Myths & Legends of the Celtic Race Part 5

To the Egyptian the disembodied soul was no shadowy simulacrum, as the cla.s.sical nations believedthe future life was a mere prolongation of the present; the just man, when he had won his place in it, found himself among his relatives, his friends, his workpeople, with tasks and enjoyments very much like those of earth. The doom of the wicked was annihilation; he fell a victim to the invisible monster called the Eater of the Dead.

Now when the cla.s.sical nations first began to take an interest in the ideas of the Celts the thing that princ.i.p.ally struck them was the Celtic belief in immortality, which the Gauls said was handed down by the Druids. The cla.s.sical nations believed in immortality; but what a picture does Homer, the Bible of the Greeks, give of the lost, degraded, dehumanised creatures which represented the departed souls of men! Take, as one example, the description of the spirits of the suitors slain by Odysseus as Hermes conducts them to the Underworld:

Now were summoned the souls of the dead by Cyllenian Hermes....

Touched by the wand they awoke, and obeyed him and followed him, squealing, Even as bats in the dark, mysterious depths of a cavern Squeal as they flutter around, should one from the cl.u.s.ter be fallen Where from the rock suspended they hung, all clinging together; So did the souls flock squealing behind him, as Hermes the Helper Guided them down to the gloom through dank and mouldering pathways.(59)

The cla.s.sical writers felt rightly that the Celtic idea of immortality was something altogether different from this. It was both loftier and more realistic; it implied a true persistence of the living man, as he was at present, in all his human relations. They noted with surprise that the Celt would lend money on a promissory note for repayment in the next world.(60) That is an absolutely Egyptian conception. And this very a.n.a.logy occurred to Diodorus in writing of the Celtic idea of immortalityit was like nothing that he knew of out of Egypt.(61)

*The Doctrine of Transmigration*

Many ancient writers a.s.sert that the Celtic idea of immortality embodied the Oriental conception of the transmigration of souls, and to account for this the hypothesis was invented that they had learned the doctrine from Pythagoras, who represented it in cla.s.sical antiquity. Thus Csar: The princ.i.p.al point of their [the Druids] teaching is that the soul does not perish, and that after death it pa.s.ses from one body into another. And Diodorus: Among them the doctrine of Pythagoras prevails, according to which the souls of men are immortal, and after a fixed term recommence to live, taking upon themselves a new body. Now traces of this doctrine certainly do appear in Irish legend. Thus the Irish chieftain, Mongan, who is an historical personage, and whose death is recorded about A.D. 625, is said to have made a wager as to the place of death of a king named Fothad, slain in a battle with the mythical hero Finn mac c.u.mhal in the third century. He proves his case by summoning to his aid a _revenant_ from the Other-world, Keelta, who was the actual slayer of Fothad, and who describes correctly where the tomb is to be found and what were its contents. He begins his tale by saying to Mongan, We were with thee, and then, turning to the a.s.sembly, he continues: We were with Finn, coming from Alba.... Hush, says Mongan, it is wrong of thee to reveal a secret. The secret is, of course, that Mongan was a reincarnation of Finn.(62) But the evidence on the whole shows that the Celts did not hold this doctrine at all in the same way as Pythagoras and the Orientals did.

Transmigration was not, with them, part of the order of things. It _might_ happen, but in general it did not; the new body a.s.sumed by the dead clothed them in another, not in this world, and so far as we can learn from any ancient authority, there does not appear to have been any idea of moral retribution connected with this form of the future life. It was not so much an article of faith as an idea which haunted the imagination, and which, as Mongans caution indicates, ought not to be brought into clear light.

However it may have been conceived, it is certain that the belief in immortality was the basis of Celtic Druidism.(63) Caesar affirms this distinctly, and declares the doctrine to have been fostered by the Druids rather for the promotion of courage than for purely religious reasons. An intense Other-world faith, such as that held by the Celts, is certainly one of the mightiest of agencies in the hands of a priesthood who hold the keys of that world. Now Druidism existed in the British Islands, in Gaul, and, in fact, so far as we know, wherever there was a Celtic race amid a population of dolmen-builders. There were Celts in Cisalpine Gaul, but there were no dolmens there, and there were no Druids.(64) What is quite clear is that when the Celts got to Western Europe they found there a people with a powerful priesthood, a ritual, and imposing religious monuments; a people steeped in magic and mysticism and the cult of the Underworld. The inferences, as I read the facts, seem to be that Druidism in its essential features was imposed upon the imaginative and sensitive nature of the Celtthe Celt with his extraordinary apt.i.tude for picking up ideasby the earlier population of Western Europe, the Megalithic People, while, as held by these, it stands in some historical relation, which I am not able to pursue in further detail, with the religious culture of ancient Egypt. Much obscurity still broods over the question, and perhaps will always do so, but if these suggestions have anything in them, then the Megalithic People have been brought a step or two out of the atmosphere of uncanny mystery which has surrounded them, and they are shown to have played a very important part in the religious development of Western Europe, and in preparing that part of the world for the rapid extension of the special type of Christianity which took place in it.

