[19] O'Curry quotes a druidic ordeal from the MS. marked H. 3. 17 in Trinity College, Dublin. A woman to clear her character has to rub her tongue to a red-hot adze of bronze, which had been heated in a fire of blackthorn or rowan-tree.
[20] "Revue Celt.," vol. ii. p. 443. Is Bel to be equated with what Rhys calls in one place "the chthonian divinity Beli the Great," of the Britons, and in another "Beli the Great, the god of death and darkness"? (See "Hibbert Lectures," pp. 168 and 274.)
[21] The Christian priests, apparently unable to abolish these cattle ceremonies, took the harm out of them by transferring them to St. John's Eve, the 24th of June, where they are still observed in most districts of Ireland, and large fires built with bones in them, and occasionally cattle are driven through them or people leap over them. The cattle were probably driven through the fire as a kind of substitute for their sacrifice, and the bones burnt in the fire are probably a substitute for the bones of the cattle that should have been offered up. Hence the fires are called "teine cnámh" (bone-fire) in Irish, and bōne-fire (not bŏnfire) in English.
[22] St. Patrick is there stated to have found around the king "scivos et magos et auruspices, incantatores et omnis malæ artis inventores."
[23] This means tonsured men, with cowls, with pastoral staves, with altars in the east end of the churches. The ancient Irish rann is very curious:—
"Ticcat Tailcinn
Tar muir meirceann,
A mbruit toillceann.
A crainn croimceann.
A miasa n-airrter tige
Friscerat uile amen."
[24] I.e., one half in Ireland, the other in Scotland, alluding to his work at Iona and among the Picts.
[25] Stokes, "Lives of the Saints, from the Book of Lismore," p. 183.
[26] Who were, according to Ammianus Marcellinus, quoting the Greek historian, Timagenes, "sodaliciis adstricti consortiis."
[27] There is one other instance of human sacrifice mentioned in the Book of Ballymote, but this is recorded in connection with funeral games, and appears to have been an isolated piece of barbarity performed "that it might be a reproach to the Momonians for ever, and that it might be a trophy over them." Fiachra, a brother of Niall of the Nine Hostages, in the fourth century, carried off fifty hostages from Munster, and dying of his wounds, the hostages were buried alive with him, round his grave: "ro hadnaicead na geill tucadh a neass ocus siad beo im fheart Fiachra comba hail for Mumain do gres, ocus comba comrama forra." For another allusion to "human sacrifice" see O'Curry's "Manners and Customs," vol. i. p. dcxli and cccxxxiii. The "Dinnseanchas," quoted from above, is a topographical work explaining the origin of Irish place-names, and attributed to Amergin mac Amhalgaidh, poet to King Diarmuid mac Cearbaill, who lived in the sixth century. "There seems no reason," says Dr. Atkinson, in his preface to the facsimile Book of Leinster, "for disputing his claims to be regarded as the original compiler of a work of a similar character—the original nucleus is not now determinable." The oldest copy is the Book of Leinster and treats of nearly two hundred places and contains eighty-eight poems. The copy in the Book of Ballymote contains one hundred and thirty-nine, and that in the Book of Lecan even more. The total number of all the poems contained in the different copies is close on one hundred and seventy. The copy in the Bodleian Library was published by Whitley Stokes in "Folk-lore," December, 1892, and that in the Advocates Library, in Edinburgh, in "Folk-lore," December, 1893. The prose tales, from a copy at Rennes, he published in the "Revue Celtique," vols. xv. and xvi. An edition of the oldest copy in the Book of Leinster is still a desideratum. The whole work is full of interesting pagan allusions, but the different copies, in the case of many names, vary greatly and even contradict each other.
CHAPTER X
THE IRISH ELYSIUM AND BELIEF IN REBIRTH
Cæsar, writing some fifty years before Christ about the Gauls and their Druids, tells his countrymen that one of the prime articles which they taught was that men's souls do not die—non interire animas—"but passed over after death from one into another," and their opinion is, adds Cæsar, that this doctrine "greatly tends to the arousing of valour, all fear of death being despised."[1] A few years later Diodorus Siculus wrote that one of their doctrines was "that the souls of men are undying, and that after finishing their term of existence they pass into another body," adding that at burials of the dead some actually cast letters addressed to their departed relatives upon the funeral pile, under the belief that the dead would read them in the next world. Timagenes, a Greek who wrote a history of Gaul now lost, Strabo, Valerius Maximus, Pomponius Mela, and Lucan[2] in his "Pharsalia," all have passages upon this vivid belief of the Gauls that the soul lived again. This doctrine must also have been current in Britain, where the Druidic teaching was, to use Cæsar's phrase, "discovered, and thence brought into Gaul," and it would have been curious indeed if Ireland did not share in it.
There is, moreover, abundant evidence to show that the doctrine of metempsychosis was perfectly familiar to the pagan Irish, as may be seen in the stories of the births of Cuchulain, Etain, the Two Swineherds, Conall Cearnach, Tuan Mac Cairill, and Aedh Sláne.[3] But there is not, in our existing literature, any evidence that the belief was ever elevated into a philosophical doctrine of general acceptance, applicable to every one, still less that there was ever any ethical stress laid upon the belief in rebirth. It is only the mythological element in the belief in metempsychosis which has come down to us, and from which we ascertain that the pagan Irish believed that supernatural beings could become clothed in flesh and blood, could enter into women and be born again, could take different shapes and pass through different stages of existence, as fowls, animals, or men. What the actual doctrinal form of the familiar idea was, or how far it influenced the popular mind, we have no means of knowing. But as Mr. Nutt well remarks, "early Irish religion must have possessed some ritual, and what in default of an apter term must be styled philosophical as well as mythological elements. Practically the latter alone have come down to us, and that in a romantic rather than in a strictly mythical form. Could we judge Greek religion aright if fragments of Apollodorus or the 'Metamorphoses' were all that survived of the literature it inspired?"[4] The most that can be said upon the subject, then, is that the doctrine of rebirth was actually taught with a deliberate ethical purpose—that of making men brave, since on being slain in this life they passed into a new one—amongst the Celts of Gaul, that it must have been familiar to the Britons between whose Druids and those of Gaul so close a resemblance subsisted, and that the idea of rebirth which forms part of half-a-dozen existing Irish sagas, was perfectly familiar to the Irish Gael, although we have no evidence that it was connected with any ritual or taught as a deliberate doctrine.
In reconstructing from our existing literature the beliefs and religion of our ancestors, we can only do so incompletely, and with difficulty, from passages in the oldest sagas and other antique fragments, mostly of pagan origin, from allusions in very