however, everyone seems to have their own ideas about the Celts. These ideas are really projections of ourselves onto the fog-screen of history and an archetypal reflection back to us of what we would like, or need, to be true. No doubt it fits our modern, urban, need for romance and escapism to imagine our ancestors as poetic warriors, living wild and free in great sacred forests, in idyllic communion with the whole of nature.
The Romans, however, had very different ideas, stemming, again, from their own (imperialistic) needs. To them, the Celts were savage barbarians, sacrificing their children, prizing the severed heads of murdered enemies, and living in the woods like animals, where they worshipped pigs and dogs and other lowly beasts. Such projections enabled the Roman leaders to justify their invasions of Celtic lands, where they would do us all a favour by ‘civilising’ the barely-human heathens who had the audacity to live there.
The Greeks, too, had their conception of the Celtic people, a somewhat different conception to that of the Romans. They called them Keltoi, which has connotations of ‘Hero’ and also of ‘Strangeness’. The Keltoi were the ones who stood outside of civilisation and had an unusual understanding of nature and the elements. To the ‘civilised’ Greeks, the Celts were still savages, but perhaps they also had something about them, some secret power or knowledge…
In summary, there are as many ‘Celts’ as there are windows into the human imagination. What we know (almost) for certain, is that they lived between 700 BC and 400 AD. Apart from that, their very tribal natures, as well as the different landscapes they occupied and the variation in natural