The La Tène religion of the Celtic elite ― part 25: In conclusion

Coat of arms of La Tène, Neuchâtel,
Switzerland. The former municipalities
of Marin-Epagnier and Thielle-Wavre
merged on 1 January 2009 to form
the new municipality of La Tène.
The design refers to the many Celtic
swords found in the lake.

Even after twenty-five parts, I have only scratched the surface of this topic. I could have included many more examples from the Gundestrup cauldron and Celtic coinage, but this is a blog, not a book. Even so, twenty five parts were still necessary to cover the basics. Archaeology is poorly equipped to deal in matters of religion and this is demonstrated by the frequent use of the word "ritual" in archaeology literature. Ritual is just one aspect of religious practice and rituals are often enacted without the slightest idea of their origin and meaning. Yet, no meaning is attached to the word in such literature and it really doesn't take a degree in archaeology to make guesses based on nothing about what one is looking at. It would be better if such objects or the arrangement of objects at an archaeological site were stated "perhaps to have religious significance", or even better, " the meaning of... is unknown to the excavators".

It seems, also, that many archaeologists have similar problems in understanding Celtic culture. Culture is nothing if it does not speak of world-views. Whenever you read that "there was no unified Celtic culture" you are reading the words of someone who is trying to define culture without using language, religion, and art to do so.  It would seem that the scope of modern archaeology is far more limited than is commonly believed. Any archaeological site or any of contents can be a point of departure for looking into cultural matters, but without any knowledge of these other subjects not much can be said with any real substance.

The main problem with defining the ancient Celts is that culture is often tied to nationalistic or biological factors.There is either no science being used in such cases, or science is being used improperly ― as little more than a veneer, and we must look to other motives, either political or personal, as to why this is done. It has everything to do with the present and nothing at all to do with the past.

As a way to avoid a lot of these problems, I proposed a classification system whereby the ancient Celts could be divided into two approximate cultural frames: Celtic A is defined as those people who used a Celtic language, and Celtic B were those people who, in addition to using a Celtic language, also made and used objects in the La Tène linked styles. Any classification system is subjective and is constructed to serve the needs of people today. The classification system that I proposed, eliminates all of the problems that had been tried to be resolved by substituting "Iron Age" for "Celtic".

Another subject that is absent in archaeology, but not in mythology, is psychology. Not only do we have to be mindful of the psychology of the ancient people we are studying, but we also have to be mindful of the psychology of those who are studying them, the latter because everything that we say and do is filtered through our own psychology. I have noticed that there are a considerable number of people in professional archaeology who exhibit the Jungian "Extraverted Thinking Type". In recent years, however, postmodern attitudes have lessened this problem. It hit its peak in the "New Archaeology" of the seventies, that might be better defined as "scientistic" rather than "scientific". The myopic views about what constitutes culture that I have mentioned above are symptomatic of the extraverted thinking type. Jung explains the type in General description of the types:

"This type will, by definition, be a man whose constant endeavour―in so far, of course, as he a pure type―is to make all his activities dependent on intellectual conclusions, which in the last resort are always oriented by objective data, whether these be external facts or generally accepted ideas. This type of man elevates objective reality, or an objectively oriented intellectual formula, into the ruling principle not only for himself but for his whole environment. By this formula good and evil are measured, and beauty and ugliness determined. Everything that agrees with this formula is right, everything that contradicts it is wrong, and anything that passes by it indifferently is merely incidental. Because this formula seems to embody the entire meaning of life, it is made into a universal law which must be put into effect everywhere all the time, both individually and collectively. Just as the extraverted thinking type subordinates himself to his formula, so, for their own good, everybody around him must obey it too, for whoever refuses to obey it is wrong―he is resisting the universal law, and is therefore unreasonable, immoral, and without a conscience. ... The fact that an intellectual formula never has been and never will be devised which could embrace and express the manifold possibilities of life must lead to the inhibition or exclusion of other activities and ways of living that are just as important. In the first place, all those activities that are dependent on feeling will become repressed in such a type―for instance, aesthetic activities, taste, artistic sense, cultivation of friends, etc. Irrational phenomena such as religious experiences, passions, and suchlike are often repressed to the point of complete unconsciousness. Doubtless there are exceptional people who are able to sacrifice their entire life to a particular formula, but for most of us such exclusiveness is impossible in the long run."

The above quote explains, fully, why there can be no further clarification when the term "ritual" is applied in most archaeological writing. It might also explain why the subject of archaeology is so theory-laden. There are a lot of people, in this psychological type looking for new laws to follow when the old laws do not seem to be serviceable to them, or when the old laws are drawing them toward neuroses. Another way to put it is that these people have their noses squashed firmly against the glass at the Logos end of the Mythos/ Logos spectrum. You do, however, see it in religion where metaphor is so utterly repressed that those who exhibit it are "infidels" who must be killed. Joseph Campbell points out how the meaning of "demon" has been changed in spelling and meaning by such people to signify evil. It's original form is daemon and the Oxford English dictionary gives "An inner or attendant spirit or inspiring force: Socrates claimed to have lived his life according to the dictates of his daimon". In other words, Socrates was revealing his Introverted type if he did, indeed, say that. Those who claim Socrates was an extravert sometimes use quotes from other extraverts like Cato the elder who said: “Socrates was a big chatterbox, who tried … to dissolve [Athenian] customs, and to entice its people to forming opinions contrary to order”. What could be more extraverted thinking than that statement of Cato?

The problems thus become complex when introverts and extraverts are looking at past people who are themselves both introverts and extraverts. Societies and cultures, too, exhibit more of one trait than the other. No one could accuse Buddhists of being extravert, for example. However, societies and cultures mostly express their "collective consciousness" with "its wretched 'ism's and 'ology's"( to quote Jung), so we can see that the more introverted views of some of the core founders of such societies become more extraverted in the subsequent mass mind.

Thus we can see that the introverted founders of religions (how can they be otherwise?) eventually vanish to be replaced by more extraverted followers who are attracted to the "system". From that pool, then, new leaders of the same religion emerge and it slowly becomes something very different from its origins. Then you eventually get "fundamentalists" who actually see only the remains of a religion (expressed by its laws) and have no idea, whatsoever,  what the religions was really about in its early days. You get enantiodromia.

In the La Tène religion, the early symbolization of the ivy as a "dark" or winter plant that is born again, slowly change to where its descendant forms are more subject to the extraverted thinking (and more primitive) view of ivy covering everything and holding it all together. Much of the life is drained from it in the process and we end up with the conservative and tired last forms of the mirror style.

