Celtic Religion Part 1

Celtic Religion.

by Edward Anwyl.

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 Noric.u.m 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 G.o.ds, 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 pa.s.sed in his emergence into civilised life. To demonstrate and to ill.u.s.trate these relations will be the aim of the following chapters.

CHAPTER II--THE CHIEF PHASES OF CELTIC CIVILISATION

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 pa.s.sed 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 a.n.a.logues 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude, 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 p.r.o.nunciation of U as 'oo' and of QU, while the 'Brythonic' or Welsh variety changed U to a sound p.r.o.nounced 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 a.s.sume 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-G.o.ds were not originally such. In the Roman calendar there is abundant evidence that Mars was at one time an agricultural G.o.d as well as a G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 sh.o.r.e 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 Ma.s.silia (Ma.r.s.eilles), 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 G.o.ds 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 h.o.m.ogeneous 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.

CHAPTER III--THE CORRELATION OF CELTIC RELIGION WITH THE GROWTH OF CELTIC CIVILISATION

In dealing with the long vista of prehistoric time, it is very difficult for us, in our effort after perspective, not to shorten unduly in our thoughts the vast epochs of its duration. We tend, too, to forget, that in these unnumbered millennia there was ample time for it to be possible over certain areas of Europe to evolve what were practically new races, through the prepotency of particular stocks and the annihilation of others. During these epochs, again, after speech had arisen, there was time enough to recast completely many a language, for before the dawn of history language was no more free from change than it is now, and in these immense epochs whatever ideas as to the world of their surroundings were vaguely felt by prehistoric men and formulated for them by their kinsmen of genius, had abundant time in which to die or to win supremacy.

There must have been aeons before the dawn even of conscious animism, and the experiment of trying sympathetic magic was, when first attempted, probably regarded as a master-stroke of genius. The Stone Age itself was a long era of great if slow progress in civilisation, and the evolution of the practices and ideas which emerge as the concomitants of its agricultural stage, when closely regarded, bear testimony to the mind's capacity for religious progress in the light of experience and intelligent experiment, and at the same time to the errors into which it fell. The Stone Age has left its sediment in all the folk-lore of the world. To the casual observer many of the ideas embedded in it may seem a ma.s.s of error, and so they are when judged unhistorically, but when viewed critically, and at the same time historically, they afford many glimpses of prehistoric genius in a world where life was of necessity a great experiment. The folk-lore of the world reveals for the same stages of civilisation a wonderful uniformity and h.o.m.ogeneity, as Dr. J. G.

