“the pre-Christian Celtic world the women were treated as equal. That changed when the Roman Empire invaded Europe.”

So, let’s look at this map with the names of Celtic families. The Celts inhabited all of Europe.  Notice how widespread and numerous Celtic families are.  You might recognize some of the names – Parisii near Paris, Galli in Gaul, Veneti in Venice, but also in France.  Note too where Hallstatt is, because it was an important mining center, and credited with the discovery of iron smelting.

One small word about pronunciation and spelling - both were probably obscured on purpose, so it’s important to think very broadly.  “Celt,” Kelt,” salt or cell,– they’re all the same.  These words all probably originate from salt - The mining and trade of salt has been associated with the Celts for the past  3000  years. 

Celts grew organically, from the ground up.  Their networks of kinship knitted all of Europe together; their trade networks crisscrossed Europe.  

Celtic men and women worked together, from defense to gardening.  

In the days before Christianity, women worked side by side with men as Druids, leaders, defenders, sages, healers, herbalists, teachers, scholars, inventors, engineers, architects, designers. Celtic laws from pre-Christian times reflect a culture in which the law benefited men, women & family. The Celtic culture was not male-centric, as opposed to the way we are today.

By stark contrast, Romans treated women as slaves, as possessions to be owned by fathers until they became their husband’s property.  Roman women could not hold property, could not inherit or bequeath property, and, with rare exception, had no political voice.

We’ll start with the Hallstatt era, the early Iron Age that is named for the village in the Austrian mountains where iron smelting revolutionized Celtic life.  Centuries later, women were burned as witches nearby.  Celtic artifacts were excavated in Hallstatt.  There are also homages to women, hidden in plain view here in the Celtic hall that is now a church - so Hallstatt pulls together a number of our threads.  

So it was on two lakes – one in Austria, one in Switzerland – that two big advancements in Celtic culture occurred.  Hallstatt, on the Austrian lake, gives its name to the Hallstatt era in around 850 years before the advent of Christianity.  

Some 800 years later, Julius Caesar came into Celtic Europe, to what is now Burgundy in France.  He saw Celtic wealth and resources.  Then he killed everyone he could.

So, here’s what Caesar might have seen when he first came into Burgundy.

Here’s an example of Iron Age Celtic goldsmithing found in Burgundy.  Note the exquisite, rhythmical precision, and imagine the mathematics and knowledge of metallurgy required to make such a treasure.

I want to illustrate this point further with this piece of gold jewelry buried in a woman warrior’s grave near Alesia.  Originally it was identified as a male prince’s tomb.  Note the 2 tiny winged horses at either end - the detail is unbelievable. 

Here is a close-up of one of the winged horses.  Look at the thin strands of gold that are looped back and forth with stunning accuracy.

Just to demonstrate that this kind of Celtic expertise was shared widely in Europe, I want to show you a conical hat, made from gold.  Many similar to this have been found in France and Germany.  The golden shoes were found near Stuttgart.  

This was the culture that Caesar saw when he came to Gaul just before the advent of Christianity.  Caesar killed everyone he trapped in Alesia, with death tolls in the tens of thousands of men, women, and children.

 A Celtic warrior came from another part of Gaul - in today’s France, about 200 miles away - to try to reason with him as Caesar’s slaves built battlements around the town to starve everyone inside.  The warrior even offered himself if Caesar would free the women and children.  Caesar’s response?  Caesar had that warrior taken back to the coliseum in Rome and dragged to death behind a chariot as a public spectacle.

And Caesar wannabes have been following his playbook ever since.

These were the Caesars’ tactics – might makes right.  Rule by terror.  Take what you can. Kill everyone in your way. - & we’re taught that Romans civilized Europe. 

Celts didn’t go quietly – they prized their freedom.  They fought for it, men and women.  How do we know that?   They honored defenders on gold coins & buried it with them in the tombs. Note the woman defender on this gold coin. 

Caesar wanted it both ways.  He wanted to destroy people so they couldn’t rise up against him, but he also wanted riches he couldn’t produce.  So, he needed slaves who had the knowledge and expertise.

He saw the Celtic gold coins. He wanted Roman gold coins.  But notice the difference in the subject matter he chose. The Roman soldier is standing on the head of a captured Celt. 

This brings us to the current era. It took a few hundred years, but the Celts organized and eventually defeated Rome in the 5th century. 

Celts coordinated with other families to regain Celtic family capitals in the Rhineland and to drive the Romans out of their lands.  2 battles were led by women to avenge the death of their husbands at the hands of Romans.  Here you see one of the couples from the Rhineland, Kremhild avenged the death of her husband Siegfried by mounting a military charge against the Romans.  Wagner made an opera based on these events, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy is based on the story of the Nibelungenlied, the heroic epic that recounts the tale. 

Fest halls flourished at the edge of the market squares. Markets buzzed with the same products as the Iron Age – fish, salt, wine, textiles, silks, amber, glass, copper pots, and basket.

