DId you know?

So, I have decided I'm basing the religion in my books on the Celtic beliefs of the Iron Age.  Here are some interesting tid-bits!

Maiden Castle in Dorset. An iron age hill fort with an intricate maze of

ramps and ditches, which were supposed to delay and confuse attackers.

Druids. Another area where oral traditions were important was in the training of Druids. There has been a lot of nonsense written about Druids, but they were a curious lot; a sort of super-class of priests, political advisors, teachers, healers, and arbitrators. They had their own universities, where traditional knowledge was passed on by rote. They had the right to speak ahead of the king in council, and may have held more authority than the king. They acted as ambassadors in time of war, they composed verse and upheld the law. They were a sort of glue holding together Celtic culture.

Religion. From what we know of the Celts from Roman commentators, who are, remember, witnesses with an axe to grind, they held many of their religious ceremonies in woodland groves and near sacred water, such as wells and springs. The Romans speak of human sacrifice as being a part of Celtic religion. One thing we do know, the Celts revered human heads.

Celtic warriors would cut off the heads of their enemies in battle and display them as trophies. They mounted heads in doorposts and hung them from their belts. This might seem barbaric to us, but to the Celt the seat of spiritual power was the head, so by taking the head of a vanquished foe they were appropriating that power for themselves. It was a kind of bloody religious observance.
The Iron Age is when we first find cemeteries of ordinary people’s burials (in hole-in-the-ground graves) as opposed to the elaborate barrows of the elite few that provide our main records of burials in earlier periods.


Ok, so the head thing?  Kinda gross.  BUT, using this information, I think souls will play the part of the heads in my own scenario.  And Druids are closely related to my own "Chosen".  There's very little known about Druids and about this particular era in history - I think that's why it fascinates me so.  It allows me to insert my own imagination in there and take aspects of what is known, and apply it to my own world.  So, that's your history lesson for tonight!