FOLKLORE PHILOSOPHY
To look for consistency in barbaric philosophy is to
disqualify ourselves for understanding it, and the theories
of it which aim at symmetry are their own condemnation. Yet
that philosophy, within its own irregular confines, works
not illogically.--Edward Clodd.
It will be remembered that in the last chapter a story was given,
p. 602, which represented the soul as a little fellow somewhat
resembling a monkey; and it will probably have struck the reader
how near this approaches the idea prevalent in medieval theology and
Christian art, which pictured the soul as a pigmy or diminutive human
being. I revert to this in order to point out that the Christian fancy
may possibly have given rise to the form of the soul as represented
in the Welsh story which I heard in Cardiganshire and Professor Sayce
in Monmouthshire; but this could hardly be regarded as touching the
other Cardiganshire story, in which the soul is likened to a madfall
or lizard. Moreover I would point out that a belief incompatible with
both kinds of story is suggested by one of the uses of the Welsh
word for soul, namely, enaid. I heard my father, a native of the
neighbourhood of Eglwys Fach, near the estuary of the Dyfi, use the
word of some portion of the inside of a goose, but I have forgotten
what part it was exactly. Professor Anwyl of Aberystwyth, however,
has sent me the following communication on the subject:--'I am quite
familiar with the expression yr enaid, "the soul," as applied to the
soft flesh sticking to the ribs inside a goose. The flesh in question
has somewhat the same appearance and structure as the liver. I have no
recollection of ever hearing the term yr enaid used in the case of any
bird other than a goose; but this may be a mere accident, inasmuch as
no one ever uses the term now except to mention it as an interesting
curiosity.' This application of the word enaid recalls the use of
the English word 'soul' in the same way, and points to a very crude
idea of the soul as material and only forming an internal portion of
the body: it is on the low level of the notion of an English pagan
of the seventeenth century who thought his soul was 'a great bone
in his body [203].' It is, however, not quite so foolish, perhaps,
as it looks at first sight; and it reminds one of the Mohammedan
belief that the os coccygis is the first formed in the human body,
and that it will remain uncorrupted till the last day as a seed from
which the whole is to be renewed in the resurrection [204].
On either savage theory, that the soul is a material organism inside
a bulkier organism, or the still lower one that it is an internal
portion of the larger organism itself, the idea of death would be
naturally much the same, namely, that it was what occurred when the
body and the soul became permanently severed. I call attention to this
because we have traces in Welsh literature of a very different notion
of death, which must now be briefly explained. The Mabinogi of Math
ab Mathonwy relates how Math and Gwydion made out of various flowers
a most beautiful woman whom they named Blodeuwed [205], that is to
say anthôdês, or flowerlike, and gave to wife to Llew Llawgyffes;
how she, as it were to prove what consummate artists they had been,
behaved forthwith like a woman of the ordinary origin, in that she
fell in love with another man named Gronw Pebyr of Penllyn; and how
she plotted with Gronw as to the easiest way to put her husband to
death. Pretending to be greatly concerned about the welfare of Llew
and very anxious to take measures against his death (angheu), she
succeeded in finding from him in what manner one could kill (llad)
him. His reply was, 'Unless God kill me ... it is not easy to kill me';
and he went on to describe the strange attitude in which he might be
killed, namely, in a certain position when dressing after a bath: then,
he said, if one cast a spear at him it would effect his death (angheu),
but that spear must have been a whole year in the making, during
the hour only when the sacrifice was proceeding on Sunday. Blodeuwed
thanked heaven, she said, to find that all this was easy to avoid. But
still her curiosity was not satisfied; so one day she induced Llew
to go into the bath and show exactly what he meant. Of course she had
Gronw with his enchanted spear in readiness, and at the proper moment,
when Llew was dressing after the bath, the paramour cast his spear at
him. He hit him in the side, so that the head of the spear remained
in Llew, whilst the shaft fell off: Llew flew away in the form of an
eagle, uttering an unearthly cry. He was no more seen until Gwydion,
searching for him far and wide in Powys and Gwyned, came to Arfon,
where one day he followed the lead of a mysterious sow, until the beast
stopped under an oak at Nantlle. There Gwydion found the sow devouring
rotten flesh and maggots, which fell from an eagle whenever the bird
shook himself at the top of the tree. He suspected this was Llew,
and on singing three englyns to him the eagle came lower and lower,
till at last he descended on Gwydion's lap. Then Gwydion struck him
with his wand, so that he assumed his own shape of Llew Llawgyffes,
and nobody ever saw a more wretched looking man, we are told: he was
nothing but skin and bones. But the best medical aid that could be
found in Gwyned was procured, and before the end of the year he was
quite well again.
