Why do we know so little about the religion of Celtic tribes in the British isles?
Norse and Germanic identities are pretty clear and they have a rather firm grasp of their pagan religions, but the Celts remain very much unknown.
Can anyone tell me more about the Celtic gods and religion?
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This has been bugging me too.
Surely there is at least something worth knowing about their mythology, culture, etc, but it's never talked about.
The oral histories were all mixed up because christianity via the romans flourished, then a pagan resurgence came with the angles and saxons before christianity fought back.
They left very, very, very few written texts, and most of those were destroyed. What remains would fit in one post. Part of their culture remains in countless local rites, but piecing it together is hard, and random, and the big picture is gone. There's plenty deities and shit we don't even know what to think about because we have so little, like Cernunnos, the horned god, deemed important, but who the fuck e was supposed to be is lost forever.
Also Celts were much bigger than that, found from roughly modern Switzerland all the way to Ireland. Most Western Europeans really are of Celtic origin, not Norse.
tell me more senpai
the Norse had a written history "the sagas" that tell us much of what we need to know about germanic paganism
the celts didn't really bother with that so what we do know is very limited
this
the celts didnt have any moon runes irl
and when they did learn writing it was from christians, well after the romans massacred most of the druids who kept the oral traditions
their scholar class, the druids, never wrote anything down as they'd memorise their teachings by heart
How much similarity do you think there would be between the Germanic/Norse and Celtic religions?
There's been a lot of talk about how they all come from a single Indo-European or other central polytheistic religion but I've heard historians argue that it's rarely so simple.
Fun fact: Christianity was Paganised in order to convert all the Germanic and Celtic peoples of the untamed north lands of Europe. Once this happened the Christian empire began its Iconoclast and destroyed all the knowledge of the ancients from Library of Alexandria to the stone druidic tablets of Anglesey.
GO BACK TO YOUR NATIVE RELIGION FELLOW EUROPEANS. NO MORE DESERT RELIGIONS.
Fertility,ancestors,strength,kin and tribe.
Not this New Age hippy shit either. Full blown death before dishonour mode is needed.
Wikipedia is a great source, also a couple history books that contain those texts. It's down to that. You may be shocked to see most books and even Wikipedia articles begin with "yeah there's really nothing to be said about all this".
I can't tell you more. Read those few texts that were written only late after Celts had appeared, and you're done. Everything else was transmitted orally, and there's no one to talk about it anymore.
Probably because the Roman Empire actively sought out and slaughtered every single one of their cultural leaders.
They placed the destruction of their culture as a more important task than military conquest.
Pfft more like faganism. You guys are just contrarians. You'd hate the local religion if you lived in a fagan country. If you lived here you'd be talking about how Buddhism is a religion for curry eating shitskin Indians and we should stop using Chinese writing. What a joke you people are. Fuck off.
No.
Stop writing in a Semitic writing system. Type in runes or some shit.
The romans didn't record much about Celtic gods, but from what I know we didn't worship a 'pantheon' of gods as such, rather innate and magical spirits in nature.
Besides, plenty of Brythonic folklore still exists today; hallowe'en, Easter, Witches, stuff like that
>Why do we know so little about the religion of Celtic tribes in the British isles?
Perhaps you've heard about the Roman Empire? Druidism was one of the few religions that the roman empire persecuted.
As a bit of mood setting:
>"Britain was in the hands of Suetonius Paulinus, who in military knowledge and in popular favour, which allows no one to be without a rival, vied with Corbulo, and aspired to equal the glory of the recovery of Armenia by the subjugation of Rome's enemies. He therefore prepared to attack the island of Mona which had a powerful population and was a refuge for fugitives. He built flat-bottomed vessels to cope with the shallows, and uncertain depths of the sea. Thus the infantry crossed, while the cavalry followed by fording, or, where the water was deep, swam by the side of their horses.
On the shore stood the opposing army with its dense array of armed warriors, while between the ranks dashed women, in black attire like the Furies, with hair dishevelled, waving brands. All around, the Druids, lifting up their hands to heaven, and pouring forth dreadful imprecations, scared our soldiers by the unfamiliar sight, so that, as if their limbs were paralysed, they stood motionless, and exposed to wounds. Then urged by their general's appeals and mutual encouragements not to quail before a troop of frenzied women, they bore the standards onwards, smote down all resistance, and wrapped the foe in the flames of his own brands. A force was next set over the conquered, and their groves, devoted to inhuman superstitions, were destroyed. They deemed it indeed a duty to cover their altars with the blood of captives and to consult their deities through human entrails.
The Celtic religion didn't have any codified pantheon, it wasn't a religion in the sense of Christianity or Judaism.
