Minoan	Celtic
Comparing Decorative Motifs Digital Drawing © Sage Starwalker. All rights reserved. After the illustration in Donald A. MacKenzie, Crete & Pre-Hellenic Myths and Legends

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Matricentric Celts?

• It seems to me that the Celts are about half-matricentric (or perhaps less-than-half). In other words, they are descended from two cultural traditions: the matricentric/matrilinear/matriarchal culture of Old Europe and the Indo-European patriarchal culture.
  • "It is readily apparent that a portion of central Europe was Kurganized to varying degrees soon after the first Kurgan wave. While the civilization of Old Europe was agricultural, matricentric, and matrilineal, a transformation took place around 4000 B.C. to a mixed agricultural-pastoral economy and a classed patriarchal society which I interpret as a successful process or Indo-Europeanization. There was a considerable increase in husbandry over tillage. The change of social structure, religion, and economy was not a gradual indigenous development from Old Europe, but a collision and gradual hybridization of two societies and of two ideologies." (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. 365)
  • "A study of the physical types of the population shows that the Kurgan warrior groups were not massive in numbers and did not eradicate the local inhabitants. They came in small migrating bands and established themselves forcefully as a small ruling elite." (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. 389)

Gender

• "women as (the Goddess's) representatives had been accorded a paramount position in society as well as in cult" (Campbell)
  • compare:
    • In both Minoan and Celtic cultures, women have leadership positions in society as well as in religion
  • contrast:
    • In the pre-patriarchal Minoans, women apparently predominated in social and religious leadership
    • In the Celts, the roles of women were sometimes greater and sometimes lesser.
• Description of Strabo, a 1st century B.C. Greek, discussing that the Crete inhabitants had a woman's brother bring up her children. (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. 346)

Religion

• "The Old European and Indo-European belief systems are diametrically opposed. The Indo-European society was warlike, exogamic, patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal, with a strong clanic organization and social hierarchy which gave prominence to the warrior class. Their main gods were male and depicted as warriors. There is no possibility that this pattern of social organization could have developed out of the Old European matrilineal, matricentric, and endogamic balanced society. Therefore, the appearance e of the Indo-Europeans in Europe represent a collision of two ideologies, not an evolution.
  The building of temples, a long-lasting tradition of Old Europe, stopped with the Kurgan incursions into Europe, except in the Aegean and Mediterranean regions. The masterfully produced religious paraphernalia--beautiful vases, sacrificial containers, models of temples, altars, sculptures, and sacred script--disappeared as well. Not a single temple directly associated with the Kurgan people is known, either in the north Pontic or Volga steppe nor in the Kurgan influenced zone of Europe during and after the migrations. The absence of any temples or even structured altars is consistent with the life of pastoralists." (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. 396)
• Nymphs / Nature Spirits
  • Danu - Danae - Danaiades
  • Naides are a subcategory of nymphs, as are dryades.
  • Dryades = female druids.

