Read Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) Online
Authors: James MacKillop
Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) (6 page)
The horse, not native to Europe, was introduced about the eighth century
BC
in the Iron Age and quickly became associated with the aristocratic warrior elite. Horses were seen in continental Celtic culture only a short time before they began to be employed in sacrifices and ritual practices, as when drawing their funerary chariots, and sometimes interred with humans. Not surprisingly, then, the horse may be linked with deities other than Epona, such as the Gaulish Rudiobus, who is honoured with a beautifully preserved bronze statue
(first century
BC
) found in the Loire Valley, western France. Rudiobus may be an aspect of Gaulish Mars (see
Chapter 2
) rather than a native god. Celtic Jupiter and Celtic Apollo also had associations with the horse, the former in huge columns where the sky god and sun god would appear on horseback. Horse figurines appear as votive offerings at the healing springs of Celtic Apollo (also worshipped as Belenus).
Owning horses may have been an uncommon luxury in the remote British Isles after the fall of the Roman empire, one of the reasons the horse is conspicuously absent in the heroic tales of Fionn mac Cumhaill, for example. The horse, nevertheless, remained in high esteem. As the swiftest of terrestrial travellers, it could be associated with the courses of the heavens of the sun. The Irish hero Cúchulainn has two prized horses, Liath Macha and Dubh Sainglenn or Saingliu. The second most common man’s name in early Ireland, Eochaid/ Eochu, means something like ‘horse rider’ or ‘fighter on horseback’. According to Giraldus Cambrensis’s twelfth-century
Topographia Hibernia
, a medieval Irish ritual required the slaughter of a white mare and the would-be king’s supposed sexual union with it, an act that would assure his achievement of sovereignty (see
Chapter 3
). In early Irish and Welsh narrative the pairing of the horse with different women rings with sexual resonance. At the beginning of the action of the epic
Táin Bó Cuailnge
[The Cattle Raid of Cooley], the pregnant Macha (one of three women to bear this name) is forced to run a humiliating footrace with the horses of King Conchobar mac Nessa. At issue is her husband Crunniuc’s boast that she can outrun any steed. Breathlessly, she does cross the finish line first, and then collapses in mortal agony, giving birth to twins, cursing all the men of Ulster to suffer the pangs of childbirth (Ir.
ces noínden Ulad
) for five days and four nights at the time of their greatest difficulty (see
Chapter 9
).
Echoes of Epona and the shadowy early British goddess Rigantona survive in the sonorously named Rhiannon, one of the major female characters in the Welsh
Mabinogi
, appearing in the first and third branches. When Rhiannon rides by on a white horse, Pwyll, prince of Dyfed (southern Wales) is so bedazzled by her that he resolves to make her his wife. When Rhiannon after a few years of marriage produces a son, the infant is stolen on the night of his birth, May Eve, a fateful day on the Celtic calendar. She is falsely accused of the child’s murder
and is forced into a mortifying but telling public penance: she must sit by the horse block outside the palace gate for seven years, offering all visitors a ride on her back. In time, the son is found, identified and returned to her, after which she gives him the name Pryderi. In the third branch of the
Mabinogi
, Pryderi, risen to power, promises his still beautiful mother, Rhiannon, to a powerful comrade-in-arms, Manawydan. Rhiannon and Pryderi are some of the few to survive a deadly mist that devastates Dyfed.
As both continental and insular Celts were cattle-raising and cattle-driving peoples, their ready use of bovine imagery bespeaks profound veneration and reverence. In this they were not unlike other early Europeans. Prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux in France and Bronze Age mosaics in Crete long predate Celtic artistic expression. A small bronze figurine of a bull with extended, implicitly aggressive horns was found at Hallstatt (seventh century
BC
), and comparable figures appear in different parts of the Celtic world over the next several centuries. The Gundestrup Cauldron features two images of bulls, one of a slain carcass on the base plate, and another in which three sword-wielding warriors assault three larger-than-life bulls, their inflated stature implying supernatural rank. Abundant evidence of bull sacrifice survives in Iron Age graves and is later testified to by Pliny the Elder in
Natural History
(first century
AD
). Romanized Gauls worshipped a three-horned bull named Tarvos Trigaranus, examples of which survive in Trier, Germany, and at the Cluny Museum in Paris. Forty other figures of triple-horned bulls survive at such well-known sites as Glanum in Provence and the ringfort of Maiden Castle in Dorset. Figures of bulls are carved in stone near Burghead, northeastern Scotland.
