Celtic Animism
As Anne Ross observed: "... god-types, as opposed to individual universal Gaulish deities, are to be looked for as an important feature of the religion of the Gauls ... and the evidence of epigraphy strongly supports this conclusion.
[citation needed] In tribal territories, the ground and waters which received the dead were imbued with sanctity and revered by their living relatives.
In the Pre-Roman Iron Age, lakes, rivers, springs and bogs received special offerings of metalwork, wooden objects, animals and, occasionally, of human beings.
The ancient name for the River Marne was Dea Matrona (Goddess Matron); the Seine was Sequana; the Severn, Sabrina; the Wharfe, Verbeia; the Saône, Souconna; there are countless others.
Inscriptions to Taranis the 'Thunderer' have been found in Britain, Gaul, Germany and the former Yugoslavia and the Roman poet Lucan mentions him as a savage god who demanded human sacrifice.
[3]: 25 Altars decorated with wheels were set up by Roman soldiers stationed at Hadrian's Wall, and also by supplicants in Cologne and Nîmes.
Deer (who shed antlers) suggest cycles of growth;[1] in Ireland they are sacred to the goddess Flidais, while in Scotland they are guarded by the Cailleach.
The animal elements in half-human, antlered deities suggest that the forest and its denizens possessed a numinous quality as well as an economic value.
[1] Hunter-gods were venerated among the Continental Celts, and they often seem to have had an ambivalent role as protector both of the hunter and the prey, not unlike the functions of Diana and Artemis in classical mythology.
[3]: 29 From Gaul, the armed deer-hunter depicted on an image from the temple of Le Donon in the Vosges lays his hands in benediction on the antlers of his stag companion.
Arduinna, the eponymous boar-goddess of the Ardennes, rides her ferocious quarry, knife in hand, whilst the boar-god of Euffigneix in the Haute-Marne is portrayed with the motif of a boar with bristles erect, striding along his torso, which implies conflation between the human animal perception of divinity.
The Greek author Arrian, writing in the 2nd century CE, said that the Celts never went hunting without the gods' blessing and that they made payment of domestic animals to the supernatural powers in reparation for their theft of wild creatures from the landscape.
Hunting itself may have been perceived as a symbolic, as well as practical, activity in which the spilling of blood led not only to the death of the beast but also to the earth's nourishment and replenishment.