The Druids, in their syncretization with Greek Pythagorean and Dionysian beliefs started with the peak experience of having previous ideas about belief as metaphor because of their travels across Germany and Gaul reinforced and expanded by contact with Greek philosophy in Italy and beyond. But their roles as judges gradually eroded that and we can never be certain as to what degree the transmigration of souls remained as a religious concept or was changed to enable the rulers to obtain vast amounts of gold by being known as a people who thought of death as only a temporary inconvenience, and that if they fought heroically in their current life, would find themselves promoted in the next. By the time that Caesar wrote about the Druids, they had not only changed, but their doom was on the horizon.

I knew that the great numbers of deities represented by later inscriptions could not possibly have developed only in the La Tène period, and was even unlikely to have developed in the previous Hallstatt period (the utter conservatism of design in the Iron Age Hallstatt, anyway, spoke loudly of the lack of religious change). I also saw syncretizations, through Celtic coin imagery, of much earlier beliefs. It was when Euan MacKie noticed that alignments at Maes Howe reflected the traditional Celtic religious celebrations of Samhain, Imbolc, etc. that I realized that what had been identified as Celtic religion was really much earlier than, most likely, even the Celtic language. Thus, there was no specific religion identified in the literature that was being expressed in the La Tène period. But the blossoming of that art could mean nothing other than religious peak-experiences. The new religion was there to be seen, all along, but modern archaeologists of the extraverted thinking types had dismissed everything that the classical authors had written about it because it did not fit with their personal psychology and, in any case, they are absolutely incapable of discussing religion, save to condemn it. Euan MacKie had experienced this psychological type when one of his papers had failed the "peer-review" process, not because his observances were flawed in any way, but because his "peers" did not believe in archaeoastronomy. But, as I said, times are changing.

Transdisciplinarity has yet to be practiced in mainstream archaeology as the subject is, of course, dominated by extraverted thinking types (the very type you would expect to rise in academia). The reason being that it deliberately violates the classical logic rule of the excluded middle, and comes about that because of the very different nature of reality that is being proven by quantum physics (String Theory being already a move back towards Newtonian physics by reason of its "physical" connections that are quite different from the related Implicate Order theory of David Bohm). Also, those who were receiving their education during the time of the "New Archaeology" are now among the "old guard" who see anything postmodern as "anything goes". In other words, lacking the formal rules that are the currency of the extraverted thinking type.

Unfortunately, changes are only likely to happen through independent studies because the academic world is subject to the same phenomena as everyone else. Joseph Campbell goes even further by suggesting that the academic world can actually prevent psychological maturity through its peer-dependence:

The La Tène religion of the Celtic elite ― part 24: Ireland

A rare sight ― Ireland on a clear day
photo: NASA's Earth Observatory

Like the sky above it, a clear picture of pagan Celtic Ireland is elusive. The shortage of clear archaeological evidence in England, Wales and Scotland seems like plenty when compared with that of Ireland. Yet, Irish manuscripts contain more legends of the Celts than anywhere else. The warriors in these tales always fight from chariots, yet there is not a single example of any Irish-made chariots or chariot fittings. There is a wooden part of a chariot from Corlea Bog, where a wooden road appears to have been made for wheeled traffic, but it contains non-native maple studs and might come from the Rhineland, and there is also a British terret ring of simple form. The commonest La Tène objects are horse bits, and they are frequently found in pairs, so their use on a chariot team is, at least, possible.  One has to be constantly aware of the adage: "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" because there is no sign of any ordinary house of the period, either ― no post-holes or fireplaces. I suspect that houses were built igloo-style from peat blocks, the later form of stone huts used by the early Christian monks perhaps echoing that form. Another suggestion is that tents were used, and what appears to be wooden tent pegs were found at the Corlea Bog road.

In his introduction to La Tène in Ireland: Problems of Origin and Chronology, Marburg, 1984, Barry Raftery starts with:

"There can be little doubt that the archaeology of Iron Age Ireland is one of the most problematical fields of study in the whole of Irish prehistory. Because of the virtual absence of significant associations, the paucity of burials and clearly recognisable settlements and, indeed, the largely selective nature of the surviving remains, there are still immense areas of uncertainty confronting the archaeologist in almost every aspect of this extremely difficult period.

"The Iron Age in Ireland is illumined, however dimly, by a not inconsiderable wealth of written material. This written record is of undeniable value to the archaeologist but arguably its existence has also had detrimental effects on the development of objective archaeology. This is not only because the written sources have been misused but also because the complete and vivid picture of society in Iron Age Ireland apparently presented by the literature is at variance with, and obscures, the very real darkness which so often confronts the archaeologist in his study of the material remains of the period."

Iron Age objects in Ulster Museum
photo: Notafly

Like northern Britain and Wales, no Celtic coins were issued in Ireland. From this we can assume that no Irish troops served in the Mediterranean campaigns, and that the the Irish did not have very strong economic and social ties with those Celts who did. Yet there are signs of La Tène influence in Ireland from the Rhineland to England. Sometimes, these connections are not that obvious. Raftery (Pagan Celtic Ireland, did not mention that the material (ash with maple studs) used in a piece of fine woodworking from Corlea Bog (fig. 53), was paralleled in Waldgallscheid, Rhineland (Jacobsthal No. 26). Some errors have also been made: the Brigantes identity of the Lambay Island settlers near Dublin was based only on the presence of a beaded torc (which objects have no clear distribution focus). Looking at the brooches and other remains, I was able to state that the most likely tribe for these settlers was the Dobunni. For reasons that I cannot fathom. rather too much attention is given, by archaeologists, to the more spectacular pieces. There was quite a commotion about the finding of the Crosby Garrett Roman parade helmet, but really, high status objects such as this have little archaeological value in comparison with a local brooch, as such items often travelled far. It would make a good display piece, but that has nothing at all to do with archaeology.

As many examples of Irish La Tène art start later and last longer than those of other areas, and because of the evidence of the Lambay Island settlers, it would seem that most of the La Tène influence was sporadic and not particularly focused (save for being largely absent in the extreme south). It seems that the Lambay Island settlers arrived in about 75 AD from the Severn estuary. The brooch type most represented in the finds being a distinctly local Polden Hill variant. I don't think that I am going out on too much of a limb by suggesting that these settlers were seeking a way of life that was not commensurate with the Roman occupation of Britain. Perhaps they were looking for hire, as warriors, from local leaders. The fact of the Menapii tribe from the mouth of the Rhine appearing in Ireland suggests a larger contingent, but without much in the way of material evidence apart from the fact that the Irish La Tène gold bears platinum inclusions not found in British gold, but present in the Rhineland and in a coin of the Boii, might mean that a large segment of the tribe moved to Ireland as did large segments of the Aulerci tribes moved down from the Rhine to Armorica.

