The Religion of the Ancient Celts | Page 9

Brythonic names or names with
Gaulish cognates. Place-names in the Pictish area, personal names in

the Pictish chronicle, and Pictish names like "Peanfahel,"[38] have
Brythonic affinities. If the Picts spoke a Brythonic dialect, S.
Columba's need of an interpreter when preaching to them would be
explained.[39] Later the Picts were conquered by Irish Goidels, the
Scotti. The Picts, however, must already have mingled with aboriginal
peoples and with Goidels, if these were already in Britain, and they
may have adopted their supposed non-Aryan customs from the
aborigines. On the other hand, the matriarchate seems at one time to
have been Celtic, and it may have been no more than a conservative
survival in the Pictish royal house, as it was elsewhere.[40] Britons, as
well as Caledonii, had wives in common.[41] As to tattooing, it was
practised by the Scotti ("the scarred and painted men"?), and the
Britons dyed themselves with woad, while what seem to be tattoo
marks appear on faces on Gaulish coins.[42] Tattooing, painting, and
scarifying the body are varieties of one general custom, and little stress
can be laid on Pictish tattooing as indicating a racial difference. Its
purpose may have been ornamental, or possibly to impart an aspect of
fierceness, or the figures may have been totem marks, as they are
elsewhere. Finally, the description of the Caledonii, a Pictish people,
possessing flaming hair and mighty limbs, shows that they differed
from the short, dark pre-Celtic folk.[43]
The Pictish problem must remain obscure, a welcome puzzle to
antiquaries, philologists, and ethnologists. Our knowledge of Pictish
religion is too scanty for the interpretation of Celtic religion to be
affected by it. But we know that the Picts offered sacrifice before
war--a Celtic custom, and had Druids, as also had the Celts.
The earliest Celtic "kingdom" was in the region between the upper
waters of the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Danube, where probably in
Neolithic times the formation of their Celtic speech as a distinctive
language began. Here they first became known to the Greeks, probably
as a semi-mythical people, the Hyperboreans--the folk dwelling beyond
the Ripoean mountains whence Boreas blew--with whom Hecatæus in
the fourth century identifies them. But they were now known as Celts,
and their territory as Celtica, while "Galatas" was used as a synonym of
"Celtæ," in the third century B.C.[44] The name generally applied by

the Romans to the Celts was "Galli" a term finally confined by them to
the people of Gaul.[45] Successive bands of Celts went forth from this
comparatively restricted territory, until the Celtic "empire" for some
centuries before 300 B.C. included the British Isles, parts of the Iberian
peninsula, Gaul, North Italy, Belgium, Holland, great part of Germany,
and Austria. When the German tribes revolted, Celtic bands appeared
in Asia Minor, and remained there as the Galatian Celts. Archæological
discoveries with a Celtic facies have been made in most of these lands
but even more striking is the witness of place-names. Celtic dunon, a
fort or castle (the Gaelic _dun_), is found in compound names from
Ireland to Southern Russia. Magos, "a field," is met with in Britain,
France, Switzerland, Prussia, Italy, and Austria. River and mountain
names familiar in Britain occur on the Continent. The Pennine range of
Cumberland has the same name as the Appenines. Rivers named for
their inherent divinity, devos, are found in Britain and on the
Continent--Dee, Deva, etc.
Besides this linguistic, had the Celts also a political unity over their
great "empire," under one head? Such a unity certainly did not prevail
from Ireland to the Balkan peninsula, but it prevailed over a large part
of the Celtic area. Livy, following Timagenes, who perhaps cited a lost
Celtic epos, speaks of king Ambicatus ruling over the Celts from Spain
to Germany, and sending his sister's sons, Bellovesus and Segovesus,
with many followers, to found new colonies in Italy and the Hercynian
forest.[46] Mythical as this may be, it suggests the hegemony of one
tribe or one chief over other tribes and chiefs, for Livy says that the
sovereign power rested with the Bituriges who appointed the king of
Celticum, viz. Ambicatus. Some such unity is necessary to explain
Celtic power in the ancient world, and it was made possible by unity of
race or at least of the congeries of Celticised peoples, by religious
solidarity, and probably by regular gatherings of all the kings or chiefs.
If the Druids were a Celtic priesthood at this time, or already formed a
corporation as they did later in Gaul, they must have endeavoured to
form and preserve such a unity. And if it was never so compact as
Livy's words suggest, it must have been regarded as an ideal by the
Celts or by their poets, Ambicatus serving as a central figure round
which the ideas