Bulls were used in divination ceremonies in both Ireland and Scotland. The best-known of these was the
tarbfheis
[bull-feast or bull-sleep] at Tara, in which a new king was chosen by having a man, not the candidate for kingship, feast upon a slaughtered bull, lie under an incantation from druids, and then know the identity of the new king in a dream. Further discussion of early kingship appears in
Chapter 3
. A comparable ritual in Gaelic Scotland was the
taghairm
, which required a person seeking the answer to an important question about the future to wrap himself in the steaming hide of a newly slain bull in
a remote place, preferably near a waterfall. The supplicant would then learn the answer to his question while in a trance.
The most celebrated bulls in all of Celtic literature are Donn Cuailnge, the Brown Bull of Ulster, and Finnbennach, the White-horned Bull of Connacht, in the great epic of early Ireland,
Táin Βó Cuailnge
[The Cattle Raid of Cooley]. Although never anthropomorphized, the two bulls carry with them the fortunes of their respective provinces. The conflict between them is a constant theme in the narrative, and their final battle, won by Donn Cuailnge, is the climax of the action. Many commentators have observed that the bulls appear to be of divine origin. And in later oral tradition, threatening supernatural bulls are thought to inhabit certain waterways, such as the Scottish Gaelic
tarbh uisge
and the Manx
taroo ushtey
. A distant echo of the
Táin
narrative may be indicated by carvings on the stone known as Cloch nan Tarbh near Loch Lomond, in which a Scottish bull is depicted as defeating an English one.
Not being maritime peoples, the ancient Celts made relatively slight iconographic use of marine creatures. The dolphin appears widely in religious art, and a prominent dolphin on the Gundestrup Cauldron is ridden by a small male figure, perhaps a godling. Unidentifiable fish, possibly salmon, are portrayed on certain Gallo-Roman altars. Nodons, ancient god of the Severn in western England, is shown hooking a salmon. But it is not until we approach the vernacular tradition that we find extensive references to marine life, especially that living in fresh waters, the eel, the trout and, most conspicuously, the salmon.
In early Irish and Welsh traditions salmon are the repositories of otherworldly wisdom, esoteric knowledge that they have gained by eating hazelnuts fallen into pools at the headwaters of important rivers. As salmon swim from salt to fresh water, they may have been seen as travellers between worlds. Their ability to swim against the current and up cataracts easily excites human imagination, and their pink flesh may have evoked human flesh. Two salmon of wisdom are cited in Fenian stories, both touched by the hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, one at the pool of Linn Féic along the Boyne River and the second at the Falls of Assaroe on the Erne waterway. In the former, better known story, the bard Finnéces (whose name can be confused with Fionn’s, often
Finn in Old Irish) has been fishing for the salmon for seven years when the youthful hero happens along. Finnéces thinks his patience has been rewarded when he finally catches the fish and begins cooking it over a fire. But Fionn touches the cooking salmon with his thumb, burning it, and thrusts it into his mouth, thus giving himself the otherworldly wisdom Finnéces had sought. A comparable Welsh salmon swims under the name Llyn Llyw in the Severn and is the ‘wisest of forty animals’ and ‘the oldest of living creatures’; it tells the hero Culhwch where the youthful Mabon is being held prisoner.
