Celtic Paganism |who were the celts?

Who were the Celts and where did celtic mythology originate?

There was a story that went, two gods were born of the same womb from the same woman, the goddess of the sea and the two brothers were gods who left the sea to live among the people on land. The reason why we know of this story being how old it must be was because it was passed down from word of mouth for ages until it was written down by a man traveling the mediterranean. It was then rewrote by the Greek historian Timaeus whose works later found their way to Diodorus. And while all the documents written by Timaeus did not survive it was thanks to Diordorus who wrote it down again who kept the story alive and his works lived on to tell the tale of the twin gods. And this was the birth of the oldest celtic gods and the birth of the celtic mythology.

So who were the celts?

They were some of the most feared people in ancient europe that lived mainly during the roman times in places such as spain,britain, ireland and even as far as italy and eastern europe and to asia. They’re main jobs and roles during this time period would have been mercenary soldiers in the armies of Egyptian kings fighting against the expanding empire of rome. They taught tales of reincarnation and they even partook in religions sacrifices of human captives that they would most likely offer to the gods. While the celtic nation was single it was very vast. They had a huge variety of tribes which all has similar languages, religion, and mythology.

The farthest dated telling of the celtic people was when we heard of the keltoi told by greek merchants and explorers around the mediterranean and atlantic area during the time period of 500 b.c.e. Eventually the same celtic people who inhabited the place of Gaul which is today's modern France traveled all over occupying Italy and greece. These stories of the Celtic people would go on to be written about by famous Greeks such as the Greek historian Xenophon and philosopher aristotle. They talked about the celtics as being amazing warriors who were courageous in battle and would dive into a fight wearing nothing but gold torques around their necks.

So the Celtics were very well known for their battles and their victories. They had taken over Italy and the city of Rome in 390 b.c.e and would bargain with their enemies for gold in return for their safety and then destroy the land anyway. Quite violent. And then it was said that in their chieftains they would keep the skulls of their enemies as victory trophies displayed for all to see and I'm sure that helped make others afraid of them. And this was recorded by the greek philosopher posidonius who visited gaul which is now france at the beginning of the first century b.c.e. The celtic descendants went all over the balkans and later invaded green some even going to what is now turkey and invading and even what is now the galatians.

They were known for having a very strong relationship with their gods and they would love to tell tales and sing about their stories. And while the celtic people of gaul were eventually overthrown by the roman general julius cesar some key parts of the celtic religion was preserved through the roman conquerors and inscribed in stone to be passed down and it is said that most was left unchanged and just adopted by the romans. The one thing to change however was the human sacrifices by the druids. Sadly no records of the celtic people have been found directly coming from the source. It was pretty much reported from people observing or meeting the celtic people. The celtic people just lived their life without any need to record or write down their myths and stories instead they were passed down strictly by word of mouth from what it seems.

And sadly cesar was brutal and continued to conquer and eventually took over the britain celtic people and practically vanished their religion. Their language and telling of the gods had lived under the roman people until it was gone forever and this was all thanks to the saxons and other germanic tribes during the beginning of A.D times. There were some parts of Wales and Cornwall in Britain where the celtic religion had stayed alive.

This is why today most of the surviving tales are from Wales known as the famous Welsh tales in the middle ages such as mabinogi. Such tales were of magic and giants and elaborate stories of supernatural powers and great kings which played a heavy role in shaping European literature during the time.

The only part of the celtic culture to remain virtually untainted by Romans was in the free ireland during the first century A.D times this was partly because ireland was known to be a far and savage island that was crazy and had cannibals and was very unsophisticated. This is probably why the celtic religion is very known for being irish because it prospered here. And the land was actually very fertile and prosperous for farmers. These farms sometimes had celtic tombs and monuments from ancient celts giving the land a very rich culture of the celtic religion.

Now let's talk Christianity, it eventually reached Ireland during the early fifth century A.D because of the bishop known by the name Palladius sent by the Pope Celestine to minister to the people of ireland. The reason we know of this is because of the boy captured during a Irish slave raid on Britain who was named Patrick who was a Roman nobleman. He had escaped and returned back as a missionary with the new religion and also the skill of writing which gave the Irish myths a way of being recorded down. Now these were recorded by a christian influence and like other parts of the celtic religion it had been written down by people with an outside influence or in other words people who were not following the celtic religion and only watched it being practiced. However it was a very key part in history because without those people we wouldn't know of any of the celtic religion at all.

