Pagan Phoenix - Miranda Aldhouse-Green

I'd been looking forward to the last talk of the afternoon. Miranda Aldhouse-Green is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University, and under the name Miranda Green she's written books about Celtic Gods and Goddesses. I've got the one on Celtic Goddesses, and it's very good.
The title of the talk was Silent Gods? Spirits and the Sacred in Roman Britain.
She began with what Roman people thought of Britain - and even in the 3rdC AD, when Roman Britain had roads and cities and villas and every aspect of civilised life, Roman writers were claiming that the island was a swampy forest full of half naked savages!

There have been some interesting finds recently, though, which give us more of an insight into Celtic religion of the time. She mentioned the Le Cottilon hoard in Jersey, for instance, a solid lump of coins, gold torcs and silver jewellery - which was probably not just buried as a sort of bank, for safe keeping, but had a religious meaning. One of the pieces in the collection was an antique even to the people who buried the treasure - a Bronze Age spear head.
She also mentioned a bronze figure which had been found at Culver Hole in Gower, which may have been a moon goddess.

Something really exciting turned up at Chartres in 2005, though - an underground Roman shrine which included four incense burners, one for each of the four directions. Here there's no doubt about the Celtic nature of the worship, because the incense burners are marked with the word "Dru", meaning druid.
There's a theory that the owner of the shrine was consciously re-creating a pre-Roman belief system which was no longer being used. Also, the druid priests of the past may have been converted, in this re-creation, from human priests into spirits which could be worshipped.

Then we got something to be passed round the audience - replicas of "spoons" which often turn up in a religious context. They have no handle as such, apart from a bit at the top of the spoon bowl to hold it, and they always come in pairs, one of which has a raised cross on the bowl and the other has a small hole, off centre. The idea is that these are tools for divination, by which some sort of powder is blown down a straw through the hole, making patterns on the other spoon with the cross, as they are held together.

The head has always been important in Celtic myth, so it was interesting to discover that when Boudica attacked the Temple of Claudius in Colchester, they cut off the head of the statue of Claudius which stood outside and threw it in the river!
At Uley, in Gloucestershire, there was a Temple to Mercury - and the head of the statue of Mercury was buried when the shrine became Christianised. The statues of Mercury in Britain tend to have horns on their heads rather than the more classical wings. Uley is also one of the places where curse tablets can be found - curses inscribed into lead, mostly invoking horrible fates on people who have stolen the curser's property.

Meanwhile at Lydney Temple there seems to have been a special association with dogs - several figurines have been found there. Lydney was the Temple of Nodens, a god of healing, and overlooked the River Severn where there was a good view of the Severn bore.

Roman towns were laid out in the same way across the Empire, and one of the reasons for this was to allow "perambulations" between the most important buildings, something that an important Roman would do regularly to see and be seen.

Then we were off to Hadrian's Wall, where Roman and Celtic gods were being worshipped together. For instance there's an altar to Jupiter (Best and Greatest) at Maryport fort on the Wall, which was the official altar of the legion, but on the back is a carving of a wheel, symbol of a Celtic god who was obviously important to the troops stationed there.
Also at Hadrian's Wall was a temple to a god unknown anywhere else, Antenociticus, who is presumed to be a local deity, but was important enough to the builder of the temple to have a life sized statue.

Even further north, at the Antonine Wall, there was a Temple of Mithras I hadn't heard about before. It also had a mask of Sol with cut out mouth (so the priest could speak through it) and cut out rays around the head, so a light source behind the mask would make it look much more impressive.

Going back to Boudica - there's a tombstone in Corinium/Cirencester to a woman called Bodicacia.

And finally (the talk had over run a little because of problems with the slides earlier) at Bewcastle Roman Fort, again on Hadrian's Wall, there are five altars dedicated to the Germanic god Cocidius, and one dedicated to an amalgam god, Mars Cocidius. The Romans saw nothing wrong or strange about mixing their gods together and creating something new.