5
The Otherworld of the Celts
Along with matters relating to the Mysteries, the information that propelled initiates toward the final act of resurrection was considered restricted material. Myths and sagas conveyed kernels of information while parables acted as recruitment tools to bait the curious. But aside from this, the bulk of the Knowledge was transmitted orally by wisdomkeepers from generation to generation. In northern Europe the last people to commit the secret things of the Celts to memory were the Druids, and by then the age of accumulated knowledge was beyond comprehension, much of it having taken place in Neolithic, possibly Mesolithic times. No wonder it took Druid priests up to ten years to learn the Mysteries; their feats of memory astounded even their cynical Roman conquerors.
Entrusting volumes of information to a human encyclopedia may be commendable but it has the drawback of dying with the person maintaining it, and so a forensic investigation of Celtic initiation practices relies on scouring surviving traditions, monuments, and language for clues as to how they might have practiced contact with the Otherworld, particularly how they created the right environment for such a purpose.
The Celts considered the Otherworld to be a location whose time and space differ from the physical world and yet utterly intertwines with it, just occupying a different dimension. For them, physical death is rebirth in the Otherworld, and death in the Otherworld is rebirth into the physical.
In Welsh mythology the Otherworld is called Annwn, also known as Caer Sidi, ‘the castle of the fairies.’ Much like the Egyptian Amdwat, it is described as a world of essential delights. Ingress into this garden of enchantment is possible through a shamanic initiation while living, and to facilitate it the Celts built countless stone structures with dark inner chambers topped by earthen mounds resembling man-made caves, the most common types being the passage mound and the dolmen. The practice was so pervasive that dolmens are found from Ireland to Libya, and across Asia, with the Korean peninsula boasting the greatest concentration anywhere in the world. Regardless of where these enigmatic structures appear they are united by one element: they all occur along the crossing points of the Earth’s electromagnetic currents, so much so that the Celts regarded them as places set aside from the normal world as though protected by a force field.
One of Ireland’s earliest mythic races was the Tuadhe d’Anu (people of the goddess Ana) who are said to have brought the Knowledge to ancient Eire. Legends describe them as capable of simultaneously inhabiting the world of the living as well as the discarnate. Their Annwn was regarded as an island in the West, an overseas paradise, a land of gods and nature spirits where the ancestors live immortally in a state of bliss, and into which mortals could be admitted upon gaining the trust of the Tuadhe and being given proper training. Most importantly, the mortals allowed into this spirit realm did so while still alive.
Classic dolmen. Crucuno, Carnac.
This ‘island’ is the same westerly realm to where Egyptian initiates embarked during their initiatory journey, the kingdom the dying sun descends into during its symbolic journey into the night—the shadow world—and both cultures believed this was situated not in some far-off, unknown territory, but close to Earth, merely a whisper away in another dimension.
The Tuadhe are said to continue living in spirit form inside the dolmens, stone circles, and long barrows peppered throughout the Irish countryside. As does the transcendental consciousness, the Sidhe, who, on occasion, presents itself to living people meditating at sacred places. One such temple is the dreamlike stone circle at Uragh, nestled on a glacially sculpted mountainside, overlooking a lake and framed by waterfalls, where the apparition of an extremely tall woman clad in what appears to be light silk often appears to visitors who travel there on spiritual quests. I have had the pleasure of being one such lucky individual.
In central Ireland, the place for connecting with the Otherworld is Sliabh na Caillighe Bheara—the ‘Mountain of the Hag’—otherwise known as Loughcrew. Over fifty ancient places of veneration exist along its flank and summit, including several chambered mounds. The site is named for Bheara, the central goddess of the Celtic creation myth, whose depiction in blue-green makes her the Celtic equivalent of those other gods of regeneration and rebirth, Siva and Osiris.
One of Sliabh na Caillighe Bheara’s most impressive passage mounds leads to a chamber filled with impressive upright stones carved with lozenges, diamonds, waves, and swirls, immediately identifying this as a room once used for visualization. The chamber receives its direct sunlight on two occasions: the sunrise marking Samhain—the day when the veil with the Otherworld is said to be thinnest; and sunrise at Imbolc, the day dedicated to the goddess Brigit, the ‘exalted one,’ daughter of the Tuadhe d’Anu.
