The Everything Celtic Wisdom Book: Find inspiration through ancient traditions, rituals, and spirituality

Introduction

I GREW UP IN a family that was tremendously proud of its European immigrant roots, which included a large proportion of Irish ancestors. As a child, I had a tremendous love of fantasy and fairy tales, especially when I discovered that my quite ordinary first name was in fact a variant of the name of a legendary queen—Guinevere, the wife of King Arthur. And although I was raised far away from ancestral haunts, I grew up convinced that the woods of upstate New York were as magical as those of Ireland. I believed that the fairy-folk had traveled with us, remaining just out of sight in the woods surrounding us. In a sense, I was sharing the same communion with the natural world that was a way of life to my distant ancestors.

Eventually, I discovered that my appreciation for nature and my love of fairy stories were more closely connected than I ever thought possible and that the characters in the stories I read were based on the exploits of the ancient Celtic gods and heroes, then real fairy-folk.

The Celts emerged as a recognizable people thousands of years ago. They were brilliant poets, skilled artisans, adept farmers, and fierce warriors. But because of their reliance on oral tradition, they left no written record to tell of their accomplishments. Until recent times, this left the historical Celts with no voice with which to defend themselves from the history recorded by their political and religious enemies, who portrayed them as bloodthirsty, intemperate barbarians. Their Roman and Greek observers admired their skills in war but viewed Celts on the whole as largely violent, crass, and drunken. Likewise, the Christian missionaries who set out to convert druidic Celts were convinced that the whole of druid spirituality was violent sacrifice and superstitious omens.

Having little or no knowledge of the Celtic languages, these recorders were almost completely unaware of the complex and deeply spiritual oral traditions of the Celtic bards and druids. Archaeological evidence has gone a very long way toward establishment of an accurate depiction of the Celts, who represent one of Europe’s greatest civilizations. Celtic artifacts, coupled with the very few firsthand accounts of Celtic life and religion, paint a picture of a rich culture of wealth, intelligence, and above all, spiritual accomplishment.

Celtic religion prized wisdom and study, but also focused on the liminal—Celtic belief focused on the threshold between man and the divine, using complex symbolism to express a doctrine of transformation, interconnectedness, and communion with the natural world. This spiritual wellspring runs so deeply in the hearts of the Celts that it has survived for thousands of years, creating a spirituality that is uniquely distinguished and crosses religious boundaries, inspiring both Christianity and paganism.

CHAPTER 1

The Celtic World

Warriors, poets, scholars, and visionaries—the ancient Celts were a people out of time. Celtic society was remarkably free, open, and democratic. Women were highly regarded, art and scholarship highly prized. Celts as warriors were fierce and fearless with a highly developed sense of justice, and an insult or injustice to one was generally regarded as an injury to all. The Celts were also renowned explorers, questing optimists ever seeking greener pastures. As a result, a majority of Americans and Europeans today have some Celtic ancestry, a testament to the tenacity of the Celtic spirit.

The Story of the Celts

The people we know today as Celts were already well established when their Greek neighbors began to refer to them as Keltoi, from which the word Celt was derived. The word was taken from a word used by a Celtic tribe to describe themselves, but its meaning is uncertain—some linguists believe it means to strike or fight, others believe it means hidden, referring to the intense secrecy surrounding Celtic spiritual knowledge.

There never was a unified body of people known collectively as Celt. In historical terms, Celt or Celtic refers to any of the peoples who spoke one of the Celtic family of languages and shared common cultural influences.

Even today you hear the echoes of this ancient culture—the influence of artists thousands of years past can be seen nearly everywhere one looks, with ancient patterns appearing everywhere from tattoos to coffee cups. The mythic quest of Celtic mythology still excites the imagination of poets and writers, so that much of today’s literature and cinema has roots in ancient Celtic tales of heroes, quests, and magical enchantment.

The words Gael or Gaelic today are often used interchangeably with Celt and Celtic. The word Gael comes from the Old Irish Goídeleg (from Gaul), and specifically refers to the people and languages of Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. British Celts and their languages are referred to as Brythonic, and the two groups together are referred to as Insular, differentiated from the Gallic or continental Celts.

Historically, the Celtic civilization did not so much emerge as erupt. Adventurous and technologically advanced tribes spread rapidly over European soil, absorbing and combining with the native cultures they encountered along the way.

