Faith's debt

to the Celts
Celtic Mysteries: The liriZ=t Religion by John Sharkey (Thames es Hudson £1.95)
It is a well-known fact that when Europe drifted into the Dark Ages, it was the Celtic Church which kept Christianity alive and, in particular, Irish monks who went into Europe to establish monasteries and reconvert a pagan continent back to the Faith.
It is also known that the Celtic Church survived as a particular entity, with its own laws and customs, for many centuries independently of Rome.
It was not until the I lth century that the Celtic Church in Cornwall was organised on Rome lines — the same century as the influence of Rome started to be felt in Brittany and in Scotland, although in Scotland the old Culdee Order survived as late as the 14th century.
From their first contacts with Christianity in the first century AD, the Celtic peoples converted to the new Faith in a remarkably quick time. The answer to this quick conversion lies in the ancient Celtic religion which is now recognised as the first known European religion to have developed a doctrine of im; mortality.
The ancient druids taught that death was only a changing of place and that life went on with all its forms in another world. They further taught that when a soul died in this world, it was reborn in the "Otherworld". And when a soul died in the "Otherworld" it was reborn in this one. Thus a constant exchange of souls took place between the two worlds.
Aristotle, Sotion and Clement all state that early Greek philosophers borrowed much of their theosophy from the Celts. Certainly the similarity of the druidic philosophy on immortality has much in common with Pythagorean philosophy, And it is interesting to note that Pythagoras had a Celtic slave named Zalmoxis.
The ancient Celts held Bel the Sun as the sacred creator of the life-force; they did not worship the sun as a god but as a lifeforce. It was, in other words, a religion based on the acceptance of Nature as the great Factor of Life.
The recognition of water as one of the first principles and sources of life was also important among the ancient Celts and is reflected in the dedication of the main river sources of Western Europe as sanctuaries to the forces of fertility by various Celtic place-names. Names like the Marne, the Seine, the Rhine, the Ruhr ... the Thames, the Severn and the Clyde ... are all Celtic in origin.
The ancient Celts were masters of natural science and great astronomers and astrologers. The Calendar of Coligny, the earliest extensive document in a Celtic language from the first century AD, is a masterpiece of calendrical calculations.
Many of the great feast days of the ancient Celtic religion were taken over by Christianity as the Celtic peoples synthesised Christian philosophy with their own strict code of morality and beliefs.
The ancient feast of Samhain, starting of the last day of October and carrying on to November 1, • marking the end of one pastoral year and the beginning of the next, became All Saints Day, or All Hallows Day. While the evening before (which the ancient Celts marked as the day when the Otherworld became visible to mankind) was called Hallowe'en.
February I, the feast of Brigit, an ancient Celtic goddess of fertility, was also taken over and, because the early Christians could not stop the rural worship of Brigit, they turned the goddess into a saint of the Christian Church.
John Sharkey's book, with its 24 colour plates and 117 illustrations, is an essential volume for those interested in the early religion and mythology of the ancient Celtic peoples. It goes a very long way in coming to grips with one of the oldest known European religions and the first that developed a doctrine of im mortality.
Peter Berresford Ellis