 A profession that likely suffered a great deal in Roman Britain along with those Celts who made weapons and chariots was poetry. Bards, who were all members of the Druid class were specialists in singing the praises of the heroic acts of their patrons, but the heroism of such British leaders as Boudicca did not provide much of a market opportunity for the bard, as local heroism against the Romans was not boasted by them for very long. I think it very likely that British and Continental bards also traveled to Ireland seeking patrons. They would have needed to familiarize themselves with the histories of their new patrons, but many colorful passages would be carried forward from verses composed about previous patrons and would have been the stock and trade of their profession. Who knows? ― Perhaps verses about the "hound of Cullan the smith" (Cú Chulainn) had some elements from verses about "the hound of Belinus" (Cunobeline).

Raftery finishes  La Tène in Ireland with an allusion to Diodorus (V.31):

'The Irish  La Tène material gives us tantalising glimpses into a Celtic, Iron Age society but, more often than not, the evidence can be said to "speak in riddles, for the most part hinting at things and leaving a great deal to be understood".

The La Tène religion of the Celtic elite ― part 23: Shapeshifting

Although a carefully designed formal composition,
seen obliquely, the shapes shift in the mind's eye.

Imagine the two diagonal bosses to be the eyes of a

bird-beaked reptile with a domed crest. its snarling

mouth seems to be grasping something. Now, look

at its left eye and call that a nose. Suddenly, a new

creature appears.

British bronze finial in the Plastic Style, late 3rd cent. BC,

found in Oxfordshire. (in coll.)

"We are told that the Gauls were valiant, quarrelsome, cruel, superstitious, and had the gift of pointed speech; their art also is full of contrasts. It is attractive and repellent; it is far from primitiveness and simplicity, is refined in thought and technique; elaborate and clever; full of paradoxes, restless, puzzlingly ambiguous; rational and irrational; dark and uncanny―far from the lovable humanity and the transparence of Greek art. Yet, it is a real style, the first great contribution by the barbarians to European arts, the first great chapter in the everlasting mutual stock-taking of Southern, Northern, and Eastern forces in the life of Europe." Paul Jacobsthal, Early Celtic Art, 1944, Epilogue. 



In speaking of naturalism, realism, and allusion, Martyn Jope (Early Celtic Art in the British Isles, 2000, p. 119), says:

"We have seen how much of the apparent imagery is allusive, conjured by reminders of analogous shapes. This may be particularly so when hints of natural forms are used to create focal points, articulations, or finial, in tectonics or ornament. Animal-head effects may, for instance, be conjured out of lyres, the foot- and top-scrolls, giving nostrils and eyes (pl. 69a, 175a, b); the breed may be made more specific by the containing outline and ancillary detail, as horse (pl.175a, b) or ox. When our vision becomes accustomed to animalizing such lyres, even the simplest relief modelling of a brooch (pl. 175d) may take on equine or bovine character. Other compositions will become similarly animated in the viewer's mind"

In another view of the finial, I decided to make the imaginary

creature a bug-eyed goldfish, but the accompanying design
also revealed is not from my imagination but wrapped

around the "Yin-Yang" boss is a traditional palmette
derivative with a distribution focus on Saarland.

On the same plane as that boss is the small palmette leaf

formed by a delineated flat area to the left of the cusp

(another common Celtic design element). The other leaves

are indicated only by the position of the viewer and are

formed on sloping sides of masses.

The importance of the shapes revealed in the view on the left cannot be overstated: not only does the addition of a revealed linear design of established design prove that the revealed image was deliberately placed, but that specific forms, at least in some cases, were also intended.

Oblique anamorphosis had been thought to have been an invention of the Renaissance, in paintings where details were to be seen from a specific point, and later "all done with mirrors". To produce an example of oblique anamorphosis in sculptural form is remarkable enough, but to create a two dimensional design from three dimensional masses also in the same piece has never been done since.

Even ignoring the anamorphosing, anyone seeing the work of this artist or one of his companions must have thought they were witnessing magic. All casting before this point had been fairly crude, only simple shapes were possible and decorative detail was not "in the round" but bas-relief. Such a small and detailed casting would seem impossible.

I have noticed that whenever people see a photograph of a masterpiece, they often imagine the object to be bigger than it really is. When a number of authorities in early Celtic art looked at the photos of the finial, one of them started calling it a "bed-knob" before he realized that it was only 23 mm. high. When proportions are just so they give a certain dignity and weight to the object. Not having any visible measure of size, an observer can add "mental mass" to the object when seeing it only as a photograph. Thinking about what he said, though, I could imagine it adorning some Art Nouveau bronze bed in a 1910 Paris apartment.

We can only speculate on from where this artist and his workshop originated. He has used the palmette in a way that starts around Weisskirchen Saarland in his time, but much later found its way to Armorica. The formal design is a triskele like on the armring from the River Tarn in France, but instead of being arranged on a curved surface, it is here draped over a fully three-dimensional form and this requires a turn of ninety degrees in each limb shortly after the centre. When his workshop ended, the knowledge of his casting technique was lost. This was obviously a tragedy to other British craftsmen and they immediately developed greater repoussé skills and even reversed his "three-dimensions to two trick" by depicting three dimensions linearly in chasing on flatter areas of a repoussé shield boss. This "missing link's" workshop changed the direction of British art.

The shapeshifting of the Plastic Style was not adopted by the Celts from Dionysos' battle with the Titans alone, but it echoed their own experiences of seeing many indigenous religions along their travels which shared underlying motifs, but which were not being understood as different metaphorical expressions of such motifs. The Druids, who were primarily philosophers and judges, insinuated themselves above all local priesthoods as being in closer contact with the otherworld. But they also controlled military matters as well. Their beliefs might already have included something very close to the Pythagorean transmigration of souls, before they even arrived in Italy, but seeing how the Greeks had organized such a philosophy into mystery cults must have been a great peak experience as we can see from this artistic explosion.

As the prototypical ivy scroll represented a second, winter, birth and this connected with the winter solstice traditions later transposed to Samhain, and to the Deep, the more primitive idea of ivy covering everything and sometimes even holding weak structures together had already started to gain more ground. In the Plastic Style, the forms of everything interweave like ivy. Everything is connected by metaphor and metaphors can also be visual. Metaphor is shapeshifting.