Celtic religion is quite well attested in Irish and Welsh literature but Celtic myths are a lot more esoteric and weird than Norse myths so normies don't know as much about them.
But the tribes in Scotland and Ireland were never conquered by the romans. The knowledge was only lost with the coming of Christianity.
The Sagas were written by Christians actually. I guess it's just unfortunate that they didn't take note of the beliefs in other regions.
Nothing of value was lost
Gabh Transna Ort Fhéin
> Most Western Europeans really are of Celtic origin
Agree with you
Don't mess with the germanics.
They were. Very few pure Celts left today.
Celtic Mythology was probably similar to the Nordic/Germanic Pantheon.
Watching a movie like Conan is probably the closest you'll get to imagining prehistoric (aka prewritten) Europe besides the desert setting
No, wrong.
Druids were the most experienced/skilled practicers. Not the knowledge banks.
Bards were in charge of documentation and recollection of ballads, rites, and family lineage/history.
Romanfags and Christcucks specifically targeted bards for slaughter.
>mfw I just found out the Celts used the Greek alphabet
Celt women belong to Germanic c*ck
There is plenty of records of Celtic culture and religion in Ireland. You just need to read up about it.
fbi testz
Celts/Gauls got steamrolled by the Romans, who had a universalist view of their gods, or at least it seems they did with many religions they encountered. They alligned their own gods with that of the Celts. So, for example, the Celtic god of the Underworld was called Dis or Pluto, and his true name was lost. A lot of their names were lost, so we don't really know very much about celtic religion. It seems to be different from Germanic, but by how much we can't tell.
According to Caesar's De Bello Gallico, they practiced human sacrifice by stuffing people into large wicker statues and then burning them. How much of this is true and just hearsay or propaganda is unclear, but I'm inclined to believe it. They may have practiced human sacrifice by throwing people into bogs, but whether it was a ritualistic sacrifice or something like a criminal execution is unclear.
Really, they left very very little behind. We only know so much about Odin because people started writting it all down only about 1000 years ago. If the Romans had conquered Germany and Scandanavia back during their height, we probably wouldn't know very much about Odin or Thor.
WTF
celt here, always found greek alphabet magical
Celts did *a lot* of human sacrifice. Often very cruel, in fact druid rituals were banned in Rome because of excessive cruelty. They used to cut people open and from their death agony and the way their intestines fell out they foretold the future.
Also burning of humans locked in a big straw puppet construction, a wicker man, for good harvest.
Tacitus for one describes how the altars on Mon used to be drenched in human blood.
>A force was next set over the conquered, and their groves, devoted to inhuman superstitions, were destroyed.
exactly what I meant here Actually quite some highland folklore still has references to human sacrificing.
Listened to a BBC History Extra podcast on exactly this just last week. Worth listening to.
historyextra.com
>Κελτοί, Keltoi and Celtae were terms used by Greek and Roman geographers to vaguely refer to any groups in various areas of Western and Central Europe from Brittany, Marseille and Iberia through to the tribes along the lower Danube and Rhine.
>May have been a word used by one tribe or another in this area to describe themselves but we don't know.
>Wasn't really used to refer to the British Isles at all and the term largely disappeared.
>The term reappeared in the 1500s and 1600s with the use of printing presses to publish classical works by Caesar and co at the same time as the rise of nation-states meant everyone in Western Europe was looking for ways to distinguish themselves and their national identity.
>The word Celt only began to be used the way we see it today in the 1700s after linguists recognised similarities between the languages of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Man. And of course the corresponding similarities in culture and art.
But seriously, we do know a hell of a lot about their culture and religions. Think Druidic sacrifices in sacred bogs, woad-painted headhunters engaged in intertribal raids, or the legends of a mortally-wounded Cú Chulainn strapping himself to a standing stone to ensure he dies on his feet while The Morrígan circles above the battlefield.
no. they are a meme people. 'celts' was the name greeks gave to gaelic speaking barbarians, not even what they used to call themselves. all larpers.
Go to bed private Smith
>Why do we know so little about the religion of Celtic tribes in the British isles?
because Latin, Saxon and Normal cultures were stacking on top of them like sediments on the earth's crust.
das rite
The Ancient Celts were black.
Progressive historians (like John Green) agree barbarians inside the gates was a pretty fucking bad idea.
Yet they are always holding refugees welcome signs and shit.
What do they mean by this?
this man knows THE TRUTH.
inb4 Varg joins the thread and starts ranting about the monoeuropean superculture with blonde hair that radiated with the intensity of approximately a billion lumens and magic blue laser eyes.
