Celtic Myths (eBook)

1

THE CELTIC COSMOS

Classical commentators were struck by the centrality of “religious observance” in Celtic life; at the same time they struggled to understand a creed without written scriptures, graven images or constructed shrines.

A mantle of mist shut out the sky above; below, a buffeting wind picked up great squalls of rain and scourged the slopes, their green, scabby grass, their tawny bracken bending to the blast. To the frightened wayfarers watching from the ridge, the hillside seemed quite bleak enough but further down a dismal prospect gave way to one of grotesque revulsion and fear. Covering the valley bottom, curving over like the carapace of a vast and squirming beetle, glossy black shapes jostled and crowded in a hectic throng. A mob of ravens, they draped the ground in deathly black, but, as they frantically pushed and pecked, the viewer caught glimpses of grey, white, gold, bronze and red between their writhing forms. Only by gradual degrees did it become clear to the dismayed onlookers that this gruesome kaleidoscope of colour represented what had been a battlefield. That mass of mangled mail, of pallid flesh, of gaping wounds, of contorted limbs, was all that remained of the youth of Ulster, cruelly slain.

As for the flapping, croaking, clawing birds climbing over one another in their greed for the broken bodies beneath, there was never any doubt in the viewers’ minds of what they were. The raven was the emblem (for the want of a better word) of the Morrigan, the war goddess – although it represented her in a way that went well beyond religious symbolism or poetic metaphor. The relation encompassed both those things, though, for the Morrigan was at once a bird and a woman; an imaginative principle and a violent, destructive force. (And, at the same time, a creative one – for death had its place in the cycle of life; dead carrion became living, breeding flesh in the body of the raven, so the Morrigan was also a powerful goddess of fertility and enduring life.) Simultaneously unique and manifold, she could be a single raven tracking its solitary way across the sky above a raging battlefield, a bird of the ultimate ill omen, or – as here – a flock of flesh-eating, bone-stripping scavengers. Numbers don’t seem to have signified too much to a cheerfully polytheistic pagan tradition: in some accounts the Morrigan is the Morrigna, a trio (a trinity, even) of bloodthirsty, shape-shifting sisters. Badb, Macha and Nemain too are typically represented as ravens or as carrion crows; again, their names vary according to different local traditions.

Pagan Paradoxes

“The whole nation of the Gauls is greatly devoted to religious observances,” Julius Caesar noted – but these observances didn’t necessarily have much to do with those of Rome or, still less, our own. Many people in the present day make claims to have espoused a “Celtic” spirituality: the reality is that the day-to-day workings of Celtic religion remain obscure. The multifaceted Morrigan is a case in point: words like “goddess” or “deity” barely begin to do her justice, so complex and so elusive is her essential nature. And she was only one of many scores or even hundreds of other deities, many of whom remain embodied in enduring myths. Hence the importance of the druids or priests who not only knew which gods to placate and by what sacrifices, but when to plant and harvest, and when to hunt. They also had a more social function as doctors, advisors and judges in disputes. The Romans distrusted them severely on this account, seeing them as a source of instability. That Roman writers have been our chief source of information on the druids’ activities is decidedly unfortunate, therefore, although one of their most seemingly extravagant charges against these Celtic priests – that they offered human sacrifices at their midnight gatherings – appears to be endorsed by the imagery on the Gundestrup Cauldron.

WORDS LIKE “GODDESS” OR “DEITY” BARELY DO HER JUSTICE.

The picture is complicated still further for us in the present day by the fact that, if they ever really were a single people, the Celts soon ceased to be as they spread out across Europe, while in later times their hold-out territories were inevitably isolated and far-flung. The Morrigan, for example, is an important figure from Irish legend – although she has her equivalents in the mythic traditions of other Celtic regions. Some 2000 years ago, when our opening scene was set, her origins were already long since lost in antiquity. Her very name was ancient, derived from that same Indo-European tradition in which almost all modern European and near-eastern languages – not just the Celtic ones – find a common root. Its first syllable came recognizably from the word mer (or “death” – from which, of course, we get the French word “mort” and the English “mortality”); its second from reg (to “lead”; to “rule” – hence “direct” or “reign”, the Spanish rey or “king” or the French regime).

Then too there’s the fact that in the absence of any written record of their own, the Celts left their oral traditions at the mercy of a posterity that – inevitably – had its own perspectives and its own prejudices. That writing was for centuries the sole property of Christian monks did nothing to clarify the picture: they naturally came at Celtic lore from their own – obviously less than sympathetic – standpoint. To take the Morrigan as our example again, it is ironic that all we know of her has come to us from texts written down by scribes for whom she was nothing more than a monstrous fiction, a scary story.

Irish Inclinations

A further fact we need to bear in mind when considering the Celtic inheritance transmitted to us by medieval monks is the bias this has meant towards the heritage of Ireland specifically and, to a lesser extent, that of the Scottish Highlands and Islands and of Wales. For, if the expansion of the Roman Empire had forced the Celts and their distinctive way of life out to Europe’s farthest margins, the implosion of that empire in the middle of the first millennium – and the irruption of barbarian invaders that immediately followed this collapse – forced monastic culture to find sanctuary in the wildest corners of the west. Monks took refuge on rock-bound coastal promontories or on the remotest offshore islands where they would be safe – at least until the onset of the Viking raids at the very end of the eighth century. So, while the Celts must have left an important cultural legacy in central Europe, Gaul and Spain, it was only in the offshore islands that the skills and facilities existed for their learning and their literature to be recorded. This book’s bias towards the Irish inheritance is, accordingly, in some ways unrepresentative – but it’s the inevitable consequence of European history.