Bertrand, in his most interesting chapter on LIrlande Celtique,(65) points out that very soon after the conversion of Ireland to Christianity, we find the country covered with monasteries, whose complete organisation seems to indicate that they were really Druidic colleges transformed _en ma.s.se_. Csar has told us what these colleges were like in Gaul. They were very numerous. In spite of the severe study and discipline involved, crowds flocked into them for the sake of the power wielded by the Druidic order, and the civil immunities which its members of all grades enjoyed.

Arts and sciences were studied there, and thousands of verses enshrining the teachings of Druidism were committed to memory. All this is very like what we know of Irish Druidism. Such an organisation would pa.s.s into Christianity of the type established in Ireland with very little difficulty. The belief in magical rites would surviveearly Irish Christianity, as its copious hagiography plainly shows, was as steeped in magical ideas as ever was Druidic paganism. The belief in immortality would remain, as before, the cardinal doctrine of religion. Above all the supremacy of the sacerdotal order over the temporal power would remain unimpaired; it would still be true, as Dion Chrysostom said of the Druids, that it is they who command, and kings on thrones of gold, dwelling in splendid palaces, are but their ministers, and the servants of their thought.(66)

*Csar on the Druidic Culture*

The religious, philosophic, and scientific culture superintended by the Druids is spoken of by Csar with much respect. They discuss and impart to the youth, he writes, many things respecting the stars and their motions, respecting the extent of the universe and of our earth, respecting the nature of things, respecting the power and the majesty of the immortal G.o.ds (bk. vi. 14). We would give much to know some particulars of the teaching here described. But the Druids, though well acquainted with letters, strictly forbade the committal of their doctrines to writing; an extremely sagacious provision, for not only did they thus surround their teaching with that atmosphere of mystery which exercises so potent a spell over the human mind, but they ensured that it could never be effectively controverted.

*Human Sacrifices in Gaul*

In strange discord, however, with the lofty words of Csar stands the abominable practice of human sacrifice whose prevalence he noted among the Celts. Prisoners and criminals, or if these failed even innocent victims, probably children, were encased, numbers at a time, in huge frames of wickerwork, and there burned alive to win the favour of the G.o.ds. The practice of human sacrifice is, of course, not specially Druidicit is found in all parts both of the Old and of the New World at a certain stage of culture, and was doubtless a survival from the time of the Megalithic People. The fact that it should have continued in Celtic lands after an otherwise fairly high state of civilisation and religious culture had been attained can be paralleled from Mexico and Carthage, and in both cases is due, no doubt, to the uncontrolled dominance of a priestly caste.

*Human Sacrifices in Ireland*

Bertrand endeavours to dissociate the Druids from these practices, of which he says strangely there is no trace in Ireland, although there, as elsewhere in Celtica, Druidism was all-powerful. There is little doubt, however, that in Ireland also human sacrifices at one time prevailed. In a very ancient tract, the Dinnsenchus, preserved in the Book of Leinster, it is stated that on Moyslaught, the Plain of Adoration, there stood a great gold idol, Crom Cruach (the b.l.o.o.d.y Crescent). To it the Gaels used to sacrifice children when praying for fair weather and fertilityit was milk and corn they asked from it in exchange for their childrenhow great was their horror and their moaning!(67)

*And in Egypt*

In Egypt, where the national character was markedly easy-going, pleasure-loving, and little capable of fanatical exaltation, we find no record of any such cruel rites in the monumental inscriptions and paintings, copious as is the information which they give us on all features of the national life and religion.(68) Manetho, indeed, the Egyptian historian who wrote in the third century B.C., tells us that human sacrifices were abolished by Amasis I. so late as the beginning of the XVIII Dynastyabout 1600 B.C. But the complete silence of the other records shows us that even if we are to believe Manetho, the practice must in historic times have been very rare, and must have been looked on with repugnance.