It is not entirely certain when the magic moment occurred that set the Celtic people apart from the Indo-European peoples they are descended from, but we do know that some 7,000 years or so ago, the ancestors of the Celtic tribes began to migrate from the Caucasus Mountains region surrounding the Black Sea and began to settle in the areas of Europe now known as France, Germany, Spain, and Italy—even as distant as Turkey. By the fourth century B.C.E., the Celtic tribes had established strongholds throughout Western Europe, where they were to remain the dominant power for hundreds of years.

Before the Celts: The Cosmic People

Little is known of the early Europeans who preceded the Celts; their day-to-day lives and customs can only be guessed at by the artifacts they left behind them. Long before the Celtic settlers began their westward sweep, these ancient people built astonishing monuments to the cosmos—their massive stone circles demonstrate a great knowledge of astronomy, and mysterious underground passage tombs reveal a belief in rebirth or resurrection. It is on these tombs that we find the earliest examples of the solar triple spiral, a symbol of eternity that is now nearly synonymous with Celtic spirituality.

As the Celts swept westward, they incorporated these ancient monuments and their symbols into their ceremonies and mythology. The stone circles became arenas of the gods, and the passage tombs became Sídhe, entrances to the Otherworld. Their people were viewed as the supernatural spiritual ancestors of the Celts, the Tuatha Dé Danann, or People of the Goddess Danu, who later passed into English folklore as the fairy-folk.

The word banshee (Ban sídhe) originally referred to a female of the Sídhe, but later came to refer to a type of mourning ghost in Celtic folklore whose appearance presaged death.

One of the best-known of these ancient monuments is the megalithic passage tomb at Newgrange, Ireland, a gigantic earthwork whose best-known feature is the annual illumination of its inner chamber by a shaft of sunlight at dawn during the winter solstice. Some theorize that the tomb was used to facilitate the passage of souls from death to new life, and the tomb is decorated with beautiful solar designs of spirals, lozenges, and circles carved into its gigantic stones. When the Gaels arrived in Ireland, they assumed that such an impressive structure must be the work of the Gods, and the tomb passed into lore as the home of Aenghus, the God of Love.

The Urnfield Culture

The archetypal early Celtic community began to take shape around 800 B.C.E., in what is now southwestern Germany, when a group of these early migrants met up with a local group and combined with them to form a new group. These people were called the Urnfield culture, after their practice of interring their cremated dead in decorated earthenware jars buried in the ground.

This combined culture had all the marks of a typical Celtic community. By all appearances, the Urnfielders loved life and attached great importance to simple acts of living—eating, drinking, and fighting with great gusto. They wore brightly colored clothing and elaborate jewelry, brewed mead and ale, raised cattle and crops, and skirmished endlessly amongst themselves.

The Urnfielders’ burial practices clearly demonstrate a belief in the afterlife. Their dead were carefully cremated and interred in wood-lined earthen tombs known as barrows. Urnfield dead were well provided for, with stores of food, jewelry, and beautifully decorated pottery.

The Halstatt Culture

Following the Urnfield period was an even more recognizably Celtic community, the so-called Halstatt culture, named for the area of Austria where the rich remains of their communities have been uncovered. The Halstatt people were by all accounts a sophisticated Iron-Age aristocracy, wealthy traders whose power derived from their control over rich salt mines whose output provided much income through international trade.

The great wealth of Halstatt tribes was likely responsible for a change in burial custom. Abandoning the simple cremations of their forebears, the Halstatts opted for elaborate grave mounds, where their wealthy chieftains would be buried in high style. Instead of earthen jars, members of the Halstatt aristocracy were laid to rest in fancy wood and iron carts, in which they would travel to the afterlife with all of their earthly possessions arrayed about them. The typical wealth of a Halstatt chieftain included elaborate jewelry and ornaments of bronze, fine weapons and armor, pottery and utensils, and even provisions of meat and grain. Wealthier graves often contained elaborate metal cauldrons and even wagons or war chariots.

Warriors and Craftsmen

The most notable characteristic of the early Celts was their extraordinary artistic ability. Highly skilled metalworkers, they introduced all of Europe to the art of iron forging, and with it, brought advances in agriculture and warfare. From the forges of the Celtic smiths poured both farm implements and fearsome weapons, from swords and spears to great wheels for wagons and war chariots.