Frazer has abundantly shown in his _Golden Bough_. This uniformity is not, however, due to necessary uniformity of origin, but to a great extent to the fact that it represents the state of equilibrium arrived at between minds at a certain level and their environment, along lines of thought directed by the momentum given by the traditions of millennia, and the survival in history of the men who carefully regarded them. The apparently unreasoned prohibitions often known as 'taboos,' many of which still persist even in modern civilised life, have their roots in ideas and experiences which no speculation of ours can now completely fathom, however much we may guess at their origin. Many of these ancient prohibitions have vanished under new conditions, others have often survived from a real or supposed harmony with new experiences, that have arisen in the course of man's history. After pa.s.sing through a stage when he was too preoccupied with his material cares and wants to consider whether he was haunted or not, early man in the Celtic world as elsewhere, after long epochs of vague unrest, came to realise that he was somehow haunted in the daytime as well as at night, and it was this sense of being haunted that impelled his intellect and his imagination to seek some explanation of his feelings. Primitive man came to seek a solution not of the Universe as a whole (for of this he had no conception), but of the local Universe, in which he played a part. In dealing with Celtic folk-lore, it is very remarkable how it mirrors the characteristic local colouring and scenery of the districts in which it has originated. In a country like Wales, for example, it is the folk-lore of springs, caves, mountains, lakes, islands, and the forms of its imagination, here as elsewhere, reflect unmistakably the land of its origin. Where it depicts an 'other world,' that 'other world' is either on an island or it is a land beneath the sea, a lake, or a river, or it is approachable only through some cave or opening in the earth. In the hunting-grounds of the Celtic world the primitive hunter knew every cranny of the greater part of his environment with the accuracy born of long familiarity, but there were some peaks which he could not scale, some caves which he could not penetrate, some jungles into which he could not enter, and in these he knew not what monsters might lurk or unknown beings might live. In Celtic folk-lore the belief in fabulous monsters has not yet ceased. Man was surrounded by dangers visible and invisible, and the time came when some prehistoric man of genius propounded the view that all the objects around him were no less living than himself. This animistic view of the world, once adopted, made great headway from the various centres where it originated, and man derived from it a new sense of kinship with his world, but also new terrors from it. Knowing from the experience of dreams that he himself seemed able to wander away from himself, he thought in course of time that other living things were somehow double, and the world around him came to be occupied, not merely with things that were alive, but with other selves of these things, that could remain in them or leave them at will. Here, again, this new prehistoric philosophy gave an added interest to life, but it was none the less a source of fresh terrors. The world swarmed with invisible spirits, some friendly, some hostile, and, in view of these beings, life had to be regulated by strict rules of actions and prohibitions. Even in the neolithic stage the inhabitants of Celtic countries had attained to the religious ideas in question, as is seen not only by their folk-lore and by the names of groups of G.o.ddesses such as the Matres (or mothers), but by the fact that in historic times they had advanced well beyond this stage to that of named and individualised G.o.ds. As in all countries where the G.o.ds were individualised, the men of Celtic lands, whether aborigines or invaders, had toiled along the steep ascent from the primitive vague sense of being haunted to a belief in G.o.ds who, like Esus, Teutates, Grannos, Borma.n.u.s, Litavis, had names of a definite character.

Among the prohibitions which had established themselves among the races of Celtic lands, as elsewhere, was that directed against the shedding of the blood of one's own kin. There are indications, too, that some at any rate of the tribes inhabiting these countries reckoned kinship through the mother, as in fact continued to be the case among the Picts of Scotland into historic times. It does not follow, as we know from other countries, that the pre-Aryan tribes of Gaul and Britain, or indeed the Aryan tribes themselves in their earliest stage, regarded their original ancestors as human. Certain names of deities such as Tarvos (the bull), Moccos (the pig), Epona (the G.o.ddess of horses), Damona (the G.o.ddess of cattle), Mullo (the a.s.s), as well as the fact that the ancient Britons, according to Caesar, preserved the hen, the goose, and the hare, but did not kill and eat them, all point to the fact that in these countries as elsewhere certain animals were held in supreme respect and were carefully guarded from harm. Judging from the a.n.a.logy of kindred phenomena in other countries, the practice of respecting certain animals was often a.s.sociated with the belief that all the members of certain clans were descended from one or other of them, but how far this system was elaborated in the Celtic world it is hard to say. This phenomenon, which is widely known as totemism, appears to be suggested by the prominence given to the wild boar on Celtic coins and ensigns, and by the place a.s.signed on some inscriptions and bas-reliefs to the figure of a horned snake as well as by the effigies of other animals that have been discovered. It is not easy to explain the beginnings of totemism in Gaul or elsewhere, but it should always be borne in mind that early man could not regard it as an axiomatic truth that he was the superior of every other animal. To reach that proud consciousness is a very high step in the development of the human perspective, and it is to the credit of the Celts that, when we know them in historic times, they appear to have attained to this height, inasmuch as the human form is given to their deities. It is not always remembered how great a step in religious evolution is implied when the G.o.ds are clothed with human attributes. M.

