distinguished as palæolithic, neolithic, and bronze, in other words to
those periods during which unpolished stone, polished stone, and bronze
implements were in use,[11] in order to discover, if possible, whether
as the tide of industrial progress flowed in, there are indubitable
signs of an unbroken tradition of religious thought and practice which
became articulate in the historic narrative of Julius Cæsar.
Mr. Clement Reid, F.R.S., has thought that he detected traces of the
palæolithic age in the raised beach at Prah Sands,[12] and there is, a
priori, no reason to suppose that his discovery will not be confirmed by
further investigation. Quite the contrary; it is not unlikely that some
of the implements which have been found in the county and which are now
commonly regarded as belonging to the later stone age will be found to
belong to the earlier. This consideration, however, has only a very
indirect bearing upon the present enquiry, for it has not yet been shown
that the men of the earlier period had any religious belief at all.
On the other hand, there is a very strong presumption that the races of
the later period had, towards the end of it, religious beliefs more or
less definite. In this connection there is no need to call attention to
the different kinds of stone implements which have been found in
Cornwall and which have been identified with this—the neolithic—period.
It will be useful, however, to consider, very briefly, the more striking
of its monuments, found chiefly in the west and, by reason of their
size, styled megalithic. They are distinguished as dolmens sometimes but
incorrectly termed cromlechs, cists (stone chests), circles, menhirs or
long stones, and alignments of which there are comparatively very few in
the county. All belong to the same period; all appear to have been
erected by the same race. They are all found in greater numbers and of
larger dimensions in Brittany. The general opinion of competent
archæologists is that, with the exception perhaps of the menhirs, they
are all sepulchral in character and with the exception of some of the
cists that they all belong to the neolithic or else to the earlier half
of the Bronze Age. The dolmens, of which Chûn Quoit and Lanyon Quoit are
good examples, differ only in size and detail from the cists which are
abundant in Cornwall, and which have been proved to be depositories for
the dead by their contents. The circles probably performed the very
useful function of marking and protecting either single graves, as many
of the smaller ones are still found to do, or a more or less large
collection of graves like a modern churchyard wall. The fact that some
of the circles no longer surround human interments, or that some cists
are found without circles to protect them, presents no difficulty to
those who accept this explanation, but who at the same time admit a
variety of use in the disposal of the dead and who have abundant proof
of a bygone vandalism which is not unknown in Cornwall to-day.
Stonehenge is not only larger and more elaborate, but of later date than
most of the larger circles, being the only one in England which is
constructed of hewn stone, all the rest being built of undressed stone.
Even of this, for which, on that account, there might have been presumed
a quasi-religious origin, Sir Arthur Evans, one of the most eminent of
living archæologists, can only assert that “it is one of the large
series of primitive religious monuments that grew out of purely
sepulchral architecture.”
Of alignments it is hardly possible to say more than this, that they are
usually associated with circles and may have served as avenues to them.
The menhirs, sometimes isolated and independent of other ancient remains
and sometimes as, for example, at St. Buryan and Drycarn, sufficiently
near to circles to suggest association with them, are even less easy to
explain. Some of them are of enormous dimensions, like the Men-er-Hroeck
at Locmariaquer in Brittany; some are so small as to be liable to be
mistaken for the rubbing stones of cattle. The former must have required
vast numbers of men to erect, and it is their weight and size which has
invested both the smaller and the greater with an interest and
importance which would otherwise have been lacking. It is probable that
some of them served as boundary stones, some as guide posts, and others
as stones of memorial, like those reared by Jacob at Bethel, Joshua at
Jordan, and Samuel at Ebenezer. The isolated menhirs of the largest
size, i.e. the true menhirs or great undressed stones, reared by human
instrumentality, wherever no traces of burial can be found either
underneath or near them, undoubtedly suggest a religious purpose. While
there is nothing to connect them with nature worship,[13] as commonly
understood, or with solar worship, it is difficult to conceive how they
came to be erected unless it was either to commemorate a departed
chief[14] or to serve as symbols or objects of religion. Reverence paid
to the dead, at certain stages of human development, may and probably
does imply a belief in life after death. These monuments are of the late
neolithic age.
