Celtic Religion | Page 2

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