The irish eventually would write down the celtic tales that they knew but also christian tales as they were being transitioned into the christian faith by war and people trying to force them to abandon their heritage and the religion altogether. Fortunately they did not and stood firm in their heritage and faith.

The only problem is these were recorded as myths but this word is debated a lot. Some say myth is equivalent to false. While as the Greeks would say myth simply means a story spoken by word of mouth not immediately fake. Another problem to deal with myths and tales especially for the celtic tales is that they were recorded by authors who were not alongside the original tale or did not actually follow the celtic faith they were only outsiders looking in and recording down what they thought of the faith and what they thought to be true. Some were rude to the celtic faith using their own nuances to change or affect the messages coming across because they simply didn’t believe it.

One very famous scribe who was christian wrote this that I find very interesting and what was probably common during the time period of all the scribers who wrote down their interpretations of the celtic religion.

This is from the tain bo cuailnge:

I however, who have copied this history or more accurately this fable- give no credence to various incidents narrated here. Some things in this story are feats of devilish deception, others are poetic figments, a few are probable, others improbable and even more invented for the delight of fools.

Saying blatantly that these are works of fiction that he recorded and they are devilish in nature to those who read and are merely invented to delight us but definitely couldn’t be true because they seem to impossible but somethings can be possible but all in all its just to be of delight to the reader.

I assume this is what happened a lot when scribers would write down things that they heard or stories they heard told as far back to the date of the twin gods. If the stories were not written down by the actual person who spoke them or the actual group of people to rehearse the daily practices it should be taken with a grain of salt because people have a tendency to change and manipulate words and stories to align with their own stories and their own message that they believe should be followed such as in these cases it would be they wanted the christian faith to be followed or with the romans they wanted to take it for their own and change it to fit their fancy. Things get manipulated and misconstrued over the centuries all the time. The Romans believed the celtic people to be wild and barbaric and they had they own judgmental view on them for their reasons to take over and conquer. These things told to us by these people are merely their own perceptions of the celtic people and probably very far from what the celtic people themselves would say or describe of their own faith if they had preserved and written it down.

So what do we know about the celtic religion and the celtic gods and goddesses?

So I was reading and saw the line in the book that said julius cesar wrote some of the most important parts of the celtic faith. Even though he writes in a satire kind of way this can't be real, it is probably one of the most fascinating pieces of the history of the celtic faith I've found.

It says:

They wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another, and they think that men by this tenet are in a great degree excited to valour, the fear of death being disregarded.

Its quite interesting and proves that they believed in souls in the human body and that once someone dies their soul or energy doesn't go away but only reincarnates into something else. And that is the reason why he found the celtic men to not be afraid of death because they believed or knew they would simply live on in another life. And with all the stories of the celtic wars and how they would dive in sword first wearing nothing showing no fear gives reason to believe they had something to at least hold this to some kind of truth. I mean why else would all of them jump head first into battle and not be afraid of death I'm sure some were but I find it very interesting.

Another thing that julius cesar had said about the Celts was:

All the Gauls assert that they are descended from the god Dis, and say that this tradition has been handed down by the Druids.

And this is a blurb from the article that puts what julius cesar said or did to the religion better than I can recite it or rephrase it:

As well as naming ‘Dis’, Caesar used the convention of giving Roman names for the rest of the gods of the Gauls and describes ‘Mercury’ as their chief deity, as well as Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva. As war is perhaps the least satisfactory arena in which to study cultural anthropology, his is probably a very rough and unreliable overview of the reality of Gaulish religion. After all, this was an era where even the Romans were confused about their own gods and religion: To contemporary intellectuals (such as followers of the 4thC BCE Hellenic philosopher Plato) gods were scientific expressions of universal phenomena, not to be taken literally. To the masses, they were a literal truth – an unseen power made visible and understood through images and ceremonies. Religion was diversifying at an alarming and unsustainable rate. His appraisal of the Gauls and the contradistinction he makes with the German tribes in chapter 21 (where he claims that they had no druids and worshipped only what they saw – the sun, fire and the moon) have underpinned the study of European paganism ever since, but it is likely that the Gauls, Britons, Irish and Germans probably shared very similar beliefs, which the mediterranean mind found it difficult to conceptualize.

