Spiritual Heritages of Ancient Europe
Short note on Veleda
I came up with this name for my blog, wanting a name that said seeress/witch/shaman and that was from my own background, in this case the Netherlands side. The account in Tacitus account is the main historical source, and it's very rich: a Bructerian prophetess that led a tribal European revolt, a confederacy of many tribes actually, against the Roman empire.
The Roman sources treat Veleda as a personal name but it was a title, related to Gaulish and Slavic words for witch, to Irish and Welsh names for seers and bards and poets, and more distantly, comes from the same Indo-European root as the Vedas. A root that means to see, to know.
We'll cover a whole chapter about Veleda and other revolutionary priestesses further into the course.