Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (39 page)

 

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icture this. It is about fifty years before the birth of Jesus, a typical day in the ancient world. In Greece, philosophers and their students stroll the streets of Athens, thinking Big Thoughts as they walk past centuries-old temples and statues gracefully carved from elegant marble. In Egypt—where the pyramids are already more than two thousand years old!—the Library of Alexandria is filled with scholars reading great works of classic literature, contemplating philosophy, drawing maps of the world, and studying higher mathematics and astronomy. In Rome, a Classic Age of poets and writers has begun to flourish and, before long, Imperial Rome will spread its language, law, martial order, and carefully constructed roads across the Mediterranean and European world.

But on a remote battlefield somewhere in Europe, the Roman general Julius Caesar leads his well-ordered legions against a howling band of naked warriors. These barbarians rush into battle with weird musical instruments—shrieking pipes made out of animal skins and strange, curved trumpets. If they win the day, these “savages” will surely take their Roman enemies’ heads as trophies and sacrifice hundreds of captives in ceremonies led by priestly magicians called Druids. These Druid priests don’t worship gods in majestic temples in city centers. Their gods are everywhere around them, a host of mythical spirits that fill every forest, field, mountain, lake, and spring. Even in the strange and mysterious circles of stones that dot the European landscape.

Descended from an ancient people of Indo-European origins, these savage warriors are called Celtae or Galli by the Romans, and Keltoi and Galatatae by the Greeks. Today they are known by a catchall word as the Celts.
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While great and glorious civilizations rose and fell in the Mediterranean worlds of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, the rampaging Celts eked out a seminomadic existence in a world of savage cruelty and nearly constant warring that was far removed from their contemporaries in Alexandria, Babylon, Athens, or Rome. Migrating across Europe over a thousand years of history, the Celts had settled uneasily on the fringes of the Roman Empire—and of its eventual successor, the Church of Rome. By the start of the first century, their principal outposts were in Ireland and the British Isles, and Brittany, in northwest France.

What little we know of these wild people stretches much further back. According to hints from history and archaeological clues, the Celts first settled in northern Europe before occupying a wide swath of territory that spread across most of western Europe. Based on what we learned from digs in Austria and Germany, they are first known to have lived in Hallstatt, near Salzburg, where hundreds of Celtic graves have been unearthed, dating from about 700 BCE. At such sites as Hochdorf in Germany, other sets of Celtic graves revealed bodies buried with entire horse-drawn wagons filled with luxury goods—obviously meant for people who thought that they were going somewhere else in the next life. Unfortunately, they did not leave a “Swiss Alps” version of the Egyptian Book of the Dead to help succeeding generations discern just what it was they were thinking.

But around 500 BCE, something happens. Just as Athens entered its Golden Age and the Roman Republic was born, the Celts began to spread across western Europe. Around the same time, or possibly around 350 BCE, groups of them crossed the seas to the British Isles and Ireland, where they established their most enduring societies. The reasons for this mass migration are still unclear—climate changes, famine, and overpopulation are all likely suspects. But the Celts were on the move. And they were fierce, as the Romans and Greeks would learn. In 387 BCE, a group of Celts attacked and burned Rome in its early days. Another group of Celtic raiders ransacked the sacred Greek Temple at Delphi in 279 BCE.
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The Celts were also on a collision course with destiny. While terrifying and not easily subdued, they never achieved true “nation” status, remaining loose collections of tribes led by warlord kings. Plagued by constant warring among themselves, the Celts began falling to the onslaught of more “civilized” opponents between 300 BCE and about 100 BCE. During this time, the Romans conquered much of Celtic Europe, basically wiping out most vestiges of Celtic society on the continent, absorbing some bits and pieces of their myths into Roman worship or merging Roman beliefs and gods with the local deities. When the Celtic leader Vercingetorix managed to unite many of the Celtic tribes in Gaul, it was a last gasp. In 52 BCE, Caesar obliterated them after a hard-fought, eight-year-long campaign. Two thousand survivors of one battle were spared, but Caesar had all of the warriors’ hands cut off. Their leader, Vercingetorix, was later executed in Rome. The only Celts who preserved their own culture for any length of time were those sheltered by the sea, on the British Isles and in Ireland—a Celtic stronghold that never succumbed to the Roman Empire but finally did submit to the Roman Church when St. Patrick converted the Irish Celts to Christianity. That is why so many elements of Celtic myth, belief, and worship are associated with the Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and British branches of the Celtic tree.

When we think of the Celts today, the image is one of a fraternity house gone really bad. Loud, boisterous, lots of feasting and drinking—especially before a battle. That impression would be largely correct. According to historian William K. Klingaman in
The First Century
, “Nothing terrified the common Roman soldier of this age more than the nightmarish prospect of capture, torture and mutilation by the Druidic priests…. Facing civilized Greeks or even the ferocious Parthians was one thing: battling barely human enemies, who according to rumor, drank human blood and roasted human flesh, was quite another.”

But that is only part of the story. Free-spirited, clannish, and primitive, the Celts had a softer side. They could also be poetic, artistic, even romantic—and deeply religious. Although their ancient spiritual practices might leave much to be desired today, the Celts were powerfully connected to the gods of the natural world. Theirs was a religion of sacred groves and hilltops, pools and springs. They believed in the healing power of water; and sacred plants—like the evergreen mistletoe—were used to cure diseases, promote fertility in women, and celebrate life in the midst of winter.