Here it will be noticed, that though the fatal wounding of Llew, at
any rate visibly, means his being changed into the form of an eagle,
it is treated as his death. When the Mabinogion were edited in their
present form in a later atmosphere, this sort of phraseology was not
natural to the editor, and he shows it when he comes to relate how
Gwydion punished Blodeuwed, as follows:--Gwydion, having overtaken
her in her flight, is made to say, 'I shall not kill thee (Ny ladaf
i di): I shall do what is worse for thee, and that is to let thee
go in the form of a bird.' He let her go in fact in the form of an
owl. According to the analogy of the other part of the story this
meant his having killed her: it was her death, and the words 'I shall
not kill thee' are presumably not to be regarded as belonging to the
original story. To come back to the eagle, later Welsh literature,
re-echoing probably an ancient notion, speaks of a nephew of Arthur,
called Eliwlod, appearing to Arthur as an eagle seated likewise among
the branches of an oak. He claims acquaintance and kinship with Arthur,
but he has to explain to him that he has died: they have a dialogue
[206] in the course of which the eagle gives Arthur some serious
Christian advice. But we have in this sort of idea doubtless the
kind of origin to which one might expect to trace the prophesying
eagle, such as Geoffrey mentions more than once: see his Historia,
ii. 9 and xii. 18 [207]. Add to these instances of transformation
the belief prevalent in Cornwall almost to our own day, that Arthur
himself, instead of dying, was merely changed by magic into a raven,
a form in which he still goes about; so that a Cornishman will not
wittingly fire at a raven [208]. This sort of transformation is not
to be severed from instances supplied by Irish literature, such as
the story of Tuan mac Cairill, related in the Book of the Dun Cow,
fo. 15a-16b. Tuan relates to St. Finnen of Magbile, in the sixth
century, the early history of Ireland from the time of Partholan
down, which he was enabled to do because he had lived through it all,
passing from one form to another without losing his memory. First of
all he was a man, and when old age had come upon him he was transformed
into a stag of the forest. For a while he was youthful and vigorous;
but again old age overtook him, and he next became a wild boar. When
old age and decrepitude overcame him next he was renewed in the form
of a powerful bird, called in the original seig. The next renewal
was in the form of a salmon: here the manuscript fails us. The
form of a salmon was also the one taken by the woman Liban when
she was overwhelmed by the flood, which became the body of water
known as Lough Neagh: her handmaid at the same time became an otter
(fo. 40b). There was an ancient belief that the soul leaves the body
like a bird flying out of the mouth of the man or woman dying, and
this maybe said to approach the favourite Celtic notion illustrated
by the transformations here instanced, to which may be added the case
of the Children of Lir, pp. 93, 549, changed by the stroke of their
wicked stepmother's wand into swans, on Lough Erne. The story has,
in the course of ages, modified itself into a belief that the swans
haunting that beautiful water at all seasons of the year, are the
souls of holy women who fell victims to the repeated visitations of
the pagan Norsemen, when Ireland was at their cruel mercy [209]. The
Christian form which the Irish peasant has given the legend does not
touch its relevancy here. Perhaps one might venture to generalize,
that in these islands great men and women were believed to continue
their existence in the form of eagles, hawks or ravens, swans or
owls. But what became of the souls of the obscurer majority of the
people? For an answer to this perhaps we can only fall back on the
Psyche butterfly, which may here be illustrated by the fact that
Cornish tradition applies the term 'pisky' both to the fairies and to
moths, believed in Cornwall by many to be departed souls [210]. So in
Ireland: a certain reverend gentleman named Joseph Ferguson, writing
in 1810 a statistical account of the parish of Ballymoyer, in the
county of Armagh, states that one day a girl chasing a butterfly was
chid by her companions, who said to her: 'That may be the soul of
your grandmother [211].' This idea, to survive, has modified itself
into a belief less objectionably pagan, that a butterfly hovering
near a corpse is a sign of its everlasting happiness.
The shape-shifting is sometimes complicated by taking place on the
lines of rebirth: as cases in point may be mentioned Lug, reborn as
Cúchulainn [212], and the repeated births of Étáin. This was rendered
possible in the case of Cúchulainn, for instance, by Lug taking the
form of an insect which was unwittingly swallowed by Dechtere, who
thereby became Cúchulainn's mother; and so in the case of Étáin [213]
and her last recorded mother, the queen of Etar king of Eochraidhe. On
Welsh ground we have a combination of transformations and rebirth in
the history of Gwion Bach in the story of Taliessin. Gwion was in the
service of the witch Ceridwen; but having learned too much of her
arts, he became the object of her lasting hatred; and the incident
is translated as follows in Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion,
iii. 358-9:--'And she went forth after him, running. And he saw her,
and changed himself into a hare and fled. But she changed herself into
a greyhound and turned him. And he ran towards a river, and became a
fish. And she in the form of an otter-bitch chased him under the water,
until he was fain to turn himself into a bird of the air. Then she,
as a hawk, followed him and gave him no rest in the sky. And just
as she was about to swoop upon him, and he was in fear of death, he
espied a heap of winnowed wheat on the floor of a barn, and he dropped
amongst the wheat, and turned himself into one of the grains. Then
she transformed herself into a high-crested black hen, and went to the
wheat and scratched it with her feet, and found him out and swallowed
him. And, as the story says, she bore him nine months, and when she
was delivered of him, she could not find it in her heart to kill him,
by reason of his beauty. So she wrapped him in a leathern bag, and
cast him into the sea to the mercy of God on the twenty-ninth day of
April. And at that time the weir of Gwydno was on the strand between
Dyvi and Aberystwyth, near to his own castle, and the value of an
hundred pounds was taken in that weir every May eve.' The story goes
on to relate how Gwydno's son, Elphin, found in the weir the leathern
bag containing the baby, who grew up to be the bard Taliessin. But
the fourteenth century manuscript called after the name of Taliessin
teems with such transformations as the above, except that they are by
no means confined to the range of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. I
heard an amusing suggestion of metempsychosis the other day: it is
related of a learned German, who was sitting at table, let us say,
in an Oxford hotel, with most of his dinner in front of him. Being,
however, a man of immediate foresight, and anxious to accustom himself
to fine English, he was not to be restrained by scruples as to any
possible discrepancy between words like bekommen and become. So to
the astonishment of everybody he gravely called out to the waiter,
'Hereafter I vish to become a Velsh rabbit.' This would have done
admirably for the author of certain poems in the Book of Taliessin,
where the bard's changes are dwelt upon. From them it appears that the
transformation might be into anything that the mind of man could in
any way individualize. Thus Taliessin claims to have been, some time
or other, not only a stag or a salmon, but also an axe, a sword, and
even a book in a priest's hand, or a word in writing. On the whole,
however, his history as a grain of corn has most interest here, as
it differs from that which has just been given: the passage [214]
is sadly obscure, but I understand it to say that the grain was duly
sown on a hill, that it was reaped and finally brought on the hearth,
where the ears of corn were emptied of their grains by the ancient
method of dexterously applying a flame to them [215]. But while the
light was being applied the grain which was Taliessin, falling from
the operator's hand, was quickly received and swallowed by a hostile
hen, in whose interior it remained nine nights; but though this
seemingly makes Taliessin's mother a bird, he speaks of himself,
without mentioning any intervening transformation, as a gwas or
young man. Such an origin was perhaps never meant to be other than
incomprehensible. Lastly as to rebirth, I may say that it has often
struck me that the Welsh habit, especially common in Carnarvonshire and
Anglesey, of one child in a family being named, partially or wholly,
after a grandparent, is to be regarded as a trace of the survival from
early times of a belief in such atavism as has been suggested above
[216].
