Abstract

Sifting the Cinders of the Cathars

© Dr M D Magee and Saviour Shirlie
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002

The Celts in Britain

The native agricultural Europeans, sometimes called the Iberians, a Mediterranean stock, were short, dark skinned and haired, and long headed. African originally, they seem to have been the same as the ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Pelasgoi of Greece, and the Etruscans of Italy. The first of the ancient Britains were these people, and they were defeated by the invading Celts, originally from Asia, and subjugated as the underclass of Celtic society.

The Dorians invaded Greece in the eighth century taking with them the skill of riding horses rather than being pulled by them in a wagon. Though there is a view that the Celts were simply the natives of Central Europe for millennia who gradually developed an identifiable culture, more probably, they were part of this movement that the Dorians too were part of.

The horse was certainly a symbol of an aristocratic warrior elite, which was the main feature of later Celtic society.

Miranda Green, The Gods of the Celts

The Celts were quite distinct from the Iberians. They were typically tall, blond, blue-eyed and fair skinned, with broad heads. They were Aryans and spoke a language similar to the Germans, Greeks and Latins. Around 600 BC, they had apparently settled in central Europe in what are now Switzerland and Austria. Then, suddenly they expanded east and west. They also occupied the Po valley slightly to the south in the sixth century, for which reason the Romans called it Cisalpine Gaul. About 390 BC, they were even sacking Rome itself. About 300 BC, those who had moved east pillaged Greece and moved on to settle in central Asia Minor, in a place they gave their name to—famous later to Christians, at least, as Galatia. About the same time they were conquering Spain—the north western province of which is Galicia, also well known to Christians from the town of Santiago de Compostela, a place of Christian pilgrimage since the middle ages, Santiago being S James—and also the British Isles.

Celts conquered and ruled as a noble class, but inevitably slowly interbred with the native stock. They ruled the British Isles for about 300 years, but large areas of Wales and Ireland were not subjugated, and societies of aboriginal people existed alongside Celtic ruled societies even until the coming of the Romans in 47 AD.

These warriors continually sought to prove their valour and climb up the social ladder of heroes to become top man when they could take the champion’s haunch of pork at the lavish feasts the Celtic warriors were fond of—unless they were challenged by another. The main import of the Celtic countries of Europe was often Mediterranean wine.

The Celts came in two main waves, the Gaels, Gauls or Goidels, and the Britons or Brythons, who were not alike. The two phases of invasion of the British Isles were marked by linguistic differences. An original “k” sound in the Goidelic language had become a “p” sound in Brythonic. Thus, the word with the sound “mak”, meaning “son of”, was written as “mac” or “mc” in Gaelic but “map” and “mab” in British, and “ap” in Welsh.

To judge from Roman descriptions, the Gauls were the taller and more gangly with blonde or reddish hair, while the Britons, also tall but less loosely built, had brown hair. Tacitus (c 55-c 117 AD) noted the presence of the aboriginal types in the Silures of South Wales, with dark complexions and curly hair, though he concluded they must have been immigrants from Spain.

The invasion of the Brythons was not sudden but occurred in several waves, or might have been continual through friendly contact across the Channel. Certainly, the Belgae, a British tribe, partly Germanized, were still migrating into Britain from 75 BC until 50 BC, only just before Caesar’s foray, and little more than a century before the eventual Roman conquest. The idea propagated (Gallic War) by Caesar (c 102-44 BC) of a land of painted savages was not strictly true. Celts were highly cultured socially, in religion and in agriculture, but had an independent spirit that resisted the large scale organisation and discipline needed for empire building.

The Roman invasion of the Britons, the bravest of the Gauls, Caesar claimed, forced them back into the rugged western regions that the Iberians had earlier been forced into, and the two races were obliged to stand together against the invader. The Romans never conquered the Scottish highlands and Ireland. After the Roman conquest, the Iberians as fairly pure stock occupied South Wales, parts of Ireland and the Pictish lands, north of the Grampians, but, though reasonably pure in stock, their culture had been mainly assimilated to the Celtic. The Gauls occupied most of Ireland, the Isle of Man, Cumberland, the West of Scotland and the Scottish Islands, Cornwall, Devon, and North Wales. The Britons held most of what is now England, and Scotland south of the Tweed.

Creation and Calendar

All we know of any creation myth of the Celts is Caesar’s claim that they were descended from Dis, the underworld god. Christian writers compared S Patrick and S Brigit to the two pillars of the world, suggesting another lost myth. The eastern Celts told Alexander the Great that they feared nothing except that the sky would fall. This too suggests a lost myth of an ultimate end when the sky fell and earth, heaven and ocean merged into one, something like the eschaton, the Christian idea of apocalypse—the Last Days, and the End Time of the Essenes—which came via Judaism from the Persians. The Ragnarok of the Norse myths is similar.

Mythologists have assumed that the god, Dis, whose real name Caesar never gave, must have been a god of fertility or agriculture—all living things depended on the earth. Most commonly, the earth is a goddess, and is impregnated by the sun—usually the dark sun, the stormy sun, or the night-time sun, not the bright summer sun that modern Europeans like to worship. Celtic myth suggests the sun they liked was the setting sun, who entered the earth each night to do his fertilising duty, which is why this sun also has phallic characteristics—it looked red and swollen. One suggestion for Caesar’s Dis is Cernunnos (cernu, horn), the horned god, often depicted with three heads. In the Gundrustup cauldron, appear several images of Cernunnos, the stag god, holding a pair of stags in one instance and accompanied by one in another. The stag shed its horns in the autumn (Samhain), and they grew again in the spring (Beltane). It and the boar are both woodland beasts, emphasising the Celtic respect for trees. Stags too, like rams and bulls were noted tuppers. In some images, the stag’s horns were replaced by solar rays. “Horn” has been a euphemism for penis since time immemorial, so a horned god might more correctly be called a horny god. Pan and the satyrs were both horned and horny.

The only other clue is that a scholiast commenting on a passage in Lucan about a god, Taranis, who was placated by human sacrifices, identifies him with Dispater.

Pliny says the Celts took the beginnings of their months and years from the moon, while Caesar says that each day began with the setting sun, as it did in Judaism. The Celts divided the year into four principle segments, each of which was halved, so that there were four main festivals each year and four lesser ones. J A MacCulloch (The Celtic and Scandivian Religions) confirms that the Celtic years was primarily divided into summer and winter at Beltane (1 May) and Samhain (1 November), but the middle of each half year were also celebrated—1 February, 1 August. Imbolc on 1 February was dedicated to the goddess, Brigit, when all things were purified and refreshed. Lughnasa on 1 August was dedicated to the god, Lugh, (Lleu). Beltane was devoted to the god, Belenos, and Samhain on 1 November was devoted to all the gods and the spirits of the dead. Fires were burnt at Beltane and Samhain as the two beginnings, that of summer and winter, when the sun and therefore the seasons were urged to be true and therefore fruitful.

Realising the popularity of these festivals and the superstition associated with them, the Christians decided to adopt them into the Christian calendar, all except Beltane which corresponded in significance to the Christian Easter, and so was always tainted with the label of Pagan, and required the power of organized labour to have it recognized as a public holiday. Even Samhain was tolerated as All Hallows Day preceded by Halloween when, even still, spirits are considered to roam the skies. Its associations remain Pagan despite it being a Christian festival. It seems that when the Christian calendar was introduced, some of the traditions of Samhain were transferred to S Martin’s Day, the others remaining on All Saint’s Eve, the Celtic first day of winter. Some Beltane ceremonies were similarly moved to S John’s Day. Lughnasa became Lammas, the harvest festival of first fruits, and Imbolc remained as it was except it was now dedicated to the catholic saint of the same name as the Celtic goddess, Brigit.

Samhain was a ceremony of the summer harvest, and a preparation for the coming blight of winter, when grain was stored and animals killed and salted in preparation for it. A sacrifice will have been offered to the sun god at this time, as the Irish tradition of offering an animal to S Martin indicates. S Martin’s Day is just six weeks after the feast of S Michael, the Christian representation of Mithras, the sun god, and Martin might have been mistaken for Michael in the early middle ages. The Celts extinguished their hearth fires, and lit a bonfire to ritually stand for the sun and magically remind it to return to full strength. They jumped through the bonfire in a purification ritual that will have replaced human sacrifice at an earlier time, and brands were taken from the sun fire to relight the hearths. This seems to have been an occasion when the wicker man will have been burnt. Victims were offered to Cromm Cruaich and to the Fomorians at Samhain.

Similar practices were followed at Beltane (Dazzling Fire). People danced sun-wise round the fire, then round the fields carrying burning brands. Cattle were driven through the embers in a purification ceremony. Animal and human victims seem to have been sacrificed. Bonfires, as ever, were meant to spur on the sun—here to its procreative activity in the summer. Beltane cakes were rolled down hills, and a ritual sexual act between a May King and a May Queen seems likely. Either at Beltane or the midsummer solstice, to judge by present tradition, a burning wheel was sent spinning down a hill, then pulled through the fields. The proper Celtic midsummer was 1 August, dedicated to Lugh. Lugnasadh was a festival of the first fruits of summer, and was a day for marriage. This great festival to Lugh held at Lyons was rededicated to Augustus when the eighth month was renamed after the emperor. The calendar found at Coligny seems to mark each month into two halves, a good half and a bad half.

A Goddess

If the Celtic festivals were agricultural and seasonal, then Celts might be expected to have a cereal goddess like Demeter, and a goddess of summer, like Kore. Strabo speaks of three goddesses worhipped on an island near Britain, but he does not give their native names. Anglesey was a great Druid center that was eventually closed by the Romans for the cruel rights of human sacrifice that went on there. Perhaps this was the island Strabo meant. The Druids here had sacred groves (“nemeton ”, “fidnemed ” in Irish), in which, Lucan says, the mishapen tree trunks were covered in blood, gore and the body parts of human sacrifices. Strabo says the three tribes of Galatia in Asia Minor met in a parliament at Drunemeton, the Sacred Grove of Oaks, so the idea of sacred groves extended throughout the Celtic world.

A triplet of goddesses were worshipped in Italy and Germany called the Deae Matres, or the Matronae. Sometimes they are depicted also with Fortuna, and, like her, seem to be goddesses of fortune. This evolves from the function of a fertility goddess, fertility generalising into properity, and these three matrons might have been the three Fates. At Trier, a broken image has the three goddesses and a three headed god, usually identified with the Roman Mercury.

