11.12 — Celtic, Slavic, and What All of It Adds Up To

The Celtic material

The same problem as everywhere else, and worse.

The Celts had a priestly class, the druids, who — Caesar reports — deliberately did not write their teaching down, on the grounds that writing weakens memory and that the teaching should not become public. Which means the religion of Iron Age Britain, Ireland and Gaul is largely gone.

What survives is Irish and Welsh material written down by Christian monks in the medieval period, several centuries after conversion, and shaped accordingly.

The Irish cycles

The Tuatha Dé Danann — the people of the goddess Danu — a race of skilled beings who came to Ireland, fought for it, and were eventually displaced by human invaders and went into the hills.

And that displacement is the origin of the fairy tradition. The sídhe who live under the mounds are the old gods, demoted, and the Irish countryside is full of places associated with them.

A pantheon that becomes fairies is exactly 1.5's pattern — a defeated people or an older religion, absorbed and diminished rather than deleted.

And the figures worth knowing.

**The Dagda, the good god — not morally good, but good at everything — with a cauldron that never empties and a club that kills with one end and revives with the other.

**The Morrígan, war and fate, appearing as a crow over battlefields.

**And Cú Chulainn, the great hero of the Ulster cycle, who defends the whole province alone at a ford, one opponent at a time, while the army sleeps. His battle-frenzy distorts his body horribly, and it is described in detail and is not glamorous.

And the detail that defines him: he is bound by geasa — personal prohibitions, unique to him — and his are contradictory. He may not eat dog meat, and he may not refuse hospitality. He is offered dog meat by an old woman, and either choice breaks a prohibition, and he eats, and his strength fails, and he dies.

A hero destroyed by a rule system that contained an unresolvable conflict, which is 2.15 and 3.2 and 10.9 arriving again from a fourth direction. Four traditions, one finding: an absolute rule will eventually meet a case it cannot handle.

And his death: mortally wounded, he ties himself to a standing stone so that he will die upright, and his enemies do not approach until a crow lands on his shoulder.

The Welsh material

The Mabinogion, and it is stranger and more dreamlike than the Irish.

And it is the source of the earliest Arthurian material, which grew into the enormous medieval body of Arthur, the round table, the grail, and Lancelot — most of which is French and twelfth-century rather than Celtic.

Worth knowing which parts are which: a possible historical war-leader in post-Roman Britain, a body of Welsh legend, and then a vast literary construction across several centuries and countries. 1.4's growth mechanism, fully documented for once, because we can watch it happen in the manuscripts.

The Slavic material

Even less survives. There is no Slavic equivalent of Snorri (11.5), no written mythology from before conversion, and the reconstruction is done from chronicles hostile to it, from later folklore, and from linguistic evidence.

Perun — thunder, oak trees, the ruler. The Slavic member of the Indo-European storm-god family (11.1), cognate with the Baltic Perkūnas, and in the same slot as Indra, Thor and Zeus.

Veles — cattle, the underworld, wealth, magic, and Perun's opponent. The two are in a permanent conflict which is very probably the storm-god-versus-serpent story again.

Mokosh, the one clearly attested goddess, associated with weaving, women's work and fate.

And Baba Yaga, from folklore rather than mythology proper, who is worth a paragraph because she is unlike anything else.

An old woman who lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs and turns around, surrounded by a fence of bones with skulls on the posts. She flies in a mortar, steering with a pestle, sweeping away her tracks with a broom.

And she is not simply evil. She sets tasks. If you are polite, competent and honest, she helps you — frequently with something essential. If you are rude or lazy, she eats you.

A test rather than a monster. And the specific character of the test is worth noting: she rewards work done properly and courtesy to a frightening person of no status.

What Part 11 adds up to

Twelve chapters, and here is the account.

The rhyme is real and it has four causes

Shared ancestry — the Indo-European sky father and storm god, traceable by linguistics across Ireland, Rome, Greece, Scandinavia, Slavic lands, Persia and India.

Shared world — floods, seasons, a dying and returning sun, and death.

Shared cognition — over-detection of agency, narrative memory, and the impossibility of imagining your own absence.

And shared problems — why obey, why keep your word, what to do with the dead.

The recurring figures

The trickster, everywhere, boundary-dwelling, morally unclassifiable, winning by wit, bringing something stolen (11.10).

The dying and returning god, which is the year (11.7, 11.2).

The failed journey to retrieve the dead — Izanagi, Orpheus, Ishtar, and the Hero Twins who succeed by changing the terms (11.9, 11.11).

The world made from a body — Ymir, Purusha, Pangu (11.5, 9.1, 11.9).

And the flood, told everywhere there is a river.

The genuine differences

And they matter more than the similarities, because this is where "all religions are the same" fails.

The Greek gods are not moral. The Egyptian order is moral and impersonal. The Norse gods are moral and doomed. The Indian ones are aspects of one reality. The Abrahamic one is singular and moral.

The Norse world ends and is not saved. The Indian world cycles. The Egyptian world is maintained daily and never finished.

And the answers to death are completely different: reputation in the north, the weighed heart in Egypt, release from the cycle in India, the wall you built in Mesopotamia, and the negotiated rate of a thousand deaths to fifteen hundred births in Japan.

What the whole Part is for

Two things.

The first is the one 1.6 argued: your internal library of cases is what you actually make decisions with, and these are the oldest and most tested cases available.

A person who knows that Baldr died through the one thing nobody bothered to secure, that Thor was humiliated while performing impossibly, that Sisyphus's moment is the walk down, that Medusa was punished for what was done to her, that Gilgamesh had to cross the world to accept what the tavern keeper told him at the start, and that the great attempt failed because a bird laughed — that person has a better set of patterns than somebody who does not.

And the second is a kind of humility. Every one of these traditions was held with total conviction by intelligent people for centuries, and every one of them contains claims their own descendants no longer believe.

Which is worth holding when you consider your own certainties.

What to carry from this page

A pantheon that becomes fairies is a defeated religion, demoted rather than deleted. Look for that pattern; it is everywhere.

Cú Chulainn's two prohibitions contradicted each other and it killed him. Fourth tradition, same finding: an absolute rule will meet a case it cannot handle.

Baba Yaga is a test, not a monster, and she rewards courtesy to a frightening person and work done properly.

And the differences between traditions are more informative than the similarities. They agree, roughly, on how to treat each other. They agree on almost nothing else.

Next: Part 12 leaves mythology for living religion — what a religion structurally is, why Bengal has Durga and Maharashtra has Ganesh, and what the traditions actually have in common.