Salomon Reinach, in his account of the vestiges of totemism among the Celts, suggests that totemism was merely the hypertrophy of early man's social sense, which extended from man to the animals around him. This may possibly be the case, but it is not improbable that man also thought to discover in certain animals much-needed allies against some of the visible and invisible enemies that beset him. In his conflict with the malign powers around him, he might well have regarded certain animals as being in some respects stronger combatants against those powers than himself; and where they were not physically stronger, some of them, like the snake, had a cunning and a subtlety that seemed far to surpa.s.s his own. In course of time certain bodies of men came to regard themselves as being in special alliance with some one animal, and as being descended from that animal as their common ancestor. The existence side by side of various tribes, each with its definite totem, has not yet been fully proved for the Gaulish system, and may well have been a developed social arrangement that was not an essential part of such a mode of thought in its primary forms. The place of animal-worship in the Celtic religion will be more fully considered in a later chapter. Here it is only indicated as a necessary stage in relation to man's civilisation in the hunting and the pastoral stages, which had to be pa.s.sed through before the historic deities of Gaul and Britain in Roman times could have come into being. Certain of the divine names of the historic period, like Artio (the bear-G.o.ddess), Moccus (the pig), Epona (the mare), and Damona (the sheep), bear the unmistakable impress of having been at one time those of animals.

As for the stage of civilisation at which totemism originated, there is much difference of opinion. The stage of mind which it implies would suggest that it reflects a time when man's mind was preoccupied with wild beasts, and when the alliances and friendships, which he would value in life, might be found in that sphere. There is much plausibility in the view put forward by M. Salomon Reinach, that the domestication of animals itself implies a totemistic habit of thought, and the consequent protection of these animals by means of taboos from harm and death. It may well be that, after all, the usefulness of domestic animals from a material point of view was only a secondary consideration for man, and a happy discovery after unsuccessful totemistic attentions to other animals. We know not how many creatures early man tried to a.s.sociate with himself but failed.

In all stages of man's history the alternation of the seasons must have brought some rudiments of order and system into his thoughts, though for a long time he was too preoccupied to reflect upon the regularly recurring vicissitudes of his life. In the pastoral stage, the sense of order came to be more marked than in that of hunting, and quickened the mind to fresh thought. The earth came to be regarded as the Mother from whom all things came, and there are abundant indications that the earth as the Mother, the Queen, the Long-lived one, etc., found her natural place as a G.o.ddess among the Celts. Her names and t.i.tles were probably not in all places or in all tribes the same. But it is in the agricultural stage that she entered in Celtic lands, as she did in other countries, into her completest religious heritage, and this aspect of Celtic religion will be dealt with more fully in connection with the spirits of vegetation. This phase of religion in Celtic countries is one which appears to underlie some of its most characteristic forms, and the one which has survived longest in Celtic folk-lore. The Earth-mother with her progeny of spirits, of springs, rivers, mountains, forests, trees, and corn, appears to have supplied most of the grouped and individualised G.o.ds of the Celtic pantheon. The Dis, of whom Caesar speaks as the ancient G.o.d of the Gauls, was probably regarded as her son, to whom the dead returned in death. Whether he is the Gaulish G.o.d depicted with a hammer, or as a huge dog swallowing the dead, has not yet been established with any degree of certainty.

CHAPTER IV--CELTIC RELIGION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIVIDUALISED DEITIES

Like other religions, those of the Celtic lands of Europe supplemented the earlier animism by a belief in spirits, who belonged to trees, animals, rocks, mountains, springs, rivers, and other natural phenomena, and in folk-lore there still survives abundant evidence that the Celt regarded spirits as taking upon themselves a variety of forms, animal and human. It was this idea of spirits in animal form that helped to preserve the memory of the older totemism into historic times. It is thus that we have names of the type of Brannogenos (son of the raven), Artogenos (son of the bear), and the like, not to speak of simpler names like Bran (raven), March (horse), surviving into historic times. Bronze images, too, have been found at Neuvy-en-Sullias, of a horse and a stag (now in the Orleans museum), provided with rings, which were, as M.

Salomon Reinach suggests, probably used for the purpose of carrying these images in procession. The wild boar, too, was a favourite emblem of Gaul, and there is extant a bronze figure of a Celtic Diana riding on a boar's back. At Bolar, near Nuits, there was discovered a bronze mule.

