Religion in Britain from the Megaliths to Arthur. An Archaeological and Mythological Exploration

284 Pages·2016·145.54 MB·English

by  Robin Melrose

Religion in Britain
from the Megaliths
to Arthur
ALSOBYROBINMELROSE
The Druids and King Arthur: A New
View of Early Britain(McFarland, 2011)
Religion in Britain
from the Megaliths
to Arthur
An Archaeological and
Mythological Exploration
Robin Melrose
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Names: Melrose, Robin, author.
Title: Religion in Britain from the megaliths to Arthur :
an archaeological and mythological exploration / Robin Melrose.
Description: Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Company, Inc.,
Publishers, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016003941 | ISBN 9781476663609
(softcover : acid free paper) ♾
Subjects: LCSH: Great Britain—Religion—To 449. |
Great Britain—Antiquities, Roman. | Great Britain—History—
Roman period, 55 B.C.–449 A.D. | Mabinogion. | Welsh literature—
To 1550—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC BL980.G7 M45 2016 | DDC 200.9361—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003941
BRITISHLIBRARYCATALOGUINGDATAAREAVAILABLE
ISBN (print) 978-1-4766-6360-9
ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4766-2426-6
© 2016 Robin Melrose. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover image of Stonehenge © 2016 iStock/Keawpiko
Printed in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Table of Contents
Preface: Routes to the Past 1
Introduction: Celts, Druids and the Age of Arthur 5
1: The Age of Megaliths (1): Stone Monuments and Neolithic Astronomy 15
2: The Age of Megaliths (2): Rich Burials and More Astronomy in the
Early Bronze Age 34
3: The Age of Depositions (1): Water, Fire and Earth in the Late
Bronze Age 53
4: The Age of Depositions (2): The Sky God and Iron Age Hillforts 78
5: The Age of Depositions (3): Chariot Burials, Lunar Eclipses and
Wooden Buckets in the Later Iron Age 111
6: The Romans in Britain: Roman Gods and British Gods, Roman
Burials and Decapitated Burials 134
7: The Beginnings of the Age of Arthur: Arthur the Bear- Man 162
8: Arthur in the Underworld 176
9: Arthur the Witch-S layer, Warrior and King 186
10: Arthur and the Early Medieval World: Holy Islands and the Arthurian
Cycle in Cornwall 203
11: Druids and the Early Medieval World: the Bear-D ruid of Welsh
Mythology 224
Chapter Notes 249
Bibliography 263
Index 275
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Preface
A few years ago I wrote a book on the Druids and King Arthur in which I said that
the Druids originated in eastern Europe and spread west into Britain some time in the
Early Iron Age, around 800 BC. At the time I was following the traditional model of the
genesis of the Celts, in which the Celts originated somewhere in Central Europe and even-
tually spread west to France, Spain, Portugal, Britain and Ireland. However, since then, I
have become convinced that this model is wrong. Archaeologists like Barry Cunliffe and
Celtic scholars like John Koch have argued persuasively that the Celts originated along
the Atlantic coasts of Europe, in Portugal, Spain, Ireland and western Britain in the Late
Bronze Age, and spread east, effectively turning the traditional theory on its head.
The present work is about prehistoric religion, and any book about prehistoric reli-
gion in Britain must tackle the question of the Druids. In his Commentaries on the Gallic
War, the Roman general Julius Caesar said that the Druid priesthood originated in
Britain, and this makes much more sense if the Celts themselves first emerged in the
west rather than the east of Europe. Caesar said that the Druids were experts on “the
stars and their motion,” and this raises the possibility, cautiously advanced by Barry Cun-
liffe in his book on the Druids, that druidism emerged in the Neolithic (4000–2500 BC),
at a time when monuments with astronomical alignment were being built across Britain
and Ireland.
So this book begins with the astronomically aligned megaliths—the great stone mon-
uments like Stonehenge—and with what John Koch calls the Age of Megaliths, which strad-
dledthe Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age (2500–1500 BC). After this came what Koch
calls the Age of Depositions, when Britons placed offerings to the gods in the earth and
in watery places like rivers, lakes and fens. It was early in this period (between 1500 BCand
700 BC) that the first Celts emerged along the Atlantic coasts of Europe, and with them,
the first Druids, who inherited the astronomical knowledge of their Neolithic and Early
Bronze Age ancestors.
The Age of Depositions came to an end with the coming of Christianity, which was
established throughout Britain by the late 7th century. The end of paganism and the begin-
ningof Christianity ushered in what I call the Age of Arthur—a celebration of Britain’s
pagan past which came to be focused on the figure of Arthur. There may have been one
or more “real” Arthurs, but the Arthur of Welsh literature before the Norman invasion
of 1066 was largely a figure of mythology and folklore. I will argue that he was originally
a British god or gods, perhaps dating back as far as the Neolithic, who went through a
series of transformations in the Roman period before assuming his final form. Arthur
in Welsh probably means “Bear-Man,” and in my final chapter I look at the Fourth Branch