Plan of cruciform passage chamber inside the east mound. Sliabh na Caillighe Bheara.
Brigit is the patroness of poetry, medicine, wisdom, knowledge, the arts, and illumination, and since she is also considered a Triple Goddess, all such attributes make her comparable to the Egyptian god of wisdom, Djehuti—the deity who presides at the threshold into the Amdwat. Her totem animals, the serpent and the bee, associate her with precisely the kind of elements involved with initiation: guided energy and divine insight, respectively. But what formally links Brigit—and by extension the chamber at Loughcrew—with the rites of raising the dead is a passage in the Cath Maige Tuireadh, a saga of Irish mythology, in which Brigit performs keening, an intense mournful wailing after death, for which she is credited with inventing a whistle used for calling out to another person across the reaches of the dark hours so that the traveler may make the journey safely. The metaphors related to night journeying in the Otherworld and the protection afforded by a seasoned guide while doing so are inescapable.
Furthermore, Brigit appears in Celtic lore as Brìghde, the root of bride, and it’s not by accident that the rooms used specifically for reaching the Otherworld were called bridal chambers, for reasons we shall expand on later.
Twenty-seven miles to the east of Loughcrew lies a group of imposing artificial mounds, the most famous of which is the cardioid-shaped Newgrange. The name is a corruption of its earlier and more appropriate title, Grain-Uagh, meaning “cave of the sun,” for indeed its long, narrow passageway lined with forty-six impressive upright stones is oriented to the light of the winter solstice sunrise. The moment the sun resurrects out of the darkest night of the year, a shaft of sunlight pierces the innermost chamber to illuminate a series of spirals carved on the stones of an alcove at the rear. But despite its estimated construction date of 3200 BC, Newgrange is a relative newcomer compared to its adjacent sibling, Knowth, which is dated to circa 4885 BC.1
Knowth stands apart in many ways, not least because it features not one but two passages. Its straight, westward-facing passage changes course abruptly by 19.4° as though it intends to meet something. Indeed, about twelve feet behind its rear wall lies a central chamber presided by a magnificent corbelled dome made of large flat stones, giving a visitor the impression of standing inside a beehive. In many ways it is a similar design concept to the ancillary chambers inside Egyptian pyramids. Three side chambers complete the design, while a 112-foot-long connecting passage made of tall orthostats leads out to the east. The plan view resembles a crucifix as well as a female womb, implying that whoever is immersed within Knowth is rendered in a state of incubation.
The east-west passages are obviously related. What is not yet known is whether a connecting passage exists between them, but should one be found (the site is still under excavation), the design would conform to the idea of initiates entering through the west door at sunset to immerse themselves in the central chambers, one of which contains a sizeable, decorated stone purposely hollowed so as to be used as a baptismal font. At the close of initiation, exit is made eastward down the long passage and toward the equinox morning light.
Indeed, it is the passages’ astronomical alignment that proves Knowth and adjacent Newgrange once formed part of a ritual whole. The former is aligned to the equinox, the latter to the winter solstice, and both to the heliacal rising of Venus; a carving above the light box in Newgrange even marks Venus’ eight-year transit. Had you lived in 3051 BC you would have observed Venus rising from Knowth on the autumn equinox, and exactly three months later, from Newgrange on the winter solstice.
Venus was the star to whose light initiates were resurrected in Egypt in order to be considered ‘sons of God,’ a position shared by the Jerusalem Church—and quite likely the priests at Saqsayhuaman and Q’inqu, for as we saw earlier, those structures are aligned to the very same heliacal rising of Venus and in that very same year.
The interrelationship between god-man, Venus, equinox, and solstice was commemorated, symbolically at least, in the early Christian era. According to the Bible, John the Baptist was conceived on the autumn equinox and born on the summer solstice, while Jesus was conceived on the spring equinox and born on the winter solstice. The relationship is enshrined in the Master Mason ritual in Scottish Rite Freemasonry, whose traditions commemorate events and rites that took place as much as five thousand years ago.2 Its 17th degree, the Knight of the East and West—perhaps its most powerful and spiritual—features numerical symbology common to both Knowth and Q’uinqu, as well as the one temple most associated with the resurrection rites of Osiris, the Osirion at Abydos. The Osirion consists of seventeen side chambers, Knowth has seventeen attendant mounds, while Q’uinqu’s preparatory area is a curving wall featuring seventeen alcoves.
