It can be hard, as a Celtic polytheist, to come to terms with how much we’ll just never know.

What were the theological debates amongst the druids? Did the traders between Britain and Ireland once recognize Lug and Llew as the same being in each other’s stories? Was Tuireann the Irish Taranis? What did pagan Celts believe, historically, about the soul and the afterlife? And how did those ideas change over the three thousand years of thriving, pagan, Celtic cultures across Europe? Were the fairies always considered kin to the gods, or did the native gods get demoted under a Christian paradigm to the aristocracy of the lesser spirit people, as has occurred in other places? What were the secrets of the famed magic and divinatory practices of the druids, the bards, and the vates?

Ultimately, we have more questions than answers. There is no surviving Celtic pagan cosmogenesis, no unambiguous cosmology, no distinct theory of the soul.

And so, we reconstruct what we can, and use that to inform modern faith practices. We draw from across Celtic cultures to fill in gaps, look to how related cultures did things and how cultures in similar geographic circumstances have approached things. We do our best to keep up on the best scholarly research, to find insights on how the cultures that worshiped these gods for so long understood and interacted with them. Comparative linguistics, comparative mythology, Indo-European studies, and archeological evidence are all invaluable in the face of how much direct evidence just isn’t there any more.

And, in part to fill in gaps and in part because we are reviving this cultus into a very different world, we draw on more modern invention and innovation and revelation to build up our modern faith traditions:
Paracelsian, Hindu, and Unitarian thought as filtered through Iolo Morganwg and developed by the neo-druidic orders. A few generations of Romantic interpretations of poorly translated Welsh and Irish myth. Tree lore and the Ogam divination system that has developed. The reconstructionist systems developed by Heathen groups and by the ADF. The latest translations and archaeology that we can get our hands on. And the gnosis of people engaged in devotional, mystical, and spiritual practices with the relevant gods and spirits.

It’s really not an easy sort of paganism.

Our sources are fragmentary, scattered across oceans of time, dozens of related but distinct cultures and languages, and often filtered through layers of roman conquest and christianization. No account of historical Celtic pagan religion from a historical Celtic pagan exists.

But the gods are still there, still calling to people.
The Morrígan drives the plot along for her people, whether they like it or not. Bloudeuwedd dances in the wind every spring, and calls out lonely in the night.
Ðirona calls from her healing waters, across time, to be remembered. Cernunnos stares enigmatically from stone reliefs and from beneath the shadows of the world tree in people’s visions.

And so long as people are still finding the Divine in these gods, we do the work, and we do our best.