Celtic Nature Worship

Celtic Nature Worship

The pagan Celts of the ancient world were animists to the extent that they believed that all aspects of the natural world contained spirits, divine entities with which humans could establish a rapport. According to classical sources, the Celts worshipped the forces of nature and did not envisage deities in anthropomorphic terms. The numinous presence of deities undoubtedly informed the background to everyday life. Both archaeology and the literary record indicate that ritual practice in Celtic societies lacked a clear distinction between the sacred and profane in which rituals, offerings, and correct behaviour maintained a balance between gods and man and harnessed supernatural forces for the benefit of the group.

The pagan Celts perceived the presence of the supernatural as integral to their world. The sky, the sun, the dark places underground all had their spirits, life-forces and personalities. Every mountain, river, spring, marsh, tree and rocky outcrop was endowed with divinity. While both the Culture of Greece and the Culture of ancient Rome revolved around urban life, Celtic society was predominantly rural. The close link with the natural world is reflected in what we know of the religious systems of Celtic Europe during the late 1st millennium BC and early 1st millennium AD. As in many polytheistic systems, the localised spirits worshipped were those of both the wild and cultivated landscapes and their inhabitants: "god-types, as opposed to individual universal Gaulish deities, are to be looked for as an important feature of the religion of the Gauls," Anne Ross observed in examining the chain motif in pagan Celtic material "and the evidence of epigraphy strongly supports this conclusion." Celts focused upon features of the immediate landscape: local mountains, forests, springs and animals. Divine powers associated with the fertility of humans, of livestock and of crops were also objects of veneration. Tribal territories were themselves held sacred and the ground and waters which received the dead were imbued with sanctity and revered by their living relatives. Sanctuaries were sacred spaces separated from the ordinary world, often in natural locations such as springs, sacred groves or lakes. Many topographical features were deified as gods: many divine names refer to specific locations or geographical features, a clear indication of how closely Celtic societies identified with place. Small thank offerings were placed in domestic storage pits, while more elaborate deposits were left in specially dug ritual shafts and in lakes. These offerings linked the donor to the place in a concrete way, since complex and varied rituals involved the individual in personal contact with the sacred sites devoted to their gods. An image very different from the idea of druids administering a pan-Celtic religion.