The La Tène religion of the Celtic elite ― part 22: Tracking religious changes over time

Hallstatt, Austria
photo: Pedroserafin 

The Hallstatt period spans the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age. Unlike the  La Tène, there is considerable uniformity in the type of art that decorates objects. A very common and widespread type of object is the bronze bracelet with decoration at the terminals and sometimes around the ring. The decoration can include a series of lines, X's, diamond shapes and  chevrons. From finds in graves we know that these bracelets were often wore in mismatched pairs.

Franz Boas' Primitive Art focuses mainly on North American Indian art, but he could have been describing late Hallstatt decoration with:

"The pattern of artistic expression that emerges from a long, cumulative process determined by a multiplicity of causes fashions the form of the art work. We recognize the permanence of pattern in those cases in which a useful form that has lost its function persists as a decorative element; in the imitation in new materials of natural forms used at one time as utensils, and in the transfer of forms from one technique to another. The fixity of the pattern does not permit the artist to apply natural forms unmodified to decorative purposes. His imagination is limited by the pattern" (p. 354)

Differing from much-repeated applied decoration on humble objects, Boas stresses the difference, with regard to meaning, in other art forms:

 "The graphic and plastic arts owe much of their emotional value to the representative and symbolic values of form. This is no less true in literature, music and dance. narrative and poetry so far as they contain intelligible words, always have a meaning which may have deep significance because they touch upon those aspects of life that stir the emotions. Frequently there is an added meaning, when the words have a symbolic, ulterior significance related to the religious beliefs or philosophical ideas. In music and dance also symbolic significance is often attached to form." (p.356)

While there are many examples of primitive art around the world to which the above words could also apply,  La Tène art would seem to be an exception, not only in our current perception of  it, but also in the ways that the original artists dealt with meaning. We have no idea about the nature of early Celtic music; we are not even sure if they danced, and the Druids and mystery religions both forbad the use of literature. The spoken word was transmitted in verse, but again, we have no surviving La Tène poetry.

I see more than just habits in what Boas has to say, the urge to express is a universal human trait and when one avenue of expression is shut down, people have a tendency to seek new outlets for their expression. We might even wonder if dance and poetry was used even more to replace the loss of meaning in the visual arts when symbols no longer carried meaning and what was previously significant had deteriorated to mindless pattern-fill.

When Tacitus noticed the similarities in a pair of German gods to the Roman Castor and Pollux, it was a curiosity to him, so he mentioned it in his Germania. He did not seem to take it as any sort of revelation, and he certainly did not start a new religion from it. A common meme among archaeologists is that artistic motifs or styles were carried far by trade. That it is a meme is indicated by its concurrent lack of thought or explanation: the human being vanishes from the scenario and things appear to affect other things without any human intervention at all. It becomes especially unthinking when difficult techniques are needed to construct objects that are considered to be inspired by trade goods. Just because I buy a television, I do not have to get the urge to build more of them and the use of the television does not tell me anything of how to make one.
We also do not see any failed attempts to copy early Celtic art in, say, Britain. The first British productions of early Celtic art come fully formed, like the birth of Athena from Zeus's skull. This error was pointed out by Martyn Jope on the very first page of Early Celtic art in the British Isles:

"The initiating stimuli for this rise evidently came from Europe, yet at the crucial time, the fourth-third centuries B.C., we can point to practically no imported pieces that might have served as potential exemplars; the new ideas and skills must have come largely in the minds and hands of men with a considerable experience in distant ateliers."

I was very pleased to be able to prove Jope's hypothesis with my discovery, in the trade, of the only piece of the La Tène Plastic Style to have been made in Britain. At first, I thought that it was the only piece of the Plastic Style to have been found in Britain, and that was exciting enough  ― I had no example of that style in my collection because of its great rarity. When it arrived, though, and I was able to examine it more carefully, I realized that it contained distinctly British features like the trumpet. I also saw that the basic geometry of the triskele decoration had acquired further dimensionality by no longer being just wrapped over a curved form like the Plastic style arm rings and anklets, but traveled from a top elevation, ninety degrees to a side elevation, so that the entire design could not be seen from any single viewpoint. After receiving a lot of skepticism about the object being British, I had it tested by electron microprobe because I knew that, if it was British and of the time period of the Plastic Style, the trace metals would show a high cobalt to nickel ratio. That it did, in spades, being just over the highest cobalt to nickel ratio recorded so far (only if it would have had very low cobalt, could its British origin be questioned).

I will come back to the Plastic Style later, but for now we will briefly track La Tène styles and add religious commentary. La Tène starts with the Early Style which preserves more of its Greek or Etruscan origins. Religious references can be narrative like the decoration of the sword scabbard from Hallstatt where the wheel turners demonstrate the repeated cycles of life. The idea of cycles was not new to them and cosmic cycles were demonstrated at Newgrange nearly three thousand years before. What had changed, though, was the addition of human beings to the scene. There are two reasons for this: Jacobsthal noted that the human figure was mostly represented in Celtic areas that had a very close contact with Mediterranean cultures such as the Rhineland and the port of Massalia in the south of France. Also, the Celts' arrival in Italy had exposed them to Pythagorean and Dionysian concepts of the transmigration of souls and resurrection, and they could then accept a more active human role in cosmic cycles apart from having the human being act as metaphor.

Far earlier than Newgrange, the people likely had a similar concept about their identity as do many First Nations people where I live: they are not a people inside of an environment, but they are people who are part of that environment. You cannot remove the environment without destroying the people's identity. Thus, when they say to doubting archaeologists, "We have always been here", they are describing a concept as sophisticated as when Stephen Hawking talks about time and the big bang theory. If the archaeologist counters their statement with something about the Bering Strait, and if the archaeologist is being honoured, then the reply will be something along the lines of "White Man's thinking." If the archaeologist is not being honoured, then the First Nations person might just say nothing and walk away to do something useful.

It is almost certain that the geometric decorations at the entrance to Newgrange were fully understood by those who saw them, but by the Hallstatt period, these decorations had become little more than part of a "pattern book" for weavers, potters, carvers, painters, and smiths. If any meaning remained at all, it was probably taken to mean "good luck". It stands to reason that when you have a long period of time where there is not only no signs of artistic inspiration, but what art there is becomes increasingly simplified, abbreviated, and repeated without change, that any sort of peak experiences in that society will be an unlikely event.

