Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/269

Rh Cuchulainn of the attributes of the sun-god. Such things can, indeed, be exaggerated; and we are all inclined to overdraw a little in setting forth a favourite theory. But to myself personally it becomes increasingly clearer, the closer we come to the ancient primitive thought of the Gael, that "man did not" in those early times "live by bread alone," and that to the imaginative and spiritual Gael especially, the feeding of his family and the gathering in of his harvest were not the only or even the chief things on which his mind was set. Nor can we imagine that the warrior of the Cuchulainn period thought much about fields or harvests. Probably he had none; we read of perpetual raids for cattle for food, but none that I am aware of, (in that cycle of tales), to reap fields or gather in corn. The 'agricultural god' period probably belongs to a later and more settled age. Though corn seems to have been grown from very ancient times, we do not hear of agriculture being regularly carried on in Ireland until the monastic period, when each religious settlement had its plots of agricultural land for the monks to cultivate. It is characteristic that in the Voyage of Maelduin, among all the isles of feasting at which the wanderers touch, it is only the hermit who provides them with 'half a cake' for food; the mention of wheaten bread has quite a Christian touch! It is possible that we may come eventually to distinguish two successive periods,—the period of pure nature-worship and myth, and the period of a ritual connected with agricultural rites,—in many nations; it certainly seems that we must do so in Ireland.

Mr. MacCulloch adopts in a wholesale manner M. D'Arbois' theory about the rule of Dispater in the realms of the dead, and his idea that the Celts believed themselves to be descended from this Dark Divinity. He says (pp. 229, 341),—"Dispater was a Celtic under-world god of fertility, and the statement (of Caesar) probably presupposes a myth, like that found among many primitive peoples, telling how man once lived underground and thence came to the surface of the earth. But it also points to their descent from the god of the underworld. Thither the dead returned to him who was ancestor of the living as well as god of the dead." For all this there is no shadow of warrant in Celtic literature, and it is time that so hypothetical a doctrine should be