Old Celtic Taboos

THE chief source of our knowledge of the religion of the Ancient Celts is the brief account we find in Julius Caesar's work on his conquest of Gaul. Against its trustworthiness it has sometimes been urged that the writer was ill prepared to deal fairly and adequately with the subject, inasmuch as he was a general and a statesman rather than an ethnographer or a folklorist.' The critics who have advanced this view have failed to take into consideration a long unnoticed trait in Caesar's character, to wit, the interest he appears to have taken in the antiquarian aspects of religion, obsolete rites and ceremonies so numerous in his own religion, a trait to which attention was drawn first by the late W. Warde Fowler.2 This interest explains the special prominence given to the Gaulish religion in a work largely devoted to politics and strategy; it also confers an exceptional value on Caesar's testimony with reference to certain Celtic taboos noticed by him in Gaul and Britain

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• The Shifting Baselines of the British Hare Goddess

  Open Access•Luke John Murphy, Carly Ameen•Open Archaeology•2020

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