Astronomy was practised in Northern Europe over 3,500 years ago. We don't know the language of those people but a recent find in Saxony, North-Eastern Germany, called the Nebra Disc has set up new and exciting avenues of investigation. It is dated to c.1600 BC making it among the earliest star maps known anywhere in the world. It specifically emphasises the Pleiades, a seasonal marker for farmers, also known from the ancient Greek writer Hesiod (about 700 B.C.) in Works and Days, in which he advises his farmer brother on good timing. "When the Pleiads, Atlas' daughters, rise up, begin your harvest; plough when they're setting once again". (Do a Google search on "NEBRA DISC" for recent news.)
It is possible, I suggest, that the creators of the Nebra Disc were early Celts, since these people were noted both for their astronomical prowess and beautiful metal working. The Celts migrated westwards from central Europe and beyond until they reached the Atlantic seaboard. The Celts were the first known inhabitants of Germany, and the German tribes did not arrive until 2nd century BC. The curved lines are markers for the four quarter points of the year. This was a portable Stonehenge!
Mabinogion
The Four Branches of the Mabinogion all feature the same minor character of Pryderi but otherwise are located in different regions. The tales roam around South Wales and Ireland. The Fourth Branch, the tale of Math son of Mathonwy, is based in Gwynedd in North Wales.
This starts with an astronomical riddle: Math can only live with his feet in the lap of a virgin, the chaste Goewin, the fairest maiden of her day, except in time of war. The Virgin is a zodiacal sign and also the largest visible constellation of the Northern Hemisphere, in a recumbent shape on the ecliptic (visible between March and August in Western Europe and occupied by the Sun in late August to late September); and above it in the heavens is a kite or pentagram shaped constellation, the male character, known to the Greeks as Bootes, the Herdsman. His legs lie above the lap of Virgo. This formation contains Arcturus, the fourth brightest star in the entire night sky.
I suggest that Math is Bootes. In the spring, when new military campaigns started, it was possible to see Bootes without Virgo, which is lower in the night sky. We have a family group as Math's niece is Arianrhod (Silver Wheel), whose stars appear next (going leftwards) as Corona Borealis or Caer Arianrhod. For the bard telling an evening tale in the period March to August, both Virgo and Bootes would be easy to find.
Math uses his magic wand to strike his two nephews, who have raped Goewin, and thus turns them into deer to be hunted. He tells them to return a year later, and what clearer clue could there be to the astronomical basis of the myth? (They are punished further, by years as pigs and wolves before returning to human form.) This could well refer to other nearby constellations, such as the hunting dogs and the two bears which run from them.
Later in this Branch, the King, Lleu Llaw Gyffes, (equivalent to solar Lugh in other Celtic traditions) reveals to his treacherous wife Blodeuwedd how he may be killed (rather as if Achilles had pointed out his heel to a Trojan). He explains that this can only happen when he has one foot on the back of a goat and the other on the back of a water trough. The weapon is to be a spear which has been made over one year, working only on Sundays.
This is another riddle which may be solved by reference to the zodiac. The goat is Capricorn, and the next sign is Aquarius, the water carrier. At this time the Sun is at its weakest, since it lies opposite its own sign of Leo when it enters Aquarius. This is the coldest time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Blodeuwedd's lover Goronwy makes such a spear and they engineer the assassination of Lleu in this manner. But Lleu changes form into an eagle (kingly bird of day associated with the sky-father Jupiter) and flies off. (Aquila the Eagle constellation lies to the right of Aquarius and Capricorn and contains the bright star Altair.) Eventually he is found and has his revenge. Blodeuwedd is turned into an Owl and only comes out at night, when of course she is far away from the Sun.
What do these zodiacal references tell us about Celtic astronomy?
First, since the zodiac was invented in Babylonia between the 5th and last centuries BC, the stories in this form cannot be any older than 5th century BC, and I suggest they are rather later than that. (The constellations that the ancient Greek bards used in their tales from about the 3rd century BC onwards were not invented by them but appear from internal evidence to have arisen about 2,000 years BC in the Near East, in the latitude of Sumer. See Star Tales by the astronomical writer and broadcaster, Ian Ridpath, 1988, Lutterworth Press, Cambridge.) The most important writer for our purposes would have been Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in Egypt in the 2nd century AD.
