A Religion Known Mainly Through Its Enemies and Its Converts

Historical Celtic pagan religious practice across pre-Christian Britain, Ireland and Gaul left remarkably little direct textual record in its own words, since Celtic religious specialists, the druids, are widely reported by Roman authors including Julius Caesar to have relied on oral transmission and reportedly avoided or restricted writing down their teachings, meaning most of what survives comes either from Roman authors writing about Celtic religion from an outside and sometimes hostile political perspective, or from medieval Irish and Welsh Christian scribes recording myth and legend generations after Christianization, material whose relationship to actual pre-Christian religious prayer and ritual is often genuinely unclear and actively debated by scholars. This combination of hostile outside description and later Christian-mediated literary material makes Celtic paganism, considered purely as a historical prayer tradition, one of the more evidentially thin corpora catalogued in this atlas, with considerably less direct textual survival than comparably ancient traditions such as Mesopotamian or Egyptian religion that left extensive contemporary written records in their own languages.