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Edward Anwyl >> Celtic Religion
CELTIC RELIGION
IN PRE-CHRISTIAN TIMES
By
EDWARD ANWYL, M.A.
LATE CLASSICAL SCHOLAR OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD
PROFESSOR OF WELSH AND COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY AT
THE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF WALES, ABERYSTWYTH
ACTING-CHAIRMAN OF THE CENTRAL WELSH BOARD
FOR INTERMEDIATE EDUCATION
LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO LTD
16 JAMES STREET HAYMARKET
1906
Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
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 Noricum 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 institutions, 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 gods, 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 passed in his emergence into civilised life. To
demonstrate and to illustrate 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 passed 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 analogues 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 passed 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 passed 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
attitude, 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 illustration 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
pronunciation of U as 'oo' and of QU, while the 'Brythonic' or Welsh
variety changed U to a sound pronounced 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 assume 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-gods were not originally such. In the Roman
calendar there is abundant evidence that Mars was at one time an
agricultural god as well as a god 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 god 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 shore 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 Massilia (Marseilles), 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 gods 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 homogeneous 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 mass 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 homogeneity, 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 passing 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 goddesses 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 gods. As in all countries where the gods 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 gods who, like Esus, Teutates, Grannos, Bormanus,
Litavis, had names of a definite character.