Celtic artisans were also adept at finer work. They produced exquisite adornments and jewelry in bronze and gold, extraordinarily intricate and detailed work that was also profoundly symbolic.

Decoration wasn’t restricted to weapons and jewelry, either. The Celts were so fond of pattern that it covered every available surface—clothing, drinking vessels, even human skin were all treated as canvas by Celtic artisans.

La Tène Culture

Around 300 B.C.E., the center of Celtic power shifted, reflecting new trade routes with Etruscan settlements in Northern Italy. The primary feature of this shift in the culture is a change in artistic style, from a simple tribal symbolism to a more classical, recognizably Celtic style. The La Tène (The Shallows) period is so called after the discovery of a large deposit of art and weaponry ritually disposed of in what is now Lake Neuchatel, Switzerland.

In La Tène art, the distinctive cosmic symbolism of earlier Celtic peoples is transformed through the addition of traditional techniques borrowed from Greek and Etruscan designs. The product of La Tène metalworkers is recognizably Celtic, full of undulating lines, spirals, and the first appearance of what we all instinctively recognize today as the Celtic knot, sinuous patterns of interlaced loops and curves.

Other aspects of La Tène culture are also recognizably Celtic. The La Tènes lived in large settlements, arrayed around large hill forts. They built log houses that might have made Abraham Lincoln proud.

One of the best-known examples of La Tène-period art is the Gundestrup cauldron, a richly detailed silver bowl decorated with images of Celtic deities and religious rituals. The cauldron was cut into pieces and deposited as a sacrificial offering in a peat bog in Denmark. It was left there undisturbed until the late nineteenth century, when it was rediscovered.

There is also much evidence of a rich spiritual life among the La Tènes. The cache of artifacts that define the La Tène culture are sacrificial in nature—the bounty of beautiful, expensive, and ornate weapons shows little or no sign of wear, indicating they were a sacrifice, most likely for success in battle.

The Celts and the Romans

To their neighbors in cultured Rome and Greece, the Celtic tribes were viewed largely as fierce, reckless barbarians—uncivilized, uncouth, boastful, and proud. But as much as their critics found fault, the criticism was tempered with a grudging admiration for the great strength and reckless abandon of the Celtic warriors, and many of the great armies of classical times counted bands of Celts among their elite fighters. Until this point, the Celts, although they continued to expand their territories, preferred not to provoke their powerful southern neighbors and trading partners.

Eventually, though, the boundaries chafed. Ever-growing populations and a restless nature led the Celts into the territories of their Etruscan neighbors. The tribes settled in and made friends with those neighbors that remained.

According to Roman accounts some of these neighbors, the Etruscan settlement of Clusium, underestimated the fierce nature of its neighbors and thought to involve them in a dispute with Roman aristocracy. Thinking the Celts simple barbarians, the Clusians enticed neighboring tribes with gifts of wine and promises of fertile land. They were quite unprepared for the arrival of heavily armed settlers who weren’t exactly prepared to go marching back from whence they came when the dispute between Clusium and Rome ended. The Clusians issued panicky messages to Rome, which sent diplomatic envoys to prevent disaster.

The Celtic warriors were so renowned that they served as elite troops in many foreign armies, including those of Hannibal and even the Ptolemy pharaohs. Cleopatra kept a band of 300 Celtic warriors as her personal bodyguards.

Unfortunately, these would-be diplomats made the same mistake in assuming the Celts to be uncultured, and during a scuffle, they murdered an important Celtic chieftain. The Celts were appalled at the poor behavior of the Romans and went before the senate seeking reparations. The senate responded by rewarding the perpetrators with political powers, a move that disgusted the Celts and proved a very bad idea.

The Celtic warlords excelled at psychological warfare and were very effective at ensuring their enemies were thoroughly unnerved before battle even began. One of the most effective methods they used to terrorize the enemy was a form of martial theater—warriors entered battle naked but for tattoos and body paint, hair bleached with lime and arranged in spikes. Combatants reinforced their supernatural appearance with great athletic leaps and screaming cries, augmented by the use of specialized musical instruments such as wailing battle harps and the jarring carnyx, a long, harsh-sounding trumpet.

