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The Celtic Cross

The Celtic cross is a magical symbol, and one that does not place Christianity at odds with its spiritual origins in the religious perceptions of man since the dawn of time.

Celtic Cross

Almost all civilizations in their early forms worshipped the Sun, which originally, amongst the Celts at least, seems to have been thought of as female. Around 1500 BC, with the fall of the Minoan goddess-based theocracy, the sexual polarity of western man’s perception of the pantheon of the gods changed to one fundamentally male in character.

Amongst the Celts the symbolism of the Sun appears to have changed too. But they retained a balance, lost elsewhere in the West, between the archetypes of the male and female principles, which is equally present in the human psyche.

The circle represents wholeness, the round contours of the Earth, or female energy, and the cross represents the four directions of movement, or male energy, in the form of the winds, seasons and so on. So the two symbols superimposed express the ’both ways state’ of being and becoming in harmony or balance.

The Celtic cross, then, is in effect a symbolic spiritual diagram, which is sometimes called a mandala. Across the face of the Earth such diagrams have appeared as the universal and essential symbols of integration, harmony and transformation. The circle is the original sign, the prime symbol of the nothing and the all, in which man finds and loses himself.

Extract from “Art of Celtia” Illustration and text by Courtney Davis

First published by Blandford Press (1994) PB ISBN 0-7137-2307-6