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causticusThe short answer is that we don't really know for sure. And that modern attempts to reconstruct this lost tradition are always going to be based on modern assumptions and opinions rather than anything genuinely representing the ancient Celtic wordlview.
The problem we have with ascertaining authentic ancient Celtic beliefs and praxis basically boils down to:
(1) Lack of primary sources from the Celtic point of view due to both the wholesale Roman conquest of Celtic territories and the fact that Celtic spirituality was an oral tradition; very little was written down.
(2) Highly-biased second and third hand accounts of their beliefs and practices from parties who were rather hostile to (or just ignorant of) Celtic traditions.
(3) The fact that at their peak, the Celts were not a single nation or centralized political entity, but rather a continuum of various tribal groups and confederations that spanned a rather large geographic reach. And owing to this decentralized arrangement, there would have been quite a variety of differing beliefs and practices found among the varying groups spread out over this vast expanse of land; of course all of this was held together to some degree by the Druid orders which did bring some semblance of coherence to the whole thing, despite the many local differences in religious expression. But let us not pretend for one moment to know what the Druids believed or taught.
The same three points above could applied to other tribal traditions that the Romans wiped out, whether that would have been through direct military conquest or the later-occurring religious conquests of Roman Christianity via its mass conversions of various European peoples.
We can clearly see now why the many attempts at pagan reconstruction today constitutes an ever-precarious endeavor.
The problem we have with ascertaining authentic ancient Celtic beliefs and praxis basically boils down to:
(1) Lack of primary sources from the Celtic point of view due to both the wholesale Roman conquest of Celtic territories and the fact that Celtic spirituality was an oral tradition; very little was written down.
(2) Highly-biased second and third hand accounts of their beliefs and practices from parties who were rather hostile to (or just ignorant of) Celtic traditions.
(3) The fact that at their peak, the Celts were not a single nation or centralized political entity, but rather a continuum of various tribal groups and confederations that spanned a rather large geographic reach. And owing to this decentralized arrangement, there would have been quite a variety of differing beliefs and practices found among the varying groups spread out over this vast expanse of land; of course all of this was held together to some degree by the Druid orders which did bring some semblance of coherence to the whole thing, despite the many local differences in religious expression. But let us not pretend for one moment to know what the Druids believed or taught.
The same three points above could applied to other tribal traditions that the Romans wiped out, whether that would have been through direct military conquest or the later-occurring religious conquests of Roman Christianity via its mass conversions of various European peoples.
We can clearly see now why the many attempts at pagan reconstruction today constitutes an ever-precarious endeavor.
