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 Cæsar 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 Cæsar’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 Cæsar 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
Rhŷs, Hibbert Lectures on Celtic Heathendom.
Rhŷs, Celtic Folk-lore, Welsh and Manx.
Reinach, S., Cultes, Mythes et Religion.
Nutt, Alfred, The Voyage of Bran.
Squire, Mythology of the British Islands.