by Searles O'Dubhain
Searles O'Dubhain was a practitioner, teacher, and scholar of Celtic Druidry who ran the Summerlands web archive and taught Celtic Workshops online for many years. This post from July 2003 opens a thread on alt.religion.druid about the cosmological models underlying Celtic religion and practice. He describes a world structured not as a hierarchy of heaven and earth but as a spiral radiating from centers of being — the individual body, the hearth, the sacred mound — and interpenetrated by an Otherworld of deities and the dead accessible at liminal moments. The post is a practitioner's introduction: historically grounded, experientially oriented, and consciously designed to provide shared vocabulary for a community with varied backgrounds.
I believe that much of the confusion we have on the a.r.d. newsgroup when we discuss deities and/or the Otherworld stems from the lack of commonly understood (shared) models for Celtic cosmology. Also, if the dynamic framework of such a cosmology were generally agreed upon then the additional complexities of spiritual interactions and the concepts/perceptions of deities would be less controversial IMO. I propose in this thread to discuss these concepts from a historical perspective, within an experiential interaction and for the possibilities of increased spiritual awareness.
Various concepts and models of being existed and were used within the ancient Celtic world. The simplest of these concepts was that creation was circular or spiral and radiated from the center of one's existence. This center for a person was where they stood. Within it was found either the heart or the head, as well as possibly the belly. In groups this center of being was to be found in the person of the leader (whether father/mother, chieftain or king/queen). The symbols for these various centers were the head/torc, the hearth/home and the bile/ritual mound. Personal actions rippled out to the boundaries of being while the bordlands were guarded by the warrior class. The Druid/Poet-seer class passed beyond and between these borders in normal and non-ordinary realities. The nobility existed at the center while the working/peasant class made up the rest of the enclosed area.
More complex cosmological models also included the Otherworld which was interconnected with this world (especially at liminal times and places). This Otherworld had pockets of specialized or exalted being which were the homes and gathering places of the deities (islands, planes or brughs/hollow hills) as well as a place that can best be described as the Abyss (a kind of non-existence or primal well).
Deities were considered to have ready access to all parts of this existence and these abodes while people had varying capabilities, opportunities and misfortunes for passing from one realm to the next. Fire, water, wind, song and rite of passage were thought to aid a person in making these journeys though at times they seem to have occurred through action, accident and divine intervention. There's a lot more to be said and discussed about these ideas as they exist/ed within Celtic tradition before we undertake to discuss and exchange our own experiences and present day concepts about similar topics and matters. These ideas varied from tradition to tradition and tribe to tribe, yet seem to have had a common thread within them. It's my hope that we can discuss and identify these common threads on this newsgroup.
I'm looking forward to a continued discussion of the traditions before we share our experiences further or aspire to grasp what the possibilities are for the future.
Colophon
Written by Searles O'Dubhain and posted to alt.religion.druid on 2 July 2003. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Searles O'Dubhain (1950–2016) was the founder of the Summerlands Celtic pagan archive and a long-time teacher of Celtic traditions and Druidry online. This post opened a thread on Celtic cosmological models, intended to provide shared vocabulary for the newsgroup community.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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