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... Parading only the head, rather than a complete idol, seems unusual. The human head was an important religious symbol of pre-Christian Celtic tribes (Ross, 1957), the site of the soul. Considering that head-ritual may have been conducted within the context of ritualmurder (Aldhouse- Green, 2001, p. 95) and its use and veneration is found repeatedly in the archaeological record and folklore of the British Isles (Clarke, 1999); it may reasonably be inferred that originally the head of a victim sacrificed at the Gouk Stone was used, paraded and proffered to propitiate the goddess into changing the weather. ...
Holme I and II were contemporary, adjacent Early Bronze Age (EBA) oak-timber enclosures exposed intertidally at Holme-next-the-sea, Norfolk, England, in 1998. Holme I enclosed a central upturned tree-stump, its function and intent unknown. Holme II is thought a mortuary structure. Both are proposed here best explained as independent ritual responses to reverse a period of severe climate deterioration recorded before 2049 BC when their timbers were felled. Holme I is thought erected on the summer-solstice, when the cuckoo traditionally stopped singing, departing to the ‘Otherworld’. It replicated the cuckoo’s supposed overwintering quarters: a tree-hole or the ‘bowers of the Otherworld’ represented by the tree-stump, remembered in folklore as ‘penning-the-cuckoo’ where a cuckoo is confined to keep singing and maintain summer. The cuckoo symbolised male-fertility being associated with several Indo-European goddesses of fertility that deified Venus - one previously identified in EBA Britain. Some mortal consorts of these goddesses appear to have been ritually sacrificed at Samhain. Holme II may be an enclosure for the body of one such ‘sacral king’. These hypotheses are considered, using abductive reasoning, as ‘inferences to the best explanations’ from the available evidence. They are supported with environmental data, astronomic and biological evidence, regional folklore, toponymy, and an ethnographic analogy with indigenous Late Iron Age practices that indirect evidence indicates were undertaken in EBA Britain. Cultural and religious continuity is supported by textual sources, the material record and ancient DNA (aDNA) studies.
The presence of the Celts in Transylvania during the middle La Tène period was neither ephemeral nor devoid of consequences. Most likely, their mythological legacy materialized in local late La Tène iconography (e.g. "the knight with bird of prey" of Surcea or the "female triad" of Lupu). Despite the changes to the regional collective identities illustrated in the historical appearance of the Dacians, myths of Celtic tradition became integrated in the cultural memory of local elites of the 1st century BC. Under these circumstances, the alleged antagonism between Celts and Dacians, emphatically incorporated in the Romanian historiography from the testimony of Strabo (VII 3, 11), should be regarded with a critical eye. Beyond the conflict between Burebista, king of the Dacians and Getae, and Critasiros, king of the Boii and Taurisci, many indicators of a particular trans-regional cultural solidarity should be better distinguished, conceived and accepted. Most likely, habits and ideological patterns of central European (Celtic) origin played a fundamental role in the genesis of late La Tène culture in pre-Roman Dacia. © 2016 INSTITUTUL DE CERCETARI ECO-MUZEALE “GAVRILA SIMION”. All rights reserved.
This is an account of the severed heads on the Auld Wives' Lifts, Craigmaddie Muir, Scotland, by the Professor of Archaeology, University of Glasgow. The Auld Wives' Lifts is an object of interest and debate for geology, antiquarianism, folklore, vernacular art and, perhaps, Celtic iconography, and we are glad to give it publicity.
Already in Caesar's account of the Gaulish druids we see evidence for a Celtic ideology of utterance, which accords the highest authority to the spoken word, even in the presence of the written. The struggle for authority between oral and literary tradition is a theme extensively featured in medieval Irish literature, in which depictions of the relationship between the two modes of communication alternate between rivalry and complementarity. In this paper some of these depictions are explored.
In August 1979 a large sculptured stone was discovered, broken and upside down in a pit immediately outside the eastern window of the Anglo-Saxon crypt of the church of St Wystan at Repton in Derbyshire (pl. V). The scenes depicted on the two surviving faces of the stone are without direct parallel in Anglo-Saxon sculpture and have so far eluded definitive interpretation. The purpose of the present article is to place on record a detailed description of the stone, and some preliminary thoughts on its date and possible significance, in the hope that wider discussion may lead to a more satisfactory understanding of what must be, on any judgement, one of the more important surviving examples of pre-Conquest sculpture.
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