A Brief History of the Celts (24 page)

But the Celts believed that the soul reposed in the head. Strabo, among others, says that the Celts believed that the human soul was indestructible. Thus the head was venerated as the source and
power of the human spirit. It was a mark of great respect to take the head of one they admired, to embalm it in cedar oil and offer it up in a temple or keep it as a prized possession. Dr Simon
James, however, argues: ‘By keeping the head of an enemy, they may have thought that the spirit was also controlled.’ We are told by Livy that the Boii, having killed the Roman consul
Lucius Postumius, in 216
BC
, took his head to their temple. The Celts also put heads into sacred rivers as votive offerings.

It is quite wrong to interpret this as evidence that the Celts were ‘head hunters’. They did not go out looking for heads. Decapitation only took place after the victims were slain
in
battle or died, and then only if they were deemed worthy of respect.

Archaeological evidence from various sources supports the information on temple offerings. A number of skulls have been found in Celtic shrines, for example at Roquepertuse, Nages and Entremont.
At Roquepertuse in Provence there is a skull portico dating to the fourth and third centuries
BC
. The skulls in this portico are of adult men, most of whom were obviously
slain in battle as scars and sword damage to the bone demonstrate. The sanctuary itself was constructed as early as the sixth century but fell into disuse after the Roman conquest of the area in
the second century
BC
. At Entremont, capital of the Saluvii, fragments of a statue have been recovered and a reconstruction shows a figure seated in the lotus position
bearing on its lap six severed heads. The figure wears a conical war helmet and a torc around his neck.

Entremont was destroyed by the Romans in 124
BC
. Excavations of the shrine have shown that it was on the highest part of the hill and approached by a pathway lined with
statues of heroes and heroines. Within this shrine stood a tall pillar carved with twelve heads. Entremont is remarkable for a large array of severed head sculpture.

One of the most interesting severed head sculptures comes from Noves in southern France, a stone sculpture dating to the third or second century
BC
. It is of a
fearsome-looking scaly beast which squats on its hind legs. It has apparently devoured a human being, for an arm protrudes from its mouth. Under its forepaws it holds the severed heads of two
people who are bearded and apparently wearing caps.

Heads have also been uncovered at a shrine in Cosgrove, in Northants, while a coin of the British king Cunobelinus shows a warrior brandishing a human head that he has taken after a battle.
Skulls have been found placed in pits, and some excavated from fortresses where they had been fixed on poles on the walls or over gateways.

A large number of skulls from the Celtic period have been discovered in the River Thames at London, at the point where the Walbrook flows into it. The Thames was probably
considered, like most rivers, to be sacred. But why were the votive offerings placed near the mouth of the Walbrook?

When the Anglo-Saxons took over London, the evidence is that they did not occupy the old city but built more to the north, in the vicinity of Moorgate. It is obvious, simply from the place-name,
that the Celts clung to the area of the Walbrook, hence
Weala-broc
, the brook of the foreigners.
Welisc
(foreigners) was the name that the Anglo-Saxons gave to the British Celts.
But why did the Celts hang on here of all places? And why were there so many skulls and other votive offerings? It is clear that this was a sanctuary which the Celts were loath to leave.
Fascinatingly, the major gate from the city, facing on to the river, was called Bíle’s gate (Billingsgate) and Bíle was a god of the dead who transported souls to the
Otherworld. The Celtic dead of the city were probably taken out of the gate to commence their last journey on the Thames, just as their fellow Indo-Europeans are carried to the Ganges for burial.
Maybe just the heads of the important citizens were taken through the gate to be deposited at the sanctuary now marked by the Walbrook?

The mythological traditions of Ireland and Wales are full of references to the importance of the head. Heads were endowed with the ability to live on once separated from the body, confirming the
idea of the soul reposing there. In the
Mabinogion
, Bran Bendigeidfran is mortally wounded by a poison. He orders his men to cut off his head before the poison reaches it, and to take the
head back to Britain. On the journey, the head talks, jokes and gives advice to them.

