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Nameless god of the Celtiberians
Strabo and Celtiberian religion
[edit]
Strabo's Geographia, written at the beginning of the 1st century CE, is the longest ancient geography which come down to us. While Strabo incorporated some first-hand knowledge into this work, his knowledge of the Celtic peoples seem to have been wholly second-hand. Strabo is known to have relied extensively on 1st century BCE polymath Posidonius, who produced (among other things) a now-lost ethnography of the Celts. Posidonius was Strabo's primary source for Book 3 of the Geographia, dealing with the Iberian peninsula.[1][2] In this book, Strabo gives us the following piece of information:
Some say the Callaicans have no god, but the Celtiberians and their neighbours on the north offer sacrifice to a nameless god at the seasons of the full moon, by night, in front of the doors of their houses, and whole households dance in chorus and keep it up all night.[3]
The Celtiberians were a collection of Celtic tribes in central-northeastern Iberia, referred to under one name by Greco-Roman authors.[4] The Callaeci were a Celtic tribe of north-west Iberia.[5] It is not clear which tribe Strabo meant by "their neighbours on the north".[6] Written sources about the religion of the Celtiberians are scare, and specialists in the field generally rely on archaeological evidence. Strabo's brief comment here is the rare example; as Gabriel Sopeña Genzor and Vicente Ramón Palerm put it, "it is, together with the fundamental verses of Silius Italicus (Punica, III, 340-343),[a] the longest and most concrete text alluding to the religion of the Celtiberians".[7]
In this passage, Strabo deals with two propositions: the godlessness of the Callaeci and Celtiberian worship of a nameless god.[8] The phrase "some claim" probably refers to the work of Posidonius. It has been pointed out that the Callaeci were certainly not atheists, as archaeological evidence from Gallaecia amply demonstrates.[9][b]}} The evident falsity of this assertion was recognised as early as the 18th-century, by Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença, who suggested that it should be interpreted as saying the Callaeci had no temples or idols.[10] In 1946, Julio Caro Baroja connected the atheism of the Callaeci to the namelessness of the Celtiberian god, suggesting that name of the Callaican gods were subject to a similar taboo, and thus Greco-Roman observers were unable to collect information about their deities.[9] This interpretation has been followed in recent scholarship by José María Blázquez Martínez,[11] but subjected to criticism in a a 1982 study José Carlos Bermejo Barrera [etc. etc.]
Background about Greco-Roman ethnography and foreign gods, naming of gods, veracity of this particular statement (see Curchin)
Nameless god
[edit]Joaquín Costa, who produced the first full study of Celtiberian religion in 1895, though a non-specialist, made much use of this passage, and suggested that this nameless god was a Celtic descendant of a monotheistic, proto-Indo-European deity. Enrique de Aguilera y Gambo similarly thought the nameless god suggestive of Celtiberian monotheism, but this line of reasoning has had limited uptake in later 20th century. More influential was the hypothesis of Camille Jullian, advanced in 1903, that the nameless god was identifiable with the moon. This identification was repeated approvingly by Julio Caro Baroja, Blas Taracena Aguirre, and Adolf Schulten (in his 1952 edition of Strabo for the Fontes Hispaniae Antiquae), and thereby was the consensus of the secondary literature for most of the 20th century.[12][13]
Moon hypothesis
Marco Simon's Gaulish Dis Pater hypothesis
Vendryes discusses the taboo
Notes
[edit]- ^ [Footnote about these verses here.]
- ^ Among the indigenous deity-names attested in inscriptions from Gallaecia are Aernus, Bormanicus, Duberdicus, and Nabia.{sfn
References
[edit]- ^ Hofeneder 2008, pp. 206–207, 215.
- ^ Radt & Elvers 2006.
- ^ Strabo, Geographia, 3, 4.16. Translation from Jones 1923, p. 107
- ^ Keay 2012.
- ^ Barceló 2006.
- ^ Hofeneder 2008, p. 217.
