CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE GODS AND THE
SUPERNATURAL
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Miranda]. Green
THE NATURE OF CELTIC RELIGIONB
ecause the pagan Celts did not write about themselves, the only way that modern
scholars can learn anything about their belief-systems is by constructing
hypotheses based upon archaeological sources and historical documents written by
contemporary, but alien, classical observers, who selected and often misunderstood
what they recorded (Rankin 1987). There is another group of documents, those
which tell of the earliest Welsh and Irish myths and written in the vernacular. But
these have to be treated with extreme caution as sources for pagan Celtic religion,
and as a strand of evidence which must be treated separately from contemporary data
(Green 1992a: 18-2 I). This tradition is the work of Christian redactors writing in
medieval times, and close links between the undoubted mythology it contains and
the evidence which is synchronous with the pagan Celts (around 500 Be to AD 400)
cannot usefully be made. Moreover, this vernacular tradition relates only to Wales
and Ireland, far from the continental heartlands of the early Celts.
The picture painted by the evidence is of a rich and varied religious tradition. This
variety and complexity is due largely to the essential animism which appears to have
underpinned Celtic religion, the belief that every part of the natural world, every
feature of the landscape, was numinous, possessed of a spirit. These natural forces
were perceived as capable of doing humankind good or harm, and so they had to be
controlled and their power harnessed by means of divination, sacrifice and other
propitiatory rituals (see Chapter 23). Sacred space could take the form of built
shrines, but equally important were natural cult foci such as lakes, springs and trees
or open-air enclosures where worshippers were not cut off from the numinous land-
scape around them (Chapter 23)'
The perception of the supernatural as being present in the natural world penetrated
all aspects of Celtic belief. Thus, the most popular, pan-tribal deities - the celestial
gods and the mother-goddesses - were linked to their respective functions as
providers of light, heat and fertility. The great healing cults of Romano-Celtic Gaul
and Britain were centred upon the natural phenomena of thermal springs. Many
divinities - such as Epona, Arduinna, Nodens and Cernunnos - had a close affinity
with animals: indeed the horned and antlered gods took on the partial personae of