Gods in England, pre-Anglo - Saxon

[David19]

Does anyone know the gods that were worshipped in England before the Anglo-Saxons came with the Norse gods. Were there any other deities worshipped. Also i've heard there were Celtic gods worshipped but were there any gods worshipped before the Celts came, i guess i'm asking what gods did the original inhabitants worship before the Celtic gods and the Norse gods?

Hope that made sense :)

[SageofThyme]

I have a list at home ....but until december 27th I am visiting family so if nobody else tells you remind me to look it up then

[ap Dafydd]

Does anyone know the gods that were worshipped in England before the Anglo-Saxons came with the Norse gods. Were there any other deities worshipped. Also i've heard there were Celtic gods worshipped but were there any gods worshipped before the Celts came, i guess i'm asking what gods did the original inhabitants worship before the Celtic gods and the Norse gods?


Not easy to determine. There are no written records before Celtic times and even the Celts didn't have many visual representations of their deities before the Roman conquest.

The original inhabitants didn't even worship the Norse gods, of course, that was the English settlers.

gwyn eich byd

Ffred

[J Santos]

Prior to the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, a great influence was already in place by previous Roman settlers/invaders. Are you looking for before that time as well? I.e. as close to "original" as you can get?

[David19]

Prior to the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, a great influence was already in place by previous Roman settlers/invaders. Are you looking for before that time as well? I.e. as close to "original" as you can get?

Kind of. I'd like to know the gods that were worshipped before the Norse and Celts. I'd be interested in Roman-british beliefs but were there anything before that.

[J Santos]

I'm a historian of science, not religion, so bare with me a bit :-P. If I recall correctly, prior to influence by the great ancient powers of europe, the people of britain were mostly small nomadic tribes. I'm not sure much is known about their god images except that they surely had some based on evidence found across the globe for similar tribal structures.

I'd say you are looking at the "essential" gods. Gods/Goddesses of fertility, the sun, the moon/stars, the sky/weather, and possibly the hunt.

[Seren_]

Does anyone know the gods that were worshipped in England before the Anglo-Saxons came with the Norse gods. Were there any other deities worshipped. Also i've heard there were Celtic gods worshipped but were there any gods worshipped before the Celts came, i guess i'm asking what gods did the original inhabitants worship before the Celtic gods and the Norse gods?

Hope that made sense :)

The simple answer is we don't know what gods were worshipped before the Celts. Without written records, we're a bit stumped, and we only start getting glimpses of the Celtic gods with the advent of the Romans - and it's important to remember that we therefore look at them through a Roman veneer. They left a lot of inscriptions and dedications to their own Roman gods, imports from other parts of the Roman empire, as well as Celtic deities. You can have a look at them at Roman Britain.org:

http://www.roman-britain.org/rbgods.htm

The evidence from this suggests that the Celts worshipped their deities on a local level, with some deities being more widespread or better known. As you can see on the website, some deities were conflated with Roman deities - like Sulis Minerva (probably the most obvious example).

Pre-Roman, we can look at archaeology to see suggestions of deities, like a wooden carving found in an Irish peat bog. We can only speculate that this may have represented a deity, though. Since such carvings representing human forms are rare in this period, we might say that certainly it represents something important, but it's not necessarily divine...

[blackroseivy]

Yes, there were heroes too, & representations of devotees.

I know what you mean when you say "conflated" - I think I do, at least! Can you (or someone) explain it just so I'm sure?

[Seren_]

Conflation is where a Celtic deity is commonly identified with a Roman deity, like Sulis is a Celtic goddess known to have been worshipped in Bath (southwest England). Inscriptions commonly incorporate the goddess Minerva with Sulis giving us Sulis Minerva. Another example would be the Celtic god Camulus being conflated with Mars on an inscription giving us Mars Camulus. Sometimes the Roman god becomes the surname of a Celtic god, sometimes it's the other way round.

It's thought that the Roman deities associated with Celtic deities like this were conflated because they both had similar attributes. Usually the Roman deities are the best known ones - Mars, Minerva, Mercury etc. The Romans were quite keen on making things that were foreign to them a bit more familiar, and this was one way of doing it. It's dangerous to assume that just because a deity is associated with Mars, for example, that this means they were precisely the same, though. Mars was often associated with war, but also agriculture (if memory serves), so he could be associated with a deity for one or both of those attributes.