Didn't the druids keep their rites alive mainly by extreme vocal training, like they repeated their shit down through tongue and thought rather than script? I thought I read that somewhere. Would explain why so little of its left. Or maybe The Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry is keeping some of it from us. Who knows.
The Ancient Celts is a myth.
Because they got BTFO by everyone they went in contact.
Plus, they adopted christianity fairly earlier, erasing most of their culture
>Would explain why so little of its left.
probably has something to do with the irish language being almost completely replaced by english. or maybe it was just christianity that killed it.
>But seriously, we do know a hell of a lot about their culture and religions.
This. There's a fuckload of Irish lore, and this includes references to continental Celts.
get fucked christcuck
I didn't know we didn't know much about it compared to other religions. We have a lot of myths, but everything was written down centuries after the introduction of Christianity so that's the long and short of it.
IIRC Volcae was also a general term for continental Celts back then, which the Celts themselves also used.
BTW there is still a personal name used in Wales and Bretagne: Cadwallon, that refers to the legendary Belgic tribe of Catavellauni (etym. "those who excell in battle")
WE
The bulk of their rites was drenched in human blood, the Romans already banned in in pre-Christian days, in 80 BC iirc, and although it went on for a while on the outskirts of the later Empire (Britain, Belgium), Romans reduced most of their rites to bloodless acting.
Think about this: the Romans, the same Romans who enjoyed watching people being thrown before the lions in their circuses, found the practices of the Celtic druids too cruel.
>Because they got BTFO by everyone they went in contact.
Also not true, they were the strongest group in barbarian Europe before Caesar. Stronger than the Germanics.
They only got weak and meek through Roman civilisation.
Yeah but maybe they lied about them. I mean the Roman army were good goys for the vatican who still owns the world today.
dumb pagan larper
Theres fuck all many of them left.
Most of the "celtic" nations are filled with far left wing mongrel larpers.
I kinda feel bad for them desu, they seem pretty chill.
No man, there are plenty of accounts about this, there is a lot of remnants pointing to human sacrifice in Scottish highlands folklore, there is plenty of archeological evidence of human sacrificing, and why would they make a law only against Celtic druids, while all other religions were tolerated by the Romans (except Christianity, because the latter did not want to accept the Caesar).
>did not want to accept the Caesar
* the divinity of the Caesar
(unlike the Jews in Rome who had no problem with that btw)
I hate the forsworn. They're not as bad as (((Thalmor))) but they're like Brazilians.
It's also why you always see interracial propaganda with ginger female and a nigger.
Gingers are almost extinct, maybe only 1-2 generations left.
Also Vatican? This was over 300 years before the legalisation of Christianity, hell this was 80 years before Christ was even born.
We don't pray to them unless we want something.
The gods can take an avatar of a living being, and when that dies, the god returns to being a god.
When celts die, we believe that we find a new body, depending on what is compatible with the soul.
If we know we are dying, the soul begins to search, and dreams out somewhere to return to after death.
Also, the soul may leave and inhabit something else if it wants to, leaving an empty shell a spirit may inhabit.
Spirits being a force, more than a soul, like the spirit of the forrest etc.
Generally the spirit would control a vessel very badly, and live only to do basic things, like tend to a forrest etc.
Hello a celtic here
Our religious practice includes the holy place, the sacred time, the cultic and magical functions - sacrifice, prayer and mantra - the cult of the head, the death and the commemoration of the dead, the cult staff and the ideas underlying this custom.
Death is seen by the druids as the beginning of the new life, so that the chthonic god of death simultaneously has a fertility function.
The type of mother deities (Matres, Matrae, Matronae) is common throughout the Celticum.
Caves, fissures, waters and other striking landscapes are preferred as sacrificial sites.
Such as the Heidentor near Egesheim (Tuttlingen district).
Holy Places
(Dolmens, menhirs, rocky voyages like Stonehenge or Avebury) as well as natural monuments, for example, external stones in the Teutoburg Forest.
Holy Time
The esoteric system of the Celtic Year Circle, the Celtic Tree Horoscope and the Tree Calendar developed from the rudimentary four main festivals "Samhain", "Imbolg", "Beltane" and "Lughnasadh" as well as interpretations of the "Calendar of Coligny".
mantic
The "Coelbren" by Iolo Morganwg as well as the "Druid Tarot" serve among other practices of the prophecy.
cult staff
The druids are an important factor in the neo-pagan druidism as the bearers of the ceremonial and the mantra.
Our deities
Abnoba Forest, source and mother goddess
Rotona Hunting and natural goddess
Sequana Healing and source goddess
Damona god of salvation
Bedaius sea deity
Cnabetius War Deity
Iovantucarus youth deity
Arvernus Trading and traveling deity
I guess the closest we have today to the Celts would be head hunting nigger tribes.
