religion the Aryan conquerors of Celtic lands may have brought with them,
they whose conquests were often only partial could not eradicate the
inveterate beliefs of their predecessors, and the result in the end was
doubtless some compromise, or else the victory of the earlier faith.

But the Aryan conquerors of Gaul and Italy themselves were not men who
had advanced up the Danube in one generation. Those men of Aryan speech
who poured into the Italian peninsula and into Gaul were doubtless in
blood not unmixed with the older inhabitants of Central Europe, and had
entered into the body of ideas which formed the religious beliefs of the
men of the Danube valley. The common modifications of the Aryan tongue,
by Italians and Celts alike, as compared with Greek, suggests contact
with men of different speech. Among the names of Celtic gods, too, like
those of other countries, we find roots that are apparently irreducible
to any found in Indo-European speech, and we know not what pre-Aryan
tongues may have contributed them. Scholars, to-day, are far more alive
than they ever were before to the complexity of the contributory elements
that have entered into the tissue of the ancient religions of mankind,
and the more the relics of Celtic religion are investigated, the more
complex do its contributory factors become. In the long ages before
history there were unrecorded conquests and migrations innumerable, and
ideas do not fail to spread because there is no historian to record them.

The more the scanty remnants of Celtic religion are examined, the clearer
it becomes that many of its characteristic features had been evolved
during the vast period of the ages of stone. During these millennia, men
had evolved, concomitantly with their material civilisation, a kind of
working philosophy of life, traces of which are found in every land where
this form of civilisation has prevailed. Man's religion can never be
dissociated from his social experience, and the painful stages through
which man reached the agricultural life, for example, have left their
indelible impress on the mind of man in Western Europe, as they have in
every land. We are thus compelled, from the indications which we have of
Celtic religion, in the names of its deities, its rites, and its
survivals in folk-lore and legend, to come to the conclusion, that its
fundamental groundwork is a body of ideas, similar to those of other
lands, which were the natural corr