A Brief History of the Celts (25 page)

The old Irish word for ‘truth’ is the basis for the linguistic concepts of holiness, righteousness, faithfulness, as well as for religion and for justice. Even in modern Irish one
can say: ‘
Tá sé/sí in áit na fhírinne anois
’ when a person dies. This literally means: ‘He/she is in the place of Truth now.’
This basic philosophy of pre-Christian Celtic religion has many parallels with eastern Indo-European concepts and we find an exact parallel in the Persian-Iranian religion of Parseeism. In the
Hindu Vedas we find that Truth (
rta
) is a land in the highest state of paradise and the source of the sacred Ganges. The Vedas say that ‘by means of Truth the earth endures’.
The same concept is expressed in the famous
Audacht
or will of the Brehon, Morannmac Cairbre, who left instructions for the high king, Feradach Finn Fachtnach (
AD
95–117), which are recorded in
Leabhar Laignech
(
Book of Leinster
).

The Celtic religion was based on a moral system which distinguished right from wrong. In old Irish the terms were
fas
and
nefas
, what was lawful (
dleathacht
) and
unlawful (
neamhdleathacht
), and the teachings were impressed on people by a series of taboos (
geasa
). Moral salvation was the
responsibility of the
individual. The Celtic Christian theologian Pelagius (
c
.
AD
354–420) was accused of reviving pre-Christian Celtic philosophies, specifically the
‘Natural Philosophy of the Druids’; he argued that men and women could take the initial and fundamental step towards their salvation, using their own efforts and not accepting things as
preordained.

Augustine of Hippo had taught that mankind took on Adam’s original sin and had no free will in effecting its own salvation. Whether people did good deeds or bad deeds in life, they were
already fated, everything was preordained. Pelagius argued that Augustine’s theories imperilled the entire moral law. If men and women were not responsible for their good or evil deeds, there
was nothing to restrain them from an indulgence in evil-doing on the basis that it was preordained and they were not responsible.

Pelagius’ arguments were an echo of the more progressive aspect of pre-Christian Celtic philosophy. But Augustine of Hippo prevailed and Pelagius was declared a heretic. For many
centuries, the Celtic Christian movement was considered to be imbued with Pelagius’ teachings. It was not that the Celts consciously accepted Pelagius’ teachings, but the belief that
men and women had free will and were responsible for their actions was an essential part of the Celtic culture. Curiously, although Christianity finally accepted Pelagius’ teachings,
Augustine of Hippo is still regarded as a saint and Pelagius as a heretic.

Concurrently with Pelagius, there were several other Celtic philosophers writing tracts which are now all lumped together as ‘Pelagian’. They shared a common set of philosophies. It
is not surprising that we can identify them as Celts and their early writings also showed a social philosophy which has distinct echoes in insular Celtic law systems. The British Celtic bishop
Fastidius, writing
De Vita Christiana
(
The Christian Life
) about
AD
411, argued:

The hospitality of Celtic kings and chieftains is well documented in mythology and stipulated in law. The rights and duties of a ruler to see that no one, particularly strangers
in his land, went hungry, the law forbidding the exploitation of workers, the fines in Irish law for anyone profiting from causing injury – all these point to the fact that Pelagius and the
other ‘Pelagian’ writers shared a particular cultural background.

We know that, like most ancient peoples, the Celts practised divination, foretelling the future or will of the gods by the presence of good or bad omens. The Greeks and Romans claimed that the
Celtic priests searched for prophetic signs in the entrails of sacrificial animals and in the flight of birds. Augury, or bird flight, was a method particularly used by the Etruscans who, like the
Romans and other civilisations, also looked for signs in animal entrails. This was known as
haruspices
(auspices) and the art was called the
Etrusca disciplina
. A college of
Etruscan augurs was established in Rome.

