# Ask the Celticist

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-celticist/530718>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [February 28, 2010, 3:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-celticist/530718 "2010-02-28T03:17:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 4

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**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\
**Post date:** [March 5, 2010, 6:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-celticist/530718/61 "2010-03-05T06:39:26Z")

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> [@Rune](#):
>
> Is the word for god in Celtic “Ta” or “Thau” or “Thaw” or anything like that?
> 
> Some places write that the old Druids had a ceremony where they’d remove the branches of a tree to make it look like a T, and the inscribe “Thau” on it. And also the names of three gods. Something you know anything about?
> 
> Do you think the Shamrock was an ancient Celtic symbol before it became Christian?

I’ve never heard of this “thau” thing. I can’t seem to trace it beyond a really dubious 17th-century source, _De dis Germanis_, by one Schedius. He writes: _Et sic unicum deum Thau Celtæ prisci colebant; & tres Personas S. S. Trinitatis, Hesum Deum patrem, Belenum Deum filium, & Tharamin Deum Spiritum Sanctum in uno Thau, id est, Deo venerabantur._ (from the 1728 edition, on google books.) Even without wrestling with the Latin, it’s pretty clear that he’s trying to map the Celtic deities Esus, Belenos, and Taranis onto the Christian trinity. “Thau” must be the Greek letter “Tau,” that is, the letter that looks suspiciously like a cross. I don’t know where he gets that: it’s not a Celtic theonym.

The Shamrock is not the clover, as the Victorian reading would have it, but the sorrel. That doesn’t really help much with whether it meant anything to the pre-Christian Celts. It probably did; there seems to have been a rich symbolic reading of the natural world, but what it represented is not clearly outlined in any early sources.

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