Celtic Nature Worship - Sanctity of Hunting

Sanctity of Hunting

Hunting deities whose role acknowledges the economic importance of animals and the ritual of the hunt highlight a different relationship to nature. The animal elements in half-human, antlered deities suggest that the forest and its denizens possessed a numinous quality as well as an economic value. For this reason they were deified as gods. Some scholars explain shape-shifting and magical motifs in terms of Celtic beliefs about rebirth and the afterlife, but it is more likely that such deities had a regenerative function. Attributes like fruit and grain imply fecundity, while animals such as snake and deer (who shed their skins and antlers) suggest cycles of growth.

Hunter-gods were venerated in Celtic Europe, and they often seem to have had an ambivalent role as protector both of the hunter and the prey, not unlike the functions of Diana and Artemis in classical mythology. From Gaul, the armed deer-hunter depicted on an image from the temple of Le Donon in the Vosges lays his hands in benediction on the antlers of his stag companion. The hunter-god from Le Touget in Gers carries a hare tenderly in his arms. Arduinna, the eponymous boar-goddess of the Ardennes, rides her ferocious quarry, knife in hand, whilst the boar-god of Euffigneix in the Haute-Marne is portrayed with the motif of a boar with bristles erect, striding along his torso, which implies conflation between the human animal perception of divinity. Arawn of Welsh mythology may represent the remnants of a similar hunter-god of the forests of Dyfed.

As with many traditional societies, the hunt was probably hedged about with prohibitions and rituals. The Greek author Arrian, writing in the 2nd century AD, said that the Celts never went hunting without the gods’ blessing and that they made payment of domestic animals to the supernatural powers in reparation for their theft of wild creatures from the landscape. Hunting itself may have been perceived as a symbolic, as well as practical, activity in which the spilling of blood led not only to the death of the beast but also to the earth’s nourishment and replenishment.