The transition from it to the Bronze Age took place in Europe, according
to the best authorities, about 1800 years before Christ. Bronze gave
place to iron about 900 years later. The use of bronze in Cornwall,
judging from the comparatively small number of bronze implements which
have been discovered in the county, and from the fact that for its
manufacture both of its constituent metals are abundant, would seem to
have been of shorter duration here than elsewhere. Bronze celts have
been found in Lelant, St. Just-in-Penwith, St. Hilary, St.
Mawgan-in-meneage, Gwinear and in a few other places, but the net result
is somewhat disappointing.
It is, however, during this period that in Gaul we meet with two races,
the Ligurian and Iberian, occupying lands east and west of the Rhone
respectively. These races must not be identified too closely with the
countries whose names they bear.
They appear to have followed different occupations, the Ligurians
devoting themselves to agriculture and the Iberians to the keeping of
sheep and cattle.[15]
It is remarkable that little evidence should have been discovered
respecting the character of the religion of either race. A bronze disc
from Ireland and a horse mounted on (not harnessed to) a six-wheeled
curricle to one of the axles of which is affixed a disc, from Denmark,
have been supposed to be emblematic of the Bronze Age sun worship of
those countries. Again, the swan-shaped prow of Scandinavian boats has
been recognised as a solar emblem, but the freedom with which that
ancient bird has been treated for decorative purposes, leaves one
somewhat in doubt as to its religious signification. No evidence of the
use of either symbol has apparently been found in Britain or in
Armorica.
If the distinction between Ligurian and Iberian can be sustained is it
not possible that the latter if not both emblems were confined to the
Ligurians and were introduced by them along with their religious
associations as traders engaged in the overland amber traffic between
the Baltic and the Mediterranean?
The same dearth of evidence meets us when we come to consider the cult
of the bull and the sacred horns and that of the axe. Had this cult been
peculiar to a pastoral people like the Iberians an irreverent mind might
have been pardoned for suggesting that they hit upon a very appropriate
symbolism. Unfortunately the Bronze Age of Britain and Armorica, whether
Iberian or otherwise, supplies us with very few if any illustrations of
it. Two bronze bulls of small size found in Morbihan have been claimed
to represent it in Armorica. The bronze bull found in the Vicarage
garden at St. Just, undoubtedly fashioned for a religious purpose, seems
to have an equal claim; but until more evidence is forthcoming it is
allowable to doubt whether the Minoan beliefs, associated with the
bronze period in the Ægean, ever gained a footing in Britain. M.
Déchelette has with great pains striven to show that the mythology and
the metal were closely related, perhaps contemporaneous and
coextensive[16]—at least this seems to be the general drift of his
exposition. While yielding to no one in gratitude for his great work—a
challenge to English archæologists—it seems to the present writer that,
in dealing with the religious symbolism of the Bronze Age, so far as
North-Western Europe is concerned, he has done little more than to show
that the double axe (_bipenne_) of the Ægean has its analogue, perhaps
archetype, in the single axe with handle (_hache simple et emmanchée_)
which is found inscribed on some of the Armorican dolmens of an earlier
age. Nor is it self-evident that either the sacred horns or the axe is a
solar emblem, though both appear to have been received into the Minoan
system.
When we leave the Bronze Age and come to the Iron, we enter upon what
has been termed protohistoric archæology. Within about 300 years of its
commencement we find ourselves in the presence of a race which has
survived and has in a measure retained its individuality up to the
present time.
The Celts, it is true, were only one of several races which from the
east and north pressed westward and southward over Europe for a period
of over a thousand years; but no invasion has ever been more complete or
the effects of an invasion more profound and permanent. The Celts became
identified with our island to a greater extent than either of their
successors, the Saxons and Normans. The second body of them imparted to
it its name. In the fifth century before Christ they had reached the
Atlantic and had begun to invade Britain although the main body were
near the Danube. In 387 B.C., they sacked Rome, and in the succeeding
century a section of them crossed the Hellespont, overran Asia Minor and
eventually settled in what became known as Galatia.
