162 



KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[May 1, 1888. 



"mothers," oi' guardian spirits, who ap])ear in medifeyal 

 legends as the White Ladies, the three foiries, the weird 

 sisters, the wild women of the woods ; while in the giants 

 and dwarfs and the fairies and goodies of nursery legend 

 other minor deities reappsar. Forming a dark background 

 to this spritely company, we find another and older creed, 

 familiar to us as Druidism, concerning which the most 

 foolish speculations and bizarre theories have been broached. 

 Upon this Professor Ehys has much to .say which is of 

 interest, and in connection with which we advise the 

 perusal of his little book on" Celtic Britain,"* as also of the 

 chapter on the religion of the British tribes in Mr. Elton's 

 scholarly and delightful " Origins of English History." f 

 As this latter book is out of print, it may be we'l to quote 

 the opening sentence from Mr. Elton's fine chapter : — 



The religion of the British tribes has exercised an important 

 influence upon literature. The medi.tval romances and the legends 

 which stood for history are full of the "fair humanities" and 

 figures of its bright mythology. The elemental powers of earth 

 and fire, and the spirits which haunted the wavts and streams, 

 appear again as kings in the Irish .annals, or as saints .and hermits 

 in Wales. The Knights of the Round Table, 8ir Kay and Tristram, 

 and the bold Sir Bedivere, betray their divine origin by the 

 attributes which they retained as heroes of romance. It was a 

 goddess, Bca quirdani j)liaiiiastica, who bore the wounded Arthur 

 to the peaceful valley. " There was little sunlight on its woods 

 and streams, and the nights were dark and gloomy for want of the 

 moon and stars." This is the country of Oberon and of Sir Huon 

 de Bonrdeaux. It is the dreamy forest of Arden. In an older 

 mythology it was the realm of a King of Shadows, the country of 

 " Gwyn ab Nudd," who rode as Kir Guyon in the " Faerie Queene," 



And knighthood took of good Sir Huon's hand. 

 When with King Oberon he came to Fairyland. 



The history of the Celtic religions has been obscured by many false 

 theories which need not be discussed in detail. The tr.aces of 

 revealed religion were discovered by the Benedictine historians in 

 the doctrines attributed to the Druids; if the Gauls adored the oak- 

 tree, it could only be a remembrance of the plains of Mamre ; if 

 they slew a prisoner on a block of unhewn stone, it must have been 

 in deference to a precept of Moses. A school pretending to a 

 deeper philosophy invented for the Druids the mission of preserving 

 monotheism in the West. In the teaching of another school the 

 Druids are credited with the learning of Phrenicia and Egypt. The 

 mysteries of the "Thrice-great Hermes" were transported to the 

 northern oak-forests, and every difficulty was solved as it rose by a 

 reference to Baal or Moloch. The lines and circles of st.anding 

 stones became the signs of a worship of snakes and dragons. The 

 mined cromlech was mistaken for ,an altar of sacrifice with the rock 

 basin to catch the victim's blood and a holed-stone for the rope to 

 bind liis limbs. 



In inquiring into the origin and nature of Druidism, it is 

 necessary to have a clear idea of the succession of races in 

 Britain prior to the Roman invasion. We may leave out 

 of this list the men of Paljeolithic times who ranged the 

 country under a more or less arctic climate, waging war 

 against the huge mammals of tho Quaternary epoch, and 

 whose chipped tools and weapons are found in the river- 

 drifts and under cavern floors, for it is certain that no 

 continuity of race can be proved between these savages 

 and any tribe or nation now found in Norlh-Western 

 Europe. 



Between their disappearance and the arrival of a more 

 advanced race great physical changes occurred, Britain 

 having been submerged, then laised, reunited to the Con- 

 tinent, and then finally separated. But the I'ritain of 

 Neolithic and far later times, down to a period long 

 subsequent to the Roman invasion, was, in its superficial 

 features, not the Britain of to-day, but a land of fen and 

 forest, the highways through which determined the ancient 

 boundaries of its several kingdoms. Despite Mr. Ruskin's 



* Published by S.P.C.K. London. 1882. 

 f London: B. Quaritch. 1882. 



