John Rhŷs

“ We Celts do not consider the power of speech to be Hermes, as you Greeks do, but we represent it by means of Heracles, because he is much stronger than Hermes. Nor should you wonder at his being represented as an old man, for the power of words is wont to show its perfection in the aged; for your poets are no doubt right when they say that the thoughts of young men turn with every wind, and that age has something wiser to tell us than youth. ”

“ The nine-night reckoning of eight days to the week could not, of course, be made in any way to coincide with the months as measured by the moon; but that cannot be urged as an objection. In fact, the more hopeless the discrepancy appeared, the more room it gave for the interference of the professional man, one of the strongholds of whose influence was doubtless the ancient calendar. Thus we find among the Taliessin-like boasts of Amorgin, the seer and poet of the Milesian invaders of Erinn, the challenge who but he could tell them the age of the moon. ”

“ There in that heaven of his, Yama sits drinking with the gods under a widely spreading tree with large leaves, and there he welcomes the fathers of the human race to share the delights of a land whose every brook runs with honey, whose heavenly cows, that kick not, offer their milk of their own accord, whose pleasures lack nought of the delights of the harem, and whose dwellers never suffer from old age or decay. ”

“ Now Fand had been married to the great sea-god Manannán mac Lir at the Dun of the Estuary, and the wooing of Cúchulainn by her is the sparkling of the pellucid drop in the sun's rays when he has reached the dark places of the earth; but that was to last only for a time, and Fand returns to her former love; that is to say, the crystal drop is finally carried back to the ocean. These pretty myth-pictures may date from almost any age in the history of an imaginative race ”

“ What, it may be asked in passing, should have led anybody to fix on a week of nine nights and eight days as a unit of time? It would be useless to demand an answer from the moon, and one should rather look at the fingers on one's hands: the half of a nine-night week would be the Irish noinden of five nights and four days; that is to say, a hand of nights, if you reckon the nights alone, as the ancient Celts must have done; and just as a third in music added to another third yields not a sixth but a fifth, so two hands of nights reduced to one sum make not ten nights but nine. ”

“ Lucian's picture enables one to portray to oneself the wrinkled, sun-burnt face of the travelled old man, who poured forth the stream of his irresistible eloquence, while his eye flashed with delight and kindly interest. Lucian says that he turned towards his willing captives with a smiling face, and we have the same touch preserved in the Irish legend, when it calls the hero Ogma Grianainech, or Ogma of the Shining Countenance. [35] The combining of the attributes of Heracles and Hermes in one personage, which puzzled the Greek traveller, was no passing whim of the Gauls. ”

“ Gwydion obtained the boons which he conferred on man mostly by force or by craft from the powers terrene, with whom he dealt in an utterly unscrupulous fashion.
Woden procured the precious draught which was to be a gift and joy for men by wiliness, Ulysses-like patience, and even perjury, as when he became the guileful lover of Gundfled, daughter of Suptung the giant, who owned the holy drink, in order to steal the latter, which he did successfully. ”

“ Out of his skull they made the firmament, and the spilling of the blood of his body caused a great flood, which, as it settled in the hollows of the earth, made up the sea.
Some of the children of Earth and Heaven were born bright beings or gods, who mostly loved the light and the upper air; and some were Giants or Titans, who were of a darker and gloomier hue. These latter hated the gods, and the gods hated them. The daring son of Earth who began the mutilation of the world-giant was one of the Titans, and he became their king ”

“ I have been searching in vain among the ever-growing mass of writings on Aryan mythology for any clear recognition of this two-fold treatment. The theory I have been forced to form is, that the myths about the sun under such names as Lleu and Lug, Cúchulainn and Balder, failed at an early period to tell with distinctness and precision the tale of their origin, and that they ceased to be understood as applying to the sun, so that the stories in which they figured became severed more or less completely, so to say, from their original fountain-head. ”

“ In the foregoing lecture I tried to reconstruct, mainly out of the ruins of the Gaulish pantheon, the fallen edifice of Celtic paganism; and in so doing, I endeavoured to confine myself as much as I conveniently could to what may be called the theology of the early Celts; but it is impossible to do justice to our subject without pursuing it, as I now briefly propose to do, into its later stages, represented by such myths as the Celtic nations of modern times happen to retain embedded in their literature or woven into their folk-lore. ”

“ I behold Earth rise again with its evergreen forests out of the deep; the waters fall in rapids; above hovers the eagle, that fisher of the falls. The Anses meet in Ida-plain; they talk of the mighty Earth-serpent, and remember the great decrees and the ancient mysteries of Fimbul-ty. There shall be found in the grass wonderful golden tables, their own in days of yore. The fields unsown shall yield their increase. All sorrows shall be healed. Balder shall come back. Balder and Höᵭr shall dwell in Woden's mansions of bliss, in the holy places of the blessed gods. ”

“ Lastly, as Cronus was sometimes associated with Rhadamanthus and the departed, so was Minos even more; for the double aspect of the powers of the other world is reflected in his story: Minos was not only reckoned brother to Rhadamanthus, but he became himself a judge of the dead, an office in which he enjoyed a reputation for the most complete impartiality, whereas he was regarded during his life in this world as the cruel tyrant who exacted from Athens a tribute of boys and girls to be devoured underground by the Minotaur, a monster with a human body and a bovine head. ”

