A Quick Overview of Celtic Figures Known to us from The Irish and Welsh Traditions.

1. Introduction: Celtic Roots and Hybridization

The Celtic traditions of the British Isles represent a legacy from Celtic Christianity that evidently featured characters drawn from older pre-Christian traditions, since many of these are known from pagan sources on the continent of Europe. At one time these pagan traditions must have been in regular contact and tales of the Gods traded, and doubtless the rituals that honored them, spread widely across the Celtic-speaking lands.

That said, there is strong evidence that the Celtic upper classes honored the religious sentiments of their predecessors, in particular the megalithic sites of the Neolithic farmers. It is very possible that it was Celtic speakers who first introduced the use of copper, and later bronze, based on the use of tin, and that it was they who brought an end to the megalithic culture, sweeping aside the Neolithic farmer religion with their radically more individualistic, Indo-European warrior cult.

Except, of course, that the Neolithic farmers themselves remained, as did their spectacular monuments, even if their native elite were now replaced by a Celticized overlordship. We may postulate that, just as when the Romans arrived in Gaul and later when Christianity arrived in Ireland, the result was a hybrid form of the new religion, taking on many of the details and even the deeper moral and social structures of the old ways of life, which persisted, largely unchanged, for many generations among the majority of the population. The Kings and priests changed, the crafts people and traders changed, the languages changed, the names used for the Gods changed, the rituals changed and the tales that went with them changed, but underlying all this was a deep continuity of spirituality and the imagery that expressed it, especially among the farming community.

We can see deep layers of symbolism in the Celtic legacy of Ireland and Britain that could easily predate the arrival of the metal-working peoples who may have been the first Celtic arrivals in these islands. Not only do megalithic monuments feature consistently in these later legends, but many of the characters and tales told of them echo and re-echo with symbolism that relates to what must have been the prime concerns of the farming community: the turning of the seasons, and the continuing fertility of the land, animals and people. The archaeological study of the Neolithic Culture of Western Europe and Western Coastal Africa confirms beyond reasonable doubt that these were prime features of the local farmers' religion.

When we come to examine the Celtic legacy of the British Isles therefore, we should be aware that we are dealing with a particular variant of Celtic culture, which almost certainly included a persistent pre-Celtic element, derived from the local Neolithic culture. We may assume that a similar process took place in Iberia and in Western France where the closely related Neolithic culture also underlay any later Celtic developments. Indeed, some of this hybridization may date to the continental roots of the Celtic religion and the new religious practices may have arrived in Ireland and Britain already prepared to incorporate and replace the local Neolithic culture.

If one accepts the theory that it was the first metal users, as part of the Maritime Bell Beaker culture, that brought the Celtic language and cults to Ireland and Britain, then we should also expect that there would be a difference in the traditions across these islands from West to East, as the archaeological record seems to indicate different continental sources as the origins of these newcomers. Thus the Irish settlers seem to have come up the Atlantic coast from Spain, whereas the British (including the Amesbury Archer buried near Stonehenge) seem to have come more from Central, or possibly Northern, Europe, across the British channel and the North Sea.

This latter group of Beaker peoples, if they were already Celticized, may have reflected somewhat different hybrid traditions since they came from areas not within the central zone of the Atlantic Neolithic. Indeed, there is reason to suspect that they represented a distinct linguistic group (the “P-Celts” as opposed to the Iberian and Irish “Q-Celts”) and may have included proto-Germanic elements in their culture, since there is considerable elements of long centuries of contact between Celtic and Germanic-speaking cultures in the regions concerned, to the point that the ancients made no clear distinctions between them and even referred to the Belgae as a mixed Germano-Celtic culture.

As to the controversy over the original Celtic homeland as such, it seems fair that I should state my preferred view, which is that I currently support the Iberian/Altantic hypothesis of Cunliffe, Koch and others. A full discussion of this debate is something I would like to prepare at another time, but the point here is that if Celtic as a language and culture first emerged from Indo-European in the west, or in Iberia particularly, and that during the Copper Age that preceded the Atlantic Bronze Age, then it would have been deeply influenced from the very start by the same Megalithic culture that united the west Atlantic seaboard and which dominated large parts of Iberia. Needless to say, it could also have been influenced by any other Iberian cultures, in as much as they were distinct from the Atlantic Megalithic culture, such as the so-called Iberian or proto-Basque traditions.

There are other influences that derive from the Mediterranean and later classical world that should also be expected. One of the earliest seems to have been the Phoenician influence deriving from extensive trading contacts in Iberia, around Gadiz (now Cadiz), where the cult of the Phoenician God and overlord of Tyre, Melqart, is known, dating back to the establishment of Gadir, around 1100 BC. A second such influence, though somewhat later, was that of the Greek trading colonies, mostly that of Marsalia at the mouth of the Rhone, which is known to have flourished trading wine upriver to the Celtic fortress of Lugudunon, modern Lyons. An Etruscan influence may also have passed through wine-trading channels, as indeed in terms of the long history of mutual rivalry and conflict between the Gauls, Etruscans and, later, Romans in northern Italy, and of course the influence at still later times of Imperial Rome, creating a Gallo-Roman hybrid culture to a greater or lesser extent coming into contact with Germanic tribes, and later again the dominant influence of early medieval Christianity, with its widespread, often Eastern Mediterranean, Levantine, Semitic and Biblical sources and in particular Latin Christianity in its various Western and local Atlantic developments and cultic practices.

All of these elements, some of which reach as far east and back as to have roots in the Levant, Anatolia and even ancient Mesopotamia, may have influenced the manner in which the Indo-European cults developed over the millennia in different European regions, coming, in part, to be reflected in what we find in the Irish and British traditions. Even after the native pagan cults were replaced by Christianity, and no longer of religious significance, European intellectual traditions, as well as later native developments, clearly influenced the compilers and copyists who created the manuscripts on which we, in very large part, depend for our knowledge of these mythical characters.

Lastly, in any overview of Celtic Gods, points of contrast can also be drawn with the eastern branches of the Indo-European tradition, particularly with the well attested Indo-Iranian tradition, which may give us insight into the once common elements of the Proto-Indo-European world view.