The belief in transformations or transmigrations, such as have been
mentioned, must have lent itself to various developments, and two
at least of them are deserving of some notice here. First may be
mentioned one which connects itself intimately with the druid or
magician: he is master of his own transformations, as in the case of
Ceridwen and Gwion, for he had acquired his magic by tasting of the
contents of Ceridwen's Cauldron of Sciences, and he retained his memory
continuously through his shape-shiftings, as is best illustrated,
perhaps, by the case of Tuan mac Cairill. The next step was for him
to realize his changes, not as matters of the past but as present
and possible; in fact, to lay claim to being anybody or anything he
likes at any moment. Of this we have a remarkable instance in the case
of Amairgen, seer and judge of the Milesians or Sons of Míl, in the
story of their conquest of Ireland, as told in the Book of Leinster,
fo. 12b. As he first sets his right foot on the land of Erin he sings a
lay in which he says, that he is a boar, a bull, and a salmon, together
with other things also, such as the sea-breeze, the rolling wave,
the roar of the billows, and a lake on the plain. Nor does he forget
to pretend to wisdom and science beyond other men, and to hint that
he is the divinity that gives them knowledge and sense. The similarity
between this passage and others in the Book of Taliessin has attracted
the attention of scholars: see M. d'Arbois de Jubainville's Cycle
mythologique irlandais, pp. 242 et seq. On the whole, Taliessin revels
most in the side of the picture devoted to his knowledge and science:
he has passed through so many scenes and changes that he has been an
eye-witness to all kinds of events in Celtic story. Thus he was with
Brân on his expedition to Ireland, and saw when Mordwyt Tyllion was
slain in the great slaughter of the Meal-bag Pavilion. This, however,
was not all; he represents himself as also a sywedyd [217], 'vates or
prophet, astrologer and astronomer,' a sage who boasts his knowledge
of the physical world and propounds questions which he challenges
his rivals to answer concerning earth and sea, day and night, sun and
moon. He is not only Taliessin, but also Gwion, and hence one infers
his magical powers to have been derived. If he regards anybody as
his equal or superior, that seems to have been Talhaiarn, to whom he
ascribes the greatest science. Talhaiarn is usually thought of only as
a great bard by Welsh writers, but it is his science and wisdom that
Taliessin admires [218], whereby one is to understand, doubtless,
that Talhaiarn, like Taliessin, was a great magician. To this day
Welsh bards and bardism have not been quite dissociated from magic,
in so far as the witch Ceridwen is regarded as their patroness.
The boasts of Amairgen are characterized by M. d'Arbois de Jubainville
as a sort of pantheism, and he detects traces of the same doctrine,
among other places, in the teaching of the Irishman, known as Scotus
Erigena, at the court of Charles the Bald in the ninth century:
see the Cycle mythologique, p. 248. In any case, one is prepared
by such utterances as those of Amairgen to understand the charge
recorded in the Senchus Mór, i. 23, as made against the Irish druids
or magicians of his time by a certain Connla Cainbhrethach, one of the
remarkable judges of Erin, conjectured by O'Curry--on what grounds
I do not know--to have lived in the first century of our era. The
statement there made is to the following effect:--'After her came
Connla Cainbhrethach, chief doctor of Connaught; he excelled the
men of Erin in wisdom, for he was filled with the grace of the Holy
Ghost; he used to contend with the druids, who said that it was they
that made heaven and earth, and the sea, &c., and the sun and moon,
&c.' This view of the pretensions of the druids is corroborated by
the fact that magic, especially the power of shape-shifting at will,
was regarded as power par excellence [219], and by the old formula
of wishing one well, which ran thus: Bendacht dee ocus andee fort,
'the blessing of gods and not-gods upon thee!' The term 'gods' in this
context is explained to have meant persons of power [220], and the term
'not-gods' farmers or those connected with the land, probably all those
whose lives were directly dependent on farming and the cultivation
of the soil, as distinguished from professional men such as druids
and smiths. This may be further illustrated by a passage from the
account of the second battle of Moytura, published by Stokes with a
translation, in the Revue Celtique, xii. 52-130. See more especially
pp. 74-6, where we find Lug offering his services to the king, Nuada
of the Silver Hand. Among other qualifications which Lug possessed, he
named that of being a sorcerer, to which the porter at once replied:
'We need thee not; we have sorcerers already. Many are our wizards
and our folk of might'--that is, those of our people who possess
power--ar lucht cumachtai. Wizards (druith) and lucht cumachtai came,
it is observed, alike under the more general designation of sorcerers
(corrguinigh).