At Cirencester, an altar is dedicated to “Mercury and the Mothers”. The Celtic Mercury was the god of traders and prosperity and seems to have been identified with the Mothers as a god of fortune. About thirty gods are identified with Mercury perhaps because they were gods of the road, and so of journeys, merchants and traders, from the habit of erecting “Hermai ” or phallic stones along routes and at crossroads representing the fertilising sun. Milestones became a practical use of these. Caesar mentioned the many “simulacra ” of the Gaulish Mercury, interpreted as images, but most likely being these Hermai. The Cenn Cruaich, ornamented with gold and silver, might have been a lingam of this kind. The blood of dead children was poured around it. At Tongres, Mercury is triple phallused!

The single goddess of many images appears in long drapes, looking remarkably like the Virgin Mary. Goddesses are rarely shown like a classic Venus—nude. They look like a mother but usually bearing fruit or a cornucopia not a child, though, at Crozant in Gaul, a single goddess appears with three children. Epona, the horse goddess, is also a goddess of fertility and properity. She is depicted invariably sitting side-saddle on a horse or pony, and was venerated by the cavalry. Interestingly, Nennius says that king Arthur carried the image of the Virgin Mary on his shield in one battle which was supernaturally successful as a consequence. Perhaps she was really Epona.

The god associated with her to make a holy couple—such as Mercury and Rosmerta—is often ithyphallic. He often seems to have a winged helmet, perhaps accounting for him being associated with the Roman Mercury, but the representations are often crude, and the supposed wings could be horns. If they are indeed wings, they could simply be meant to represent the god in a solar aspect, the sun flying through the sky, for other solar symbols often appear too. The cockerel is shown with this Mercury, perhaps signifying a god of the dawn sun, or again being a virility symbol. The animals associated with Mercury signify masculine virility—goats, rams, and cockerels being experts at tupping, and the tortoise whose neck withdrawing has the look of a penis subsiding. The sun god is also represented, peculiarly to the Celts, as a glans penis, a phallic head!

Pomponius Mela (fl c 50 AD) describes nine perpetual virgin priestesses or pythons living on an island off Brittany. They foretold the future of sailors, exerted power for them over wind and sea, and healed even those deemed incurable in the name of an unknown Gaulish god.

The Gods of the Goidel

Charles Squire (The Mythology of the Celtic People) says that Celtic mythology is really Goidelic mythology, the Brythonic variety having been erased more completely by the Christians. The Gaelic gods are “much like the divine hierarchies of other Aryan peoples”. There is war in heaven. The Norse had the Aesir battling the Jotuns, the Olympians fought the Titans in Greek myth, the Asuras and the Devas fought in Hindu myth, the Persians had the demons of Ahriman set against the angels of Ahuramazda. In Gaelic myth, similarly, gods of goodness and light fought gods of evil and darkness. The family of Danu set themselves against the family of Domnu, the Fomors. The most terrible of the Fomors was Balor who kept one eye shut because it killed whoever it looked upon. He had a good eye and an evil eye. This is reminiscent of Odin who also had a good and a bad eye, but the bad eye was supposed to be blind. These are characteristics of the sky god who has two eyes, the summer and the winter suns, the winter one being the wicked one or dark (blind) one in northern climes.

Celtic burials show that some women had kingly status, something absent in Mediterranean societies. In an elaborate sixth century barrow burial at Vix near the Seine in France, a high status woman was buried with her funerary cart. The burial chamber was lined with planks, and interred with her were a 210 kg Greek krater (cauldron), and many other jugs and vessels, many imported, as well as many jewels and valuables. Their high regard is evidence of the hypothesised matriarchal society of neolithic Europe:

1. Women have high status tombs.
2. Warrior women were accepted, and Boudicca and Cartimandua were more trouble to the Romans trying to defeat the Britons than the kings were.
3. Medb, legendary queen of Connaught, was an important figure in Irish legend, and the Irish and Welsh claim descent from the goddess, Danu.
4. Some mythical sons, like Mabon were referred to their mothers not their fathers.
5. Land, the property of the whole clan, was vital to Celtic self-regard, and was considered the property of the local goddess, who took on the role of a warrior goddess in defence of it. Indeed, kingship in Ireland might have been conferred by a ritual marriage—a hierogamos—between the king and the goddess of the land he was to rule.
6. The mother goddess was the protector of the dead.

Celtic goddesses are basically mother goddesses—goddesses of fertility and procreation, and by extension, to prosperity. She is therefore a mirror of the high god, including having aspects of death as well as life associated with her. Danu seems to have been the Irish earth goddess, the goddess of plenty, called by the old Irish writer, Cormac, “Mother of the Irish Gods”, an Irish Magna Mater—an equivalent of Demeter or Cybele, the Great Mother. Cormac actually calls Anu by this title but names two hills in County Kerry, “the Paps of Anu”, that have been glossed as “the Paps of Danu”, equating the goddesses. So, Danu, was also Ana or Anu, and her family were the Tuatha dé Danann.

An unnamed fertility goddess was pulled through Gaulish fields and vinyards as an image on a wagon, people singing joyously along with it. The ceremony went on into Christian times, according to Gergory of Tours, at least until the end of the fourth century. The habit continued beyond that date, it being the practice still in many Mediterranean countries to drag though the town on a wagon an elaborate image of the Virgin Mary.

Danu is the mother of a Celtic trinity, the “tri n-dea” of Brian, Iuchar and Iucharbar. The Tuatha Dea were also called the “Fir Tri n-Dea”, the “Men of the Three Gods”. Brian is Bran and Brenos, and is the real hero, the others scarcely serving any purpose. Though described as brothers, they sound like the triad of annual and two half annual suns whose myths have been attenuated or supplanted by others. As happens in mythology, these gods seem to be early high gods of the Celts, supplanted by newcomers and promoted upstairs into obscurity. The same seems to be happening to Yehouah in Christianity, where Christ is becoming the god that Christians “experience”, not his dad. Their seniority is shown by the later high gods like Dagma, Ogma, and Lugh, occasionally seeking the advice of the original three, who therefore have become the fount of knowledge and wisdom.

A pure conjecture is that they became an analogy of the three fates who prescribed everyone’s destiny—even the gods’—standing for time. They are gods of the past, the present and the future, like the three ghosts in Charles Dickens’ christmas story, The Christmas Carol. Even the gods were subject to time, and so the gods of time were superior to them. In Zoroastrianism, time was the primeval god, Zurvan, whose sons were Ahuramazda, the good bright god, and Angra Mainyu, the wicked dark god. These two plainly relate to summer and winter, but they also relate to past and future, made clear by Ahuramazda having the gift of foresight which Aingra Mainyu lacked. Mithras, often considered as the link between the two gods, might have been the present.

Another of her sons was Nuada, a Gaelic Jupiter, but killed by the Fomors. Camulus was a god popular everywhere judging by the occurrence of his name—which means heaven—in place names in Briton. He was a war god with an invincible sword, so sounds like a storm god, like Zeus or Mars, and was parallelled by Taranis, Teutates and Esus in continental Gaul. Lucan seemed to think that these three Gaulish gods were particularly notable, although archaeology does not confirm it. “Taranis” means “Thunderer” suggesting a Celtic Thor. Each had its characteristic form of sacrifice, according to the commentaries on Lucan—Taranis by fire, Teutates by water, and Esus by hanging from a tree. It is this latter that offered the parallel between Esus and Jesus. Esus is depicted cutting down a tree and the victim would have been sacrificed to him on a pole or on a cross, as an impaling or crucifixion.

Plenty of evidence has been found of bog and lake or river offerings. Lindow Man was a lake burial, the victim being multiply killed by clubbing, garotting and having his throat cut before being placed face down in the water. He had mistletoe in his stomach. Many of the bog burials of Denmark were hanged and then placed in the water naked except for the garotte, a cap and a girdle. The methods seem to highlight three of the four elements, so one wonders whether burial alive was a sacrificial method of another unnamed god. At Garton Slack, a youth and a woman of about thirty were pinned down with a stake through their arms, and they were buried alive. The excavators found a foetus between the woman’s legs just below her pelvis, expelled from the womb with her death throws. Was it a punishment or a sacrifice? In any event the victims were killed by earth, so it seems Celts made a conscious effort to use all the four primitive elements as an instrument of sacrificial murder.

In Gaul, over 300 names of different deities have been found, showing that many of them were local and tribal gods. The reason for the large variety of Celtic gods is twofold. One is the animistic ideas of the Celts. Like the Greeks, they saw the whole landscape as sacred. The other is that, in a tribal society, each tribe had its gods with local names although their characteristics would have been fairly uniform. They each had a high god who was the son of the sky god, and the chief goddess was an earth goddess. Water was also associated with the earth because it flowed downwards, collecting in hollows, and into the earth. But human figures of gods are uncommon in Celtic culture until Roman times, and even then are unusual. Diodorus Siculus relates that king Brennius, in the fourth century BC, invited into a Greek temple, thought it hilarious that the Greeks depicted their gods in human form. Here is the belief of the Persians from miles further east. The Celts, however, were ready to show their gods in symbolic form. Carved stone monuments from Romano-Celtic times are found in parts of Europe in fair numbers. They might be rough hewn stones or well cut, and described as altars, but have an inscribed dedication to a sky god, or bear the image of a wheel or swastika, or sometimes more than one of these, permitting the assumption that they all meant the same thing.

The most interesting conclusion to emerge from these [Celtic stone] monuments is the breadth of function of the Celtic solar-sky god, who appears to embrace not only sun and sky, but war fertility and death as well.

Miranda Green, The Gods of the Celts

A large number of them, according to Dr Green, came from the Pyrenees (with swastika emblems), Provence (Nimes and Montpellier), the Rhineland (Köln), and north Britain, with a solar wheel or swastika, and often a dedication to Jupiter. Except for the British cases which seem to be associated with the Roman military, these areas curiously parallel the main areas of Catharism. Sometimes a rosette replaces the wheel, and the Tresque altar has a seven spoked wheel on one side and a seven petalled rose on the other.

A popular figure in Romano-Celtic art is a god on horseback supported by, or riding down, a Titan-like monster with snaky legs. The scuptured group often appears on a tall Corinthian column decorated with branch and leaf patterns as if simulating a tree. It resonates with the widespread myth of a tree of life, and the Celtic adoration of trees. The horseman battling with the monster on the top of the pillar reminds us of the war in heaven, in Greek mythology between the Olympians and the Titans, though classical gods rarely rode horses. Judaeo-Christian tradition also has a war in heaven, and Persian tradition had a perpetual war between good and evil on both the spiritual plain and the physical one, just as Christianity has in practice. The horse, like the bull, is a solar animal, and snakes are among the chthonic animals associated with the underworld.

This dualism in the cult group may represent positive and negative forces, day and night, light and darkness, and the higher and lower aspects of Celtic mythology. Perhaps, simultaneously too, both the antithesis and interdependence of life and death.

