The Celtic world can be traced back to the Bronze Age, but it is already between the 9th and 5th centuries BC. C., in the Iron Age, when specialists consider that they can speak without reservations of their civilization, which would last well into the Middle Ages, although in clear decline from much earlier.
With a basically agrarian society, the social structure was divided into three strata: at the top were the druids, experts in religion and law, and the aristocracy, who dominated the tribes; below, artisans and merchants; and, finally, the peasants.
To talk about the Celtic religion is to talk about the druids, a word that, from the Indo-European roots wid (knowledge) and deru (oak, their sacred tree), could be translated as “the connoisseur of the oak”, that is, “the one who He has knowledge of the sacred.” It constituted the priestly caste of the main Celtic peoples, especially the Gauls and Islanders. However, we lack news of it in others, which raises a question about its universality. This caste was made up of selected young people who received extensive oral instruction from an older member.
Cloaked in a sacred character, the druids were not celibate and could own property, although they tended to lead an austere and retired life, dedicated to learning the most varied disciplines. These included jurisprudence, divination, astrology and therapeutic knowledge of plants.
They also made their lunar calendars, which began with the festival of Samain, the first day of November, a precursor to our festival of All Saints and Anglo-Saxon Halloween. They were the guardians of morality, based on respect for tradition, and, although we do not know their exact organization, a hierarchy divided into five degrees is assumed: students, diviners, vates, bards and druids.
They met during the summer solstice in specific places, such as in the French town of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, for the Gauls, or in Mona (Anglesey), among the islanders. In these congregations they performed sacrifices and judged some especially serious cases, whose punishments had to be carried out under penalty of being excluded from public life.
According to their beliefs, all living beings came from Mother Earth through an intangible force in constant renewal, whose physical image was the Sun. Also different trees, whose function was to relate the celestial world with the earthly world, received a special veneration. .
It is not surprising that most religious ceremonies were celebrated in the clearings of their sacred forests, but also in lakes and rivers. In these meetings, material offerings were made, such as weapons, which were previously broken so that they could not be reused. But this did not exclude, due to Greco-Roman influence, the existence of small temples, never in large numbers, in which wooden images of their divinities were worshiped.
The mistletoe that grew at the foot of the oaks was important. They collected it with a small sickle, and it was used to prepare a drink of miraculous character.
The number of their gods was enormous. They can be classified into Pan-Celtic and other tribal divinities, who often presented similar attributes with different names. In the mythological scenes of the Gundestrup gilded silver cauldron there are magnificent examples.
The main deities were Lug, giver of all knowledge; Teutates, protector of commerce; Cernunnos, the deer god, lord of all animals; Tarannis, who ruled atmospheric phenomena and war; o Epona, goddess of fertility identified with a mare. However, they often accumulated and shared attributes.
For the Celts, life did not end in this world, but rather there was an afterlife. In it they kept a memory of their previous existence and could contact their relatives, who had the obligation to preserve their memory. Hence, along with the deceased’s trousseau, messages could be added for previous deceased, of which he would become the bearer.
If the passage of time diluted its memory, the spirit could pass to a higher level of wisdom, or it could be reincarnated in the event that its earthly existence had not been, from a moral point of view, completely satisfactory, in view of restart a process that tended towards immortality.
Celtic religiosity incorporated an aspect that was repugnant to Greco-Roman chroniclers: human sacrifice. To appease their gods, those people did not hesitate to ritually kill inmates or prisoners. They were hanged, slit their throats, drowned or burned alive in wicker containers, when not subjected to several of these torments at the same time, evident proof of the complexity of the ritual.
They also developed a cult of the skull of enemies killed in combat, believing that strength and courage resided in the head. Hence they were decapitated, and their skull was carefully preserved, as the Entremont site makes clear, where pillars with niches containing skulls have appeared. Even so, the complexity of the topic means that its true meaning often escapes us.
This belief system was always frowned upon, not only by the Roman authorities, but also by their Christian heirs, fearful that it could keep the flame of rebellion alive. For this reason they maintained a special effort to make the druid caste disappear. However, features of his teachings persisted in a tradition conveyed by the different variants of the Celtic language, which, like Gaelic, have persisted to the present day.
This text is part of an article published in number 460 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.