*The Names of Celtic Deities*

What were the names and the attributes of the Celtic deities? Here we are very much in the dark. The Megalithic People did not imagine their deities under concrete personal form. Stones, rivers, wells, trees, and other natural objects were to them the adequate symbols, or were half symbols, half actual embodiments, of the supernatural forces which they venerated.

But the imaginative mind of the Aryan Celt was not content with this. The existence of personal G.o.ds with distinct t.i.tles and attributes is reported to us by Caesar, who equates them with various figures in the Roman pantheonMercury, Apollo, Mars, and so forth. Lucan mentions a triad of deities, sus, Teutates, and Tara.n.u.s(69); and it is noteworthy that in these names we seem to be in presence of a true Celtic, _i.e._, Aryan, tradition. Thus sus is derived by Belloguet from the Aryan root _as_, meaning to be, which furnished the name of Asura-masda (_lEsprit Sage_) to the Persians, sun to the Umbrians, Asa (Divine Being) to the Scandinavians. Teutates comes from a Celtic root meaning valiant, warlike, and indicates a deity equivalent to Mars. Tara.n.u.s (? Thor), according to de Jubainville, is a G.o.d of the Lightning (_taran_ in Welsh, Cornish, and Breton is the word for thunderbolt). Votive inscriptions to these G.o.ds have been found in Gaul and Britain. Other inscriptions and sculptures bear testimony to the existence in Gaul of a host of minor and local deities who are mostly mere names, or not even names, to us now. In the form in which we have them these conceptions bear clear traces of Roman influence. The sculptures are rude copies of the Roman style of religious art. But we meet among them figures of much wilder and stranger aspectG.o.ds with triple faces, G.o.ds with branching antlers on their brows, ram-headed serpents, and other now unintelligible symbols of the older faith. Very notable is the frequent occurrence of the cross-legged Buddha att.i.tude so prevalent in the religious art of the East and of Mexico, and also the tendency, so well known in Egypt, to group the G.o.ds in triads.

*Caesar on the Celtic Deities*

Caesar, who tries to fit the Gallic religion into the framework of Roman mythologywhich was exactly what the Gauls themselves did after the conquestsays they held Mercury to be the chief of the G.o.ds, and looked upon him as the inventor of all the arts, as the presiding deity of commerce, and as the guardian of roads and guide of travellers. One may conjecture that he was particularly, to the Gauls as to the Romans, the guide of the dead, of travellers to the Other-world, Many bronze statues to Mercury, of Gaulish origin, still remain, the name being adopted by the Gauls, as many place-names still testify(70). Apollo was regarded as the deity of medicine and healing, Minerva was the initiator of arts and crafts, Jupiter governed the sky, and Mars presided over war. Csar is here, no doubt, cla.s.sifying under five types and by Roman names a large number of Gallic divinities.

*The G.o.d of the Underworld*

According to Csar, a most notable deity of the Gauls was (in Roman nomenclature) Dis, or Pluto, the G.o.d of the Underworld inhabited by the dead. From him all the Gauls claimed to be descended, and on this account, says Csar, they began their reckoning of the twenty-four hours of the day with the oncoming of night.(71) The name of this deity is not given.

DArbois de Jubainville considers that, together with sus, Teutates, Tara.n.u.s, and, in Irish mythology, Balor and the Fomorians, he represents the powers of darkness, death, and evil, and Celtic mythology is thus interpreted as a variant of the universal solar myth, embodying the conception of the eternal conflict between Day and Night.

*The G.o.d of Light*

The G.o.d of Light appears in Gaul and in Ireland as Lugh, or Lugus, who has left his traces in many place-names such as _Lug-dunum_ (Leyden), Lyons, &c. Lugh appears in Irish legend with distinctly solar attributes. When he meets his army before the great conflict with the Fomorians, they feel, says the saga, as if they beheld the rising of the sun. Yet he is also, as we shall see, a G.o.d of the Underworld, belonging on the side of his mother Ethlinn, daughter of Balor, to the Powers of Darkness.

