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Prologue: Beliefs of the Ancient Celts

These pages are dedicated to the gods of the Brythonic Celts. As such they focus on the deities represented and recorded by the P-Celtic speaking peoples of Britain. The Brython who were the pre-Roman ancestors of the modern Cymry, Cornish and Breton. Unless there are parallels or links the Irish deities are omitted from this list as they are adequately covered on many other websites.

There is also the question of what constitutes a Celtic god in that the Celtic belief system evolved from animism to maternalism and paternalism. As a result many Celtic deities are deities of place. Intimately tied to the place or the site of their worship. Many of the gods in the lists supplied here are also local deities. Tied to the tribes and peoples who worshipped them. Few Celtic deities are global gods worshipped in a pan-Celtic fashion. As such the idea of what constitutes a Celtic deity is a complex one. Made all the more confusing in that the evidence fore their existence and worship is fragmentary at best.

The Celtic gods are also not like their Classical counterparts and it is wrong to make an equivalence between a Celtic god and a Roman or Greek one. Indeed many of the major celtic deities were triple-gods. Each single deity merely an aspect of a gestalt of three gods. Also, gods with similar properties may be worshipped in different regions under different names. It is impossible to say whether these are aspects of the same deity or merely reflect a convergence of belief systems.

In generating this website I have attempted to gather as much information about the deity together as is possible. Most of the deities are illustrated with my own interpretation of their aspect. Which, in and of itself, could be considered an affectation as it was only relatively late that the Celts began to create stylized humaniform representations of their deities.

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Copyright © 2005, Dyfed Lloyd Evans

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