A symbolic language with no dictionary
Almost every popular book on Celtic design says that spirals stand for the sun, triskeles for the three realms, and so on. None of these meanings comes from a Celtic source. The peoples who made La Tène art left no written explanation, and the Greek and Roman writers who described them said little about their decoration. What follows is therefore a guide to how Celtic symbolic motifs are studied: first the images themselves, then the contexts in which they appear, then the later texts that may or may not apply.
The art historian Paul Jacobsthal, whose 1944 survey of early Celtic art still shapes the field, stressed that these designs are often ambiguous on purpose. A curve can be a leaf, a bird’s head or a face, depending on how it is viewed. That playfulness may be the real point, and a single fixed meaning for each motif may never have existed.
Spirals, curves and palmettes
The characteristic S-curve and spiral of La Tène art grew out of Mediterranean plant ornament, the palmettes and tendrils seen on Greek sculpture and pottery, which Celtic craftworkers abstracted and reworked. This origin suggests that, at the start, these were decorative rather than symbolic in any strict sense. Whether they gained extra meaning later is unknown.
Spirals are not unique to the Celts, which is worth keeping in mind. The carved spirals at the Neolithic passage tomb of Newgrange in Ireland are thousands of years older than any Celtic art, and they are often wrongly called Celtic. Other cultures from the Aegean to China also used spirals. Suggestions that Celtic spirals represent the sun, water, growth or the cycle of life are plausible readings, but they are modern ones.
The triskele
A triskele is a three-armed or three-lobed swirl. It appears on Celtic metalwork, coins and Insular manuscripts, but it also occurs in other ancient cultures, including on coins of ancient Sicily. In medieval Irish and Welsh literature, groupings of three are common; the Welsh Triads are one example. Some writers link the triskele with this habit, but the connection across a gap of many centuries is a conjecture. The triskele is best described as a popular Celtic pattern whose meaning is unrecorded.
Animals
Animals are among the most readable images, and they recur on weapons, horse gear, coins and cauldrons.
- Boars appear on helmets, shields and as bronze figurines, and ancient writers mention boar crests and boar-shaped war trumpets, the carnyx. A link with strength and war seems reasonable.
- Horses are very common on coins, which were often adapted from Greek types showing a chariot or a horse. They suggest status and mobility.
- Bulls, stags and birds also appear. A stag-antlered figure on the Gundestrup cauldron is often compared with the later Gallo-Roman god Cernunnos, who is shown with antlers on a first-century CE monument in Paris, though how far the two images represent the same idea is debated.
- Water birds and ravens appear in Hallstatt and La Tène art, and the Celtic world’s bird imagery is compared with that of the Scythian animal style on the steppe, although the two traditions arose independently.
Animals may have been emblems of clans, of gods, or of qualities admired in warriors. In each case the context matters more than the image: a boar on a helmet is evidence of a different kind from a boar on a hoard of offerings.
Heads
Human heads are everywhere in Celtic art, and they are the motif where outside sources say the most. Greek writers such as Diodorus and Strabo, drawing on earlier accounts, reported that Celtic warriors took the heads of enemies, hung them from their horses or doorposts and sometimes preserved them in oil. Archaeology offers some parallel: niches holding skulls were found at the southern French sanctuaries of Roquepertuse and Entremont, which date to the last centuries BCE. Carved stone heads occur at sites as widespread as Bohemia, where a head from Mšecké Žehrovice shows a man wearing a torc, and Ireland, where a three-faced head was found at Corleck.
Many scholars therefore suggest that the head was seen as the seat of the soul or of power. That is an inference built partly on the Greek reports, which come from outsiders, and partly on later Irish and Welsh stories where heads have special powers. It is reasonable, but it remains an interpretation.
Wheels and other signs
Small wheel-shaped pendants and models are found in Gaul and Britain, and a wheel appears on the Gundestrup cauldron. Roman-period images of a sky god holding a wheel are often connected with Taranis, whose name is usually taken to mean “thunderer”. The wheel has accordingly been read as a sky or sun symbol, but the link is uncertain.
How to weigh the evidence
Four kinds of evidence can be sorted by reliability:
- Find context: where and how an object was deposited, which is physical evidence and can be checked.
- Ancient outsiders: Greek and Roman writers, who had their own agendas and often wrote from second-hand reports.
- Later insiders: medieval Irish and Welsh texts, written by Christian scribes centuries later.
- Modern interpretation: comparisons with other cultures, psychology and spirituality, which can be thoughtful but cannot be tested.
Beyond the Celtic world, comparisons exist too. The Pictish symbol stones of Scotland carry a set of repeated signs that no one can read with confidence, and they show how a symbolic system can survive while its explanation is lost entirely. The same may be true of Celtic art. The sensible conclusion is that these motifs were meaningful to their makers, in ways we can partly guess, but a confident one-to-one dictionary of Celtic symbols is out of reach.