Human interactions with salmon take many forms. Like the Norse god Loki who took the form of a salmon to escape detection, several personages are wholly or partly transformed into salmon, such as the poet Amairgin of the Milesians, Fintan mac Bóchra who survived the Biblical flood, and Taliesin the Welsh poet. Tuan mac Cairill, putative narrator of the pseudo-history
Lebor Gabála
[Book of Invasions], tells the story of being changed into a salmon and eaten by a woman who gives birth to him under his own form so that he might tell the history of Ireland. The beautiful Lí Ban of Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland becomes a salmon except for her head. The motif migrated easily into early Christian narrative, as in the story of Saint Fínán Cam’s mother who was impregnated by a salmon when she went swimming after dark. Saint Kentigern (d. 603) is reported to have found a ring in a salmon, a story which explains the seal of the City of Glasgow, of which Kentigern is a patron. The motif of the ring thrown into the water to be caught by a salmon bears the Aarne-Thompson international catalogue number of 736A, meaning the same episode is also found in other traditional literatures, without our having a clear explanation why it should be so widespread. In an Irish variant of 73 6A, Ailill (one of dozens bearing this name) casts the ring into a stream, and much later the Irish hero Fráech discovers it in a salmon’s belly.
Remnants of Celtic Religion
‘Druid’ is a troublesome word for readers of Celtic myth. As one of the few concepts from early Celtic culture to have migrated into popular usage, any mention of a ‘druid’ now conjures up a fog of associations and connotations that cannot be supported by texts written in any language before
AD
1500. ‘Druidism’, for example, will not work as a synonym for Celtic religion or Celtic culture as a whole, although such implications still exist in print. Further, the druids did not build the surviving ancient monuments in Western Europe once attributed to them, such as Stonehenge in England or Carnac in Brittany, both constructed well before Celtic languages were spoken in those areas. What little we know about the druids comes primarily from ancient sources, Greek and Roman, augmented by early Irish and Welsh documents. There is even some argument about what the root meaning of the word ‘druid’ might be.
One of the reasons we know so little about what druids thought or practised is that their learning was oral and secret, judged too sacred to be written down where it could be seized upon by the uninitiated or the profane. Such practice has many parallels in other religions, starting with the mystery cults of later Greece. The claim by modern druids to be in possession of esoteric wisdom that has survived in secret from ancient times is not supported by scholars outside their religious community.
The druids were a religious order among the Celtic peoples of ancient Britain, where, perhaps, the order originated, and Gaul and Ireland. One commentator calls them priest-philosophers, another magician-sages.
They might fulfil many roles for the society they served: judges, diviners, intellectuals, mediators with the gods. The druids of Gaul had authority over divine worship, officiated at sacrifices (including, perhaps, human sacrifices), exercised supreme authority over legislative and judicial matters, and educated elite youth along with aspirants to their order. As members of a privileged learned class, they did not have to pay taxes or serve in the military. Ancient commentators classified them in three strata, a categorization supported by early Irish records. Highest in status are the philosophers and theologians, who bear the name druid without modification. They were not the only persons of elevated rank. Below them are the diviners and seers, also known as
vates
or
manteis
. Third are the panegyric poets or
bardi
. The Irish
filid
(sing.
fili
) is an exact cognate of
vates
, and the Welsh
gwawd
is a near cognate. Bards, as we use the term in English, also existed in Ireland and Wales. Both women and men served as druids according to Irish sources, but the evidence for female druids among the ancient continental Celts is more ambiguous. In an oft-cited passage in Tacitus’
Annals
(first century
AD
), the Roman general Suetonius Paulinus was greeted on the island of Anglesey in northwest Wales by druids and also by black-robed women with dishevelled hair like furies, who stood beside but apparently separate from the druids. Several scholars have recently argued convincingly that although classical sources do not name female druids, the presence of women as magicians, warriors and commanders in battle (see
Chapter 4
) implies the likelihood of women as druids in ancient times.