From what little has survived of the earliest Celtic myths, we know they found their gods all around them—in earth, water, woods, and in the animals they prized, especially horses. While their sun god was important, he was not an overpowering deity, as in Egypt. Perhaps that made sense in a colder, often darker part of the world where the sun didn’t shine as often or as brightly. But just as the myths of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome illuminated their cultures, so did the legends of the Celts shed light on a people who would find a unique place in Western civilization.

How do we know what the Celts believed?

In dealing with the Celts—and especially their myths and beliefs—we are a bit like the proverbial six blind men touching an elephant: each feels a different part of the animal and makes a very different assumption about the creature he is touching. When it comes to understanding the Celts, there are lots of disconnected parts, but it is hard to see the whole picture.

Unlike the great civilizations before them, the Celts left very few indelible marks. They were mostly a nonliterate people who produced no lasting writings in their earliest known periods—no
Gilgamesh
, no Book of the Dead, no
Iliad
, no Holy Bible. Although they went from being nomadic wanderers to settled farmers, the Celts never built large cities and left no records or bureaucracy to provide insights into their habits and customs. Some of their Druid priests did have a rudimentary form of writing, but if they recorded any religious writings, myths, poetry, or hymns, none survive. An identifiable Celtic Creation story has never been found.

That leaves us with a handful of other sources, including writers from the Classical Period in Rome, chief among them Julius Caesar—bane of generations of Latin students. Caesar and other Roman reporters often recount a Celtic fascination with rituals that the “civilized” Romans found barbaric, including human sacrifice, headhunting, strange forms of divination, and an attitude toward life after death that the Romans found curious. But because these writers were looking down their prominent noses at a people they considered well beneath them, Roman views of the Celts must be taken with a healthy grain of salt.

Archaeology also offers some clues to who the early Celts were and how they lived, but here, too, there are large gaps in the record. The Celts did not leave behind pyramids and temples, libraries filled with cuneiform tablets, and ancient cities waiting to be unearthed, such as Knossos, Troy, or Nineveh. Sacred spaces of Celtic worship often consisted of open-air enclosures, like a grove of sacred oaks, or holy lakes and springs. The Celts dug deep pits or shafts in order to communicate with the mysterious powers of the underworld. But the more enduring places that survive from Celtic settlements were often tainted by later conquerors. For instance, the Celts considered the famed mineral waters found at Bath, England, to be sacred healing waters associated with Sulis, an otherwise obscure local goddess of these thermal springs. After the Roman conquest of Britain, the site was transformed by the Romans into Aquae Sulis (“Waters of Sulis”), with a temple to a goddess the Romans called Sulis Minerva, simply attaching the name of one of their familiar deities to that of the existing local goddess. Later generations of British royalty turned the waters of Bath into a regal spa, and it finally became a Victorian-era resort where the English aristocracy could “take the waters.”
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As for the early Celtic burial sites uncovered in Alpine Germany, these, too, have yielded some clues to their myths, religious practices, and beliefs. But even some of these recent finds date from the post-Roman era and are sometimes tainted by Roman influence. There are a few surviving images of Celtic gods from the pre-Roman period, which depict a god with the horns of a stag. And some stone figurines show three seated women, presumably representing a three-person mother goddess as a maiden, a mother, and an older woman. But museum shelves aren’t exactly groaning with impressive collections of Celtic statuary and decorated pottery. Getting a visual impression of early Celtic culture is, ultimately, slippery business.

There is one shining bright spot in this otherwise dimly lit room of the Celtic past. One branch of the Celtic family tree deserves a laurel wreath for record-keeping. Fortunately, the rich oral traditions, foundation stories, and tales of gods and legendary heroes of the Celts who settled in Ireland, Wales, and southwest England were preserved. And several important collections of Irish and Welsh myths capture the voice and spirit of this pre-Christian Celtic world.

Granted, these sources come with a big red warning label attached. Most of the surviving tales were not written down until the eleventh and twelfth centuries, long after Ireland and the British Isles were Christianized in the fifth century. In Irish and British monasteries, the literate monks—the same ones who are largely responsible for preserving the Bible during Europe’s Dark Ages—recorded many of the traditional Irish and Welsh Celtic stories, but probably laundered the Celtic originals, layering them with biblical or Christian sentiments. But beggars can’t be choosers. These Irish and Welsh tales are the best we have—and they have made an enormous contribution to Irish and British literature.

Of these later sources, three from Ireland are most significant and entertaining. The Book of Invasions (
Leabhar Gabhala
); the Ulster Cycle—which includes a masterful Irish epic called the
Táin Bó Cúailnge
(pronounced
toyn boe kool-ee
), or
The Cattle Raid of Cooley
; and the Fionn (Fenian) Cycle were all written down in Irish monasteries that would be crucial to preserving the written word during the Middle Ages. A fourth collection, the
Mabinogion
, was written in Wales, although exactly how it found its way into print is a mystery. The oldest known fragments date to 1225, but the oldest complete
Mabinogion
is dated to around 1400.

The first of these collections—the Irish Book of Invasions (
Leabhar Gabhala
)—is a twelfth-century attempt to compile a “history” of Ireland. Certainly derived from a much older oral tradition—just as
Gilgamesh
or Hesiod’s
Theogony
had been—it describes a series of five successive mythical occupations of Ireland, including a generation said to be descendants of the biblical Noah. Such a biblical flourish was typical of the medieval Christian attempt to add a touch of religious “legitimacy” to these old pagan myths. It concludes with the arrival of the ancestors of the Celts in Ireland.