The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends Read Online Free PDF

under my fiction-writing pseudonym of Peter Tremayne and were: The Ever-Living Ones; The Sons of Tuireann; Island of the Ocean God; The Shadowy One; Bran and
Branwen; Tewdrig, Tyrant of Treheyl and The Destruction of Ker-Ys. My thanks to Mike Ashley and Nick Robinson of Magpie Books, for allowing them to be reprinted in the current
volume.
    In Celtic mythology and legend, one enters a fascinating world of fantasy, which is remote from the world of Greek and Latin myths, but which holds a strange resonance with Hindu myths. Even
though the insular Celts have spent at least three millennia in their north-west homelands, separated from their Indo-European parent, it is curious that there is a warmth and lightness rather than
the brooding bleakness that permeates the sagas of the Germanic and Nordic cultures. It is hard to believe, at times, that we are considering a north-west European culture. A bright, happy spirit
pervades even the tragedies. There is a spirit of eternal optimism. Even in the tragedy of The Children of Lir there is nothing final about the end.
    Death is never the conqueror and we are reminded that the ancient Celts were one of the first cultures to evolve a sophisticated doctrine of the immortality of the soul, in a form of
reincarnation. Their teaching was of such interest to the Classical world that scholars of the Greek Alexandrian school are divided as to whether Pythagoras, via his Thracian servant Zalmoxis,
borrowed the concept or whether Zalmoxis had taught it to the Celts. However, on examination, the Celtic theory of immortality and reincarnation was unlike the theory expounded by Pythagoras.
    The Celts taught that death is only a change of place and that life goes on, with all its forms and goods, in the Other-world. When a soul dies in this world, it is reborn in
the Otherworld and when a soul dies in the Otherworld, it is reborn in this one. Thus birth was greeted with mourning and death with exaltation and celebration. These customs were regarded with
some surprise by the Greeks and Latins. And from such ancient customs there survived until modern times the Irish funereal celebrations of the wake.
    It is important to remember that, for the ancient Celts, the soul reposed in the head. Thus the cult of “head collecting” was used by the Romans to denigrate the Celts. The ancient
Celts would take and keep the heads of those people they respected, embalming them with cedar oil, and thus paying reverence to great souls. They were not, as some have claimed, head hunters. Only the heads of those already slain in battle, friend or foe, were taken as trophies: and always people worthy of respect. Sometimes the heads were placed in sanctuaries or, more often, were
placed in the sacred Celtic rivers as votive offerings.
    Even in London, signs of this Celtic practice have been found. Countless skulls from the Celtic period were found in the River Thames and in Walbrook, a brook running into the Thames. Scholars
have argued whether Tacitus, who first records the Latin form of the name Londinium was recording this from the Celtic Lugdunum (fortress of Lug) or from another Celtic word, a word
still surviving in the Irish root, londo – the wild place. London, as a Celtic trading town of the Trinovantes, stood on the north bank of the Thames, or Tamesis, as it was
recorded. Tamesis means “the dark river”, cognate with the Sanskrit Tamesa, meaning exactly the same. Now the River Tamesa is a tributary of the Ganges, a sacred river of
the Hindus, in which votive offerings were placed.
    Is it any surprise, therefore, that we find many rich votive offerings and skulls placed in the Thames by the ancient Celts? Celtic coins, weapons such as swords and shields, exquisite jewellery
and other objects were thrown into the Thames and indeed the Walbrook. Whatever the origin of London’s Celtic name, we have many other Celtic namesassociated with the
city, not least the names of some of its ancient