Celtic Artwork; It's not what you think
The early Celts were marvelous metalworkers. They could make horse equipment not unlike that we use today: bits, bridle fittings. They made cooking utensils, warfare necessities--swords and spearheads and the like. While these were all utilitarian pieces, they were also all adorned with pictorial elements and design motifs, making it clear that beautifying their world was an important part of early Celtic life. They also indulged themselves in wonderfully worked gold jewelry, some of it—the torques in particular—signifying rank in the community.
Celtic artisans worked in pottery as well. It is also likely they were as attentive to their textiles as to the things they added to their clothing, although, of course, no clothing has survived. They did have mirrors, though, made of bronze that was highly polished on one side, decorated with curvilinear designs or animal motifs on the other.
Their earthworks, too, were in and of themselves works of art, though intended either for defense or astronomical observation. Indeed, the early Celts may well have developed a pictogram for the Milky Way, which they would have observed by means of highly polished, concave 'mirrors' at the bottom of earth-dug shafts. The official word in Ireland is that these were chieftain's graves, but other scientists believe that the placement of the earthworks and their decoration makes them likely to have been early observatories, useful for planning the planting of crops and waging of wars. And there is some evidence that the largest earthwork in Ireland, the Hill of Tara, overlies not an observatory in the usual sense, but a portal to another dimension. Granted, this research appears in an alternative publication called Atlantis Rising, but it is suggestive and apparently founded on the discovery of 300 or so huge pillar holes far below the known base of the hill. (This will be explored further in a future column.)
Early art in any culture tends to reduce complex forms to simple shapes. Most people know the Lascaux paintings in France: the horses depicted, very complex animals, are rendered in a few lines. The Celts, too, reduced nature to shapes. The result was their distinctive curvilinear art that was taken to its zenith by the monks in the Christian era, as they illuminated manuscripts with the endless circles and curlicues and fabulous beasts that become known as Celtic knotwork. The highest example of that Christian Celtic genre is The Book of Kells, housed today at Trinity College, Dublin. (Again, there is a more esoteric interpretation of this book, one that posits Ireland as the holy land, no less. And again, it will be discussed in a future column.)
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