The point of greatest importance at the present stage of our enquiry is
that of the Celtic religion between the close of the Bronze Age and
Cæsar’s invasion of Gaul and Britain. Was it one of the many forms of
nature worship which found the central object of its adoration in the
glorious orb who in the words of the Psalmist “cometh forth as a
bridegroom out of his chamber and rejoiceth as a giant to run his
course”? Did the worship of the sun form its most prominent
distinguishing feature?
The much-quoted passage given by Diodorus the Sicilian, who lived in the
first century before the Christian era and who reproduced it from the
_Description of the World_ written by Hecatæus in the fifth century,
states that in the island of the Hyperboreans over against Celtica there
is a magnificent circular temple which they have erected to Apollo.[17]
The passage presents more than one difficulty. The Hyperboreans were
known to the ancient world as the possessors of the sources of amber, a
substance which is not found in Britain but in the neighbourhood of the
Baltic. Those who would identify the Hyperborean island with Britain and
the temple with Stonehenge, have to face the greater difficulty of
accounting for the fact that a sepulchral structure erected in
pre-Celtic times was, in the fifth century before Christ, being used for
sun worship by Hyperboreans who may or may not have been Celts, but who
in the passage are described as having erected it for that purpose. It
should be remembered that Hecatæus had been dead for over a century when
Pytheas the daring Greek explorer made his famous voyage of discovery,
and that if that voyage was, as M. Déchelette contends,[18] to the
navigator of the fourth century before the Christian era what a polar
expedition is to the navigator of to-day, it is hardly likely that
Hecatæus could have had very reliable information concerning either
Britain or its Celtic inhabitants.
It may, perhaps, be allowable to hazard an opinion which after all is
only an opinion, viz. that the Ligurians who dwelt along the
transcontinental amber route were sun worshippers, but that until the
days of Julius Cæsar we know very little, if indeed anything for
certain, of the religion of the Celts who inhabited western Gaul and
Britain. Whether Stonehenge was the temple referred to is very doubtful;
whether it was orientated with respect to the sun is a matter which, as
Professor Oman justly observes, need not be taken seriously.[19]
But what of the Phœnicians, and where do they come in? It is a cruel
thing to say to a generation which can ill afford to part with any
fragment of its diminished archæological patrimony, but it must be said
without reserve or qualification: the Phœnicians do not come in at all.
It would be comparatively easy, as some have already found, to provide
Celtic Britain with all the elaborate machinery of sun worship if it
could be shown that there were direct and close relations between
Britain and Phœnicia either before or after the Celtic invasion. No one,
of course, doubts or denies the glory of the Phœnician thalassocracy.
The Bible is only one of many witnesses. Hiram King of Tyre supplied
Solomon both with craftsmen for the brass work of the Temple at
Jerusalem and with sailors for his trading expeditions to India. Gades
(Cadiz) the port of Tartessus, or Tarshish, was founded by the
Phœnicians before 1100 B.C. The ships of Tarshish are rooted in the
memory like the bulls of Bashan and the cedars of Libanus. Ezekiel’s
lamentation for Tyre[20] is not only one of the most profoundly pathetic
but also one of the most illuminating passages in the Old Testament.
Speaking of Tyre, he says, “Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the
multitude of all kind of riches, with silver, iron, tin, and lead they
traded in thy fairs:” “the ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy
market: and thou wast replenished and made very glorious in the midst of
the seas.”
Nevertheless, great, extensive and varied as was the commercial
enterprise of the Phœnicians, scholars are now generally agreed that
they never got beyond Gades in their Atlantic voyages.
Moreover, the Cassiterides or Tin Islands, mentioned by Diodorus, which
a former generation strove to identify with the Scilly Isles, lay
undoubtedly to the north of Spain.[21] At the same time it must be noted
that the same author Diodorus, who probably had his information from
Poseidonius (born circa 135 B.C.), does expressly state in the same
passage that tin was conveyed from Britain to Gaul and overland to
Marseilles. By that time, however, the doom of Carthage, the daughter
city of Tyre, situated on the Bay of Tunis, had also been sealed.
