Celtic Religion | Page 6

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