Across the Irish Sea in Celtic Scotland there exist ample traditions of sacred places and people crossing into the Otherworld, a number of which are identified with sorcha (pronounced “sahkhaa”), an ancient word meaning both ‘paradise’ and ‘illuminated being.’ Once again there is a hint of Egyptian influence, for the syllable ka is their word for ‘risen soul or consciousness.’
Plan of the two passages of Knowth.
Main initiatory mound of Knowth and some of its seventeen attendant mounds.
At the core of Scottish Otherworld tradition is a mountain marking the geodetic center of the country, Sidh Chailleann, meaning ‘hill of the Sidhe’ or ‘hill of the Faery Realm.’ On the west shoulder of Schiehallion (as it’s known today), approximately two-thirds of the way up to its pyramidal summit lies a cave the Celts peopled with fairies and goblins, its folklore committed to paper by a local nineteenth-century parish priest:
There is a very remarkable cave near the south-west angle of Sithchaillinn, at the Shealing, called Tom-a-mhorair [cave of the giant]. Some miles to the east, there is an opening in the face of a rock, which is believed to be the termination thereof. Several stories are told and believed by the credulous, relating to this cave; that the inside thereof is full of chambers or separate apartments, and that, as soon as a person advances a few yards, he comes to a door, which, the moment he enters, closes, as it opened, of its own accord, and prevents his returning.3
According to Reverend MacDonald, the stories were related by people who “may be characterized as intellectual, sober, and industrious in their habits, honest and religious.”4
Schiehallion, the hill of the Sidhe.
The only people known to have frequented this abode of supernatural beings were individuals believed to have been initiated into the secrets of nature, a tradition traced back to an autonomous group of local hermit monks named the Culdee, who once were associated with the early Celtic Church. Formerly known as Chaldeans (from the Aramaic Khalid, ‘Friend of God’), they migrated from Asia Minor, and their practices were extensions of Druid, Manichean, and Essene beliefs,5 all of which shared the same tradition of initiation and living resurrection.
This tradition finds its counterpart on the island of Mull, stepping stone to the sacred isle of Iona. Mull’s own venerable holy mountain, Ben Mhor, rises formidably above an unusual feature: an enormous cave with a mouth gaping at the Atlantic and wide enough to swallow the setting sun. MacKinnon’s Cave is connected with many eerie legends. Folk tales describe initiates performing rituals there during pagan times on a massive flat stone called Fingal’s Table, which rests in a chamber deep inside this horizontal volcanic tube. Certainly the environs are protected by enough superstition to keep the superficially curious away, in addition to a sea that enters the cave and flows far inland with the rising tide. It is said that the cave’s recesses pass right through the mountain to the other side of the island, allowing those so inclined to enter in the west and emerge into the sunrise in the east.
That was then. Today the rear of the cave is blocked by sand and debris, but assuming the legend is true and the natural chasm does run beneath the island—such volcanic features are common in this part of Scotland—an easterly line projected across Mull does arrive at the mouth of Uamh na Nighinn (Cave of the Young Maiden), an unusual name given its isolation from any settlement and accessible only from the sea. Could its given name imply a communion with the divine virgin to whom initiates were wedded? Perhaps. And as if this wasn’t coincidence enough, the distance between the two cave mouths is 18.6 miles, the same number in years as the lunar cycle.
That the resurrection Mystery was performed in some fashion in this area may be commemorated in the unusual behavior of Odhràn, a sixth-century Celtic Christian monk who, upon reaching the adjacent island of Iona with St. Columba, rebuilt a ruined chapel previously built by the Culdee. Legend states that the walls of the chapel came down as fast as they went up as though by evil intent; only when a person was buried alive inside would the stones remain upright. Odhràn volunteered for the task, and when the earth was removed three days later, Odhràn raised himself and declared that all that had been said of hell was a joke. Clearly this monk experienced something inside this ancient place of veneration that changed his outlook on the true nature of reality.