Miranda Green

The columns are called Jupiter columns suggesting the sky god riding down the subterranean monster—light, goodness, life overcoming darkness, evil and death—the good sun overcoming the evil sun. Literary confirmation comes from Maximus of Tyre and Valreius Flaccus. The first tells us the Celtic image of Zeus was a high oak tree, and the second that a Celtic tribe worshipped Jupiter associated with wheels and columns. The Jupiter columns have been deliberately vandalized—by Christians.

A tentative interpretation suggests the emergence of a dualistic religion in which a celestial high god has dominion over, but is inextricably linked to, the earth and the underworld.

Miranda Green

The most popular Roman identification of Celtic gods—about 50—was with Mars, perhaps not surprisingly for a warlike people. Dr Green sees the high god as a single being but with many facets, perhaps appearing as independent aspects of the god, just as Ahuramazda had seven angelic aspects, and the Jewish god appears in different forms—three to Trinitarian Christians. The cult was associated with the sky, and meteorological and astronomical observations, but also tall things that seem to touch or reach the sky such as mountains, trees, and the Jupiter columns, as well as fertility and death because the tall objects link heaven and earth, and so does water which falls as a gift from heaven and seeks the earth or the sea. All are linked by a mythology based on the seasonal cycle.

Among the gods, the Gauls had five war goddesses. A trinity of them were collectively known as Badb (crow), individually being the war goddesses, Morrigu, Macha and Nemen. Celtic women would join in the fighting, as Boudicca proves, and a goddess with a similar name to Badb was worshipped in Gaul. Morrigu appeared on the field of a battle as a “hoodie”, a carrion crow.

Dagda the great god of the Irish, the good god, replaced Nuada as the High God. He seems to have been a harvest god and an earth god, either the father or the son of Danu, according to the myth you are reading. He had a magic cauldron, the Undry, which rewarded people with food according to their merits, one of the mythical origins of the Holy Grail. He also had a living harp of oak which brought the seasons into order when played. Finally, he had a mighty, eight-pointed war club which he dragged about on a wheel. Wheels most commonly represent the sun, or the sun’s annual passage, and the eight pointed club suggests the eight Celtic annual festivals. He seems a Celtic Hercules. Dagda was married to the river Boyne, the Celts being fond of deifying rivers. The word, “Dee”, a common name for British rivers, means “divine”, from “divona” (Devon), being the same as “deus” and “dea”.

In the myth of the Boyne, at first there was no river, merely a well surrounded by nine hazelnut trees, whose red nuts gave the eater knowledge of everything. In fact, only the salmon in the well ever ate the nuts, but were consequently pink fleshed and all wise. Even the gods were scared to approach the magic well, but the goddess, Boann (Boyne), did. The well water rose up towards her to scare her off, but overflowed forming the river, and was, therefore, never able to return. That is why salmon desperately swim up rivers trying to find the well and its magic nuts. Finn mac Cool, however, ate one of the magic salmon and became omniscient himself.

Brigit, a daughter of Dagda, was the most famous Irish goddess, the Gaelic Vesta, represented by a flame. The name is sure to be linked philologically with the word “bright”, and words like “brecht” and “bert”, all meaning “shining”, “brilliant” and “bright”. A goddess, Bricta, was the consort of Luxovius at Luxeuil. Brigit also was a trinity, one being a goddess of poetry and culture, one a goddess of leech craft and, presumably, healing, and one a goddess of metal work. So, she was a goddess of knowledge (dan) and identified with Danu. She appeared in Gaul as Brigindu, and in Britain as Brigantia, goddesses that the Romans saw as Minerva. The goddess Brigit was such a popular goddess she was canonized to suit the Church, and her life appears in the Book of Lismore. As S Brigit or Bride, she had a sacred fire at Kildare that no male could approach. Nineteen nuns attended to it, each one for a day, and on the twnetieth day, the saint herself was personally present to attend to the fire. This is no Christian tradition. It is a ritual of the goddess directly transferred into Christianity. The goddess, Sul, at Bath (Aqua Sulis), was also a goddess of fire, with a fire temple, and regarded by the Romans as another Minerva.

To note Irish religious bigotry, in the latter half of the second millennium, detracts from the irreverance of the Irish to Christianity in the first millennium. Sent by her father on an errand to the king of Leinster, S Bride met one of the king’s slaves, who promised to convert to Christianity if the saint could obtain his freedom. On meeting the king, S Brigit asked of him the boon of freeing his slave. “Why should I?” was the response. “To get kingship for your sons and the kingdom of heaven for yourself,” was the saint’s characteristic bribe. But the king had the sense later lost by the Irish:

Kingdom of heaven, eh? As I see it not, I ask it not! Kingship for my sons, eh? As I am yet alive, I ask it not. Let each work for it. Tell you what! Why not give me a long life as king, and victory over the king of Connaught, for we often are at war?

“Oh, all right!” said S Brigit. Both king and saint, in this little joke, eschew Christian nonsense in a matter of fact way. Christian figments had not yet replaced the realities of life for the Irish.

Another child of Dagda was a son, Ogma, the Gaulish Ogmios, a god of poetry and eloquence, described as smiling, who invented the Ogham script. Some think this is ancient, but it seems to be a representation of the Roman alphabet, and there is a view that it is post-Christian. Lucan identifies Ogmios with Hercules, an old man in a lion skin with a crowd chained to his tongue, symbolising the power of his eloquence to compel people’s attention. For eloquence to be compelling, it had to be wise, so the picture was of an old man.

The sea god, Ler is obscure and his functions seem to have transferred to his son, Manannan mac Lir (Manawyddan), the god of sailors and merchants, whose grave was on the Isle of Man, which is named after him. Waves were “the son of Ler’s horses” just as we call spumy waves on a choppy sea “white horses” until this day. Manannan rides a chariot drawn by these horses, and he is himself “the Great Sea Wave”. In both Goidelic and Brythonic tradition, he is the god of Elysium. Manannan has lots of magic objects including two spears, “Yellow Shaft” and “Red Javelin”, three swords, “the Retaliator” which always killed, “Great Fury” and “Little Fury”, a vessel called “Wave Sweeper” that sailed wherever the owner wanted, a horse called “Splendid Mane” that was as swift as the spring wind, and travelled equally well on land or sea, chain mail and a breastplate that could not be pierced, and a helmet with two jewels that shone like the sun.

Then he had a mantle of invisibility, that herd of pigs that never diminished though being slaughtered for food, and lastly he offered a “Feast of Age”, the banquet that conferred immortality—the warrior ritual of the type of a eucharist. Another aspect of it is hidden in the myth of Goibreu, who was the Celtic smith god, the equivalent of Hephaestus. He made the weapons of the gods, and offered an ale which conferred invulnerability. A Goidelic or Brythonic eucharist must involve beer and not wine.

The sun god, called by the classical writers, Apollo, was Lugh to the Gaels, Latinized to Lugus to the Gauls, and was Lleu to the Britons. Lugh was the most important god, an expert with the rod sling and so called “Far-Shooter” or “Long-Handed”. Lugh’s rod sling was in the sky, the rainbow, and the Milky Way was Lugh’s chain. Lugh is described as the sun in one battle with the Fomorians, but was also called, Samildanach, a title matching Caesar’s description of a Gaulish Mercury—“Inventer of All Arts”—a type of Orpheus. The most important art people had at this stage was metal work. The sun god was a likely candidate as god of smiths who wrought miracles from their white hot braziers. Lugh’s talents broadened and a specific smith god, Goibneu (goba, smith) was introduced. Lugh had a living spear that could never be satiated in killing except by resting it in pounded poppy flowers.

Towns named after him were Lugdunum, now Laon, Leydon, and possibly London. The earliest name for London is the Latinized Londinium, but it is accepted as being a Celtic name at origin, even though there is little sign of a town there before the Romans came. Lyons, another Lugdunum, celebrated on 1 August, Lugnassadh or Lammas, a festival to the sun god well into Roman times. Describing what can only be Stonehenge, Diodorus Siculus writes of “a magnificent temple to Apollo” in the “centre of Britain”, consisting of a “circular enclosure”. He calls the priests of the temple “borcadae”, thought to have been an attempt at the word “bard”, and adds that Apollo came every nineteen years when he danced and harped in the sky until nightfall, and:

The citizens are given to music, harping and chanting in honour of the sun.

This shows that the Celts counted time by the moon, not the sun, though they worshipped the latter in various forms, doubtless for reasons of fertility. The reason is that the solar years does not divide precisely into twelve lunations. A calendar found in Gaul shows an attempt to square the two reckonings on a five years cycle, but the nineteen year cycle mentioned here is a better approximation.

Belenos (“the Shining One”) is a sun god of the Gauls and perhaps the Brythons, identified with Apollo. About twenty Celtic gods were identified with Apollo, including Belenos, though others are more of an Aesculapius. The god, Maponos, worshipped by the Brigantes was identified with Apollo and became the Mabon of the romances. The Celts would not write down anything to do with their religion, mythology or poetic tales. Their culture was oral, and their images were not named until they came under Roman influence. The Celts made little models and pendants of various animals, likely to be charms associated with a deity. The horse figurines invited the favour of Epona, the horse goddess. Bulls and boars were also common especially on coins, doubtless standing for the summer and winter sun gods.

The god, Esus, had some connexion with a bull, and is depicted as a man cutting down a tree in a reference to some lost myth. Images of a bull and three cranes are also found. Most common of all were little wheels, and gods with a wheel, standing for the annual sun and the year. The same is true of the swastika found on Gaulish monuments, and the triskele, the three legged man of the Isle of Man. S Patrick wrote of sun worship in Ireland, and Lugh is described as having the splendour of the setting sun.

In the Acts of S Vincent appears a custom of fourth century AD Aquitaine in which a flaming wheel was rolled down a hill into a river. After being quenched in the water, the wheel was recovered and taken into a Pagan temple to be reassembled or rebuilt ready for another occasion. It could be a ritual of the setting of the sun in the sea in the west, then its reappearance in the temple renovated stood for the dawn.

Layers and Cycles of Mythology

Gaelic mythology parallels others in having previous “dynasties” of gods who had been replaced. The first was the Race of Partholon. 24 males and 24 females arrived with their leader on Beltane. They dwelt in Ireland for 300 years, expanding in numbers until there were 5000, despite their battles with the new invaders, the Fomors. The people of Partholon were eventually carried off in a plague, though another version, possibly earlier, had them simply returning whence they came. The Race of Nemed followed, and also found itself facing the Fomors, and similarly died off in a plague! The Fomors lived on Tory Island in a tower of glass, and imposed a tax of two thirds of their children payable at Samhain. The remnant of the Nemed attacked the tower of glass succeeding in killing the Fomor king, Conann, but under another, Morc, the Fomors regrouped and wiped out the last remnants of the Nemed. They too retuned whence they came—meaning that they died.

