Following in the footsteps of historians like Verea y Aguiar (Historia de Galicia, “History of Galicia”, 1838) and, above all, 19th-century French historiography (Augustin Thierry), Manuel Murguía elaborated, in his Historia de Galicia (1865) and other works and speeches (Galicia), the Celtic myth of the origins of Galicia as a nation. Based on very weak empirical evidence and a Romantic vision of the pre-historical Galician “Castro” society, Murguía’s mythical account was motivated by a fundamental goal: the symbolic construction of the nation.

The Celtic myth reached Murguía from two sources: older regional antiquaries and more modern Irish and French academic sources dealing with the Gaelic origin-myth of how the Milesian race had settled in Ireland from a starting point in north-western Iberia. A mediator between these two source traditions was the exiled priest Joaquín Villanueva, proscribed as a member of the Cortes of Cádiz and accused of Jansenism, who had taken up residence in Ireland and there had engaged with the speculations of Irish antiquaries of the older “Celtomaniac” school; his writings were known to Vicetto Pérez and to Murguía. The Celtic myth provided Murguía with a number of useful tropes for Galician national consciousness-raising.

First, there was the justification for the community of origin of the nation. Following a chain of concepts that, through a binary code of oppositions, stand in contrast to their “Semitic” counterparts, the Celtic “race” provides the organic, ethnicist starting point for the concept of a Galician nation and a much-needed marker of its historical permanence.

Second, the Celtic myth allowed for a symbolic recovery of a national dignity lost after centuries of submission, destitution, crushing centralism and proscription of Galician culture within the Spanish state, identifying a lost (but freshly inspiring) Golden Age prior to the medieval and modern period of decay.

Third, the myth, as penned by Murguía, sets what is typical of Galicia apart from what is Spanish/Castilian, in addition to the geographical opposition of Atlantic to Mediterranean, North vs South. This opposition also serves to obviate the country’s internal social heterogeneity. The myth of a common ancestry enfolds an ideal Galicia into a shared identity against the backdrop of a broken social landscape, defusing or postponing inner conflicts and diverging interests.

The oppositional terms that set a Galician ethnic profile against its Spanish or Semitic counterpart involve the qualities of North, European, green meadows, dynamic progress towards modernity and a masculine work ethic vs South, African, barren deserts, static traditionalism or decline and a feminine culture of wasted time.

Fourth, Murguía’s Celtic myth – as opposed to Brañas’s anti-modernity nostalgia for the Middle Ages, and also in a departure from the image of the Celtic among French and British intellectuals – calls for Europeanism and modernization, arguing that the Celts “gradually gave a marked European character to the societies they founded in the course of their migrations, and to our people like no other”. This aligns the Galician people with the “truly modern peoples” of northern Europe, whose attitudes are diametrically opposed to any fickle love of the past. Against the decline of Semitic Spain, Galicia looks forward to a future of economic progress – but also one of political freedom. For Murguía’s nationalism, far removed from traditional monarchism and, ultimately, from Brañas’s Carlism, involves the liberal intention of “preserving what is in its soul and in its blood, but in the context of modern liberties”, since “we are sons and daughters of Galicia, but also of our time”.

Finally, the Celtic myth provides Murguía with a much-needed justification for contesting the Spanish centralized state. Differences in origin, culture and interests justify a new organization of the State and self-government in Galicia. This gives rise to the first historical demand for autonomy: beyond mere administrative subsidiarity or a traditional monarchy with legal privileges, Murguía calls for an actual political devolution of legislative power.

The Celtic myth was re-elaborated and disseminated by the writers and intellectuals, based in A Coruña, calling themselves Cova Céltica (“Celtic Cave”); one of the members, the poet Eduardo Pondal, enshrined Celticism in what was to become Galicia’s national anthem, which celebrates Galicia as “Breogán’s nation” (after an ancestral figure of the legendary Milesian race). From there, it was adopted into the historiographical canon by Florentino López Cuevillas (La civilización céltica en Galicia, 1953) and became part of the political ideology of 20th-century Galician nationalism thanks to a text that served as a work of reference for several generations: Daniel R. Castelao’s Sempre en Galiza (1944). In the course of the 20th century, representatives of the region repeatedly attempted, with varying success, to have Galicia accepted as a member of the Pan-Celtic movement.