The gate of the year

Limestone portal, with niches containing human skulls (about I century B.C.), from Roquepertuse, ancient Celtic religious site near the town of Velaux, Provence, and now in the Musée-Borély, Marseille, France.
The presence of heads separated from the body, also in sculpture, is a recurrent theme in Celtic art, and has suggested the existence of a sort of “head cult”. It is likely that the heads of dead warriors were kept: Latin authors referred (with revulsion) the custom of Germanic populations, who hang up the heads of slain enemies near their headmen’s huts or at the horse’s bridles of valiant warriors. In the Irish epic, the hero Cú Chulainn came back from battle holding nine heads in one hand and ten in the other. The mythic traditions emphasize the holiness of the head, referring how certain heroes’ head, like the Welsh Brân the Blessed, continued to speak for a long time after having been severed from the body.
The Celts perceived, probably, the boundaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead as tenuous and permeable: certain places, like the hearth or the burial place were regarded as points of passage, through which the deceased could come back to contact the world they had left with their death. In the most ancient past, the continental Celts practiced the burial of the corpses, but in a later period they began to cremate the dead, perhaps influenced by the Romans. Among the insular Celts, however, there were no traces of inhumation before the I century B.C., an evidence of the fact that the corpses were cremated or left to decompose outdoors. Seemingly, the dead did not inhabit a world radically separated from that of the living, but there was a certain contiguity, permitting to the dead to enter periodically in contact with the living. This was allowed above all during the feast of Samhain, on November 1, when the screen separating the two realms reduced until it disappeared for a brief period. Marginal or liminary places, like caves or swamps, were regarded as access routes through which it was possible to enter in that “other dimension” in which the dead, the divinities and the spirits lived, and which existed beside that of humans. In this alternative world, time passed in a different way with respect to our world, whereby a short sojourn beyond the boundary between the worlds could mean a period of hundreds of years in the human world. This explained why those who lived in the invisible world were not subjected to aging and death. That world was called in several ways: Mag Mell (“Plain of Honey”), Tir Na Nog (“Land of Youth”) or Avalon (from Emain Ablach, the “Island of Apples”).

[Image: http://library.artstor.org/library/]




World of the Dead

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Limestone portal, with niches containing human skulls (about I century B.C.), from Roquepertuse, ancient Celtic religious site near the town of Velaux, Provence, and now in the Musée-Borély, Marseille, France. The presence of heads separated from the body, also in sculpture, is a recurrent theme in Celtic art, and has suggested the existence of a sort of “head cult”. It is likely that the heads of dead warriors were kept: Latin authors referred (with revulsion) the custom of Germanic populations, who hang up the heads of slain enemies near their headmen’s huts or at the horse’s bridles of valiant warriors. In the Irish epic, the hero Cú Chulainn came back from battle holding nine heads in one hand and ten in the other. The mythic traditions emphasize the holiness of the head, referring how certain heroes’ head, like the Welsh Brân the Blessed, continued to speak for a long time after having been severed from the body. The Celts perceived, probably, the boundaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead as tenuous and permeable: certain places, like the hearth or the burial place were regarded as points of passage, through which the deceased could come back to contact the world they had left with their death. In the most ancient past, the continental Celts practiced the burial of the corpses, but in a later period they began to cremate the dead, perhaps influenced by the Romans. Among the insular Celts, however, there were no traces of inhumation before the I century B.C., an evidence of the fact that the corpses were cremated or left to decompose outdoors. Seemingly, the dead did not inhabit a world radically separated from that of the living, but there was a certain contiguity, permitting to the dead to enter periodically in contact with the living. This was allowed above all during the feast of Samhain, on November 1, when the screen separating the two realms reduced until it disappeared for a brief period. Marginal or liminary places, like caves or swamps, were regarded as access routes through which it was possible to enter in that “other dimension” in which the dead, the divinities and the spirits lived, and which existed beside that of humans. In this alternative world, time passed in a different way with respect to our world, whereby a short sojourn beyond the boundary between the worlds could mean a period of hundreds of years in the human world. This explained why those who lived in the invisible world were not subjected to aging and death. That world was called in several ways: Mag Mell (“Plain of Honey”), Tir Na Nog (“Land of Youth”) or Avalon (from Emain Ablach, the “Island of Apples”). [Image: http://library.artstor.org/library/]