of the medieval Welsh Mabinogion, the story of Math son of Mathonwy, whose name
1
2 Preface
Math is a very ancient word for “bear.” Math is a magician in the Fourth Branch, and I
will show that he is in fact a Druid, and that the earliest form of Arthur may have been
a Druid like Math.
Since there are no written records of British religion in prehistoric times (apart from
the occasional report of a Greek or Roman writer), we must rely heavily on the findings
of archaeology to give us an insight into ancient British paganism. Archaeology can tell us
what was buried in the earth or cast into river, lakes or fens, so we can learn a good deal
about burial rites, the kinds of offerings that prehistoric Britons made to the gods, and
where they lived. What archaeology tells us can be interpreted in the light of the obser-
vations of Greek and Roman writers, mostly about Gaul (France), which came under
Roman rule in the 2nd and 1st century BC(between about 125 BCand 50 BC).
But the Greek and Roman writers can only take us so far, and perhaps the most valuable
source of information about prehistoric British religion is the collection of Welsh tales
known as the Mabinogion, in particular the four branches of the Mabinogion, which were
probably composed between 1060 and 1200. The Mabinogionwas of course written by Chris-
tians, several centuries after the last pagan gods were worshipped, but if we can match
what we find in the Mabinogion with the findings of archaeology, then we can arrive at
an approximation of the truth. If we combine the four branches of the Mabinogionwith
Welsh Arthurian tales like Culhwch and Olwen(11th century), Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
fanciful History of the Kings of Britain (12th century), and the French tales of Tristan and
Isolt (also 12th century), we are afforded a series of glimpses into Britain’s pagan past—
or rather, how medieval Britons saw their pagan past.
Although archaeology is the most powerful tool we have to explore prehistoric reli-
gion in Britain, it is not the only one. Much of this book concerns the Celts, and Celtic
languages are still spoken across the British Isles: Welsh in Wales, Gaelic in Scotland, and
Irish in Ireland (Cornish became extinct in the 18th century, though there are attempts to
revive it). The Celtic languages belong to a family of languages known as I ndo- European,
which includes most of the languages of Europe, together with some languages of the
Middle East—most notably Farsi or Persian—and many of the languages of the Indian
subcontinent, including Hindi and Urdu.
Now the main languages of the British Isles, Welsh, Irish and English, only appeared
in written form in the early medieval period, but other I ndo-E uropean languages have
a much longer history. The earliest literary texts in Latin date from the 3rd century BC,
and the earliest Greek texts—Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey—date from around 700 BC. But
we can go back even further. The Greeks of Mycenae in the Peloponnese used a script
called Linear B between about 1450 and 1200 BCto produce a series of texts, mostly lists
and inventories. The Hittites of Anatolia (now Turkey) used a Sumerian cuneiform script
between the 16th and 13th century BCto produce a wide variety of texts. In the 2nd mil-
lennium BCthe priests and poets of northern India composed the Vedas, the oldest sacred
texts of Hinduism, in the language known as Sanskrit (Old Indian). At around the same
time, Zoroaster was composing the earliest sacred texts of the Zoroastrian religion in
Avestan, a form of Old Iranian which is very close to Sanskrit.
Thanks to Mycenaean Greek, Hittite, Sanskrit and Avestan, we have some idea of
the Indo- European gods worshipped over three thousand years ago across a wide area,
from northern India to Greece. We don’t know what gods were worshipped in Britain
three thousand years ago—or two thousand years go, for that matter—but in the course
of this book I’m going to use findings from archaeology to speculate on some of these
Preface 3
gods. Often I will draw on what we know about Greek or Vedic Indian gods, but I will
also be making use of Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch
(“Indo-European Etymological Dictionary”), which was first published in 1959 but has
since been updated. The gods I introduce into the discussion may not be the actual deities
worshipped in Britain, but they are about as close as we can get to long forgotten gods.
The plan of the book is simple. The first two chapters deal with the Age of Mega-
liths—Chapter 1 with the Neolithic and Chapter 2 with the Early Bronze Age. Chapters
3 to 6 deal with the Age of Depositions—Chapter 3 with the Middle—Late Bronze, Chap-
ters 4 and 5 with the Iron Age, and Chapter 6 with the Roman period. Chapters 7 to 11
deal with the early Medieval period that I am calling the Age of Arthur—Chapter 7 with
the genesis of Arthur, Chapter 8 with Arthur as an underworld figure, and Chapter 9
with Arthur as w itch-s layer, warrior and king. In Chapter 10 I bring all these elements
together in an attempt to “explain” Arthur, and introduce the story of Tristan and Isolt,
which emerged in the 12th century and exists on the fringes of the Arthurian tales. Finally
in Chapter 11 I return to the Druids with the B ear- Druid Math son of Mathonwy, perhaps
the most ancient incarnation of Arthur.