CELTIC MYTHOLOGY (Illustrated Edition). T. W. Rolleston

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Both in Ireland and in Brittany, on November eve food is laid out for the dead who come to visit the houses and to warm themselves at the fire in the stillness of the night, and in Brittany a huge log burns on the hearth. We have here returned to the cult of the dead at the hearth.⁵⁰² Possibly the Yule log was once a log burned on the hearth—the place of the family ghosts—at Samhain, when new fire was kindled in each house. On it libations were poured, which would then have been meant for the dead. The Yule log and the log of the Breton peasants would thus be the domestic aspect of the fire ritual, which had its public aspect in the Samhain bonfires.

All this has been in part affected by the Christian feast of All Souls. Dr. Frazer thinks that the feast of All Saints (November 1st) was intended to take the place of the pagan cult of the dead. As it failed to do this, All Souls, a festival of all the dead, was added on November 2nd.⁵⁰³ To some extent, but not entirely, it has neutralised the pagan rites, for the old ideas connected with Samhain still survive here and there. It is also to be noted that in some cases the friendly aspect of the dead has been lost sight of, and, like the síd-folk, they are popularly connected with evil powers which are in the ascendant on Samhain eve.

480. Silius Italicus, v. 652; Lucan, i. 447. Cf. p. 241, infra.

481. Ammian. Marcell. xv. 10. 7; Joyce, SH i. 45.

482. Bulliot, Fouilles du Mont Beuvray, Autun, 1899, i. 76, 396.

483. Le Braz, ii. 67; Sauvé, Folk-lore des Hautes Vosges, 295; Bérenger-Féraud, Superstitions et Survivances, i. 11.

484. Hearn, Aryan Household, 43 f.; Bérenger-Féraud, i. 33; Rev. des Trad. i. 142; Carmichael, ii. 329; Cosquin, Trad. Pop. de la Lorraine, i. 82.

485. Kennedy, 126. The mischievous brownie who overturns furniture and smashes crockery is an exact reproduction of the Poltergeist.

486. Dechelette, Rev. Arch. xxxiii, (1898), 63, 245, 252.

487. Cicero, De Leg. ii. 22.

488. Dechelette, 256; Reinach, BF 189.

489. Dechelette, 257-258. In another instance the ram is marked with crosses like those engraved on images of the underworld god with the hammer.

490. Kennedy, 187.

491. Lady Wilde, 118; Curtin, Tales, 54.

492. Le Braz, i. 229; Gregor, 21; Cambry, Voyage dans le Finistère, i. 229.

493. Le Braz, ii. 47; Folk-Lore, iv. 357; MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye, 254; Sébillot, i. 235-236.

494. Names of places associated with the great festivals are also those of the chief pagan cemeteries, Tara, Carman, Taillti, etc. (O'Curry, MC ii. 523).

495. Rennes Dindsenchas, RC xv. 313-314.

496. Cf. Frazer, Adonis, 134.

497. Cf. Chambers, Mediæval Stage, i. 250, 253.

498. See Vigfusson-Powell, Corpus Poet. Boreale, i. 405, 419. Perhaps for a similar reason a cult of the dead may have occurred at the Midsummer festival.

499. Miss Faraday, Folk-Lore, xvii. 398 f.

500. Bede, de Temp. Rat. c. xv.

501. Vigfusson-Powell, i. 419.

502. Curtin, Tales, 157; Haddon, Folk-Lore, iv. 359; Le Braz, ii. 115 et passim.

503. Frazer, Adonis, 253 f.

      Primitive Nature Worship

       Table of Contents

In early thought everything was a person, in the loose meaning then possessed by personality, and many such "persons" were worshipped—earth, sun, moon, sea, wind, etc. This led later to more complete personification, and the sun or earth divinity or spirit was more or less separated from the sun or earth themselves. Some Celtic divinities were thus evolved, but there still continued a veneration of the objects of nature in themselves, as well as a cult of nature spirits or secondary divinities who peopled every part of nature. "Nor will I call out upon the mountains, fountains, or hills, or upon the rivers, which are now subservient to the use of man, but once were an abomination and destruction to them, and to which the blind people paid divine honours," cries Gildas.⁵⁰⁴ This was the true cult of the folk, the "blind people," even when the greater gods were organised, and it has survived with modifications in out-of-the-way places, in spite of the coming of Christianity.

S. Kentigern rebuked the Cambrians for worshipping the elements, which God made for man's use.⁵⁰⁵ The question of the daughters of Loegaire also throws much light on Celtic nature worship. "Has your god sons or daughters?... Have many fostered his sons? Are his daughters dear and beautiful to men? Is he in heaven or on earth, in the sea, in the rivers, in the mountains, in the valleys?"⁵⁰⁶ The words suggest a belief in divine beings filling heaven, earth, sea, air, hills, glens, lochs, and rivers, and following human customs. A naïve faith, full of beauty and poetry, even if it had its dark and grim aspects! These powers or personalities had been invoked from time immemorial, but the invocations were soon stereotyped into definite formulas. Such a formula is put into the mouth of Amairgen, the poet of the Milesians, when they were about to invade Erin, and it may have been a magical invocation of the powers of nature at the beginning of an undertaking or in times of danger:

      "I invoke the land СКАЧАТЬ