Plainly, the Partholon and the Nemed are the same, and the story has been duplicated with the different names. Moreover, the names of many of the Partholon are non-Aryan, and transparently appear again later in the mythological history as Fir Bolg names. Since Gaelic has no “p”, even the racial name “Partholon” betrays itself as non-Celtic. The Partholon and the Fir Bolg might best be explained as the native Iberian race mythologised by different Celtic invaders or clans. Later, the different clans had the same myths expressed slightly differently, and the poets layered them in the mythological history rather than taking them to be contemporary. Moreover, the Christian monks seem to have separated out people from their deities when the deities were brought to earth. So, the Fomorians seem to have been the gods of the Iberians, and the Tuatha dé Danann the gods of the Goidels.

The Fir Bolg consisted of three tribes and five kingdoms of people who supposedly came to Ireland from Greece or Spain. The newer Celtic invaders, if these Fir Bolg were the aboriginals of the British Isles, will have thought of them as devilish, through the natural xenophobia of people for strangers, and because they must have resisted the newcomers taking their good land. Alienated from the culture of the aboriginals, the invaders regarded their rituals as magic and sinister, and though disdained, they were never quite sure that there was not something in it. Christians remain the same about other religions, and others about them. People simply do not get that other people can have perfectly respectable, and equally invalid religions as their own. So, the invaders always paint themselves as the good ones opposed by the evil ones. They are allies of the summer sun, while the natives are the agents of the wicked sun. They are creatures of lightness and the natives are creatures of the night and the winter cold—creatures of the dark. The metaphor of summer and winter, light and dark, good and evil is always fought out in reality as well as in myth, and “we” are always the good ones, whoever “we” are, and whichever side “we” are on. The American settlers treated the native American Indians in this way, and many Americans continue to treat the rest of the world in the same way—as the “Evil Empire”. US intellectuals remain silent.

Next came the Tuatha dé Danann, some say from the sky, but later versions say from four mythical cities on earth. Each city provided a magical object—the merciless sword of Nuada, Lugh’s equally merciless spear, the Dagda’s cauldron, and the stone of destiny which cried out whenever touched by someone who would be king of Ireland. The same stone is supposed to be the one beneath the Coronation Throne in Westminster Abbey, the Stone of Scone, but the latter came from Scotland, and there is no reliable evidence that the Irish stone ever got to Scotland. Now followed a complicated war between the Fir Bolg and the Tuatha dé Danann, full of mutual respect and chivalry, but the Fir Bolg were too proud to accept the truces offered, though they were losing, and were cut down to 300 men when they were obliged to accept a final truce in which they were offered their own choice of a fifth of Ireland. They chose Connaught where they remained ever since. Mythologists think this is a late romance based on a real conflict dated about 1100 AD.

The original myth was the battle of the Tuatha dé Danann and the Fomors, seen as the Gaelic gods and the native Iberians’ gods. Lugh arrives at Nuada’s castle, skilled in eveything, and is taken in as a sage. He knows the Fomorians will attack, and makes sure everyone has a clear duty in the coming war. The preparations took seven years. With many fairy-tale adventures, the war was won. Then the Tuatha dé Danann had to fight the incoming Gauls called Milesians. This war they lost, but the two races came to a truce in which the defeated Tuatha dé Danann would be treated with respect by their conquerors so long as they did not wage a guerrilla war causing pestilence, droughts and famines by using magic. In fact, the Milesians were the Celts, and the Tuatha dé Danann their gods, and the myth explains why their gods became fairies living in hills. It was the best the Christians monks could do.

Some, nevertheless, opted to sail west to the island of Breasil, after which Brazil is named. Really, this was a Celtic heaven. It was the “Plain of Happiness” and the “Land of the Young”. Others remained in Ireland but went underground to build their homes, the entrances to which were marked with barrows. Again, underground dwellers must be assumed to be dead, and these came to be called “the Aes Sidhe”—the People of the Hills—the hills being the mounds of the barrows. A god is a “Fer Sidhe” and a goddess is a “Bean Sidhe” (a Banshee). Some of these barrows, like that at New Grange, were too vast for tombs, and were still in use in the Roman period, although pre-Celtic in age. They were possibly re-used tombs, but seem likely to have been sun temples too.

A new cycle of mythology began with the Gaels, a mythology of terrestrial gods or demi-gods, heroes descended from the gods like Cuchulainn. They seem like idealised heroes who took on characteristics of gods, perhaps from a supposed parent, but are sun gods brought to earth. Cuchulainn seems to be another sun god. Cuchulainn grew supernaturally quickly, and was of extraordinary strength even as a boy. He seemed small but his heat melted the snow about him, and no one could look at him without blinking. He turned red as he entered the sea. He developed a strange affliction. His face distorted in frenzy, one eye disappearing while the other beacame huge, making him sound like Balor of the Fomorians, for in this state of distortion his look killed, or Odin, the Norse god. In his distorted state, he gave out such intense heat that he had to be plunged into three vats of cold water, which boiled as a consequence. Such intense heat comes from the sun.

The cyclic and repetitive nature of the tales is illustrated by the genealogy of Cuchulainn. His father in one myth was Lugh, and Cuchulainn is plainly enough a sun god with a phallic aspect, perhaps a reincarnation of Lugh himself. The two half-yearly suns are necessarily reincarneted annually. In another tale, he is the son of the mythical king of Ulster, Conchobar, through an incestuous union with his sister, Dectire. Conchobar, however, in another myth was the son of Lugh himself, and, if this were the correct myth, then Cuchulainn was separated from Lugh by a generation. Elsewhere, Cuchulainn’s father is a vague figure called Sualtam, an Ulster hero who beheaded himself while trying to arouse Ulster to danger. The bodiless head continued to shout warnings to the people of Ulster, and Cuchulainn planted it on the top of a pillar. This is suspicuiously Bran-like. Sualtam’s wife is again Dectire in this myth, and since she is Conchobar’s sister, Conchobar is now Cuchulainn’s uncle.

Cuchulainn had a son Connla whom he accidentally killed years later not having known him for many years. Natural solar myths have sons killing their fathers or uncles, so this is curious. Most probably it reflects some adjustment in tribal relations, but might have an origin in some phenomenon like solar eclipses. Ireland had a multiplicity of sun gods, each one the god of different clans or provincial kingdoms. They divided into an annual god, and two half yearly sons, perhaps the origin of the three headed figurines found in Celtic countries. In classical mythology, the divisions were more intricate being by constellations, the annual sun appearing in twelve different guises, as in Hindu myth, or facing twelve tasks, as did the Greek sun god, Herakles. Similar extended tasks occur in the Celtic myths but they are not clearly linked to the constellations. “Thirteen” appears in the Celtic legends, like the thirteen treasures of Britain, and this might be a reflexion of the luni-solar nature of Celtic belief. There are thirteen lunar months in a year, counting the thirteenth partial one as included.

The Fenian cycle is another cycle of Irish myth. Finn (Fionn) was another supernatural hero, the leader of the Fenians, the son of Cumhal, Camulus (pronounced “Cool”), the sky god whom the Romans identified with Mars. Finn mac Cumhal means the “Fair Son of the Sky”, a name that betrays him as a likely god, though he is said to be historic, from the third century. Camulus gave his name to Camulodunum, now Colchester, written in Brythonic as Caer Coelvin. He appears in British mythical history as a duke of this city. He is Old King Cole. Finn is another solar hero, involved in another love triangle with Grainne and Diarmaid. Grainne is betrothed to Finn but elopes with Diarmaid whom Finn eventually has killed by a boar. The victory of a boar, the winter animal, suggests that Finn is the winter sun. Diarmaid is therefore the summer. In a Christian story, S Patrick intercedes to get Finn out of hell, seeming to confirm that he is the dark or winter sun.

Finn’s enemies were the Lochlamnach or the men of Lochlann, seemingly invaders from overseas, and identified by those who want to see history in these myths as the Northmen. Finn, however, pre-dates the Viking attacks on Ireland. The Lochlamnach are really like the Fomorians, from beneath the sea rather than across it. The Fenians were something between the Arthurian knights and the yeomen of Sherwood Forest. Their standards were those of chivalry, but for half the year they lived as outlaws in the countryside, surviving by hunting and fishing. Their aim was supposedly to help any Irish chieftain who needed help against foreign foes, but the annual half yearly break betrays their solar origins. They were nobles in the summer, when the good sun ruled, but outlaws in the winter, when the bad one was in charge.

Gods of the Brythons

The Britons had a goddess, Don, who must have been the same as the Gaelic Danu. Another god was Llyr, equalling the Gaelic Ler. Leicester is Llyr Caster, Llyr’s Castle, and, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Cordelia (Creudylad), buries her father there in a vault in honour of Janus. So, Llyr, the sea god, was identified with Janus. Llyr, like Janus was considered by the Celts as the fons et origo. Shakespeare makes Llyr into king Lear. Another god, Lludd or Nudd, was Nuada, especially as both had the same surname, “Silver Hand”. He was revered in the Britain of the Romans under the name Nodens, to whom a temple was dedicated at Lydney on the river Severn. In typical sun god imagery, he was depicted as a youth driving a four horse chariot. Another temple was found near S Paul’s cathedral, by a thoroughfare called, since Saxon times at least, Ludgate. The son of Lludd was called Gwyn, a god of the dead, who led the Wild Hunt in Wales.

In an episode in Culhwch and Olwen, Gwyn is the rival of Gwythur for the hand of Creudylad, the beautiful daughter of Lludd. They take it in turns to kidnap the maiden. King Arthur commands them to fight in combat for the maiden every Beltane to see who would have her. This judgement is supposed to settle the dispute but merely legitimized it. Gwythur means Victor, so he won the contest on May Day because he stood for the summer sun. Gwyn, however, was the winter sun and so was a Lord of the underworld, where the sun went to rest at night. He obviously took the maiden back at Samhain, forcing the battle again in the following spring. Creudylad is the Celtic Kore—Persephone. Shakespeare calls her Cordelia in King Lear, where she is the daughter of Llyr (Ler, Lear) not Lludd, but the parallel with the Greek also stretches this far, for Persephone is the daughter of Zeus and of Poseidon in different versions of the Greek myth.

The same relationship as Gwythur and Gwyn arises in the story of the brothers, Lleu and Dylan. When Dylan was born he plunged into the sea and took on its nature, showing he is the setting sun dropping down into the western sea. Thus Dylan was called the “Son of the Wave”, but he is also Math, the Brythonic Pluto, god of wisdom and wealth. The parents of Lleu and Dylan were Gwydion and Arianrod. Lleu Llaw Gyffes is the Gaelic Lugh Lamhfada, “Light the Long Handed” and “the Lion with the Steady Hand”, where the word for light, Lleu, has been substituted by a pun on the word for lion, Llew.