Medieval hot spring towns with gardens and pavilions drew winter crowds

Secular abbeys offered education, work, and housing to men and women

By the 11th century the Roman Christians began their Crusades in Celtic Europe using the same Roman divide-and-conquer tactics.  Armed monks rampaged Europe.  These Crusades attacked the south of France, which was then called Gaul and inhabited by Celts.  The Crusades also attacked the Baltic region, leaving a broad swath of the area depopulated.  They made brutal, concentrated assaults, but they also infiltrated every berg and hamlet.  They installed priests in the places the Celts have loved to gather most and converted them into churches. The fest halls.

Refuge castles were overtaken to house newly-minted nobility.

Roman Christian missionaries imposed new languages and even a new script – Cyrillic.  Borders, nationalities, religions – all were used to slash apart Celtic connectedness and to keep the Celtic populace weak, poor, and sick. 

Piety has masked hideous atrocities such as these for two thousand years.

The Christians used Roman law and courts to carry out their campaigns of terror.  Secularism was criminalized for 1400 years by heresy laws.  The church-state allowed no thought, no expression, no art, no speech, no writings that were not created by the church.

Celtic freedom dissolved into feudal fiefdoms. Not only were Celts left landless, but they also became the property of others to be bought and sold.  

By overtaking the abbeys, the Roman Christian church-state controlled education and taught fiction as truth.  They excised the Celts from history. 

Secular abbeys had sprung up like mushrooms all over Europe after the 5th century fall of Rome and numbered in the thousands by the 12th century.  They had served as an open network for learning, apprenticeship and collaboration across the Celtic world.  With the Christian conquest, these thriving complexes either were turned into all-male religious enclaves or fell into ruin after the Celts were driven away. 

How did women go from being founders and directors of abbeys to being excluded from them?  Christians besieged the abbeys and installed their own people or they destroyed them.

The Christian conquest did not happen everywhere at once.  The time of Christian takeover of an area can be marked by when the abbey turned male-only. 

The defacement of statuary of females also has been found to correlate to the Christian takeover.

Feudal fiefdoms took over the markets, castles, abbeys, hot springs resorts and put them under the exclusive control of the nobility.  People were forced to swear fealty to masters, both seen and unseen, as a show of servitude.  Droits de seigneur meant that noble men could do what they wanted to all females.  

The church-state hunted and killed all those that it tagged as heretics and witches, with women explicitly targeted.  Roman Christians singled out the women as a major foe and pursued a vendetta against them.  They called them the gates of hell.  They blamed women for being thrown out of the gardens of paradise, an ancient version of “blame the victim.” – and her sin was eating an apple from the tree of knowledge.  Think about that.  The tree of knowledge.

At this point in the story, we need to stop and laud our Celtic men.  When women everywhere in Europe had a price on their heads and were tracked by Christian bounty hunters, the men hid them away in refuge castles and safe houses.    The tables had shifted.  Instead of the early women avenging their husbands before Rome fell, the medieval men defended and had to hide their women when the Roman Christian Crusaders returned. 

If they did escape, where did people go?   They went where they could – to refuges that had not been conquered – to places that would take them in.  To safe houses.  As refugees.  You see where this is going.  It doesn’t have to be this way.

We’re a country of immigrants, of refugees.  How do our individual stories relate back to these conquests?

To put this into context, Europe suffered under Draconian heresy laws for most of the current era.  During that time, heresy laws gave the church the authority to accuse people as heretics and have them burned at the stake.  The powers of the church and state worked hand in hand to kill untold thousands. Like a tornado, they leave a wake of devastation where they’ve been.

The curtain was pulled up just enough to expose some of those dark days of imperial oppression just before World War I. And who conducted excavations in Hallstatt, Austria to uncover a lost world of the Celts?  A woman.  The Duchess of Mecklenburg.  Mecklenburg is now in northeastern Germany, but the Duchess made the digs in Austria and Slovenia with the help of a French archaeologist.  Everything about her reads Celtic to me.  Harvard Press wrote a book about her archeological finds and Harvard’s Peabody Museum contains part of her collection.

To recap, let me just say that I’ve come to these conclusions gradually as I researched and wrote 8 books.  There’s a reason that a woman holds the scales of justice and the torch of freedom.  She fights for her family’s freedom right alongside the men.  But there’s also a reason that women have been vilified.

We see religious suppression rampant in our own country.  Our own American lands were taken by force from those who were already here.  Male supremacy has been forced on native peoples all over the world - and it’s been done under the flag of religion in most cases.  Many of us are the children and grandchildren of people who have been forced to flee their European homelands to seek refuge in this country.  We are the very people we’re talking about – We’re Celts.

That’s why religion must be kept separate from governance.   Religion is not based on fact; it is not for the common good; it does not benefit the entirety.  It is anti-science and against reason.  It serves as a cover for atrocity and enslavement.