The Romans, as it turns out, were not prepared for barbarian invaders. After witnessing the spectacle of tall, painted, naked warriors with spiked hair singing, dancing, and blasting horns, they beat a terrified retreat all the way to the fortress on the Capitoline hill, where they remained barricaded until an epidemic of disease convinced the invaders to accept a cash bribe and vacate the city.

The Celts Under Roman Rule

From that point onward, the Celts were in near-constant conflict with the Romans. Despite the Celts’ early success, they were no match for the organized war machine that was Rome, which responded to its humiliating defeat with a relentless forward push into Celtic territories. Within 200 years, the Romans were unquestionably in charge, and the era of the Celts gave way to Roman rule. The subsequent Romano-Celtic period was to last for hundreds of years.

The series of military campaigns that brought about the end of Celtic Europe is known collectively as the Gallic wars. It is through Julius Caesar’s account of these wars that we know much of what we do about Celtic society and culture.

After the Roman conquest, Celtic society began to conform in many ways to Roman custom and societal norms. Religion began to follow Roman styles—worship moved from sacred groves to temples, and Celtic gods merged with their Roman counterparts and were more frequently depicted in human form, often with Roman-style written inscriptions. The ancient pastoral lifestyle gave way in many places to Roman-style cities, and the Celtic lifestyle gradually gave way until the only truly Celtic communities were those of Ireland and Scotland.

Celtic Society

Early Celtic society was divided into tribal groups called tuatha. A tuath (singular) was like a kingdom in miniature, a family group that usually claimed descent from a common ancestor. Most tuaths operated as independent entities, but many came together as part of larger kingdoms under a central ruler. This was the beginning of the succession of chieftains and high kings.

Each tuath was headed by a king (or, sometimes, a queen) who usually claimed descent from one or more tribal ancestral deities. In times of peace, the king was both ruler and an administrator of justice; in times of conflict, he was a warlord. The king was vested in his office through his symbolic marriage with the land, which was personified as a goddess. This rite of investiture ensured the fertility of the land and is echoed endlessly in mythological tales. The legendary Queen Medb of the Ulster Cycle is a personification of the sovereignty of the land, queen to nine kings who ruled only with her consent—a metaphor for the true source of a king’s power and his true responsibilities.

A Celtic king was never above the law. A special judge called a brithem rig (literally, judge of the king) oversaw cases and settled disputes involving the king and his rights. A king who angered his people could find himself removed from his throne.

The Celtic system of rulership was bound by a strict code of justice, given that the prosperity of a king’s tribe depended upon his fairness and honesty. This was a practicality, as the king also acted as landlord to his people and provided them both protection and grazing land. In later times, these lesser kings themselves swore allegiance to an over-king, who traded military protection in return for tributes of food, supplies, or treasure. A Celtic king was often elected to his position, and if he did not fulfill the role as expected, he could be replaced.

Under the king were the nobles or flaithi—warriors, artisans, lawyers, poets, and other skilled citizens. Under the noble class were the freemen who kept the flocks, tilled the soil, and paid rent to the nobles. Each class contained subdivisions, each with its own rights and responsibilities.

Women in Celtic Society

Many of the most powerful deities of the Celtic pantheons were female, ranging from powerful, nurturing earth mothers to fierce goddesses of war.

The women of Celtic mythology are likewise portrayed as brave, resourceful, even crafty heroines. Unlike the wilting heroines and distressed damsels of the Greeks, these heroines did what they wanted, when they wanted, even when it meant disaster—and when matched with these larger-than-life women, the heroes of many Celtic tales are most often done in, whether by beauty, cleverness, or enchantment.

While customs varied according to region and circumstance, when compared to neighboring cultures like Rome or Greece, women enjoyed a very high status in Celtic society. Female aristocrats were afforded the same lavish burials as their male counterparts, with the same rich grave goods as the men. Women were often afforded positions of authority, often serving as leaders, chieftains, diplomats, and even warriors. Celtic women also served in religious life as seers, healers, poets, and even as druids.

Married women had unparalleled rights of property and divorce. A married woman with greater wealth than her husband would control all of their combined property, unlike the Roman women, who left their fathers’ homes only to become the property of their husbands. Divorce was available to both men and women, and women who divorced retained their property.

