It is reasonable to suppose that much of the lore passed down has been altered or debunked in some way, so as not to detract from the sovereign status of God Himself, or to conform to Christian perspective.

The limited powers and flawed characters of the Celtic deities and god characters are not being placed against any formalised religion as we understand it.Popular among Celts was the cult of the Hero, or Great Person, and stories from several cults have found their way into the general stream of Celtic mythology.

Over time, these heroes were either imbued with godly attributes or became confused or merged with legendary Otherworld beings. This turned the Great Person into a quasi-divine entity in his or her own right.

Like the later Christian saints, the early Celtic warriors gathered cults about themselves, enjoying adulation noted far removed from outright worship. The amorphous character that emerged out of all this is difficult to categorise. Those who came to write about such figures undoubtedly added lore of their own and might have enlarged them even further. It might be true to say that the Celts never accorded their hero-gods wholly divine status in the style of the Romans and Greeks. There was always some part of them connected to the mortal world.

A good example was the Scots/Irish god Fionn Mac-Cumhaill – Finn MacCool – as he later came to be known. Originally the personification of wisdom, his cult merged his persona of earthly seer with that of an actual hero and this was how he was recorded throughout medieval Irish literature. He was described as one of the most important warriors of the Fianna – a band of heroic knights – from time to time, accorded unearthly powers.

In Celtic mythology, the concept of fertility was deemed female, since it was women who bore the children. Some folklorists argue that the original all-encompassing deity of the Celts was female, perhaps the Great Mother, although this is purely speculation.

One of the oldest Celtic goddesses known is Danu, whose cult – the Children of Danu (Tuatha Dé Danann) – invaded Ireland several millennia ago, according to the 12th-century Book of Invasions. The name Danu was well known all over early Europe and is most probably primitive Celtic, if not Indo-European in origin. The goddess of fertility and agriculture, she was adopted by the Celts as they settled down and became a farming people, rather than a warrior force. Other, local, female farming deities were also known to the early Celts – Bóinn, Banna and Brigid – and it is no coincidence that many of the rivers which irrigated the lands had female names and female aspects.

See also: Spirits of Earth and Air

From Complete Guide to Celtic Mythology by Bob Curran