The Religion of the Ancient Celts Part 39

In numerous Celtic folk-tales the dead rise in the body, not as ghosts, from the grave, which is sometimes described as a house in which they live. They perform their ordinary occupations in house or field; they eat with the living, or avenge themselves upon them; if scourged, blood is drawn from their bodies; and, in one curious Breton tale, a dead husband visits his wife in bed and she then has a child by him, because, as he said, "sa compte d'enfants" was not yet complete.[1168] In other stories a corpse becomes animated and speaks or acts in presence of the living, or from the tomb itself when it is disturbed.[1169] The earliest literary example of such a tale is the tenth century "Adventures of Nera," based on older sources. In this Nera goes to tie a withy to the foot of a man who has been hung. The corpse begs a drink, and then forces Nera to carry him to a house, where he kills two sleepers.[1170]

All such stories, showing as they do that a corpse is really living, must in essence be of great antiquity. Another common belief, found over the Celtic area, is that the dead rise from the grave, not as ghosts, when they will, and that they appear _en ma.s.se_ on the night of All Saints, and join the living.[1171]

As a result of such beliefs, various customs are found in use, apparently to permit of the corpse having freedom of movement, contrary to the older custom of preventing its egress from the grave. In the west of Ireland the feet of the corpse are left free, and the nails are drawn from the coffin at the grave. In the Hebrides the threads of the shroud are cut or the bindings of feet, hands, and face are raised when the body is placed in the coffin, and in Brittany the arms and feet are left free when the corpse is dressed.[1172] The reason is said to be that the spirit may have less trouble in getting to the spirit world, but it is obvious that a more material view preceded and still underlies this later gloss. Many stories are told ill.u.s.trating these customs, and the earlier belief, Christianised, appears in the tale of a woman who haunted her friends because they had made her grave-clothes so short that the fires of Purgatory burnt her knees.[1173]

Earlier customs recorded among the Celts also point to the existence of this primitive belief influencing actual custom. Nicander says that the Celts went by night to the tombs of great men to obtain oracles, so much did they believe that they were still living there.[1174] In Ireland, oracles were also sought by sleeping on funeral cairns, and it was to the grave of Fergus that two bards resorted in order to obtain from him the lost story of the _Tain_. We have also seen how, in Ireland, armed heroes exerted a sinister influence upon enemies from their graves, which may thus have been regarded as their homes--a belief also underlying the Welsh story of Bran's head.

Where was the world of the dead situated? M. Reinach has shown, by a careful comparison of the different uses of the word _orbis_, that Lucan's words do not necessarily mean "another world," but "another region," i.e. of this world.[1175] If the Celts cherished so firmly the belief that the dead lived on in the grave, a belief in an underworld of the dead was bound in course of time to have been evolved as part of their creed. To it all graves and tumuli would give access. Cla.s.sical observers apparently held that the Celtic future state was like their own in being an underworld region, since they speak of the dead Celts as _inferi_, or as going _ad Manes_, and Plutarch makes Camma speak of descending to her dead husband.[1176] What differentiated it from their own gloomy underworld was its exuberant life and immortality. This aspect of a subterranean land presented no difficulty to the Celt, who had many tales of an underworld or under-water region more beautiful and blissful than anything on earth. Such a subterranean world must have been that of the Celtic Dispater, a G.o.d of fertility and growth, the roots of things being nourished from his kingdom. From him men had descended,[1177] probably a myth of their coming forth from his subterranean kingdom, and to him they returned after death to a blissful life.

Several writers, notably M. D'Arbois, a.s.sume that the _orbis alius_ of the dead was the Celtic island Elysium. But that Elysium _never_ appears in the tales as a land of the dead. It is a land of G.o.ds and deathless folk who are not those who have pa.s.sed from this world by death. Mortals may reach it by favour, but only while still in life. It might be argued that Elysium was regarded in pagan times as the land of the dead, but after Christian eschatological views prevailed, it became a kind of fairyland. But the existing tales give no hint of this, and, after being carefully examined, they show that Elysium had always been a place distinct from that of the departed, though there may have arisen a tendency to confuse the two.

