Celtic Religion | Page 3

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