Celtic nature worship

According to classical sources, the ancient Celts were animists. They honoured the forces of nature, saw the world as inhabited by many spirits, and saw the Divine manifesting in aspects of the natural world.

The Celts of the ancient world believed that many spirits and divine beings inhabited the world around them, and that humans could establish a rapport with these beings. The archaeological and the literary record indicate that ritual practice in Celtic societies lacked a clear distinction between the sacred and profane; rituals, offerings, and correct behaviour maintained a balance between gods, spirits and humans and harnessed supernatural forces for the benefit of the community.

The pagan Celts perceived the presence of the supernatural as integral to, and interwoven with, the material world. Every mountain, river, spring, marsh, tree and rocky outcrop was inspirited. While the polytheistic cultures of ancient Greece and Rome revolved around urban life, ancient Celtic society was predominantly rural. The close link with the natural world is reflected in what we know of the religious systems of Celtic Europe during the late 1st millennium BCE and early 1st millennium CE. As in many polytheistic systems, the local spirits honoured were those of both the wild and cultivated landscapes and their inhabitants. As Anne Ross observed, "god-types, as opposed to individual universal Gaulish deities, are to be looked for as an important feature of the religion of the Gauls ... and the evidence of epigraphy strongly supports this conclusion." As what some may consider spirits are considered by other authors to be deities, the list of Celtic deities derived from local inscriptions can at times be rather long.

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