Celts, had taken another direction in their religion. Th e Celts
believed there were gods and goddesses everywhere. Bodies
of water, even small ones, had their own individual spirits,
as did particular pieces of land. Dark parts of forests could
harbor spirits of great power.
By the fi rst century b.c.e. the Celts inhabited almost all
of northern Europe, and they had become a diverse group of
peoples with diverse religious beliefs. For instance, the Celts of
the Iberian Peninsula (present-day Portugal and Spain) held
somewhat diff erent beliefs from Celts in Britain, Gaul, and
the Balkans. Ideas about life aft er death, an aft erworld, and
the human soul had variations depending on which group of
Celts one studies. Th ese diff erences defi ed Greek and Roman
eff orts to describe a single set of Celtic beliefs.
For example, one aspect of Celtic belief mentioned
by Caesar involved the transmigration of souls. Th e word
transmigration is here chosen with care, because it is not the
same as reincarnation. Celts did not believe in reincarna-
tion—the rebirth of the soul into a new human being—but
some believed that the soul of a dead person could migrate
to the body of another living person. Th us the souls of the
dead were dangerous. One way of dealing with the danger
was to decapitate an enemy and carry the head home to be
placed in a chest or in a shrine. Because the head was be-
lieved to be the seat of life, control of it imparted control of
the dead person’s spirit, which could be used for protection
from other spirits.
Other Celts, however, believed that the souls of the dead
went to an aft erlife. Th ey envisioned a special land where no
one ever lied, where good fruit abounded, and where hunt-
ing was always successful. It seems to have been universal
among the Celts that they did not believe in sin or in good
deeds as having eff ects aft er death. Everyone, good and evil,
went to the aft erlife and shared in it. For those who believed
in this aft erworld, it was ruled by the fi rst man who ever lived,
who when he died became the fi rst person in the aft erlife and
made the land of the dead his own.
Th e land of the aft erlife was not a well-defi ned place,
partly because the living could visit it and even live there. In
parts of western Europe, Britain, and Ireland a person could
walk through a supernatural mist and emerge in a strange land
with amazingly beautiful and imposing fortresses inhabited
by people who were courteous and kind. Elsewhere people
believed that crossing a lake or spring or walking through a
sacred grove or among old stone megaliths could bring a per-
son into the otherworld, which could have been the land of
the dead or a mystical alternate dimension to the earth. Th e
Celts themselves seem to have been vague about the nature of
the otherworld, regarding it as something removed from the
laws of the ordinary world and therefore something that ordi-
nary people could not fully comprehend. During the festivals
of Beltane (May 1) and Samhain (November 1) the borders
between the everyday world and the otherworld disappeared,
and both humans and supernatural beings could cross from
one to the other without trouble.
Th e roles of the priests, shamans, seers, and magicians
of the Celts are almost as unclear to scholars today as they
were to ancient observers. Th e Druids are the best known of
these fi gures, but they did not have infl uence much beyond
the British Isles and western Europe. When Caesar wrote of
them, he noted that they had probably originated in Britain,
because those who studied to be Druids usually went there
for their education. Archaeologists and historians have spec-
ulated that what Caesar actually saw was a dying cult, with
the Druids already disappearing from the Continent but
holding out in parts of Britain. Th is notion implies that the
Druids fl ourished for only a few hundred years. Whatever the
period of their existence, they were certainly among the best
organized of Celtic religious groups. Th ey met annually in
t he la nd of t he Carnutes (t he area around modern-day French
cities of Chartres, Orléans, and Blois), where they discussed
political, theological, and legal business. Th ey had a leader
who was elected at this assembly, when necessary, and who
served for life.
Druids seem to have been exclusively male. A woman
could be executed for witnessing any part of certain sacred
rites. Th e Druids resisted the use of a written language. Each
priest was expected to spend 20 years memorizing laws and
rituals, and no outsider was allowed to learn them. Druids
served as judges in legal matters, as priests in worship, and as
seers who through ritual could foretell the future. Th e Greeks
and Romans depicted the Druids and Celtic priests in gen-
eral as very murderous and bloody, and the archaeological
record supports their claims. For instance, the Druids fore-
told the future by cutting out a living human being’s intes-
tines and studying their confi guration. Another approach to
telling the future was to stab a person in the diaphragm and
observe where the blood spurted and how the victim writhed
in agony. Torturing, maiming, and mangling human sacri-
fi ces occurred at festivals and during eff orts to win the favor
of certain gods. Sometimes horses were sacrifi ced. Wars may
sometimes have been waged for the purpose of taking prison-
ers to be used in ritual sacrifi ces.
Although the Druids tried to make themselves the exclu-
sive intermediaries between human beings and the supernat-
ural, most Celts believed that anyone could have contact with
the supernatural. One way to achieve this kind of individual
contact was by making sacrifi ces during public rituals. Th is
practice was taken very seriously, as evidenced by the very rich
sacrifi ces given to spirits of rivers and lakes. Th e river Th ames
in England has yielded numerous artifacts, such as fi nely cast
bronze armor and gold jewelry. Some armor, shields, and
swords are extraordinarily ornate, as if made specifi cally for
sacrifi ce to the river god, perhaps in the hope of future mili-
tary victories. (When a Celtic war party led by Brennus looted
the temple at Delphi in Greece in 279 b.c.e., much of the booty
seems to have been deposited in a lake in eastern Europe.)
Sometimes the sacrifi ces were deposited on sacred sites on
land, and people did not touch the gold and other valuables
for fear of retribution from gods and other Celts.850 religion and cosmology: Europe