The Religion of the Ancient Celts Part 24

(3) _Sacramental eating of an animal._--The custom of "hunting the wren," found over the whole Celtic area, is connected with animal wors.h.i.+p and may be totemistic in origin. In spite of its small size, the wren was known as the king of birds, and in the Isle of Man it was hunted and killed on Christmas or S. Stephen's day. The bird was carried in procession from door to door, to the accompaniment of a chant, and was then solemnly buried, dirges being sung. In some cases a feather was left at each house and carefully treasured, and there are traces of a custom of boiling and eating the bird.[751] In Ireland, the hunt and procession were followed by a feast, the materials of which were collected from house to house, and a similar usage obtained in France, where the youth who killed the bird was called "king."[752] In most of these districts it was considered unlucky or dangerous to kill the bird at any other time, yet it might be ceremonially killed once a year, the dead animal conferred luck, and was solemnly eaten or buried with signs of mourning. Similar customs with animals which are actually wors.h.i.+pped are found elsewhere,[753] and they lend support to the idea that the Celts regarded the wren as a divine animal, or perhaps a totem animal, that it was necessary to slay it ritually, and to carry it round the houses of the community to obtain its divine influence, to eat it sacramentally or to bury it. Probably like customs were followed in the case of other animals,[754] and these may have given rise to such stories as that of the eating of MacDatho's wonderful boar, as well as to myths which regarded certain animals, e.g. the swine, as the immortal food of the G.o.ds. Other examples of ritual survivals of such sacramental eating have already been noted, and it is not improbable that the eating of a sacred pastoral animal occurred at Samhain.

(4) _Exogamy._--Exogamy and the counting of descent through the mother are closely connected with totemism, and some traces of both are found among the Celts. Among the Picts, who were, perhaps, a Celtic group of the Brythonic stock, these customs survived in the royal house. The kings.h.i.+p pa.s.sed to a brother of the king by the same mother, or to a sister's son, while the king's father was never king and was frequently a "foreigner." Similar rules of succession prevailed in early Aryan royal houses--Greek and Roman,--and may, as Dr. Stokes thought, have existed at Tara in Ireland, while in a Fian tale of Oisin he marries the daughter of the king of Tir na n-Og, and succeeds him as king partly for that reason, and partly because he had beaten him in the annual race for the kings.h.i.+p.[755] Such an athletic contest for the kings.h.i.+p was known in early Greece, and this tale may support the theory of the Celtic priest-kings.h.i.+p, the holder of the office retaining it as long as he was not defeated or slain. Traces of succession through a sister's son are found in the _Mabinogion_, and Livy describes how the mythic Celtic king Ambicatus sent not his own but his sister's sons to found new kingdoms.[756] Irish and Welsh divine and heroic groups are named after the mother, not the father--the children of Danu and of Don, and the men of Domnu. Anu is mother of the G.o.ds, Buanann of heroes. The eponymous ancestor of the Scots is a woman, Scota, and the earliest colonisers of Ireland are women, not men. In the sagas G.o.ds and heroes have frequently a matronymic, and the father's name is omitted--Lug mac Ethnend, Conchobar mac Nessa, Indech, son of De Domnann, Corpre, son of Etain, and others. Perhaps parallel to this is the custom of calling men after their wives--e.g. the son of Fergus is Fer Tlachtga, Tlachtga's husband.[757] In the sagas, females (G.o.ddesses and heroines) have a high place accorded to them, and frequently choose their own lovers or husbands--customs suggestive of the matriarchate. Thus what was once a general practice was later confined to the royal house or told of divine or heroic personages. Possibly certain cases of incest may really be exaggerated accounts of misunderstood unions once permissible by totemic law. Caesar speaks of British polyandry, brothers, sons, and fathers sharing a wife in common.[758] Strabo speaks of Irish unions with mothers and sisters, perhaps referring not to actual practice but to reports of saga tales of incest.[759] Dio Ca.s.sius speaks of community of wives among the Caledonians and Meatae, and Jerome says much the same of the Scoti and Atecotti.[760] These notices, with the exception of Caesar's, are vague, yet they refer to marriage customs different from those known to their reporters. In Irish sagas incest legends circle round the descendants of Etain--fathers unite with daughters, a son with his mother, a woman has a son by her three brothers (just as Ecne was son of Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba), and is also mother of Crimthan by that son.[761] Brother and sister unions occur both in Irish and Welsh story.[762]