- ^ Sopeña Genzor & Ramón Palerm 1994, pp. 22–23: "se trata, junto a los fundamentales versos de Silio Itálico (Pun., III, 340-343), del texto más largo y concreto alusivo a la religión de los celtíberos".
- ^ Sopeña Genzor & Ramón Palerm 1994, p. 25.
- ^ a b Hofeneder 2008, p. 215.
- ^ Leite de Vasconcelos 1913, pp. 69–70.
- ^ Blázquez Martínez 1986, p. 199.
- ^ Hofeneder, 2008 & pp.
- ^ Sopeña Genzor 1995, p. 29.
Bibliography
[edit]- Aguilera y Gamboa, Enrique de (1916). Las necrópolis ibéricas. Madrid. pp. 49–50.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Barceló, Pedro (2006). "Callaici". Brill's New Pauly Online. Brill. doi:10.1163/1574-9347_bnp_e224870.
- Barrigón, Carmen (2007). "Los ritos lunares en Estrabón". In Hernández Guerra, Liborio (ed.). El mundo religioso hispano bajo el Imperio romano. Pervivencias y cambios. Valladolid: Secretariado de Publicaciones e Intercambio Editoria. pp. 57–69.
- Bermejo Barrera, José Carlos (1994). Mitología y Mitos de la Hispania Prerromana I (2nd ed.). Madrid.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Blázquez Martínez, José María (1986). "Einheimische Religionen Hispaniens in der römischen Kaiserzeit". Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt. II 18.1: 164–275. doi:10.1515/9783110861464-004.
- Blázquez Martínez, José María (1999). "Últimas aportaciones a las religiones indígenas de Hispania: cuestiones a propósito de religiosidad celta". Homenaje al Profesor Montenegro. Valladolid: Secretariado de Publicaciones e Intercambio Editorial. pp. 305–317.
- Caro Baroja, Julio (1946). Los pueblos de España: Ensayo de etnología. Barcelona. pp. 217f.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Costa, Joaquín (1917) [1895]. La religión de los celtíberos y su organización política y social. Madrid. pp. 17–18, 98–99, 161–162.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Hofeneder, Andreas (2008). Die Religion der Kelten in den antiken literarischen Zeugnissen. Vol. 2. Wien: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
- Strabo: Geography, Volume II: Books 3–5. Loeb Classical Library. Vol. 50. Translated by Jones, Horace Leonard. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1923. p. 107.
- Keay, Simon J. (2012). "Celtiberians". The Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.
- Leite de Vasconcelos, José (1913). Religiões da Lusitania. Vol. III. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional.
- Radt, Stefan; Elvers, Karl-Ludwig (2006). "Strabo". Brill's New Pauly Online. Brill. doi:10.1163/1574-9347_bnp_brill130030.
- San Vicente, J. Ignacio (2015). "Reflexiones en torno a Estrabón y las celebraciones ante las puertas de los pueblos del norte" (PDF). Hispania Antiqua. 39: 23–46.
- Schulten, Adolf, ed. (1952). Estrabón: Geografía de Iberia (PDF). Fontes Hispaniae Antiquae. Vol. VI. Barcelona.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Sopeña Genzor, Gabriel; Ramón Palerm, Vicente (1994). "El anonimato de un dios de los celtíberos: aportaciones críticas en torno a Estrabón III, 4, 16". Studia historica. Historia antigua. 12: 21–34.
- Sopeña Genzor, Gabriel (1995). Ética y ritual: aproximación al estudio de la religiosidad de los pueblos celtibéricos. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico.
- Vendryes, Joseph (1997) [1948]. La religion des Celtes. Spézet: Coop Breizh.
Further reading
[edit]- Bermejo Barrera, José Carlos (1983). "Estrabón: III, 4,16 Algunas consideraciones sobre el ateísmo de los galaicos". Colóquio Galaico-Minhoto: Ponte de Lima, 1-5 de setembro de 198. Vol. 2. Associaçao Cultural Galaico-Minhota. pp. 225–232.