A Brief History of the Celts (27 page)

Valerius then took the cognomen of Corvus, being the word for crow or raven.

Cassius Dio (
c
.
AD
150–235) repeats this story mentioning Livy as his source. Now this symbolism is scarcely Roman. We know that one of the personae of the
Celtic war goddess was in the form of a raven. This is particularly evident in Irish mythology. Indeed, Dr Henri Hubert points to the combat at the ford where the Red Branch champion
Cúchulainn fights in single combat. He has rejected the amorous advances of the war goddess the Mór Ríoghain (or Mórrígán, Great Queen), the
personification of the triune war goddess. In some versions she assumes the form of a raven of battle and, as a revenge, attacks Cúchulainn during his combat against the champion
Lóch. Cúchulainn realises that he does not stand a chance when the great crow or raven stands before him and croaks of war and slaughter. The portent means: ‘My life’s end
is near; this time I shall not return alive from the battle.’ Like the unknown Celtic warrior in Livy’s story, he eventually succumbs and, mortally wounded, ties himself to the pillar
stone, so that he can die standing up. The goddess, still in raven form, perches on his shoulder and drinks his blood.

I have argued elsewhere that Livy’s story, instead of being a ‘lift’ from a particular mythological tale, could be a recounting of Celtic symbolism. Ravens warn the god Lugh of
the approach of a Fomorii army. Lugdunum (Lyons), named after Lugh, once issued a coin with a raven on it. The Celtic goddess Nantosuelta and also the horse goddess Epona are sometimes accompanied
by, or depicted as, ravens. In the Welsh story, the Dream of Rhonabwy, we find a raven army raised by Owain
ap Urien. Raven symbols are found on Celtic war helmets from the
third to second centuries
BC
.

This was not the first time that Celtic symbolism entered Livy’s work. One of his best-known accounts is of the Celts climbing up the Capitol in Rome at night with the sacred geese of Juno
cackling a warning to the Roman garrison. Juno, the wife of Jupiter, was goddess of women and marriage and mother of Mars (Area), the god of war. Now Livy says, and he is echoed by subsequent
generations of writers, that these geese were kept as a sacred totem in the temple. In fact, the Roman geese were not sacred to Juno but kept in the Capitol’s temples for ritual slaughter
during divination practices. If the geese were not sacred to Juno, one cannot help wondering if there is any other reason why Livy introduces them into the epic. It could well be that he is
recounting simple fact. On the other hand, as he was raised among Celts, was possibly even a Celt himself, there could be a link with Celtish symbolism here.

Dr Miranda Green, in her
Animals in Celtic Life and Myth
, has pointed out that geese are most commonly associated with war in Celtic iconography. Because of their watchful and
aggressive natures, the birds were used as an appropriate symbol or companion to the gods and goddesses of battle. On top of the skull sanctuary of Roquepertuse, in Provence, is a great
free-standing goose gazing attentively as a sentinel. A first-century
BC
figurine of a war goddess, found in Dinéault, in Brittany, shows her with a helmet surmounted
by an aggressive goose. An altarpiece from Vaison shows a Celtic god of war with a goose and a raven as his companions.

Caesar noted that the goose was sacred in Britain and he pointed out that there was a taboo on eating the creatures. The same taboo was found in Ireland until medieval times when it was
forbidden to eat the barnacle goose on certain holy days. The exiled Irish soldiers who had to leave Ireland, after their defeat by the English, and serve in the Irish Brigades of countries
like France, Spain and Austria were known as
na Géanna fiáne
, the Wild Geese, a reference to the military symbolism of the goose rather than to its
migratory habits.

The goose as a warlike symbol, aggressive and watchful, is found in Celtic culture long before the sack of Rome. The geese in the Capitol were there as sacrificial birds. Are we witnessing a
factual incident in that these geese cackled a warning, changing Roman perceptions, or have ‘the sacred geese of Juno’ come into Latin mythology from a Celtic source? Thereafter, we are
told, the Romans carried the geese on litters, with purple and gold cushions, in an annual ceremony in Rome and their feeding was made the responsibility of the censors. As part of the same ritual,
dogs were crucified on stakes of elder, to remind the people they had not barked a warning of the Celtic attack. It was a ritual which lasted in Rome well into the Christian epoch.

