Talk:Celtic polytheism

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Contents 1 Note on reconstructed Celtic pantheon 1.1 Rationale 1.2 Note on syncretism and definition 1.3 Note on orthography 2 Celtic pantheon 3 External Sources 4 Belenos, Beli Mawr, Bile 5 Cult of the Power of Boggy Terrain 6 Theonyms 7 Accuracy of linguistics in theonyms table 8 sources 9 Invented(?) deity names 10 Cults section 11 Move? 12 Cleanup or Re-write? 13 Cosmology and eschatology 14 Cleanup 15 The Problematic Chart

[edit] Note on reconstructed Celtic pantheon

[edit] Rationale

The purpose of the table is to provide a synopsis of the sources cited with regard to the intrinsic nature and the plausible Romanised Brythonic name-forms and semantics of Celtic gods and goddesses likely to have been known to and recognised by Iron Age British tribes. Much is uncertain with regard to Celtic deities.

[edit] Note on syncretism and definition

Only in instances where the cited sources assert in certitude that several names referred to the same deity, have deities been allotted more than one reconstructed name. For example, in the case of the name Rhiannon ( from *Rigantona ‘Great Queen.’ ), the Encyclopaedia Britannica maintains that the epithet was used in Welsh mythology for the Welsh manifestations of both the Gaulish Epona and the goddess Macha of Irish mythology. Otherwise, a separate name has been allotted a separate entry.

[edit] Note on orthography

In accordance with classical Roman transcriptions of Celtic names, Proto-Brythonic [*k] has been written as ‘c,’ [*j] as ‘i,’ (except in initial and intervocalic positions) and initial and intervocalic [*w] has been shown as ‘v,’ while post-consonantal [*w] has been written as ‘u.’ To denote the remnant position of a former Proto-Indo-European [**p] in the morphology of these names, ‘h’ has been used, because ‘h’ appears in some classical transcriptions of Celtic words apparently denoting this remnant, as with the toponym Hercynia, presumably from Proto-Indo-European **PérkōwnjeH2 , ‘Land of Pigs’ (cf. pork). In other respects, accepted Proto-Celtic reconstructions, including diphthongs, have been rigidly followed. Since Proto-Brythonic was a P-Celtic language, ‘p’ has been written where Proto-Celtic would have had [*kw]. In keeping with the conventions of proto-linguistics, the asterisk * denotes an unattested, reconstructed form. Here follows a reconstruction of the Iron Age British pantheon, with the head names of the deities given in their likely Proto-Brythonic form. Sincerely, GeoffMGleadall 01:08, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Celtic pantheon

[edit] External Sources

could someone (ideally the person who entered them, as s/he is more aware of what those pages are) please go through these and provide titles to the links? Whateley23 04:02, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Belenos, Beli Mawr, Bile

this is a very contested etymology at this time. see, for instance, Peter Schrijver "On Henbane and Early European Narcotics", Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie vol. 51, pp.17-45, especially secs. 2.3 and 4.1-4.2. Whateley23 04:16, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Cult of the Power of Boggy Terrain

i hesistate to remove it immediately, but i'd like to see a reference to northern Europeans executing people for homosexuality. i don't recall running across such a reference among classical authors, and archaeology probably can't be the source of this. in fact, i seem to recall classical authors accusing Celtic warriors of homosexuality in the field, not saying that anyone was executed for it. Whateley23 07:57, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Theonyms

Is the large table needed in the article when it is duplicated at Proto-Celtic theonyms? The theonym page is an orphan adrift in the harsh wiki world and should be united with this article or... Well you know the rest, it is a tragic fate for any article, I will delete the table and make a link to the orphan if nobody objects. MeltBanana 14:23, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing out the duplication. I made Proto-Celtic theonyms redirect to this article. Otherwise the notes above and the sources and other things get duplicated in both places or misplaced. 4.250.177.52 15:12, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure this is the best solution as the table is also in Neo-druidism, I found afterwards, a seperate article for the table is maybe warranted so that it can be taken out of both articles. MeltBanana 19:53, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

The problem with this merger is that one page was about proto-Celtic (ie, reconstructed precursor) deities and the other about Celtic (ie attested) deities. Those are not the same thing. --Nantonos 20:44, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Accuracy of linguistics in theonyms table

I'd appreciate it if somebody with the appropriate linguistic knowledge could review the reconstructions of the Proto-Celtic theonyms in the table- several of them seem highly unlikely. Just the few that I've picked up on:

