The true origin of the Celts
One of the most mysterious civilization of the West shows a surprisingly ancient history. Linguistic analyzes bring us back to an extremely remote era in the heart of Asia: but where did the Celts really come from?
When we think of the Celts today, numerous images come to mind. The Celts include the Gauls in the style of Asterix; William Wallace, the Scottish Braveheart from the Mel Gibson film, is Celtic; and all the Irish emigrants around the world who celebrate St. Patrick's Day by turning the cities they've "colonized" green are also Celtic.
Celtic culture is present in the beautiful music of Enya, Loreena McKennitt, and other New Age artists; it appears in fantasy novels, from "The Lord of the Rings" onwards; in a certain type of Christian mysticism, far removed from the Roman-Vatican mentality; and in all those European languages and dialects (and not only European) that have experienced millennia of cultural influence.
Indeed, it seems that half the world remains Celtic, and perhaps that is true.
If we look at history, it might seem that the Roman Empire first and the barbarian invasions later destroyed the traditional foundations of various European countries. However, this is not the case: ancient magical and shamanic traditions and conceptions that are thousands of years old have remained unchanged in many geographically isolated places.
Before the arrival of the Romans, the Celts occupied a swath of territory from the British Isles to the Iberian Peninsula, extending to Hungary in the east and Turkey in the south. This colonization was relatively peaceful; the Galatians ("milk drinkers" in Greek) were excellent warriors but also great farmers and herders, and unlike their Latin neighbors, they were not imperialists.
The area of Celtic expansion was therefore immense and not subject to threats, embedding traditions and philosophies in primitive indigenous peoples without destroying their native identities.
According to theories followed by most archaeologists, starting from a small area in northern Switzerland, at La Tène, and later from the Hallstatt valley in Germany, the Celts deeply rooted themselves in numerous European nations, with visible results in some cases even today. For example, the Lusitanians in Portugal and the Celtiberians in Spain show their traditions even in the modern world, especially in the south of the two Iberian countries: despite Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, and Castilians, Celtic folklore survives intact in some cases.
The same can be said for certain French areas, such as the regions bordering Germany—Lorraine and Alsace—or even Provence in the south of the country. Switzerland and Austria, in turn, show Celtic traces in the most remote Alpine valleys, spared from fierce Calvinism; while in Italy, similarly, this occurs both in the Alps and the Apennines.
In Italy, Celtic traces are unequivocal when it comes to dialects. Emilia is strongly Celtic, as are Piedmont, Lombardy, and parts of Tuscany and the Marche. This can be explained by the large number of Gallic tribes settled in the north: the Taurisci, Lepontii, Insubres, Senones, and Boii formed a strong federation allied with the Etruscans.
But the colonization continued even into the former Yugoslavia: Istria was (and is) deeply marked by Celtic traces, as were Pannonia and Illyria, corresponding to present-day Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Hungary. Traces of Gauls are even found in Bulgaria, while Galatia in Turkey is a region created more recently by Gallic mercenaries who fought for the Greeks and, after the war ended, decided to settle in the heart of the Anatolian peninsula, in a culturally similar area populated by the Scythians and Cimmerians.
Indeed, in this reconstruction, we have arrived at a familiar name: we encountered the Cimmerians at Cumae, near Naples, home of the famous trapezoidal cavern so important to Roman history because it housed the Cumaean Sibyl described by the poet Virgil. This type of architecture is likely of Minoan origin, although archaeologists believe the Sibyl’s cavern is probably of Greek or Roman origin. However traces of this trapezoidal shape are present in many places on Earth, all linked to mysteries: from the Pyramid of Cheops to Etruscan tombs, from Mayan architecture to Inca fortresses in Peru, from the Tombs of Giants and Nuraghi in Sardinia to the lost city of Ugarit.
We immediately wondered how it was possible that all these ancient cultures had the same type of architecture and what significance that trapezoidal shape might have.
What could connect the Campanian colony of Cumae with the Mayan, Egyptian, and Inca cultures?
This suggests that there was a single, very ancient civilization that implemented the same type of architecture in all these places around the world, an architecture evidently also linked to other artifacts widely present in both Celtic and pre-Columbian cultures: the megaliths. While the trapezoidal door can have an apparent explanation in the architectural need to support the ceilings of buildings (conceived as a prototype of the arch), dolmens and menhirs cannot be interpreted this way. Often of such size and weight, they make one think of a civilization technologically more advanced than even our own today!