Jeremiads on tho degradation of the climate of England 

 through the blotting out of her skies with " Manchester's 

 devil darkness, and sulphurous chimney-pot vomit," and of 

 the troubling, not as by the angel at Bethesda, of her streams 

 with the pollution and filth of her factories, we are in much 

 better case now than then. When the legions of C;esar 

 first disembarked they found the island little better in 

 most parts than " a cold .and watery desert. According to 

 all the accounts of the early travellers the sky was stormy 

 and oliscured by continual rain, the air chilly even in 

 summer, and the sun during the finest weather had little 

 power to disperse the steaming mists. The trees gathered 

 and condensed the rain ; the crops grew rankly, but ripened 

 slowly, for the ground and the atmospliere were alike over- 

 loaded with moisture. The fallen timber obstructed the 

 streams, tho rivers were squandered in the reedy morasses, 

 and only the downs and hill-tops rose above the perpetual 

 tracts of wood." The herds of mammoths, rhinocero.ses, and 

 other pachyderms ; the cave-lions, cave-bears, hyamas, and 

 other beasts of prey, that had roamed through the jungles 

 and wallowed in the rivers during the alternating polar and 

 tropical climates of the Old Stone Age, had vanished, and in 

 their place wild boars and o.xen (the urns of Ca'sar), elks 

 and other animals, for the most part extinct, tenanted the 

 forests and swamps. Wolves prowled over the long desert 

 that stretched from the Cheviots to the Peak ; beavers 

 built in the streams ; and only the cry of the cormorant 

 and other sea birds broke the silence that reigned over the 

 expanse of peat-bog that .stretched inland on the west, over 

 tho swamps of the midlands, and over the dreary fens that 

 spread in monotonous flatness eastwards. Masses of 

 forest so dense as to bo in some districts impenetrable, stretch^ 

 ing, as did the Andredsweald, one hundred and twenty miles, 

 with wide expanses of moor and swamp, that surrounding 

 the higher ground where Ely Cathedral now stands exceed- 

 ing sixty miles across ; narrow strips of arable, and wider 

 breadths of pasture land, spread over the estttaries and 

 across tho inland valleys — such, broadly outlined, were the 

 features of England from pre-Roman times till a thousand 

 years later, despite much that had been accomplished by the 

 military spirit of the Romans and the industrious energy of 

 the Saxons, whose work the Norman, with his passion for 

 the chase, undid so ruthlessly. 



This description of the physical .aspect of our island 

 applies still more to the Neolithic age, when no Aryan 

 husbandman had yet struck his plough into the soil, or 

 burned the timber into charcoal for the smelting of tho 

 abundant ore. The earliest known Neolithic settlers in 

 Britain were a short and thickset people, with long or oval 

 heads, dark hair, probably swarthy complexions, .aquiline 

 noses, long n.arrow foreheads, and with the tibia or shiiibone 

 presenting in many cases that flattened, sabre-like form, 

 called platycnemi.a — a feature not so much indicative of 

 ape-like ancestry as of physical change dire to the freer and 

 more constant use of certain muscles which are brought into 

 action in hanti)ig game on foot, and such-like occupations. 

 These people, the Kynesii, of whom Herodotus speaks as 

 dwelling outside the Pillars of Hercules, furthe.st away 

 towards the setting of the sun, are now generally identified 

 with the remnants of non- Aryans known to us as Iberians, 

 found in various parts of Europe, descendants of the wide- 

 spread race whose relics — tombs, and stone circles marking 

 the transition from burial-place to temple — exist by thou- 

 sands in both hemispheres. Notable among these remn.ants 

 are the Basques, living in the Western Pyrenees, and speak- 

 ing a relatively modern language which is the sole survivor 

 of the Iberian family of speech, and, fo far as is known, 

 without affinity with .any other language in the world. But 

 it is obvious that unless the untenable and indolent theories 



