Meaning of Name: Scholars give various translations of her name, all pretty similar. Olmsted translates it as “Horse Goddess”. Green derives it from the word for horse. Kondratiev translates it as “Great Mare”. Nantonos Aedui, of Epona.net translates it as “Divine Mare” or “She who is like a mare”. Mackillop gives us “Divine Horse” or “Horse Goddess”. 1 Pronunciation: Ep-AWN-aa Other Names and Epithets: Olmsted gives us Rîganâ, and its Latin equivalent Regina, both meaning…

The Nature of the Gods: The Gods are by far the best known part of Gaulish Polytheism. We have a vast corpus of Latin inscriptions that give us the names of numerous divinities worshiped by Gauls, and a much smaller corpus of Gaulish-language inscriptions, sometimes to the same deities. We have representations of the Gods, symbols, sometimes in clearly understandable settings, sometimes paired with Classical Greco-Roman symbols or images, which can make meanings clearer. We…

This rather lengthy poem was written in fits and starts of inspiration over the course of a couple weeks. It has been only minimally checked as to vocabulary and grammar. I use words from the Old Celtic Lexicon, which specifically says not to use it as a citable source, so from a scholarly point of view, the poem is already beyond the pale. I also don’t like the repetitiveness of some of it. “Thus and…

When I first started this column, I promised the occasional glimpse of my life in rural Florida. For the most part, I have not kept this promise, as the subject matter has proven too demanding and interesting for me to spend much time on personal subjects. A good break point has been hard to find, a good place to talk about my own life, without damaging my exposition of Gaulish Polytheism itself. But, he point…

The Two Words for Holy In most Indo-European languages, there are two words for “holy”. In Old English for example, the word “halig”, which once meant “holy, whole, health giving” was complemented by the word wíh, which meant “sacred, set apart, belonging to the realm of the Gods”. In German, the exact same pair of words was “heilig” and “weih”. In Latin, the words were “sanctus” and “sacer”, while in Greek they were “agios” and…

The ancient Gaulish worldview can only be known in general outline, and then mostly from linguistics. We have no great literature in Gaulish, as we do in Greek, Latin, Irish, and Welsh. We have only inscriptions and what can be pieced together from comparative studies. Still, given the paucity of evidence at our disposal, it is surprising how much we can know. We can get ideas of seasons and cosmic principles, of Three Worlds in…