The Culdee’s alleged arrival in the British Isles circa AD 376 is supported by the fact that this small chapel aligns to the simultaneous rising of Venus and the sun on the spring equinox of that year.
Incidentally, the Druids (Gaelic, ‘magicians, wise men’) were known to have conjured the weather against St. Columba when he tried to boot them and the Culdee out of Iona. Or perhaps the gesture was aimed at Columba’s distaste of women, for Iona and Mull point to a tradition of ritual whereby women were very much involved, seeing as a disproportionate number of churches and monasteries were maintained by female orders, including Eilean nam Bam, the Island of Women, while the Druid and Culdee monks themselves were known to have been married.7
To the north of Iona, spread out amid the gales and crashing waves of the northern Atlantic, lies the barren Isle of Lewis and its most alluring feature, the ritual temple of Callanais. Centuries ago one would have been forgiven for not assigning any significance to this site, until six feet of peat cut away for fuel revealed the details of one of the world’s most magnificent ceremonial sites.
Callanais is unique insofar as it is a stone circle connected by four avenues of glistening Hebridean gneiss, each aligned to the cardinal points save one, which is notably kinked to the northeast, the direction associated with illumination and ancient wisdom. From the air, the site takes on the appearance of a sprawling crucifix.
Callanais, Isle of Lewis.
Remains of beehive ceremonial cairn inside Callanais.
Ceremonial cairn, Nether Largie. The actual burial chamber is in the foreground.
It is this last detail that may give away one of its original functions. While there is little doubt that the site references significant astronomical events,8 a superfluous beehive-shaped cairn was added to the center of the circle, under which was unearthed a rectangular underground chamber facing east. There was no trace of burial. However, recent research has brought to light the fact that the anomalous northeast avenue—aside from marking the northernmost risings of the moon and sun—once extended a mile farther and, prior to a devastating rise in sea level around 2200 BC that created the nearby loch, would have concluded at a second cairn, also with an underground chamber facing equinox sunrise. If so, part of Callanais served a ritual function, as though a person was prepared in one cairn, then walked the ceremonial route to be ensconced inside another. Such a speculative scenario would be very familiar to someone visiting from an Egyptian temple, especially Saqqara, for the very same route was taken by candidates there wishing to undergo a ritual journey into the Otherworld, as we shall see later in chapter 13.
As with Egyptologists, archaeologists in Britain also made sweeping generalizations that all mounds were built for funerary purposes, despite only 15 percent of them yielding evidence of deliberate human burial. Such is the case at Nether Largie, a reasonably well-preserved mound in Kilmartin. It is essentially a 130-foot-wide mound featuring a central chamber capable of holding a sizeable group of twelve meditating people very comfortably beneath a damp schist roof. Its acoustics seem purposefully designed to elicit a state of reverie. Not that any sound would wake the dead, for the only sign of burial is the small cyst that lies adjacent to, but separate from the mound.
The examples throughout the British Isles of anomalous ceremonial mounds and chambers are too numerous to list, but one in particular merits attention due to its long association with the Celtic Otherworld—an island of volcanic rock and slate barely tethered to the mainland of Cornwall—Tintagel. It is the quintessential ‘island in the west’ to where the soul migrates in resurrection traditions. Indeed, by its geographic location, at Tintagel one physically prepares to embark on a westward journey into the endless Atlantic horizon. The entire mass even sits on a magnetic anomaly, giving the site a palpable aura of a place set aside from the physical world.
The persistent lashings from the Atlantic’s capricious weather make this place tolerable for seals rather than humans, and indeed the lack of habitation suggests Tintagel island was once a site used for spiritual seclusion, one of its earliest remains being those of Julitta’s chapel, a Celtic oratory from around the fifth century. Discoveries of fine Mediterranean and Tunisian pottery further attest to the island’s importance as a religious sanctuary.
Inside the Nether Largie cairn.
