|
It seems that the native mythology of Cantabria connected, from the beginning and with the passing of the years, with Celtic and Roman mythology becoming partly related with legends and traditions from the rest of the Cantabrian Mountains. In most cases its deeper meaning, passed from parents to children through oral tradition, has been diluted, either because this meaning has been lost or because the classic writers didn't gather all the popular wealth and mentality of the time, paying attention only to cults and divinities that were similar to theirs. On the other hand, the Romanization and later ascendancy of Christendom transformed the sense and representation of these pagan rites, reaching in many cases religious syncretism. Even so, Cantabrian people still conserve more apologues and legends with a great ritual or behavioral component than significant tales. == Divinities == Among the remains of myths that still persist as substrate in the Cantabrian tradition is the cult to great protective divinities, like the adoration to the Sun, as is evident in Cantabrian Steles, and in relation to the cult of the fire.〔bonfires of Saint John, coincident with solstice of summer, could be a reminiscence〕 Also, the Cantabrians worshiped a supreme divinity-father which in Roman time was associated with Jupiter and the cult to the Sun, and later with the Christian God.〔a beautiful bronze sculpture was discovered at Herrera de Camargo〕 Combined with the marked warlike disposition of the Cantabrians, appears a god of war, subsequently identified as the Roman Mars, to whom they offered sacrifices of male goats, horses, or large numbers of prisoners, as Strabo, Horace and Silius Italicus point out.〔Estr. III,3,7〕〔Carm. III,4,34〕〔Silius III, 361〕 These hecatombs were accompanied by the drinking of the still warm blood of the horses,〔Tacitus considers them by the Germans as ministers of the gods: 〕 as Horace mentions in regard to the ''concanos'', and it will be, then, a true communion. For the ancient Cantabrians these practices had a mystic origin thanks to the belief that these animals were sacred.〔Julio Caro Baroja suggests the possibility of the existence of an equestrian deity among Hispanian Celts similar to that of the other European Celts.〕 Some link this ritual very closely with the variant of the Celtic solar god Mars and that these animals they represented his reincarnation.〔E. Thevenot. ''Sur les traces des Mars Celtiques'', Bruges, 1995.〕〔At Numantia, these representations of the horse-god are decorated with solar signs.〕 The Human sacrifices among the northern peoples are also mentioned by Saint Martin of Braga〔''De correctione rusticorum VIII''〕 and they will have the same value of redemption and prediction that for the rest of the Celts of Gaul, where they were very frequent. Then Strabo will tell that those who examined the prisoners' viscus, covering them with thin tunics, cut the right hand and consecrated it to the gods. The way to predict the future depended on the fall of the victim.〔 〕 Together with this war deity, appear the germinator mother-goddesses related to the Moon, remaining almost until the present time, when they have a clear influence in rural environments, evident in the phases of sowing and gathering of the crops. In the same way, the cult to a god of the sea was assimilated in Roman times through Neptune (a statuette of this deity, but with features of the original Cantabrian divinity, was found in Castro Urdiales). The ancient Cantabrians believed in the immortality of the spirit. Thus they demonstrated in their funeral rites where cremation predominated, with the exception of those who died in combat, who had to rest in the battlefield until vultures opened their entrails to take their soul to Heaven and reunite in glory with their ancestors. This practice is testified in the engravings of the Cantabrian stele of Zurita. Sacrifice played a major role in the complex Cantabrian society in both its aspects: as a means to fulfill the divine will as well as the prevalence of abnegation to collectivity against the individual. Then, in a warring society, as the Cantabrian, immolation was not considered as primitive or barbarian but the strong determination required from the person to commit sacrifice gave it a great importance. That was the case of the ''devotio'', a singular and extreme sacrifice practices by the Cantabrians in which the warring communities joined their destiny to that of their leader. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cantabrian mythology」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|