The bucket of enlightenment

It is usually not the big things that lead us to sudden insights. Through my novels, I've been dealing with the culture of the Celts for quite some time now, and I'm among those who are very much in favor of the fact that they were an advanced civilization. All those ornate pieces of jewelry, the elaborately decorated weapons, the logistics of uniting all the tribes against Caesar ... And yet it happens even to me that I get stuck in the mental images that one actually rather associates with the Vikings. Roughnecks, boozing warriors, shaggy beards ... (even if there were finds of shaving kits).

Then you stumble across a post on social media about an exhibition in Brittany. Not only is there a very special statuette on display: the Bard of Paule.

Isn't he adorable? His lyre, by the way, is the model for the one Arduinna will receive in volume four (oops, spoiler). It has since been proven that his nose was deliberately knocked off, probably an act of desecration when the Romans conquered Gaul, since the bards, like the druids, were among the dangerous intellectual class that had to be destroyed (some things never change).

But it is not the statuette of the bard that was my enlightenment. No, it is a bucket, a pail.

An ordinary everyday object, the kind you use to fetch water, feed your pig, or maybe use as a nighttime toilet. Granted, not the cheap 5kg oranges supermarket model, more the sturdy construction site version. But nonetheless, a bucket. Not noble tableware, not a weapon, not a status symbol. And yet this bucket is adorned with ornaments. Not quickly painted on to avoid confusion ("Attention, chamber pot, not food bucket!"), but artful, punched-out metal ornaments.

And it is precisely these little things that probably say in all clarity: We were a rich culture, and an art-loving culture. We could afford to embellish even everyday objects with intricate metalwork where a few brushstrokes would have done just as well. We had the craftsmen who not only had the skill but also the time for such "gimmicks" because we all had enough to eat, because our smithes didn't have to worry about harvesting and feeding animals in addition to their work.

It reminds me of the saying of a scientist whose name I have forgotten. She was asked what, in her opinion, had been the first sign of "being human", of "culture". One expected as an answer something like "the wheel", "the first axe". But she said, "a healed broken leg." For only when a person was embedded in a community that cared for him, that protected him, that looked after him for weeks, could a broken bone heal without the person starving or being attacked by wild animals.

And Paule's bucket also gives me the courage to think that sometimes I may not be so wrong when I question many a "cult object." Because quickly everything is a "cult object", for which one does not know immediately a meaning. And I think to myself again and again: Who knows, maybe it was just Schnokes? The knickknacks of the Iron Age?

Like this "cult object" from the Natural History Museum in Vienna. I can't help but think it looks like a rich kid's trailing duck to me ....

Or these "votive figures". Maybe they were the Playmobil of the Iron Age ... Or maybe that's blasphemy and any respected archeologist will stone me for thinking thus.

Nevertheless, I must also think of another report in this context. Researchers had found (I think, somewhere in South America) razor-sharp obsidian blades in the roof beams of houses. Quite logical, they said. They kept them on the rafters so they would be closer to the gods. Quite logical, said a woman. They kept them on the rafters so that the little children couldn't reach them.

It is always fascinating how little we really know, how much we are influenced by our current views about the "past" and how easily a little thing changes many views again ...