Celtic Nature Worship - Weather Worship

Weather Worship

Meteorological patterns and phenomena, especially the sun and thunder, were acknowledged as divine and propitiated. Inscribed dedications and iconography in the Roman period show that these spirits were personifications of natural forces. Taranis’s name indicates not that he was the god of thunder but that he actually was thunder. Archaeological evidence suggests that the sun and thunder were perceived as especially potent. Inscriptions to Taranis the ‘Thunderer’ have been found in Britain, Gaul, Germany and the former Yugoslavia and the Roman poet Lucan mentions him as a savage god who demanded human sacrifice.

From the early Bronze Age, people in much of temperate Europe used the spoked wheel to represent the sun and, by the late Iron Age and Roman periods, solar deities were represented with wheel-symbols, such as the sun cross. The Romans exported their own celestial god, Jupiter, to Celtic lands by interpretatio romana, and his imagery was merged with that of the native sun-god to produce a hybrid sky-deity who resembled the Roman god but who had the additional native solar attribute of the wheel. This Celtic sky-god had variations in the way he was perceived and his cult expressed. Yet the link between the Celtic Jupiter and the solar wheel is maintained over a wide area: altars decorated with the wheels were set up by Roman soldiers stationed at Hadrian's Wall, and also by supplicants in Cologne and Nîmes.