In the museum at Mayence is a bas-relief of the G.o.ddess of horses, Epona (from the Gaulish _Epos_=Lat. _equus_, horse), riding on horseback. One of the most important monuments of this kind is a figure of Artio, the bear-G.o.ddess (from Celtic _Artos_, a bear), found at Muri near Berne. In front of her stood a figure of a bear, which was also found with her. The bull of the Tarvos Trigaranos bas-relief of Notre Dame was also in all likelihood originally a totem, and similarly the horned serpents of other bas-reliefs, as well as the boar found on Gaulish ensigns and coins, especially in Belgic territory. There is a representation, too, of a raven on a bas-relief at Compiegne. The name 'Moccus,' which is identified with Mercury, on inscriptions, and which is found inscribed at Langres, Trobaso, the valley of the Ossola and the Borgo san Dalmazzo, is undoubtedly the philological equivalent of the Welsh _moch_ (swine). In Britain, too, the boar is frequently found on the coins of the Iceni and other tribes. In Italy, according to Mr. Warde Fowler, the pig was an appropriate offering to deities of the earth, so that in the widespread use of the pig as a symbol in the Celtic world, there may be some ancient echo of a connection between it and the earth-spirit. Its diet of acorns, too, may have marked it out, in the early days of life in forest- clearings, as the animal embodiment of the oak-spirit. In the legends of the Celtic races, even in historic times, the pig, and especially the boar, finds an honoured place. In addition to the animals aforementioned, the a.s.s, too, was probably at one time venerated in one of the districts of Gaul, and it is not improbable that Mullo, the name of a G.o.d identified with Mars and regarded as the patron of muleteers, mentioned on inscriptions (at Nantes, Craon, and Les Provencheres near Craon), meant originally 'an a.s.s.' The G.o.ddess Epona, also, whose worship was widely spread, was probably at one time an animal G.o.ddess in the form of a mare, and the name of another G.o.ddess, Damona, either from the root _dam_=Ir. _dam_, (ox); or Welsh _daf-ad_ (sheep), may similarly be that of an ancient totem sheep or cow. Nor was it in the animal world alone that the Celts saw indications of the divine. While the chase and the pastoral life concentrated the mind's attention on the life of animals, the growth of agriculture fixed man's thoughts on the life of the earth, and all that grew upon it, while at the same time he was led to think more and more of the mysterious world beneath the earth, from which all things came and to which all things returned. Nor could he forget the trees of the forest, especially those which, like the oak, had provided him with their fruit as food in time of need. The name Druid, as well as that of the centre of worship of the Gauls of Asia Minor, Drunemeton (the oak-grove), the statement of Maximus of Tyre that the representation of Zeus to the Celts was a high oak, Pliny's account of Druidism (_Nat. Hist_., xvi. 95), the numerous inscriptions to Silva.n.u.s and Silvana, the mention of Dervones or Dervonnae on an inscription at Cavalzesio near Brescia, and the abundant evidence of survivals in folk- lore as collected by Dr. J. G. Frazer and others, all point to the fact that tree-worship, and especially that of the oak, had contributed its full share to the development of Celtic religion, at any rate in some districts and in some epochs. The development of martial and commercial civilisation in later times tended to restrict its typical and more primitive developments to the more conservative parts of the Celtic world. The fact that in Caesar's time its main centre in Gaul was in the territory of the Carnutes, the tribe which has given its name to Chartres, suggests that its chief votaries were mainly in that part of the country. This, too, was the district of the G.o.d Esus (the eponymous G.o.d of the Essuvii), and in some degree of Teutates, the cruelty of whose rites is mentioned by Lucan. It had occurred to the present writer, before finding the same view expressed by M. Salomon Reinach, that the worship of Esus in Gaul was almost entirely local in character. With regard to the rites of the Druids, Caesar tells us that it was customary to make huge images of wickerwork, into which human beings, usually criminals, were placed and burnt. The use of wickerwork, and the suggestion that the rite was for purifying the land, indicates a combination of the ideas of tree-worship with those of early agricultural life. When the Emperor Claudius is said by Suetonius to have suppressed Druidism, what is meant is, in all probability, that the more inhuman rites were suppressed, leading, as the Scholiasts on Lucan seem to suggest, to a subst.i.tution of animal victims for men. On the side of civil administration and education, the functions of the Druids, as the successors of the primitive medicine men and magicians, doubtless varied greatly in different parts of Gaul and Britain according to the progress that had been made in the differentiation of functions in social life.