Apart from the Celtic fighter having had the peak experience of "If I die heroically in battle, I will be promoted in my next life!", his more pragmatic commander might be thinking "Great! they will do anything I tell them, and everyone will be afraid to fight them." We can never know where, on this Mythos to Logos line of thinking, the Celts sat. All we can do is to project wherever we are along its line, to the earlier time. If we assume that we don't know, however, then future clues to the Celtic world-view might not be missed and we might at least approximate these things better. There is an indication of the dual nature of the Celtic world-view much later, where Caesar reports that many tribes had piles of war loot set up in their towns, and that no one could remove any of it under penalty of death. It was given as a religious taboo, but the Celts used gold to purchase troops, the more gold you had, the more powerful you became. Ancient societies fell easily when their local economy had only badly debased currency. While such a situation could be countered locally by price fixing etc., bad currency would not buy good soldiers. They fell because they could not hire auxiliaries and probably had depleted their own resources anyway. Such went the Etruscans. Had captured gold been allowed to "circulate", the inevitable end result would have been the emergence of a war lord who had a bigger army than anyone. They had brought an awful lot of gold back from the Mediterranean. The Druids did not want that situation to play out (they were a sort of democracy, if only among themselves). I should add, that there are those who disagree with my theory and say that the reason was purely religious or the piles were set up simply as a trophy. To the latter, I say that the Greeks and Roman both set up trophies for only a short period of time. To leave them up would have been like opening old wounds and not conducive to progress.

In its own way, but dated much later than the early style, the Gundestrup cauldron (my date: after 272 BC - circa 200 BC), too, has similar religious iconography to the Early Style. This is because of a secondary syncretism between the Celts, and this time, Thracian craftsmen who had their own nuanced approach to the Dionysian ideas already absorbed by the Celts. It might have introduced Dionysos as Zagreus, but I think that the Celts had absorbed Dionysos as shapeshifter in the first half of the third century BC. While this overlaps my date period for the Gundestrup cauldron by 22 years, that system is based on limits and I would imagine the cauldron to have been made in circa 210 BC (with a lower percentage of certainty).

The Early Style had little influence on what came next, it had been transitional and while a certain amount of Greek/Celtic syncretization had taken place, there appears to be no peak experiences associated with the Early Style. The style that followed was called "Waldalgesheim", but is now called "Vegetal". This is where the ivy is introduced as an aspect of Dionysos the twice-born.. This had a dramatic impact on Celtic art and innovation and variation flourished. This indicates multiple and ongoing peak experiences at least among the Druid class and this would include artists. The winter aspect of ivy would certainly have been a strong syncretizing connection for the Celts and this line of syncretization, for them, goes back as far as the Newgrange winter solstice. For the Greeks, the ivy was a common decorative element on Minoan buildings, before its meanings had been defined by Dionysianism.

Dionysos as shapeshifter, adopted by the Celts in northern Italy sometime in the first half of the third century BC, was a peak experience of even greater magnitude than the adoption of the ivy. It was the start of Celtic magic. Find out tomorrow...

The La Tène religion of the Celtic elite ― part 21: Better methods for deciphering Gundestrup cauldron iconography

Gundestrup cauldron "Cernunnos" plate.
Some of the animal emblems are not as "generic" as previously thought.
(click to enlarge)

There are two purposes in Flemming Kaul's The Gundestrup cauldron reconsidered, Acta Archaeologica 66, 1995, pp-1-38: to demonstrate that it is Thracian work, and to show that some of its iconography can be compared with Thracian and generally eastern Mediterranean iconography. The latter is mostly done in a piecemeal fashion by finding some things within the target area that can be favourably compared with what appears on the Gundestrup plates. This adds to Berquist and Taylor's 1987 paper which took the same approach. In his introduction, Kaul quotes Vincent Megaw's 1970 statement: "probably no other surviving relic of European craftsmanship, with the exception of Stonehenge, has occasioned so much publication and dispute as the silver cauldron of Gundestrup". After explaining that the interest has not waned since 1970, Kaul then says:

"It is, in particular, the establishment of the place of production which has occupied researchers for more than a century. Only through identifying the Gundestrup Cauldron's geographical origins is it possible to arrive at a proper understanding of its cultural and historical background."

It would have been wonderful if that is what had happened, but the main line of inquiry was to identify the school of the art, and then assume that the cauldron was made at one of its homeland workshops. The second assumption was the Celtic subject matter must have been for Celtic clients who lived close by. Following the criterion established by the first assumption, the tribe of the Thracian artist's client was the Scordisci. The third assumption was that the vessel must have travelled from its home to Denmark in a single journey, and thus the wanderings of the Cimbri became the most popular theory. Kaul came very close to the solution in attempting to explain the presence of the Etruscan Mosbæk Cauldron which is dated to circa 300 BC, in the same bog, not too far from where the Gundestrup cauldron was found, by saying: "perhaps the Cimbri 'acquired' this cauldron in northern Italy and brought it back with the Gundestrup Cauldron" (n.8).

One of my main reasons for investigating the idea that the Gundestrup cauldron was made by Thracians, but at a workshop in north Italy is Livy's account of the triumphal procession held in 191 B.C. to celebrate the victory over the Boii by Publius Cornelius. Livy speaks of "2,340 pounds of silver, both unwrought and wrought into vessels of respectable craftsmanship in the Gallic style" (XXXVI, 40). We have no evidence of the Celtic production of silver vessels and silver seemed mainly to be used by the Gauls for coinage only, but we know that the Etruscans had a history of finely crafted silver and silver gilt vessels such as has been found in the Regolini Galassi tomb of the seventh century B.C. It is highly unlikely that any Roman would mistake the Etruscan style for Gallic, but the same could not be said for any works done by Thracian silversmiths for Celtic patrons such as with the Gundestrup cauldron. The fate of these captured silver vessels would have been the melting pots. We thus might wonder if the Gundestrup cauldron is the only currently known example from a thriving Thracian workshop in northern Italy that catered to the Gauls and perhaps even to the Etruscans. While Livy's account has been criticized in its connection to the Gundestrup cauldron because of the lack of any material evidence, one should not dismiss such threads so cavalierly until all pieces of the evidence are examined.

In trying to establish weight of evidence, I'm not sure that archaeological evidence can be used in the same ways as contemporary evidence: it is a study, after all, of what remains and not what originally existed. Its finds can be both accidental and deliberately targeted. Even if it were possible to translate this sort of study into something as well structured as a modern case study, then the subjectivity of any weighting system will then come into play and the disciplinary background of those devising such a system might well influence its design.

