The Ancient Celtic Thresholds Of Liminal Time And Space
The ‘Veil of Isis’ is an ancient metaphor and allegorical motif of mythology where nature is personified as the goddess Isis covered by a veil representing the mystery and inaccessibility of nature's infinite secrets. In mythology and religion liminal deities, like Isis, were gods or goddesses who presided over thresholds, gates, or doorways: the crossers of boundaries. While at the simplest level these deities could be called guardians of the passage to the underworld, in crossing the threshold between life and death the ancient cultures of Scotland and Ireland also worshiped a range of seasonal cyclical liminal deities. The crumbling ruins of Neolithic burial chambers and Bronze Age stone circles that encrust the Celtic landscape, deliver fragments of evidence at several archaeological sites, that collectively reveal just how textured the ancient world was with a range of conceptual veils.
Nature is personified by the goddess Artemis, and is revealing itself to a personified science, by Jan Luyken. Frontispiece to the book “Anatome Animalium" by Gerhard Blasius (1681) (Public Domain)
The Annual Veils Of Ancient Celtic Agriculture
October 31 is Halloween, or All Saint’s Day, which is a Christianized festival with Celtic origins. While pumpkins (originally turnips) are carved today by families wearing ghoulish costumes, back in pre-Christian days this date was Samhain (SAH-win). Nicholas Rogers’ 2002 book Samhain and the Celtic Origins of Halloween. Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night explains that on this date the conceptual veil between this world and others was believed to be at its thinnest. While this fact relating to the date of Halloween is fairly widespread, what not so many people consider is that many of the standing stone monuments and massive stone built burial chambers of Scotland and Ireland were themselves ‘veils’ standing on the borders of liminal worlds, and dates.
