Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) by James MacKillop Read Free Book Online

world. Knowledge here implies an esoteric, metaphysical perception, something that can only be bestowed, not gained gradually through sustained, unaided effort. Alas, the site of these wells is never clearly established, although the Well of Segais was traditionally (but inaccurately) thought to be the common source of the Shannon and Boyne Rivers. Connla’s Well may be in fabulous lands like Tír na nÓg [the land of youth], usually thought to be under the sea or more fancifully in Co. Tipperary. The identifiable pool of Linn Féic on the Boyne River in eastern Ireland or the falls of Assaroe on the Erne River in the northwest are the real-world sites where Fionn mac Cumhaill gains superior knowledge by touching the salmon with his thumb and tasting the fish when he thrusts his thumb into his mouth.
    Water deities, whether associated with wells, lakes, cataracts or rivers, tend to be female. Ritona or Pritona, a name indicating passageway, was the goddess of fords and water-crossings at Trier on the Moselle River. The ford could also have been seen as a metaphor for the passage between life and death, this world and the next. Also worshipped in Trier as well as in nearby Metz, eastern France, was Icovellauna, credited with powers of healing. No images of her survive, but her name tells us something about her function, for example:
Ico-
can mean ‘water’. She presides over an octagonal shrine known as Sablon, built in Romano-Celtic times. Much earlier, perhaps as early as the third century BC , is Glanis, eponym of the sacred springs at Glanum in what is today Provence, southern France. Greeks and Romans occupied the site before the coming of the Celts. Ancient cisterns near the springs indicate that pilgrims came here to bathe. Adjacent to one of the springs there is an altar to Glanis and to the Glanicae, a brood of local mother-goddesses linked to Glanis and her healing power.
Three deities of early Britain, Brigantia, Coventina and Sulis, are better known to us from the wealth and abundance of their remains. Cults for each of the three flourished during the Roman occupation, giving the goddesses Mediterranean-influenced faces as well as Latinate names. Brigantia, probably a British counterpart of the Gaulish Brigindo, came to personify the hegemony of the powerful Brigantes confederation of warring tribes, centred in what is today West Yorkshire. The River Brent, a tributary joining the Thames at Brentford, is named for her. The Romans tended to equate her with Minerva, goddess of wisdom, but more recent commentators see links between her and Brigit, the Irish fire goddess. Coventina, in contrast, may have been represented by Graeco-Roman-influenced iconography as a nearly naked water nymph or as a triple nymph pouring water from a beaker, but was not equated with any member of the Roman pantheon. Coventina’s inscriptions range as far as Galician Spain and the Gaulish Mediterranean coast at Narbonne, but her principal shrine was at Carrawborough on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. Excavations in 1876 at her well here, called Procolitia or Brocolitia, uncovered a cache of 14,000 ancient coins. Other items may signal motivations for her worship, such as the number of brooches, ornamental clasps or fibulae apparently given by women in hopes of safe childbirth. Figures of a horse and a dog are among the statuettes dedicated to her. Her Roman epithets
Augusta
[august, majestic] and
Sancta
[holy] underscore the esteem she enjoyed. Curiously, though, the powers of healing attributed to her cannot be supported by a contemporary analysis of the waters at Carrawborough.
    The high status of Sulis or Sul can be presumed from the many altars dedicated to her in the Romano-British city of Bath, her principal shrine. Today a resort town in Avon (before 1982, Somerset), ten miles southeast of Bristol, Bath has been known for its medicinal waters since prehistoric times and is one of the oldest continually inhabited spots in