The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn) (53 page)

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Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

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T
he introduction of horses suitable for riding or for pulling war chariots at speed provided unparalleled mobility, as culturally catalytic to the early Celts of 700 B.C. as the combustion engine would be to a later era. No longer restricted to tribal territories or depleted soils, they were free to seek new horizons. With abundant energy and superior iron weaponry they exploded from their homeland to sweep across the face of Europe.

Epona’s story is set in what is now known as Hallstatt, in the Austrian Alps, site of some of the richest finds of early Celtic archeology. The Celts were never, in the truest sense, a nation, but a loose confederacy of tribes spread through the mountains and rich river valleys of ancient Europe, developing their own unique culture even as Troy fell and Athens rose. Theirs was the Bronze Age, and the spectacular, historymaking dawn of the Age of Iron.

Within a century of acquiring the eastern horse and marstering iron, the prototype of the Celtic warrior was fully developed. Fearless, passionate, proud, poet and warrior,
headhunter and entrepreneur, the tall Celt emerged from dim prehistory to furnish much of the foundation stock for modern Europe. Becoming equestrians brought to the surface qualities that may have been lying dormant in earlier, proto-Celtic natures: a fiery temperament, a taste for adventure, the idealism of one whose star is always just over the horizon.

Tracing the Celtic trail backward through time meant sifting the vast amount of information coming to light as archeologists focus more and more interest on non-Mediterranean Europeans, as well as studying Celtic mythology and folklore to find the seeds of real history from which such stories grow.

Progress often occurs in the fringe areas where two cultures clash. When Celt met Scyth, West met East, and the wily Celt profited greatly from the exchange. Herodotus, the earliest historian to write extensively of the Scythians, provided a springboard for an exploration of their culture, though his geography of the Ukraine and the steppes was flawed. However, his comments on the Scythian culture have proved to be less fanciful than we once thought, as archeologists learn more about Eastern Europe and the region from above the Black Sea to the Altai Mountains.

The preliterate history of the Celts is also manifest in their artifacts, and can be constructed, to some degree, from their own bardic tales and the imprint they left on subsequent cultures. The first to write of them were the Greeks, who called them
keltoi,
a phonetic version of their own name for them-selves. Later, Julius Caesar would have ample opportunity to write of them and to study them. As Gauls and Britons they proved to be among his most formidable opponents, and he would arbitrarily divide Gaul into three parts to avoid confronting the Germanic branch of the family.

The magic of the Celtic Druids would fuel the fires of imagination in song and story for over two thousand years—and be absorbed into many other religions. The symbols of that forgotten faith remain with us to the present day, their shapes only slightly changed. And wherever the Celts went, they carried with them the stories of those who had come to be their deities, those who had done spectacular things in their
own age and time. Goibban, eventually known as Goibniu, whom the Romans equated with Vulcan. Nematona, goddess of the trees. Toutorix (also known as Teutates), Taranis, and Esus, the Celtic trinity. A host of other figures who passed into mythology as Suleva and Macha, Rigantona and Vallaunus—and great Cernunnos, lord of the animals. Cernunnos would be transmogrified, in ways only a shapechanger might fully appreciate, into the fearsome werewolf of Transylvanian legend, to haunt the Carpathian mountains forever. The shapechanger, ancient practitioner of sympathetic magic, consecrated to the good of the tribe, was to acquire a peculiar secondary immortality.

But the most truly influential of all the Celtic pantheon, in the long sweep of history, would be Epona herself. Goddess of the horse.

Aided by the horse, the Celts expanded into what is now northern Italy; into Switzerland, Hungary, southern Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Rumania, as well as into Germany, Belgium, and France. They sacked Rome in 390 B.C. and were in Delphi a century later. As Galatians, in central Anatolia, they were the recipients of epistles from Saint Paul in the Christian era.

Their energy carried them westward as well, toward that horizon that has always lured the adventurer. They crossed the Pyrenees and entered Iberia; they crossed the channel to Albion, to shape Britain and give birth to Arthur. They dared the cold Irish Sea to set foot on green lerne, five hundred years before Christ was born.

They carried With them complex art forms, unexcelled craftsmanship, a passion for poetry and music, and a deep reverence for nature. They passed on their vitality and fierce love of liberty to their descendants, a bequest ultimately carried by the peoples of Europe to the New World.

The Celtic contribution to western civilization has never been fully appreciated. For the countless millions who, perhaps unknowingly, carry that indomitable blood in their veins today, it is a priceless heritage.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE HORSE GODDESS

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eISBN 9781429983464

First eBook Edition : January 2011

ISBN: 0-812-55503-1

Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 82-6234

First Tor edition: July 1998