Obviously the Romans had a very heavy influence on the celtic religion and they heavily romanised the celtic gods and goddesses so what we know about them is heavily jaded by the roman view. So we don't have a lot of concrete knowledge of what pre-roman/pre-hellenic religion amongst the iron age or celtic and germanic tribes was really about.

What I find interesting is the god ‘DIS’ or god to julius cesar as he put it was the conductor of souls or guardian of the earth's fertility of life who lets souls fly from one body after death to return to another existence of life form. A things that I find interesting to this is the scientific fact that

The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed - only converted from one form of energy to another. This means that a system always has the same amount of energy, unless it's added from the outside.

And that was from einstein

Which leads me to believe this as well but that's just my opinion on this statement.

So basically to at least julius cesar and the celtics this DIS god or entity was the most notable or totem god for the religion.

But i was reading in the same article that discussed this and it mentioned julius cesars attempt at showing the romans the similarities between them and the gauls due to the fact that some of them owned gaulish slaves during this time period, and i dont know why he would try to orientate them but it goes on to describe the roman gods such as roman, mercury who was hermes to the greeks who was also a psychopomp or conductor of souls. It said in the article one reason why cesar used the names mercury and dis as well as the other mars,apollo or jupiter was to refer to the same important divinity and connect the gauls to the romans in some way.

Another piece from this article I feel like i need to recite is this:

The core domestic (and plebian) religion of Rome was, after all, based upon ancestor-spirit worship (of ‘Lares’ and ‘Genii’ as well as ‘Lemures’, ‘Larvae’ and ‘Manes’) and veneration of the ‘eternal gods’ (Jupiter etc) was generally seen as a more high-minded and public affair, albeit open to fads and trends, and imperial decree. The Roman beliefs in disincarnate souls therefore showed a distinct commonality with their ‘Celtic’ neighbors, and is in evidence among Rome’s Etruscan forerunners

It just says it better than I could portray it but it was obvious that the Romans had adopted some if not taken some of the celtic religion and transformed it into their own at least in some degree.

Now it states another interesting statement about fairies during christian times and how during the christian times the ideas of discarnate souls that were of pagan ideas or origin were identified now as fairies or spirits that inhabited an inverted parallel world basically their day was our night and our night was their day and it said that this went on to become a cultural shibboleth of the atlantic celtic people

And I want to dive into the faerie thing real quick.

This piece is from https://ericwedwards.wordpress.com/2015/08/14/the-origin-and-lore-of-fairies-and-fairy-land/

ERIC EDWARDS COLLECTED WORKS:

In Irish mythological tales fairies are referred to as the Tuatha de Danaan. Their origin is assumed to be derived from ancient goddesses, priestesses, nature spirits, nymphs, druidesses, the Fates (MacCulloch, 1911) making the fairies and the Tuatha the descendants of primordial gods and goddesses.

And this was in the time were the celts were still pagan or following a very pagan type of craft. And they depicted fairies in a different type than what we see with wings and tiny beings that came during the 19th century. The Irish fairies had the ability to fly without wings; it was a supernatural ability.

Another excerpt this time from

By: Steven Forsythhttps://www.celtic-weddingrings.com/fairy-stories/irish-fairies

Tales of the Tuatha de Danann go back thousands of years. Translated as ‘tribe of Danu’, they were a race of people that possessed incredible, almost God-like, powers. According to legend, they ruled Ireland from the early 19th Century BC until the end of the following century. The tribe was defeated by the Milesians, so they fled into the Sidhe underground. After that, they became known as the Daoine Sidhe and had children with the likes of Fionn mac Cumhaill.

Also known as the Aos Sí, these underground people became smaller over generations. The tales of these diminutive figures is in line with the Celtic tradition of believing in tiny people forced into hiding by hordes of invading humans. Other figures such as the Pooka are also possibly from Celtic pagan times; the Pooka is associated with the Samhain festival.

It said in the post christian era was when we began to get the stories and legends of the banshee and the leprechaun who was also a fairy or it was probable that it was. Another part of the celtic religion on fairies is that the fairies had a realm that they shared with gods where they never aged and avoided death and was said to be located in a place called tir na nog which meant the land of the young. It said in the article “that it was believed that this realm was located in the hollow hill where the tuatha de danann was forced to flee and was a magical portal that allowed gods and fairies to come and go”

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