Another solar myth is that of Lleu, Blodeuwedd and Gronw Pelwr. Blodeuwedd is the maiden, her name meaning “Flower Faced”. Gronw is a god of darkness. Lleu and Blodeuwedd are married but the maiden falls for Gronw, and they plot to kill Lleu. But they have to do it as Delilah did to Samson, by tricking the secret from him. Lleu was immortal except that he could be killed in one extremely unlikely way—having just bathed, standing with one foot in the bath and one on a goatskin. For a sun god, this curious pose suggests the interval between the zodiacal signs of the Water Carrier and Capricorn—midwinter, when the sun is at its weakest. Having got the secret the lovers arrange the murder, and Lleu flies off as a wounded eagle. The souls of sun gods, like Hercules, typical fly off as eagles when they die. Gwydion finds his son and restores him, changing Blodeuwedd into an owl, a bird that hates light. Gronw had to face the precise fate of Lleu in this story, but otherwise it looks much like the other half of the story of Gwythur and Gwyn, how the dark sun recaptures the maiden.

The Welsh bard, Taliesin, tells a story of Manawyddan and Pryderi ruling Annwfn, the Celtic underworld jointly, guarding a cauldron of poetic inspiration that the gods of light desired. This is another source of the Grail romances. Annwfn is often said to be the Brythonic Hades, but Annwfn is only sometimes unpleasant, just like the earth itself. Annwfn might have been the place where the aboriginal inhabitants of Britain lived—Pembroke. It was in the west where the sun set, and fits a certain awe that the conquering tall fair headed Celts felt for the short swarthy natives they had driven off or enslaved. They seemed like a race of the dead, an antipathy that never ceased into modern times, when an English writer of the horror genre, Dennis Wheatley, can describe his Welsh villain in derogatory terms. Plainly, the Iberians predominated in Wales, for the average Welshman, like many Irishmen, is indeed short and dark haired. The Brythons and Iberians merged in Wales over the centuries, and in the face of multiple foreign invasions pushing them ever together in the Welsh hills, Iberian racial features denominated, while Celtic culture mainly did. The Britons in the east of Wales realized that the Iberians to the west were human enough, and gods, heroes and the joyful dead did not reside among them. In truth, the sun set beyond the sea, and Annwfn which had been identified as Pembroke—in those days Dyfed—was moved further west, to beyond the sea, into submarine and subterranean places which were the source of growth.

So, the Prince of Dyfed was called Pen Annwfn—the Head of the Underworld. A myth to explain it appears in the Mabinogion, where the hero is Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, who agreed to stand in for Arawn, the king of Annwfn, to amend for a slight, and to defeat the king’s enemy. The two kingdoms in the story have every indication of being nearby countries in the real world, but the king of Annwfn has the white hunting hounds with red ears that gods of the supernatural underworld always have, and he is able to use magic to exchange their appearances. They swap kingdoms for the traditional year, both evidently ruling their new kingdoms well, Pwyll defeats the enemy of Arawn with a single blow, and so Pwyll was given the honorary title of Pen Annwfn. If the single blow was originally a beheading, then perhaps the title “Pen” (“head”) was meant literally.

In subsequent stories, the dynasty of Pwyll seems heroic, and it is hard to believe they were meant to be actually kings of the underworld at all, unless the underworld was not, for the Celts, anything like as awful as the Greeks, Jews and mainly the Christians have made it out to be. The exchange of kingdoms might signify that mutatis mutandis the two kings were essentially the same—Arawn was the winter sun and Pwyll the summer sun—and they simply exchanged authority every half year.

In another tale about Pwyll in the Mabinogion, he meets Rhiannon, by waiting on the magic mound of Narberth between the courses of a banquet. She explains she had been betrothed by the nobles of her land to a man, Gwawl of Cluj, she did not wish to marry, for she wanted to marry Pwyll, who was naturally delighted to have the affection of such a beautiful woman. Pwyll agreed to appear at the gates of her father’s castle on that day twelvemonth. He did as promised arriving with a band of retainers, but at the betrothal feast, he unguardedly promised a stranger a boon before he knew what he wanted. Being Gwawl in disguise, he chose Rhiannon, to her annoyance.

A date a year ahead was agreed for the exchange of the maiden, when Pwyll played the same trick in reverse. Disguised as a poor man, Pwyll, asked the prince simply to fill his bag with food, but the bag was a magic one provided by Rhiannon. It could not be filled. Gwawl was incensed and asked how the magic could be overcome. He was told that only by a prestigious prince stamping down the food in the bag, then the sack would be sated. So, Gwawl stepped into the bag to do the necessary stamping, whereupon Pwyll pulled it over his head and secured it with cord. Hanging the bag on a wall, the retinue, as it entered, asked what it was, and they were told it was merely a badger which it was customary to kick at the feast. Thus it was that the game of kicking the Badger in the Bag began. The badger is black and white. Perhaps it should have been all white!

Gwawl means light, and here is another solar myth in which one sun is ritually trapped and kicked to death while the other enjoys the maiden. Traditionally, Pwyll is the lord of Annwfn, the dark sun, and Gwawl’s name suggests the Summer sun, so the characters might stand for the old and the new year vying for the ever virginal earth goddess, rather than the spring and summer suns per se. The feast will then have been the New Year’s celebration, held in Celtic lands at Samhain, according to Rhys—the winter sun of the New Year first possessing the maiden. If this badger baiting is not a ritual for celebrating the New Year, the year long intervals have been rationalised by a later collector from the original six monthly intervals, which would easily regenerate the normal seasonal exchange of the earth goddess between the rival suns. Charles Squire writes of “the eternal strife between the powers of light and darkness for the possession of the symbolic damsel” in Celtic myth. Geoffrey of Monmouth makes the struggle of the summer and winter suns into history by describing a civil war between the rival brothers, Brennius (Bran), and Belinus (Beli).

The story continues with Pwyll and Rhiannon married, but without a son. The nobles want an heir and demand that Pwyll takes a new wife. Pwyll asks for the customary twelvemonth grace, and in that time the goddess bore a son. Six nurses were set to attend to him on his birthday and ensure the infant prince came to no harm, and the goddess fell into a sleep. Note the six nurses, not twelve, the nurses being the months in the period—moon goddesses—suggesting the original was a six month not twelve, a nurse being appointed for each lunar cycle. But all six nurses mysteriously fell asleep at the same time and when they woke up, the infant had disappeared. Scared of the consequences, they plotted to blame the disappearance on to Rhiannon. They killed a litter of greyhound puppies and smeared the face of the sleeping queen with the blood, leaving the bones by her bed. Then they raised a hew and cry, blaming the goddess. Naturally, she denied it but the evidence looked compelling and the Druids pronounced her guilty. Pwyll refused to abandon his wife, despite this, but she was obliged to face the penance of carrying any visitor to the castle through its gates.

In the next story, a valuable mare foaled every Beltane night but by morning the foal had disappeared. Teirnyon of Gwent, the owner of the mare, tired of this annual loss and decided one May Day to stand guard, fully armed for whatever became of the foal. At the moment of birth, a great tumult suddenly arose, and a massive clawed hand came though the window and took hold of the young horse. Teirnyon leapt forward with his sword and sliced through the huge hand forcing it to yield the foal and withdraw. At that instant he heard the cry of a baby outside, and found a new born child there. Teirnyon and his childless wife adopted the child, calling it Gwri of the Golden Hair. As the boy grew older, the couple noticed how like Pwyll it was, and remembering that Rhiannon had been convicted of eating her own child, they realised that an injustice had been done. They returned the child, everyone agreeing that Gwri was the son of the king and queen, and Rhiannon was released from her punishment of seven years. In her relief, she called the boy “Care” which is Pryderi.

The story must be the supernatural birth and delivery from evil of the sun god at Beltane, and the seven years of penance of the earth goddess has curious echoes of the seven years absence of Baal in Canaanite myth. Curiously, Tiernyon derives from king and Rhiannon from queen, so these two might have been the parents of Prideri in a more original version of the myth. The medieval monks who wrote down these stories must inevitably have influenced them, and here might have deliberately divided and confused the tale, so that it could not seem a rival to the supernatural birth of the Christian god. Matthew Arnold wrote in his essay on Celtic mythology:

The very first thing that strikes one in reading the Mabinogion is how evidently the mediæval story teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not possess the secret.

The monks were like the Greek or Egyptian peasants building their rude homes of the stones taken from the derelict temples of a magnificent antiquity. They had, though, an idea of it and a consciouness that it was not Christian, and determined to reduce it to make it seem absurd in relation to their own truly absurd beliefs. Yet the wonder and pathos still shine through the monkish distortions and misunderstandings.

Branwen, Bran’s sister, is “White Bosom”, and she appears in the romance of Tristam and Iseult as Brangwine whose love potion the couple drink to cause their fate to unravel. She seems like a Brythonic Aphrodite. Bran, son of Llyr, allowed Branwen to marry the king of Ireland, Matholwch, but another brother of Branwen was offended not to have been consulted and mutilated Matholwch’s horses, out of spite. Bran had to appease Matholwch with a fresh set of horses and a magic cauldron that brought men back to life, aleit unable to speak. Even so, the Irish king’s nobles thought Branwen should be humbled in return for the humiliation of the Irish king. She was made to serve in the kitchen, where she was regularly scolded and beaten. Branwen trianed a starling to take a message of complaint to Bran, who raised a huge army to invade Ireland. Bran waded across the sea, while his army followed in ships, the sun needing no ships to cross an ocean.

When Matholwch heard of the invading army, he retreated beyond the Shannon, but the huge Bran simply lay across the river allowing his armies to cross on his body. The Irish Druids advised the king to build Bran a vast home, and so he did. The two armies met in the centre of the vast residence, by the fireside to crown Gwern, Bran’s son, as king in place of Matholwch. But the spiteful brother of Bran grabbed the youth and threw him into the flames of the fire, and the armies engaged again in battle. Sun gods are mythically immolated on pyres, and doubtless the myth justified human sacrifice.

Now, the Irish had the advantage because they revived their dead men in the magic cauldron of life, but the wicked brother, in a moment of remorse, saw the mayhem he had caused and, pretending to be a dead Irishman, got himself thrown into the magic cauldron. Then forcing it with his shoulders and legs with all his might he split it asunder, simultaneously bursting his own heart. So it was that the British defeated the Irish.

