Celtic Mythology: History of Celts, Religion, Archeological Finds, Legends & Myths. T. W. Rolleston
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in Greece, so among the Celts, the primitive corn-spirits had probably become more individualised goddesses with an elaborate cult, observed on an island or at other sacred spots. The cult probably varied here and there, and that of a god of fertility may have taken the place of the cult of goddesses. A god was worshipped by the Namnite women, according to Strabo, goddesses according to Dionysius. The mangled victim was probably regarded as representative of a divinity, and perhaps part of the flesh was mixed with the seed-corn, like the grain of the Maiden sheaf, or buried in the earth. This rite is common among savages, and its presence in old European ritual is attested by survivals. That these rites were tabu to men probably points to the fact that they were examples of an older general custom, in which all such rites were in the hands of women who cultivated the earth, and who were the natural priestesses of goddesses of growth and fertility, of vegetation and the growing corn. Another example is found in the legend and procession of Godiva at Coventry—the survival of a pagan cult from which men were excluded.897
Pliny speaks of the nudity of the women engaged in the cult. Nudity is an essential part of all primitive agricultural rites, and painting the body is also a widespread ritual act. Dressing with leaves or green stuff, as among the Namnite women, and often with the intention of personating the spirit of vegetation, is also customary. By unveiling the body, and especially the sexual organs, women more effectually represented the goddess of fertility, and more effectually as her representatives, or through their own powers, magically conveyed fertility to the fields. Nakedness thus became a powerful magico-religious symbol, and it is found as part of the ritual for producing rain.898
There is thus abundant evidence of the cult of fertility, vegetation, and corn-spirits, who tended to become divinities, male or female. Here and there, through conservatism, the cult remained in the hands of women, but more generally it had become a ritual in which both men and women took part—that of the great agricultural festivals. Where a divinity had taken the place of the vaguer spirits, her image, like that of Berecynthia, was used in the ritual, but the image was probably the successor of the tree which embodied the vegetation-spirit, and was carried through the fields to fertilise them. Similar processions of images, often accompanied by a ritual washing of the image in order to invigorate the divinity, or, as in the similar May-day custom, to produce rain, are found in the Teutonic cult of Nerthus, the Phrygian of Cybele, the Hindu of Bhavani, and the Roman ritual of the Bona Dea. The image of Berecynthia was thus probably washed also. Washing the images of saints, usually to produce rain, has sometimes taken the place of the washing of a divine image, and similarly the relics of a saint are carried through a field, as was the tree or image. The community at Iona perambulated a newly sown field with S. Columba's relics in time of drought, and shook his tunic three times in the air, and were rewarded by a plentiful rain, and later, by a bounteous harvest.899
Many of these local cults were pre-Celtic, but we need not therefore suppose that the Celts, or the Aryans as a whole, had no such cults.900 The Aryans everywhere adopted local cults, but this they would not have done if, as is supposed, they had themselves outgrown them. The cults were local, but the Celts had similar local cults, and easily accepted those of the people they conquered. We cannot explain the persistence of such primitive cults as lie behind the great Celtic festivals, both in classical times and over the whole area of Europe among the peasantry, by referring them solely to a pre-Aryan folk. They were as much Aryan as pre-Aryan. They belong to those unchanging strata of religion which have so largely supplied the soil in which its later and more spiritual growths have flourished. And among these they still emerge, unchanged and unchanging, like the gaunt outcrops of some ancient rock formation amid rich vegetation and fragrant flowers.
837. Pliny, xvi. 45; Cæsar, vi. 18. See my article "Calendar (Celtic)" in Hastings' Encyclopædia of Rel. and Ethics, iii. 78 f., for a full discussion of the problems involved.
838. O'Donovan, Book of Rights, Intro. lii f.
839. O'Donovan, li.; Bertrand, 105; Keating, 300.
840. Samhain may mean "summer-end," from sam, "summer," and fuin, "sunset" or "end," but Dr. Stokes (US 293) makes samani- mean "assembly," i.e. the gathering of the people to keep the feast.
841. Keating, 125, 300.
842. See MacBain, CM ix. 328.
843. Brand, i. 390; Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 437; Stat. Account, xi. 621.
844. Hazlitt, 297-298, 340; Campbell, Witchcraft, 285 f.
845. Curtin, 72.
846. Fitzgerald, RC vi. 254.
847. See Chambers, Mediæval Stage, App. N, for the evidence from canons and councils regarding these.
848. Tille, Yule and Christmas, 96.
849. Chambers, Popular Rhymes, 166.
850. Hutchinson, View of Northumberland, ii. 45; Thomas, Rev. de l'Hist. des Rel. xxxviii. 335 f.
851. Patrol. Lot. xxxix. 2001.
852. IT i. 205; RC v. 331; Leahy, i. 57.
853. See p. 169, supra.
854. The writer has himself seen such bonfires in the Highlands. See also Hazlitt, 298; Pennant, Tour, ii. 47; Rh^ys, HL 515, CFL i. 225-226. In Egyptian mythology, Typhon assailed Horus in the form of a black swine.
855. Keating, 300.
856. Joyce, SH ii. 556; RC x. 214, 225, xxiv. 172; O'Grady, ii. 374; CM ix. 209.
857. See Mannhardt, Mythol. Forschung. 333 f.; Frazer, Adonis, passim; Thomas, Rev. de l'Hist. des Rel. xxxviii. 325 f.
858. Hazlitt, 35; Chambers, Mediæval Stage, i. 261.