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Gods, Offerings and the Ritual Year

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Gods, Offerings and the Ritual Year

The evidence is overwhelmingly local. Of the several hundred divine names recorded in Gaul, the large majority occur a single time, usually on an altar set up at a spring, a river or a hill by one person. A handful travel. Lugus may lie behind the many Lugudunum place-names, Lyon among them, and is generally connected with the Irish Lugh. Epona, the horse goddess, was taken up by Roman cavalry and worshipped as far as the Danube. Belenus appears across the Alps and northern Italy. The antlered figure conventionally called Cernunnos carries that name exactly once, on the Pillar of the Boatmen in Paris.

Offerings were commonly destroyed or made unrecoverable. Weapons, cauldrons, torcs and human remains were placed in lakes, rivers and bogs across Europe: at La Tene in Switzerland, at Llyn Cerrig Bach on Anglesey, in the Thames. Enclosed sanctuaries in northern Gaul such as Gournay-sur-Aronde and Ribemont-sur-Ancre held large deposits of deliberately broken weapons and of human bone, some of it arranged. Severed heads appear in sculpture and in practice often enough that classical writers remarked on it.

Calendar evidence is thin but real. The Coligny calendar, a bronze plaque from Roman Gaul inscribed in Gaulish using Roman letters, sets out a lunisolar cycle of sixty-two months and marks days as favourable or not. The four festivals often presented as the Celtic year, Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh, are attested in medieval Irish sources; there is no evidence continental Celts kept them, and the eight-festival scheme used by modern Pagans is a twentieth-century construction.

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