demand our attention, as the
all-pervading and animating spirit, which shows its essential character
even through the scanty remains of the ancient Celtic world. Celtic
religion bears the impress of nature on earth far more than nature in the
heavens. The sense of the heaven above has perhaps survived in some of
the general Indo-European Celtic terms for the divine principle, and
there are some traces of a religious interest in the sun and the god of
thunder and lightning, but every student of Celtic religion must feel
that the main and characteristic elements are associated with the earth
in all the variety of its local phenomena. The great earth-mother and
her varied offspring ever come to view in Celtic religion under many
names, and the features even of the other-world could not be dissociated
for the Celt from those of his mother-earth. The festivals of his year,
too, were associated with the decay and the renewal of her annual life.
The bonfires of November, May, Midsummer, and August were doubtless meant
to be associated with the vicissitudes of her life and the spirits that
were her children. For the Celt the year began in November, so that its
second half-year commenced with the first of May. The idea to which
Caesar refers, that the Gauls believed themselves descended from Dis, the
god of the lower world, and began the year with the night, counting their
time not by days but by nights, points in the same direction, namely that
the darkness of the earth had a greater hold on the mind than the
brightness of the sky. The Welsh terms for a week and a fortnight,
_wythnos_ (eight nights) and _pythefnos_ (fifteen nights) respectively
confirm Caesar's statement. To us now it may seem more natural to
associate religion with the contemplation of the heavens, but for the
Celtic lands at any rate the main trend of the evidence is to show that
the religious mind was mainly drawn to a contemplation of the earth and
her varied life, and that the Celt looked for his other-world either
beneath the earth, with her rivers, lakes, and seas, or in the islands on
the distant horizon, where earth and sky met. This predominance of the
earth in religion was in thorough keeping with the intensity of religion
as a factor in his daily pursuits. It was this intensity that gave the
Druids at some time or other in the history of the Western Celts the
power which Caesar and others assign to them. The whole people of the
Gauls, even