• Eremon is has *Arjoman-es as an etymon, defined as "noble ploughman". Not only is this definition more appropriate for Amaethon, the Irish Eremon is clearly an o-stem, and the etymon should have the termination *-os.
• Speaking of whom, Amaethon is definately from *Ambaxtonos- "great ploughman", an augmentive of *ambaxtos "farmer, ploughman". (trivia: the same word gives English "ambassador").
• Boann is given the rather unweildy etymon *Bou-han-d(e)wā "cattle-fen-dew", in preference to the generally accepted *Bovindā "white cow" (c.f. 197 Google hits for "Bovinda" vs. only 47 for "Bovanda", all of which are either Wikipedia mirrors or unrelated).
• Pwca is most likely unrelated to *bukka, which actually gives Welsh bwch. A chance similarity in form does not necessarily indicate a genetic relationship.
• Both Deva and Devona are simply Romanisations of *dēwā "goddess" (and its augmentive form *dēwonā), and probably have no connection to "dew".
• Morrigan possibly comes from *māro-rīganā "great-queen" rather than *moro-rīganā.
• Gwydion is highly unlikely to come from *Weid-ī-kondos- which would rather have produced something like **Gwytgon.
• 'Gwen Teir Bron simply means "white three-breasts", which is totally transparent in Modern Welsh, coming from *windā tisres brundā
• In addition, I see no reason for the common augmentive infix *-on- to be translated as spirit.

If the above are only the ones I've noticed, it might be an idea to re-examine the whole table (and related entries). Dewrad 21:34, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

I agree about the need for checking. The translation of -on-, which often indicates divinity but is also found in personal names, as 'spirit' is unusual and I have not found a reference. I think this comes from the person who adds links to the University of Wales proto-Celtic lexicon without citing the actual etymology - it seems to be widespread in Wikipedia articles. --Nantonos 03:51, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

i also agree on the need for checking. i'll comment only a bit, though, and only on Morrígan - my own feeling is that both etymologies are correct, and the name is the result of a semantic confluence. Whateley23 07:48, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

it needs to have sources, above all, otherwise it is pure Original Research. dab (ᛏ) 12:47, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] sources

there is at least a collection of literature and external links here, but it is entirely unclear which statements are from which source. It is pointless to link to dictionary.com as an external link. If dictionary.com is the source of one particular statement, it should have a footnote with the link. As it is, the statements in the article are essentially unsourced. dab (ᛏ) 12:47, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Invented(?) deity names

An anonymous user just provided reconstructed Welsh-language equivalents for a lot of the names in the deities table – or at least, those with asterisks are clearly reconstructions. The rest may be attested. (I do wonder at Braint rather than Ffraid, however...) What do people think of these? Personally, I find such linguistic exercises very interesting and appealing; but I wonder whether they belong on Wikipedia. In particular, I think we cannot include them if they involve original scholarship. QuartierLatin1968 19:25, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cults section

I think this whole section is highly problematic. Somebody's gone through and tried to schematize a cult of X, Y, and Z in the abstract, in a way that (A) smells strongly of original research and (B) draws together themes and motifs that are either separate in the form we find them, or worse, deduced from shoddy DIY etymologies. The section on the cult of the power of the boggy terrain is particularly dreadful in this respect. I think it would be very hard to edit this section so that it's much good; it may be necessary to rewrite the section from scratch. Any discussion of cults must also pay attention to the geographic and temporal distribution of those cults... QuartierLatin1968 19:32, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Its a different point to the above by why do the Celtic gods named here have Roman names eg Mercury and Jupiter? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.140.124.55 (talk • contribs).

We don't know the Celtic names in all cases. In other cases, we know Celtic names that were used regionally (e.g. Visucius in the Rhineland), but it's more convenient to use the name that was used supra-regionally (e.g. Mercurius), even if the latter is in Latin. The assumption is that patterns of worship in the Romano-Celtic areas owed a lot to their pre-Roman precursors, Latin names notwithstanding. Q·L·1968 ☿ 19:51, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Move?

Celtic polytheism is an okay name, but there seems to be no standardization among Germanic paganism/Norse paganism, ancient Greek religion, religion in ancient Rome, Egyptian mythology, and so on. Most of these should theoretically be comparable things, so I'd expect they could have comparable article names. I'd prefer a move to Celtic paganism or (best of all) religion among the ancient Celts. QuartierLatin1968 19:32, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Standardization is ofte a good thing. However, it can also have a negative side. For example, many religious systems could be standardized under XXX Mythology (where XXX is Greek, Roman, Norse, Irish, etc etc). Which is fine for those religions primarily defined b a written mythology but not, for example, Continental Celtic reigion (which has no extant mythology, but does have epigraphy and archaeology). So, I would rather see Celtic polytheism than, say, Celtic mythology. --Nantonos 21:45, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup or Re-write?

This article is a mess. A big, huge mess. It's not even close to a decent article:

• The prose is stuffy and rather impenetrable, particularly to non-specialists.
• It includes no images.
• It contains way too much original research.
• It's about as engaging as the extended commentary to the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch. In the original German.

The whole article is riddled with a certain user's unsubstantiated original research about the etymologies of deity names which betray a lack of familiarity with Celtic linguistics, which also infects pretty much all other articles about Celtic deities.

As mentioned above by someone else, I have difficulty swallowing the information about cults. So what's to do? Completely re-write it or clean it up? If the latter, how? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.67.42.145 (talk • contribs).

