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.
Read more about this topic: Celtic Nature Worship
Famous quotes containing the words weather and/or worship:
“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men’s affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it—because it is a fact.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)