Thank you for answering the question hopefully it helps people that do not know the difference. For me personally I don't use the word Celtic when I'm referring to Irish mythology anymore. I will use the country, people, tribe or culture... Only because people still get confused for some reason. Also I referred a fellow RUclipsr to this channel along with the Ogham Academy & Morgan Daimler for quality information on Irish mythology.
In my view, native peoples and their deities are a synergy of interaction. So each groups landscape, experience, prayers and interaction with the deities shape our view of that deity. That collective cultural link will always influence the view. There will always be similarities, but the key is lense that we view with.
The same DNA findings, that make Iron Age Celtic invasions look extremely unlikely, show us that there is a genetic affinity between formerly Celtic speaking people on the continent with most Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Bretons, and some English people today (see Y haplogroup R-P312). It makes sense to group those people under the umbrella term Celts. It would be interesting to view Gaelic mythology with an eye to Gaels actually having settled in Britan and Ireland around 2500 BCE then being somewhat isolated from the continent for a millennium or so due to Brythonic speakers migrating to Britain and dominating contact with people on the continent (thus history gives us the name British Isles).
When you consider the millions that were murdered by the invading Christians to impose their new religion, of course the conquered were made to look evil and had to be punished.
Sometimes there are cultures with a connected source, sometimes there are cultures that influence each other, and sometimes there are cultures that have similarities by coincidense
To boil down what you're saying (and with what I agree wholeheartedly): Infinite diversity in infinite combinations. A Vulcan saying. Live long and prosper, John.
On the topic of misconceptions and misinformation, I was wondering if you had any insight on the nature and mythological stories of Flidais? Most sources I find seem to be lacking credibility, and I would really like to make sure I am honoring this deity appropriately
i mean it's well attested and documented that Lugh alone was a gaulish god and brought in later, and i'd say the mythology that we have from the christian monks that wrote it down far too late reinforces that he was a later addition to the irish pantheon. i love everything IPS does for education and the overall gist of this video, but why be coy about admitting that as successive waves of immigrants brought in their beliefs, so things changed? that is, unless we truly believe that every individual named by monks c.1000ad must absolutely be real and ancient intelligences that have always existed but only within the confines of irish space. sorry to be bold, but the plot has holes.
If you don't mind I'd love to hear your opinion on Gaelic vs Gaelige when discussing the modern Irish language. Like people saying we speak Gaelic or that the language of the natives is Gaelic. I am still trying to figure out why that bothers me. It feels like saying the native French speak Latin (yeah even I recognise that's a dubious stretch) but would to hear the perspective and view of people more in touch with their Irish culture than I am currently.
Gaeilic is an old term that's only really used in some Northern parts of this island today. Most of us say Irish or Gaeilge. The language moves and I'm a fan of keeping up.
In the spiritual world there is no ethnicity, no culture, no land borders,....Whether Lugh was a Gaulish god or not doesn't matter to one's spiritual practice. Celtic also refers to people who had similarities in more ways than just language. They had similar ways to build their homes, dress, in Gaul they had druids too,...etc.
I love all the IPS material but yet again this just sounds like a coded way of saying Irish gods for Ireland only, get your own gods but please buy our courses and be fooled into thinking we accept your practice. I dont know anymore. I mean the cultural flow and exchange over the years and different lands is obvious. They are in some respect clearly the same gods.
YES, they are. Some gods, different names. Same pagan rite-ritual myth. Same era, same family of dialects - same religious customs. Yes, they are the same gods. Pagan Welsh religion and myth and Irish paganism and ritual were more probably the same structure of custom.
There are subtleties and ambiguities in the pagan pantheon. Dis Pater= the Dagda/Pluto/Kronos = the king of the Underworld, Lord of Souls and reincarnation. Lugh = Mercury or Apollo, Maponos, Óengus = a sun king or all-artificer god, the tutor of a chief on earth. Gobannon=Hephaestus. Venus/Demeter= Maeve, Epona, Morrigan. J Caesar says the Celtic have pretty much the same conception and myths as all the other IE peoples of Europe.
The analogy of Dis Pater with Pluto is one that was made by Cicero, but it's actually a very obscure deity that we don't know much about. Let's not confuse the analogies that ancient people made with facts. The Romans and the Greeks were very adept of such analogies, but it's a peculiar cultural phenomenon, it's not based on the careful study of mythology. So sometimes the deities they considered to be the same did have common origins, but other times they just happened to have overlapping attributes (like Hermes and Thot). It can be very tempting for people today to consider that all these different names are just a puzzle to be recomposed, but that's mysticism. Indo-european pantheons are more like a branching trees: different deities in different cultures may share common origins (sometimes in surprising ways), but they also evolved in their own way, and there are also deities that come from elsewhere, and new gods. So whether you can consider Dis Pater to be the same god as Pluto completely depend on the timeline. In the 2nd century CE? Yeah at that point they were considered the same god. But in the 3rd century BCE? Not the same god.
@@Ezullof somewhat agree. IE pagan cult shared a lot of culture across a chronology. You may insist for academic science that Isis and Maeve Dergberg or Rhiannon are not the same goddess. I would say that they not the same name but do serve the same ritual-myth function. Yes, they are analogous. Sometimes, Roman analogies or Greek ones were ethno-centric and ignorant. You may consider that by the Roman Age, Iron Age Greek myths were literary and rationalized shadows of their Bronze Age relevance. But when we observe that two god or goddesses served the same religious-cult functions, that is more than a literary analogy or the vulgar intelligence of New Age Mysticism. Rather, it is the anthropology of an empirical and religious phenomenon.
Thank you for answering the question hopefully it helps people that do not know the difference. For me personally I don't use the word Celtic when I'm referring to Irish mythology anymore. I will use the country, people, tribe or culture... Only because people still get confused for some reason. Also I referred a fellow RUclipsr to this channel along with the Ogham Academy & Morgan Daimler for quality information on Irish mythology.