Being no exception to subjective limitations imposed by one's background, I have been looking at the Gundestrup cauldron from a numismatic perspective and thus am taking a rather more focused approach to the matter of style and subject. Previous studies have rightly said that many of the animals depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron are too "generic" to be of much value in its interpretation. One can find images of bulls, boars, lions, deer, dogs, etc. almost everywhere, and used in multiple contexts.There are a few emblems on the Gundestrup cauldron which can be narrowed down much better, but as the main differences of opinion circled around Celtic or Thracian origin these were never examined, at least, in full.

Coin of Taras Circa 281 - 272 BC
Image courtesy  of Classical Numismatic Group Inc.

You could wake any collector of Greek coins from a deep sleep and say "Man riding dolphin? Quick, what coins?" and the first thing the collector would say that was not connected to be being woken up thusly would be "didrachms of Taras". The badge of the city of Taras is its eponymous founder riding a dolphin to shore and this is its main coin subject, Yet, Taras has not been suggested for the man on the dolphin on the above Gundestrup plate, but the related Arion has been offered on account of his connection to Orphism. Robert Graves, in The Greek Myths (87.2) says:

"Taras, a son of Poseidon by Minos’s daughter Satyraea (‘of the satyrs’), was the dolphin-riding New Year Child of Tarentum, which he is said to have founded, and where he had a hero shrine (Pausanias); Helianthus, the founder of Dorian Tarentum in 708 BC, took over the dolphin cult from the Cretanized Sicels whom he found there."

For Arion, he previously(87.1) says:

"Both Arion and Periander are historical characters of the seventh, century BC, and a fragment of Arian’s Hymn to Poseidon survives. The story is perhaps based partly on a tradition that Arian’s songs attracted a school of dolphins and thus dissuaded some sailors from murdering him for his money—dolphins and seals are notoriously susceptible to music—partly on a misinterpretation of a statue which showed the god Palimony, lyre in hand, arriving at Corinth on dolphin-back. Mythic color is lent to the story by making Arion a son of Poseidon, as was his namesake, the wild horse Arion, and by giving his name to the Lyre constellation. Pausanias, a level-headed and truthful writer, doubts Herodotus’s hearsay story about Arion; but reports that he has seen with his own eyes the dolphin at Proselyte, which was mauled by fishermen, but had its wounds dressed by a boy, coming in answer to the boy’s call and gratefully allowing him to ride on its back. This suggests that the ritual advent of the New Year Child was dramatically presented at Corinth with the aid of a tame dolphin trained by the Sun-priests."  

I picked this particular type of the didrachms of Taras to illustrate because "Rutter (HN Italy) notes that the elephant on this coinage symbolizes the fact that Pyrrhos was the first to use elephants in battle in Italy.". This coin was issued at the time he was defending the city. Among his troops, or present just before he arrived were members of the Gaulish Ambiani. Their earliest coin copies a specific type of Taras gold that would have been paid to them for their service there against the Romans. To add weight to this evidence is that elephants are depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron, as well as a figure of Herakles wrestling the Nemean lion that is copied from the coins of Herakleia on a small plate where the central female character beats her chest in grief (Pyrrhos' victory at Herakleia was at such a cost of life that it inspired the phrase "Pyrrhic victory"). There are a number of devices on the Gundestrup cauldron that show evidence of being copied from Italian models such as the situla.

Competing with the Celts love of gold, was their love of the heroic, and what else might they have wanted depicted on the trophy they ordered from the Thracian silversmiths if not a record of their battles. We know, for certain, that the Gundestrup cauldron taught that a heroic death in battle would lead to even greater glory in their next life, and other imagery showing such battles could be expected on a trophy.

The other device had been noted only in its connection to Phrygia, but not to the Celts, and that is the pair of confronted lions in the above plate. This is not listed as a coin type at all in Plant's Greek Coin Types and their Identification. It exists, of course as the Mycenaean lion gate, but is also seen in Phrygia at the Broken Lion Tomb. The Celts were known to loot tombs for gold: Plutarch mentions that Pyrrhus

"after getting Aegae into his power, besides other severities exercised upon its inhabitants he left as a garrison in the city some of the Gauls who were making the campaign with him. But the Gauls, a race insatiable of wealth, set themselves to digging up the tombs of the kings who had been buried there; the treasure they plundered, the bones they insolently cast to the four winds. This outrage Pyrrhus treated with lightness and indifference, as it was thought; he either postponed punishment because he had some business on hand, or remitted it altogether because he was afraid to chastise the Barbarians"

It was three Celtic tribes: Tolistobogii, Tectosages, and Trocmi who were invited to Asia Minor by Nicomedes of Bithynia in 278 BC (Rankin, Celts and the Classical World, p. 188), and they went on to establish Galatia. Galatia still had many of its original population of Phrygians only partially changed by Celtic rule. Other examples of confronted lions in tomb architecture also exist, but I find it amusing to think that the Gundestrup cauldron does, indeed, depict the Phrygian example! It was to Pyrrhus' advantage, and to the advantage of the Celts that stories of their atrocities spread. The Celts used various psychological warfare methods, and having everyone terrified before you even show up is always a bonus.

Coin of Agathokles
Image courtesy of Classical Numismatic group Inc.

Of more tenuous connection is the lion(?) to the right of the antler headdress. The only example, in Plant, of a lion raising one forepaw without grasping anything is on a coin of Agathocles of Syracuse, 310-304 BC., and Agathocles had Celts in his army at Himera, Sicily, against the Carthaginians. The tail on the single cauldron lion is drawn in Thracian style, the same way it is drawn on the confronted lions.

The La Tène religion of the Celtic elite ― part 20: The Cernunnos figure

Petroglyph presumed to be the "god Cernunnos"
 rock 70 in Naquane area. Capo di Ponte, Val Camonica
4th cent BC. (click to enlarge) photo:  Luca Giarelli

I am not the first person to link any of the Gundestrup cauldron imagery to Italy. In Symbol & Image in Celtic Religious Art, Miranda Green says:

"The antlered deity differs from many other Celtic divinities occurring during the Roman period in that he appears iconographically well before the Romano-Celtic phase in western Europe. True he is not named until the reign of Tiberius, when he is called '(C)ernunnos' ('the horned one'), but his image may be traced back to the fourth century BC at Camonica Valley in northern Italy." (p. 87)

In the description of him holding, in his left hand, a ram-headed serpent she references a paper by Phyllis Fray Bober, "Cernunnos: Origin and Transformation of a Celtic Divinity" in American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Jan., 1951), pp. 13-51. One of the many connections discussed by Bober is the identification of the ram-headed serpent with Dionysos Zagreus and pro and con opinions about this from others are listed too although, strangely, there is no mention of Pythagoras in Italy even though he had been an Orphic. Orphism and Zagreus is, however, discussed.