What type is that?
gaulish?
The names don't appear to be brythonic or gàelic
no they didn't, they slaughtered the romans at first.
Rome was raped and pillaged by teh gaul, then hundreds of years later roman/gaul rape babies got mad and used the gaul tactics against them and hired mercenaries to beat them.
every single roman battle there were auxillaries, and not a SINGLE ONE the romans will tell the truth about.
every single bit of roman history is nothing but lies.
Why do you think the filthy jews/masons require you to prove your ancestry to the emperor Augustus to join?
The highest liars of all the liars and you believed them?
roman names lol
The "real Celts" are simply the Welsh. Essentially Labour-voting proles with a few weird consonants, nothing too exciting.
This image is paganism in a Catholic Church.
Game over caramel biscuit.
>but the Celts remain very much unknown
This is by design, peasant.
t. druid marie celeste
it's a dumb larper mix of Latin and Irish.
I don't trust any of these figures because they way they measure how many speakers is different for each language.
checkem
honk honk
i'll accept the divinity of your digits
No, these are the deities from the Alemannic space.
We have preserved the religion and still celebrate it according to ancient needs
For example carnival (heist with us fasnet)
Samhein (with us Ernetdankfest and so on ...)
The trick was at that time camouflage our customs under the Catholic church as Christian festivals;)
We local know exactly what we are celebrating.
Both Catholics and Orthodox did take over the most harmless pagan festivals, undid it of any pagan idolatry, and gave it a new meaning. So that people could continue their traditional festivities, but now honoured to Christ, the Holy Virgin and the veneration of saints.
This was never a secret. Don't act as if you invented the hot water.
Nothing as pathetic as a pagan larper who doesn't even know the gruesome details of his """"faith"""".
kek desu
...
As a 1/4 Galician I am a Celt and I would like to know more about my ancestors.
I agree, but the romans beat them anyway and after some time the germanics beat them
...
I read that Germanic tribes were influence by Celtic culture, Odin, Baldur and Loki seem to have Celtic origins. A good book with chapters on Brythonic and mainland Celt culture is Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies, it focuses solely on Europe.
Lolno it got stripped off of all barbarous blood-shedding. You were forced so, both by Christianity and the resulting sense of moral decency.
What do you think what you see here? : D
The names of our gods were simply translated into Latin, and we made saints from them.
Otherwise nothing has changed in our rituals (except that we no longer make bloody sacrificial ceremonies, but this might change soon thanks to the Muslims)
...
In the old days this straw doll used to have a living man inside, as an offering to the gods. This ritual was found all over the Celtic world.
The Romans had a hold on Celt people, by means of having conquered the lands, from northen portugal, northern spain to england, way stronger than they ever had with Germans and norse.
Because they controlled Celt lands, they had the power to genocide believers and pratictioners, the religion died out waaay before the germanic did. And it got forgotten. There is still residual knowledge (Celts had a script, the ogham, still in some stones) but also alot of speculation about both original language and original gods, at least in the case of northen portugal. But again, Celt religion got hunted down and killed a long time before germanic /norse
Romans didn't care about other religions. Christianity was the exception (for refusing the divinity of the Caesar) but Romans had never before persecuted a religion, the other exception was Celtic druidism. Because they couldn't stomach the cruelty and inhuman barbarity of the druids.
....but yeah, like someone said here already, lots of the Celt religion was canibalised by early xtians and incorporated. Which is cool.
Yeah, still, the Romans were the ones to bring Christianity here and to, for one reason or the other, continue the dilution of the religion to the point of virtual dissapearence. But it stared before that, with marginalization and discrimination viz. Paganus= peasants, uneducated, inferior
>wales with a crwth
this is pretty nice senpai, not seen before
absolutely right
in past time delinquent who have murdered or raped were there detained and burned alive.
To take their souls out of the cycle to death and reborn.
These souls (so they said) have dissolved forever
or walked forever between all the worlds (undead)
The early Celtic church had it's origins and manner of belief and practise from Egypt
Any celtic religion that existed in Germany has been replaced by romans, and later germanics
with us in alemannen it is a kind of reformation that our god-world is related to that of the Indians.
Therefore we have many similarities in the sybolic and gods world
Such as the hakenkreuz
Purity of the blood
etc...
>we local know exactly what we are celebrating
My motherfucking nigga
the jews had some problem, in that rather than sacrificing to the emperor, they sacrificed to yahweh in the emperor's name. this let them not betray their beliefs while not shitting off the caesar.