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Since the Romantic era, there has been a substantial revival of interest in all things Celtic, including the visual arts. Many painters, calligraphers, and other artists have worked with the themes drawn from ancient or medieval Celtic art, or else inspired by Celtic literary themes.
Some of this work has remained very close to the style of La Tène or illuminated manuscript originals, but much of it has a distinctly new feel. Modern Celtic-themed art can be seen today in a wide range of logos, jewellery, crafts, postcards, and so on.
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Celtic Spiral The spiral was found on many Dolmans and gravesites. Its true meaning is not known for sure, but many of these symbols were found as far as Ireland and France.
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It is believed to represent the travel from the inner life to the outer soul or higher spirit forms; the concept of growth, expansion, and cosmic energy, depending on the culture in which it is used. To the ancient inhabitants of Ireland, the spiral was used to represent their sun.
On rock carvings in Scandinavia one often finds signs which look like a strange type of boats or sleighs with short vertical lines on them. They have hitherto been interpreted as representing people. Together with them a lot of small, round signs can be seen. Why would people, thousands of years ago, hire rock carvers to work for long hours with the carving of these, seemingly rather meaningless pictures of ships or sleighs together with small, round signs and , in hard rock, as if they were messages important enough for posterity to be made to last thousands of years? Why did neolithic men think these pictures should be conveyed over eons to posterity?
A breakthrough in the understanding of these strange ideograms seems to have been made in 1991. An archaeologist got the idea that the small, round signs on those rock carvings could be signs for stars in the sky. He fed the structures of some of the rock carvings into a computer and had the computer to compare them with representations of the constantly changing structure of the constellations of the brightests stars of the sky, century for century for some thousands of years. What he found was that the rock carvings were documentations of the configurations of the visible planets and the brightest of the fixed stars at times of total solar eclipses.
Thus the sign might mean the eclipsed sun.
The spiral above is called the spiral of life and was found in the remnants of an old temple from the Bronze Age in Ireland. The sign is drawn in one single line without beginning or end. Compare with an old Celtic sign that was also used in pre-Columbian America, and in Greece and neighboring countries in antiquity. The triple spiral denotes the Threefold Goddess. The circle, spiral and wheel are all powerful symbols representing the cycle of life, death and rebirth, including the seasons of the year.
(c) 123 Celtic Irish |
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