One of the profound and often bitter realisations about life, for every individual and every culture in every age, is that one day, not too far away, our life will cease to be – at least in this form. The Celtic peoples were well aware of death in the midst of life; in those times, life was hard and subject to disease, accident and warfare and generally people did not live as long.
Yet the Greeks and Romans observed of the Celts that they seemed not to be afraid of death.
For their journeys and in battle they use two-horse chariots, the chariot carrying both charioteer and chieftain. When they meet with cavalry in the battle they cast their javelins at the enemy and then, descending from the chariot, join battle with their swords. Some of them so far despise death that they descend to do battle, unclothed except for a girdle.
Diodorus Siculus (Cunliffe, 2010, p.57)
For the Celtic peoples, death did not mean annihilation, because the soul did not perish but passed from one body to another. So death was an evitable part of life and not to be feared because it was, in essence, a rite of passage to the otherworld, the blessed realm of the gods and ancestors and the eternal home of the soul.
The otherworld, in pre-Christian Ireland, was intimately connected to the earth – a parallel world, invisible, but part of this world – not the more transcendent and remote heaven of Christianity. In the mythology of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the semi-divine inhabitants of Ireland, they reside in the otherworld of the Sidhe within the earth itself.
But as to the Tuatha Dé Danaan after they were beaten, they would not go under the sway of the sons of Miled, but they went away by themselves. and Manannan … chose out the most beautiful of the hills and valleys of ireland for them to settle in; and he put hidden walls about them, so that no man could see through, but they themselves could see through them and pass through them. And he made the Feast of the Age for them, and what they drank as it was the ale of Goibniu the Smith, that kept whoever tasted it from age and from sickness and from death.
Gregory (1904, reprint 1994, p. 61)
The Celtic otherworld was an invisible realm within this visible realm of the material world. Only a thin veil inhibited humans from seeing it, except for those who had the second sight and for those times and places which are called thin times and thin places – when a glimpse of the otherworld was possible.
The Celtic otherworld was also the place of poetry and music – the special artistic gifts of the most skilled. it was the haunting music of the otherworld that called out to Bran and changed the course of his life forever. Bran listened to the song of the woman from the otherworld describe its beauty:
From one ancient tree, a chorus of birds sing out the hours. All is harmony and peace in this fertile, well-tilled land. Music sweetens the ear and colour delights the eye. Brightness falls from the air and the sea washes against the cliffs Like a crystal veil. In this fair island there is nothing rough or harsh. No weeping or sobbing is heard there and treachery is unknown. There are no cries of lamentation or grief, no weakness or illness. No death Heaney (1994, pp. 57–8).
The otherworld is a place of beauty, peace, harmony and eternal life. It is also a place integrated with the earth itself – a place where everything is possible.
This reverence for the earth as the place where the divine reside, coupled with a belief in the afterlife of the otherworld is evidenced in the Celtic rituals for the dead. Archaeologists are aware of the practice of carefully interring bodies from the paleolithic period and Mesolithic period, the individuals often buried with grave goods, such as red deer antler, shell beads and red ochre. This underlines what the ancient mythologies tell us of the reverence of the Celtic peoples for the natural world and also of their belief in an afterlife.