One seems to come upon traces of the same classification of a
community into professionals and non-professionals, for that is
what it comes to, in an obscure Welsh term, Teulu Oeth ac Anoeth,
which may be conjectured to have meant 'the Household of Oeth and
Anoeth' in the sense of Power and Not-power [221]. However that
may be, the professional class of men who were treated as persons
of power and gods seem to have attained to their position by virtue
of the magic of which they claimed to be masters, and especially of
their supposed faculty of shape-shifting at will. In other words,
the druidic pantheism [222] which Erigena was able to dress in the
garb of a fairly respectable philosophy proves to have been, in point
of genesis, but a few removes from a primitive kind of savage folklore.
None of these stories of shape-shifting, and of being born again, make
any allusion to a soul. To revert, for instance, to Llew Llawgyffes,
it is evident that the eagle cannot be regarded as his soul. The
decayed state of the eagle's body seems to imply that it was somehow
the same body as that of Llew at the time when he was wounded by
Gronw's poisoned spear: the festering of the eagle's flesh looks as
if considered a continuation of the wound. It is above all things,
however, to be noted that none of the stories in point, whether Irish
or Welsh, contain any suggestion of the hero's life coming to an end,
or in any way perishing; Llew lives on to be transformed, under the
stroke of Gwydion's wand, from being an eagle to be a man again; and
Tuan mac Cairill persists in various forms till he meets St. Finnen in
the sixth century. Then in the case of Étáin, we are told in the Book
of the Dun Cow, fo. 129a, that her first-mentioned birth and the next
one were separated by more than a thousand years. So practically we may
say that these stories implied that men and women were imperishable,
that they had no end necessarily to their existence. This sort of
notion may be detected in Llew's words when he says, 'Unless God kill
me ... it is not easy to kill me.' The reference to the Almighty may
probably be regarded as a comparatively late interpolation due to
Christian teaching. A similar instance seems to occur in a poem in
the Black Book of Carmarthen, fos. 47b-8b, where Arthur loudly sings
the praises of his friend Cai. The couplet in point runs thus:--
Ny bei duv ae digonhei.
Oet diheit aghev kei.
Unless it were God that wrought it,
Hard to effect were the death of Cai.
I am not sure, however, of the meaning; for, among other things,
diheit, which I am inclined to interpret as 'hard to reach' or 'not
easy to effect,' has been rendered otherwise by others [223]. In any
case, the other instance seems to imply that at one time the heroes
of Llew's world were not necessarily expected to die at all; and when
they happened to do so, it was probably regarded, as among savages at
the present day, as a result brought about by magic. Any reader who may
feel astonished at such a crudeness of belief, will find something to
contrast and compare in the familiar doctrine, that but for the fall
of Adam and Eve we should have never heard of death, whether of man
or of beast. But if he proceeds to ask questions about the economy of
our world in case nobody died, he must be satisfied to be told that
to ask any such question is here not only useless but also irrelevant.
Now, suppose that in a society permeated by the crude kind of
notions of which one finds traces in the Mabinogion and other old
Welsh literature, a man arose who had a turn for philosophizing and
trying to think things out: how would he reason? It seems probable
that he would argue, that underneath all the change there must be some
substratum which is permanent. If Tuan, he would say, changed from one
form to another and remembered all that he had gone through, there must
have been something which lasted, otherwise Tuan would have come to an
end early in the story, and the later individual would not be Tuan at
all. Probably one thing which, according to our folklore philosopher's
way of thinking, lasted through the transformations, was the material
of Tuan's body, just as one is induced to suppose that Llew's body, and
that of the eagle into which he was transformed, were considered to be
one and the same body labouring under the mortifying influence of the
wound inflicted on Llew by Gronw's enchanted spear. Further, we have
already found reasons to regard the existence of the soul as forming a
part of the creed of some at any rate of the early inhabitants of this
country, though we have no means of gathering what precise attributes
our philosopher might ascribe to it besides the single one, perhaps,
of continuing to exist. In that case he might otherwise describe
Tuan's shape-shifting as the entrance of Tuan's soul into a series
of different bodies. Now the philosopher here sketched agrees pretty
closely with the little that is known of the Gaulish druid, such as he
is described by ancient authors [224]. The latter seem to have been
agreed in regarding him as believing in the immortality of the soul,
and several of them appear to have thought his views similar to those
of Pythagoras and his school. So we may perhaps venture to suppose that
the druids, like Pythagoras, believed in the transmigration of souls,
including that from the human to an animal form and the reverse. If,
in the absence of an explicit statement, one may ascribe this latter
form of that belief to the druids, the identity of their creed becomes
almost complete with that of our conjectured folklore philosopher. At
one time I was inclined to fancy that the druids of Gaul had received
no unimportant part of their teaching from Greek philosophy by way
of Massilia, but I am now more disposed to believe their doctrines
to have been gradually developed, in the way above suggested, from
the unfailing resources of that folklore which revelled in scenes of
shape-shifting and rebirth. Possibly the doctrines of Pythagoras may
have themselves had a like origin and a somewhat parallel development,
or let us say rather that the Orphic notions had, which preceded
Pythagoreanism.