If there was a genuine Celtic belief in an island of the dead, it could have been no more than a local one, else Caesar would not have spoken as he does of the Celtic Dispater. Such a local belief now exists on the Breton coast, but it is mainly concerned with the souls of the drowned.[1178] A similar local belief may explain the story told by Procopius, who says that Brittia (Britain), an island lying off the mouth of the Rhine, is divided from north to south by a wall beyond which is a noxious region. This is a distorted reminiscence of the Roman wall, which would appear to run in this direction if Ptolemy's map, in which Scotland lies at right angles to England, had been consulted.

Thither fishermen from the opposite coast are compelled to ferry over at dead of night the shades of the dead, unseen to them, but marshalled by a mysterious leader.[1179] Procopius may have mingled some local belief with the current tradition that Ulysses' island of the shades lay in the north, or in the west.[1180] In any case his story makes of the gloomy land of the shades a very different region from the blissful Elysium of the Celts and from their joyous _orbis alius_, nor is it certain that he is referring to a Celtic people.

Traces of the idea of an underworld of the dead exist in Breton folk-belief. The dead must travel across a subterranean ocean, and though there is scarcely any tradition regarding what happens on landing, M. Sebillot thinks that formerly "there existed in the subterranean world a sort of centralisation of the different states of the dead." If so, this must have been founded on pagan belief. The interior of the earth is also believed to be the abode of fabulous beings, of giants, and of fantastic animals, and there is also a subterranean fairy world. In all this we may see a survival of the older belief, modified by Christian teaching, since the Bretons suppose that purgatory and h.e.l.l are beneath the earth and accessible from its surface.[1181]

Some British folk-lore brought to Greece by Demetrius and reported by Plutarch might seem to suggest that certain persons--the mighty dead--were privileged to pa.s.s to the island Elysium. Some islands near Britain were called after G.o.ds and heroes, and the inhabitants of one of these were regarded as sacrosanct by the Britons, like the priestesses of Sena. They were visited by Demetrius, who was told that the storms which arose during his visit were caused by the pa.s.sing away of some of the "mighty" or of the "great souls." It may have been meant that such mighty ones pa.s.sed to the more distant islands, but this is certainly not stated. In another island, Kronos was imprisoned, watched over by Briareus, and guarded by demons.[1182] Plutarch refers to these islands in another work, repeating the story of Kronos, and saying that his island is mild and fragrant, that people live there waiting on the G.o.d who sometimes appears to them and prevents their departing. Meanwhile they are happy and know no care, spending their time in sacrificing and hymn-singing or in studying legends and philosophy.

Plutarch has obviously mingled Celtic Elysium beliefs with the cla.s.sical conception of the Druids.[1183] In Elysium there is no care, and favoured mortals who pa.s.s there are generally prevented from returning to earth. The reference to Kronos may also be based partly on myths of Celtic G.o.ds of Elysium, partly on tales of heroes who departed to mysterious islands or to the hollow hills where they lie asleep, but whence they will one day return to benefit their people. So Arthur pa.s.sed to Avalon, but in other tales he and his warriors are asleep beneath Craig-y-Ddinas, just as Fionn and his men rest within this or that hill in the Highlands. Similar legends are told of other Celtic heroes, and they witness to the belief that great men who had died would return in the hour of their people's need. In time they were thought not to have died at all, but to be merely sleeping and waiting for their hour.[1184] The belief is based on the idea that the dead are alive in grave or barrow, or in a s.p.a.cious land below the earth, or that dead warriors can menace their foes from the tomb.

Thus neither in old sagas, nor in _Marchen_, nor in popular tradition, is the island Elysium a world of the dead. For the most part the pagan eschatology has been merged in that of Christianity, while the Elysium belief has remained intact and still survives in a whole series of beautiful tales.

