Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/268

246 social system, as pre-Celtic, or pre-Aryan. So long as our knowledge of what is and what is not Celtic is so slight as it is at present, such determinations must necessarily be of the nature of guess-work; they endeavour to decide off-hand, and without sufficient data, what the Celts held and what they did not. When we find stone-worship, tree-worship, totemism, the matriarchal system, and even a system so bound up with the whole social life of the Gaulish, the Irish, and the Welsh 'Celt' as the druidical system, relegated by different writers to the pre-Celtic races, we begin to wonder what is left for the Celt, among whom we find all these customs in full swing, to have developed as his own share in his own religion. Coming of an imaginative race, the chances are that he evolved some ideas for himself; though that he may have also incorporated others from the peoples he found existing in the countries to which he came as a settler, no one would without fuller knowledge venture to dispute. But the theory may carry us too far. The author's protest on p. 224-5 seems to us timely; and still more so when he comes (pp. 294-302) to discuss the Druids, and endeavour to reclaim them for the Celtic system. With all respect to the earlier races, about which we know almost nothing, it is difficult to see why a class associated with the religious practices of Gaul, Ireland, and Wales from the dawn of their history should not have grown up and been elaborated by themselves. It is the more likely that this was so, from the fact that we find the Druids occupying a different position and assuming different functions in early Ireland and in Gaul, their position among the more highly developed race being that of priest and teacher, while among the Irish Gaels it was rather that of medicine-man and wizard. Mr. MacCulloch has, however, fallen a victim to the modern cult of agricultural gods, and the sacrifice of animals and human beings to ensure fertility. We do not intend to dispute the point. There are signs that such a belief existed through a long period of Celtic primitive worship. But, when he proceeds further to discredit altogether the so-called 'solar theory,' and the suggestion that the great mythological figures of Celtic romance may have derived attributes from natural objects, and especially from the sun, we cannot follow him. The author is very severe on the ascription to