Celtic religion

“ In dealing with Celtic religion, mythology, and legend, it is not so much the varying local and temporal forms that demand our attention, as the all-pervading and animating spirit, which shows its essential character even through the scanty remains of the ancient Celtic world. ”

“ In the foregoing lecture I tried to reconstruct, mainly out of the ruins of the Gaulish pantheon, the fallen edifice of Celtic paganism; and in so doing, I endeavoured to confine myself as much as I conveniently could to what may be called the theology of the early Celts; but it is impossible to do justice to our subject without pursuing it, as I now briefly propose to do, into its later stages, represented by such myths as the Celtic nations of modern times happen to retain embedded in their literature or woven into their folk-lore. ”

“ With the growth of religion the vaguer spirits tended to become gods and goddesses, and worshipful animals to become anthropomorphic divinities, with the animals as their symbols, attendants, or victims. And as the cult of vegetation spirits centred in the ritual of planting and sowing, so the cult of the divinities of growth centred in great seasonal and agricultural festivals, in which the key to the growth of Celtic religion is to be found. But the migrating Celts, conquering new lands, evolved divinities of war ”

“ We are thus compelled, from the indications which we have of Celtic religion, in the names of its deities, its rites, and its survivals in folk-lore and legend, to come to the conclusion, that its fundamental groundwork is a body of ideas, similar to those of other lands, which were the natural correlatives of the phases of experience through which man passed in his emergence into civilised life. ”

“ The older nature spirits and divine animals were never quite forgotten, especially by the folk, who also preserved the old rituals of vegetation spirits, while the gods of growth were worshipped at the great festivals. Yet in essence the lower and the higher cults were one and the same, and, save where Roman influence destroyed Celtic religion, the older primitive strands are everywhere apparent. ”

“ The Celtic invaders of Aryan stock brought their gods with them to the lands they conquered just as much as the ancestors of the English brought with them theirs to the Christian land of Roman Britain; and the former continued to be in the main the great figures of the Celtic pantheon until that rude edifice crumbled to dust under the attacks of Christianity; but as to the innumerable divinities attached, so to say, to the soil, the great majority of them were very possibly the creations of the peoples here before the Celts. ”

“ Clear glimpses through this Celtic mist are rare. This is not to be wondered at when we consider how much of the mythology has been long forgotten, and how many hands have worked upon the remainder. The stories are relics of a dead past, as defaced and inexplicable as the battered monuments of the old religion. Romancers, would-be historians, Christian opponents of paganism, biographers of saints, ignorant yet half-believing folk, have worked their will with them. ”

“ But these sacrifices, had been and still often were rites in which the representative of a god was slain. Some divinities were worshipped over a wide area, most were gods of local groups, and there were spirits of every place, hill, wood, and stream. Magic rites mingled with the cult, but both were guided by an organised priesthood. And as the Celts believed in unseen gods, so they believed in an unseen region whither they passed after death.
Our knowledge of the higher side of Celtic religion is practically a blank, since no description of the inner spiritual life has come down to us. ”

“ But those gods worshipped far and wide over the Celtic area may be gods of the undivided Celts, or gods of some dominant Celtic group extending their influence on all sides, or, in some cases, popular gods whose cult passed beyond the tribal bounds. If it seem precarious to see such close similarity in the local gods of a people extending right across Europe, appeal can be made to the influence of the Celtic temperament, producing everywhere the same results, and to the homogeneity of Celtic civilisation, save in local areas, e.g. ”

“ The pantheon of the continental Celts was a varied one. Traces of the primitive agricultural rites, and of the priority of goddesses to gods, are found, and the vaguer aspects of {48} primitive nature worship are seen behind the cult of divinities of sky, sun, thunder, forests, rivers, or in deities of animal origin. We come next to evidence of a higher stage, in divinities of culture, healing, the chase, war, and the underworld. We see divinities of Celtic groups—gods of individuals, the family, the tribe. ”

“ For the things of the spirit have never appealed in vain to the Celtic soul, and long ago classical observers were struck with the religiosity of the Celts. They neither forgot nor transgressed the law of the gods, and they thought that no good befell men apart from their will.3 The submission of the Celts to the Druids shows how they welcomed authority in matters of religion, and all Celtic regions have been characterised by religious devotion, easily passing over to superstition, and by loyalty to ideals and lost causes. ”

“ From this sketch of Celtic civilisation it will readily be seen how here as elsewhere the religious development of the Celts stood closely related to the development of their civilisation generally. It must be borne in mind, however, that all parts of the Celtic world were not equally affected by the material development in question. Part of the complexity of the history of Celtic religion arises from the fact that we cannot be always certain of the degree of progress in civilisation which any given district had made, of the ideas which pervaded it, or of the absorbing interests of its life. ”

“ The great earth-mother and her varied offspring ever come to view in Celtic religion under many names, and the features even of the other-world could not be dissociated for the Celt from those of his mother-earth. ”

“ Celtic Christianity was a religion of perpetual miracles, of deep and varying emotions, and of contempt for worldly things, that, however noble in itself, was sometimes manifested extravagantly. While its teachers seldom failed to win men’s love, they were not equally successful in influencing their conduct. It was well that the English Church turned away from them, for their religious system could never have produced an organized ecclesiastical society. ”

“ Celtic religion bears the impress of p. 66nature on earth far more than nature in the heavens. The sense of the heaven above has perhaps survived in some of the general Indo-European Celtic terms for the divine principle, and there are some traces of a religious interest in the sun and the god of thunder and lightning, but every student of Celtic religion must feel that the main and characteristic elements are associated with the earth in all the variety of its local phenomena. ”

