Desborough Iron Age Mirror Drawing & Essay

‘Who were the Celts?’ a wonderful course at at Oxford Department for Continuing Education gave me so much inspiration. I enjoyed it from the first till the last day and regretted it came to an end. One of the essays I had to read was an essay on Iron Age mirrors. ‘Mirrors in the British Iron Age: Performance, Revelation and Power, by Melanie Giles and Jody Joy.

Iron Age 50 BC – AD 50
Found in 1908 near Desborough

After reading about Iron Age mirrors, I set out to draw the Iron Age Desborough mirror. Through drawing I would gain more insights into its decorations and its function. Iron Age mirrors that were beautifully decorated and made of bronze and iron were found in graves of high status Iron Age women.

I like to say something about high status Iron Age women. One might think ‘high status’ refers to rich women or wives of rulers or kings. But although both accounts can be correct, high status refers in the Iron Age more to women being leaders or shamans.

Working on the patterns of Desborough Iron Ago Mirror

Detail of Desborough Iron Age Mirror

The essay discusses how Iron Age metallurgy and how a whole community was involved in the making process. Also, it discusses social relations, grave goods, and the compass drawn motifs of repeated and distinctive forms arranged into intricate and flee flowing designs. Fascinating, to say in the least. The question begs why were mirrors used as grave goods? The easiest answer does not always work, one being that the Iron Age lady was buried with her belongings. Perhaps the mirrors were not possessions but (diplomatic) gifts. And why would a deceased lady take a mirror, she wouldn’t need it in her afterlife, or would she?

Imagine looking into this mirror. The effect of seeing your face in the reflective properties of the plate, disrupted or enhanced by its La Tene decorations would …yes, what would you see?

Giles and Joy describe how the decorations on the mirrors are not only used to deceive the eye, but also to reinforce the reflective qualities of the mirror plate. The anthropologist Alfred Gell points out that Iron Age mirrors could have expressed political power and legitimize associations with the supernatural. This is hard for us to understand but in order to understand what Gell states requires us to imagine a time in which you only saw your reflection in (restless or calm) water, in shiny objects, like copper, bronze, silver or gold. How special such mirrors would be! Imagine now that next to not frequently seeing your reflection, you were raised to notice all sorts of shapes in water, smoke, old trees, and rocks. We have a clear sense of what we see is real and what is imagination, but for ancient people perhaps seeing was just seeing, whether it was imagination or fact. If the under-upper and middle world aren’t having hard borders, perhaps seeing imaginative, hallucinative and factual weren’t compartmentalized either.

Working on Desborough Iron Age Celtic Mirror; adding a golden border.

When I suffer a migraine aura, I see things that do not exist and things that I need to see are gone. I can pass a person in a street who is missing his head! Perhaps looking into an Iron Age mirror yields a similar effect as having a migraine aura because Iron Age mirrors have blanked out spaces and thus provide viewers with a disorienting and distorted image of themselves. Yet, an Iron Age mirror has not only missing parts (blanked out spaces, decorated with a basket woven texture) but carefully chosen synchronized but flow-like playful, witty, and mischievous botanical and animal patterns. What effect would looking into a shiny plate, with a deliberate disorienting pattern have? Here the essay explains more about the ‘technology of enchantment‘ and goes deeper into psychological war-fare though powerful visceral and visual effects. It informs the reader about the Fang People of Gabon who used hallucinogens before looking into mirrors, and states that these Iron Age mirrors were not real mirrors (not for checking hair or make-up). In fact, the mirrors played a role in rituals to release the soul to its afterlife.

Desborough Mirror copied by Paula Kuitenbrouwer. Mixed media; Derwent graphite & metallic pencils, and bronze coloured ink.

During the time that I spent drawing this Iron age mirror, I tried many things. I tried to project my face behind the decorations, fusing my face and the decorations and then see all sorts of animals. Of course, this is a very poor attempt to understand its magic. But I have to do it with a large doses of imagination and hours of drawing as there is no way I would be able to hold the mirror up and have a look in it. And even if I could do that, there wouldn’t be a ritual that would be helpfully performed by an Iron Age shaman who would be experienced in travelling between worlds. (Or brainwaves, or different stages of consciousness, whatever way you might define shamanistic journeying).

My concluding thoughts are that by looking into this mirror, in an Iron Age ritual ceremony, with an Iron Age cognitive mindset, maybe, as a dying lady of high status, I would find great comfort in seeing my old face being obscured with these splendid swirling decorations. I would be calm as I have seen, thanks to my migraines, things that aren’t there and fail to notice things that are there. I would probably enter theta brainwaves the same way as after sitting down for a longer time in meditation or -more Iron Age style- looking into the smoky swirls of an open campfire. I might start seeing my face, combined with the swirly flowing embellishments turning into animal and ancestral spirits.

