The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts

712 Pages·2013·6.76 MB·English

by  Rodney Castleden

http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield
D
EDICATION
This book is dedicated to a people who, over many centuries, have been
misunderstood and frequently misrepresented.
The harp that once through Tara’s halls
The soul of music shed,
Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls
As if that soul were fled.
So sleeps the pride of former days,
So glory’s thrill is o’er,
And hearts, that once beat high for praise,
Now feel that pulse no more.
The Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852)
C
ONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
PART 1: Celtic People and Lifestyle
PART 2: Celtic Places
PART 3: Celtic Religion
PART 4: Myths, Legends, and Stories
PART 5: Symbols, Ideas, and Archetypes
PART 6: Celtic Twilight and Revival
Celtic Twilight
Celtic Revival
Brief Bibliography
Copyright page
About the Publishers
P
REFACE
“S S P F D ”
O LEEPS THE RIDE OF ORMER AYS
This book is an attempt to explore the entire spectrum of Celtic culture.
Each of us carries, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, a
particular image of the Celts and their culture. It is like a distinctive and
familiar smell or flavor that we recognize as soon as we encounter it.
To some “Celtic” means the soulful, echoing music of harps or
bagpipes, or a particularly plaintive style of singing, while to others it
means a political movement striving to create—or restore—a regional
identity. To some it means modern team games, while to others it means
clans and tartans. To some it is a wild, rocky landscape with mist, sea
spray, and the roar of breaking waves, while to others it is dissent, tribal
warfare, and the world of Braveheart. To some it means ancient legends
about dragons, King Arthur, and the Lady of the Lake, while to others it
means a lost empire that more than 2,000 years ago spanned Iron Age
Europe.
With so many different contemporary takes on Celticness, it will be
useful to explore where these ideas have come from. Those who are Celts
may want to relive what Thomas Moore called “the pride of former days”
and bring that pride into the present, but to do that honorably there is a
need to be honest about the past.
One important idea that will emerge from this book is that the nature
of Celticness has changed through time, and that means that we need to
look at the Celts of 2,000 years ago, look again at the Celts of the Middle
Ages, and look yet again at the Celts of today. In order to reach the true
nature of Celticness, we have to establish who the Celts were—and who
they are.
I
NTRODUCTION
W W C ?
HO ERE THE ELTS
For many people, the word “Celt” conjures two different images; two
quite different personalities. One is hot-blooded, fiery, passionate, quick
to take offense, volatile, and argumentative. The other is quiet, nostalgic,
thoughtful, contemplative, mystical, and in tune with the natural world
and also with the world of the spirit. These are two quite different
personalities, but they complement each other. They are the two sides of
an ancient Celtic coin: the Janus faces of Celticness.
The Celts have tended to dwell on their past, forever looking back to
days of former glories and brooding over past defeats. The ancient and
medieval Celts loved to tell stories about their tribes, their leaders, their
heroes, and their gods. Sometimes there was a practical value in this.
Kings and princes needed to justify their positions of privilege, and their
ancestry was an integral part of their title. “I am your king because my
father was your king and his father before him…” They needed bards to
recite their genealogies so that their subjects were regularly reminded of
their lords’ pedigrees. Sometimes these genealogies included glamorous
imaginary heroes and the recitation of the family tree developed into
entertainment.
Storytelling has always been an important element in the Celtic
psyche, and the edge between story and history has always been blurred.
But a story, or the complex web of interlocking stories that made up the
tribal myth, was what held Celtic society together. Every community
needs an idea of itself in order to survive, a clear self-image that makes it
possible to tell the difference between itself and other communities. This
was why one tribe adopted one totem animal and another tribe adopted a
different animal, and why one tribe adopted one species of tree, and
another tribe a different species. “We are the elm people.” “We are the
oak people. We are different.” That sense of special identity has always
been important.
An important theme in this book is that the key to that sense of identity
has changed through time. The basis, the foundation, of Celticness is not
the same now as it was. What I hope to show is that in spite of this the
roots of Celticness are deep; they are thousands of years old, much older
than most modernday Celts realize.
PEOPLE WE KNOW
Sometimes we think of that early world of the Celts as being an
anonymous tribal world, a place where we know no one. In fact we know
a surprisingly large number of people who lived in that world and we will
be meeting some of them in the first section of this book.
There were several kings in Britain whose names are known:
Cassivellaunus (or Caswallawn), Cunobelin (or Cymbeline), Caratacus,
Cogidumnus, Cartimandua the client queen of the Brigantes, Boudicca
the warrior queen of the Iceni, Diviciacus the Druid king who visited
Rome and befriended Cicero, and Vercingetorix the heroic Gaulish king
who surrendered to Caesar rather than see his horses, or any more of his
companions, killed. A few centuries later we stumble upon St. Patrick, St.
Columba, and the ever-mysterious, ever-elusive figure of King Arthur.
Arthur has somehow moved across from history to myth, acquiring the
character of a Celtic god along the way, and some of the mystification
surrounding his life may reflect the religious beliefs of the time. Another
section of this book is devoted to these beliefs.
