Hi Malcom:
A funny comment in suport of your excellent observations. As an undergraduate on the way to law school, I majored in political science and history. I focused on trials of heritics, and the evidence is that after the destruction of cathars, there were no (NO!) real heritic movements inculuding evidence that there is no servial of pre christian celtic religions (One has to exclude Romani (gypsy) faiths from this observations, as they stil practice ancient Vedic religions overwriten in the major religions language... but they are always left out of most historical analisis).
Well the funny part, a neo pagan friend called to ask me how to enclude more celtic paganism in her beliefs... I told her to get her little congrigation together, around Samhain (pronouced SOW WAIN not Sam Hain folks!) or Belthain, and have some cookies baked, with all the grains you want to see grow next year... (She was excited by this... ) Burn the bottom of one (Oh yes! says she...) make sure the best of you getts the burned one, though it should not appear to be other than by chance... then have him eat the cookie, take him to a bog, near a bog hole, have him kneal, hit him behind the head with an axe while passing a torch over him, then push him down into the hole staking him down under the water to die the triple death. That is the religion and all the rest is comontary. She asked, that is it, Larry? The whole thing, I replied.
Now I dont want modern wiccans to think I am making fun of them, nor do I want them to return to the REAL old religion, just a small reality check.
In the above ritual, music is optional
Play nice
Larry