One has to understand that the Iron Age was full of spirits, spirits we have carefully abandoned from our modern life. But just as they have been forgotten, it doesn’t mean these spirits aren’t there. I would most certainly find an ancestral spirit that would ‘present’ itself as so much of my own face would be blanked out, and only essential and familiar facial lines would still linger in the reflective image. Or perhaps, I would see a beautiful stag or another mammal, and experience it as my guiding spirit animal. Perhaps I would see the hybrid human-animal dressed-up shaman of the village giving me instructions to journey to the Other-world.

All in all, it would perhaps release my soul into an in-between world in which I would be able to project comfortably to what I would need to see. I would probably have been fasting during the last days of my life, I would be susceptible for my imaginative mind to dominate and thus the softly and dreamily reflecting mirror would get a transitional quality and function. Or perhaps I would look and whisper some wise words, like Tibetan shamans who look into mirrors to see the future and the past, wise words that would be helpful to my tribe. The Fang people of Gabon use mirrors to contact their ancestors. Do Iron Age mirrors have a similar function?

Obviously, many things become possible should such a highly valued mirror be available to a tribe. There are many more than this Desborough mirror only. One by one these mirrors and their fascinating embellishments are showing us that Iron Age metallurgy and shamanism practices were interrelated and that highly decorated ‘magic’ Iron Age mirrors were much appreciated by Iron Age peoples.

Paula Kuitenbrouwer

www.mindfuldrawing.com

@mindfuldrawing on Instagram

At Etsy

P.S. During the hours that I was drawing the Desborough mirror, I travelled between worlds too. I had to descend from my creative, spiritual plane of manifesting ideas to the mundane world of running errands. As the trees were shedding their leaves, I noticed many decomposed leaves with open parts resembling mini Iron Age mirrors scattered on the street. If you can not enjoy looking into the Desborough Iron Age mirror at the British Museum, do not despair, mini versions are freely available every autumn.

Art cards are available at Etsy (and can be framed as small memories to this exquisite mirror):

Paula holds an MA degree in Philosophy and she is the owner of mindfuldrawing.com. Her pen and pencils are always fighting for her attention nevertheless they are best friends; Paula likes her art to be brainy and her essays to be artistic.

Paula’s art shop is at Etsy and her portfolio is at Instagram. Contact her freely should you like to commission her or buy her art.

A Bardic Storytelling of the ‘Celtic of the West’ Model

I am much impressed by Celtic art and as a result of being so inspired I have summarized the Celts from the West Theory in a ‘Celtic’ artistic style, as a way of Bardic story-telling, in which we aren’t sure what is fact and what is story-telling.

(Reconstruction of the Lady of Vix’s face based on her skeleton)

Allow me to present lady Vix, a highly gifted and deformed woman, born in the ancient Portuguese city Tartessos, in the first millennium BC. She inspires a local artist to chisel her in stone, riding a horse, side-saddled because of her deformities. Later this statute, identified by archaeologists as that of a Celtic Goddess, is found in San Bartolomeu de Messines along with Tartessian letters[1]. About 97 other Tartessian inscriptions on stone convince Koch that Tartassian was a Paleohispanic Celtic language.[2]

Tartessos isn’t big enough for Lady Vix and soon she is on her way to spread her metalworking skills. She, and other traders, use Tartassian as a trading and metal-work related vocational language. Phylogenetic work (Gray and Atkinson, 2003) offers a date of the development of Celtic language, which is about the 4^th millennium BC.[3]’[4]

Lady Vix travels extensively, using Atlantic sea-ways to visit Brittany and the British Isles. Along with spreading metal working fashion, increasing artistic awareness is responsible for establishing ‘a high degree of cultural similarities displayed by maritime communities’ (Cunliffe, 1999)[5] along the Atlantic coast. Such as upstanding angular stones, Cliff Castles along the entire Atlantic façade, and circularity in domestic architecture. We can’t be sure this is Lady Vix’s and her apprentices influence exclusively but with many women written out of history, one should be mindful of missing women when stumbling upon gaps in our knowledge.

