(Untitled)

[gwynethfar]

A friend and I were discussing various Gods and Goddesses of the pan-Celtic pantheon today (like ya do), and she mentioned Danu and her consort... Beli. I was all, "fwuh?" until she told me it was something she read on a website, which immediately raises my hackles because I have a wild distrust of websites

Comments

[lastwaykeeper]

While I'm not sure of the reliability of the site, Encyclopedia Mythica says this:

The Celtic god of light and healing, "Bel" means "shining one," or in Irish Gaelic, the name "bile" translates to "sacred tree." It is thought that the waters of Danu, the Irish All-Mother goddess, fed the oak and produced their son, [An] Dagda. As the Welsh Beli, he is the father of Arianrhod by Don.

The same article put out the suggestion that Bilé and Beli Mawr are, if not synonymous, at least reflections of each other.

[gwynethfar]

I did see that bit, but thanks! My only hesitancy about sites like these are that they rarely cite sources and sometimes they're just parroting around the same misinformation.

I do see the startling similiarities between Bilé and Beli Mawr, though, so maybe I'm just being paranoid.

[alfrecht]

The idea that *Bele- names, including Belenus, Beli Mawr, Bile, and possibly Belatucadrus (and variations thereon) in Roman Britain all mean "light" or "fair" or "shining" is not necessarily tenable. There was an article a few years back in Zeitschrift fur Celtische Philologie by Peter Schrijver called "On Henbane and Early European Narcotics" which suggests instead that all of these deities, whose names share roots with the name for "henbane" in many I-E languages, actually means some sort of god of the plant, associated possibly with ecstatic states and perhaps healing. Having Bile as the name of a possibly euhemerized divine ancestor as well as the common noun for sacred tree is very suggestive, therefore, but not necessarily definitive. It remains an interesting possibility, in any case.

[parizadhe]

How do you get your fingers on these articles? I mean, that's pretty obscure! ...isn't it?

[alfrecht]

Not really, if you've either got access to a good academic library, or at least one known for Celtic Studies holdings. Luckily, my institutional library where I did my doctoral studies had the full collection, and the nearest university library here in WA also has the full collection.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because things have "foreign" titles, or aren't readily known to the wider world, that therefore they are "obscure"; I guarantee you that anyone who is a thorough and decent researcher in these subjects knows ZCP.

[smarriveurr]

I posit that everything worth knowing is written in a German journal somewhere. It's just so. Everybody knows it. If you wanna research Origen's thought on divine intermediaries... German philosophical journals. Traditional British Isles deities and root words? German philology journals. They've just got the monopoly.

The really fun part is learning German sufficiently to translate the page-long sentences with 90 varying dependent and independent clauses, with all verbs in a vaguely relative concatenation toward the end. Once spent 3 hours in the pub bloody diagramming one sentence to make sure I was translating properly...

[lastwaykeeper]

Ha. Nice.

Diagramming is always fun the old-school way. The new one just looks like a factoring table.

[smarriveurr]

This was particularly fun, since pretty much everything but the verb was a pointer reference (to steal from my other geekery). So it was extensive, recursive sequences of

§A1:
Origen (§B1)| is | §B2
 \from §B3         \ of §B4

[lastwaykeeper]

:P

Gotta love 'em