In these cases incest with a mother cannot be explained by totemic usage, but the cases may be distorted reminiscences of what might occur under totemism, namely, a son taking the wives of his father other than his own mother, when those were of a different totem from his own. Under totemism, brothers and sisters by different mothers having different totems, might possibly unite, and such unions are found in many mythologies. Later, when totemism pa.s.sed away, the unions, regarded with horror, would be supposed to take place between children by the same mother. According to totem law, a father might unite with his daughter, since she was of her mother's totem, but in practice this was frowned upon. Polygamy also may co-exist with totemism, and of course involves the counting of descent through the mother as a rule. If, as is suggested by the "debility" of the Ultonians, and by other evidence, the couvade was a Celtic inst.i.tution, this would also point to the existence of the matriarchate with the Celts. To explain all this as pre-Aryan, or to say that the cla.s.sical notices refer to non-Aryan tribes and that the evidence in the Irish sagas only shows that the Celts had been influenced by the customs of aboriginal tribes among whom they lived,[763] is to neglect the fact that the customs are closely bound up with Celtic life, while it leaves unexplained the influence of such customs upon a people whose own customs, according to this theory, were so totally different. The evidence, taken as a whole, points to the existence of totemism among the early Celts, or, at all events, of the elements which elsewhere compose it.

Celtic animal wors.h.i.+p dates back to the primitive hunting and pastoral period, when men wors.h.i.+pped the animals which they hunted or reared.

They may have apologised to the animal hunted and slain--a form of wors.h.i.+p, or, where animals were not hunted or were reared and wors.h.i.+pped, one of them may have been slain annually and eaten to obtain its divine power. Care was taken to preserve certain sacred animals which were not hunted, and this led to domestication, the abstinence of earlier generations leading to an increased food supply at a later time, when domesticated animals were freely slain. But the earlier sacramental slaying of such animals survived in the religious aspect of their slaughter at the beginning of winter.[764] The cult of animals was also connected with totemic usage, though at a later stage this cult was replaced by that of anthropomorphic divinities, with the older divine animals as their symbols, sacrificial victims, and the like. This evolution now led to the removal of restrictions upon slaying and eating the animals. On the other hand, the more primitive animal cults may have remained here and there. Animal cults were, perhaps, largely confined to men. With the rise of agriculture mainly as an art in the hands of women, and the consequent cult of the Earth-mother, of fertility and corn-spirits probably regarded as female, the sacramental eating of the divine animal may have led to the slaying and eating of a human or animal victim supposed to embody such a spirit. Later the two cults were bound to coalesce, and the divine animal and the animal embodiment of the vegetation spirit would not be differentiated. On the other hand, when men began to take part in women's fertility cults, the fact that such spirits were female or were perhaps coming to be regarded as G.o.ddesses, may have led men to envisage certain of the anthropomorphic animal divinities as G.o.ddesses, since some of these, e.g. Epona and Damona, are female. But with the increasing partic.i.p.ation of men in agriculture, the spirits or G.o.ddesses of fertility would tend to become male, or the consorts or mothers of G.o.ds of fertility, though the earlier aspect was never lost sight of, witness the Corn-Mother. The evolution of divine priest-kings would cause them to take the place of the earlier priestesses of these cults, one of whom may have been the divine victim. Yet in local survivals certain cults were still confined to women, and still had their priestesses.[765]

FOOTNOTES:

[696] Reinach, _BF_ 66, 244. The bull and three cranes may be a rebus on the name of the bull, _Tarvos Trikarenos_, "the three-headed," or perhaps _Trikeras_, "three-horned."

[697] Plutarch, _Marius_, 23; Caesar, vii. 65; D'Arbois, _Les Celtes_, 49.

[698] Holder, _s.v._ _Tarba_, _Tarouanna_, _Tarvisium_, etc.; D'Arbois, _Les Druides_, 155; S. Greg. _In Glor. Conf._ 48.

[699] _CIL_ xiii. 6017; _RC_ xxv. 47; Holder, ii. 528.

[700] Leahy, ii. 105 f.; Curtin, _MFI_ 264, 318; Joyce, _PN_ i. 174; Rees, 453. Cf. Ailred, _Life of S. Ninian_, c. 8.