Henri Hubert believes that two of Livy’s sources were the mainly lost works of the Insubrean Celtic writer, Cornelius Nepos (
c
. 100–
c
. 25
BC
), and the Vocontii Celt, Trogus Pompeius (27
BC
–
AD
14). It was from these Celtic historians, writing in Latin, that Livy learned
the Celtic tradition of how the Celts started their expansions through Europe. He gives as a reason for this expansion the fact that the Celtic heartland had become so populated that the main
ruler, Ambicatus, encouraged his nephews to take pioneers with them and move east and south in search of new lands to settle.

Perhaps we should not leave this section on Celtic mythology without reference to two comparatively recent developments in the area. To the modern popular mind, the most famous of Celtic
mythological figures is Arthur. He was undoubtedly a historical person, living during the late fifth and early sixth centuries
AD
. Within a few centuries after his death,
this British Celtic ‘war chief’, fighting the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain, had become firmly embedded in mythology. The first literary reference to Arthur comes in a poem
attributed to Aneirin, written in the late sixth century. In
Y Gododdin
, Aneirin writes of an attempt by 300 élite warriors, led by Mynyddawn Mwynfawr,
chieftain of the tribe whose capital was at Dineiddyn (Edinburgh), to recapture Catraeth (Catterick) from the Anglo-Saxons.

Historical references to Arthur can also be found in Gildas (
AD
500–700), the British Celtic monk who wrote
De Excidio et Conquesta Britanniae
(
Concerning the Ruin and Conquest of Britain
); in Nennius (
c
.
AD
800), another Celtic historian, in his
Historia Britonum
, who credits Arthur with
twelve major victories over the invading Anglo-Saxons; and in the
Annales Cambriae
(
c
.
AD
955), a Latin history of the rise of Cymru (Wales), which records
Arthur’s victory at Mount Badon and states that Arthur and Medraut (Mordred) fell at the battle of Camluan in the year
AD
537.

As it seems to be a tendency that Celts make their heroes into gods and their gods into heroes, over the next few centuries, following the death of the historical Arthur, the Celts embellished
his story with earlier mythological themes, giving him a special circle of warriors, who later became Knights of the Round Table, but were originally closer to the Fianna of Fionn Mac Cumhail. In
fact, many of the Arthurian tales seem to have been embellished with themes from the Fenian Cycle. Christian themes soon began to replace the intrinsically Celtic elements; for example, the search
for the magic cauldron of plenty from the Otherworld developed into a search for the Christian Holy Grail. Other elements, however, remain in their pure Celtic form – the magic sword of
Arthur, now popularly known through a Latin corruption as Excalibur, was, in fact, the Welsh Caladfwlch (Hard Dinter) which seems to have been taken from the Irish form Caladcholg, the sword of the
hero Fergus Mac Roth in the Red Branch Cycle.

Geoffrey of Monmouth (
c
. 1100–1155) developed Arthur into something approaching his popular heroic image in his
Historia Regnum Britanniae
. Since Geoffrey’s
developments,
a great body of literature has sprung up. Arthur was an accepted character in both Welsh and Irish mythology. There are at least twenty-five identified
Arthurian tales in Irish from the medieval period but, as we have pointed out before, they never displaced the popularity of Fionn Mac Cumhail as a hero in Irish imagination.

A second world-famous myth developed out of the Celtic world: the story of Tristan and Iseult. There was an historic king Marc’h of Cornwall, identified as Marcus Cunomarus. Marc’h
comes from the Celtic word for horse, not from the Latin name Marcus, and the second name means ‘Hound of the Sea’. A writer lets slip that Mark, to use the modern accepted form, had
ears like a horse. His capital in Cornwall was at the hill-fort of Castle Dore, occupied from the second century
BC
to the sixth century
AD
. King
Mark had a son, Drustaus or Drustanus, which scholars claim is a philological equivalent of Tristan. A mid-sixth century
AD
stone inscription at Castle Dore records:
‘
Drustanus hic iacit Cunomori Filius
’, Here lies Drustanus son of Cunomarus.

However the myth developed, the basis is that Mark of Cornwall married Iseult, daughter of an Irish king. He sent Tristan, his nephew in the myth, to fetch her and Tristan fell in love with her.
They eventually fled from Mark’s court. The core motif is a traditional Celtic elopement tale known in Irish as
aithedha
, and most of the essential elements are to be found in other
Celtic stories, such as the elopement of the king’s wife with the king’s nephew. The tales of Diarmuid and Gráinne and of Noísu and Deirdre are comparable.