This absence of historical evidence respecting Phœnician intercourse
with Britain, supposing such intercourse to have existed, might have
been in some measure explained—and not as the Privy Council explained
the Ornaments Rubric of the Church of England, by arguing that omission
implies prohibition—by assuming that the source of the tin supply was
kept secret, like that of amber, by the traders in that commodity. It is
the fact that no vestige of these Semitic navigators has been found
either in Gaul or in Britain, which decisively excludes the supposition
that they ever visited those countries. Dr. Birch in giving his judgment
upon the bronze bull found in the garden of St. Just Vicarage states it
as his conviction that no object has yet been found in Britain which can
be satisfactorily identified with the Phœnicians,[22] and M. Déchelette
is equally emphatic respecting the absence of similar objects in
Gaul.[23] What M. Alexandre Bertrand says of Celtic civilisation,
namely, that neither the Ligurians, nor the Phœnicians, nor the Greeks,
nor the Iberians collaborated in that educational work, may with some
reservations in favour of the two latter nations be accepted as true of
the Celtic religion.
From Julius Cæsar some useful information is to be gained respecting the
religion of the Celts of his own day. He states that they had many gods,
the chief of whom, in Gaul at least, answered to the Roman Mercury,
patron of arts and crafts. Mars, Apollo, Minerva and Dis Pater were
represented in the Celtic system, but it is not easy to equate them
satisfactorily. After the Roman conquest the Britons followed the custom
of other subject races and identified their gods with those of Olympus.
Some of their gods found no corresponding analogue, like Nodens, whose
temple overlooked the Severn; others again were purely local and
patronal.
During the three centuries while Britain remained a province of the
Empire the Romanisation of the native religion had free scope, the
spread of Christianity meanwhile striving with indifferent success to
keep pace with it. “The larger half of the altars and shrines,
discovered in Britain are simply set up to honour the ordinary gods of
the Roman world.”[24] Among these latter were many strange divinities,
who in origin were neither Celtic nor Roman, but were those of alien
races led to Britain by the hope of profitable traffic or by compulsory
military service.
Mithras, for example, whose worship was introduced at Rome under the
Emperors, found in this way a place in the British pantheon.
There is no evidence to show that either nature worship or sun worship
was the dominant religion of the Celts either before, during or after
the Roman occupation. It is, of course, possible to say of the Romans
that they practised both, but it is an abuse of language to say that
they were either sun worshippers like the Egyptians or nature
worshippers like the Phœnicians. The same holds good of the Celts.
Under Roman influence the days of the week received Latin names derived
from the planetary system, all of which except Sunday (_Dies Solis_
which became _Dies Dominica_) continued to be used by our lawyers until
English took the place of Latin in the courts of record. In Cornwall,
notwithstanding the Saxon invasion, the Latin names were retained until
Cornish ceased to be a spoken and written language. Thus Sunday, _Dies
Solis_ became _Dê Zil_, _Zil_ being the Cornish derivative of Sol and
not a variant of the Cornish word Houl.[25] Until the Roman occupation
the Celts reckoned time by nights, not days. Thus the first night (of
the week if they had weeks) was the sixth night after new moon, that is
when the moon was on the point of becoming half-full. Their year,
therefore, consisted of thirteen months. The Celtic mind appears to have
revelled in the realm of mystery. The practice of magic; the prevalence
of human sacrifice; the numerous local divinities, with strange names
preserved to us only in the dedications of their shrines, whose
attributes and powers remain unknown; the hidden virtues of the
mistletoe and the selago; above all, the secrets of the Celtic
priesthood—the Druids—suggest, but unfortunately only suggest, a
religious differentiation which carries us back to a period more remote
than that of any religious system with which we are familiar.
