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Celtic Beasts

The Bible relates that Adam was given authority to name all the animals. We are not told how the animals reacted to this, but if they understood at all what was going on they should have felt threatened. From the human perspective of that era, one who had the authority to name could also presume a certain amount of power and control over whatever had been identified. Such power was explicitly spelled out in Genesis 1:28: "Rule over the fish in the ocean, the birds in the sky, and every animal on earth" Calling by name of ten Implied not so much the desire to be on intimate terms with an to exercise control over the one invoked, even if the control went no further than catching the other’s attention. No wonder people eventually grew hesitant to call the God of Israel by name. One wouldn’t want to appear presumptuous with the Deity! In developing this aggressive, objectifying relationship with non-human reality, people not only began to distance themselves from divinity but to place themselves in an antagonistic relationship with mother mature. Eventually most people could no longer hear the animals speak.

The Great Bear

Because the non-human inhabitants of this planet would probably find bewildering the need some humans have to compartmentalise creatures by boxing them into categories,, the beasts treated in this book might resent being labelled "Celtic’’. So it must be stated from the beginning that this book in a reflection not so much on the beasts themselves as on what they meant to the Celts.

The Celts are the earliest identifiable Northern European civilisation, writing around 550 BCE, the Greek historian Herodutos mentioned in passing that at that timer the ” lived along the Danube River. Around 400 BCE, they crossed south of the Alps into the Po River Valley. By then they inhabited an area which extended as far East as Western India and included Asia Minor parts of the Balkans, present day Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Northern Italy, France, Northern Spain, and Portugal. The unique culture mythology, and art developed by these fierce warriors is considered the greatest achievement north of the Alps after the Ice Age. During the Roman periods just before the Celtic "empire" began to wane, cities as widely separated an Ankara. Belgrade. Cologne. and Milan all spoke Celtish. The Romans usually called them Gauls. but Julius Caesar (ioo-44 BCE) wrote that the Gauls of his day referred to themselves as Celtae. When at. Paul wrote to the Galatians, he was addressing Celts. By that timer Celts had already reached Britain and Ireland. subjugated the previous inhabitants, and blended their cultures and religious systems for over half a millennium.

They were a people deeply connected with Creation. Both literally and symbolically, animals were a constant part of their lives. In ancient times the Druids used beasts for divination. This is likely the reason the Irish continued to domesticate ravens and wrens. To this day, if a bird happens to fly into some Irish households. on the literal level such an event might be understood to mean nothing more than a new pet. On the symbolic level, it can portend good luck. But if a frog hops into the house, it means that someone in about to die. In the Scottish Highlands on the other hand small birds are often considered harbingers of death. The Celts not only relied on animals for their survival but they respected them, learned from them, and honoured them by decorating their jewellery, weapons, monuments, and in the Christian period their manuscripts, book covers, reliquaries, and chapels with brilliant intricate, elaborate zoomorphic designs.

In order to enter the world of Celtic beasts it is essential to act aside all linear thinking. To understand the role of animals in the ancient myths and in the lives of the saints, it will be necessary to see them as more than either simple beasts or archetypal symbols. We are about to journey on a spiritual path, the origin of which can be traced to the earliest remaining evidence of human worship. Since archaeologists have claimed that the Bear is the oldest identifiable deity we will begin with her. We will observe that there is a thread forming a connecting link, which runs all the way back to the ancient Bear Mother and forward into Christian hagiography. That thread in shamanism.

Shamanism is very likely the oldest spiritual discipline in the world. It is a complex of practices of a magico-religious character whose primary focus is psycho-spiritual and psychosomatic healing. The word "shaman" comes from Tungusc, the ancient language of those who inhabit the Altai mountain region in Russian Siberia. Shamanic practice can also be found among the indigenous people of North, Central, and South America, the Arctic region, and Australia. The root word “s’ aman" can be translated "to burn up" or "to set on fire” referring to a shaman’s ability to work with the energy of heat. Shamanism was practised by the Celts and seems to have been an aspect of their Druidic training that was ultimately blended into the spiritual discipline of the Celtic Church. Several authors have sought antecedents for Druidism among ancient shamans perhaps even the Altaic ones, arguing that this connection opens up a vista of fully twenty thousand years. We can sense how connected the Celtic saints were with their ancient Shamanic forebears when we recall that the ability to handle either fire or hot coals was a skill frequently demonstrated by these saints

