In the preceding chapter we have seen that the belief was widely
prevalent among Greek and Roman writers that the Druids taught the
immortality of the soul. Some of these writers, too, point out the
undoubted fact, attested by Archaeology, that objects which would be
serviceable to the living were buried with the dead, and this was
regarded as a confirmation of the view that the immortality of souls was
to the Celts an object of belief. The study of Archaeology on the one
hand, and of Comparative Religion on the other, certainly leads to the
conclusion that in the Bronze and the Early Iron Age, and in all
probability in the Stone Age, the idea prevailed that death was not the
end of man. The holed cromlechs of the later Stone Age were probably
designed for the egress and ingress of souls. The food and the weapons
that were buried with the dead were thought to be objects of genuine
need. Roman religion, too, in some of its rites provided means for the
periodical expulsion of hungry and hostile spirits of the dead, and for
their pacification by the offer of food. A tomb and its adjuncts were
meant not merely for the honour of the dead, but also for the protection
of the living. A clear line of distinction was drawn between satisfied
and beneficent ghosts like the Manes, and the unsatisfied and hostile
ghosts like the Lemures and Larvae. To the Celtic mind, when its
analytical powers had come to birth, and man was sufficiently
self-conscious to reflect upon himself, the problem of his own nature
pressed for some solution. In these solutions the breath, the blood, the
name, the head, and even the hair generally played a part, but these
would not in themselves explain the mysterious phenomena of sleep, of
dreams, of epilepsy, of madness, of disease, of man's shadow and his
reflection, and of man's death. By long familiarity with the scientific
or quasi-scientific explanations of these things, we find it difficult to
realise fully their constant fascination for early man, who had his
thinkers and philosophies like ourselves. One very widely accepted
solution of early man in the Celtic world was, that within him there was
another self which could live a life of its own apart from the body, and
which survived even death, burial, and burning. Sometimes this inner
self was associated with the breath, whence, for example, the Latin
'anima' and the Welsh 'enaid,' both meaning the soul, from the root _an_-,
to breathe. At other times the term employed for the second self had
reference to man's shadow: the Greek 'skia,' the Latin 'umbra,' the Welsh
'ysgawd,' the English 'shade.' There are abundant evidences, too, that
the life-principle was frequently regarded as being especially associated
with the blood. Another tendency, of which Principal Rhys has given
numerous examples in his Welsh folk-lore, was to regard the soul as
capable of taking a visible form, not necessarily human, preferably that
of some winged creature. In ancient writers there is no information as
to the views prevalent among the Celts regarding the forms or the abodes
of the spirits of the dead, beyond the statement that the Druids taught
the doctrine of their re-birth. We are thus compelled to look to the
evidence afforded by myth, legend, and folk-lore. These give fair
indications as to the types of earlier popular belief in these matters,
but it would be a mistake to assume that the ideas embodied in them had
remained entirely unchanged from remote times. The mind of man at
certain levels is quite capable of evolving new myths and fresh folk-lore
along the lines of its own psychology and its own logic. The forms which
the soul could take doubtless varied greatly in men's opinions in
different districts and in different mental perspectives, but folk-lore
tends to confirm the view that early man, in the Celtic world as
elsewhere, tended to emphasise his conception of the subtlety and
mobility of the soul as contrasted with the body. Sooner or later the
primitive philosopher was bound to consider whither the soul went in
dreams or in death. He may not at first have thought of any other sphere
than that of his own normal life, but other questions, such as the home
of the spirits of vegetation in or under the earth, would suggest, even
if this thought had not occurred to him before, that the spirits of men,