But as to Gaul generally, it is not to be assumed that the Gaulish
druids and all the other Gauls held the same opinion on these
questions: we have some evidence that they did not. Thus the Gauls
in the neighbourhood of Massilia [225], who would accept a creditor's
promise to pay up in the next world, can hardly have contemplated the
possibility of any such creditor being then a bird or a moth. Should
it be objected that the transformations, instanced above as Brythonic
and Goidelic, were assumed only in the case of magicians and other
professional or privileged persons, and that we are not told what was
held to happen in the case of the rank and file of humanity, it is
enough to answer that neither do we know what the druids of Gaul held
to be the fate of the common people of their communities. No lever
can be applied in that direction to disturb the lines of the parallel.
In previous chapters, pp. 45, 54, 61, 88, 97, 229, instances
from Welsh sources have been given of the fairies concealing
their names. But Wales is not the only Celtic land where we find
traces of this treatment of one's name: it is to be detected also
on Irish ground. Thus, when a herald from an enemy's camp comes to
parley with Cúchulainn and his charioteer, the latter, being first
approached, describes himself as the 'man of the man down there,'
meaning Cúchulainn, to whom he pointed; and when the herald comes to
Cúchulainn himself, he asks him whose man he is: Cúchulainn describes
himself as the 'man of Conchobar mac Nessa.' The herald then inquires
if he has no more definite designation, and Cúchulainn replies that
what he has given will suffice [226]: neither of the men gives his
name. Thus Celts of both groups, Brythons and Goidels, are at one in
yielding evidence to the same sort of cryptic treatment of personal
names, at some stage or other in their past history.
The student of man tells us, as already pointed out, that the reason
for the reluctance to disclose one's name was of the same nature as
that which makes savages, and some men belonging to nations above the
savage state feel anxious that an enemy should not get possession of
anything identified with their persons, such as a lock of one's hair,
a drop of one's blood, or anything closely connected with one's person,
lest it should give the enemy power over one's person as a whole,
especially if such enemy is suspected of possessing any skill in
handling the terrors of magic. In other words, the anthropologist would
say that the name was regarded as identified with the person; and,
having said this, he has mostly felt satisfied that he has definitively
disposed of the matter. Therein, however, he is possibly wrong; for
when he says that the name was probably treated as a part of the man,
that only leads one to ask the question, What part of the man? At any
rate, I can see nothing very unreasonable in such a question, though
I am quite willing to word it differently, and to ask: Is there any
evidence to show with what part of a man his name was associated?
As regards the Aryan nations, we seem to have a clue to an answer in
the interesting group of Aryan words in point, from which I select
the following:--Irish ainm, 'a name,' plural anmann; Old Welsh anu,
now enw, also 'a name'; Old Bulgarian imen (for *ienmen, *anman);
Old Prussian emnes, emmens, accusative emnan; and Armenian anwan
(for a stem *anman)--all meaning a name. To these some scholars [227]
would add, and it may be rightly, the English word name itself, the
Latin nomen, the Sanskrit naman, and the Greek ynoma; but, as some
others find a difficulty in thus grouping these words, I abstain
from laying any stress on them. In fact, I have every reason to be
satisfied with the wide extent of the Aryan world covered by the other
instances enumerated as Celtic, Prussian, Bulgarian, and Armenian.
Now, such is the similarity between Welsh enw, 'name,' and enaid,
'soul,' that I cannot help referring the two words to one and the same
origin, especially when I see the same or rather greater similarity
illustrated by the Irish words, ainm, 'name,' and anim, 'soul.' This
similarity between the Irish words so pervades the declension of
them, that a beginner frequently falls into the error of confounding
them in medieval texts. Take, for instance, the genitive singular,
anma, which may mean either animæ or nominis; the nominative plural,
anmand, which may be either animæ or nomina; and the gen. anmand,
either animarum or nominum, as the dative anmannaib may likewise be
either animabus or nominibus. In fact, one is at first sight almost
tempted to suppose that the partial differentiation of the Irish forms
was only brought about under the influence of Latin, with its distinct
forms of anima and nomen. That would be pressing the point too far;
but the direct teaching of the Celtic vocables is that they are
all to be referred to the same origin in the Aryan word for 'breath
or breathing,' which is represented by such words as Latin anima,
Welsh anadl, 'breath,' and a Gothic anan, 'blow or breathe,' whence
the compound preterite uz-on, twice used by Ulfilas in the fifteenth
chapter of St. Mark's Gospel to render exepneuse, 'gave up the ghost.'