I disagree in some respects. Be fair; the article is 67 kb long, and there's really good material stretching across (shall we say) 25 kb of it. True, we could definitely use some images, and the "cults" section is, I agree, pure original research. And too much material is superfluous to that on other articles, such as druid or Celtic mythology. I'm going to take it home to do a bunch of rewriting to see what I can do, but afterwards I'd appreciate help from a layperson in making the material accessible. I've been reading far too much Old Irish mythology recently to have any sense left! QuartierLatin1968 01:33, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

(PS: I've been on an extended campaign lately to decontaminate the Celtic deity articles from GeoffMGleadall's well-intended but over-ebullient theorizing. Let me know if you find any more areas in need of de-GeoffMGleadalling.)

I see that Neo-druidism has a copy of the same table, presumably by the same author. --Nantonos 09:06, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Learned comrades, please find before you a partial clean-up and a partial re-write. As you can see, much more remains to be done: (1) I haven't completely finished the cleanup of the revised 'cults' section. (2) Many citations are still needed. (3) We want more pictures. (4) The language may still be inaccessible to the lay reader.

(By the way, you may wonder where I have drawn the categories for the new 'cults' section: Wherever two out of the three of Green, Duval, and Jufer & Luginbühl agreed on a major heading, it became one of mine. A rough-and-ready solution, but it was the only one I could think of. As for the 'deities' table, I have pared it back dramatically so as to remove the purported etymologies and suggest 'associations' between gods only in a few cases where this is most widespread.) Solidarity, QuartierLatin1968 22:00, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Good job, QL, it sure needed this.--Cúchullain ^t/c 00:13, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cosmology and eschatology

Statements such as the following:

"They believed in a life after death, as they buried food, weapons, and ornaments with the dead.”

and

"The Celts provided their dead with weapons and other accoutrements, which indicates that they believed in an afterlife."

should never find their way into a scholarly discussion. Equating the burial of objects with the dead to a belief in an afterlife is not the same as saying that 2 + 2 = 4. Such statements are assumptions only and are 100% reflective of the author's personal beliefs and zero % grounded in fact.

This is not to say that these statements are categorically false. They may well be true but if so, it would be indicative of sheer luck, not actual science. Too frequently, the writings of self-proclaimed scientists are taken as the truth when they are in fact only the opinions of said individuals. Sadly, this tendency seems especially rampant in the field of archeology.

Perhaps because of the scarcity of factual evidence in the archeological world, archeologists feel compelled to "fill in the gaps" to justify their work. However, sometimes the discipline as well as science and, indeed, the world, are better served by simply saying, "I don't know".

~gws

That's quite true (although I'm not qualified to say much about your categorization of the archaeological world). However, what we can do is to say that "it is scholar X's assessment that archaeological fact Y means Z" (whilst adding, where appropriate, that "scholar W feels that scholar X came up with conclusion Z under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs"). This is why I think an appeal for citations is appropriate for such statements. Q·L·1968 ☿ 20:06, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup

Wow. I had no idea how much work this needed. I guess I'd only skimmed it, and a long time ago. Uh, I did rather a lot, but it still needs work. It's really biased towards Gaulish, even after everything I added in. The article still has an overall tone that Gaulish and PIE are the standard, and all other Celtic cultures merely manifestations of that overall pattern and structure. I have serious disagreements with that assumption, and am in Sjoestedt's camp that it is really inappropriate to try to fit the Insular deities into a Roman or Romano-Celtic template. Argh. Tired now. --Kathryn NicDhàna ♫♦♫ 05:28, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The Problematic Chart

i could've sworn that there was some discussion here of why different names were added to the current chart. i definitely remember discussing the "Lamiae = Morrigan" equation with someone, for instance. it's possible that was done on personal talk pages, though. in any case, that specific equation comes from medieval sources, which can be referenced in, e.g., Epstein's comprehensive thesis regarding Irish "war goddesses". i'm not sure what happened to the references in the wiki article, either. it's possible that they were overlooked. now, as for the basic value of that table, i would be interested to see arguments in both directions. me, i don't care much either way, but am inclined to let it stand. Whateley23 05:00, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Yup, it was with me – Q·L·1968 ☿ 19:46, 5 February 2007 (UTC). I'll take the liberty of copying your explanation:

firstly, let me say that you're right to question the source of that. after writing it, to be fair, i started questioning it, since it wasn't so glossed by Romans, but by Irish monks commenting on Latin texts.

the very first instance of the word "morrigan" in an Irish text is in "manuscript Regina No. 215 in a gloss of Isaiah 34.14, a passage which recounts the desolation of Edom. Lamia is there glossed monstrum in femine figura .i. morigain ‘monster in female form, that is, a morrígan’ (Stokes and Strachan 1901: I.2.6). The codex was written in 876 or 877 A.D.." (as cited in Angelique Gulermovich Epstein, War Goddess electronic edition (1998), Chapter One "The Morrígan in Mythological Tradition", page 2). Epstein goes on to document a number of other instances in which "Lamia" or "Lamiae" is glossed as "Morrígan" or vice versa.

also, apparently i forgot to include the signature, so i'll do that now: Whateley23 11:53, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

thank you. Whateley23 06:31, 17 February 2007 (UTC)