“ Above all, one has to bear in mind the distortion which the Hindu side of the picture has undergone in consequence of the removal of the abode of the dead from the nether world to the most distant heaven. But when it is considered what a far cry it is from the shores of the Baltic to the land of the Five Rivers, how long it must have taken our kindred to reach it, and how largely their blood had by that time been mixed with that of other races, it is a matter of surprise that Sanskrit literature yields so many points of contact between Indra and Gwydion-Woden. ”

“ For to read of the priests connected with the holy forest of Romove in ancient Prussia unavoidably leads one to this comparison, and reminds one in a striking manner of what is told us in the classics about the druids of Gaul, and in a later literature about those of Ireland. Seeing the importance of sacred trees in the ancient cult of the chief god of the Aryans of Europe, and the preference evinced for the oak as the tree fittest to be his emblem or even the residence of his divinity, I am inclined to regard the old etymology of the word druid as being, roughly speaking, the comet one. ”

“ The Greek myth, which distressed thoughtful and pious minds like that of Socrates, was a survival, like the other scandalous tales about the gods, from the time when the ancestors of the Greeks were savages like the Maori; and its origin is to be sought in the animism so characteristic of the savage mind, that is to say, its tendency to endow the sun, the moon, the sky, or any feature of the physical world admitting of being readily individualized, with a soul and a body, with parts and passions, like their own. ”

“ For if the Aryans in question had attained to the idea of so transcendent a god as this would suggest, there would be a difficulty in understanding how, as the Dyaus of Sanskrit literature, he should have become comparatively a lay figure, that as Tiu he should have been superseded by Woden and Thor among the Teutons, and that among the Gauls his pre-eminence should at any time have been threatened by a Mercury. This would look somewhat like a reversion of the great law of evolution, a serious argument against any theory of religion or mythology. ”

“ It is better, however, to abide on the safer ground of confronting one Aryan religion with another; and in this instance one may contrast the direction which progress took in the theology of our ancestors with that which it followed in Greece and Italy, where Zeus or Jove, etherealized and expanded like his namesake the heavens, was able to hold his own, though it must be confessed that he came near having a formidable rival, not in any one of the older divinities, but in Heracles, a god whom Greek theology regarded as by birth a mortal. ”

“ The pro-ethnic Aryan's ideas of religion and morals can only be guessed, and how many gods he had, it is impossible to say. It is, however, certain that he worshipped one above all others, if others he had, and that he spoke of him in terms expressive at once of the light of day and of the wide expanse of the sky, which looked down upon him wherever he roamed. ”

“ Were one inclined to draw a parallel in the spirit of Casaubon or Bishops Lowth and Horsley, one might point to the rise of the figure of the Man-god in Celtic and Teutonic heathendom, as helping to introduce a cult less given to the shedding of human blood than that which went before; and with it one might compare the worship of a very different kind of Man-god who abolished for Christians all the blood sacrifices in which the Jewish religion, like most other ancient cults, took no small delight in spite of the reforming voice of an Isaiah. ”

“ Formulæ of words have always been the backbone of magic as well as the means, in most religious systems, of moving the gods to accede to the worshipper's prayer: in ancient Erinn the words of the satirist were believed to raise hideous blotches on the face of him who happened to be the object of them, and the Gaulish euhemerist who undertook to enlighten Lucian was content to believe Ogmios to have performed the labours of Heracles, without the grosser club and bow, by the irresistible force of his charms of speech. ”

“ At any rate, one cannot help seeing that the wars, in which Nuada engaged with the Fir Bolg and the Fomori, have their Welsh counterparts in those between Llûᵭ and the scourges just mentioned, though the treatment of the story is somewhat different. In both cases the hostile forces were identical—the blighting fogs, the malarious mists, the cold and stormy winds and the other hurtful forces of nature. If one wishes for comparisons beyond the limits of the mythology of the Celtic nations, one has only to turn to that of the Teutons, especially as represented in old Norse literature. ”

“ As a corollary, we may regard all three as the gods of riches or the lords of the metallic wealth of the world: this rôle of the classical deities is indicated by their names. Thus Pluto, in Greek Πλούτων, is derived from πλοῦτος, 'wealth,' just as Dis, genitive Ditis, is supposed to be a contraction of dives, gen. divitis, 'wealthy;' though the name Cernunnos did not, at least directly, connote wealth of any kind, the attributes of the god, such as the money-bag and the torques, than which no symbols more expressive of wealth were known to the Gauls, amply made up for it ”

“ After giving it all the attention I can, I have come to the conclusion that we cannot do better than follow the story of Geoffrey, which makes Stonehenge the work of Merlin Emrys, commanded by another Emrys, which I interpret to mean that the temple belonged to the Celtic Zeus, whose later legendary self we have in Merlin. It would be in vain to look for any direct argument for or against such an hypothesis: one can only say that it suits the facts of the case, and helps to understand others of a somewhat similar nature. ”

“ Thor is a less complex divinity, with a well-marked and individual character; the friend of man, the husbandman's god, whose wrath and anger are ever directed against the evil powers that injure mortals and their possessions, whose bolt destroys the foul thick blights that betray the presence of the wicked ones, and smites through the huge cloud-masses that seem to be crushing the earth. ”