In the chief countries of Celtic civilisation, Gaul, Cisalpine and
Transalpine, Britain and Ireland, abundant materials have been found for
elucidating the stages of culture through which man passed in prehistoric
times. In Britain, for example, palaeolithic man has left numerous
specimens of his implements, but the forms even of these rude implements
suggest that they, too, have been evolved from still more primitive
types. Some antiquarians have thought to detect such earlier types in
the stones that have been named 'eoliths' found in Kent, but, though
these 'eoliths' may possibly show human use, the question of their
history is far from being settled. It is certain, however, that man
succeeded in maintaining himself for ages in the company of the mammoth,
the cave-bear, and other animals now extinct. Whether palaeolithic man
survived the Ice Age in Britain has not so far been satisfactorily
decided. In Gaul, however, there is fair evidence of continuity between
the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods, and this continuity must
obviously have existed somewhere. Still in spite of the indications of
continuity, the civilisation of primitive man in Gaul presents one aspect
that is without any analogues in the life of the palaeolithic men of the
River Drift period, or in that of man of the New Stone Age. The feature
in question is the remarkable artistic skill shown by the cave men of the
Dordogne district. Some of the drawings and carvings of these men reveal
a sense of form which would have done credit to men of a far later age. A
feature such as this, whatever may have been its object, whether it arose
from an effort by means of 'sympathetic magic' to catch animals, as M.
Salomon Reinach suggests, or to the mere artistic impulse, is a standing
reminder to us of the scantiness of our data for estimating the lines of
man's religious and other development in the vast epochs of prehistoric
time.
We know that from the life of hunting man passed into the pastoral stage,
having learned to tame animals. How he came to do so, and by what
motives he was actuated, is still a mystery. It may be, as M. Salomon
Reinach has also suggested, that it was some curious and indefinable
sense of kinship with them that led him to do so, or more probably, as
the present writer thinks, some sense of a need of the alliance of
animals against hostile spirits. In all probability it was no motive
which we can now fathom. The mind of early man was like the unfathomable
mind of a boy. From the pastoral life again man passed after long ages
into the life of agriculture, and the remains of neolithic man in Gaul
and in Britain give us glimpses of his life as a farmer. The ox, the
sheep, the pig, the goat, and the dog were his domestic animals; he could
grow wheat and flax, and could supplement the produce of his farm by
means of hunting and fishing. Neolithic man could spin and weave; he
could obtain the necessary flint for his implements, which he made by
chipping and polishing, and he could also make pottery of a rude variety.
In its essentials we have here the beginnings of the agricultural
civilisation of man all the world over. In life, neolithic man dwelt
sometimes in pit-dwellings and sometimes in hut-circles, covered with a
roof of branches supported by a central pole. In death, he was buried
with his kin in long mounds of earth called barrows, in chambered cairns
and cromlechs or dolmens. The latter usually consist of three standing
stones covered by a cap-stone; forming the stony skeleton of a grave that
has been exposed to view after the mound of earth that covered it has
been washed away. In their graves the dead were buried in a crouching
attitude, and fresh burials were made as occasion required. Sometimes
the cromlech is double, and occasionally there is a hole in one of the
stones, the significance of which is unknown, unless it may have been for
the ingress and egress of souls. Graves of the dolmen or cromlech type
are found in all the countries of Western Europe, North Africa, and
elsewhere, wherever stone suitable for the purpose abounds, and in this
we have a striking illustration of the way in which lines of development
in man's material civilisation are sooner or later correlated to his
geographical, geological, and other surroundings. The religious ideas of
man in neolithic times also came into correlation with the conditions of
his development, and the uninterpreted stone circles and pillars of the
world are a standing witness to the religious zeal of a mind that was
haunted by stone. Before proceeding to exemplify this thesis the
subsequent trend of Celtic civilisation may be briefly sketched.
Through the pacific intercourse of commerce, bronze weapons and
implements began to find their way, about 2000 B.C. or earlier, from
Central and Southern Europe into Gaul, and thence into Britain. In
Britain the Bronze Age begins at about 1500 or 1400 B.C., and it is
thought by some archaeologists that bronze was worked at this period by
the aid of native tin in Britain itself. There are indications, however,
that the introduction of bronze into Britain was not by way of commerce
alone. About the beginning of the Bronze period are found evidences in
this island of a race of different type from that of neolithic man, being
characterised by a round skull and a powerful build, and by general
indications of a martial bearing. The remains of this race are usually
found in round barrows.