Cernunnos detail on Gundestrup Cauldron plate
derivative photo: Fuzzypeg, original: Bloodofox

The figure wearing antlers on the Gundestrup cauldron plate is commonly identified with Cernunnos and also the "Lord of animals" theme as expressed by Orpheus' claimed ability to charm animals with the music of his lyre. While there might be some allusion to this in the composition, the central figure does not play a lyre and the animals are not all facing that figure as they are usually portrayed in Roman depictions of the scene.

The central figure in this scene is male and wears an antler headdress. He wears a torc around his neck and is seated on the ground in the celtic manner. The background ivy scroll work which connects the elements on the plate is particularly emphasized around the antlers of the headdress and the antlers of the stag to the left of the figure. This deliberate connection identifies the owner of the headdress with a concept or a deity represented by the stag. We might guess, thus, that the figure is a priest or devotee of that "stag cult". Both the Gundestrup and the Val Camonica "stag men" have their arms raised in the devotional orans position. That the Val Camonica figure has torcs on its arms together with a ram-headed serpent is open to some interpretation: if the torcs are not just a representation of a sleeve opening in a tunic, and are actual objects, why not Celtic armlets? I can also imagine the ram-headed serpent as being a sword and hangar.

In the Gundestrup iconography, offerings are represented as being grasped in the hands and the arms being in the orans position. The supplicant thus offers the torc which is used by the Celts on their coins and elsewhere as a symbol of power, and Dionysos Zagreus in his form as the ram-headed serpent. There is thus a triad of deference here: to Dionysos Zagreus, the shapeshifter who is resurrected as the god of the grape-vine. His serpent form inherited from his father Zeus, as Meilichios. The serpent, too, sloughs its skin as is "reborn" as a new serpent. This symbolization goes back to the Neolithic planters who saw in it the idea of plants growing new each year. The torc with a loop between its terminals is an ouroboros sort of symbol which might be compared with omega. The Celts share with the Pythagoreans the idea of the transmigration of souls, as is attested by the classical authors, and this is demonstrated on the "procession" plate of the Gundestrup cauldron. Finally, the stag sloughs its antlers each year to grow a new set.

All three points in this Pythagorean triad speak of the repeated cycle. Not only does this echo the triskele-form of the Celtic ivy-scroll, its symbology referring to the ivy plant being "twice-born" with its winter shoot, and the triple spiral at Newgrange reused with other Megalithic imagery on Coriosolite coins much later, it refers to the syncretization of differing, yet connected, religious belief absorbed into the Celtic ethos.

Tomorrow, connecting the central figures with what surrounds them.

The La Tène religion of the Celtic elite ― part 19: Interpreting Celtic coin iconography

Fig. 1. Variations on a theme

A set of banner designs on Coriosolite Series Y,

Group H1/2, coins. Each die on this  sub-group is specially

marked and in each banner, the top half opposes the 

bottom half as a lesson in Celtic iconography

In the Druid schools, writing was taboo and the student was expected to memorize a great amount of information in verse form. None of that information is available to us today, because even if such verses were
memorized and eventually written down in the Medieval period, there is no way to reconstitute the original because the stories become changed over time to better relate to the people in those times.

After studying Coriosolite coinage for many years, it was apparent to me that many of the motifs had religious significance and that some artists sought interesting ways of explaining that significance. I had noticed that the exact design of the banners in front of the pony in Series Y seemed arbitrary and that the die engraver would vary the designs and would take up, abandon, and take up again various forms of that motif. The clincher, though, was when he built a set of variations one after the other over a part of the chronology and  specially marked those die, on the obverse with the use of a C-shaped mouth, and on the reverse, with a martingale in front of the pony. The moneyers, though, mixed up the order so that the sequence ended up being stagger by one die and the first and last coins only showed the obverse and the reverse of the sequence. Some of the middle designs might have been mixed as well, but as there were no "evolutionary" changes to that sequence, the intended order of each within the series could not be determined.

Reasoning that the meaning of these banners would be the same and that the different designs would all share a particular characteristic, it was easy to see that the "as above, so below" concept was being demonstrated by having the top half mirror the bottom half as a visual metaphor. But why should I reason this way? Just because I see some pattern in the data and then interpret it, does not mean that the same pattern and interpretation was intended by the original artist. This is where the subject can so easily go "pear-shaped" for the novice. Such novices fall into two, broad, categories: the first (Introvert/Mythos/Yin) says (in essence): "I am seeing this and because, when I point it out to other like-minded people who see it too, it must thus be true". The second category (Extravert/Logos/Yang) says "The whole thing is just too subjective, and besides, a certain symbol in one place might mean something completely different in some other place".
These are extremes: people who will stop at that thought and go no further. Most people, and those closer to the centre of the two poles, especially, will see both ends of the problem and thus will be able to resolve it with a new reality. At the poles, only classical logic is possible and only one can be right, but in the middle is a zone of transdisciplinary potential where a new state can exist which too, contains two poles, and at their middle is another new state where... .This is the area where we also find the wave/particle duality and Schrodinger's Cat.

Before it is possible to find evidence to resolve the problem, the requirements of the problem have to be simplified. The reason for this is that when faced with a very specific problem, the chances are great that it also contains a very high measure of uniqueness. We need to make it a part of a greater whole, so that we kind find corresponding evidence from other realities that all, while different in many ways, share a certain structure. The minimum requirement for my banner interpretation is that the artist's culture would understand visual metaphor and that the artist would not be against inventing a quiz using visual metaphors for his audience. Diodorus stamps our license in talking about Celtic conversation:

"... when they meet together they converse with few words and in riddles, hinting darkly at things for the most part and using one word when they mean another." (V, 31)

Can this also be applied to their visual arts? Apparently so, with a Celtic bard translating a cryptic painting for the Greek orator, Lucian .

Shifting from the banner problem which subsequently gets resolved in various ways, we return to the coin theme with regard to the position, on the coins, where certain devices appear, and any determinable purpose that the device in conjunction with its position might have. We also need to know what is permitted by the tenets of their art and what is forbidden.

Some Armorican coins are easily grouped together as tribal issues or as "classes" within an issue by reason, in part, of them sharing the same device seen below the horse. The Redones coins have the wheel beneath the pony; One paper on the manufacturing methods of Coriosolite coins referred (erroneously) to two groups
of coins: one with a lyre "mintmark", the other with a boar "mintmark". This tendency extends to other coinages who have an identifying device on their coins such as the tree on the Dobunni coins, a consistent pattern (like on the pattern/horse Iceni issue), and so on.

