Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/159

Rh statues show, we may well hesitate in too easily accepting the off-hand identifications of Caesar or any outside observer; they were probably as ignorant of the real meaning of the Gallic cults and the real significance of the local symbols as we ourselves are, and their assimilations were necessarily crude, taking into account surface resemblances only. It is unlikely that even if they had the desire they had the means of penetrating deeply into the sacred and mysterious cults of Celtic Gaul. The words of M. Réville in connection with Roman identifications of another set of national divinities may equally well apply to those of Gaul; "The studies that I am at this moment making in the Phoenician religion show me on what slight foundations the Greeks, and after them the Latins, undertook their identification of divinities. Melkart, god-patron of Tyre and Carthage, is called by the Greeks sometimes Apollo, or Helios, because he is a Sun-god, sometimes Zeus, because he is the chief of the gods, sometimes Kronos, because he devours little children. This depends on the writer, or on those whose sayings he reports. And, in addition, they treat all these things with that profound insouciance which is always astonishing to us, reared as we have been in a school of fixed dogmatisms which are for ever showing their offensive points." Thus we get no clear view of the Gaulish Pantheon in its original condition, we see it only through the spectacles of outside beliefs, and the literary remains which should have helped us, if they ever existed at all, are all swept away.

It appears to me to be a sufficient reason for hesitating to identify the beliefs and customs observed by the Roman writers in Gaul with those of Britain, and still more with those in Ireland, that the hints that we derive from the old native literature of these islands throw so little, if indeed they throw any light upon the purpose and