There are many different versions of the tale written in practically every European language but scholars have traced them back to one extant manuscript written by Béroul in the middle of
the twelfth century. It was said that Béroul, writing in French, copied the saga from a Breton source. The source could, however, equally have been Cornish. Our earliest Cornish textual
evidence, as distinct from its British Celtic
parent, is from the tenth century
AD
. Mark was also known to have ruled in Carhaix, in Cornouaille, in
Brittany, as well as Carhays in Cornwall. We have already seen that many Celtic kings, even back to the time of Caesar, are noted to have ruled both in Britain and on the Continent. We have little
factual knowledge of the Cornish Mark. In Brittany he was regarded as an unscrupulous tyrant. Urmonek, a monk of Landévennec, writing his
Life of St Pol de Léon
, about
AD
880, is the person who identifies Mark as Cunomarus and says that he was a powerful king, under whose rule lived peoples who spoke four separate languages.

One motif that frequently occurs throughout the Celtic world is that of the magic cauldron, including the cauldron of plenty, which feeds everyone, and the cauldron of rebirth whereby the dead
are put in and come out alive. Cauldrons can be found from the late Bronze Age period – vast cauldrons with a capacity of 60–70 litres. In May 1891, at Gundestrup, in north Jutland, a
cauldron with a capacity of 130 litres was found in a peat bog. This silver dish had twelve rectangular plates, forming the inner and outer sides, and it is clear that it is of Celtic origin,
although recently some academics outside the field of Celtic studies have disputed this by pointing out that it seems to have been manufactured in the Thracian area. These scholars did not,
apparently, realise that Thrace had been settled by Celts by the fourth and third centuries
BC
. Kings of Thrace with Celtic names did not cease to rule until 192
BC
.

The Celtic motifs are absolutely clear on the cauldron. We have the antler-headed god Cernunnos, with his neck ring, and a sequence of animal symbolism. One of the fascinating scenes on the
cauldron is that in which a god accompanied by warriors holds a dead warrior over a cauldron while previously dead warriors march away. This is clearly the cauldron of rebirth.

Cauldrons have been found at Llyn Fawr in Mid-Glamorgan, dating from 600
BC
, and at Llyn Cerrig in
Anglesey, dating from the second century
BC
and the first century
AD
. Cauldrons have been found throughout the Celtic world and back up the mythological traditions surviving in Irish and
Welsh texts. They are found in both Hallstatt and La Tène graves, from Hochdorf to Duchov. In 1882 in Duchov, a town in Bohemia, which was the site of a spring sanctuary, a bronze cauldron
was found containing some 2000 items of jewellery, fibulae, rings and other metal objects of the early La Tène period.

The Dagda had a magic cauldron that came from the fabulous city of Murias. It was so enormous, we are told, that the Formorii could make a porridge in it with goats, sheep, pigs and eighty
measures each of milk, meal and fat. No one left the cauldron hungry. Cúchulainn and Cú Roi stole a magic cauldron that produced gold and silver from a castle. Midir the Proud,
another of the gods, also had his magic cauldron.

In the Welsh tales, we hear that Matholwch of Ireland possessed a magic cauldron into which the dead were cast to appear the next morning whole and well except that they had lost their power of
speech. We are told that the cauldron was originally the property of Bran Benedigeidfran (Bran the Blessed) who is perceived as an early god. He gave it to Matholwch but, after hostilities broke
out, the cauldron had to be destroyed before Bran and his Britons could overcome Matholwch. The story recounts how the cauldron emerged from the Lake of the Cauldron on the back of a huge man
accompanied by a huge woman. Were they deities whose role has been obscured?

Yet another magic cauldron appears in the tale of Culhwch’s search for Olwen, for one of Culhwch’s tasks is to obtain a magic cauldron which belongs to Diwrnach of Ireland and which
is full of all the treasures of Ireland.

Our knowledge of Celtic mythology overall is greatly obscured by the Greek and Roman interpretations in the classical allusions. It has been argued that the Celtic peoples did
not possess a uniform mythology but, instead, a plethora of different myths which are only comparable to a limited degree. As we have no systematic record before the insular Celts
began to set down their stories at the start of the Christian era, it has also been argued that we have no means of forming a complete picture of pre-Christian mythology. However, knowledge in this
field is still very fragmentary and new information is constantly coming through. The native sources are not yet exhausted and full comparisons with other Indo-European cultures have yet to be
carefully made.