too, had entrance to the world below. Whether this world was further
pictured in imagination depended largely on the poetic genius of any
given people. The folk-lore of the Celtic races bears abundant testimony
to their belief that beneath this world there was another. The 'annwfn'
of the Welsh was distinctly conceived in the folk-lore embodied in
mediaeval poetry as being 'is elfydd' (beneath the world). In mediaeval
Welsh legend, again, this lower world is regarded as divided into
kingdoms, like this world, and its kings, like Arawn and Hafgan in the
Mabinogi of Pwyll, are represented as being sometimes engaged in
conflict. From this lower world had come to man some of the blessings of
civilisation, and among them the much prized gift of swine. The lower
world could be even plundered by enterprising heroes. Marriages like
that of Pwyll and Rhiannon were possible between the dwellers of the one
world and the other. The other-world of the Celts does not seem,
however, to have been always pictured as beneath the earth. Irish and
Welsh legend combine in viewing it at times as situated on distant
islands, and Welsh folk-lore contains several suggestions of another
world situated beneath the waters of a lake, a river, or a sea. In one
or two passages also of Welsh mediaeval poetry the shades are represented
as wandering in the woods of Caledonia (Coed Celyddon). This was no
doubt a traditional idea in those families that migrated to Wales in post-
Roman times from Strathclyde. To those who puzzled over the fate of the
souls of the dead the idea of their re-birth was a very natural solution,
and Mr. Alfred Nutt, in his _Voyage of Bran_, has called attention to the
occurrence of this idea in Irish legend. It does not follow, however,
that the souls of all men would enjoy the privilege of this re-birth. As
Mr. Alfred Nutt points out, Irish legend seems to regard this re-birth
only as the privilege of the truly great. It is of interest to note the
curious persistence of similar ideas as to death and the other-world in
literature written even in Christian times and by monastic scribes. In
Welsh, in addition to Annwfn, a term which seems to mean the 'Not-world,'
we have other names for the world below, such as 'anghar,' the loveless
place; 'difant,' the unrimmed place (whence the modern Welsh word
'difancoll,' lost for ever); 'affwys,' the abyss; 'affan,' the land
invisible. The upper-world is sometimes called 'elfydd,' sometimes
'adfant,' the latter term meaning the place whose rim is turned back.
Apparently it implies a picture of the earth as a disc, whose rim or lip
is curved back so as to prevent men from falling over into the 'difant,'
or the rimless place. In modern Celtic folk-lore the various local other-
worlds are the abodes of fairies, and in these traditions there may
possibly be, as Principal Rhys has suggested, some intermixture of
reminiscences of the earlier inhabitants of the various districts. Modern
folk-lore, like mediaeval legend, has its stories of the inter-marriages
of natives of this world with those of the other-world, often located
underneath a lake. The curious reader will find several examples of such
stories in Principal Rhys's collection of Welsh and Manx folk-lore. In
Irish legend one of the most classical of these stories is that of the
betrothal of Etain, a story which has several points of contact with the
narrative of the meeting of Pwyll and Rhiannon in the Welsh Mabinogi. The
name of Arthur's wife, Gwenhwyfar, which means 'the White Spectre,' also
suggests that originally she too played a part in a story of the same
kind. In all these and similar narratives, it is important to note the
way in which the Celtic conceptions of the other-world, in Britain and in
Ireland, have been coloured by the geographical aspects of these two
countries, by their seas, their islands, their caves, their mounds, their
lakes, and their mountains. The local other-worlds of these lands bear,
as we might have expected, the clear impress of their origin. On the
whole the conceptions of the other-world which we meet in Celtic legend
are joyous; it is a land of youth and beauty. Cuchulainn, the Irish
hero, for example, is brought in a boat to an exceedingly fair island
round which there is a silver wall and a bronze palisade. In one Welsh
legend the cauldron of the Head of Annwfn has around it a rim of pearls.