[701] Jocelyn, _Vita S. Kentig._ c. 24; Rees, 293, 323.

[702] Tacitus, _Germ._ xlv.; Blanchet, i. 162, 165; Reinach, _BF_ 255 f., _CMR_ i. 168; Bertrand, _Arch. Celt._ 419.

[703] Pennant, _Tour in Scotland_, 268; Reinach, _RC_ xxii. 158, _CMR_ i. 67.

[704] Pausan, vii. 17, 18; Johnson, _Journey_, 136.

[705] Joyce, _SH_ ii. 127; _IT_ i. 99, 256 (Bricriu's feast and the tale of Macdatho's swine).

[706] Strabo, iv. 4. 3, says these swine attacked strangers. Varro, _de Re Rustica_, ii. 4, admires their vast size. Cf. Polyb. ii. 4.

[707] The hunt is first mentioned in Nennius, c. 79, and then appears as a full-blown folk-tale in _Kulhwych_, Loth, i. 185 f. Here the boar is a transformed prince.

[708] I have already suggested, p. 106, _supra_, that the places where Gwydion halted with the swine of Elysium were sites of a swine-cult.

[709] _RC_ xiii. 451. Cf. also _TOS_ vi. "The Enchanted Pigs of Oengus,"

and Campbell, _LF_ 53.

[710] _L'Anthropologie_, vi. 584; Greenwell, _British Barrows_, 274, 283, 454; _Arch. Rev._ ii. 120.

[711] _Rev. Arch._ 1897, 313.

[712] Reinach, "Zagreus le serpent cornu," _Rev. Arch_. x.x.xv. 210.

[713] Reinach, _BF_ 185; Bertrand, 316.

[714] "Cuchulainn's Sick-bed," D'Arbois, v. 202.

[715] See Reinach, _CMR_ i. 57.

[716] _CIL_ xiii. 5160, xii. 2199. Rh[^y]s, however, derives Artaios from _ar_, "ploughed land," and equates the G.o.d with Mercurius Cultor.

[717] _CIL_ xii. 1556-1558; D'Arbois, _RC_ x. 165.

[718] For all these place and personal names, see Holder and D'Arbois, _op. cit. Les Celtes_, 47 f., _Les Druides_, 157 f.

[719] See p. 32, _supra_; Reinach, _CMR_ i. 72, _Rev. Arch._ ii. 123.

[720] O'Grady, ii. 123.

[721] Epona is fully discussed by Reinach in his _Epona_, 1895, and in articles (ill.u.s.trated) in _Rev. Arch._ vols. 26, 33, 35, 40, etc. See also ii. [1898], 190.

[722] Reinach suggests that this may explain why Vercingetorix, in view of siege by the Romans, sent away his horses. They were too sacred to be eaten. Caesar, vii. 71; Reinach, _RC_ xxvii. 1 f.

[723] Juvenal, viii. 154; Apul. _Metam._ iii. 27; Min. Felix, _Octav._ xxvii. 7.

[724] For the inscriptions, see Holder, _s.v._ "Epona."

[725] _CIL_ iii. 7904.

[726] _CIL_ xiii. 3071; Reinach, _BF_ 253, _CMR_ i. 64, _Repert. de la Stat._ ii. 745; Holder, ii. 651-652.

[727] Granger, _Wors.h.i.+p of the Romans_, 113; Kennedy, 135.

[728] Grimm, _Teut. Myth._ 49, 619, 657, 661-664.

[729] Frazer, _Golden Bough_{2}, ii. 281, 315.

[730] Caesar, v. 21, 27. Possibly the Dea Bibracte of the Aeduans was a beaver G.o.ddess.

[731] O'Curry, _MC_ ii. 207; Elton, 298.

[732] Girald. Cambr. _Top. Hib._ ii. 19, _RC_ ii. 202; _Folk-Lore_, v.

310; _IT_ iii. 376.

[733] O'Grady, ii. 286, 538; Campbell, _The Fians_, 78; Thiers, _Traite des Superst.i.tions_, ii. 86.

[734] Lady Guest, ii. 409 f.

[735] Blanchet, i. 166, 295, 326, 390.

[736] See p. 209, _supra_.

[737] Diod. Sic. v. 30; _IT_ iii. 385; _RC_ xxvi. 139; Rh[^y]s, _HL_ 593.

[738] _Man. Hist. Brit._ p. x.