The clue to unlocking Tintagel’s secret lies across the way, on the edge of a precipitous mainland cliff, where stands a rare fifth-century church dedicated to Madryn, a Welsh princess said to have birthed a divinely conceived child. The name is most likely a corruption of Mater Ann, the mother of the gods. Beside the church were found slate graves devoid of bodies, but bearing a cache of goods from southeast Turkey. How odd that tomb robbers should have pinched the corpses but left the precious gifts behind. These graves encircle an ancient mound beneath which was found a large polygonal chamber aligned east-west, featuring a hollowed greenstone used for ritual libations. It too was devoid of burial.
At the center of these anomalous features stands an unusual conical stone cut from mica and marking the edge of one of Europe’s most studied pathways of naturally occurring energy, the Morganna line.9 However, it also doubles as a sighting post used for aligning the Great Bear and the pole star that rise over Tintagel island just before the sun is reborn on the winter solstice. This is very significant because, according to indigenous traditions, souls incarnate from the still point of the sky—the pole star—travel along an invisible tube to Earth, and return through it at death.
Tintagel’s further connection with the Otherworld stems from an ancient folktale claiming that the island possesses a faery castle that appears twice a year—once in winter, once in summer—as though Tintagel acts as a gateway to another dimension on two special occasions, such as the solstices.
Then there is the association with the Arthurian myth. Although Tintagel’s connection to Arthur and the Grail is a recent popularization by the poet Tennyson, the story is an adaptation of the Egyptian resurrection myth, with Arthur playing the role of Osiris, his evil brother Mordred as Seth, and Merlin as Djehuti, god of wisdom. It is also a remake of the earlier Celtic legend of Tristan and Isolde, a veiled story of a hero’s perilous journey to wed his divine virgin.
Arthur appears to be a composite fifth-century king, part real, part myth; it may not even have been a real name but a title, given that Arth Fawr is Welsh for Great Bear, the constellation bearing the pole star in his time. Like Heracles and his twelve labors, the twelve-part Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, the trials of the Nordic Ar-Thor, or the journey of the Greek Odysseus, Arthur represents the hero on a spiritual quest. Like other god-men, his birth to a virgin queen is magically conceived, while his battles resemble stages of initiation into the Mysteries. His court, Camelot, is derived from the local river Camel, whose original name was Cam-Alan.
In the myth Arthur marries a beautiful maiden who brings to him a round table as part of her dowry. Its twelve stages are linked to the twelve battles in his quest, and yet its overtones are analogous to the passage of the sun through the houses of the zodiac. And if so, the story starts to resemble a portrayal of the cycle of life and rebirth, least of all because it is rich in allegorical references of transcending ordinary consciousness through a journey into a mystical land. The experience is what empowers the hero to overcome a fatal wound and return to raise his kingdom from catastrophe.
The Welsh Mabinogion describes how Arthur and companions sail across the water to islands in the Otherworld in search of a magic cauldron. Tintagel may very well be one such island, along with a goodly number of sacred places throughout Cornwall associated with Arthur. Assuming the folk tale commemorating the solstices is correct, a line drawn through Tintagel in the direction of the rising sun on December 21 connects to Stowe’s Hill, a ritual site of extreme importance in the center of Cornwall (stowe means ‘sacred site’ in Saxon). From this focal point spokes of an invisible wheel radiate outward, revealing a geodetic round table of temples. Tintagel marks the northwest quadrant10—the traditional position on the Celtic Wheel of Life allocated to the spirit world, marked by the festival of Samhain, and now Christianized as All Hallows Eve.
Tintagel and the round table of sacred sites.
Along this alignment on the summit of Tintagel lies Arthur’s footprint carved into the living stone, through which passes the Morganna line as it makes a beeline to Madryn church and the winter solstice. The footprint marks the spot for resurrecting the power of the ruler, his or her divine kingship consecrated the moment the sun rises above the horizon. An identical mark exists on the sacred hill Dunadd near Kilmartin, where divine kings from the line of David were similarly consecrated. It too is aligned to the winter solstice sunrise, as well as the highest position of the light, the summer solstice sunrise.
