page_title: Celtic mythology
section_title: Lugh/Lug
hierarchical_section_title: Celtic mythology / Irish mythology / Lugh/Lug
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration of Lugh's magic spear by Harold Robert Millar. From: Squire, Charles&#32;(n.d.),&#32;“Chapter 5: The Gods of the Gaels”, in&#32;Celtic Myth And Legend Poetry And Romance, London&#58; Gresham Publishing Company, page 62. Originally published under the title The Mythology of the British Islands, London: Blackie and Son, 1905.
context_page_description: Celtic mythology is the mythology of Celtic polytheism, the religion of the Iron Age Celts. Like other Iron Age Europeans, the early Celts maintained a polytheistic mythology and religious structure. For Celts in close contact with Ancient Rome, such as the Gauls and Celtiberians, their mythology did not survive the Roman Empire, their subsequent conversion to Christianity and the loss of their Celtic languages. It is mostly through contemporary Roman and Christian sources that their mythology has been preserved. The Celtic peoples who maintained either political or linguistic identities left vestigial remnants of their ancestral mythologies that were put into written form during the Middle Ages.
context_section_description: The god appearing most frequently in the tales is Lugh. He is evidently a residual of the earlier, more widespread god Lugus, whose diffusion in Celtic religion is apparent from the number of place names in which his name appears, occurring across the Celtic world. The most famous of these are the cities of Lugdunum (the modern French city of Lyon), Lugdunum Batavorum (Brittenburg, 10 kilometers west of Leiden in the Netherlands) and Lucus Augusti (Greek: Λοuκος Λuγούστον, the modern Galician city of Lugo). Lug is described in the Celtic myths as the last to be added to the list of deities. In Ireland a festival called the Lughnasadh (Irish: Lúnasa "August") was held in his honor.
caption: Lugh's Magic Spear; illustration by H. R. Millar
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