Celtic Mythology: History of Celts, Religion, Archeological Finds, Legends & Myths. T. W. Rolleston

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       J. A. MacCulloch, T. W. Rolleston, W. Y. Evans-Wentz

      Celtic Mythology: History of Celts, Religion, Archeological Finds, Legends & Myths

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      2020 OK Publishing

      EAN 4064066392734

      Table of Contents

       Introduction

       Religion:

       The Religion of the Celts

       The Gods of Gaul and the Continental Celts

       The Irish Mythological Cycle

       The Tuatha dé Danann

       The Gods of the Brythons

       The Cúchulainn Cycle

       The Fionn Saga

       Gods and Men

       The Cult of the Dead

       Primitive Nature Worship

       River and Well Worship

       Tree and Plant Worship

       Animal Worship

       Cosmogony

       Sacrifice, Prayer, and Divination

       Tabu

       Festivals

       Accessories of Cult

       The Druids

       Magic

       The State of the Dead

       Rebirth and Transmigration

       Elysium

       The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries

       Myths:

       Mythic Powers of the Gods

       Myths of Origins

       The Irish Invasion Myths

       The Early Milesian Kings

       Tales of the Ultonian Cycle

       Tales of the Ossianic Cycle

       The Voyage of Maeldūn

       Myths and Tales of the Cymry

       The Mabinogion

      Introduction

       Table of Contents

      Earliest References

In the chronicles of the classical nations for about five hundred years previous to the Christian era there are frequent references to a people associated with these nations, sometimes in peace, sometimes in war, and evidently occupying a position of great strength and influence in the Terra Incognita of Mid-Europe. This people is called by the Greeks the Hyperboreans or Celts, the latter term being first found in the geographer Hecatæsus, about 500 B.C.1

      Herodotus, about half a century later, speaks of the Celts as dwelling “beyond the pillars of Hercules”—i.e., in Spain—and also of the Danube as rising in their country.

      Aristotle knew that they dwelt “beyond Spain,” that they had captured Rome, and that they set great store by warlike power. References other than geographical are occasionally met with even in early writers. Hellanicus of Lesbos, an historian of the fifth century B.C., describes the Celts as practising justice and righteousness. Ephorus, about 350 B.C., has three lines of verse about the Celts in which they are described as using “the same customs as the Greeks”—whatever that may mean—and being on the friendliest terms with that people, who established guest friendships among them. Plato, however, in the “Laws,” classes the Celts among the peoples who are drunken and combative, and much barbarity is attributed to them on the occasion of their irruption into Greece and the sacking of Delphi in the year 273 B.C. Their attack on Rome and the sacking of that city by them about a century earlier is one of the landmarks of ancient history.

The history of this people during the time when they were the dominant power in Mid-Europe has to be divined or reconstructed from scattered references, and from accounts of episodes in their dealings with Greece and Rome, very much as the figure of a primæval monster is reconstructed by the zoologist from a few fossilised bones. No chronicles of their own have come down to us, no architectural remains have survived; a few coins, and a few ornaments