Fig. 2. Some Celtic coin reverse sides showing a variety of devices around the main subject 
From Henri de La Tour, Atlas de monnaies gauloises

In Fig. 2., a coin of the Arverni (BN 3740) depicts two lyres, one above the horse, and one below. We can be sure that such repetition was allowed, and we might also wonder if the position added further meaning in combination. The other coins of the Arverni that I have shown here have a wide variety of devices below the pony, quite unlike the Redones coins where the idea of the wheel is likely even embedded in their tribal name and their mythology. Obviously, the Arverni coins are all of the same tribe, but they have different devices in a place that other tribes seem to use to identify themselves. If the rule or tendency is true, also, for the Averni, who are not one of the Armorican tribes (the identifying use of that position is also seen on many Belgic coins, but other Celtic tribes use different places on the coin to show their identity) then we might be seeing clan or settlement designations. All of the devices used have a wider usage as religious symbols, but it would seem that certain groups had a greater affinity for one symbol.  This is a bit like a small Greek city state who has an emblem on their coins which represents the local religion, myths or product. For the Celts, the clan or the ethnic group would seem to be depicted with varying symbols below the pony.

The position above the pony, on Coriosolite coins, is where a lot goes on: evolutionary changes, and various examples of "variations on a theme" like my banner example. The position below the pony. however, changes only rarely, and then permanently. Its device does not evolve or present visual metaphors of itself. It is distinctly iconic.

The sun sceptre above the horse in Fig. 2 (BN 3722) appears in another form below the horse in BN 3699. A consistent feature in Coriosolite Series X, where it appears most often as a staff surmounted by a pellet within a circle, but on a rare occasion as a fleur-de-lis shape. Also on BN 3722, a triskele element of the vine scroll motif shows a different version to the one above the boar on the Petrocorii coin. A fleur-de-lis sun sceptre is below the boar That the sun sceptre is below the boar might be significant as wherever the boar appears on the Series Y Coriosolite coins, it is conjoined by a pellet in circle sun symbol rising above a base line. Like the lyre symbol in the same position on Series X coins, it refers to the dawn of the year (originally sunrise at the winter solstice).

The coin of the Santones (Fig. 2, BN 4316) might be depicting a myth with the wolf standing in front of a tree or large plant of indeterminate species and a bucranium to the side. Unfortunately, identifying the myth on such narrative-depicting coins is rarely possible.

So this has been just a basic introduction to how some of the Celtic coin iconography might be investigated. It always requires. at the least, an interdisciplinary approach, but often, although general meanings can be assigned to certain devices, their exact role in local myths might never be discovered.

The La Tène religion of the Celtic elite ― part 18: Hacking the druid code

Thracian display in the National History Museum, Sofia, showing a

number of vessels made by Greek artists most likely from Sicily

photo: Nenko Lazarov

Everyone knows that the Gundestrup cauldron was made by Thracian hands but apparently it is less well known that besides hands, Thracians also had feet. These enabled Thracians to travel around a bit, which is essential if you are an artist dependent on patrons as, when things get a bit tight for funding in one place, you can move to where there is more money. Greek artists (who also had  feet) had flocked to Sicily to take advantage the wealth there, but when the economy took a bit of a dive some of them found work in Thrace, which was doing much better at the time, and had developed a fashion for all things Greek.

Native Thracian style vessel
photo: Nenko Lazarov

This fashion for Greek art in Thrace did not bode well for the native Thracian artists so they started to look around for a market better suited to their more primitive styles and iconography. Northern Italy was hosting a lot of  rather wealthy Celts at that time, and the Celts even shared some of their religious iconography, so they hurried there as fast as their feet and a boat could take them.

Later still, Augustus was teaching his puppet Thracian king Rhoemetalces a thing or two about the value of nationalism in getting people to question their rulers less, and that led to a native Thracian revival (Hooker, forthcoming) with such objects as the Stara Zagora phalera which, because they were unable to break with the classical style entirely, was only partially native.

Unfortunately, there is no image of the Stara Zagora phalera which can be freely used so you will have to look at the image at the linked page while I point out its defining details. The figure of Herakles wrestling the Nemean lion, is not taken from the same sculpture as on the coins of Herakleia in Italy, but  combines an earlier image used by Kimon of Syracuse with a view where Herakles holds his club and was known by the folks at Taras in southern Italy. The more recent model for Herakles head, on the phalera, shows him with a Roman haircut and appears to have been copied from a coin showing L. Junius Brutus which had circulated in Thrace. The Stara Zagora phalera, and other Thracian revival phalera, used a cruder and more open background chasing that was used on the much earlier Gundestrup cauldron. Even though the Stara Zagora phalera was found with silver cups from around Augustus' time, and presentation phalera were popular during Augusts' time, the cauldron was dated far too late for its style, and too early for the Stara Zagora phalera with which it is compared (although one of the Gundestrup papers does ask the question about what native Thracian artists had been doing for the two hundred years since their last work).
Without a knowledge of human anatomy, especially that people, even Thracians, always had feet, only guesses are possible and the Celts who ordered the cauldron must thus have been the Scordisci who were very close to Thrace.

To decipher a lost language, a bilingual inscription such as the Rosetta stone really helps, and the same is true for art objects as well: the Celtic themes depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron are far easier to understand if you know a little about Greek iconography and how Thracian artists depicted beliefs very similar to those adopted by the Celts. The cauldron is a sort of "bilingual document", too, but it is in the visual language of art. Without a knowledge of art-history, only guesses are possible.

I have also used a lot of coin imagery, both Celtic and Greek. The Celtic coins are also "bilingual" in that it was necessary for the Celts to adopt Greek motifs for their own coinage ― especially those coins which had been paid to them in their earlier, more glorious, times serving in the Italian campaigns and elsewhere around the Mediterranean. The coins were not just currency, they had cultural content and the Greek imagery spoke of heroic battles. So too, of course, did the Gundestrup cauldron. But the Celtic coins, especially those in Armorica were "multilingual" as they bore devices more familiar to the indigenous people who lived in the regions that the Celts later controlled, as well as earlier imagery from those Celts' homelands, too. Some of that imagery can be tracked back more than three thousand years ― religious iconography is especially long-lasting. In hacking the Druid code, without a knowledge of numismatics, only guesses are possible.

On Monday, some Celtic iconography "cracks".