At this point, Branwen, heartbroken herself that the two islands of Britain had been so long at war over her, died. In the battle, Bran had been injured with a poisoned spear, and told his followers to cut off his head, which would remain alive then for eighty more years. Here is a justification of a cult of headhunting. The Celts were head-hunters, even if not head worshippers. Disembodied heads are often found in Celtic burials or interred in the foundations of Celtic hill forts. Sometimes they have been mounted on stakes. A third century BC stone monument from Entremont in Provence has inscribed on it twelve mouthless and eyless heads, arranged as four large singles above a double and two trebles, the bottom three of which has the central head inverted. Sometimes heads are found buried or built into the wall of a simple shrine. Some shrines had niches meant for severed heads, or had them nailed in a prominent position, in one case with a spear head stuck through it. Classical writers endorse the cult of the head among the Celts. Gilded skulls were used as drinking vessels. Heads were hung on saddles of horses, or nailed on to doors as trophies or good luck charms. Celtic myth also confirms it. Cuchulainn collected the heads of his enemies, placing them on stones, and Bran’s head was a notable example.

In this eighty years, Bran, now surnamed “of the Wonderful Head” was feasting and animatedly carousing with his men just as if he were a whole being. The Wonderful Head of Bran makes time pass supernaturally quickly to those who share its company, perhaps suggesting death. Eventually, though, they buried the head in London, supposedly on Tower Hill facing the continent to scare off invaders. It was none other than Arthur who had it dug up, whereupon Britain was invaded by the Saxons and the Danes.

Pryderi, the son of Pwyll, encouraged his mother, still attractive as she was, to marry Manawyddan, the last surviver of Llyr, and the two couples became inseparable companions. One day the four went to the magic mound at Narberth where they became enclosed by a dense mist such that they could not even see each other, despite the lightning that flashed above. When the mist cleared, the country around Narberth was quite unlike it had been. It was empty and desolate, with no sign of humanity except their own castle. It was a waste land.

Unable to survive, the four went to the east to what is now England to earn a living doing craft work. Their work was so good, though, that they raised the envy of the local craftsfolk, and had to move on time and time again until they gave up and returned to Dyfed. One day, while the two gods were hunting a white boar, the animal led the hounds into a strange castle, they had never seen before. Pryderi entered while Manawyddan stayed outside. In the castle was no sign of the boar or the hounds but in its centre was a fountain beside which was a golden bowl chained to a marble slab. As soon as Pryderi touched the bowl, he found himself stuck and unable to move. Manawyddan waited outside until dusk, then, fearing the worst, he returned to tell the women what had happened. Rhiannon rebuked Manawyddan for cowardice and sped to the strange castle. Finding Pryderi still stuck to the bowl unable to move, she tried to help him, and became stuck herself. Meanwhile, the other two trailing behind, suddenly saw the castle disappear before their eyes in a clap of thunder.

Manawyddan and Pryderi’s wife, Kicva, were left to fend for themselves. Manawyddan returned from a trip to the east with sacks of grain to try to seed the land afresh, and ploughed and sowed three fields. At harvest time, the yield looked to be excellent, and Manawyddan resolved to harvest on the morrow. Arriving at the field the next day with his scythe, he found it stripped bare of grain. Having had the self same experience with the second field, Manawyddan decided to stand guard over the third. In the night, a great horde of mice arrived and began nipping off ears of wheat and running off with them. There were too many for Manawyddan to stop, but he managed to catch one of them.

Determined to hang the little thief, he set up a tiny gallows on the mound of Narberth. Three passers by, each one a Christian churchman of increasing rank, asked him his purpose and offered a ransom for the thief, but Manawyddan refused. The last cleric was a bishop with his full retinue, but Manawyddan would not even accept all his horses and baggage as a ransom. Then the bishop said, “Well, then, name your price.” Manawyddan said he would only ransom the thief for the return of Pryderi and Rhiannon. The bishop agreed but Manawyddan had not finished his conditions. He found that the mouse was the bishop’s wife, and that the Lord of Annwfn and his mother had been trapped, and the country desolated to avenge Gwawl who had been kicked as the Badger in the Bag. Manawyddan was careful to extract several other promises of safety before he released the mouse, which turned immediately into a beautiful woman. But Pryderi and Rhiannon were returned, and Dyfed became fertile again.

Here again seems to be a seasonal metaphor, the desolation of Dyfed simply being winter, the clue being the boar which is the winter animal. But the winter sun is also the wicked sun and causes troubles like droughts, pestilence and famine, and this is a story of winter turning to pestilence with a plague of mice, and the famine that would follow. The summer yield fails because of the plague, and it is blamed on to Gwawl, who had been kicked as the symbolic badger, and is identified here with the Church! Perhaps it was set down at a time before the Celtic and Roman Churches had agreed.

Celtic Society

Posidonius (c 135-c 51 BC), Cicero’s tutor, visited Britain about 110 BC, and described the Britons as like the wild men of the woods. They were fond of adornments like torcs, pins and brooches, and beads of jet, amber and glass. They made spears, swords, axes and daggers of bronze and iron, and also swung a hammer on a rope. They drove wicker chariots pulled by two or four horses and carrying several warriors. Celtic charioteers greatly impressed Caesar with their skill and agility.

Society was based on family clans under a chief whose wealth was based on cattle ownership, land being held in common. Battles were fought by the chiefs and their direct retainers, the common people being too poor and insignificant to matter. The chiefs were demi-gods. It was much like Greek society about a millennium before, about the time of the Trojan War, when professional bards wrote poems about the exploits of the semi-divine chieftains. Celts wore trousers, fitted at the ankle, a blouse and a shawl clipped at the shoulder with a brooch. The shawls were evidently bright and gaudy, woven of multi-coloured threads, and now can be identified as probably a type of tartan. The men also wore a felt hat, but disposed of it for battle, when they combed their hair forward in a mass which they matted and dyed red with a soap of goats fat and beech ashes.

Caesar claimed the Celts were grossly sexually immoral, with ten ot twelve men having wives in common, brothers with brothers and fathers with sons. Others say that the Goidels indulged in free love and incest. For 2000 years, the western concept of sexual morality stemming from the biblical son of God is of neat pairing off of male and female for life, an arrangement that God takes the trouble to approve for Christians in the “sacrament” of marriage. It has, therefore, often seemed natural to us, though it is an artificial system imposed by people with a particular view. The rapid increase in divorce since it became more possible in the modern secular world shows that monogamy is far from natural—certainly when it is imposed for life.

What seems natural is for males and females to pair up for arbitrary periods from a single night (a “one night stand”) to a few years (a “trial marriage”). When they find themselves compatible, the “trial marriage” can extend to a lifetime of living together (“over the brush or broom”), or those who are religious can seek the approval of their god through the marriage ceremony. These arrangements do not, in practice, stop people from indulging their sexual appetite with other partners, an act forbidden by Christianity and therefore called sinful (not forbidden because it is sinful, as Christian clerics pretend). It is the sin called adultery. It is a sin for Christians because they promise in their marriage ceremony to be faithful to each other until death, so the perfectly natural act is not, and cannot be, sinful, but breaking a promise can be. The Christian marriage is mainly a promise not to be adulterous, and so being adulterous is sinful.

What of the Celts? They simply behaved naturally from the descriptions, but their critics, including Caesar, have surely misunderstood Celtic social arrangements. They lived in extended families (derbfine), a common way of living in tribal societies, as modern anthropologists understand. Because the whole family lived in the same hut, Caesar took it that they were incestuous. The extended family gave a lot of security to women and children who were not dependent on the survival of one man, a necessary system in a quarrelsome, warlike society. In Celtic myths, adoption of children is not unusual, and will reflect the care that children have in being brought up communally. They are not formally adopted, they are simply brought up by an uncle in an extended family as his own child. The Celtic myths tell of casual sexual relationships, but also of love ties that seem permanent, and marriages that are arranged.

The Druids

For some reason, Briton became the centre of Druidism, and students of Druidism from Europe and Ireland were sent to Britain (Alba) for their training. Pliny the Elder (c 23-79 AD), in Natural History, described how the Druids used mistletoe in their rituals, but it was important too in the Norse religion as the instrument of the death, and probably resurrection of Baldur, and in the Roman religion where it was the “Golden Bough” which gave access to Hades, and was used by Farzer as the title of his fascinating study of folk religion. The Druids were the priestly caste of the Celts, lower in rank only than the nobility of the high kings and the chieftains. Pliny was so impressed by the Druids that he thought they “might have taught magic to Persia”, meaning the Magi, not realising from the Hellenized culture of Rome that the conservative native cultures of northern Europe will originally have been the same as that of the Persians.

It is not true that the Gauls did not write. Caesar says they wrote using Greek letters, but it seems they only wrote down mundane matters of business such as contracts, and occasionally letters. Their religious practices were memorised by the Druids by committing them to verse. He portrays Druids as savages and magicians but they were priests, judges, bards and seers. Critics played down their priestly functions in favour of their supposed magic practices. People always seem to think there is a difference. Druids could restore the dead to life, a fact that impresses no Christian, whose faith is based on one alleged instance of this miracle. They cannot see that the priests of any religion like Christianity, in which believers accept a eucharist-like magic ritual can claim to restore the dead to life—the trick is that the restoration is not to this life! All Christian priests and ministers can be said, by those who believe in their magic rituals, to restore the dead to life. There is nothing original about it. Others who did it, though, were dismissed as frauds or magicians by Christians. Indeed they were! Case closed! The lives of the saints who encountered the Druids called them “magi”, but the Christian saint is the equal of any magus. They are conceptually precisely equal.

Life After Death

An important and indisputable belief Druids taught was that of life after death. Evidence that the Celts believed in an after-life is their habit of burying a great man with all his worldly wealth in the belief that he still would have need of it in a future life—just as the Egyptians, and many others did. Caesar confirmed that everything held dear by the dead man were immolated, even children, making you wonder how the race survived at all. Slaves and wives were immolated with the great man at his death, like the suttee of India and close relatives would throw themselves on the dead man’s pyre. Caesar thought their belief was in reincarnation:

Chiefly, the Druids teach that souls do not die, but pass one to another after death. This they think excites to valour, the fear of death being neglected.

Lucan (39-65 AD) disagreed:

From you [the Druids] we learn that the bourne of man’s life is not the silent halls of Erebus, but the spirit animates the members in another place. If your songs are true, death is but the center of a long life.

This belief reduced the fear of death as effectively as the one Caesar related. Then Diodorus Siculus (fl before 21 BC) turns up to confirm what Caesar said, but was possibly drawing from the Gallic Wars, the point where his history ended. He compared Celtic belief with that of the Pythagoreans. Besides Diodorus Siculus, Valerius Maximus (c 49 BC-c 30 AD), Ammianus Marcellinus (c 330-c 400 AD) and Origen (c 185 AD-c 254 AD) all relate the beliefs of the Druids to those of Pythagoras, mainly in connexion with the idea of metempsychosis. Origen even says that Zalmoxis, the disciple of Pythagoras, had been a Pythagorean missionary among the Gauls in the fifth century BC. Herodotus (Histories 4:94-96) says Zalmoxis was a disciple of Pythagoras, and the god of the Getae. He fooled them into thinking that he had been resurrected, leading to them believing in the afterlife. Origen seems to think the Getae are the Gauls, but Goths might have been meant.