Both Strabo and Diodorus Siculus, using as their only source Poseidonius, claimed that the Druids (or Druidic priests) divined from the death throes of human victims. Caesar repeated the
information. They described the Celtic priests as plunging a dagger into a victim and watching his death throes. Tacitus, echoing these earlier writers, says: ‘The Druids consult the gods in
the palpitating entrails of men.’ Indeed, the reputation of the ancient Celts as indulging in human sacrifice relies on several Roman-orientated writers, who can all be traced back to one
informant only – the source
of all ‘human sacrifice’ tales is Poseidonius. Those who mention human sacrifice all explain that it was only used in
divination or to propitiate the gods. Cicero among others repeats this: ‘they find it necessary to propitiate the immortal gods and defile their altars and temples with human
victims.’

Of course, human sacrifice in religious matters was certainly practised in the ancient Indo-European world and we may ask why the Celts should have been singled out for criticism in this way.
Yet we have only the unsupported word of Poseidonius as the basis for all these accusations. We also have to bear in mind that the Romans had an agenda of their own in denigrating the Celts and
making them less than human. The curious thing is that the Romans practised human sacrifice themselves. For after Hannibal’s victory at Cannae in 216
BC
, the Romans
sacrificed two Celtic prisoners and two Greek prisoners by burying them alive in the Forum Boarium in Rome to propitiate their gods.

Roman writers loved to talk about Celtic savagery, the quality of being fierce, cruel and uncivilised. By Rome’s own bloodthirsty standards, any Celtic cruelty seems to have been quite
mild. Ritual killings were a way of Roman life and in the Tullianum, at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, state prisoners were ceremonially executed to appease the gods of war. What else is this but
human sacrifice? Vercingetorix, who surrendered to save his people in 52
BC
, was incarcerated for six years before being ritually slaughtered to celebrate Caesar’s
triumph.

The view of Roman society as advanced and moral, and the acceptance of their condemnation of human sacrifice among the Celts, based on a single authority who was then repeated
ad
nauseam
, is curious to say the least. In 264
BC
Marcus and Decimus Brutus decided to mark the death of their father by having three pairs of slaves fight to the death
as a sacrifice to the Roman gods and with the approval of the priests. Julius Caesar in 46
BC
, so disapproving of human sacrifice among the
Celts,
had slaves fight to the death to commemorate the funeral of his daughter Julia.

This form of sacrifice reached its peak in the fourth century
AD
. Diocletian (
AD
284–305) is recorded as having had 17,000 men, women and
children slaughtered in the arena in one month alone. By the first century
AD
most Roman writers, even if begrudgingly, agreed that human sacrifice among the Celts was a
thing of the past. They obviously could not repeat Poseidonius’ comments as applying to their own time; a time when tens of thousands were being ritually slaughtered in the Roman arena for
the sake of entertainment.

It is certainly true to say that in the insular Celtic literatures there is no tradition, no shadow of a tradition, of human sacrifice. As this material was written down by Christian clerics,
who would have taken any opportunity to denigrate the pagan beliefs of their ancestors, it must be argued that had there been any such practice it would have come under fierce attack.

In terms of divination of the future, Greek and Roman writers observe that the Celts were renowned for their ‘speculation from the stars’, which meant that they practised astrology
and were adept at astronomy. We have already considered this aspect of Celtic culture in Chapter 9.

CELTIC MYTH AND LEGEND

T
he evidence of the myths and legends of the
ancient
Celts is, strictly speaking, scanty. The reason for this is that those myths and
legends were not committed to a written form until the Christian period when they were given a Christian ‘gloss’ and when the ancient gods and goddesses were adjusted to new roles to
fit in with the precepts of the new religion.

Even with this caveat, the Celtic languages contain one of Europe’s oldest and most vibrant mythologies. What do we mean precisely by mythology? It is a sacred tradition embracing a whole
set of concepts covering the philosophical beliefs of a given culture. Some have argued that myths are parables to explain ideas on imponderable questions. Basically, the function of mythology is
to give an account of the religious ideas, including the concept of creation, and the fortunes of a people. It leads, almost seamlessly, into the legends of a culture, that is the oral history of
the people from the distant past. Again, there is a fine line between legend and the historical reality.