Peter Berresford Ellis writes in his well-researched and authoritative work, The Druids (Constable, 1994) page 237: "...Just what this native Celtic system of astrology was is not clear, nor indeed, can we tell exactly how the Celts viewed the zodiac. By the second century AD the British Celts, at least, knew the zodiac as we would recognise it today."
I would add that the Roman solar/astral religion of Mithraism, which started in the 1st century BC, was spread all over the Roman Empire by its soldiers and therefore is definitely a method by which the Chaldeans brought their zodiac to Britain (from 1st century AD onwards). That religion is now believed to have been based on the system of Zodiacal Ages, an aspect of precession of the equinoxes, which was discovered by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus only in the 2nd century BC. See link: http://www.well.com/user/davidu/mithras.html. The Museum of London contains a good example of an iconic Mithraic bull-slaying sculpture which incorporates a zodiac.
A further story of transformations into animals in the story of Taliesin may well have a basis in astral bardism. Gwyon Bach transforms into a hare, fish, bird and grain of wheat before Ceridwen catches him. One thinks of Canis Major chasing Lepus the Hare, for example. This follows round the circle of the sky into Pisces, Aquila and Virgo (containing Spica as the Grain of Wheat). Other Celtic transformation stories may also turn out to be bardic aides-memoire, perhaps wrongly interpreted elsewhere as shamanistic shape-shifting.
Acknowledgment: Jacqueline Huxter. Audio tape, Star Myth. I personally cracked the riddle of the goat and the water trough. We had not read Hamlet's Mill then.
The British Constellations--The Thirty Seven Remarkable Sights
This star list dates back to the posthumously published notes of the celebrated 20th century English Druid, Ross Nichols (see The Book of Druidry p.287, Aquarian Press 1990). I did not know him personally and therefore had no opportunity to investigate this directly; and I have been unable to trace it to any earlier sources. His editors give some footnotes which identify a few of the correlations, often from the Hanes Taliesin (which appears at the end of some editions of the Mabinogion).
I have tried to improve on this, and others may decide whether I have been successful. One simple technique that I have used is to line up two known asterisms on a planisphere and see where they lead next. It is interesting to note that the Sun aligns with the first constellation, Corona Borealis, at the Celtic New Year (start November). This pattern is the exact shape of the famous Celtic torc or torque, which may explain the popularity of that decoration.
1. The Circle of Arianrod - Corona Borealis
2. The White Throne - must be Hercules from position and shape (IF).
3. Arthur's Harp - The Lyre (Lyra)
4. The Circle of Gwydion - The Galaxy (Draco? IF)
5. The Great Plough-Tail - The Great Bear (assuming "Boar" is typography)
6. The Small Plough-Tail - The Little Bear from position and shape (IF)
7. The Great Ship - Lynx? (IF)
8. The Bald Ship - (in the sense of no sails? Hyades in Taurus? Auriga? IF)
9. The Yard - Orion
10. Theodosius' Group - The Pleiades (in Taurus).
11. The Triangle - must be Triangulum from position and shape (IF)
12. The Palace of Don - Cassiopeia
13. The Grove of Blodeuwedd - possibly Cepheus from position and shape (IF)
I greatly admire this celebrated 20th century writer and recommend his Greek Myths as background reading. However, by confusing Welsh, Irish and Greek sources in The White Goddess, and making a leap of interpretation from an unreliable source book on Irish Ogham script, he has left us an untenable set of propositions on Ogham, which was never a Tree Alphabet or Thirteen Sign Tree Zodiac, despite the assurances to the contrary by many subsequent writers. Many of the Ogham letters are named otherwise than after vegetation, according to Peter Berresford Ellis, using his knowledge of Gaelic.
