Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar. T. Rice Holmes
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or even that in Caesar’s time their physiognomies were sharply outlined. When we see that the Germans whom he encountered worshipped Sun, Moon, and Fire,1181 and that those whom Tacitus described had their Mars and Mercury,1182 we may be inclined to suspect that Celtic ideas, under classical influence, had undergone a like transformation.1183 In polytheism divers attributes of deity tend to become separate deities.1184 Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus were, it would seem, only specialized forms of the same god;1185 and some of the Celtic epithets which are attached to Minerva, Mars, and the rest may mean that they were assimilated by this or that tribe to topical divinities.1186 Dis Pater was certainly near of kin to Saturn—that old Italian chthonian divinity;1187 and Dis Pater and Toutates, ‘the god of the people,’ who was perhaps primarily conceived as a kind of Saturn,1188 may once have been one; indeed there seem to be indications that from one point of view Dis Pater was Jupiter—a Jupiter of the nether world.1189 Again, if Toutates in Britain remained Mars, while in Gaul the Romanized Celts seem to have hesitated whether to identify him with Mars or Mercury, one is tempted to conjecture that he may have been the common ancestor of both.1190
No deities were nearer to the hearts of Celtic peasants than those who were known as deae matres—the mother goddesses. Once they were thought to belong to Germans and Celts alone;1191 but their statues have been found in numbers at Capua; and, slightly modified, they survived into the Middle Age. Generally figured in groups of three—a mystic number1192—their aspect was that of gentle serious motherly women, holding new-born infants in their hands, or bearing fruits and flowers in their laps; and many offerings were made to them by country folk in gratitude for their care of farm and flock and home.1193
Besides the gods whose cult was common to all the Celtic peoples or to one or the other of the two great stocks were local deities innumerable. We know that the Gallic cities, Bibracte1194 and Lugudunum,1195 had their divine patrons; and it is probable that every British town had its eponymous hero.1196 The deities, however, from whom towns derived their names were doubtless often worshipped near the site long before the first foundations were laid: the goddess Bibracte was originally the spirit of a spring reverenced by the peasants of the mountain upon which the famous Aeduan town was built.1197 Perhaps we shall not err if we also suppose that the heads of his slain enemies, which the Celtic brave religiously treasured and fastened upon the walls of his cottage, were offered to his household gods or to the spirits of his ancestors.1198
The worship of animals, to those who have not felt the fascination of anthropology, appears merely unintelligible and absurd. Animals were worshipped because they were formidable or wonderful; because men fancied that they were incarnations of deity; because they might be tenanted by the souls of heroic forefathers;1199 and animal-worship, or a relic of animal-worship, which may perhaps, in some cases, have been a survival of totemism, has left vestiges in Celtic art. The boar was especially sacred. Bronze figures of boars have been found alone and on the crests of helmets: the Witham shield, as we have seen, was decorated with the figure of a boar; and so are numerous coins, both Gallic and British.1200 Like the Romans, the Gauls and doubtless also the Britons had military standards: like the Romans also, they carried not a flag but the figure of an animal, and with them this animal was always the boar.1201 A reminiscence of animal-worship is probably also discernible in the horned head of Cernunnos, a god who is figured on one of the well-known altars of Paris, and in Tarvos Trigaranus—‘the bull with the three cranes’—which fills the back of another.1202
But votive altars, statues, and temples, although they embodied older beliefs, belong, as we have seen, to the period when the Celts had fallen under the dominion of Rome. The Cisalpine Gauls, if Livy1203 and Polybius1204 are to be believed, worshipped in temples: but the holy places of the Western Celts were groves,1205 and perhaps stone circles which they inherited from the people of the Bronze Age. Such simplicity was of course not peculiar to the Celts and the Germans.1206 The Pelasgian Zeus had no temple: the oldest sanctuary of Jupiter on the Alban Mount was a grove of oaks.1207 Not a single statue of pre-Roman date has ever been found in Britain; not one in Gaul later than the close of the Palaeolithic Age. Caesar indeed says that the Gallic Mercury was represented by numerous simulacra; but if these were statues, it is inexplicable that none of them has ever come to light; and perhaps we may accept the suggestion that Caesar was thinking of menhirs, which had been erected long before the first Celt set foot in Gaul,1208 but which, like the formless stones that the Greeks venerated as figures of Hermes,1209 were, he supposed, regarded as possessed by the spirit of the great national deity. On the menhir of Kernuz in Finistère a rude Mercury was sculptured in Roman times.1210 The conjecture may be well founded that the Druids, like the priests of Israel, were opposed to anthropomorphism;1211 but it is not needed to explain the lack of native statues of Celtic gods.1212 The Romans, according to Varro, had for many years no sacred images:1213 like the Celts, like the Germans, who also, even in the time of Tacitus,1214 deemed it derogatory to the majesty of the gods to ascribe to them human form, they were content to recognize manifestations of divine will; and even when their temples were being crowded with the works of Greek art, their ancient Vesta remained shrouded in awful mystery.1215 But, while the Druids may have been as hostile as Israel to Gentile abominations, the Celts in general were as receptive as the Romans, and readily accepted the services of foreign sculptors.
Sepulchral usages.
The evidence of interments, from which we tried to glean some information as to the religion of the Bronze Age, remains much the same during the later period; and the noticeable changes do not seem to have much significance. British customs differed somewhat from those of Gaul. Inhumation, which had almost entirely ceased in that country in the second century before Christ, continued everywhere in Britain except in the territory of the Belgae; and even there cremation was not universal.1216 In the more southern districts nearly all the interments which have been explored were unmarked by any tumulus; while in the cemetery of Aylesford the urns which contained the cremated remains were placed in small cylindrical pits set in what has been described as a family circle.1217 When barrows were erected their form was still circular: but they were generally much smaller than those of the Bronze Age: they were grouped in much greater numbers;1218 and they were never more than structureless heaps of earth or stone.1219 Although the contracted position was still common, skeletons have been found extended in this country, as generally in Gaul;1220 and, as in Wiltshire in the Bronze Age, the head generally pointed towards the north.1221 On the other hand, ornaments and weapons were placed in graves more frequently than before:1222 animals were still occasionally interred;1223 and flint chips and stones were still sometimes deposited in or along with urns.1224 But rites which in the Bronze Age could only be inferred are attested in the Iron Age by eye-witnesses. We learn from Caesar1225 that it was a custom of the Gauls to immolate the dead man’s cherished possessions, even his favourite animals, on the funeral pyre; and that not long before the time of his oldest contemporaries slaves and retainers had been sacrificed.
Fig. 44.
The most remarkable perhaps of the sepulchral discoveries that illustrate this period appears to show that old persisted along with new. Hard by the family circles of the Aylesford cemetery, Dr. Arthur Evans opened three cists, each containing a contracted skeleton, the upper slab of one being pierced with a hole which may perhaps have been intended to let the ghost escape;1226 while almost side by side with elegant Late Celtic vases he picked up fragments of the old-fashioned finger-dented ware, including a drinking-cup and a cinerary urn.1227
The Druids.
It would be interesting to learn whether any Celtic prophet, like the great preachers of India and Palestine, taught that mercy is better than sacrifice. If we may trust Diogenes Laertius,1228 the Druids bade their disciples not only to fear the gods, but to do no wrong and to quit themselves like men. At all events the study of Celtic religion is inseparable from that of Druidism.
Where did Druidism originate? Caesar, in a well-known passage, remarks that it was believed to have arisen in Britain and to have been imported thence into Gaul;1229 and some scholars accept this tradition as literally true. The earliest extant mention of Druids1230 was made about the commencement of the second century before Christ—not long after the