The more we investigate the state of the Celtic world in ancient times, the clearer it becomes, that in civilisation it was very far from being h.o.m.ogeneous, and this heterogeneity of civilisation must have had its influence on religion as well as on other social phenomena. The natural conservatism of agricultural life, too, perpetuated many practices even into comparatively late times, and of these we catch a glimpse in Gregory of Tours, when he tells us that at Autun the G.o.ddess Berecyntia was worshipped, her image being carried on a wagon for the protection of the fields and the vines. It is not impossible that by Berecyntia Gregory means the G.o.ddess Brigindu, whose name occurs on an inscription at Volnay in the same district of Gaul. The belief in corn-spirits, and other ideas connected with the central thought of the farmer's life, show, by their persistence in Celtic as well as other folklore, how deeply they had entered into the inner tissue of the agricultural mind, so as to be linked to its keenest emotions. Here the rites of religion, whether persuasive as in prayer, or compulsory as in sympathetic magic, whether a.s.sociated with communal or propitiatory sacrifice, whether directed to the earth or to the heaven, all had an intensely practical and terribly real character, due to man's constant preoccupation with the growth and storage of food for man and beast. In the hunting, the pastoral, and above all in the agricultural life, religion was not a matter merely of imagination or sentiment, but one most intimately a.s.sociated with the daily practice of life, and this practical interest included in its purview rivers, springs, forests, mountains, and all the setting of man's existence. And what is true of agriculture is true also, in a greater or less degree, of the life of the Celtic metal-worker or the Celtic sailor.

Even in late Welsh legend Amaethon (old Celtic _Ambactonos_), the patron G.o.d of farming (Welsh _Amaeth_), and Gofannon, the patron G.o.d of the metal-worker (Welsh _gof_, Irish _gobha_), were not quite forgotten, and the prominence of the worship of the counterparts of Mercury and Minerva in Gaul in historic times was due to the sense of respect and grat.i.tude, which each trade and each locality felt for the deity who had rid the land of monsters, and who had brought man into the comparative calm of civilised life.

CHAPTER V--THE HUMANISED G.o.dS OF CELTIC RELIGION

One of the most striking facts connected with the Celtic religion is the large number of names of deities which it includes. These names are known to us almost entirely from inscriptions, for the most part votive tablets, in acknowledgment of some benefit, usually that of health, conferred by the G.o.d on man. In Britain these votive tablets are chiefly found in the neighbourhood of the Roman walls and camps, but we cannot be always certain that the deities mentioned are indigenous. In Gaul, however, we are on surer ground in a.s.sociating certain deities with certain districts, inasmuch as the evidence of place-names is often a guide. These inscriptions are very unevenly distributed over Gaulish territory, the Western and the North-Western districts being very spa.r.s.ely represented.

In the present brief sketch it is impossible to enter into a full discussion of the relations of the names found on inscriptions to particular localities, and the light thus thrown on Celtic religion; but it may be here stated that investigation tends to confirm the local character of most of the deities which the inscriptions name. Out of these deities, some, it is true, in the process of evolution, gained a wider field of worshippers, while others, like Lugus, may even have been at one time more widely worshipped than they came to be in later times.

Occasionally a name like Lugus (Irish _Lug_), Segomo (Irish, in the genitive, _Segamonas_), Camulos, whence Camulodunum (Colchester), Belenos (Welsh _Belyn_), Maponos (Welsh _Mabon_), Litavis (Welsh _Llydaw_), by its existence in Britain as well as in Gaul, suggests that it was either one of the ancient deities of the Aryan Celts, or one whose worship came to extend over a larger area than its fellows. Apart from a few exceptional considerations of this kind, however, the local character of the deities is most marked.

A very considerable number are the deities of springs and rivers. In Noric.u.m, for example, we have Adsalluta, a G.o.ddess a.s.sociated with Savus (the river Save). In Britain 'the G.o.ddess' Deva (the Dee), and Belisama (either the Ribble or the Mersey), a name meaning 'the most warlike G.o.ddess,' are of this type. We have again Axona the G.o.ddess of the river Aisne, Sequana, the G.o.ddess of the Seine, Ritona of the river Rieu, numerous nymphs and many other deities of fountains. Doubtless many other names of local deities are of this kind. Aerial phenomena appear to have left very few clear traces on the names of Celtic deities.

