page_title: Celtic animism
section_title: Honouring the waters
hierarchical_section_title: Celtic animism / Honouring the waters
caption_attribution_description: English: Looking downriver from the bridge over the Shannon at Drumsna, County Leitrim. Fishermen in a dinghy.
context_page_description: According to classical sources, the ancient Celts were animists. They honoured the forces of nature, saw the world as inhabited by many spirits, and saw the Divine manifesting in aspects of the natural world.
context_section_description: The spirits of watery places were honoured as givers of life and as links between the physical realm and the other world. Sequana, for example, seems to have embodied the River Seine at its spring source, and Sulis appears to have been one and the same as the hot spring at Bath, Somerset, (Roman Aquae Sulis) not simply its guardian or possessor.
  In Ireland, the tutelary goddesses Boann and Sionnan give their names to the rivers Boyne and Shannon, and the tales of these goddesses are the origin stories of the rivers themselves. The threefold goddess Brighid is associated with a number of holy wells and The Morrígan is connected with the River Unius.
  There is abundant evidence for the veneration of water by the Celts and indeed by their Bronze Age forebears. In the Pre-Roman Iron Age, lakes, rivers, springs and bogs received special offerings of metalwork, wooden objects, animals and, occasionally, of human beings. By the Roman period, the names of some water-deities were recorded on inscriptions or were included in contemporary texts. The ancient name for the River Marne was Dea Matrona (Goddess Matron); the Seine was Sequana; the Severn, Sabrina; the Wharfe, Verbeia; the Saône, Souconna; there are countless others.
  Natural springs were foci for healing cults: Sulis was prayed to as a healer at Aquae Sulis and the goddess Arnemetia was hailed as a healer at Aquae Arnemetiae. Nemausus, for example, was not only the Gallic name for the town of Nîmes but also that of its presiding spring-god. He had a set of three female counterparts, the Nemausicae. In the same region, the town of Glanum possessed a god called Glanis: an altar from a sacred spring is inscribed to Glanis and the Glanicae.
caption: The River Shannon, (Irish:Abhainn na Sionainne) County Leitrim, Ireland
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