Sacred Groves

Historically, many cultures cultivated sacred groves, including the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as the Celts. We recently were able to eat lunch in an oak grove above St. Cybi’s well. This 360 degree video will let you look around the grove while I talk. We are sitting in a grove of oak trees, but throughout history sacred trees could be of many kinds, depending on the locality. The Greeks had a sacred cyprus grove at the Temple of Zeus at Nemea and an olive grove at the temple of Athena on Rhodes. There was a sacred fir grove near Croton in southern Italy, and a laurel grove on the road to Ostia. In Roman law, cutting down trees in a sacred grove was punishable by death. For the Celts, living in more northern climates the sacred groves were Read more…

Roman Religion in Britain

Question: There’s been a lot written about Roman religion. What’s different about it in Britain? While you’re right that the Roman religion is something we know a lot about, it didn’t just get transplanted to Britain whole cloth and didn’t look in Britain the same as what it looked like in Rome. The reason for this is that the Romans who conquered Britain were almost exclusively male, they were members of the Roman army, and many were not actually Roman by birth. This shaped which gods and goddesses they focused on in their worship. Secondly, as I mentioned in an earlier video, the Celtic religion syncretized to some degree with the Roman, in part because the Romans worked so hard to eliminate the druids and native religious beliefs. By the end of the first century AD, as far as the Read more…