Many people are aware that some dates within our modern calender, such as Halloween, have an ancient Celtic Origin. Much of this information however is confused, both with the Christian festivals and ideas which suplanted the celtic ones (and other interim cultures such as Roman and Norse beliefs), and the modern interpretations of Celtic lore by the 'New Age' movement, the new Wiccan and Druid movements and modern European political attempts to forge the Celts in in the role of a primal EU.

The Celtic Calender was influenced largely by the Ancient Greek model and comes down to us primarily in the form of the Coligny Calendar. This calendar, fragments of bronze inscribed with the days months and years of the Celtic world dates from the late first century and was found in Coligny in Ain, France.

The calender shows a period of sixty two months divided into sixteen columns, detailing major festivals, lunar cycles and propitious and inauspicious parts of the year, and with notes pertaining to individual days. A full-on almanac in fact.

Fortunately the Coligny calendar is not our only reference, there are various other written records from both inside and outside the Celtic world to denote how they divided the year. The Celts had a rich oral tradition, which found itself finally committed to the written word both as the Celtic and Roman worlds integrated (as with Coligny), and surviving as a Celtic form in Ireland, where these rites were not written down for several hundred years.

This Insular Literature allows us to recognise that this was not a one-off document, and these calendar notions were widespread and well established across the Celtic world. Other documentary sources allow us to plug the gaps that Coligny doesn't give us. Fleshing out the year with those festivals and periods not relevent to the design of that particular almanac, and giving us an insight into the rites involved in those festivals. The Coligny evidence does however give us a unique overview of how the Celts saw time itself, the ebb and flow of the year, and how those years fitted into a larger chronological picture.

Further to this we can establish from other matirial sources how certain sites were used at different times of year and how their design reflected their function. Though we are all familiar with the astrocalendric design of megalithic monuments such as Callanesh or Stonehenge, the notion that these are Celtic monuments is something of a fallacy, the Celts having not arrived in Britain / Britainy (the only areas such monuments occur) until after these sites had fallen out of use.

The sixteen columns of the Coligny Calendar are each divided into four lunar months (alternating 29 and 30 days in length) to a column – except however the fifth and ninth columns each contain two lunar months and an additional third intercalary month. These intercalary ('between calendar') months function in a similar way to the extra day in our modern leap years. As the lunar calendar of twelve months would add up to just 354 days a few days were left over each year that had to be made up to match the lunar and solar calendars.

Each month was divided into light and dark halves, with the word ‘Atenoux’ (night returns) at the point the moon begins to wane. The months were further noted to be ‘mat’ or ‘anm’ – abbreviations denoting good and ill times. Individual days were also marked with abbreviations which we currently do not understand.

Two key festivals are also marked each year Beltane and Lugnasad. Festivals such as these divided the year into four clear seasons - seasons corresponding shifts in the agricultural year.

There were four key fesivals in the Celtic year:

Imbloc (Februray 1st) Spring fertility festival associated with the godess Bridgit.

Beltane (May 1st) Fire festival of the god Belenus.

Lugnasad (August 1st) Festival of the god Lugh - and time of the Council of the Gauls. Whether other Celtic tribes held councils of a similar nature is unknown.

Samhain (November 1st) - This festival ran from the end of the old year to the begining of the new through the intercalliary month, these days, laying not in one year or the other, were 'out of time' a kind of limbo where the spirits of the dead ran free. It was the final and largest festival of the year.

These were social festivals, involving everyone in the community, and indeed were a time of communion and communication between communities. As such they are well documented in written sources such as the Insular literature, so we have a clear idea of when they occured and what happened at these events which largly corresponded to the agrarian calendar.

Religious rites possibly had their own periodic calendar, however it was the nature of the Celtic religion that only initiates of the priestly class were privvy to the religious secrets. Therefore no written record of these survive, as there was no oral tradition to preserve them, and we must look to non documentary evidence.

The Celts were farmers - it's no wonder that they had a rigorously defined calender, what farmer doesn't lean heavily on his almanack to tell him when to plough and when to pasture. So why these festivals, what did they mean to those who practiced them and what function did they serve?

The both the timing and practices of these festivals alow us to make observations both about the lives of the Celts and how their lives formed and shaped these festivals.

Beyond the social observation of religion at the appropriate public festivals nothing is know of the religious calendar. Structural evidence from bronze age temples and monuments shows a keen understanding of the astronomical calendar - and many sites are aligned to certain key dates, notably the Summer and Winter solstaces and the Vernal and Autumnal Equinoxes. As mentioned earlier, the nature of these religious rites played is unknown, or even if they are an adjunct feature of Celtic life or are a seperate, distinct tradition and culture is debatable. As is the point at which the Druids came to be a force in Celtic societies.