Now the lessons which the words here grouped together contain for the
student of man is, that the Celts, and certain other widely separated
Aryans, unless we should rather say the whole of the Aryan family,
were once in the habit of closely associating both the soul and one's
name with the breath of life. The evidence is satisfactory so far as
it goes; but let us go a little more into detail, and see as exactly
as we can to what it commits us. Commencing at the beginning, we may
set out with the axiom that breathing is a physical action, and that
in the temperate zone one's breath is not unfrequently visible. Then
one may say that the men who made the words--Welsh, enaid (for an
earlier anatio-s), 'soul'; Irish, anim (from an earlier stem, animon);
Latin, anima, also animus, 'feeling, mind, soul'; and Greek, anemos,
'air, wind'--must have in some way likened the soul to one's breath,
which perhaps first suggested the idea. At all events they showed
not only that they did not contemplate the soul as a bone, or any
solid portion of a man's frame, or even as a manikin residing inside
it: in fact they had made a great advance in the direction of the
abstract notion of a spirit, in which some of them may have been
helped by another association of ideas, namely, that indicated by
speaking of the dead as shades or shadows, umbræ, skiai. Similarly,
the words in point for 'name' seem to prove that some of the ancient
Aryans must have, in some way, associated one's name with the breath
of life. On the other hand, we find nothing to show that the name and
the soul were directly compared or associated with one another, while
the association of the name with the breath represents, probably, a
process as much earlier as it is cruder, than likening the soul to the
breath and naming it accordingly. This is countenanced to some extent
by the general physiognomy, so to say, of words like enaid, anima,
as contrasted with enw, ainm, nomen, name. Speaking relatively, the
former might be of almost any date in point of comparative lateness,
while the latter could not, belonging as they do to a small declension
which was not wont to receive accessions to its numbers.
In what way, then, or in what respect did early folklore identify the
name with the breath? Before one could expect to answer this question
in anything like a convincing fashion, one would have to examine
the collector of the folklore of savages, or rather to induce him to
cross-examine them on the point. For instance, among the Singhalese
[228], when in the ceremony of name-giving the father utters the baby's
name in a low whisper in the baby's ear, is that called breathing the
name? and is the name so whispered called a breath or a breathing? In
the case of the savages who name their children at their birth, is
the reason ever advanced that a name must be given to the child in
order to make it breathe, or, at least, in order to facilitate its
breathing? Some such a notion of reinforcing the child's vitality and
safety would harmonize well enough with the fact that, as Mr. Clodd
[229] puts it, 'Barbaric, Pagan, and Christian folklore is full of
examples of the importance of naming and other birth-ceremonies,
in the belief that the child's life is at the mercy of evil spirits
watching the chance of casting spells upon it, of demons covetous to
possess it, and of fairies eager to steal it and leave a "changeling"
in its place.' Provisionally, one must perhaps rest content to
suppose the association of the name to have taken place with the
breath regarded as an accompaniment of life. Looked at in that sense,
the name becomes associated with one's life, and, speaking roughly,
with one's person; and it is interesting to notice that one seems to
detect traces in Welsh literature of some confusion of the kind. Thus,
when the hero of the story of Kulhwch and Olwen was christened he
was named Kulhwch, which is expressed in Welsh as 'forcing or driving
Kulhwch on him' (gyrru kulh6ch arna6 [230]); Kulh6ch, be it noticed,
not the name Kulhwch. Similarly when Brân, on the eve of his expedition
to Ireland, left seven princes, or knights as they are also called,
to take charge of his dominions, we have an instance of the kind. The
stead or town was named after the seven knights, and it is a place
which is now known as Bryn y Saith Marchog, 'the Hill of the Seven
Knights,' near Gwydelwern, in Merionethshire. But the wording of the
Mabinogi of Branwen is o acha6s hynny y dodet seith marcha6c ar y dref
[231], meaning 'for that reason the stead was called Seven Knights,'
literally 'for that reason one put Seven Knights on the stead.' In
Guest's Mabinogion, iii. 116, this will be found rendered wrongly,
though not wholly without excuse--'for this reason were the seven
knights placed in the town.' It is probable that the redactor of the
stories from which the two foregoing instances come--and more might
be cited--was not so much courting ambiguities as adhering to an old
form of expression which neglected from the first to distinguish,
in any formal way, between names and the persons or things which they
would, in modern phraseology, be said to represent [232].
An instance has been already mentioned of a man's name being put or
set on him, or rather forced on him: at any rate, his name is on him
both in Welsh and Irish, and the latter language also speaks of it as
cleaving or adhering to him. Neither language contemplates the name,
however closely identified with him, as having become an inseparable
part of him, or else as something he has secured for himself. In the
neo-Celtic tongues, both Welsh and Irish, all things which a man owns,
and all things for which he takes credit, are with him or by him;
but all things which he cannot help having, whether creditable or
discreditable, if they are regarded as coming from without are on him,
not with him. Thus, if he is wealthy there is money with him; but if
he is in debt and owes money, the money is on him. Similarly, if he
rejoices there is joy with him; whereas if he is ashamed or afraid,
shame or fear is on him. This is a far-reaching distinction, of capital
importance in Celtic phraseology, and judged by this criterion the
name is something from without the man, something which he cannot
take credit to himself for having acquired by his own direct willing
or doing. This is to be borne in mind when one speaks of the name as
identified or closely bound up with one's life and personality. But
this qualified identification of the name with the man is also what
one may infer from savage folklore; for many, perhaps most, of the
nations who name their children at their birth, have those names
changed when the children grow up. That is done when a boy has to be
initiated into the mysteries of his tribe or of a guild, or it may
be when he has achieved some distinction in war. In most instances,
it involves a serious ceremony and the intervention of the wise man,
whether the medicine-man of a savage system, or the priest of a higher
religion [233]. In the ancient Wales of the Mabinogion, and in pagan
Ireland, the name-giving was done, subject to certain conditions,
at the will and on the initiative of the druid, who was at the same
time tutor and teacher of the youth to be renamed [234]. Here I may
be allowed to direct attention to the two following facts: the druid,
recalling as he does the magician of the Egypt of the Pentateuch
and the shaman of the Mongolian world of our own time, represented
a profession probably not of Celtic origin. In the next place, his
method of selecting names from incidents was palpably incompatible
with what is known to have been the Aryan system of nomenclature,
by means of compounds, as evinced by the annals of most nations of
the Aryan family of speech: such compounds, I mean, as Welsh Pen-wyn,
'white-headed,' Gaulish Penno-ouindos, or Greek Hipparchos, Archippos,
and the like. Briefly, one may say that the association of the name
with the breath of life was probably Aryan, but without, perhaps,
being unfamiliar to the aborigines of the British Isles before their
conquest by the Celts. On the other hand, in the druid and his method
of naming we seem to touch the non-Aryan substratum, and to detect
something which was not Celtic, not Aryan [235].
