o-existing in Gaul and Britain, it is not improbable
that the development of the non-military professional class varied very
considerably in different districts, and that all the aspects of Druidism
which the ancient writers specify found their appropriate places in the
social system of the Celts. In Gaul and Britain, as elsewhere, the
office of the primitive tribal medicine-man was capable of indefinite
development, and all the forms of its evolution could not have proceeded
_pari passu_ where the sociological conditions found such scope for
variation. It may well be that the oak and mistletoe ceremonies, for
example, lingered in remote agricultural districts long after they had
ceased to interest men along the main routes of Celtic civilisation. The
bucolic mind does not readily abandon the practices of millennia.

In addition to the term Druid, we find in Aulus Hirtius' continuation of
Caesar's _Gallic War_ (Bk. viii., c. xxxviii., 2), as well as on two
inscriptions, one at Le-Puy-en-Velay (Dep. Haute-Loire), and the other at
Macon (Dep. Saone-et-Loire), another priestly title, 'gutuater.' At
Macon the office is that of a 'gutuater Martis,' but of its special
features nothing is known.

CHAPTER VII--THE CELTIC OTHER-WORLD

In the preceding chapter we have seen that the belief was widely
prevalent among Greek and Roman writers that the Druids taught the
immortality of the soul. Some of these writers, too, point out the
undoubted fact, attested by Archaeology, that objects which would be
serviceable to the living were buried with the dead, and this was
regarded as a confirmation of the view that the immortality of souls was
to the Celts an object of belief. The study of Archaeology on the one
hand, and of Comparative Religion on the other, certainly leads to the
conclusion that in the Bronze and the Early Iron Age, and in all
probability in the Stone Age, the idea prevailed that death was not the
end of man. The holed cromlechs of the later Stone Age were probably
designed for the egress and ingress of souls. The food and the weapons
that were buried with the dead were thought to be objects of genuine
need. Roman religion, too, in some of its rites provided means for the
periodical expulsion of hungry and hostile spirits of the dead, and for
their pacification by the offer of food. A tomb and its adjuncts were
meant not merely for the honour of the dead, but also for the protection
of the living. A