Heads often talk once stricken from the body. The famous decapitation game in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
has its origin in Celtic myth and appears in one of the Red Branch tales
with Cúchulainn in the role later assumed by Gawain.
Cúchulainn takes the heads of his enemies without compunction and, like the Celts mentioned by Diodorus
Siculus, he hangs them from his chariot: ‘. . . terribly, he comes. He has in the chariot the bloody heads of his enemies.’

This reverence for the head was not displaced by Christianity for many centuries. The doorway from Dysert O’Dea and the doorway from Clonfert, Ireland, both Romanesque, display a
preoccupation with heads. Professor Barry Cunliffe has remarked that it is often impossible to distinguish pre-Christian and Christian Celtic head carvings. The gargoyles, corbels and other
decorative forms on churches, particularly down to the eleventh and twelfth centuries
AD
, owed much to the Celtic belief that the soul dwelt in the head.

The Celts believed in an afterlife. The Gaulish teaching was that the soul was immortal. According to Diodorus Siculus it was Polyhistor who first mentioned that the ‘Pythagorean
doctrine’ prevailed among the Gauls. The Alexandrian school of writers, as we saw in Chapter 4, spent much time debating whether the Celts had taken the doctrine of the soul’s
immortality, its reincarnation, from Pythagoras or whether Pythagoras took it from contact with the Celts. But how close were their teachings? Pythagoras, of course, wrote nothing down or, if he
did, nothing has survived even in copies. From later writers we hear that he taught that the soul was immortal, a fallen divinity imprisoned in a body. The soul, by its actions, determined how it
would be reincarnated in human, animal, or even plant form. Eventually, the soul would obtain its release from worldly cares by keeping itself pure, which involved an austere regime of
self-examination, abstention and so on. This theory of metempsychosis was alien to Greek philosophical traditions at this time.

However, in other Indo-European cultures, notably in India, it was believed that due to its karma a soul transmigrated from one life to another in a never-ending cycle
which could only be broken in Nirvana. Nirvana was the state of supreme bliss which, once achieved, liberated the soul from the repeating cycle of death and rebirth.

The Celtic idea of immortality was that death was but a changing of place and that life went on with all its forms and goods in another world, a world of the dead, or the fabulous Otherworld.
When people died in that world, however, their souls were reborn in this. Thus a constant exchange of souls took place between the two worlds; death in this world took a soul to the Otherworld,
death in that world brought a soul to this. Philostratus of Tyana (
c
.
AD
170–249) observed correctly that the Celts celebrated birth with mourning for the
death in the Otherworld, and regarded death with joy for birth in the Otherworld. So firm was the Celtic belief in the Otherworld, according to Valerius Maximus writing in the early first century
AD
, that ‘they lent sums of money to each other which are repayable in the next world, so firmly are they convinced that the souls of men are immortal.’ As we
have seen, rich grave goods, personal belongings, weapons, food and drink were buried with the dead to give them a good start in the Otherworld.

My view is that the Celts did not borrow their philosophy from the Greeks, nor did the Greeks borrow it from the Celts. The evolution of the doctrine of immortality of the soul was a parallel
and differing development in several Indo-European cultures, and might originate from an earlier common belief.

We have used the term ‘Otherworld’ for this world of the dead because it has become so popular. The insular Celts themselves had numerous names for the Otherworld – all
euphemisms, for the Celtic languages are filled with euphemisms. We find over half a dozen names for the sun and the moon, with prohibitions as to when those words could be used. Doubtless this was
the case with the Otherworld. In old and middle Irish we find the words
cenntar
as meaning ‘this world’ and
alltar
meaning the ‘Otherworld’.

To take Irish mythology alone we find, among the synonyms for the Otherworld: Tír na nOg (Land of Youth); Tír Tairnigiri (Land of Promise); Tír na
tSamhraidh (Land of Summer); Magh Mell (Plain of Happiness); Tír na mBeo (Land of the Living); Magh Da Cheo (Plain of Two Mists); Tír fo Thuinn (Land Under the Wave); Hy-Breasail
(Breasal’s Island); Hy-Falga (Falga’s Island) and Dún Scaith (Fortress of Shadows).