One Irish story has a naive description of the glories of the Celtic
Elysium in the words--'Admirable was that land: there are three trees
there always bearing fruit, one pig always alive, and another ready
cooked.' Occasionally, however, we find a different picture. In the
Welsh poem called 'Y Gododin' the poet Aneirin is represented as
expressing his gratitude at being rescued by the son of Llywarch Hen from
'the cruel prison of the earth, from the abode of death, from the
loveless land.' The salient features, therefore, of the Celtic
conceptions of the other-world are their consonance with the suggestions
made by Celtic scenery to the Celtic imagination, the vagueness and
variability of these conceptions in different minds and in different
moods, the absence of any ethical considerations beyond the incentive
given to bravery by the thought of immortality, and the remarkable
development of a sense of possible inter-relations between the two
worlds, whether pacific or hostile. Such conceptions, as we see from
Celtic legend, proved an admirable stimulus and provided excellent
material for the development of Celtic narrative, and the weird and
romantic effect was further heightened by the general belief in the
possibilities of magic and metamorphosis. Moreover, the association with
innumerable place-names of legends of this type gave the beautiful
scenery of Celtic lands an added charm, which has attached their
inhabitants to them with a subtle and unconquerable attachment scarcely
intelligible to the more prosaic inhabitants of prosaic lands. To the
poetic Celt the love of country tends to become almost a religion. The
Celtic mind cannot remain indifferent to lands and seas whose very beauty
compels the eyes of man to gaze upon them to their very horizon, and the
lines of observation thus drawn to the horizon are for the Celt continual
temptations to the thought of an infinity beyond. The preoccupation of
the Celtic mind with the deities of his scenery, his springs, his rivers,
his seas, his forests, his mountains, his lakes, was in thorough keeping
with the tenour of his mind, when tuned to its natural surroundings. In
dealing with Celtic religion, mythology, and legend, it is not so much
the varying local and temporal forms that demand our attention, as the
all-pervading and animating spirit, which shows its essential character
even through the scanty remains of the ancient Celtic world. Celtic
religion bears the impress of nature on earth far more than nature in the
heavens. The sense of the heaven above has perhaps survived in some of
the general Indo-European Celtic terms for the divine principle, and
there are some traces of a religious interest in the sun and the god of
thunder and lightning, but every student of Celtic religion must feel
that the main and characteristic elements are associated with the earth
in all the variety of its local phenomena. The great earth-mother and
her varied offspring ever come to view in Celtic religion under many
names, and the features even of the other-world could not be dissociated
for the Celt from those of his mother-earth. The festivals of his year,
too, were associated with the decay and the renewal of her annual life.
The bonfires of November, May, Midsummer, and August were doubtless meant
to be associated with the vicissitudes of her life and the spirits that
were her children. For the Celt the year began in November, so that its
second half-year commenced with the first of May. The idea to which
Caesar refers, that the Gauls believed themselves descended from Dis, the
god of the lower world, and began the year with the night, counting their
time not by days but by nights, points in the same direction, namely that
the darkness of the earth had a greater hold on the mind than the
brightness of the sky. The Welsh terms for a week and a fortnight,
_wythnos_ (eight nights) and _pythefnos_ (fifteen nights) respectively
confirm Caesar's statement. To us now it may seem more natural to
associate religion with the contemplation of the heavens, but for the
Celtic lands at any rate the main trend of the evidence is to show that
the religious mind was mainly drawn to a contemplation of the earth and
her varied life, and that the Celt looked for his other-world either
beneath the earth, with her rivers, lakes, and seas, or in the islands on
the distant horizon, where earth and sky met. This predominance of the
earth in religion was in thorough keeping with the intensity of religion
as a factor in his daily pursuits. It was this intensity that gave the
Druids at some time or other in the history of the Western Celts the
power which Caesar and others assign to them. The whole people of the
Gauls, even with their military aristocracy, were extremely devoted to
religious ideas, though these led to the inhumanity of human sacrifices.
At one time their sense of the reality of the other-world was so great,
that they believed that loans contracted in this world would be repaid
there, and practical belief could not go much further than that. All
these considerations tend to show how important it is, in the comparative
study of religions, to investigate each religion in its whole
sociological and geographical environment as well as in the etymological
meaning of its terms.
In conclusion, the writer hopes that this brief sketch, which is based on
an independent study of the main evidence for the religious ideas and
practices of the Celtic peoples, will help to interest students of
religion in the dominant modes of thought which from time immemorial held
sway in these lands of the West of Europe, and which in folk-lore and
custom occasionally show themselves even in the midst of our highly
developed and complex civilisation of to-day. The thought of early man
on the problems of his being--for after all his superstitions reveal
thought--deserve respect, for in his efforts to think he was trying to
grope towards the light.
SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY
RHYS, _Hibbert Lectures on Celtic Heathendom_.
RHYS, _Celtic Folk-lore_, _Welsh and Manx_.
REINACH, S., _Cultes_, _Mythes et Religion_.
NUTT, ALFRED, _The Voyage of Bran_.
SQUIRE, _Mythology of the British Islands_.
GAIDOZ, _Esqiusse de Mythologie gauloise_.
BERTRAND, _La Religion des Gaulois_, _les Druides et le Druidisme_.
FRAZER, _The Golden Bough_.
JOYCE, _The Social History of Ireland_.
D'ARBOIS DE JUBAINVILLE, _Les Druides et les dieux celtiques a forme
d'animaux_.
WINDISCH, _Irische Texte mit Worterbuch_.
CYNDDELW, _Cymru Fu_.
FOULKES, _Enwogion Cymru_.
CAMPBELL, _Popular Tales of the West Highlands_.