impossible, because "it was about this period that the mythology of
Ireland was being rewoven into spurious history."[150] It is not,
however, upon the mistakes of other inquirers[151] that the
mythologists may rest a good claim for their own view. The _Historia
Britonum_ of Geoffrey of Monmouth disposes of neither the myths nor
the history of the Celts. It shows myth in its secondary position, in
the handling of those who would make it all history, just as now there
are scholars who would make it all myth. In front of the legends
attaching to persons and places is the history of these persons and
places. Behind these legends lies the domain of the unattached and
primitive folk-tale, Mr. Campbell's _Highland Tales_, Kennedy's
_Fireside Stories of Ireland_, and those English tales which have been
rescued by Mr. Clodd and others. This makes it impossible to see in
the hero-legends naught else than the intangible realm of Celtic gods
and goddesses.

Equally impossible is it to create for them a home in a system of
"state religion," and yet a state religion is a necessary part of the
evidence for mythological origins.[152] There was no Celtic state.
Emphatically this was so. Everything we know about the Celts of
Britain, both before and after the Roman conquest, both in Britain,
where the Roman power was upheld for four centuries, and in Ireland,
where the Roman power never penetrated, the Celts were possessed of a
tribal, not a state polity; lived in tribal strongholds, not in Celtic
cities; occupied tribal territories, not countries formed into states;
elected tribal chiefs in primitive fashion, and not kings with state
ceremonial; and when they come under the dominion of an incipient
state policy after the conquest of the English and the Northmen, their
laws are promulgated and codified, and show that both Welsh and Irish
codes are tribal, not state law.

Not only do I fail to discover a state religion of the Celts, but I do
not find it among the Teutons. There is greater evidence of
discrepancies than of agreement in all the European religions, but
these have not been dwelt upon by scholars. Professor York Powell, in
one of his illuminating studies on Teutonic heathendom, is the only
authority I know of who argues against the idea of a systematised
religion. "It is important that we should at once throw aside the idea
that there was any _system_, any organized pantheon in the religion of
these peoples. Their tribes w