This race, which certainly used bronze weapons, is generally believed to
have been the first wave that reached Britain of Aryan conquerors of
Celtic speech from the nearest part of the continent, where it must have
arrived some time previously, probably along the Rhine valley. As the
type of Celtic speech that has penetrated farthest to the west is that
known as the Goidelic or Irish, it has not unreasonably been thought that
this must have been the type that arrived in Britain first. There are
indications, too, that it was this type that penetrated furthest into the
west of Gaul. Its most marked characteristic is its preservation of the
pronunciation of U as 'oo' and of QU, while the 'Brythonic' or Welsh
variety changed U to a sound pronounced like the French 'u' or the German
'u' and also QU to P. There is a similar line of cleavage in the Italic
languages, where Latin corresponds to Goidelic, and Oscan and Umbrian to
Brythonic. Transalpine Gaul was probably invaded by Aryan-speaking Celts
from more than one direction, and the infiltration and invasion of new-
comers, when it had once begun, was doubtless continuous through these
various channels. There are cogent reasons for thinking that ultimately
the dominant type of Celtic speech over the greater part of Gaul came to
be that of the P rather than the QU type, owing to the influx from the
East and Northeast of an overflow from the Rhine valley of tribes
speaking that dialect; a dialect which, by force of conquest and culture,
tended to spread farther and farther West. Into Britain, too, as time
went on, the P type of Celtic was carried, and has survived in Welsh and
Cornish, the remnants of the tongue of ancient Britain. We know, too,
from the name Eporedia (Yvrea), that this dialect of Celtic must have
spread into Cisalpine Gaul. The latter district may have received its
first Celtic invaders direct from the Danube valley, as M. Alexandre
Bertrand held, but it would be rash to assume that all its invaders came
from that direction. In connection, however, with the history of Celtic
religion it is not the spread of the varying types of Celtic dialect that
is important, but the changes in the civilisation of Gaul and Britain,
which reacted on religious ideas or which introduced new factors into the
religious development of these lands.
The predatory expeditions and wars of conquest of military Celtic tribes
in search for new homes for their superfluous populations brought into
prominence the deities of war, as was the case also with the ancient
Romans, themselves an agricultural and at the same time a predatory race.
The prominence of war in Celtic tribal life at one stage has left us the
names of a large number of deities that were identified with Mars and
Bellona, though all the war-gods were not originally such. In the Roman
calendar there is abundant evidence that Mars was at one time an
agricultural god as well as a god of war. The same, as will be shown
later, was the probable history of some of the Celtic deities, who were
identified in Roman times with Mars and Bellona. Caesar tells us that
Mars had at one time been the chief god of the Gauls, and that in Germany
that was still the case. In Britain, also, we find that there were
several deities identified with Mars, notably Belatucadrus and Cocidius,
and this, too, points in the direction of a development of religion under
military influence. The Gauls appear to have made great strides in
military matters and in material civilisation during the Iron Age. The
culture of the Early Iron Age of Hallstatt had been developed in Gaul on
characteristic lines of its own, resulting in the form now known as the
La Tene or Marnian type. This type derives it name from the striking
specimens of it that were discovered at La Tene on the shore of Lake
Neuchatel, and in the extensive cemeteries of the Marne valley, the
burials of which cover a period of from 350-200 B.C. It was during the
third century B.C. that this characteristic culture of Gaul reached its
zenith, and gave definite shape to the beautiful curved designs known as
those of Late-Celtic Art. Iron appears to have been introduced into
Britain about 300 B.C., and the designs of Late-Celtic Art are here
represented best of all. Excellent specimens of Late-Celtic culture have
been found in Yorkshire and elsewhere, and important links with
continental developments have been discovered at Aylesford, Aesica,
Limavady, and other places. Into the development of this typical Gaulish
culture elements are believed to have entered by way of the important
commercial avenue of the Rhone valley from Massilia (Marseilles), from
Greece (_via_ Venetia), and possibly from Etruria. Prehistoric
archaeology affords abundant proofs that, in countries of Celtic speech,
metal-working in bronze, iron, and gold reached a remarkably high pitch
of perfection, and this is a clear indication that Celtic countries and
districts which were on the line of trade routes, like the Rhone valley,
had attained to a material civilisation of no mean character before the
Roman conquest. In Britain, too, the districts that were in touch with
continental commerce had, as Caesar tells us, also developed in the same
direction. The religious counterpart of this development in civilisation
is the growth in many parts of Gaul, as attested by Caesar and by many
inscriptions and place-names, of the worship of gods identified with
Mercury and Minerva, the deities of civilisation and commerce. It is no
accident that one of the districts most conspicuous for this worship was
the territory of the Allobrogic confederation, where the commerce of the
Rhone valley found its most remarkable development. From this sketch of
Celtic civilisation it will readily be seen how here as elsewhere the
religious development of the Celts stood closely related to the
development of their civilisation generally. It must be borne in mind,
however, that all parts of the Celtic world were not equally affected by
the material development in question. Part of the complexity of the
history of Celtic religion arises from the fact that we cannot be always
certain of the degree of progress in civilisation which any given
district had made, of the ideas which pervaded it, or of the absorbing
interests of its life. Another difficulty, too, is that the accounts of
Celtic religion given by ancient authorities do not always harmonise with
the indisputable evidence of inscriptions. The probability is that the
religious practices of the Celtic world were no more homogeneous than its
general civilisation, and that the ancient authorities are substantially
true in their statements about certain districts, certain periods, or
certain sections of society, while the inscriptions, springing as they do
from the influence of the Gallo-Roman civilisation, especially of Eastern
Gaul and military Britain, give us most valuable supplementary evidence
for districts and environments of a different kind. The inscriptions,
especially by the names of deities which they reveal, have afforded most
valuable clues to the history of Celtic religion, even in stages of
civilisation earlier than those to which they themselves belong. In the
next chapter the correlation of Celtic religious ideas to the stages of
Celtic civilisation will be further developed.