*The Celtic Conception of Death*

The fact is that the Celtic conception of the realm of death differed altogether from that of the Greeks and Romans, and, as I have already pointed out, resembled that of Egyptian religion. The Other-world was not a place of gloom and suffering, but of light and liberation. The Sun was as much the G.o.d of that world as he was or this. Evil, pain, and gloom there were, no doubt, and no doubt these principles were embodied by the Irish Celts in their myths of Balor and the Fomorians, of which we shall hear anon; but that they were particularly a.s.sociated with the idea of death is, I think, a false supposition founded on misleading a.n.a.logies drawn from the ideas of the cla.s.sical nations. Here the Celts followed North African or Asiatic conceptions rather than those of the Aryans of Europe. It is only by realising that the Celts as we know them in history, from the break-up of the Mid-European Celtic empire onwards, formed a singular blend of Aryan with non-Aryan characteristics, that we shall arrive at a true understanding of their contribution to European history and their influence in European culture.

*The Five Factors in Ancient Celtic Culture*

To sum up the conclusions indicated: we can, I think, distinguish five distinct factors in the religious and intellectual culture of Celtic lands as we find them prior to the influx of cla.s.sical or of Christian influences. First, we have before us a ma.s.s of popular superst.i.tions and of magical observances, including human sacrifice. These varied more or less from place to place, centring as they did largely on local features which were regarded as embodiments or vehicles of divine or of diabolic power. Secondly, there was certainly in existence a thoughtful and philosophic creed, having as its central object of worship the Sun, as an emblem of divine power and constancy, and as its central doctrine the immortality of the soul. Thirdly, there was a worship of personified deities, sus, Teutates, Lugh, and others, conceived as representing natural forces, or as guardians of social laws. Fourthly, the Romans were deeply impressed with the existence among the Druids of a body of teaching of a quasi-scientific nature about natural phenomena and the const.i.tution of the universe, of the details of which we unfortunately know practically nothing. Lastly, we have to note the prevalence of a sacerdotal organisation, which administered the whole system of religious and of secular learning and literature,(72) which carefully confined this learning to a privileged caste, and which, by virtue of its intellectual supremacy and of the atmosphere of religious awe with which it was surrounded, became the sovran power, social, political, and religious, in every Celtic country. I have spoken of these elements as distinct, and we can, indeed, distinguish them in thought, but in practice they were inextricably intertwined, and the Druidic organisation pervaded and ordered all. Can we now, it may be asked, distinguish among them what is of Celtic and what of pre-Celtic and probably non-Aryan origin? This is a more difficult task; yet, looking at all the a.n.a.logies and probabilities, I think we shall not be far wrong in a.s.signing to the Megalithic People the special doctrines, the ritual, and the sacerdotal organisation of Druidism, and to the Celtic element the personified deities, with the zest for learning and for speculation; while the popular superst.i.tions were merely the local form a.s.sumed by conceptions as widespread as the human race.

*The Celts of To-day*

In view of the undeniably mixed character of the populations called Celtic at the present day, it is often urged that this designation has no real relation to any ethnological fact. The Celts who fought with Caesar in Gaul and with the English in Ireland are, it is said, no morethey have perished on a thousand battlefields from Alesia to the Boyne, and an older racial stratum has come to the surface in their place.

The true Celts, according to this view, are only to be found in the tall, ruddy Highlanders of Perthshire and North-west Scotland, and in a few families of the old ruling race still surviving in Ireland and in Wales.

In all this I think it must be admitted that there is a large measure of truth. Yet it must not be forgotten that the descendants of the Megalithic People at the present day are, on the physical side, deeply impregnated with Celtic blood, and on the spiritual with Celtic traditions and ideals.

Nor, again, in discussing these questions of race-character and its origin, must it ever be a.s.sumed that the character of a people can be a.n.a.lysed as one a.n.a.lyses a chemical compound, fixing once for all its const.i.tuent parts and determining its future behaviour and destiny.

Race-character, potent and enduring though it be, is not a dead thing, cast in an iron mould, and thereafter incapable of change and growth. It is part of the living forces of the world; it is plastic and vital; it has hidden potencies which a variety of causes, such as a felicitous cross with a different, but not too different, stock, orin another spherethe adoption of a new religious or social ideal, may at any time unlock and bring into action.

Of one thing I personally feel convincedthat the problem of the ethical, social, and intellectual development of the people const.i.tuting what is called the Celtic Fringe in Europe ought to be worked for on Celtic lines; by the maintenance of the Celtic tradition, Celtic literature, Celtic speechthe encouragement, in short, of all those Celtic affinities of which this mixed race is now the sole conscious inheritor and guardian.