The bards’ story-telling about the influence of Lady Vix inspire local village heads to adopt Celtic place names. Later linguistic research, by Patrick Simms-Williams (2006), offers maps with high density of Celtic places, resulting in linguistic geographical evidence for the ‘Celtic from the West’ model. It is also thought that Celtic language spreads further ‘as a supra-regional language of Bell Beaker groups[6], as maps of Bell Beaker burials and Celtic language Bronze age maps show remarkable similarities.[7]

The last successor of Lady of Vix is found in a burial mount in Burgundy, France (dating from 500 BC). Next to her remains stands an extraordinary Greek wine mixing vessel that tells us that trade, charisma and metalworking skills have been interrelated for a long time.

Mont Lassois, France, Lady Vix’s Burial Mount

(CGI of Lady Vix’s burial chamber)

Vix Chariot & Krater — Lady Vix’s Wine Krater and Chariot in which she was buried. Lady Vix burial artefacts are magnificent, especially the large Greek wise vessel.

The last known Lady in the Vix tradition is buried away from the Atlantic Celtic language zones as the long line of successors have used thousands of years of trading coastal, riverine and migratory networks from Portugal to the British Isles, from the Atlantic coast to the east of Europe. The Roman Herodotus was right after all that the Celts lived near the Pyrenees, ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules’[8]’[9]. Lady Vix and contemporaries have brought their DNA to the British Isles which leads in 2006 to Oppenheimer stating that the ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago.[10]

From Tartessos, like Lady Vix.

Paula Kuitenbrouwer

2017

P.S. I wrote this story being inspired by my course ‘Who are the Celts’, at Department for Continuing Education University of Oxford. I tried to bring knowledge together on Celtic sea-way trading, Celtic metallurgy, Celtic DNA, and Female Druidism. I hope you have enjoyed my story. Should you feel the ambition to unravel what is fact and what is fiction, I highly recommend the course at Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education. Having said that, the footnotes might be helpful too.

Paula Kuitenbrouwer holds an MA degree in Philosophy and she is the owner of mindfuldrawing.com. Her pen and pencils are always fighting for her attention nevertheless they are best friends; Paula likes her art to be brainy and her essays to be artistic.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Koch, J. Tartessian, Europe’s newest and oldest Celtic language. Published in Celts: Issue II (Mar/Apr 2009), Prehistory/Archaeology, Vol.17.

[2] More on Celtic inscriptions and identification of Celtic place names: Koch. J. An atlas for Celtic studies (Oxford, 2008).

[3] Gibson, C. & Wodtko D, The background of the Celtic languages: theories from archaeology and linguistics, p. 5

[4] Others suggest it goes back to the 2^nd-3^rd millennium BC.

[5] Cunliffe, B. Atlantic Sea-ways. Revista de Guimaraes, Volumne Espeiual, I. Guimaraes, 1999, pp. 93-105.

[6] Gibson, C. & Wodtko D, The background of the Celtic languages: theories from archaeology and linguistics, p. 7

[7] Harrison, R.J., Jackson, R. and Napthan, M., 1999 A rich Bell Beaker burial from Wellington Quarry, Marden, Herefordshire, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, vol. 18, no. 1, pp 1–16.

[8] Beyond the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ refers to the Straits of Gibraltar, what is now southern Portugal, were the ancient city Tartassos was located.

[9] Cunliffe, B. 2003. The Celts, a Very Short Introduction. Oxford; OUP. Chapter 2.

[10] Oppenheimer, S., 2006 Origins of the British: A genetic detective story, Constable & Robinson Ltd.

My Celtic Art Project

Preliminary studies for a drawing of an oval metal disk, showing four boars, swans and a hidden face.

My Celtic Art Project

This is my contribution to my “Who are the Celts’ course at Oxford Department for Continuing Education, week 5 ‘Celtic Art’ (2017). At the end of a demanding study week the participants were challenged to make their own Celtic art, a drawing, woodwork, or poem, whatever your prefer.

I was always in awe when I saw Celtic art in museums but I was never challenged or commissioned to make Celtic art. For doing this project, I had to remove my anxiety for rigid mathematical organization (the patterns and swirls). I liked the part of focusing on mythology, faces, and animals.

The article on the enchantment of technology, that I had to read during the course, inspired me to embrace a geometrical challenge for making Celtic patterns. I enjoyed the challenge more than I beforehand thought possible.

I used golden/silver ink-pens, ordinary Bic blue pens, art paper, a protector and many rulers.

Paula Kuitenbrouwer

Paula holds an MA degree in Philosophy and she is the owner of mindfuldrawing.com. Her pen and pencils are always fighting for her attention nevertheless they are best friends; Paula likes her art to be brainy and her essays to be artistic.