Language

• Description of language structure of lineal or kinship organization (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. 394)
• general --
  • Celtic -- IndoEuropean
    • "All linguistic evidence suggests that Proto-Indo-European society was patrilineal in descent and male dominated according to the much-overworked term patriarchal. We lack a common term for husband or wife although we can recover a Proto-Indo-European *widhewa 'widow'. We cannot reconstruct a common word for marriage for Proto-Indo-European; but as we have seen, many Indo-European languages do employ the same Proto-Indo-European verb *wedh- 'to lead (home)' when expressing the act of becoming married, from the groom's point of view. This suggests that the residence rules of the Proto-Indo-Europeans involved the woman going to live in the house of her husband or with his family." (Mallory JP (1989) In Search of the Indo Europeans. Thames and Hudson Ltd. London. p. 123-4)
  • Minoan -- independent Mediterranean type
• art
  • content
    • Minoan -- daily life and the environments in which daily life occurred (the "natural" world; plants and animals)
    • Celtic -- animal motif
    • both -- figures with raised arms (also cernunnos)
    • Minoan -- representational
    • Celtic -- abstract
    • "In western Europe, depictions of the Snake Goddess continued up to the Celtic La Tene culture in France, 4th to 3rd centuries B. C." (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. 236)
    • Description of metallugical and ceramic character of combined Indo-European and Matristic cultures. (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. 371)
    • "In contrast with the realism and natural beauty preferred by Greek and Roman artists, the imaginative art of the Celts delighted in symbols and intricate patterns." (source: Northern Ireland Timeline)
  • "Celtic style developed indigenously out of the early Urnfield beginnings, through the Hallstatt and into the early La Tène period. The developments may be compared with the Greek change from Orientalizing to Archaic to Classical; radical stylistic change takes place within a relatively stable cultural group. Postulations of invasions, racial or population shifts, or large-scale immigrations are no longer necessary to explain cultural change in either area. During the long era from the sixth to the fourth centuries B.C.E., contact with Mediterranean art took place in the form of importation of objects; the stylistic development, however, is unaffected by southern "influence."
    Constant contact with eastern and northern neighbors with similar societal structures brought about an "Orientalizing" of Celtic art, with the introduction of elements of the Scythian/Thraco-Cimmerian Animal Style. There is no evidence whatsoever that the Orientalizing elements were transmitted through the filter of Greece or Etruria. Etruscan and North Italian (Este and Golasecca) art found its way easily to the Alps and northward; there is again some cultural similarity between the peoples of west-central Europe and the northern Italians, and a range of identical vessels and utensils were made on both sides of the Alps. It is important to emphasize that in all of the cases mentioned in which a foreign motif or stylistic element was introduced into the Celtic repertoire, it was immediately and unmistakably appropriated into the Celtic artistic language. Thus, zoomorphic creatures, floral elements, geometric patterns, disembodied heads, or vessel forms, for example, do not undergo any lengthy transition from copy to adaptation to transformation. When such an element appears in Celtic art, it appears in Celtic style.
    More interesting, perhaps, than the short list of imported motifs is the enormous range of Mediterranean interests that clearly held no attraction for the Celts and were consistently rejected in favor of local priorities. The historian may ask why the Celts refused to write down their stories, or why they did not build monumental stone architecture. The art-historian notes the rejection of figural, narrative art, of illusionism, and of the logic of Greek floral and geometric ornament in favor of abstraction, stylization, dismemberment and curvilinear ornament that denies distinctions between foreground and background. Celtic metalwork is highly sculptural, while retaining linear articulation, rejecting the classical Greek striving for integration of sculptural form and surface. Celtic pottery is never decorated with figural scenes; instead, its ornaments are polychrome and textural. In short, Celtic producers and consumers alike neither perceived an inferiority or lack in their own fully developed stylistic and craft traditions, nor did they look to the Mediterranean as the "center" from which artistic influences were to be adopted.
    The art-historical ramifications of this reinterpretation of the origins of Celtic art have only been adumbrated here. Stylistic analyses that seek classical prototypes for Celtic design elements are beside the point of what the Celtic artists do with that material -- what is Celtic about Celtic art. When it is not seen as peripheral to, and derivative of, the Greek artistic tradition, the Celtic aesthetic reveals itself as sharply distinct from, and essentially incompatible with, that of Greece and Hellenized Italy.
    Mainstream art history currently tends to regard Iron Age Europe as tangential to contemporary cultures in the Mediterranean, at best as a forerunner to the artistic developments of later Western Europe. Popular surveys give the art of this period short shrift, concentrating instead on the naturalistic, representational arts of classical Greece and Rome. It is my contention that any history of Western art that disregards the Celtic alternative ignores one of the vital issues in twentieth century thought about art. At the beginning of Western art, the conflict between non-illusionistic abstraction and naturalistic representation was already well established. A narrow, Hellenocentric view of the history of Western art ignores the tensions underlying the two rival developments, and thus does justice neither to Greece, in placing it in splendid and artificial isolation, nor to Europe, in silencing its alternative voice. Study of Western art must take the early Celtic style into account, not as a peripheral development on the fringes of the classical Mediterranean world, but as a powerful and influential way of looking at and imaging the world." (Source: Celtic Europe and the Mediterranean)
  • "For example [function of animal motifs]: 'At Hallstatt, ducks appear swimming up the supports of a bronze container, which also is further embossed with ducks and wheels on its side." (ibid., p. 26) Apparently, scholars believe that ornamentation of this kind was meant for cultic purposes. In Minoan art, curvilinear and abstract animal motifs (mainly bulls and bull horns) decorate vessels used for all types of cults and practices, especially in the pouring of libations. Throughout the Hallstatt culture, the animal in question was mainly waterfowl. Many pieces include various species of birds and swans." (Source: Karen and Jean's Celtic Art Page)

Traditions

• linear measurement systems:
  "So great are the similarities between (the) linear measuring system (of the megalithic builders of western Europe) and that of Minoan Crete, that there has to be a strong connection, across what is, after all, a significant distance. I have shown and proved this connection and so we may gain a better understanding of our own megalithic ancestors by learning more about the Minoans themselves." source
• Celto-Iberian and Minoan bull rituals source
• Differences in Goddess Culture and Indo European burial practices. (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. 281)

Culture

Economics

• coins
• trade
• agriculture
• Celts
  • originally tribal ("their loyalties would lie with family and tribe" source)
    • The clan (something like an extended family) is the basic unit of Celtic tribe.
    • Each "tribe" is comprised of several (hundred) clans.
    • Clan-tribe affiliations and relationships fluctuate.
    • In these clans, is the descent matrilineal or patrilineal? Is there any credible evidence of either?
    • Before contact with Roman, the clans were ruled by a chieftain/king or a chieftainess/queen); i.e., they were small monarchies.
  • with patriarchalization and later, contact with Roman culture, especially the Celtae and the Roman colony of Massala (Marseilles), leaders are elected rather than determined by birth and inheritance
• Minoan
  • originally communal with goddesses and priestesses
  • later allegedly monarchal, with King Minos et al. and the Mycenaeans (descendants of the "marriage" of patriarch Indo-European culture and matriarchal Artemisian culture?)