To these it will respond, by these it can be deeply moved; nor has the harvest ever failed those who with courage and faith have driven their plough into this rich field. On the other hand, if this work is to be done with success it must be done in no pedantic, narrow, intolerant spirit; there must be no clinging to the outward forms of the past simply because the Celtic spirit once found utterance in them. Let it be remembered that in the early Middle Ages Celts from Ireland were the most notable explorers, the most notable pioneers of religion, science, and speculative thought in Europe.(73) Modern investigators have traced their footprints of light over half the heathen continent, and the schools of Ireland were thronged with foreign pupils who could get learning nowhere else. The Celtic spirit was then playing its true part in the world-drama, and a greater it has never played. The legacy of these men should be cherished indeed, but not as a museum curiosity; nothing could be more opposed to their free, bold, adventurous spirit than to let that legacy petrify in the hands of those who claim the heirship or their name and fame.

*The Mythical Literature*

After the sketch contained in this and the foregoing chapter of the early history of the Celts, and of the forces which have moulded it, we shall now turn to give an account of the mythical and legendary literature in which their spirit most truly lives and shines. We shall not here concern ourselves with any literature which is not Celtic. With all that other peoples have madeas in the Arthurian legendsof myths and tales originally Celtic, we have here nothing to do. No one can now tell how much is Celtic in them and how much is not. And in matters of this kind it is generally the final recasting that is of real importance and value.

Whatever we give, then, we give without addition or reshaping. Stories, of course, have often to be summarised, but there shall be nothing in them that did not come direct from the Celtic mind, and that does not exist to-day in some variety, Gaelic or Cymric, of the Celtic tongue.

CHAPTER III: THE IRISH INVASION MYTHS

*The Celtic Cosmogony*

Among those secret doctrines about the nature of things which, as Csar tells us, the Druids never would commit to writing, was there anything in the nature of a cosmogony, any account of the origin of the world and of man? There surely was. It would be strange indeed if, alone among the races of the world, the Celts had no world-myth. The spectacle of the universe with all its vast and mysterious phenomena in heaven and on earth has aroused, first the imagination, afterwards the speculative reason, in every people which is capable of either. The Celts had both in abundance, yet, except for that one phrase about the indestructibility of the world handed down to us by Strabo, we know nothing of their early imaginings or their reasonings on this subject. Ireland possesses a copious legendary literature. All of this, no doubt, a.s.sumed its present form in Christian times; yet so much essential paganism has been allowed to remain in it that it would be strange if Christian influences had led to the excision of everything in these ancient texts that pointed to a non-Christian conception of the origin of thingsif Christian editors and transmitters had never given us even the least glimmer of the existence of such a conception. Yet the fact is that they do not give it; there is nothing in the most ancient legendary literature of the Irish Gaels, which is the oldest Celtic literature in existence, corresponding to the Babylonian conquest of Chaos, or the wild Norse myth of the making of Midgard out of the corpse of Ymir, or the Egyptian creation of the universe out of the primeval Water by Thoth, the Word of G.o.d, or even to the primitive folklore conceptions found in almost every savage tribe. That the Druids had some doctrine on this subject it is impossible to doubt. But, by resolutely confining it to the initiated and forbidding all lay speculation on the subject, they seem to have completely stifled the mythmaking instinct in regard to questions of cosmogony among the people at large, and ensured that when their own order perished, their teaching, whatever it was, should die with them.

In the early Irish accounts, therefore, of the beginnings of things, we find that it is not with the World that the narrators make their start.i.t is simply with their own country, with Ireland. It was the practice, indeed, to prefix to these narratives of early invasions and colonisations the Scriptural account of the making of the world and man, and this shows that something of the kind was felt to be required; but what took the place of the Biblical narrative in pre-Christian days we do not know, and, unfortunately, are now never likely to know.

*The Cycles of Irish Legend*

Irish mythical and legendary literature, as we have it in the most ancient form, may be said to fall into four main divisions, and to these we shall adhere in our presentation of it in this volume. They are, in chronological order, the Mythological Cycle, or Cycle of the Invasions, the Ultonian or Conorian Cycle, the Ossianic or Fenian Cycle, and a mult.i.tude of miscellaneous tales and legends which it is hard to fit into any historical framework.

*The Mythological Cycle*

The Mythological Cycle comprises the following sections:

1. The coming of Partholan into Ireland.

2. The coming of Nemed into Ireland.

3. The coming of the Firbolgs into Ireland.