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is far from clear. Caesar identifies a Gaulish pantheon headed by Mercury and including Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Minerva; corroborating evidence is so absent, however, that one has to suspect he is simply pinning Roman tails on a Celtic donkey.7 It is the Gaulish sculptures and inscriptions (we have no stories, unfortunately) that attest to the true nature of Celtic religion: no pantheon, but rather localized deities with localized functions; and this accords with what we know of the Celts politically, for they had little tolerance for centralized authority, even their own. The more widespread and possibly more important deities include Lugos (Mercury in Caesar, Lug in Ireland, Lleu in Wales; he gave his name to Lyon, Leiden and Liegnitz (Legnica), as well as to the Irish autumn festival of Lugnasad); Belenos, whose name means ‘bright’ and who might have been a rough counterpart to Apollo; Maponos (Mabon in Wales, the Macc Óc in Ireland; his name means ‘great son’); Ogmios, whom Lucian describes as the Gaulish Herakles and as a god of eloquence;8 Cernunnos, whose name means ‘horned’ and who presumably is the homed figure on the Gundestrup cauldron; and Epona, a goddess whose name means ‘great horse’. Much attention has been given to the trio of Esus, Taranis and Teutates in Lucan9 and to the sacrifices with which they allegedly were appeased (hanging, burning and drowning, respectively), but their true importance is uncertain. Evidence as to how these and other Celtic gods (who are literally too numerous to mention) related to each other – the kind of testimony we find in Greek mythology – is totally lacking.

The evidence of the Irish tales, our third and final source, is abundant, but it has suffered from faulty transmission, political distortion, historical overlays and church censorship; the result is no clearer than that from the continent. The Ireland of the tales comprises two worlds, ‘real’ and ‘other’; but the line between them is not well demarcated. Even the location of the otherworld – which should not be confused with the Classical underworld – is uncertain: sometimes it is to the west, over the sea; sometimes it is in the south-west of Ireland (where it may be called the ‘House of Dond’, Dond being a chthonic deity); but usually it is found in the great pre-Celtic burial mounds of the Síde, of which the most important in the tales is Bruig na Bóinde, today’s New Grange. The Irish otherworld is, not surprisingly, a stylized, idealized version of the real one: everyone is beautiful, and there is an abundance of beautiful things, and the joys of life are endless – hunting, feasting, carousing, perhaps even love. Paradoxically (of course), though this otherworld makes the real one seem a shadow by comparison, it is the Síde who are the shadows, for they have no physical strength for fighting; just as Pwyll, in ‘Pwyll Lord of Dyved’, is asked to fight on behalf of the otherworld ruler Arawn, so Cú Chulaind, in ‘The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulaind’, is asked to fight on behalf of the otherworld ruler Labraid Lúathlám. The Síde are distinguished primarily by their power of transformation: they move invisibly, or they turn themselves (and others) into birds and animals. But they exert no moral authority, and, while they can injure and heal, they do not have that power over life and death characteristic of the Greek Olympians. Often they seem just like ordinary humans.

Relatively few of the names from Gaulish inscriptions reappear in Ireland – given the decentralized nature of Gaulish religion, this is not surprising. Lug is the major figure in ‘The Second Battle of Mag Tured’, but in the stories included in this volume he appears prominently only as the father of Cú Chulaind. The Macc Óc is a central character in both ‘The Wooing of Étaín’ and ‘The Dream of Óengus’, but he has been so thoroughly euhemerized that there is no trace of the Gaulish Maponos; and such names as the Dagdae, Mider, Bóand, Étaín. Cáer Ibormeith, Medb and Cú Ruí have no apparent continental counterparts. Many of the quasi-divine figures in