Certainly, the Celts and earlier the Cimmerians can provide us with valuable historical clues to try to explain these astonishing and, in some ways, inexplicable similarities. To do so, we must start with the etymology of the name of the city of Cumae, and the people who, according to classical writers, inhabited this territory before the arrival of Greek colonists.
Cumae theoretically derives from the Greek Kyma, which means summit, peak, or top. In truth, there are no real mountains in Cumae; everyone knows that the Phlegraean Fields are extinct volcanic craters. However, Kyma was the first part of the name of the people called by the Greeks Kymamineira: Mineira means cavity, underground gallery (from which the term "mine" derives). The Kymamineira were known by ancient historians as the "Cimmerians": their oldest mention is by Homer in the Odyssey, when he tells of Ulysses, following the instructions of the sorceress Circe, reaching the sacred groves of Persephone to consult the shadow of the seer Tiresias.
The historian Strabo reports the ancient tradition, collected by Ephorus, according to which Lake Avernus, a stone's throw from Cumae, was the homeland of the Cimmerians, who lived in underground houses called Argillae, connected by tunnels. It was said that they never saw the sun and lived by mining metals from the underground and practicing divination in a Sanctuary, also underground, where visitors came to consult the so-called Oracle of the Dead.
The writer Festus claims that the Cimmerians lived between Baiae and Cumae, in a restricted area of the Phlegraean Fields, in a valley surrounded by high mountains, which was never illuminated by the sun, called "Cimmerian Darkness."
Pliny also recounts that there was once a village called Cimmerium near Avernus, and Diodorus Siculus narrates that from that village, one could reach the Oracle of the Dead.
The historian Naevius also mentions a Cimmerian Sibyl, who perhaps lived in a similar Sibyl's Cave actually existing on the shores of Lake Avernus.
From this information, we deduce that the Cimmerians indeed existed and were devoted not only to metallurgy but also to divination. However, official archaeology teaches us that the Cimmerians historically lived only in Asia Minor: they were a branch of the Scythian race and originally occupied, between the end of the 2nd millennium and the early centuries of the 1st millennium BCE, the regions north of the Black Sea, the lower Don valley, and the steppes north of the Caucasus, pushing south into Anatolia around the 6th century BCE. Engaged in a nomadic economy, they were highly skilled goldsmiths and metallurgists. We have found traces of their works in the burial mounds of kings, while no traces of their settlements have been found.
But what could unite, beyond the passion for metalworking, the Cimmerians of Cumae and those of Asia Minor? Are they the same people? And what connection could they have with the Celts?
Despite some small differences due to geographical location, one might think of a common origin for all three peoples. Let us not forget that the Gauls of Galatia in Turkey found in Asia Minor a culturally similar ground because it was populated by people of common Indo-European and Cimmerian stock!
Strabo states that the historian Posidonius believed that the Asian Cimmerians,
"...by their nature robbers and wanderers, pushed their raids up to the vicinity of the Maeotian swamp and because of them, the Bosphorus was called Cimmerian..."
But the Cimmerians are also called by Strabo another name, that is, Cimbri. Indeed, the Greek repeatedly confuses Celts and Cimbri, Cimbri and Cimmerians. Historically, the Cimbri are considered a people who invaded Europe around 113 BCE, sowing death and destruction in the territories populated by the Gauls.
The defeat of the Cimbri by the Roman troops of Gaius Marius, which occurred in 102 BCE at Aquae Sextiae (today's Aix-en-Provence, in France), did not clarify the origin of that people. According to Artemidorus of Ephesus, the Cimbri were Celts; Plutarch said that in his opinion, they were of Celto-Scythian stock, confirming the modern view of the Asiatic Cimmerians. Herodotus seems to entirely ignore the Celts, calling them all "Cimmerians," and Diodorus Siculus states that these men bore the name of Cimmerians "...who were soon after called Cimbri by corruption." Thus, the Cimbri would be a part of the Cimmerians who emigrated around the 6th century BCE to the area of the Cimbrian Chersonese, today's Danish Jutland.