The world of the dead was in all respects a _replica_ of this world, but it was happier. In existing Breton and Irish belief--a survival of the older conception of the bodily state of the dead--they resume their tools, crafts, and occupations, and they preserve their old feelings.

Hence, when they appear on earth, it is in bodily form and in their customary dress. Like the pagan Gauls, the Breton remembers unpaid debts, and cannot rest till they are paid, and in Brittany, Ireland, and the Highlands the food and clothes given to the poor after a death, feed and clothe the dead in the other world.[1185] If the world of the dead was subterranean,--a theory supported by current folk-belief,[1186]--the Earth-G.o.ddess or the Earth-G.o.d, who had been first the earth itself, then a being living below its surface and causing fertility, could not have become the divinity of the dead until the mult.i.tude of single graves or barrows, in each of which the dead lived, had become a wide subterranean region of the dead. This divinity was the source of life and growth; hence he or she was regarded as the progenitor of mankind, who had come forth from the underworld and would return there at death.

It is not impossible that the Breton conception of Ankou, death personified, is a reminiscence of the Celtic Dispater. He watches over all things beyond the grave, and carries off the dead to his kingdom.

But if so he has been altered for the worse by mediaeval ideas of "Death the skeleton".[1187] He is a grisly G.o.d of death, whereas the Celtic Dis was a beneficent G.o.d of the dead who enjoyed a happy immortality. They were not cold phantasms, but alive and endowed with corporeal form and able to enjoy the things of a better existence, and clad in the beautiful raiment and gaudy ornaments which were loved so much on earth.

Hence Celtic warriors did not fear death, and suicide was extremely common, while Spanish Celts sang hymns in praise of death, and others celebrated the birth of men with mourning, but their deaths with joy.[1188] Lucan's words are thus the truest expression of Celtic eschatology--"In another region the spirit animates the members; death, if your lore be true, is but the pa.s.sage to enduring life."

There is no decisive evidence pointing to any theory of moral retribution beyond the grave among the pagan Celts. Perhaps, since the hope of immortality made warriors face death without a tremor, it may have been held, as many other races have believed, that cowards would miss the bliss of the future state. Again, in some of the Irish Christian visions of the other-world and in existing folk-belief, certain characteristics of h.e.l.l may not be derived from Christian eschatology, e.g. the sufferings of the dead from cold.[1189] This might point to an old belief in a cold region whither some of the dead were banished. In the _Adventures of S. Columba's Clerics_, h.e.l.l is reached by a bridge over a glen of fire,[1190] and a narrow bridge leading to the other world is a common feature in most mythologies. But here it may be borrowed from Scandinavian sources, or from such Christian writings as the _Dialogues_ of S. Gregory the Great.[1191] It might be contended that the Christian doctrine of h.e.l.l has absorbed an earlier pagan theory of retribution, but of this there is now no trace in the sagas or in cla.s.sical references to the Celtic belief in the future life. Nor is there any reference to a day of judgment, for the pa.s.sage in which Loegaire speaks of the dead buried with their weapons till "the day of Erdathe," though glossed "the day of judgment of the Lord," does not refer to such a judgment.[1192] If an ethical blindness be attributed to the Celts for their apparent lack of any theory of retribution, it should be remembered that we must not judge a people's ethics wholly by their views of future punishment. Scandinavians, Greeks, and Semites up to a certain stage were as unethical as the Celts in this respect, and the Christian h.e.l.l, as conceived by many theologians, is far from suggesting an ethical Deity.

FOOTNOTES:

[1154] Skene, i. 370.

[1155] Caesar, vi. 14, 19.

[1156] Diod. Sic. v, 28.

[1157] Val. Max. vi. 6. 10.

[1158] _Phars._ i. 455 f.

[1159] Amm. Marc. xv. 9; Strabo, iv. 4; Mela, iii. 2.

[1160] Miss Hull, 275.

[1161] Nutt-Meyer, i. 49; Miss Hull, 293.