Put another way, even the most reliable of classical sources were still subject to their own prejudices and may be interpreted with reference to knowledge come to light in the last century. The oldest text referring to the druids comes from an anonymous Greek from
c
.200
BC
who spoke of certain ‘philosophers’ among the barbarian Celts. Julius Caesar’s seven-volume
Gallic War
(first century
BC
) has long been the most frequently cited source, although we recognize today that many of his observations are taken from subordinates as well as from the stoic philosopher Posidonius (
c
.135–
c
.51
BC
). In Caesar’s disdainful view, druids were one of two groups of men who held honour among the Gauls, the other being the nobles (
equites
). In contrast to the nobles, the druids were a highly organized inter-tribal
brotherhood. If anyone were to disobey their decrees, the druids would give him the severest of punishments: to be barred from sacrifices. One druid was to be made chief over the others, and upon his death another would be appointed. If there were several candidates of equal merit, an assembly of druids would vote for the successor. This was not always orderly, as armed conflict was known to break out among disappointed candidates and their supporters. Once each year the druids would assemble at a sacred place in the land of the Carnutes, between the Seine and Loire Rivers, thought to be the centre of all Gaul, at which time druids would rule on all the disputes of the preceding year.
Caesar speaks of a druidical religious belief that human souls do not cease at the death of the body but are reborn in different forms. In classical times such a belief would be known as a variation of metempsychosis, a doctrine espoused by sixth-century
BC
mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras. Today we are more likely to speak of it as reincarnation, an idea found in Eastern religion and advanced by any number of modern mystics and prophets. Thus many informed commentators see the druids as Celtic counterparts of the Roman
flāmines
or the brahmins of India. There is no reliable documentation, however, to support the speculation that the druid was a Celtic equivalent of the shaman of north Asia and among native North Americans. The shaman is a healer with magical powers who serves as a medium to the spiritual world to bring about good or evil; the shaman becomes a medium in an ecstatic trance, sometimes assisted by natural hallucinogens. The only shard of evidence for a link with shamanism is the pierced antler, perhaps used as a headdress, found at a fourth-century
AD
Roman bath-site in what is now Hertfordshire.
Augmenting Caesar’s view of druidical religion is the description of a ceremony in Pliny the Elder’s
Natural History
(first century
AD
). During a festival of the sixth day of the moon, white-robed druids climb an oak tree, cut with a golden sickle the mistletoe growing there, and sacrifice two white bulls as part of a fertility rite. European mistletoe, unlike its North American counterpart, grows in nest-like balls, a parasite high on the limbs of trees such as the oak and the apple. What is implied by this procedure has been the subject of enormous commentary, including that in Sir James Frazer’s
Golden
Bough
, whose title is a translation of Virgil’s name for mistletoe. Informed opinion today asserts that the druids felt mistletoe mixed in drink could cure barrenness. The analogy is to the plant’s flourishing in winter when the oak supporting it is barren and apparently dead. But even more powers may be implied. When Lindow Man, the second-century
BC
British murder victim, was exhumed in 1984, the analysis of his stomach revealed he had eaten mistletoe pollen prior to his death.
More troublesome are the druidical associations with the oak tree. Contemporary informed opinion now rejects the etymology of the word ‘druid’ as derived from the speculative root
dervo-vidos
: ‘knowledge of the oak’. The English word ‘druid’ is not borrowed from any Celtic language and derives instead from the Latin
druidae, druides
via the French
druide
. Both Latin and Greek (
druidai
) forms are plural, presupposing a Gaulish root,
druvis
, from
druvids
, which has yet to be found in any inscription. Celtic languages offer tantalizing cognates. The Old Irish
druí
is sometimes translated as ‘druid’ but may also mean magician, wizard, diviner, poet or learned man. The Welsh
dryw
[seer] is probably a cognate of the Irish. From these Kenneth H. Jackson hypothesizes a Gaulish original of
druwids
, meaning ‘wise man of the woods’ or ‘very wise man’. These seem unrelated to the several Celtic words for oak, Old Irish
dair
, etc. But the Greek root for oak,
dru
-, is implicit in the name of the sanctuary Drunemeton among the Galatians of Anatolia, which the geographer Strabo (first century
AD
) tells us was filled with oak trees.
