their westward migration some 5,000 years ago.

The Freemasons took the Bible legends literally and incorporated them into their rites in the 1600's. However, there is documented evidence of proto-masonic influence in the Witch cult in France as early as the 1400's, long before the Freemasons as we know them came into existence. Southern France was the homebase of not only the Templars but the Cathars -- both of which had considerable middle eastern and gnostic influences in their rites and practices. The influence of the Cathars on the Troubadour tradition of Courtly Love and Grail legends is also well documented. It doensn't seem to be a coincidence. After all, that region was known as Gaul until the Romans conquered it, and you don't get much more Celtic than that. It is also well documented that the Templars fled from France in the 1300s and ended up in the Scottish court of Robert the Bruce. There is no reason to assume that they didn't end up in Ireland and Wales, too. So, the middle eastern or saracenic influence in the British Isles has been considerable for centuries.

This raises the question of what precisely constitutes "Celtic?" Our researches have indicated that Celtic history and culture is considerably more diverse than that presented in the pretty but historically inaccurate fairy stories coming from the Victorian era Celtic revivial of Yates, Lady Gregory and Lady Charlotte Guest. The Celts swept across Western Europe in a wave, inhabiting every single country there was and living cheek to jowel with Turks, Huns, Slavs, Franks, Jutes, Norse, Basques and a variety of other tribes. There is considerable archeological evidence that they traded freely with their neighbors along the way. Why stop at trade goods? Why not exchange ideas, gods, ritual practices, traditions and such also?

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