Perhaps the reader will not regard it as wholly irrelevant if here
I change the subject for a while from one's name to other words and
locutions in so far as they may be regarded as illustrative of the
mental surroundings in which the last paragraph leaves the name. I
allude especially to the exaggerated influence associated with
a form of words, more particularly among the Irish Celts. O'Curry
gives a tragic instance: the poet Néde mac Adnai, in order to obtain
possession of the throne of Connaught, asked an impossible request of
the king, who was his own father's brother and named Caier. When the
king declared his inability to accede to his demand the poet made the
refusal his excuse for composing on the king what was called in Irish
an áir or áer, written later aor, 'satire,' which ran approximately
thus:--
Evil, death, short life to Caier!
May spears of battle wound Caier!
Caier quenched, Caier forced, Caier underground!
Under ramparts, under stones with Caier!
O'Curry goes on to relate how Caier, washing his face at the
fountain next morning, discovered that it had three blisters on it,
which the satire had raised, to wit, disgrace, blemish, and defect,
in colours of crimson, green, and white. So Caier fleeing, that
his plight might not be seen of his friends, came to Dun Cearmna
(now the Old Head of Kinsale, in county Cork), the residence of
Caichear, chief of that district. There Caier was well received as
a stranger of unknown quality, while Néde assumed the sovereignty
of Connaught. In time, Néde came to know of Caier being there, and
rode there in Caier's chariot. But as Néde approached Caier escaped
through his host's house and hid himself in the cleft of a rock,
whither Néde followed Caier's greyhound; and when Caier saw Néde,
the former dropped dead of shame [236]. This abstract of the story
as told by O'Curry, will serve to show how the words of the satirist
were dreaded by high and low among the ancient Irish, and how their
demands had to be at once obeyed. It is a commonplace of Irish
literature that the satirist's words unfailingly raised blisters on
the face of him at whom they were aimed. A portion at least of the
potency of the poet's words seems to have been regarded as due to
their being given a certain metrical form. That, however, does not
show how the poet had acquired his influence, and one cannot shut
one's eyes to the fact that the means he might adopt to make his
influence felt and his wishes instantly attended to, implied that
the race with which he had to deal was a highly sensitive one: I may
perhaps apply to it the adjective thin-skinned, in the literal sense
of that word. For the blisters on the face are only an exaggeration
of a natural phenomenon. On this point my attention has been called
by a friend to the following passages in a review of a work on the
pathology of the emotions [237]:--
'To both the hurtful and curative effects of the emotions M. Féré
devotes much attention, and on these points makes some interesting
remarks. That the emotions act on the body, more by their effects on
the circulation than by anything else, is no new thesis, but M. Féré
is developing some new branches of it. That the heart may be stopped
for a few seconds, and that there may be localised flush and pallor of
the skin, owing to almost any strong emotion, whether it be joy, anger,
fear, or pain, is a matter of common observation; and that there may
be many changes of nutrition due to vaso-motor disturbance is a point
easy to establish. The skin is particularly easily affected; passion
and pain may produce a sweat that is truly hemorrhagic (Parrot);
and the scientific world is obliged to admit that in the stigmata of
Louise Lateau the blood vessels were really broken, and not broken by
anything else than an emotional state as cause. In a shipwreck Follain
tells us that the pilot was covered in an hour with pustules from his
fear; and the doctor sees many dermato-neuroses, such as nettle-rash,
herpes, pemphigus, vitiligo, &c, from the choc moral.'
I can illustrate this from my own observation: when I was an
undergraduate there was with me at college a Welsh undergraduate, who,
when teased or annoyed by his friends, was well known to be subject
to a sort of rash or minute pustules on his face: it would come on
in the course of an hour or so. There is a well-known Welsh line on
this subject of the face which is to the point:--
Ni chel grud gystud càlon.
The cheek hides not the heart's affliction.
So a man who was insulted, or whose honour was assailed, might be
said to be thereby put to the blush or to be otherwise injured in his
face; and the Irish word enech, 'face,' is found commonly used as a
synonym for one's honour or good name. The same appears to have been
the case with the Welsh equivalent, wyneb, 'face,' and dyn di-wyneb,
literally 'a faceless man,' appears to be now used in Carnarvonshire
and Glamorgan in the sense of one who is without a sense of honour,
an unprincipled fellow. So when Welsh law dealt with insults and
attacks on one's honour the payment to be made to the injured person
was called gwynebwerth, 'the price of one's face,' or gwynebwarth,
'the payment for disgracing one's face.' Irish law arranged for similar
damages, and called them by analogous names, such as enech-gris,
'a fine for injuring or raising a blush on the face,' and enech-lóg or
enech-lann, 'honour price'; compare also enech-ruice, 'a face-reddening
or blushing caused by some act or scandal which brought shame on
a family.' Possibly one has to do with traces of somewhat the same
type of 'face,' though it has faded away to the verge of vanishing,
when one speaks in English of keeping another in countenance.
