nal order that they were, before the Roman
epoch, the only central, definite power capable of consecutiveness in
its conceptions and of unity in its views, and their influence over a
gross and ignorant people was proportionally great.

To the _chamanisme_, or belief in the spirits that pervade nature, and
in the power of man over them by magic arts, of the original Touranians,
the Celtic tribes brought the worship of natural forces,--the sun, fire,
torrents, tempests, mountains, etc.; but neither they nor the Druids had
any human figures or symbols in their pantheon. The invasions
_galatiques_ or _kimrobelge_, on the contrary, brought in from the
Orient a cult already strongly anthropomorphous, and with these symbols,
traditions, and divinities those of the Greeks and Romans became mingled
to a greater or lesser degree that it is impossible to determine,
because, as it appears, all that we really know of the Gaulish religion
before the Roman conquest is reduced to a few lines in Polybius, in
which can be found the name of _Perkunas_, the Perkun of the Slavs.
Caesar identifies the gods of the Gauls with the Roman ones, Mercury,
Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva; and M. Andre Lefevre, in the _Revue
mensuelle de l'Ecole d'anthropologie_, asks, without being able to
answer: "How is it possible that such men as Caesar and Tacitus were able
to confound with Mercury the supreme gods of the Gauls and the Germans;
but, still more, how is it that the Gaul should have adopted with
enthusiasm the Latin name and forgotten the Gaulish name of his supreme
god?" M. Reinach is considered to have proved beyond a doubt that the
god with the mallet, the Dispater of the Gallo-Roman period, was a sort
of copy, in Gaulish attire, of the Egyptian Serapis; and the
inscriptions of the imperial epoch testify to the diffusion of the
worship of the divinities of Alexandria from Arles and Nimes, in the
extreme south, to Besancon, almost on the borders of Switzerland, and
Soissons, northeast of Paris. Nevertheless, those archaeologists who have
thought they found traces of the art of Egypt and Babylon in that of the
original cave-dwellers are now considered to have been deceiving
themselves; and M. Reinach has modified the opinions he held a few years
ago on the early religious art of Gaul. "In short, what we know of
Gaulish mythology amounts to nothing, or practically nothing."

Various rude images and fragments of altars found under the modern
pa