[1162] Larminie, 155; Hyde, _Beside the Fire_, 21, 153; _CM_ xiii. 21; Campbell, _WHT_, ii. 21; Le Braz{2}, i. p. xii.

[1163] Von Sacken, _Das Grabfeld von Hallstatt_; Greenwell, _British Barrows_; _RC_ x. 234; _Antiquary_, x.x.xvii. 125; Blanchet, ii. 528 f.; Anderson, _Scotland in Pagan Times_.

[1164] _L'Anthropologie_, vi. 586; Greenwell, _op. cit._ 119.

[1165] Nutt-Meyer, i. 52; O'Donovan, _Annals_, i. 145, 180; _RC_ xv. 28.

In one case the enemy disinter the body of the king of Connaught, and rebury it face downwards, and then obtain a victory. This nearly coincides with the dire results following the disinterment of Bran's head (O'Donovan, i. 145; cf. p. 242, _supra_).

[1166] _LU_ 130_a_; _RC_ xxiv. 185; O'Curry, _MC_ i. p. cccx.x.x; Campbell, _WHT_ iii. 62; Leahy, i. 105.

[1167] Vigfusson-Powell, _Corpus Poet. Boreale_, i. 167, 417-418, 420; and see my _Childhood of Fiction_, 103 f.

[1168] Larminie, 31; Le Braz{2}, ii. 146, 159, 161, 184, 257 (the _role_ of the dead husband is usually taken by a _lutin_ or _follet_, Luzel, _Veillees Bretons_, 79); _Rev. des Trad. Pop._ ii. 267; _Ann. de Bretagne_, viii. 514.

[1169] Le Braz{2}, i. 313. Cf. also an incident in the _Voyage of Maelduin_.

[1170] _RC_ x. 214f. Cf. Kennedy, 162; Le Braz{2}, i. 217, for variants.

[1171] Curtin, _Tales_, 156; see p. 170, _supra_.

[1172] Curtin, _Tales_, 156; Campbell, _Superst.i.tions_, 241; _Folk-Lore_, xiii. 60; Le Braz{2}, i. 213.

[1173] _Folk-Lore_, ii. 26; Yeats, _Celtic Twilight_, 166.

[1174] Tertullian, _de Anima_, 21.

[1175] Reinach, _RC_ xxii. 447.

[1176] Val. Max. vi. 6; Mela, iii. 2. 19; Plut. _Virt. mul_ 20.

[1177] See p. 229, _supra_.

[1178] Le Braz{2}, i. p. x.x.xix. This is only one out of many local beliefs (cf. Sebillot, ii. 149).

[1179] Procop. _De Bello Goth._ vi. 20.

[1180] Claudian, _In Rufin._ i. 123.

[1181] Sebillot, i. 418 f.

[1182] _de Defectu Orac._ 18. An occasional name for Britain in the _Mabinogion_ is "the island of the Mighty" (Loth, i. 69, _et pa.s.sim_).

To the storm incident and the pa.s.sing of the mighty, there is a curious parallel in Fijian belief. A clap of thunder was explained as "the noise of a spirit, we being near the place in which spirits plunge to enter the other world, and a chief in the neighbourhood having just died"

(Williams, _Fiji_, i. 204).

[1183] _de Facie Lun[oe]_, 26.

[1184] See Hartland, _Science of Fairy Tales_, 209; Macdougall, _Folk and Hero Tales_, 73, 263; Le Braz{2}, i. p. x.x.x. Mortals sometimes penetrated to the presence of these heroes, who awoke. If the visitor had the courage to tell them that the hour had not yet come, they fell asleep again, and he escaped. In Brittany, rocky clefts are believed to be the entrance to the world of the dead, like the cave of Lough Dearg.

Similar stories were probably told of these in pagan times, though they are now adapted to Christian beliefs in purgatory or h.e.l.l.

[1185] Le Braz{2}, i. p. xl, ii. 4; Curtin, 10; MacPhail, _Folk-Lore_, vi. 170.