It has been suggested that if a magician got a man's name he could
injure him by means of his arts: now the converse seems to have been
the case with the Irish áer or satire, for to be effective it had,
as in the instance of Caier, to mention the victim's name; and a
curious instance occurs in the Book of Leinster, fo. 117, where
the poet Atherne failed to curse a person whose name he could not
manipulate according to the rules of his satire. This man Atherne is
described as inhospitable, stingy, and greedy to the last degree. So
it is related how he sallied forth one day, taking with him a cooked
pig and a pot of mead, to a place where he intended to gorge himself
without being observed. But no sooner had he settled down to his meal
than he saw a man approaching, who remarked to him on his operating
on the food all alone, and unceremoniously picked up the porker and
the pot of mead. As he was coolly walking away with them, Atherne
cried out after him, 'What is thy name?' The stranger replied that
it was nothing very grand, and gave it as follows:--
Sethor . ethor . othor . sele . dele . dreng gerce
Mec gerlusce . ger ger . dír dír issed moainmse.
Sethor-Ethor-Othor-Sele-Dele-Dreng gerce
Son of Gerlusce ger-ger-dír-dír, that is my name.
The story goes on to say that Atherne neither saw his meal any more
nor succeeded in making a satire on the name of the stranger, who
accordingly got away unscathed. It was surmised, we are told, that
he was an angel come from God to teach the poet better manners. This
comic story brings us back to the importance of the name, as it implies
that the cursing poet, had he been able to seize it and duly work it
into his satire, could not have failed to bring about the intruder's
discomfiture. The magician and folklore philosopher, far from asking
with Juliet, 'What's in a name?' would have rather put it the other
way, 'What's not in a name?' At any rate the ancients believed that
there was a great deal in a name, and traces of the importance which
they gave it are to be found in modern speech: witness the article on
name or its equivalent in a big dictionary of any language possessed
of a great literature.
It has been seen that it is from the point of view of magic that the
full importance of one's name was most keenly realized by our ancient
Celts; that is, of magic more especially in that stage of its history
when it claimed as its own a certain degree of skill in the art of
verse-making. Perhaps, indeed, it would be more accurate to suppose
that verse-making appertained from the outset to magic, and that
it was magicians, medicine-men, or seers, who, for their own use,
first invented the aids of rhythm and metre. The subject, however,
of magic and its accessories is far too vast to be treated here: it
has been touched upon here and there in some of the previous chapters,
and I may add that wizardry and magic form the machinery, so to say,
of the stories called in Welsh the 'Four Branches of the Mabinogi'
namely those of Pwyll, Branwen, Manawydan, and Math. Now these four,
together with the adventure of Llûd and Llevelys, and, in a somewhat
qualified sense, the story of Kulhwch and Olwen, represent in a
Brythonicized form the otherwise lost legends of the Welsh Goidels;
and, like those of the Irish Goidels, they are remarkable for their
wizardry. Nor is that all, for in the former the kings are mostly
the greatest magicians of their time: or shall I rather put it the
other way, and say that in them the greatest magicians function as
kings? Witness Math son of Mathonwy king of Gwyned, and his sister's
son, Gwydion ab Dôn, to whom as his successor he duly taught his magic;
then come the arch-enchanter Arawn, king of Annwn, and Caswallon
ab Beli, represented as winning his kingdom by the sheer force of
magic. To these might be added other members of the kingly families
whose story shows them playing the rôle of magicians, such as Rhiannon,
who by her magic arts foiled her powerful suitor, Gwawl ab Clûd,
and secured as her consort the man of her choice, Pwyll prince of
Dyfed. Here also, perhaps, one might mention Manawydan ab Llyr, who,
as Manannán mac Lir, figures in the stories of the Goidels of Erin
and Man as a consummate wizard and first king of the Manx people: see
p. 314 above. In the Mabinogi, however, no act of magic is ascribed
to Manawydan, though he is represented successfully checkmating the
most formidable wizard arrayed against him and his friends, to wit,
Llwyd ab Kilcoed. Not only does one get the impression that the ruling
class in these stories of the Welsh Goidels had their magic handed down
from generation to generation according to a fixed rule of maternal
succession (pp. 326, 503, 505), but it supplies the complete answer
to and full explanation of questions as to the meaning of the terms
already mentioned, Tuatha Dé ocus Andé, and Lucht Cumachtai, together
with its antithesis. Within the magic-wielding class exercising
dominion over the shepherds and tillers of the soil of the country, it
is but natural to suppose that the first king was the first magician
or greatest medicine-man, as in the case of Manannán in the Isle of
Man. This must of course be understood to apply to the early history
of the Goidelic race, or, perhaps more correctly speaking, to one of
the races which had contributed to its composition: to the aborigines,
let us say, by whatsoever name or names you may choose to call them,
whether Picts or Ivernians. It is significant, among other things,
that our traditions should connect the potency of ancient wizardry
with descent in the female line of succession, and, in any case, one
cannot be wrong in assuming magic to have begun very low down in the
scale of social progress, probably lower than religion, with which
it is essentially in antagonism. As the crude and infantile pack of
notions, collectively termed sympathetic magic--beginning with the
belief that any effect may be produced by imitating the action of the
cause of it, or even doing anything that would recall it [238]--grew
into the panoply of the magician, he came to regard himself, and to
be regarded by others, as able for his own benefit and that of his
friends to coerce all possible opponents, whether men or demons,
heroes or gods. This left no room for the attitude of prayer and
worship: religion in that sense could only come later.