In the archaic past of human evolution, before any of the great religions came into being shamans were the first to emerge as the mediators of the sacred for their people. The great historian of religions Mircea Eliade defined shamanism primarily as a technique of ecstasy. In situations where information vitally needed for healing or survival was otherwise unavailable. a shaman would put herself or himself into an altered state of consciousness, during which the shamans’ soul would leave the body and make a journey. Presuming that we living inhabitants of Earth are denizens of the Shamanic Middle world the shamans' souls would either ascend to the Upper world or descend to the Lower world. There among the ’nhabitants of those places they would meet and confer with their "spirit guides" - either human or animal - who would help them either to obtain needed information or otherwise to achieve their journey’s purpose. In the altered state of consciousness that is an essential component of Shamanic experience, many sorts of animals are apt to appear. Very far from being subject to humankind, they serve rather as helpers and spiritual guides. In the Shamanic Otherworld animals can talk. move about like humans jest, warn, and shape shift,. In that world animals frequently function as teachers while we are the learners. Since the human “spirit guides” are recognisable people who actually lived on Earth earlier in history, it in possible that the animal spirit guides are even older and come from a period- in history prior to the emergence of the human race. So they may literally be our pro-human relatives.

As human history unfolded shamans and other mediums between this world and the spirit world may have realised that certain animals appeared consistently to be associated with specific aspects of life. Thus did pigs begin to be connected with the Underworld and salmon and eels with Wisdom. This may be why certain animals wore divined at first and then later came to be associated with specific divinities. Sometimes through the language of Christian iconographic symbolism the divinised animal reappeared after having shape shifted into the constant companion and/or the metaphoric symbol of the saint. This is how St. Anthony the Abbot acquired his pig companion and became patron of gravediggers.

To give a more extended example - tenth-century Byzantine missionaries working in the Kiev area blended the fourth century bishop and martyr Blaise (Vlasios) of Sebaste, with the ancient god Volos who had been worshipped there both as lord of wild animals (especially bears), cattle, and wealth and as a guardian of the entrance to the Underworld. As part of this syncretism, they incorporated into the legend of “St. Vlas” an episode where he hid in a cave and became a protector of the forest animals. When devotion to Blaise was carried to Europe, he was also blended with the Celtic deity Cernunnos - likewise a lord of the forest animals and guardian of the entrance to the Underworld. The chthonic function of these old gods was blended into Christian experience when chapels to Blaise were erected in places that had previously been considered entrances to the Underworld by the earlier Celtic inhabitants. To further stress the point the feast of Blaise was linked with those of St. Brigid and Candlemas which in Rome absorbed the old pagan festival of Lupercalia - with St. Brigid, our Lady of Candlemas and St. Blaise replacing Proserpina / Persephone, Ceres / Demeter and Pluto / Hades. Then this triduum of feasts absorbed the ancient Celtic festival of Imbolc another celebration of Spring’s return from the Underworld. In old representations, both Eastern and Western, St. Blaise was still sometimes shown accompanied by his animals as well an holding the candles which connect him with Imbolc. There is another tale of St. Blaise, in which he orders a wolf to return a stolen pig to the woman from whom the wolf stole it. The Breton word "Blez" means “wolf” and the pig represents the Underworld. It is possible that the wolf stealing the pig represents Hades stealing Persephone, who like the pig returned to the "woman", in eventually returned to her mother Demeter. Finally, of course, the Old English word "Blaze" means "to burn brightly," which relates it to the root meaning of Shaman.

Our departed Ancestors have preceded us into the otherworld, as have our Shamanic forbears, the old divinities, and the saints as well. They live on in memory and in eternity that has remained constant from age to age in Mother Earth and her wide variety of non-human inhabitants. If through artistic symbolism the goddess Artemis and the god Cernunnos could continue to be identified because of their stag companions. so could Sts. Cadoc, Teilo, Hurbert, Eustace and many others who followed. Since their stags are never named, we are allowed to wonder whether they might not be the same stag reappearing again and again whose true home is the Shamanic Otherworld if we can come to understand this otherworld stag better we might be better able to appreciate the splendour of a living stag. Glancing through a Celtic lens we might begin to gain deeper insight into all kinds of beasts. This book in intended to be such a lens.