When the insular Celtic traditions were first committed to writing about the sixth century
AD
, it was a development of a far earlier and highly
sophisticated oral tradition. Those entrusted with handing on the myths orally had to be word perfect and, as Julius Caesar remarked, it sometimes took twenty years for trainees to learn the lore
before they were regarded as ‘qualified’. Therefore, the traditions contained an echo of voices from the dawn of European civilisation. The late Professor Kenneth Jackson once described
the Irish
Táin Bó Cuailgne
as ‘a window on the Iron Age’.

Certainly the Irish myths still have a particular vibrancy as Ireland was the only Celtic land to escape Roman conquest and was relatively uninfluenced by contact with Rome until the Christian
period. Then, however, Latin culture was the vehicle by which the new religion was imported. The Christian scribes tended to bowdlerise the pagan vibrancy of the myths and give them a Christian
veneer.

Some of this veneer is quite blatant. For example, the sea god Manannán Mac Lir, in one story, foretells the coming of Christ to save the world. In another, the great hero
Cúchulainn pleads with St Patrick to intercede with Christ to save him from the ‘Fires of Hell’, out of which the saint has summoned him to prove a point to a pagan Irish
monarch. As the stories were set down by individuals, working at varying times and copying more often than not from older books as well as oral tradition, the pre-Christian vitality in Irish myth
has not been entirely obliterated.

Irish mythology has been categorised into four sections. ‘The Mythological Cycle’ relates to the various ‘invasions’ of Ireland, from that of Cesair, at the time of the
Deluge, through the invasions of Partholón, Nemed, the Firbolg, the Dé Danaan and the sons of Milesius, the progenitors of the Gael. In the background lurk the ancient deities of
Ireland, the Tuatha Dé Danaan, the Children of Danu. This group of tales are the closest to the creation myths in any Celtic language.
We find the gods and goddesses,
the Children of Danu, have arrived in Ireland from their four fabulous Otherworld cities, to overthrow the Firbolg and claim Ireland for their own. However, the real villains are the Tuatha de
Domhain, the Children of Domhnu, who are also called the Fomorii (
fo
, under,
morii
, sea, so ‘undersea dwellers’). It becomes clear that the Children of Danu are the
deities of light and good, while the Children of Domhnu are the deities of darkness and evil. The cycle ends with the arrival of the mortals in Ireland, the sons of Golamh, known in Latin as
Míle Easpain (Soldier of Spain) or Milesius. He is identified as an Iberian Celt who has wandered the world selling his military services. He has served Nectanebus, the pharaoh of Egypt, and
married his daughter, Scota. This is a device to explain the word ‘Scotii’ as applied to the Irish of this period and eventually the name ‘Scotland’. There is another Scota
in Irish mythology who was the daughter of the pharaoh Cingris and became the wife of Niul, mother of Goidel.

The old gods and goddesses are defeated and are forced to retreat underground, dwelling in the hills (
sídhe
). Eventually, they are called ‘people of the hills’ and
the
sídhe
become ‘fairies’ in folklore. The best known is the banshee (
bean sídhe
, woman of the fairies) who wails outside the home of the family to whom
she is attached when one of that family is about to die. The great god of arts and crafts, Lugh, was demoted to
Lugh chronáin
(stooping Lugh), Anglicised as
‘leprechaun’.

The second group of tales are called ‘The Ulster Cycle’. These are the stories of the deeds of the ‘warriors of the Red Branch’, the military élite of Ulster of
whom Cúchulainn was the great champion. This group of tales contains the famous epic
Táin Bó Cuailgne
, often regarded as the Irish equivalent of the
Iliad
.
This is the story of the campaign waged by Medb, the masterful queen of Connacht, to capture the famous Brown Bull of Ulster. She leads a vast army against the
kingdom of
Ulster whose warriors are prevented from defending it by a strange debility inflicted by the war goddess Macha. Only the youthful hero Cúchulainn is able to carry on a single-handed
resistance against her army.