Vate

The vate , in the Celtic Société protohistoric is a member of the sacerdotal class, as well as the druids and the bards. Their name (of Latin vatis , of the Greek ouateis ) is a word of origin Gaulois E which appoints a soothsayer, a prophet, an oracle. It corresponds to the Welsh gwawd , and to the Irish fàith . The root * uat - also gave Germanic Wotan (Odin at the Scandinavians). The word is found at Strabon (IV, 4,4), Pline ( Natural history XXX, 13), Lucain ( Pharsale I, 448), Ammien Marcellin (XV, 9) and, before him, Timagène.

The Celtic company

The sources Greek and Roman, supplemented and enriched by the accounts mythological Irish by the the Middle Ages, revealed us the structure of the Celtic Société. In accordance with the diagram of the tripartite ideology of the Indo-Europeans, such as it was developed by Georges Dumézil, this one is composed of three classes to the well defined functions:

  • the sacerdotal class which has the Knowledge and makes the Law; it manages crowned and the monk
  • the warlike class which manages the military businesses under the command of the king
  • the class of the producers (craftsmen, farmers, stockbreeders, etc) which must provide for the needs for the whole of the company and in priority those of the two other classes.

The sacerdotal class

  • the word druid is a generic term which applies to all the members of the sacerdotal class, whose fields of attribution are the religion, the sacrifice, justice, teaching, poetry, the divination, etc a first category deals more particularly with “theology”.

  • the bards is specialized in oral and sung poetry, its role is to make the praise, the satire or the blame (see Geis and Glam dicinn).
  • the vate is a soothsayer, he deals more particularly of the worship, the Divination and medicine. The women take part in this function of prophecy (the such Gallisenae of the Island-of-Center).

The role of the vate

Belonging to the sacerdotal class, the vate is a druid (of “thickly-wid-be” who means “very erudite”) which, in the hierarchy, belongs to the third speciality, the sides of the “theologists” and the bards. Its functions are thus obligatorily nuns for fields which nowadays concern the layman. The vate had in load the fields of the divination, clairvoyance and medicine (magic, bloody and vegetable). Its practices divinatoires and prophetic are connected with a poetic form (recitations, incantations).

The contemporary Néo-druidisme, created at the 18th century, taking again the three specialities of the Antiquity, transformed the word vate into ovate (Irish oibid , Welsh ofydd , Breton oviz ), following an error of comprehension of the Greek name of Ovide.

Related articles

Sources and bibliography

  • Gwenc' hlan Scouëzec, the Druids , - volume 1: Of the origins to the Roman Empire , Editions Beltan, 2001,
  • Anonymous, the Dialog of both Wise presented and annotated by Christian-Joseph Guyonvarc' H, scientific Library Payot, Paris, 1999,

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