Celtic Religion | Page 8

sphere. There is much plausibility
in the view put forward by M. Salomon Reinach, that the domestication
of animals itself implies a totemistic habit of thought, and the
consequent protection of these animals by means of taboos from harm
and death. It may well be that, after all, the usefulness of domestic
animals from a material point of view was only a secondary
consideration for man, and a happy discovery after unsuccessful
totemistic attentions to other animals. We know not how many
creatures early man tried to associate with himself but failed.
In all stages of man's history the alternation of the seasons must have
brought some rudiments of order and system into his thoughts, though
for a long time he was too preoccupied to reflect upon the regularly
recurring vicissitudes of his life. In the pastoral stage, the sense of order
came to be more marked than in that of hunting, and quickened the
mind to fresh thought. The earth came to be regarded as the Mother
from whom all things came, and there are abundant indications that the
earth as the Mother, the Queen, the Long-lived one, etc., found her
natural place as a goddess among the Celts. Her names and titles were
probably not in all places or in all tribes the same. But it is in the
agricultural stage that she entered in Celtic lands, as she did in other
countries, into her completest religious heritage, and this aspect of
Celtic religion will be dealt with more fully in connection with the
spirits of vegetation. This phase of religion in Celtic countries is one
which appears to underlie some of its most characteristic forms, and the
one which has survived longest in Celtic folk-lore. The Earth-mother

with her progeny of spirits, of springs, rivers, mountains, forests, trees,
and corn, appears to have supplied most of the grouped and
individualised gods of the Celtic pantheon. The Dis, of whom Caesar
speaks as the ancient god of the Gauls, was probably regarded as her
son, to whom the dead returned in death. Whether he is the Gaulish god
depicted with a hammer, or as a huge dog swallowing the dead, has not
yet been established with any degree of certainty.



CHAPTER IV
--CELTIC RELIGION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF
INDIVIDUALISED DEITIES
Like other religions, those of the Celtic lands of Europe supplemented
the earlier animism by a belief in spirits, who belonged to trees,
animals, rocks, mountains, springs, rivers, and other natural phenomena,
and in folk-lore there still survives abundant evidence that the Celt
regarded spirits as taking upon themselves a variety of forms, animal
and human. It was this idea of spirits in animal form that helped to
preserve the memory of the older totemism into historic times. It is thus
that we have names of the type of Brannogenos (son of the raven),
Artogenos (son of the bear), and the like, not to speak of simpler names
like Bran (raven), March (horse), surviving into historic times. Bronze
images, too, have been found at Neuvy-en-Sullias, of a horse and a stag
(now in the Orleans museum), provided with rings, which were, as M.
Salomon Reinach suggests, probably used for the purpose of carrying
these images in procession. The wild boar, too, was a favourite emblem
of Gaul, and there is extant a bronze figure of a Celtic Diana riding on a
boar's back. At Bolar, near Nuits, there was discovered a bronze mule.
In the museum at Mayence is a bas-relief of the goddess of horses,
Epona (from the Gaulish Epos=Lat. equus, horse), riding on horseback.
One of the most important monuments of this kind is a figure of Artio,

the bear-goddess (from Celtic Artos, a bear), found at Muri near Berne.
In front of her stood a figure of a bear, which was also found with her.
The bull of the Tarvos Trigaranos bas-relief of Notre Dame was also in
all likelihood originally a totem, and similarly the horned serpents of
other bas-reliefs, as well as the boar found on Gaulish ensigns and
coins, especially in Belgic territory. There is a representation, too, of a
raven on a bas-relief at Compiegne. The name 'Moccus,' which is
identified with Mercury, on inscriptions, and which is found inscribed
at Langres, Trobaso, the valley of the Ossola and the Borgo san
Dalmazzo, is undoubtedly the philological equivalent of the Welsh
moch (swine). In Britain, too, the boar is frequently found on the coins
of the Iceni and other tribes. In Italy, according to Mr. Warde Fowler,
the pig was an appropriate offering to deities of the earth, so that in the
widespread use of the pig as a symbol in the Celtic world, there may be
some ancient echo of a connection between it and the earth-spirit. Its
diet