“ Time also brought its revenges, for when paganism passed away, much of its folk-ritual and magic remained, practised by wise women or witches, who for generations had as much power over ignorant minds as the Christian priesthood. The fact that Cæsar and Tacitus speak of Germanic but not of Celtic priestesses, can hardly, in face of these scattered notices, be taken as a proof that women had no priestly rôle in Celtic religion. ”

“ The Popular Religion of the Celts
But first we must point out that the Celtic religion was by no means a simple affair, and cannot be summed up as what we call “Druidism.” Beside the official religion there was a body of popular superstitions and observances which came from a deeper and older source than Druidism, and was destined long to outlive it—indeed, it is far from dead even yet.
The Megalithic People
The religions of primitive peoples mostly centre on, or take their rise from, rites and practices connected with the burial of the dead. ”

“ Classical writers, of course, may have known of what appears to have been a sporadic Celtic idea, derived from old beliefs, that the soul might take the form of an animal, but this was not the Druidic teaching. Again, if the Gauls, like the Irish, had myths telling of the rebirth of gods or semi-divine beings, these may have been misinterpreted by those writers and regarded as eschatological. But such myths do not concern mortals. ”

“ What M. Alexandre Bertrand says of Celtic civilisation, namely, that neither the Ligurians, nor the Phœnicians, nor the Greeks, nor the Iberians collaborated in that educational work, may with some reservations in favour of the two latter nations be accepted as true of the Celtic religion.
From Julius Cæsar some useful information is to be gained respecting the religion of the Celts of his own day. He states that they had many gods, the chief of whom, in Gaul at least, answered to the Roman Mercury, patron of arts and crafts. ”

“ The world swarmed with invisible spirits, some friendly, some hostile, and, in view of these beings, life had to be regulated by strict rules of actions and prohibitions. Even in the neolithic stage the inhabitants of Celtic countries had attained to the religious ideas in question, as is seen not only by their folk-lore and by the names of groups of goddesses such as the Matres (or mothers) , but by the fact that in historic times they had advanced well beyond this stage to that of named and individualised gods. ”

“ That is, however, but an accident of the medium, so to say, through which our information about Celtic paganism has reached us: the gods have, in the course of the transmission of the legends about them through Christian channels, been reduced to the status of men playing parts, more or less heroic, in a mythic history. So it is only by careful comparison that one is enabled to find that such and such a hero of our stories was, in the pagan period, such and such a god. Let me call your attention to one of the kind, who, in the Mabinogion, bears the name
Gwydion Son of Dôn. ”

“ As in all countries where the gods were individualised, the men of Celtic lands, whether aborigines or invaders, had toiled along the steep ascent from the primitive vague sense of being haunted to a belief in gods who, like Esus, Teutates, Grannos, Bormanus, Litavis, had names of a definite character. ”

“ Nevertheless their folk-lore displays such remarkable homogeneity, from whatever quarter of the Celtic world it be derived, that it seems the soundest method to treat them as one people for all the purposes of the student of sociology, mythology, and religion. ”

“ The great difficulty in studying the religion and mythology of the ancient Celts, is to bridge over the gulf of ages dividing the literature of the Celtic nations of the present day from the narrative of the writers of antiquity and the testimony of the stones. ”

“ Such a difference of temper is often regretted, but nobody can deny its existence; and whatever explanation details the history of many centuries has to offer, the contrast may be said to be as great now as it was in the time of Julius Caesar. But evident as is its persistence, its origin is by no means easy to define. On the one hand, it may be said that the Celts, who delivered religious matters over to their druids, that is, to their magicians and medicine-men acting as priests, showed themselves proner to superstition and lent themselves more readily to spiritual thraldom ”

“ The studies of the Celtic nations were therefore reduced simply to learning by heart certain hymns in which were embodied their law, their religion, their history and, in general, all that it was desirable the people should know. ”

“ Belenos Augustus. Cults of local gods became cults of the genius of the place, coupled with the genius of the emperor. In some cases, however, the native name stands alone. The process was aided by art. Celtic gods are represented after Greco-Roman or Greco-Egyptian models. Sometimes these carry a native divine symbol, or, in a few cases, the type is purely native, e.g. that of Cernunnos. Thus the native paganism was largely transformed before Christianity appeared in Gaul. ”

“ Generally an animal in whose shape a dead man helps his benefactor is found in other European versions, but in the Celtic stories not an animal but the dead man himself appears as a living person in corporeal form.1162 Equally substantial and corporeal, eating, drinking, lovemaking, and fighting are the divine folk of the síd or of Elysium, or the gods as they are represented in the texts. To the Celts, gods, síde, and the dead, all alike had a bodily form, which, however, might become invisible, and in other ways differed from the earthly body. ”

“ Like other religions, those of the Celtic lands of Europe supplemented the earlier animism by a belief in spirits, who belonged to trees, animals, rocks, mountains, springs, rivers, and other natural phenomena, and in folk-lore there still survives abundant evidence that the Celt regarded spirits as taking upon themselves a variety of forms, animal and human. ”

“ Those who fought for their homes felt that they were fighting for their gods, who also fought on their side. Several inscriptions, "To the genius of the place," occur in Britain, and there are a few traces of tutelar gods in Irish texts, but generally local saints had taken their place.
The Celtic cult of goddesses took two forms, that of individual and that of grouped goddesses, the latter much more numerous than the grouped gods. Individual goddesses were worshipped as consorts of gods, or as separate personalities, and in the latter case the cult was sometimes far extended. ”