The spirit world was integrated into the everyday Celtic world in a way
that it no longer is today. There was no separation between the people and
the spirits: the gods and goddesses who inhabited and controlled
everything. The spirits were seen as residing within the natural features
of the landscape. Every hill and headland, and every stream and spring,
every forest and marsh had its own in-dwelling spirit. Worship was a
matter of communing with the spirits in the places where they lived.
People went to riverbanks to commune with the spirits of the river. They
went to springs to commune with the sprites who looked after those
magic places where life-giving water seeped out from the Underworld.
There were temples and shrines, but a great deal of the mediation
between the everyday world and the spirit world went on out in the
landscape, in the open air.
Another section of this book looks at places that have special
associations with the Celts: their settlements and strongholds, the scenes
of their famous victories and defeats in battle, their sanctuaries and cult
places.
There is also a section about the symbols and archetypes that underpin
the culture of the Celts and another looking at a selection of their myths,
legends, and folktales; the Celts have always been great storytellers.
The final section is a brief overview of the last thousand years or so of
Celtic history, which falls into two halves. One is a phase of suppression
and eclipse which I call the “Celtic twilight.” The second is a phase of
rediscovery and re-emergence—the “Celtic revival”—which brings this
review of the Celts up to the present day.
To go back to the beginning, the origin of the people first named the
Celts by classical writers has long been the subject of speculation and
discussion. The Celts of the Iron Age have an aura of mystery about them
because, like the Minoans, they did not leave us any written literature of
their own. There are some inscriptions and a fragmentary calendar, but
there is no literature as such. The ancient Celts, either deliberately or
inadvertently, surrounded themselves with mystery, like the hero
Caswallawn with his magic plaid of invisibility.
Who were they? It is a question we are going to come back to again
and again, and it is not an easy one to answer. BBC Wales has posted a
Celts “factfile” on its educational website aimed at children. The first
question is: “Who are the Celts?” It is answered by a simple timeline
showing five blocks of time: “STONE AGE” (to 2000 ), “BRONZE
BC
AGE” (to 600 ), “IRON AGE CELTS” (to 50), “ROMANO-
BC AD
BRITISH” (to 400), followed by “CELTS OF TODAY.” There are two
AD
cartoon Celts: one wearing a helmet and waving a sword, for the Iron
Age, and one wearing a yellow shirt and blue tracksuit bottoms for today.
So, according to BBC Wales, “Celt” has two senses, describing a group of
people today and another group of people 2,000 years ago. Then a link
between them is made: “Their culture lives on in language, music, song,
and literature.”
One of the questions this book needs to address is how far that is true.
Is the Celticness of today really the same as that of 2,000 years ago?
BARBARIANS?
The earliest documented reference to the Celts comes from about 450 .
BC
Herodotus, long known as “the father of history,” mentions the “Keltoi”
briefly:
The River Ister [Danube] begins in the country of the Celts and the city of
Pyrene [perhaps Girona, near Barcelona] and flows through the middle
of Europe, bisecting it. The Celts are outside the Pillars of Heracles,
bordering the Kynesians, who dwell at the edge, farther toward the
setting sun than all other inhabitants of Europe.
Herodotus was well traveled, but he admitted to knowing little about
northern and western Europe. His Celts are located in relation to the
source of the Danube, which he wrongly believed to be near the Pyrenees,
but he emphasized that the Celts lived further west in Europe than any
other race. This implies that he was thinking of them as being the people
of the Atlantic fringe, not of central Europe, but the misplacing of the
Danube source confuses the issue. Herodotus had perhaps heard that the
Kynesians and Keltoi lived in the far west (the Bay of Biscay coast of
northern Spain), not far from the Pyrenees, and that was true. It was also
true that those people lived further west than the Pillars of Heracles,
which were the Straits of Gibraltar (longitude 5° 21’W). The longitude of
La Coruña in Galicia is 8° 25’W, three degrees further west. Herodotus
was just mistaken about the course of the Danube. Nineteenthcentury
scholars chose to correct him regarding the river’s source, which is in the
Black Forest, and accordingly moved the homeland of the Celts to
southern Germany as well.
Other fragmentary references to the Keltoi suggest that some Greeks
may have used the name loosely to apply to all the tribes of northern and
western Europe.
The ancient Greeks thought their own language was the hallmark of
civilization and that people who gabbled away in foreign languages were
automatically uncivilized—the meaningless “barbar” of their speech
defined them as barbarians. So the Greeks tended to lump together all the
indigenous peoples of northern, central, and western Europe—non-
Mediterranean Europe—and treat them as if they were all the same, even
though they were not.
By the fourth century , the Celts were regarded as one of the four
BC
peripheral peoples of the known world. To the south were the Ethiopians,
to the east were the Scythians, and a long way farther off were the
Indians. It was a simple, generalized view: only the Mediterranean world
was in sharp focus.
The Roman writers of 2,000 years ago took the same view as their
Greek predecessors, regarding all the non-Latin-speaking peoples who
lived to the north as “barbarians.” The word was not used with any
anthropological accuracy—even then—and covered a multitude of
peoples with a range of customs and traditions. Roman writers had little
interest in the ethnic differences among these peoples. The word Galli
was used in the same negative way as the label “barbarian”—the Galli,