Now, if we look at the current name of Wales, it is Cymru: the Welsh, today as in the past, call themselves Cymry (in ancient Welsh "patriot," "refugee," derived from the name given to the fleeing Britons expelled from Northumbria and Cumbria by the Saxons starting from the 3rd century CE). Cymry derives from the Celtic "cum" and "ro," "cumrog," which means "people of the same country."
The Cimmerians, the Cimbri, and the Kymamineira of Cumae thus have a common etymological origin; their customs are also similar, as all are skilled metallurgists; they also have a penchant for caves, galleries, and mines; they are nomadic, but when they settle, they live in partially underground hive-like cities, reminiscent of the Anasazi Indians of the United States and the fairy-tale cities of Cappadocia in Turkey, in an area adjacent to the aforementioned Galatia.
Linguistic similarities also geographically indicate their presence. We recall the already mentioned region of Northumbria, in England; we remember Cambria (from which the Cambrian Geological Era derives), the Roman name for Wales; we even recall the Italian Umbria, inhabited by people of Caucasian stock related, ethnically, to the Cimmerians and the Etruscans, as the historian Polybius states.
This common Cimmerian origin of the peoples of half of Italy and half of Europe finds linguistic confirmation, as the only certain trait that unites Celtic peoples is the language.
According to the most accredited theory, Proto-Celtic originated from the Indo-European stock, which split off between 2900 and 2400 BCE. The fact is that, from a cultural point of view, the Celts come from the same area north of the Black Sea where the Scythians, historical Cimmerians, and the Kurgan Culture, probably the ancestor of all Western peoples, lived. A culture that has its origins even further east: let's not forget that in 2800 BCE, a mysterious Indo-European language, Tocharian, was spoken in the desert regions of the Taklamakan, in the area of the Tarim River basin, in today's Xinjiang, China.
The discovery in 1978 at Loulan, on the shores of Lake Lop Nor, of many mummies with white skin and red hair, followed by the extraordinary discovery in 2005 of a mound in the Xiaohe area with over three hundred similar mummies dating back to 2500 BCE suggests that the Gobi Desert was the cradle of the Cimmerians.
According to the nineteenth-century English explorer James Churchward, the capital of the region, the monumental Khara Khoto, was the ancient Uighur main city of the mythical Mu, populated by wise white-skinned men. These same white men, from China, traveled across the Pacific Ocean in wooden boats, spreading megaliths across the Polynesian islands, such as Pohnpei and Palau.
They are the same ones who influenced the Mesoamericans, reaching the Maya and their architecture. From this reconstruction, it becomes clear that the White Gods mentioned in Chinese, Tibetan, and Indian legends as inhabitants of the sea that once covered the area of the Gobi Desert might be the same white men with red hair who were deified in South America.
The Peruvian Viracocha, the Maya Kukulkan, and the Aztec Quetzalcoatl are depicted as tall white men with red hair and beards and long hanging ears, the same ears that are prominent on the enigmatic faces of the Moai of Easter Island.
It all fits: megaliths, dolmens, and menhirs scattered across the Pacific, America, Europe, Asia, and Africa; the ancestral memory of mythical white civilizers, probably associated with the trapezoidal form in their architecture; and finally, linguistic affinities, such as the Rongo-Rongo script of Easter Island, which is identical in its ideograms to that of the people of the Indus Valley, also of probable Cimmerian-Tocharian origin, who inhabited the destroyed (by an atomic bomb?) Mohenjo-Daro.
In between are the descendants of this mysterious people, those Celts with red hair and very white skin… Certainly, one cannot say that the Irish, Welsh, or Scots are all genetically pure. Indeed, genetic studies on these populations and other Europeans have established that there is more of a common cultural imprint rather than a common genetic heritage among the former Celts of Europe.
Therefore, we should speak more of a set of traditions, folklore, a Celtic-Cimmerian-Indo-European mentality, rather than a unified people: a federation of similar but not identical peoples, often in rivalry, but united by a common shamanic-religious spirit. And perhaps this pre-modern globalization is what everyone today calls Atlantis: a people who united the entire planet in their civilizing culture. A people, however, whose origin is not in a lost continent in the Atlantic Ocean, but in Asia and perhaps the Pacific, and in the mythologized Mu, so criticized by researchers, as their original homeland…
Are these the ancestors of the Celts?