Professor Sir John Rhys has attempted to show that Druidism was a
pre-Celtic survival, the religious system, in short, of some race which
preceded the Celts in Britain, and his judgment would doubtless have
been accepted had there not been good evidence to show that the system
was not peculiar to Britain but to the Celts themselves. It prevailed
among the continental Celts just as it prevailed among those of Britain
and Ireland. On the other hand, its affinities with classical mythology
are not sufficiently pronounced at the time when it is first encountered
to indicate an Ægean origin. When the original home of the Celt has been
determined it may be possible to discover the home of his religion.
The Druids[26] were the interpreters of divine things to the Celtic
conscience. They shared with the knights the administration of public
affairs, expounded the ceremonial law and determined the times and modes
of its application. Cæsar states, but not on good authority, that
Druidism originated in Britain, and Tacitus, who lived towards the end
of the first century of the Christian era, that Anglesey was its
religious centre. An impressive picture is given of the scene (A.D. 60)
which was presented to the army of Suetonius Paulinus preparing to
attack that venerable sanctuary. “Along the shore was seen a dense line
of armed warriors, while women were rushing about between the ranks
garbed like the Furies, in black gowns, their hair flowing loose, and
torches in their hands. The Druids were visible in the rear offering
sacrifices to their gods, raising their hands to heaven, and calling
down dire imprecations upon the head of the invader.”[27]
Of Druidical worship in Cornwall there is no direct evidence.[28] The
kinship and intercourse and close relations, however, which subsisted
between Cornwall, Wales and Ireland leave no room for doubt that
Druidism was its religious system. It should be needless to observe that
its megalithic remains, dolmens, circles, and the like, which were
erected many centuries before the Celts appeared in Britain, had
originally no connection with Druidism and that there is no evidence to
show that they ever became identified with it.
Without stopping to compare Irish and Gaulish Druidism with that of
Britain there is one point which claims attention and which, whether
Druidical or essentially primitive and sporadic, bears witness to the
existence of a cult which, occurring in Ireland, could not have been
introduced by the Romans.
From the life of St. Patrick we learn that in Ireland idols of stone,
sometimes adorned with gold, silver, or copper, and in particular one
stone, that of Ceen Cruaich or Cronn Cruach, were worshipped by all the
people of the land.[29] Practices similar though not necessarily
identical—in other words idol worship—characterised the Cornish paganism
of the sixth century. Henoc the biographer of St. Sampson relates an
incident of such absorbing interest that a translation of the Latin,[30]
however imperfect, will be welcomed. It was during the saint’s sojourn
at Docco (St. Kew) that we read, “Now it came to pass, on a certain day
as he journeyed through a certain district which they call Tricurius
(the hundred of Trigg) he heard on his left hand (_in sinistra parte de
eo_) to be exact, men worshipping (at) a certain shrine after the custom
of the Bacchantes by means of a play in honour of an image. Thereupon he
beckoned to his brothers that they should stand still and be silent
while he himself, quietly descending from his chariot to the ground and
standing upon his feet and observing those who worshipped the idol, saw
in front of them, resting on the summit of a certain hill an abominable
image. On this hill I myself have been and have adored and with my hand
have traced the sign of the cross which Saint Sampson, with his own
hand, carved by means of an iron instrument on a standing stone. When
Saint Sampson saw it (the image), selecting two only of the brothers to
be with him, he hastened quickly towards them, their chief Guedianus
standing at their head, and gently admonished them that they ought not
to forsake the one God who created all things and worship an idol. And
when they pleaded as excuse that it was not wrong to keep the festival
of their progenitors in a play, some being furious, some mocking but
some of saner mind strongly urging him to go away, straightway the power
of God was made clearly manifest. For a certain boy driving horses at
full speed fell from a swift horse to the ground and twisting his head
under him as he fell headlong, remained, just as he was flung, little
else than a lifeless corpse.
“Then St. Sampson, speaking to the tribesmen as they wept around the
body, said, ‘You see that your image is not able to give aid to the dead
man. But if you will promise that you will utterly destroy this idol and
no longer adore it I, with God’s assistance, will bring the dead man to
life.’ And they consenting, he commanded them to withdraw a little
further off and after praying earnestly over the lifeless man for two
hours he delivered him, who had been dead, alive and sound before them
all.