He also says that Celts threw letters to dead relatives on to a funeral pyre, evidently thinking the dead man could deliver them. Since reincarnation must be a future event, these letters could not have been delivered to anyone already dead. And, if the belief was in reincarnation into this world, the believers in it must have expected all the grave goods left with the dead person to arrive with every new born baby.

In fact, reincarnation was an unusual curiosity in Celtic religion. Gwion assumed the form of a grain of wheat and was eaten by Cerridwen in the form of a hen, and was reborn as Taliesin. Taliesin boasts of his many incarnations in history. Caesar might have been wrong or expressed imself imperfectly, meaning that the souls passed from “one [life] to another [life] after death”, but the second life was not on this earth. Another explanation would be that the Celts had beliefs similar to the Cathars. There was an ultimate heaven for souls to live in forever, but they could be reincarnated several times before this ultimate destiny. The difference seems to be that the reincarnations for the Cathars were for people to develop perfection. The Celts seemed to have the bardic heroes and gods incarnated on earth, to guide les autres.

The Celtic “Heaven”

Celtic gods did not live in the sky but in the earth, though their home was not hellish but heavenly. The Celtic notion of heaven was a wonderful paradise, beautifully natural, full of song and joy, and free of disaster and trouble, including death. People here lived forever. The Christian god died on the cross and three days later came back from the dead in the Christian myth, making him the center of a religion. In some Celtic myths, people get to the wonderful paradise, and then return. The stories must be metaphors of death and resurrection. Men are usually lured there by a goddess, and, when the hero returns, it is to find that the world has aged by decades or centuries, as it did for Rip Van Winkle. “All his friends are trapped in lead”, though only a year or even a single night seemed to have passed.

The place has several names and locations. It is an island, usually in the west. Portrayed as an island in the western ocean, the Celtic myth of Paradise motivated the Christian story of S Brendon, perhaps a canonisation of Bran. He travelled westward into the Atlantic ocean seeking this place in a coracle of greased sheeps’ hides. Munchausen-like tales are told but evidently based on reality, such as whales and icebergs. Someone had experienced these things, but the tale is probably a compilation of fishermen’s tales and myth.

It may be submarine, or subterranean, in a barrow or a sidhe. Sometimes, it is simply on earth but is supernaturally invisible. It is Mag Mell the “Pleasant Plain”, Tir fa-Ton the “Land under the Waves”, Tir na m-Beo the “Land of the Living”, and Tir na n-Og the “Land of Youth”, the people there all being young and beautiful.

In the story of Connla, a beautiful woman appeared, invisible to anyone but him. She told him she came from the land of the living where no one ever died, and for her there would never be old age or death. Those who lived there were the Aes Sidhe, the People of the Hill. She confessed she loved Connla and wanted him to join her in Mag Mell. She left the hero an apple and departed. Connla tasted the apple and instantly felt refreshed. For the next month he ate only the apple yet it was never consumed. Then the woman appeared again. She sat in a boat of glass inviting him to step into it, and reassuring him he would feel no sense of loss at leaving. Connla stepped in, and the boat floated serenely away. Connla was never seen again. Here in Celtic myth is the sense of Keat’s poem, La Belle Dame sans Merci. She is death, and the hero left willingly with her for Paradise.

Like the Christian idea of heaven, it is a perfect place to retire to for the rest of eternity, yet just like the Christian heaven, the perfection is not consistent. A perfect place cannot have war, but the Christian heaven had a serious civil war early in its recorded history, and it has not yet been resolved because it is what causes us all our troubles on earth, Christians tell us. A horde of wicked angels (wicked angels—in heaven?) rebelled with their leader called Satan against the High God, and continue to obstruct everything that God tries to do for good. This God sent His only begotten son to solve the problem, but 2000 years later, it still continues, apparently because the institution supposedly set up by the son has been taken over by Satan—unless the son was already Satan in disguise—though no Christian can see it despite its Satanic record!

Summer and winter, night and day, darkness and light, good and evil, all are represented as the battle of two dragons in the heavens, or emerging from the earth or the waters. Later the good dragon, the life giving sun was seen as a god, Marduk, Mithras, Jesus, but the other dragon remained reptilian as the Devil.

The Celtic heaven was a paradise for the dead, but it too was subject to attacks by its enemies, or its king was. In some of the myths, the king of the realm of the dead needs help from a hero. They are solar myths of the fight of summer and winter, day and night, order and chaos, light and dark—the theme of mythology everywhere. The Christian story is no different. Though it is transparently a solar myth, and many depictions of their own god are of the sun, they are blind to the truth. They need the scales removing from their eyes.

Many Celtic myths call the wonderland place Annwfn, the word implying to a Celt the underworld. Either this was a later Christian misnomer or the underworld of the Celts was never seen in the same sense as the gloomy classical underworld, or the torture chamber of Christianity. Caer Sidi is the British Elysium, but in an Arthurian poem, the heroes seek the spoils of Annwfn, including the cauldron of Pen Annwfn in Caer Sidi. Annwfn and the Celtic Elysium are therefore the same. Elsewhere in the Arthurian cycle, the place for dead heroes was Avalon, the Land of Apples, again suggesting that apples were seen as a sacred fruit of Paradise. Perhaps the sacred brew was cider! Conceivably, Annwfn was originally called Avalon, the original name emerging from suppressed tradition into the Arthurian cycle.

The Celtic Eucharist

The Greek gods were immortal because of the food they ate, the food and drink of the gods being ambrosia and nectar. The same idea is implied in the story of Adam and Eve, where the primeval pair could eat the fruit of immortality but not the fruit of knowledge! By eating the fruit of knowledge they were expelled from Paradise and could no longer eat the fruit of immortality, becoming mortal. Anyone who tried to steal this food of the gods and make it available to humanity were severely punished. Myths are invented to justify religious practice. These myths imply that there were, long ago, rituals that purported to convey immortality to human beings, but they were secret, and so not available to the masses. It was a eucharist, and was meant for heroes and exemplary people who were assured immortality for their good deeds. Christianity’s novelty was to do what the Greek myths warned against—they not only made it available to anyone, but promised it especially to the riff-raff and dregs of civilised society, people they called sinners.

Christian censorship, in the first millennium of their noxious and destructive religion, has deliberately expunged all direct reference to any meal, banquet or feast meant to confer on to the eater an eternal life in the ancient religions. Christianity claimed to be uniquely revealed, and by censorship and destruction of evidence they have contrived to make it seem so. Only Christianity was allowed to have a life-giving meal. They still believe it, though now we know it was certainly common for old religions to have ceremonial meals, and their purpose looks increasing certain too.

The Celts had the notion of food of immortality, and we can deduce they therefore had a similar ritual meal. They believed in a banquet of immortality, that sounds to have the same effect as the Christian eucharist. In a Celtic story, the swine of Manannan were immortal, and taking a portion of their flesh made the eater immortal too. That is how the Tuatha dé Danann were made gods. Another Celtic god, Goibneu, had a beer of immortality. All such ideas will be an extension of the intoxicating or psychedelic effects of some brews, herbs and mushrooms. Consuming these things gave people psychological effects of various kinds and degrees, apparent insight, bravery, psychedelia, and so on, and they extrapolated from it that something similar gave the gods their powers and made them eternal. The ultimate brew or herb must confer immortality. Before long, a priest, claiming direct communication with the gods, tells the credulous that he has the secret food and drink of the gods, and anyone can have it for a fee. The ambrosia or nectar did not take effect until you actually died, but it definitely brought you back to life in paradise. “Trust me!”

The magic food was often the fruit of a sacred tree, depicted in northern climes as an apple, like Conn’s, but in warmer countries a fig or a pomegranate. The Celtic Paradise was full of wonderful trees and plants bearing magic fruit. Even the stones of the earth were magical. It sounds like a recognition of the power of herbs and stones in healing. Things of benefit to humanity came from this heavenly wonderland. Things like cattle and pigs were stolen from heaven, just as Prometheus stole fire from the gods for the benefit of humanity in Greek mythology.

A magic cauldron was also stolen from heaven. It was inexhaustible, and so able to feed a multitude. Such feeding is not with food. It is metaphorical feeding with the spirit, just as the Christian eucharist is. It is illustrated also in the gospels by the mass feedings by Jesus. Christians have made it into a miracle to hide the truth. It was a spiritual feeding of a crowd of people in a mass eucharist—a mass, in fact! The magic cauldron of the Irish served the same purpose and did the same trick. A portion of the porridge or brew it contained served as spiritual fuel, conferring upon them, the taster believed, life in the Land of Youth and inspiration—the life ever after and the Holy Spirit of Christianity.

Human Sacrifice

Because of their belief in immortality, warriors never thought death was final, and so could be brave. Celts were willing to be selected or even volunteer to be sacrificed in the wicker man or on a funeral pyre. The same belief motivates Christians and Moslems, some of whom have given up and still give up their lives voluntarily believing they get a better one elsewhere. Whose interests are served by this insanity?

It would not be surprising to a historian or anthropologist that human sacrifice was still offered in societies more primitive than Rome’s, when Great Rome itself had banned it only in Caesar’s lifetime (97 BC), and might not yet have eliminated it in unoffical practice. Details of these sacrifices come only from Romans, like Caesar and the Christians, and had a propagandistic content. So, one might question the scale of the wicker man suggested by Caesar, who claims it was of “vast size”, so that the limbs alone could be “filled” with “men”. Strabo (c 63 BC-c 21 AD) tells the same story, though Caesar might have been his source, writing about Celts burning a colossus of wood and straw filled with people and animals. Most commonly bonfires and human sacrifice on pyres were solar rituals.

The Cromm Cruaich of County Cavan was an idol that evidently received the sacrifice of Irish children. One in three children died for it, though not by fire like the Canaanite and Carthaginian sacrifices to Moloch. These sacrifices took place at the main seasonal festivals, particularly the ancient festival of Summer’s End, Samhain, now called Halloween. The sacrifice to Cromm Cruaich of one child in three is surprising, but could have been exaggerated by the monks, who preserved the myths but fashioned to their own purpose. Or, like the Roman habit of exposing unwanted children, and the likely purpose of the Canaanite sacrifice of children to Moloch, the reason was perhaps to keep the size of a family manageable. Here might be a necessary but acceptable way of rejecting unwanted children to match resources to commitments—it regulated the population and staved off unnecessary poverty. The children, so far as these people were concerned, were returning to their source—the god who sent them—and the parents will have done it with personal grief and solemnity, though they thought of the place whither their children returned as like the Christian heaven—a beautiful and happy place itself, and a better place for the child.

