The point of greatest importance at the present stage of our enquiry is that of the Celtic religion between the close of the Bronze Age and Cæsar’s invasion of Gaul and Britain. Was it one of the many forms of nature worship which found the central object of its adoration in the glorious orb who in the words of the Psalmist “cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber and rejoiceth as a giant to run his course”? Did the worship of the sun form its most prominent distinguishing feature?
The much-quoted passage given by Diodorus the Sicilian, who lived in the first century before the Christian era and who reproduced it from the Description of the World written by Hecatæus in the fifth century, states that in the island of the Hyperboreans over against Celtica there is a magnificent circular temple which they have erected to Apollo.[[17]] The passage presents more than one difficulty. The Hyperboreans were known to the ancient world as the possessors of the sources of amber, a substance which is not found in Britain but in the neighbourhood of the Baltic. Those who would identify the Hyperborean island with Britain and the temple with Stonehenge, have to face the greater difficulty of accounting for the fact that a sepulchral structure erected in pre-Celtic times was, in the fifth century before Christ, being used for sun worship by Hyperboreans who may or may not have been Celts, but who in the passage are described as having erected it for that purpose. It should be remembered that Hecatæus had been dead for over a century when Pytheas the daring Greek explorer made his famous voyage of discovery, and that if that voyage was, as M. Déchelette contends,[[18]] to the navigator of the fourth century before the Christian era what a polar expedition is to the navigator of to-day, it is hardly likely that Hecatæus could have had very reliable information concerning either Britain or its Celtic inhabitants.
It may, perhaps, be allowable to hazard an opinion which after all is only an opinion, viz. that the Ligurians who dwelt along the transcontinental amber route were sun worshippers, but that until the days of Julius Cæsar we know very little, if indeed anything for certain, of the religion of the Celts who inhabited western Gaul and Britain. Whether Stonehenge was the temple referred to is very doubtful; whether it was orientated with respect to the sun is a matter which, as Professor Oman justly observes, need not be taken seriously.[[19]]
But what of the Phœnicians, and where do they come in? It is a cruel thing to say to a generation which can ill afford to part with any fragment of its diminished archæological patrimony, but it must be said without reserve or qualification: the Phœnicians do not come in at all.
It would be comparatively easy, as some have already found, to provide Celtic Britain with all the elaborate machinery of sun worship if it could be shown that there were direct and close relations between Britain and Phœnicia either before or after the Celtic invasion. No one, of course, doubts or denies the glory of the Phœnician thalassocracy. The Bible is only one of many witnesses. Hiram King of Tyre supplied Solomon both with craftsmen for the brass work of the Temple at Jerusalem and with sailors for his trading expeditions to India. Gades (Cadiz) the port of Tartessus, or Tarshish, was founded by the Phœnicians before 1100 B.C. The ships of Tarshish are rooted in the memory like the bulls of Bashan and the cedars of Libanus. Ezekiel’s lamentation for Tyre[[20]] is not only one of the most profoundly pathetic but also one of the most illuminating passages in the Old Testament.
Speaking of Tyre, he says, “Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kind of riches, with silver, iron, tin, and lead they traded in thy fairs:” “the ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy market: and thou wast replenished and made very glorious in the midst of the seas.”
Nevertheless, great, extensive and varied as was the commercial enterprise of the Phœnicians, scholars are now generally agreed that they never got beyond Gades in their Atlantic voyages.
Moreover, the Cassiterides or Tin Islands, mentioned by Diodorus, which a former generation strove to identify with the Scilly Isles, lay undoubtedly to the north of Spain.[[21]] At the same time it must be noted that the same author Diodorus, who probably had his information from Poseidonius (born circa 135 B.C.), does expressly state in the same passage that tin was conveyed from Britain to Gaul and overland to Marseilles. By that time, however, the doom of Carthage, the daughter city of Tyre, situated on the Bay of Tunis, had also been sealed.
This absence of historical evidence respecting Phœnician intercourse with Britain, supposing such intercourse to have existed, might have been in some measure explained—and not as the Privy Council explained the Ornaments Rubric of the Church of England, by arguing that omission implies prohibition—by assuming that the source of the tin supply was kept secret, like that of amber, by the traders in that commodity. It is the fact that no vestige of these Semitic navigators has been found either in Gaul or in Britain, which decisively excludes the supposition that they ever visited those countries. Dr. Birch in giving his judgment upon the bronze bull found in the garden of St. Just Vicarage states it as his conviction that no object has yet been found in Britain which can be satisfactorily identified with the Phœnicians,[[22]] and M. Déchelette is equally emphatic respecting the absence of similar objects in Gaul.[[23]] What M. Alexandre Bertrand says of Celtic civilisation, namely, that neither the Ligurians, nor the Phœnicians, nor the Greeks, nor the Iberians collaborated in that educational work, may with some reservations in favour of the two latter nations be accepted as true of the Celtic religion.
From Julius Cæsar some useful information is to be gained respecting the religion of the Celts of his own day. He states that they had many gods, the chief of whom, in Gaul at least, answered to the Roman Mercury, patron of arts and crafts. Mars, Apollo, Minerva and Dis Pater were represented in the Celtic system, but it is not easy to equate them satisfactorily. After the Roman conquest the Britons followed the custom of other subject races and identified their gods with those of Olympus. Some of their gods found no corresponding analogue, like Nodens, whose temple overlooked the Severn; others again were purely local and patronal.