Read Online Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) by James MacKillop - Free Book Online Page B

who survived the Biblical flood, and Taliesin the Welsh poet. Tuan mac Cairill, putative narrator of the pseudo-history
Lebor Gabála
[Book of Invasions], tells the story of being changed into a salmon and eaten by a woman who gives birth to him under his own form so that he might tell the history of Ireland. The beautiful Lí Ban of Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland becomes a salmon except for her head. The motif migrated easily into early Christian narrative, as in the story of Saint Fínán Cam’s mother who was impregnated by a salmon when she went swimming after dark. Saint Kentigern (d. 603) is reported to have found a ring in a salmon, a story which explains the seal of the City of Glasgow, of which Kentigern is a patron. The motif of the ring thrown into the water to be caught by a salmon bears the Aarne-Thompson international catalogue number of 736A, meaning the same episode is also found in other traditional literatures, without our having a clear explanation why it should be so widespread. In an Irish variant of 73 6A, Ailill (one of dozens bearing this name) casts the ring into a stream, and much later the Irish hero Fráech discovers it in a salmon’s belly.

2
Remnants of Celtic Religion

DRUIDS
    ‘Druid’ is a troublesome word for readers of Celtic myth. As one of the few concepts from early Celtic culture to have migrated into popular usage, any mention of a ‘druid’ now conjures up a fog of associations and connotations that cannot be supported by texts written in any language before AD 1500. ‘Druidism’, for example, will not work as a synonym for Celtic religion or Celtic culture as a whole, although such implications still exist in print. Further, the druids did not build the surviving ancient monuments in Western Europe once attributed to them, such as Stonehenge in England or Carnac in Brittany, both constructed well before Celtic languages were spoken in those areas. What little we know about the druids comes primarily from ancient sources, Greek and Roman, augmented by early Irish and Welsh documents. There is even some argument about what the root meaning of the word ‘druid’ might be.
    One of the reasons we know so little about what druids thought or practised is that their learning was oral and secret, judged too sacred to be written down where it could be seized upon by the uninitiated or the profane. Such practice has many parallels in other religions, starting with the mystery cults of later Greece. The claim by modern druids to be in possession of esoteric wisdom that has survived in secret from ancient times is not supported by scholars outside their religious community.
    The druids were a religious order among the Celtic peoples of ancient Britain, where, perhaps, the order originated, and Gaul and Ireland. One commentator calls them priest-philosophers, another magician-sages. They might fulfil many roles for the society they served: judges, diviners, intellectuals, mediators with the gods. The druids of Gaul had authority over divine worship, officiated at sacrifices (including, perhaps, human sacrifices), exercised supreme authority over legislative and judicial matters, and educated elite youth along with aspirants to their order. As members of a privileged learned class, they did not have to pay taxes or serve in the military. Ancient commentators classified them in three strata, a categorization supported by early Irish records. Highest in status are the philosophers and theologians, who bear the name druid without modification. They were not the only persons of elevated rank. Below them are the diviners and seers, also known as
vates
or
manteis
. Third are the panegyric poets or
bardi
. The Irish
filid
(sing.
fili
) is an exact cognate of
vates
, and the Welsh
gwawd
is a near cognate. Bards, as we use the term in English, also existed in Ireland and Wales. Both women and men served as druids according to Irish sources, but the evidence for female druids among the ancient