The name Cromm Cruaich was not the proper name of the Celtic god. It means “The Bent one of the Mound”, the gods being worshipped, after the fashion of the Persians and Canaanites, on high places or mounds. The Christians had chopped the idol in half and pushed the top forward on to its face, whence the derisory name! If the false name is a pun, the proper title of the god might have been Cenn Cruaich, “Head of the Mound” or “Lord of the Mound”. If the parallels are valid, Cenn Cruaich will have been a sky or sun god. The solstices and equinoxes were important in Celtic religion, showing its solar nature, but these seasonal festivals were not held at the celestial equinoxes but about six weeks later, allowing for the climatic hysteresis in northern Europe which causes this delay in the onset of the seasons. The spring equinox was called Beltane.

The Sacrifice of Lindow Man

The preserved man found in the bog at Lindow Moss near Manchester in 1984 had burnt bread in his stomach. T Bruce Eve noted that the Celts often chose a sacrificial victim by a lottery in which a small piece of a ceremonial bread was burnt. The one who chose the blackened piece from a basket was the victim. Examination of the contents of the victim’s stomach showed the barley, wheat and rye cereals it contained was from a baked item not a porage, but something that had been baked only for a short while and without yeast, so it was like an Indian chapati—a flat cake or bannock. But the quantity was small suggesting it was eaten ritually and not as a meal. Moreover, the body was naked except for a band of animal skin round an arm. Ritual sacrifices were usually naked. Forensic inspection of the body confirmed that the victim had suffered a threefold death, by blows to the head, by garotting sufficiently severe to have dislocated his spinal column in his neck, and by stabbing. The autopsy showed the man to have been about thirty, the Celtic preferred age for sacrificial victims.

The garotte was a cord of animal sinew knotted in three places, and twisted so tight that it had cut into the flesh, besides breaking the neck, utterly cutting off the air supply. The garotte had been applied after the three stunning blows by a sharp instrument, probably an axe. Lastly, inspection showed that the neck had also been cut after an initial precise puncturing of the jugular vein done before the man was dead, so that his blood was spurted from the body, and most likely caught in a bowl. Such bleeding is the chief characteristic of ritual killing, as practised by devout Jews and Moslems still.

The occasion when victims were chosen and fires burnt was at Beltane, May Day, 1 May, the Celtic Easter when the winter ended and preparations began for the summer. At Beltane two bonfires were lit on hills if possible and most of the livestock driven between them, but some were sacrificed, and undoubtedly humans were sacrificed too. The summer had to be productive to avoid famine and starvation, so the ritual magic had to be successful, and demanded the ultimate. Caesar described the huge wicker men that were allegedly filled with victims, both humans and animals, then set alight burning them all in a “sea of flame”. Caesar might not have been exaggerating, but these massive shows were unlikely to have been the norm, but were put on precislely because of the invasion by the Romans. The victims will have been captives or collaborators with their horses and cattle. The Celts themselves had no fear of death, believing in metempsychosis, and kept no prisoners alive, imagining that everyone else felt the same.

In the Celtic lands of the British Isles, particularly Scotland, traditions hint at the original sacrifice. In particular the picking out of someone by the lottery of burning a portion of cake or bread survived widely until WWI. The tradition of the Perthshire boys who gather on the moors to eat a ceremonial gruel by a fire is one such. A devoted one was selected by using an oatcake and he had to jump three times over the bonfire! Sometimes the devoted one was driven off in mock dudgeon, suggesting the apotropeic nature of the ritual. The burnt cakes of king Alfred, hiding from the Danes at Athelny in Somerset, inviting the disdain of the old woman whose cakes he was meant to be watching, is likely to be a memory of a Beltane victory ritual conducted in the old tradition, unacceptable to the Christians who therefore changed it, as they commonly did. The implication is that the king was the scapegoat, the one who picked the blackened portion of bun, and was ritually tormented. It seemed to work for him, because he returned and defeated his Danish enemies.

Anne Ross, co-author with Don Robins of The Life and Death of a Druid Prince, was told that, as late as 1977 in Derbyshire, only a few miles from the Lindow Moss where the sacrificed Brython was found, the local tradition was to set bonfires on May Eve, nominally to burn garden waste. May Day ceremonial like the Maypole, nutmegging, and so on, illustrate that the festival was looked on optimistically and joyously, and baking bread was part of the tradition, as the hot cross bun testifies—a Christianization of the Pagan tradition.

Three was a magic number for the Celts. They liked things to come in threes. Their gods and godesses often had three aspects, and their chief gods were three, Taranis, the Rain God, Esus, the tree and nature god, and Teutates, god of the people. Sacrifices were made to each one in an appropriate way. Taranis wielded thunder bolts, so his victims were axed. Esus as god of trees and nature had his victims hung or garotted and stabbed to draw blood. Teutates took his victims back into the earth, and noble victims, at least, were, preferably, committed to water. Throwing votive objects into Christian sacred wells was the continuation of the idea, and now it is a romantic custom at certain fountains to throw in coins for luck. Lindow man was axed three times in the Taranis tradition, garotted and stabbed to draw blood in the Esus tradion, and ended up committed to the water of the Black Pool (Lindow) in the tradition of Teutates.

Ross and Robins think the weight of the evidence is that the victim was a Celtic nobleman, but not a warrior, a Druid, who was chosen by the lottery of the blackened bread to be the sacrificial victim in some time of hardship. They go on to speculate further, but thus far, the guesses do not seem too outlandish. The man was in almost pristine condition, went to his death willingly, perhaps honoured as the devoted one dying for the common good, or derided as the apotropeic victim carrying off the burden of misfortune the people felt was on them. Druids were highly honoured and they were the caste that decided on ritual questions and justice. Here they sacrificed one of their own, an ordinary person, treated by the Celtic nobility as slaves, according to Caesar—the Celts beings the rulers having set themselves over the natives—or a wicker man of captives being insufficient in some time of dire need.

The Druid priesthood transcended the tribal system, and Druid national centres existed where intertribal councils were convened. These centres in Ireland were at Carman on the Curragh of Kildare, at Uisnech in Westmeath, thought to have been the centre of the country, and Tailtiu, Tlachtga, and Tara in Meath. In Britain Anglesea ended up being the key site, but islands often seem to have been considered sacred. The Isle of Man was the Island of the Celtic god Manannan, and so was sacred to him. A stone mentions the son of a druid, but is after the Roman period, about the fifth century at the very earliest, and more probably later, so Druids still practised on the Isle of Man at least until 500 AD. The Irish king Erc chose to bury his three sons on Iona around 500 AD. Irish Christians soon after were setting up covens of thirteen monks on islands like Iona, and sacrificing humans to consecrate them. The Druids were superior to kings, although kings could be Druids too. They considered themselves as creators of the universe, and so were living gods. It is curiously like the beliefs of the Cathar Perfects, and harks back to the Essenes who seem to have believed they were present with God at the creation as His prophets.

When problems arose with the building of the castle of the British king, Vortigern, the Druids recommended a sacrifice. It was to be that of a child born without a father. The victim’s blood had to be sprinkled over the site to purify it. This is a perfect epitome of Christianity! Moreover, the elder Pliny writes that the British regarded killing a human being as an important religious act, and eating the flesh offered “salubrious restitution”. Diodorus Siculus confirms that the Irish ate their enemies, and Solinus spoke of them washing themselves in their enemies’ blood and drinking it. Irish even drank the blood of dead relatives until the sixteenth century. But Celtic chiefs who had led their people to disaster, unlike modern politicians, resigned, and not only that, they offered themselves as a sacrifice to propitiate the angry gods.

Like the priests of many countries, Druids were exempt from military service and from war taxation. The Jews secured exemption from military service in the Roman empire because they were a “nation of priests”, and the Christians were to claim the same privileges as the “True Israel”. Young Brythons would chose to be Druids knowing they were free from military demands, but perhaps unlike many of their Christian mimics in Rome, they knew they were not getting away with avoiding the battle. Like the conscienscious objectors of the First World War who had to drive battlefield ambulances and do such dangerous jobs, the Druids were there in the battle calling on the gods, singing and playing their verses, and advising the kings and chieftains. They would stand upright with arms raised to pray and to invoke the gods and would spend hours in that position. Lindow man, though young and generally healthy had signs of arthritic wear in his back that could be explained by his having adopted such a position for long hours. Interestingly, it was the position the Cathar Perfects also took for prayer.

The marshy ground of Lindow is overlooked barely a mile away by the escarpment called Alderley Edge. Associated with it is an Arthurian legend. A farmer on his way to Macclesfield market with a white mare met a hermit at Alderley edge. He offered a price for the horse but the farmer refused, thinking he could do better. He was disappointed, and returned with the mare in the evening. The hermit was still there and made his offer again, and, this time, the farmer accepted. The hermit asked the farmer to lead the horse to a rock in the woods at the foot of the scarp which miraculously opened leading inside. Seeing the farmer was awe struck, the hermit explained that one of king Arthur’s knights sleeping there with the king until they were needed again by Britain, was short of a horse, whereupon he stepped with the animal inside and only a blank rockface remained. Such legends are not uncommon in Europe, but what is their origin? Here is one close to a site where a British nobleman was apparently sacrificed for the good of his people.

Another local tradition is that of “Riding the Black Lad”, a custom of Easter Monday at Ashton-under-Lyne until the 1960s. The Black Lad is the effigy of a black knight in armour which was paraded through the town to suffer the derision of the people, eventually being left as a target for people to pelt with refuse and bricks. Plainly this is a scapegoat or apotropeic victim meant to carry off in death the misdeeds and misfortune of the people. The same custom but called “Riding the Lord” was followed not far off in Neston until the nineteenth century. They have been explained as being a mockery of a wicked medieval landlord, but older Pagan traditions were often rationalized and therefore castrated by the clergy in this way. A noble Druid dying as a scapegoat, could leave the memory encapsulated in an old custom.

Ross and Robins surmise that the victim would have been killed at a sacred grove on Alderley edge in the ritual manner, and left with the blood dripping into a cauldron until rigor mortis began to set in, then the figure, already in a seated position was placed on a white horse for a ceremonial journey to the Black Pool where he—already a sacrifice to Taranis and Esus—was finally committed to Teutates in the dark water of the peaty pool. The folk memory lived on in local customs. But the occasion of it all, the authors think, was the events of 58-60 AD when Suetonius Paulinus destroyed the Druids on Anglesea and defeated Boudica, finally to subdue the British. The purpose of the ultimate noble sacrifice was to placate the three chief gods, the gods who seemed to have abandoned the British people.

Further Reading

• More on heretical beliefs
• More on dualistic solar belief, and sun gods as atoning saviours
• More on Mithras, and something about Zoroastrianism

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