Transcribed from the 1906 Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd. edition by David
Price, ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
CELTIC RELIGION
IN PRE-CHRISTIAN TIMES
By
EDWARD ANWYL, M.A.
LATE CLASSICAL SCHOLAR OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD
PROFESSOR OF WELSH AND COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY AT
THE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF WALES, ABERYSTWYTH
ACTING-CHAIRMAN OF THE CENTRAL WELSH BOARD
FOR INTERMEDIATE EDUCATION
LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO LTD
16 JAMES STREET HAYMARKET
1906
Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
FOREWORD
It is only as prehistoric archaeology has come to throw more and more
light on the early civilisations of Celtic lands that it has become
possible to interpret Celtic religion from a thoroughly modern viewpoint.
The author cordially acknowledges his indebtedness to numerous writers on
this subject, but his researches into some portions of the field
especially have suggested to him the possibility of giving a new
presentation to certain facts and groups of facts, which the existing
evidence disclosed. It is to be hoped that a new interest in the
religion of the Celts may thereby be aroused.
E. ANWYL.
ABERYSTWYTH,
_February_ 15, 1906.
CHAPTER I--INTRODUCTORY: THE CELTS
In dealing with the subject of 'Celtic Religion' the first duty of the
writer is to explain the sense in which the term 'Celtic' will be used in
this work. It will be used in reference to those countries and districts
which, in historic times, have been at one time or other mainly of Celtic
speech. It does not follow that all the races which spoke a form of the
Celtic tongue, a tongue of the Indo-European family, were all of the same
stock. Indeed, ethnological and archaeological evidence tends to
establish clearly that, in Gaul and Britain, for example, man had lived
for ages before the introduction of any variety of Aryan or Indo-European
speech, and this was probably the case throughout the whole of Western
and Southern Europe. Further, in the light of comparative philology, it
has now become abundantly clear that the forms of Indo-European speech
which we call Celtic are most closely related to those of the Italic
family, of which family Latin is the best known representative. From
this it follows that we are to look for the centre of dissemination of
Aryan Celtic speech in some district of Europe that could have been the
natural centre of dissemination also for the Italic languages. From this
common centre, through conquest and the commercial intercourse which
followed it, the tribes which spoke the various forms of Celtic and
Italic speech spread into the districts occupied by them in historic
times. The common centre of radiation for Celtic and Italic speech was
probably in the districts of Noricum and Pannonia, the modern Carniola,
Carinthia, etc., and the neighbouring parts of the Danube valley. The
conquering Aryan-speaking Celts and Italians formed a military
aristocracy, and their success in extending the range of their languages
was largely due to their skill in arms, combined, in all probability,
with a talent for administration. This military aristocracy was of
kindred type to that which carried Aryan speech into India and Persia,
Armenia and Greece, not to speak of the original speakers of the Teutonic
and Slavonic tongues. In view of the necessity of discovering a centre,
whence the Indo-European or Aryan languages in general could have
radiated Eastwards, as well as Westwards, the tendency to-day is to
regard these tongues as having been spoken originally in some district
between the Carpathians and the Steppes, in the form of kindred dialects
of a common speech. Some branches of the tribes which spoke these
dialects penetrated into Central Europe, doubtless along the Danube, and,
from the Danube valley, extended their conquests together with their
various forms of Aryan speech into Southern and Western Europe. The
proportion of conquerors to conquered was not uniform in all the
countries where they held sway, so that the amount of Aryan blood in
their resultant population varied greatly. In most cases, the families
of the original conquerors, by their skill in the art of war and a
certain instinct of government, succeeded in making their own tongues the
dominant media of communication in the lands where they ruled, with the
result that most of the languages of Europe to-day are of the Aryan or
Indo-European type. It does not, however, follow necessarily from this
that the early religious ideas or the artistic civilisation of countries
now Aryan in speech, came necessarily from the conquerors rather than the
conquered. In the last century it was long held that in countries of
Aryan speech the essential features of their civilisation, their
religious ideas, their social institutions, nay, more, their inhabitants
themselves, were of Aryan origin.
A more critical investigation has, however, enabled us to distinguish
clearly between the development of various factors of human life which in
their evolution can follow and often have followed more or less
independent lines. The physical history of race, for instance, forms a
problem by itself and must be studied by anthropological and ethnological
methods. Language, again, has often spread along lines other than those
of race, and its investigation appertains to the sphere of the
philologist. Material civilisation, too, has not of necessity followed
the lines either of racial or of linguistic development, and the search
for its ancient trade-routes may be safely left to the archaeologist.
Similarly the spread of ideas in religion and thought is one which has
advanced on lines of its own, and its investigation must be conducted by
the methods and along the lines of the comparative study of religions.
In the wide sense, then, in which the word 'Celtic religion' will be used
in this work, it will cover the modes of religious thought prevalent in
the countries and districts, which, in course of time, were mainly
characterised by their Celtic speech. To the sum-total of these
religious ideas contributions have been made from many sources. It would
be rash to affirm that the various streams of Aryan Celtic conquest made
no contributions to the conceptions of life and of the world which the
countries of their conquest came to hold (and the evidence of language
points, indeed, to some such contributions), but their quota appears to
be small compared with that of their predecessors; nor is this
surprising, in view of the immense period during which the lands of their
conquest had been previously occupied. Nothing is clearer than the
marvellous persistence of traditional and immemorial modes of thought,
even in the face of conquest and subjugation, and, whatever ideas on
religion the Aryan conquerors of Celtic lands may have brought with them,
they whose conquests were often only partial could not eradicate the
inveterate beliefs of their predecessors, and the result in the end was
doubtless some compromise, or else the victory of the earlier faith.
But the Aryan conquerors of Gaul and Italy themselves were not men who
had advanced up the Danube in one generation. Those men of Aryan speech
who poured into the Italian peninsula and into Gaul were doubtless in
blood not unmixed with the older inhabitants of Central Europe, and had
entered into the body of ideas which formed the religious beliefs of the
men of the Danube valley. The common modifications of the Aryan tongue,
by Italians and Celts alike, as compared with Greek, suggests contact
with men of different speech. Among the names of Celtic gods, too, like
those of other countries, we find roots that are apparently irreducible
to any found in Indo-European speech, and we know not what pre-Aryan
tongues may have contributed them. Scholars, to-day, are far more alive
than they ever were before to the complexity of the contributory elements
that have entered into the tissue of the ancient religions of mankind,
and the more the relics of Celtic religion are investigated, the more
complex do its contributory factors become. In the long ages before
history there were unrecorded conquests and migrations innumerable, and
ideas do not fail to spread because there is no historian to record them.
The more the scanty remnants of Celtic religion are examined, the clearer
it becomes that many of its characteristic features had been evolved
during the vast period of the ages of stone. During these millennia, men
had evolved, concomitantly with their material civilisation, a kind of
working philosophy of life, traces of which are found in every land where
this form of civilisation has prevailed. Man's religion can never be
dissociated from his social experience, and the painful stages through
which man reached the agricultural life, for example, have left their
indelible impress on the mind of man in Western Europe, as they have in
every land. We are thus compelled, from the indications which we have of
Celtic religion, in the names of its deities, its rites, and its
survivals in folk-lore and legend, to come to the conclusion, that its
fundamental groundwork is a body of ideas, similar to those of other
lands, which were the natural correlatives of the phases of experience
through which man passed in his emergence into civilised life. To
demonstrate and to illustrate these relations will be the aim of the
following chapters.