The Celts, who lived in the Iron Age, believed in gods and goddesses and good and evil spirits. Religion ran like a red line through their lives, apparently they even practiced human sacrifices to appease the deities.
Gods and goddesses
The Celts had a polytheistic religion, which means they believed in multiple gods and goddesses. They also believed in animism, so their religion could also be seen as a nature religion where people believe in good and evil spirits that live in trees, animals and utensils. The spirits must be appeased in the form of offerings, rituals and rules. Rituals and sacrifices were supervised by priests, who were also called druids. The Druids, who emerged in the 4th century BC, enjoyed high prestige within Celtic society. In addition to being priests, they were also mediators, physicians, scientists and judges and advised the king. The druids made predictions based on omens from nature and had a great knowledge of the galaxy. For that reason they also determined the calendar and then divided it into so-called good and bad days. In principle, anyone could become a druid, as the position did not have to be inherited. To become a druid one had to have been in the profession for about twenty years. At first the Celts did not assign human forms to their gods, but it was only late in the Iron Age that they began to do so.
Burial mounds
A striking feature of Celtic civilization are the enormous burial mounds. Some of these had a stone core. The dead were given many objects in their graves, such as weapons, utensils and in some cases bronze bowls whose usefulness has not yet been discovered. Archaeologists have even found beautiful wooden chariots in the graves. Among them was even an Etruscan copy that must have been imported. The cars, most of which have four wheels, are light, comfortable and well built. Some indications suggest that the deceased was buried sitting on a wagon. In addition to large wagons, small wheels made of clay were also found. This probably had a religious meaning, although this is not yet clear to us. Other clay models, for example of hands, and sometimes other objects, were also given to the dead in their graves. From these finds of the burial mounds and grave goods we can conclude that the Celts believed in life after death. Death was just a minor evil, a pause so to speak, and life was something they couldn’t really lose.
In the village of Hochdorf in southern Germany, in an area of fertile agricultural land, a huge Celtic burial mound was discovered around the mid-20th century. This was originally eight meters high. The wall and roof, which consisted of oak beams, had collapsed many centuries ago under the weight of a protective layer of stones. The burial chamber itself had an area of twenty square meters. This burial mound is one of the richest Celtic burial chambers that has been recovered, the grave was not looted or destroyed.
Here is an image of a reconstruction of the burial chamber in the burial mound. The deceased was a Celtic chieftain. The couch he lay on was made of bronze. The back of the sofa depicted dancing figures and a number of horses pulling a cart. No human hair was found, indicating that the body had been preserved in the period between death and the construction of the tomb. The grave was dated to around 550 BC, the Celtic king himself would have been forty years old. At 1.80 meters tall, he was taller than his contemporaries. He was laid out in several beautiful robes of expensive Chinese silk. In addition, his subjects had decorated him with flowers and placed a birch bark hat on his head. His grave goods included iron nail clippers, a wooden comb, fish hooks, and, importantly, a lot of gold. There were gold pins on his cloak, he wore a gold bracelet and a gold collar, and even his shoes had gold stripes. There is also a cart on the reconstruction. This was made of three different types of wood: ash, elm and maple. It was also decorated with bronze chains and figurines. On the cart were all kinds of utensils that the subjects thought their king would need for life in the afterlife: bowls, plates, dishes and knives. In the corner near the sofa is a bronze cauldron. After all these years, it still contained the sludge of four hundred liters of fermented honey. A number of decorated drinking horns hang on the wall. The largest, which held five liters, naturally belonged to the king himself.
Sacred places
The Romans built large temples to honor their gods and goddesses. The Celts rarely built stone temples. They saw nature as the source of divinity, and therefore gods and goddesses were everywhere in the world. There were a number of places in particular where a divine atmosphere prevailed. These were natural boundaries, such as trees or the banks of lakes and near springs and forests. When a shrine was built, such as a temple, it was covered and made of wood and straw. The most beloved place among the Celts to worship the gods was the forest. They referred to the sacred grove with the word nemeton. According to the Greek writer Strabo, a certain group of Celts met every year at Drunemeton, the sanctuary of the oak, to discuss important matters of politics and religion. The Celts named each sacred area after the deity with which they associated that place. For example, the goddess Arduinna was the goddess of the forests that we today call the Ardennes.
Human sacrifices
There is a suspicion that the Celts sacrificed people. This was part of the obligatory rituals they had to perform to appease the gods and spirits. It is true that animal sacrifice was carried out on a larger scale, and that utensils such as weapons and jewelry were also often sacrificed. Evidence for human sacrifice comes from archaeological material, Irish medieval texts and writings of Romans and Greeks.
For example, Emperor Julius Caesar had written the following about the Celts:
”The Celts believe that it is necessary for a man to die for another man, otherwise the Royal immortal gods will not be satisfied. Some tribes have figures of immense dimensions, the limbs of which consist of woven branches, which are filled with living people. After these figures are set on fire, the people disappear in a sea of fire. They believe that executing those caught for theft or burglary best satisfies the immortal gods; but when there is a scarcity of these kinds of victims, they even execute innocent people.” (source: Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts_and_human_sacrifice)
What Emperor Julius Caesar was referring to with figures of immense size is the wicker man, in Dutch it means the braided man. This is a large structure in the shape of a human and was made entirely of branches. Although several Roman writers have written about the human sacrifices of the Celts, there is little evidence for how it happened as Caesar describes it. He was not an eyewitness and he is the only one who writes about it, which gives people a skeptical view of this. According to Caesar, killing a murderer was done less as a punishment for killing someone, but more to give a human life for a human life and thus rebalance the scales. So it wasn’t a matter of revenge.