Whether Lindow Man was a druidical sacrifice is impossible to say on the evidence, but plentiful classical testimony speaks of the druids’ role in other human sacrifice. With some disgust, Caesar speculated that the druids felt supernatural powers could be controlled only if one human life were exchanged for another, so that victims would be slaughtered as a kind of compensation for men falling in battle. Criminals and social outcasts would be favoured for this role but, lacking them, any helpless innocent would do. Strabo supplies vivid details. The Cimbri people of Gaul (who may or may not have been Celts) liked to collect the blood from the slashed necks of victims in cauldrons with the expectation it might aid in divination. The death-throes of stabbing victims were also thought to portend the
future. Other victims might be imprisoned for five years, shot with arrows, impaled, or, most memorably, burned alive in a huge wicker figure of a man. This last image has been drawn by several artists over the centuries and was the premise of a 1973 British cult movie
The Wicker Man
. Tacitus describes druidical altars on the island of Anglesey as being drenched with blood and human entrails.
Roman contempt for the druids became the pretext for their suppression. Druidical practice was judged ‘seditious’ in occupied Gaul. Inscriptions on Gallo-Roman altars and shrines, however, indicate that elements of the older cults continued all through the Pagan period. The end of native tradition came more abruptly in Roman Britain, in
AD
61, when imperial troops pursued the druids to Anglesey and slaughtered them.
Early Irish literary record cites the names of hundreds of druids, always in prominent positions in the courts of powerful rulers. In the
Lebor Gabála
the druid Mide, eponym of the province of Mide (coextensive with Co. Meath and parts of six other counties), lights the first fire in Ireland, which lasts for seven years and from which every other fire is lit. Instead of oak, the druids of Ireland favoured the wood of the yew tree, hawthorn and rowan, especially for use in wands. Such wands might be carved with the figures of the ogham alphabet. Druids watched flame and smoke for telling signs and chewed raw flesh to induce visions. As masters of divination, they possessed three powers that would later be attributed to poets and heroes. Those powers were
díchetal do chennaib
or extempore incantation, perhaps a kind of clairvoyance or psychometry in which the seer conveys his message in quatrain or verse;
imbas forosnai
or poetic talent that illuminates, which comes to the seer only after he/she chews on a piece of red meat from a pig, dog or cat; and
teinm laida
, breaking open of the pith, most mysterious of the three, which the hero Fionn could gain by gnawing his magical thumb and chanting. With the coming of Christianity, druids were portrayed as disputing unsuccessfully with Saint Patrick and Colum Cille.
Druidism may not simply have been snuffed out with the coming of Christianity, but any argument that it has survived in some form to modern times gets no hearing from Celtic scholars in leading universities. Nonetheless, the popular press reports that people calling
themselves ‘druids’ appear from time to time at the ancient monuments of Great Britain and Ireland, especially at the time of the summer solstice. For the true believers, their faith has survived in secret through centuries of Christian hegemony. Sceptics, including nearly all academics, trace modern druidism to seventeenth-and eighteenth-century antiquarians in England, France and Germany, beginning with John Aubrey (1616–97) and William Stukeley (1687–1765), the latter of whom took the pseudonym Chyndonax, after an ancient druid allegedly named in an inscription found at Dijon, France. In their view druids had migrated to Europe from India but were nonetheless linked to aboriginal North Americans. Virtually every prehistoric monument was attributed to druidical religious practice, most prominently Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. The phrases ‘druids’ table’ and ‘druidical circles’ were applied to megalithic structures today called dolmens or portal tombs as well as to stone circles. Stukeley may have founded the Order of Druids in 1717, a claim that is disputed, but documents support Henry Hurle’s establishment of the Ancient Order of Druids, a quasi-masonic society, in 1781. A doctrinal dispute created the breakaway United Order of Druids in 1839. Under the banner of neo-druidism the Welshman Iolo Morganwg (
né
Edward Williams, 1747–1826) launched the national cultural society called Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain [Throne/Assembly of the Bards of the Isle of Britain] in 1792, which fostered a revival of interest in the Welsh national heritage.