Thanks for this video Jon, I hope it reaches a lot of people. The homogenized approach to 'Celtic' paganism that people take is very frustrating.
In my view, native peoples and their deities are a synergy of interaction.
So each groups landscape, experience, prayers and interaction with the deities shape our view of that deity. That collective cultural link will always influence the view.
There will always be similarities, but the key is lense that we view with.
The same DNA findings, that make Iron Age Celtic invasions look extremely unlikely, show us that there is a genetic affinity between formerly Celtic speaking people on the continent with most Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Bretons, and some English people today (see Y haplogroup R-P312). It makes sense to group those people under the umbrella term Celts. It would be interesting to view Gaelic mythology with an eye to Gaels actually having settled in Britan and Ireland around 2500 BCE then being somewhat isolated from the continent for a millennium or so due to Brythonic speakers migrating to Britain and dominating contact with people on the continent (thus history gives us the name British Isles).
Thank you for this video. Thank you yt algorithm for recommending it. I'm subscribed now and look forward to learning from you
Nuanced and deep but lucid and empirically responsible stuff Sir. Excellent work, man thanks!
When you consider the millions that were murdered by the invading Christians to impose their new religion, of course the conquered were made to look evil and had to be punished.
Sometimes there are cultures with a connected source, sometimes there are cultures that influence each other, and sometimes there are cultures that have similarities by coincidense
To boil down what you're saying (and with what I agree wholeheartedly): Infinite diversity in infinite combinations. A Vulcan saying. Live long and prosper, John.
On the topic of misconceptions and misinformation, I was wondering if you had any insight on the nature and mythological stories of Flidais? Most sources I find seem to be lacking credibility, and I would really like to make sure I am honoring this deity appropriately
i mean it's well attested and documented that Lugh alone was a gaulish god and brought in later, and i'd say the mythology that we have from the christian monks that wrote it down far too late reinforces that he was a later addition to the irish pantheon. i love everything IPS does for education and the overall gist of this video, but why be coy about admitting that as successive waves of immigrants brought in their beliefs, so things changed? that is, unless we truly believe that every individual named by monks c.1000ad must absolutely be real and ancient intelligences that have always existed but only within the confines of irish space. sorry to be bold, but the plot has holes.
If you don't mind I'd love to hear your opinion on Gaelic vs Gaelige when discussing the modern Irish language. Like people saying we speak Gaelic or that the language of the natives is Gaelic. I am still trying to figure out why that bothers me. It feels like saying the native French speak Latin (yeah even I recognise that's a dubious stretch) but would to hear the perspective and view of people more in touch with their Irish culture than I am currently.
Gaeilic is an old term that's only really used in some Northern parts of this island today. Most of us say Irish or Gaeilge. The language moves and I'm a fan of keeping up.
In the spiritual world there is no ethnicity, no culture, no land borders,....Whether Lugh was a Gaulish god or not doesn't matter to one's spiritual practice. Celtic also refers to people who had similarities in more ways than just language. They had similar ways to build their homes, dress, in Gaul they had druids too,...etc.
I love all the IPS material but yet again this just sounds like a coded way of saying Irish gods for Ireland only, get your own gods but please buy our courses and be fooled into thinking we accept your practice. I dont know anymore. I mean the cultural flow and exchange over the years and different lands is obvious. They are in some respect clearly the same gods.
YES, they are. Some gods, different names. Same pagan rite-ritual myth. Same era, same family of dialects - same religious customs. Yes, they are the same gods. Pagan Welsh religion and myth and Irish paganism and ritual were more probably the same structure of custom.
There are subtleties and ambiguities in the pagan pantheon. Dis Pater= the Dagda/Pluto/Kronos = the king of the Underworld, Lord of Souls and reincarnation. Lugh = Mercury or Apollo, Maponos, Óengus = a sun king or all-artificer god, the tutor of a chief on earth. Gobannon=Hephaestus. Venus/Demeter= Maeve, Epona, Morrigan. J Caesar says the Celtic have pretty much the same conception and myths as all the other IE peoples of Europe.
The analogy of Dis Pater with Pluto is one that was made by Cicero, but it's actually a very obscure deity that we don't know much about.
Let's not confuse the analogies that ancient people made with facts. The Romans and the Greeks were very adept of such analogies, but it's a peculiar cultural phenomenon, it's not based on the careful study of mythology. So sometimes the deities they considered to be the same did have common origins, but other times they just happened to have overlapping attributes (like Hermes and Thot).
It can be very tempting for people today to consider that all these different names are just a puzzle to be recomposed, but that's mysticism. Indo-european pantheons are more like a branching trees: different deities in different cultures may share common origins (sometimes in surprising ways), but they also evolved in their own way, and there are also deities that come from elsewhere, and new gods.
So whether you can consider Dis Pater to be the same god as Pluto completely depend on the timeline. In the 2nd century CE? Yeah at that point they were considered the same god. But in the 3rd century BCE? Not the same god.
@@Ezullof somewhat agree. IE pagan cult shared a lot of culture across a chronology. You may insist for academic science that Isis and Maeve Dergberg or Rhiannon are not the same goddess. I would say that they not the same name but do serve the same ritual-myth function. Yes, they are analogous. Sometimes, Roman analogies or Greek ones were ethno-centric and ignorant. You may consider that by the Roman Age, Iron Age Greek myths were literary and rationalized shadows of their Bronze Age relevance. But when we observe that two god or goddesses served the same religious-cult functions, that is more than a literary analogy or the vulgar intelligence of New Age Mysticism. Rather, it is the anthropology of an empirical and religious phenomenon.