Names of Zeus: Beli

Beli Mawr (“Great Bel”) appears in many Welsh texts as an ancestor figure of all rulers of Britain. His name also appears in medieval Welsh poetry, sometimes linked to light, kingship, and the heavens, reinforcing an identity of a God of light and the skies. In Gaul, Zeus was also known as Taranis, a God of thunder and the wheel whose integration into Roman religion is more understood.

THE CELTIC ISSUE

British and Welsh mythology was incredibly Christianized from an early date. To add to this obscuring state of affairs, even the infamous Druids of history communicated through complex oral codes rather than writing much down, similarly to the ornate verbal symbolism of the Pythagoreans. It was even forbidden to write down or to elaborate what the divine verses meant:

They are said there to learn by heart a great number of verses; accordingly, some remain in the course of training twenty years. Nor do they regard it lawful to commit these to writing, though in almost all other matters, in their public and private transactions, they use Greek characters. That practice they seem to me to have adopted for two reasons; because they neither desire their doctrines to be divulged among the mass of the people, nor those who learn, to devote themselves the less to the efforts of memory, relying on writing; since it generally occurs to most men, that, in their dependence on writing, they relax their diligence in learning thoroughly, and their employment of the memory.

Julius Caesar also mentions that Dies Pater is the ancestor of all of the Celtic peoples and was actively regarded as such. The primary word for ‘God’ in Welsh is Duw (Old Welsh: Diow), related to Dio of Zeus, Día in Irish, Deus in Latin and possibly Dumn in Romanian.

The genealogies begin with the paternal and maternal pedigrees of King Hywel Dda and extend back to Beli Mawr, highlighting his significance in the royal lineage of Gwynedd, the most powerful Welsh state, in particular. Beli was known to be either the father or husband of Don, known as Danu in Irish.  In the Old North (Scotland to Cumbria), heroes such as Urien Rheged, Gwenddolau and Llywarch Hen traced their lineage to Beli through the ancestor Coel Hen. Geoffrey of Monmonth’s history of the British monarchs claims he ruled the throne for forty years, the most holy number of Zeus.

BELENOS AND THE SERPENT

This ancestor figure is an evolution of the God Belenos, a God associated with thunder, serpents and fate. Another scholar, Posedonius, says the Celts of Galatia would organize all military matters in the Sacred Oak Grove, the Drunemeton.

Various references to the serpent occur with this figure in the poem Kein gyfedwch:

Beli is said to watch with a serpent’s qualities over ‘the places of the drinking vessels’ as his people ‘drink in golden horns, golden horns in the hand, a hand in foam.’ He is said to rule over a blessed island bestowed with golden horns, a symbolic reference to the life force and activated witchpower.

He resides in ‘a strong fortress’ within the island and rules over two lakes, a reference to the dual functions of Zeus in being the active expression of Truth. He is also claimed to the ‘Guardian of the Paths’.

Another poem references his qualities:

Another cryptic message occurs in the forty second verse of the medieval Englynion y Clyweid (‘Stanzas of the Wise Sayings’), a collection of 72 ancient sayings of ancestral figures put into verse:

The symbolism of Beli to Odin and other figures that underwent transformation of the soul through death should be obvious with this message.

It is said in the inherent text the Mabinogion and in other works that Beli was totally driven out by Maxientius who is hinted to have imposed Christianity strongly on Britain, paralleling the casting out of the serpent by St. Patrick in Ireland. The process of Christianization in post-Roman Britain was extremely thorough, and it extended down into the most remote parts of society.

Many Welsh elaborations of poetry share highly cryptic symbolism; they are clearly designed around a repetition of codes and themes reflecting the need for secrecy, which ties into the known fact that Celtic religion was transmitted orally and not revealed easily. In one dialogue, the sister of Merlin, Gwenddydd, asks him who could replace the best of rulers:

Another facet is the connection to the great hero Alexander the Great. The Celts were strongly aware of his image. Several poems by Talesin and others are dedicated to his memory, including one that references his alignment with the lord of the sky. The southern tribes of Britain and Gauls used the coinage of him clad in ram’s horns on almost all of their extant coins.

There was also a solar aspect to Belenos named Apollo Belenus who was worshipped prolifically in Roman Gaul and the parts of Italy previously inhabited by the Celts. This entity represented the powers of the entity we know to be Amon Ra, rather than Zeus.

Many visual similarities between the Phoenician representations of Baal and the Celtic variations clad with axes and hammers appear to exist. In many of the sources, including Welsh poetry, references to Tyre and Carthage are prominent. It is also known that the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus spread far and wide into Britain by Roman times.

BELTANE

Beltane is one of the four major fire festivals of the ancient Celtic calendar, celebrated primarily in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Marking the transition between spring and summer, Beltane was historically associated with fertility, protection, and the renewal of life. Although Beltane is referenced in the Irish manuals relating to this, the Welsh called this festival Cyntefin, meaning ‘beginning of the summer’.

The solstice was an essential festival in pre-Christian Britain. It signified the agricultural cycle, the movement of livestock, and communal rituals aimed at securing prosperity. It also signified the end of spring, which Zeus inaugurates.

According to the 17th-century Irish historian Geoffrey Keating, at the hill of Uisneach each Beltane in medieval Ireland there were celebrations, where a sacrifice of food was made to a God named Beil. Subsequent excavations of the site have proven his assertions. For many years, this assertion was equated with the Baal from the Bible, showing a certain subconscious understanding.

From ancient times, it was known that the Druids lit bonfires and sacrificial flames in groups of nine men, a tradition that continued well into the 1830s in some parts of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. The first maypole recorded from the 1300s by Gruffudd ab Adda ap Dafydd is known description of this type of celebration, which by the time of Geoffrey Chaucer late in the century seems to have either been already present or spread to areas of England.

TARANIS

Taranis (from Gaulish taran “thunder”) was worshipped in Gaul, Hispania, and the Rhineland as a god of thunder and storms. Roman writers (like the poet Lucan in the 1st century AD) list Taranis alongside Teutates and Esus as the chief deities of the Gauls. Taranis was explicitly identified with Jupiter by the Romans. In the interpretatio Romana, they saw the Celtic thunder-god as essentially the local Jupiter.

Indeed, many Celtic sanctuaries to Jupiter (Jupiter Optimus Maximus) in Roman Gaul show assimilation of Taranis’s symbols: notably the wheel and thunderbolt. Carvings and altars depict a God holding a wheel in one hand and a lightning bolt in the other, merging Celtic and Roman iconography​. The wheel, a common Celtic solar symbol (perhaps representing the sun’s course or the wheel of heaven), was associated with Taranis as a sign of the sky and cyclic time.

Jupiter columns erected in Romanized Gaul often depict Jupiter on horseback holding a thunderbolt and tramping a serpent or giant, with a celestial wheel displayed. This is a syncretic image: Jupiter in heroic pose combined with Taranis’s wheel.