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...

It is only as prehistoric archæology 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 discl

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 archæological evidence tend

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, palæolithic 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 sto

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

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

One of the most striking facts connected with the Celtic religion is the large number of names of deities which it includes.  These names are known to us almost entirely from inscriptions, for the most part votive tablets, in acknowledgment of some benefit, usually that of health, conferred by the god on man.  In Britain these votive tablets are chiefly found in the neighbourhood of the Roman walls and camps, but we cannot be always certain that the deities mentioned are indigenous.  In Gaul, ho

No name in connection with Celtic religion is more familiar to the average reader than that of the Druids, yet there is no section of the history of Celtic religion that has given rise to greater discussion than that relating to this order.  Even the association of the name with the Indo-European root dru -, which we find in the Greek word drus , an oak, has been questioned by such a competent Celtic scholar as M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, but on this point it cannot be said that his criticism is

In the preceding chapter we have seen that the belief was widely prevalent among Greek and Roman writers that the Druids taught the immortality of the soul.  Some of these writers, too, point out the undoubted fact, attested by Archæology, that objects which would be serviceable to the living were buried with the dead, and this was regarded as a confirmation of the view that the immortality of souls was to the Celts an object of belief.  The study of Archæology on the one hand, and of Comparativ

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