Vintios, a G.o.d identified with Mars, was probably a G.o.d of the wind, Taranucus, a G.o.d of thunder, Leucetios, a G.o.d of lightning, Sulis (of Bath) a sun-G.o.ddess, but beyond these there are few, if any, reflections of the phenomena of the heavens. Of the G.o.ds named on inscriptions nearly all are identified with Mercury, Mars, or Apollo. The G.o.ds who came to be regarded as culture-deities appear from their names to be of various origins: some are humanised totems, others are in origin deities of vegetation or local natural phenomena. As already indicated, it is clear that the growth of commercial and civilised life in certain districts had brought into prominence deities identified with Mercury and Minerva as the patrons of civilisation. Military men, especially in Britain, appear to have favoured deities like Belatucadros (the brilliant in war), identified with Mars.

About fourteen inscriptions mentioning him have been found in the North of England and the South of Scotland. The G.o.ddess Brigantia (the patron- deity of the Brigantes), too, is mentioned on four inscriptions: Cocidius, identified with Mars, is mentioned on thirteen: while another popular G.o.d appears to have been Silva.n.u.s. Among the most noticeable names of the Celtic G.o.ds identified with Mercury are Adsmerius or Atesmerius, Dumiatis (the G.o.d of the Puy de Dome), Iovantucarus (the lover of youth), Teutates (the G.o.d of the people), Caletos (the hard), and Moccus (the boar). Several deities are identified with Mars, and of these some of the most noticeable names are Albiorix (world-king), Caturix (battle-king), Dunatis (the G.o.d of the fort), Belatucadrus (the brilliant in war), Leucetius (the G.o.d of lightning), Mullo (the mule), Ollovidius (the all-knowing) Vintius (the wind-G.o.d), and Vitucadrus (the brilliant in energy). The large number of names identified with Mars reflects the prominent place at one time given to war in the ideas that affected the growth of the religion of the Celtic tribes. Of the G.o.ds identified with Hercules, the most interesting name is Ogmios (the G.o.d of the furrow) given by Lucian, but not found on any inscription. The following G.o.ds too, among others, are identified with Jupiter: Aramo (the gentle), Ambisagrus (the persistent), Bussumarus (the large-lipped), Taranucus (the thunderer), Uxellimus (the highest). It would seem from this that in historic times at any rate Jupiter did not play a large part in Celtic religious ideas.

There remains another striking feature of Celtic religion which has not yet been mentioned, namely the identification of several deities with Apollo. These deities are essentially the presiding deities of certain healing-springs and health-resorts, and the growth of their worship into popularity is a further striking index to the development of religion side by side with certain aspects of civilisation. One of the names of a Celtic Apollo is Borvo (whence Bourbon), the deity of certain hot springs. This name is Indo-European, and was given to the local fountain- G.o.d by the Celtic-speaking invaders of Gaul: it simply means 'the Boiler.' Other forms of the name are also found, as Bormo and Borma.n.u.s.

At Aquae Granni (Aix-la-Chapelle) and elsewhere the name identified with Apollo is Grannos. We find also Mogons, and Mogounus, the patron deity of Moguntiac.u.m (Mainz), and, once or twice, Maponos (the great youth).

The essential feature of the Apollo worship was its a.s.sociation in Gallo- Roman civilisation with the idea of healing, an idea which, through the revival of the worship of AEsculapius, affected religious views very strongly in other quarters of the empire. It was in this conception of the G.o.ds as the guides of civilisation and the restorers of health, that Celtic religion, in some districts at any rate, shows itself emerging into a measure of light after a long and toilsome progress from the darkness of prehistoric ideas. What Caesar says of the practice of the Gauls of beginning the year with the night rather than with the day, and their ancient belief that they were sprung from Dis, the G.o.d of the lower world, is thus typified in their religious history.