Vestiges of this resurrection ritual lie a few yards from Arthur’s footprint: a fougou, a hand-cut tunnel that once held a pool of water at its western opening, which may have served a baptismal function. Just like the Otherworld chamber at Q’inqu, the tunnel has been cut like an S curve for no apparent practical reason, until it was discovered to mark the path of the Morganna line.11 Like so many of its kind, entrances reference the equinox sunrise and sunset, respectively, allowing the candidate to enter through the west, be ritually baptized, become immersed in the womb for three days before emerging into the rising light, and be resurrected into the world of the living.
Fifth-century Britain was a busy time for mystics, priests, and hermits. Many, like Telo, Cado, Piran, and the Irish princess Ia, traveled from Ireland and Wales to Devon and Cornwall, even the coast of Brittany, in what appears to have been a concentrated effort to counteract the false Christian doctrine then spreading across Europe.
The solar king’s footstep (foreground) with Madryn church across on the mainland (above). And the king’s footprint at Dunadd (below).
The ritual chamber or fougou on Tintagel.
Another such itinerant monk was Neachtan, and part of a valley dedicated to him lies two miles from Tintagel. Local folk tales persist of pilgrims traveling to Rocky Valley seeking the path of enlightenment. There are distant legends of knights associated with a Round Table, and later, Templar knights made it a point of journeying here as part of a spiritual curriculum to prepare themselves for that most arduous of journeys, the path of self-discovery and spiritual resurrection.
The path in and out of the valley takes on the vague form of the Egyptian symbol of life everlasting, the ankh, the head of which lies in the east, marked by an ancient hermitage said to have once been occupied by Neachtan himself. The tiny cell, built out of local slate and still in existence today, was expanded in the nineteenth century into a modest stone cottage. Beside it flows a stream that plunges sixty feet to become a dramatic waterfall.
So far so good. But the story takes an unusual turn because the only known human iteration of this name, St. Nectan, whose religious calling was shaped by a passion to imitate the way pursued by a hermit of the Egyptian desert, lived twenty-eight miles away to the north in Hartland. So are we dealing with the same person or is the name commemorating a curious purpose behind the valley?
Tales describe initiates spending long periods of time immersed in the intimacy of the hermit’s cell, then walking out to a ledge halfway up the waterfall to jump into a deep kieve, or basin, before passing through a dramatic circular hole in the rock face to emerge newborn out of the waterfall. To this baptismal pool is connected a ritual path straddling the river, ending a mile away at what appears to be a vertical chamber, hand cut from the black slate cliffs at the point where the sweet waters merge with the sea.
The whole forms what is essentially a ritual landscape temple.
As we learned earlier, the initiatory path to spiritual resurrection requires the body’s energy field to be open to finer, more penetrating stimuli, and indeed one does get a sense that during a peregrination along Rocky Valley the body is being stimulated. The fact that another well-studied telluric current—the Merlin line—also flows through the hermitage and the kieve only adds to the palpable energy. If the valley were a mirror of the human body and its chakras, the only bridge that straddles it would mark the location of the heart, and traditionally, unless one is able to open the heart, the rest of the journey is futile. Coincidentally this bridge bisects the valley into two halves that feel very different yet complementary to one another. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why the religious chose the site, insofar as it forms a material counterpart to the accounts from initiates undertaking an out-of-body experience who describe crossing a bridge over dark matter before reaching an entirely different, paradisiacal landscape.
Farther along Rocky Valley, in what would be the equivalent of the third-eye chakra, two labyrinths have been carved upon the slate rock face, each estimated to be over 4,500 years old. These coincide with the flow of another well-documented energy pathway, the Morganna line.12 Beside these carvings is a small enclosure in the rock face barely large enough to accommodate a person in fetal position, yet reportedly used for meditation.
The crown chakra is marked farther along the path by the aforementioned vertical chamber at the mouth of the river, where the view expands dramatically to embrace the western horizon.
Folk tale, figment of the imagination, or fact, the truth is that a hermit’s body was found buried inside a hollowed oak at the base of the kieve, a ritual of obvious Druidic origin and thereby predating the historical St. Nectan.
Neachtan, on the other hand, is the name of the lord who presides over the Celtic Otherworld.
Neachtan’s kieve. And right, the chamber at the end of the trail.