Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [132]
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.
MYTHIC VOICES
As a nation they are extremely superstitious. People suffering from diseases, as well as those who are exposed to danger in battle, offer human sacrifices at ceremonies conducted by the Druids. They believe that the only way of preserving one man’s life is to let another man die in his place. Regular tribal sacrifices are held, at which colossal figures made of wickerwork are filled with living men, and then set alight so that the victims burn to death. They think that the gods prefer the sacrifice of thieves and bandits, but whenever there is a shortage of criminals, they do not hesitate to make up the number with innocent men.
—JULIUS CAESAR, The Battle for Gaul
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