Graves himself made it very clear that he was not a member of any Druidic or similar group. He did, however, wish to revive goddess related interests as a cultural balance to the war he had lived through and wrote about. He thought very deeply about modern European culture with its mixed blessings and many of his best known books are attempts to answer the question, what to do about it all? The Claudius books, for example, seek to tell you how to deal with dictators,
who were a fact of life for Europeans in much of the period in which he wrote. The simple answer would be, don't put them into power in the first place, but if they are already there you need to learn how to survive, as young Claudius did.
The ancient Celts had a far more complex and reliable calendar system than that offered by Graves, which has survived in an artefact found at Coligny in France. (Detailed analysis of this fascinating calendar is now readily searchable on the Web. It is somewhat similar to the Vedic system of cosmology. Be warned that the Celtic autumnal new year festival of Samhain has no relation to the Gaulish month of Samonios, which actually fell in May. See for further information Chapter 9 of The Celts by Peter Berresford Ellis, Carroll & Graf, 2004.)
The greatest irony is that Graves' own Grandfather, Charles Graves, was in his day a world expert in Ogham; and was, in fact, the first person reported in modern times who deciphered Ogham inscriptions extant on stones in South Wales; which I have personally inspected. He correctly found that they were Gaelic. His results were published in academic papers in Ireland. The best scholarship on Ogham is found in Ireland, which is not surprising since this is where Ogham probably originated.
The Irish scholars of his day were well placed to warn off Robert Graves from pursuing the unreliable Tree Alphabet theory of O'Flaherty but this warning, apparently known to Nichols, has generally not been heeded. Graves was not able to check O'Flaherty's theory without recourse to scholarship on the Irish Gaelic language, which was not his field of expertise, and it also appears that he was not very willing to do so.
I can confirm from enjoyable fieldwork in South Wales that these inscriptions all date from the Christian era and all are brief genealogies in Gaelic of known individuals, no doubt denoting ownership of the land in question by the local Celtic chieftain. This would be identical to the purpose of the Babylonian inscribed boundary stones or kudurru, which form an impressive part of the Near Eastern collection in the British Museum. The purpose of testifying to ownership in the medium of stone is that it is permanent and hard to forge.
The Ogham stone inscriptions are brief, and those translated so far contain nothing mystical or religious. The medieval Irish books on the subject, written well into the Christian era, are more informative. Pictish Ogham remains undeciphered. I would not expect to find any Ogham writing dating from before the Christian era, for the insuperable reason that the original Druids famously had a ban on writing, until their religion changed, at about the time of St Patrick.
The fans of the Robert Graves calendar support his year of thirteen months ruled by the Moon. The difficulties here are legion. (I speak here from experience.)
(1) Ogham is built up as a tally system for finger counting on base 5, which does not divide in any method into 13.
(2) The calendar year, a brute mathematical fact, does not divide by 13.
(3) The ancient Celts themselves reconciled the solar and lunar years by an entirely
different, and much more sophisticated system, as we now know from the Gaulish
Coligny Calendar, which was discovered even before Robert Graves wroteThe White
Goddess. It extends over a period of 30 years with planned adjustments. Plutarch
mentioned a 30 year festival among the Celts when Saturn entered Taurus (the sign
of the Bull was often noted as the ancient marker of the Spring Equinox).
My advice to readers is to study what has been published online by Peter Berresford Ellis on this topic and also study the Coligny Calendar and its wondrous workings. The Ancient Celts rightly deserved a reputation as leaders in European astronomy but the zodiac was invented by the Babylonians, who operated a twelve-fold solar year running from a New Year celebrated at the Spring Equinox, surviving into modern times as the Persian Festival of Newroz.
Pre-eminent Celtic scholar Peter Berresford Ellis has a quirky alter ego in Peter Tremayne, whose saucy Irish nun, Fidelma, solves disturbing mysteries with the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes, the
intensity of Adam
Dalgleish and the
feminine power of
Kali.
Sister Fidelma is
an Irish religieuse
of the 7th Century
AD, who is also a trained advocate of the ancient Irish law system of the time - the Laws of the Fenechus, popularly called the Brehon law system. The thrillers are international best sellers and are can't-put-it-down reading. If you like Cadfael, you'll love Fidelma.For more about this unique detective, go to
