The World Tree. Celtic Cosmology.
Biblis| N° d'inventaire | 23544 |
| Format | 10 x 17 |
| Détails | 200 p., paperback. |
| Publication | Paris, 2021 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782271136718 |
The Celts were a group of peoples who, until the expansion of the Roman Empire, covered more than a third of Europe. They were not a truly homogeneous group, either in terms of material culture or linguistics. What do we know about their cosmology or their religion? Still too little: they themselves wrote little about their rituals, and Greek and Roman authors preserved only a few tiny fragments of their mythology.
The ambition of this book is to better understand their cosmology, taking as its subject not a god or a myth, but rather a mythological figure that is particularly well attested in Europe and around the Mediterranean: the world tree. Many sources indeed mention a cult of trees. But what are their specificities? What deity do they house? What role is conferred on them? And what can we deduce from this about the beliefs and theology of the Celts? This is what this book seeks to discover...
The Celts were a group of peoples who, until the expansion of the Roman Empire, covered more than a third of Europe. They were not a truly homogeneous group, either in terms of material culture or linguistics. What do we know about their cosmology or their religion? Still too little: they themselves wrote little about their rituals, and Greek and Roman authors preserved only a few tiny fragments of their mythology.
The ambition of this book is to better understand their cosmology, taking as its subject not a god or a myth, but rather a mythological figure that is particularly well attested in Europe and around the Mediterranean: the world tree. Many sources indeed mention a cult of trees. But what are their specificities? What deity do they house? What role is conferred on them? And what can we deduce from this about the beliefs and theology of the Celts? This is what this book seeks to discover...