Insular Celtic literature is filled with stories of voyages or journeys to the Otherworld, such as Cúchulainn’s trip to Hy-Falga, or the Voyage of Bran, or that of Mael Duin, or the
journey of Pwyll to Annwn in Welsh literature. One of the most famous sojourns in the Otherworld in insular literature was that of Oisín who rode off on a magical horse with Niamh, the
daughter of the sea god, Manannán Mac Lir, and stayed there for 300 years.

The Otherworld, for the brave traveller who undertook the journey, could be reached by various means, through a cave, in a lake, but most popularly by voyaging across the great sea to the
south-west or west. Even in modern English we have a survival of this – when someone was killed in wartime he was referred to as having ‘gone west’. One Irish name, Hy-Breasail,
Breasal’s Island, was so accepted in people’s minds as a real land to the west that it was marked on medieval maps. When in 1500 the Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral reached
South America, he thought he had discovered Hy-Breasail and thus named the country Brazil.

The gathering place of the souls of the dead was always regarded as a small island to the south-west of Ireland and a similar belief was held in Wales. The souls were then transported by the god
of the dead to the Otherworld.

The actual location of the Otherworld, whether in this world or a spirit world not of this earth, has caused some confusion. The poet Lucan, in
Pharsalia
, refers to it as
orbe
alio
, implying that it was merely a different area of the world known to us. Furthermore, there are many different concepts
of what the Otherworld was like, ranging
from dark and brooding places to happy, rural paradises.

There was one day of the year when the Otherworld could become visible to this world: on the feast of Samhain, the eve of 31 October to 1 November. This was a time when the supernatural boundary
between the two worlds was broken down and people, the dead and living, could move freely between the two lands. It was a time when those who had been wronged by the living could return and haunt
them. Christianity, unable to suppress the belief, adopted it. 1 November became All Hallows Day or All Souls’ Day and the evening before, ‘Hallowe’en’.

In Irish myth there are two ‘gatekeepers’, the deities who escorted souls to the Otherworld: Bíle, the one-time consort of Danu, and Donn, although Donn is often confused in
the texts with Bíle. Tech Duinn (House of Donn) was the name given to the assembly place of the dead off the south-west of Ireland.

Who administered the religion of the Celts? Pomponius Mela states that the Druids ‘profess to know the will of the gods’. Caesar says: ‘The Druids officiate at the worship of
the gods, regulate public and private sacrifices, and give rulings on all religious questions.’ But it is clear that this is only one small part of what a Druid did. As we have seen, the
Druids were the intellectual caste and incorporated the priesthood within their ranks. This is why the Greeks and Romans are not consistent in using the word Druid for a priest and why Druids are
not referred to in many parts of the Celtic world while the intellectual professions are mentioned. Even in areas where Druids are referred to, such as Gaul, other words for priests are used:
gutuatri
, for example, perhaps incorporating the Celtic word for ‘voice’ which survives in the Irish
guth
. The office of
gutuater
is referred to in
inscriptions at Maçon, Haute-Loire and Autun. Livy talks of the priests of the Boii as
antistes templi
while Ausonius speaks of the
aedituus Beleni
.

Having established that the ancient Celts believed in a pantheon of gods, whom they saw as ancestors and not as creators, and that they believed in an immortal soul and
in the Otherworld, can we now find evidence of their moral code? Diogenes Laertius observed that the chief maxim was that the people ‘should worship the gods, do no evil and exercise
courage’. From the various insular sources, comparing them to classical writers’ comments, we may argue that the Celtic priesthood taught that the ideal was for people to live in
harmony with nature and themselves, accepting that pain and death were not evils but essential parts of the divine plan, and that the only evil was moral weakness. As Professor Myles Dillon has
pointed out, the notion of Truth as the highest principle and sustaining power of creation pervaded all early Irish literature.