Celtic wives often accompanied their husbands to battle and were not always content to keep to the sidelines; there are numerous accounts of Celtic warrior women and their achievements in battle. Some of these warrior women were so notable in their achievements that they became teachers of the art of war, owners of their own martial academies. Many became legendary.

The Greek historian Marcellinus, writing of Celtic warriors, marveled:

In a fight, any one of them can resist several strangers at once, with no other help than his wife, who is even more formidable.

The Story of Boudicca

Perhaps the most famous Celtic heroine of history is Boudicca, the legendary warrior queen of the Iceni. The Iceni were a tribe of eastern Briton, a somewhat independent ally of the Roman Empire—that is, until the Iceni King Prasutagus died. The king had hoped to maintain some independence for his tribe upon his death by leaving half of his kingdom to his daughters and bequeathing the rest to the Emperor Nero, but this proved a mistake. The Romans moved in almost immediately, and had no interest in royal daughters. When Boudicca protested the Roman takeover along with her daughters, she was publicly flogged, and her daughters were raped by Roman soldiers. Iceni chieftains were deprived of their position and property, many of Boudicca’s relatives were sold as slaves, and the kingdom was reduced almost overnight to the status of province.

Boudicca was understandably outraged at this great humiliation. When Roman Governor Paulinius Suetonius left on a campaign against a stronghold of rebel druids on the Isle of Mona, Boudicca easily convinced the oppressed Celts to take on the hated Romans, and 80,000 Iceni warriors rallied behind her.

The queen and her all-female guard made quite an impression on the enemy. Roman historian Cassius Dio described her appearance:

In stature she was very tall. In appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce, and her voice was harsh; a great mass of the tawniest hair fell to her hips; around her neck was a large golden necklace; and she wore a tunic of diverse colors over which a thick mantle was fastened with a brooch. This was her invariable attire.

The Iceni queen’s armies initially swept the Romans and laid waste to three Roman cities and an entire Roman legion in a very short time. Boudicca, having no soft spot for her own sex, slaughtered her enemies to the last woman.

Boudicca’s story ended in defeat. Suetonius and his men, fresh from victory over the druids at Mona, gained a tactical advantage over Boudicca’s forces and decimated her army in one devastating battle. The queen’s warriors were destroyed, and she is reported to have ended her life by poison.

The Celtic Cosmos

Unlike the Greeks and Romans, whose gods lived far from human reach, the deities of the Celts were ever-present, embodied in the natural world around them. The visible, everyday world was interpenetrated by the Otherworld, the abode of the gods, elemental spirits, and the souls of the dead.

The abode of the gods was delineated by three elemental domains, those of earth, sea (water), and sky. These domains of spirit were not distinct but instead operated in a continual state of flux and overlap.

The elements were both physical and spiritual—the domain of water, for instance, encompassed not only the oceans, wells, and streams, but was also the source of wisdom and inspiration. The lords of the sky provided not only sunlight for crops but also strength and vigor to warriors and heroes. The woodland creatures gave not only their flesh to those who consumed them but their qualities as well—the boar gave strength, the salmon wisdom, and rabbits, cleverness.

The elements were both the home and the substance of the gods. Goddesses of earth brought forth and nurtured the crops; gods of the sky brought rain and lightning, and so on.

The ubiquitous motif of the triskele, with its three interlocking and flowing spirals, originated as a solar symbol, an emblem of birth, death, regeneration. However, it also illustrates the interplay of the three worlds, as well as the labyrinthine path to the Otherworld.

Gods and goddesses all over Celtic lands appear in triplicate form. Two of the best-known are the Morrigan, a goddess of the battlefield who also had command of birth and death, and Brigid, the patron of artisans and a goddess of healing. Three-headed gods made their first appearance in prehistoric rock-carvings and persisted into Roman occupation, eventually associated with the god Mercury.

Celtic stories, poems, and even riddles are likewise divided into threes, a tradition that carried over in Christian times. It is widely believed that it was the Celts’ threefold view of divinity that aided the ready acceptance of Christianity in Ireland.

Rebirth and Reincarnation

The body of Celtic mythology gives much evidence of Celtic beliefs in reincarnation and life after death. The Celts had an underworld similar in some ways to the beliefs of the Romans and Greeks, but all indications are that it was a place much like the everyday world. It is most commonly referred to as the Otherworld, for although its entrances are