The popular image of Celtic pagan religion as promoted by neo-Druids and various New Age pagan groups is a simple and somewhat otherworldly nature worship. This view comes from an over-reliance on the testimony of Caesar and other Classical writers who wished to portray the Celts as irrational and superstitious barbarians. The Celts had some highly distinctive religious practices, especially their cult of the severed head, and they were unusual in ancient Europe in having a class of professional priests known as Druids. However, in most respects, the religious beliefs and practices of the Celts were similar to those of contemporary Romans, Greeks and Germans. All were polytheists, all believed in the efficacy of sacrifice and divination, magic spells and witchcraft. All reverenced significant features of the landscape, such as springs and rivers. All were mortally afraid of ghosts and believed that there was no clear boundary bet weenthe natural and the supernatural. Human sacrifice and the cult of the severed head apart, there was really nothing in Celtic religion that was not compatible with Roman beliefs.
Though they were polytheists, the Celts did not have an ordered pantheon of gods like the Greeks and Romans. The names of over 400 Celtic deities are known, the vast majority of which were associated only with a particular tribe or, like the Roman genius loci, with a particular place. The goddess Sequana, for instance, was worshipped only at her shrine at the source of the river Seine. Each tribe probably had its own pantheon, which overlapped to some degree with those of neighbouring tribes, as some gods are known that were worshipped more widely. A mother goddess, who was frequently portrayed as a triple entity, was worshipped almost universally. Hammer-wielding Sucellus, a god of the underworld, was worshipped across most of Gaul, Switzerland and southern Germany, while the warlike god Teutates was worshipped in Britain, Gaul and the Alpine region. The worship of a god with horns or antlers who was a lord of the beasts was also widespread: in Gaul he was called Cernunnos. One of the most widespread cults was that of the sun god Lugh, who was worshipped in Iberia, Ireland and Gaul, where his major cult centre was at Lyon {Lugdunum). Given their reputation for clever speech, it should be no surprise that the Celts also venerated a god of eloquence called Ogmios. These gods did not necessarily have the same attributes everywhere they were worshipped. Lugh was a musician and a war god in Ireland but he was a god of trade and technology in Gaul. The Celts did not have any concept of Heaven or Hell or the judgement of the dead. The Otherworld was conceived of as being essentially subterranean and they apparently believed that the afterlife would be similar to this one as they buried their dead with offerings appropriate to their rank and sex. The Hallstatt practice of barrow burial was abandoned by the La Tene Celts in favour of interment in flat grave cemeteries. From the second century bc the practice of cremation gradually spread through most of the Celtic world, though not to all parts of the British Isles. On the continent Celtic burials became scarce after 150 bc.
Plate 1 Panel of the Gundestrup cauldron showing a ritual drowning Source: National Museum, Copenhagen, Werner
Perhaps indicating another change in funerary customs. The dead may have been disposed of by exposure or some other method that has left no trace in the earth.
Celtic gods had to be propitiated by sacrifices, which could range from food to hoards of weapons and jewellery and human sacrifices. Sacrifices were usually buried in the ground, a sign of the importance of chthonic (underworld) deities to the Celts, or deposited under water. Though there is some suggestion that the practice was declining at the time of the Roman conquest, human sacrifice was neither rare nor unusual. Many methods are recorded. The victims of Teutates were drowned in a vat of water, those of the thunder god Taranis were burned in wicker effigies or beheaded. A feature of Celtic human sacrifice is overkill, such as the triple death (head injuries, garrotting and throat cutting) meted out to Lindow Man, who was killed and placed in a peat bog in Cheshire, England, in the first century ad. The Lusitanians sacrificed human victims for the purpose of divination, so that their entrails could be examined for signs and portents, but the exact purposes of most human sacrifices are conjectural. Late Iron Age sanctuaries at Ribemont-sur-Ancre and Gournay-sur-Aronde (France), in the territory of the warlike Belgae, provide evidence that the sacrifice of prisoners of war was common. At Gournay the bones of around a thousand people were burned in square-shaped, open-topped ossuaries. The bones had first been crushed to expose the marrow, which the Gauls, in common with the Greeks, believed to be the home of the soul on which the gods of the underworld fed. Thousands of weapons and pieces of armour were displayed, both on a platform over the gateway to the sanctuary and on poles around its perimeter. When the weather and the decay of wooden and leather parts finally brought these to the ground, they were ritually destroyed by the priests and thrown into a ditch, a common practice for ritually deposited weapons throughout the Celtic world. The sanctuary at Ribemont also provided evidence for the burning of human bones, but the most spectacular find was a deposit of 80 decapitated skeletons mingled with weapons that was found by the sanctuary’s outer wall. The headless bodies and weapons had probably been heaped together as a communal trophy to celebrate a victory in war. The missing heads had probably been offered to Taranis, who was partial to severed heads, or were kept by individual warriors as personal trophies. We know from written sources that the heads of important victims could become treasured family heirlooms, to be passed from one generation to the next. To modern sensibilities, these displays of rotting dismembered corpses seem nothing short of horrifying, yet for the Celts who owned and created them they probably gave feelings of security and pride, knowing that they would intimidate their enemies and win the favour of their gods.
The practice of human sacrifice does not set the Celts so far apart from their contemporaries as it was common among the Germans too. The Greeks and Romans of Classical times did not normally perform human sacrifice, but even these most gruesome of Celtic practices have some parallels in the Mediterranean civilisations. Not only was ritual destruction of weapons practised by other European peoples, such as early Germans and pagan Vikings, but also, according to Plutarch, by the Romans. A sunken altar found at Gournay, similar to the Greek escharon, which was sacred to the gods of the underworld, provides evidence of links between Gallic religion and Greek chthonic cults. In Homer’s Iliad Achilles sacrificed Trojan prisoners on the funeral pyre of his friend and lover Patroclus. Homer regarded this as a primitive practice, long since abandoned. Gladiatorial combats (adopted in Rome in 264 bc from the Etruscans) were in origin funeral games in which slaves fought to the death. The fresh blood that spilled onto the ground was thought to benefit the soul of the deceased. Later Roman scholars, such as Festus (second century ad), believed that it was a less cruel substitute for human sacrifices which had formerly been performed over the graves of the deceased. And was the Roman practice of executing prisoners during the celebration of a triumph not really a form of ritual killing?
No aspect of Celtic religion has attracted more attention than the Druids. Druids were more than Just priests. They served a demanding 20-year apprenticeship during which they had to commit to memory a vast body of orally transmitted verse (a mnemonic device) comprising religious lore, magic, medicine, law, astronomy and tribal history. As well as performing religious rituals and divination, Druids also had educational and legal
Responsibilities. Their knowledge gave them political influence and status, though most were probably drawn from the aristocracy in the first place as no peasant could afford the luxury of such an apprenticeship. Though a single reference mentions Druids wearing white robes, there is really no reason to believe that they habitually dressed any differently from any other member of the tribal elite. It is also uncertain how widespread Druidism was as Druids are only ever mentioned by Classical writers in connection with Britain and Gaul. Druids performed ceremonies in sacred oak groves, but from the second century bc temples and sacred enclosures became increasingly common in Gaul, central Europe and south-east Britain. This seems to indicate that the process of state formation in the Celtic world was accompanied by a move to more formal forms of worship, comparable to those in the Greek and Roman world. In southern Gaul, the architecture of Celtic temples shows Classical influences, but they retained distinctive Celtic features, including skull niches. Elsewhere, an indigenous form of rectangular ditched enclosure appeared, containing a central sanctuary building and sacrificial pits. The temple at Gournay-sur-Aronde, discussed above, was of this type.
World History
